From ‘Lyra Apostolica,’ edited by H. C. Beeching, M.A., Professor of Pastoral Theology at King’s College, with an Introduction by H. S. Holland, M.A., Canon and Precentor of S. Paul’s. London: Methuen & Co. [The Library of Devotion.]
[By the kind permission of the Rev. H. C. Beeching, the Rev. H. S. Holland, and Messrs Methuen & Co.].
[I. From Canon Scott Holland’s Introduction.]
‘“It was at Rome that we began the Lyra Apostolica. The motto shows the feeling of both Froude and myself at the time. We borrowed from M. Bunsen a Homer, and Froude chose the words in which Achilles, on returning to the battle, says: ‘You shall know the difference, now that I am back again.’”[390] So wrote Dr. Newman in the Apologia, and the words give exactly the note of the temper with which the book still tingles from cover to cover. It sprang out of a critical hour in which the force of an historical movement first found speech. It was an hour of high passion that had been gathering for some onset dimly foreseen, and had now, at last, won free vent, and had flung itself out in articulate defiance…. With the defiance, goes also a strong note of confidence. The men who write, however dark their outlook seems to be, speak as those who see their way, and have made their choice, and have found their speech, and have no doubt at all about the issue. There was a certain rapture of recklessness about them at the time, such as belongs to young souls who have let themselves go, under the inspiration of a high adventure. They have burned their boats. There is no going back. Forward all hearts are set. The opportunity is come. It is now or never. Hurrell Froude was the embodiment to them of this spirit of confidence, with its tinge of audacity. He had the glow and the fascination of a man consecrated to a cause. He wrote very little of the book, but his touch is on it everywhere. And in a poem like “The Watchman,” with its splendid swing and radiant courage, we can see how the subtler brain of Newman was swept by the fire and force of the man who was to him like an inspiration.
‘And with Froude, too, is to be associated much of the stress laid on personal discipline which so deeply marks the poems, and which was so congenial to both Newman and Keble…. All the heart of the men comes out in this cry for control, for austerity. It expressed their revolt against the glib and shallow tolerance of the popular religion, and the loose and boneless sentimentality of the prevailing Evangelicalism. They were determined to show that religion was a school of character, keen, serious, and real, which claimed not merely the feeling or the reason, but rather the entire manhood, so that every element and capacity were to be brought into subjection under the law of Christ, and to be governed in subordination to the supreme purpose of the Redemptive Will. No labour could be too minute or too precise, which was needful to bend the complete body of energies under the yoke of this dedicated service. Hurrell Froude’s diary, edited by Newman and Keble, startled the easy-going world of the Thirties by its exhibition of the thoroughness and the rigour and the precision with which this self-discipline had been carried out. Such a temper of mind was, of course, capable of becoming morbid, strained, unnatural. And in the hands of smaller men, it would rapidly show traces of this. But here, in the Lyra, it is still fresh and clean; and the men themselves who are under its austere fascination are so abounding in vitality, and so rich in personal distinction, and so abhorrent of anything pedantic or conventional, that the record of it cannot but brace us into wholesome alarm.’
[II. From the Rev. H. C. Beeching’s Critical Note.]
‘Of the one hundred and seventy-nine pieces in the collected volume [Lyra Apostolica] (and all but two of those published in The British Magazine were reprinted), Newman wrote one hundred and nine, Keble forty-six, Isaac Williams nine, Hurrell Froude eight, J. W. Bowden six, and R. I. Wilberforce one. To speak of the lesser contributions first. Robert Wilberforce’s single contribution is not particularly happy…. Mr. Bowden’s poems are not so infelicitous in substance, but they leave much to desire in other ways…. The contributions of Isaac Williams consist of a few translations and critical sonnets. Altogether of a higher stamp are the poems by Hurrell Froude. No one could accuse that fiery spirit of being commonplace; and perhaps because verse composition in English was not a constant exercise with him, the few poems he wrote for the Lyra have a free grace, as well as a lyric intensity that removes them from the rank of the ordinary imitations of Keble. In XXXVI. [“Weakness of Nature”] he strikes a note that recalls Blake:
‘In the “Dialogue between the Old and New Self” (LXXIX.), he is an apt pupil of Andrew Marvell.
‘He uses his fisher again, to give effect, in the poem on Tyre (CXXIX.):
‘Froude’s sonnets are some of the best in the book: the one entitled “Sight against Faith” (CXXXVI.), supposed to be addressed to Lot by his sons-in-law, being an especially vivid piece of imagination.’