‘Newman,’ by William Barry. (Literary Lives.) London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1904.
[By the kind permission of the Rev. Dr. Barry, and of Messrs. Hodder & Stoughton.]
‘Keble was an elegant scholar, from whose rarely-opened lips pearls and diamonds of wisdom dropped, when listeners were congenial; he could not brook, as he did not understand, variety of opinions; and charming as he proved to all who would not contradict him, none was constitutionally less fitted to be at the head of a great party. His genius had in it no elements deserving the name of original thought. Rather did he serve Newman as the living embodiment of institutions now deemed Apostolic, and, so to speak, himself a present antiquity. He possessed none of those gifts which strike and subdue the unconverted. Hurrell Froude, the “bright and beautiful,” cut off in the midst of his days, was another sort of man. “He went forward,” says his brother Anthony, “taking the fences as they came, passing lightly over them all, and sweeping his friends along with them. He had the contempt of an intellectual aristocrat for private judgment.” This, which sounds like a bull, but is only a paradox, was equally applicable to Newman, despite his infinite consideration for persons as they came before him. The Many could be neither wise nor right, except when they listened to the Few who were both. It was Froude that made Newman and Keble really known to each other: he boasted of it as the one good thing he had ever done. It was certainly the most important. “You and Keble are the philosophers, and I the rhetorician,” wrote the Vicar of St. Mary’s to him in 1836. There was so much of a foundation in the contrast that Newman did always look to Froude as a standard, a test, and a light by which to judge of his own utterances…. But [Froude] disclaimed being original as other men have prided themselves upon it. Thoughts and speculations, nevertheless, were his daily bread…. Alone among Newman’s correspondents, he writes as his born equal, criticising freely, breaking out into the genial humour, so fresh and unconstrained, which lights up this all too serious intercourse of country parsons, London dignitaries, and unfledged Oxford dons.
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‘When preaching on the Greatness and Littleness of Human Life, [Newman] refers secretly to this lofty spirit as among the men who, “by such passing flashes, like rays of the sun, and the darting lightning, give tokens of their immortality, … that they are but angels in disguise.”’[391]