To the Rev. John Keble, Nov. 5, 1826.

‘It may seem an odd sort of thing to say, but I got from your letter something more like happiness than I have known since my mother died. Since that time it seems as if I had been ἄθεος ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ; but I hope I may yet get right at last. It is a great comfort to find so many expressions in the Psalms like “O tarry thou the Lord’s leisure,” as they serve to keep up the hope that, weary and unsatisfactory as are my attempts to be religious, they may in time “comfort my heart.” And now I can talk to you about myself, I feel a sort of security against bewildering my mind with vague thoughts, which I did not know where to check, because I could not get anyone to sympathise with them at all.

‘I have borrowed Mr. Bonnell’s Life,[52] and have got about two-thirds through it. I did not at first like the plan you recommended to me about reveries, as I had been directing all my actions with a view to fitting myself for realising my reveries. But it is a wretched unsatisfactory pursuit, for besides that it does not seem to have any real religion in it, I have often felt as if I had lost myself, and that I was acting blindly, without a drift. It is much better to give up all notion of guiding myself, and “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added.” I beg your pardon for putting before you the roundabout fantastic methods to which I have been resorting to arrive at a plain simple truth that ought to have come at once; but perhaps they may serve to show the state of my mind better than any direct description I could give. It is very frightful to see people like Mr. Bonnell so alarmed about themselves, and expressing so strongly the wretchedness of their moral condition. It seems as if, to a fellow like me, it must always be presumptuous not to despair. The evening before last I was much struck with a thought in the beginning of Hooker’s Preface to the Ecclesiastical Polity, about not permitting thoughts to pass away as in a dream. It seems as if people might make so much more out of their lives by keeping records of them….

To this productive year belong also some haunting unfinished lines which might bear for a title The Summons. Of course none of these three poems of Hurrell’s appeared, later, in Lyra Apostolica; nor elsewhere than in the Remains.

Froude at this time was associating a good deal with Blanco White, the Anglicised Spaniard and ex-priest who came to Oriel, aged fifty-one, when Tyler left it, and deeply interested Oriel men with his knowledge of the scholastic philosophy. For some three years he was in great repute among them: his mental gifts were invalidated to them, later, by his aimlessness and instability. To his practical acquaintance with the Roman Breviary, often demonstrated in his own rooms, after dinner, to Froude, Newman, Pusey, and Wilberforce, Hurrell owed much, especially in conjunction with the able lectures on liturgical subjects being delivered by Dr. Lloyd.

To the Rev. John Keble, Oct. 23, 1827.

‘Lloyd gave us his introductory Lecture to-day, i.e., settled the books we were to do, and the times of coming, and was very good-natured, as usual, in his reception of all of us. I am afraid my time and spirits will be so much drawn upon in another quarter, that I shall not have much left of either for him. Otherwise an historical account of the Liturgy, tracing all the prayers, through the Roman Missals and Breviaries, up to their original source, for one Lecture, and the Epistle to the Romans and First of Corinthians for the other, would be a very eligible subject to spend a good deal of time on…. I go to the Tyrolese singers, who perform some national music in the Town-Hall at eight o’clock. I hope they will help to lull me into a momentary forgetfulness; and that I may dream myself among lakes and mountains, far, far away from the vulgar crowd.’

‘The richness and melody of Copleston’s[55] voice surpassed any instrument…. It was no small part of the daily amusement of the undergraduates to repeat what Copleston had said, and just as he said it, and to vary it from their own boyish imaginations…. The second of the four Froudes, who died young, made this a special study. Coming out of Tyler’s room after a Lecture, he tapped gently at the door, and said in the exact Copleston tone: “Mr. Tyler, will you please step out a moment?” Tyler rushed out, exclaiming: “My dear Mr. Provost!” but only saw the tail of the class descending the staircase. “You silly boys, you’ve been playing me a trick!” was all that he could say.’[56]

The wheel of fortune brought the Provostship of Oriel not to ‘an angel,’ John Keble, but to Edward Hawkins, on the promotion of Copleston to the See of Llandaff, early in this year. A letter of Froude’s to him has been preserved. There is an entry in the former’s Diary, under date of Nov. 22, 1826, thus printed: ‘Promised —— I would not vote against him if ever he stood for the ——. Foolish: but I must abide by it.’ Hawkins and James Endell Tyler were the two among the Fellows who had for years set their hearts upon the Provostship. Tyler lost his chance when he left Oriel during the autumn for the living of S. Giles-in-the-Fields, London, where Endell Street, W.C., yet preserves his name. Either to him, or to Hawkins, Hurrell had hastily pledged his word. But when he wrote the following letter he was quite aware of Mr. Keble’s definite withdrawal from the candidacy which was not yet announced. As a matter of fact, Mr. Keble had never consented to come forward, and his disciple’s course became, thereby, easy as well as plain.

To the Rev. Edward Hawkins,[57] Jan. 23, 1828.

‘My dear Hawkins,—Though I don’t set so high a value on the emanations of my pen as to volunteer a superfluous communication, yet, from what Churton said to me in his note, I fancy I ought to supply an ἔλλειμμα in my last letter by making a more formal declaration of my unconditional and uncompromising determination to rank myself among your retainers. I am really very sorry that my stupid delay in answering your letter should have caused you any bother (to use a studiously elegant expression, than which I cannot hit on a better): and this is the more provoking, as I actually had written you an answer the first day; but as I said something at the end of it about my brother, which afterwards I thought too gloomy, and which, I believe, was suggested by seeing him look particularly unwell from some accident, I thought it rather too hard to call on you for sympathy in my capricious fancies. I suppose I may take the liberty to enclose this in a cover to the Bishop, otherwise I should hesitate to draw on your purse as well as your time for such a scribble as this. However, I have left you enough clear paper at the end to work out a question in algebra, or make the skeleton of a sermon! And as this is probably worth more than any words I have to put into it, I shall conclude by begging you to consider me ever affectionately,

‘… I have not much spirits to write to you, but will not allow my promise to go for nothing. When I first came home I found my brother very much emaciated and enfeebled, but not quite so far gone as I had been prepared for. But since I have been here his disorder has been making very rapid progress indeed…. From what I had heard at Oxford, I almost doubted I might not find all over before my arrival: and the relief which I felt when, on getting off the coach at Totnes, I heard from my father that, not a quarter of an hour before, he[58] had driven in to meet me, was so great as almost to unsettle my resolution. So that now the near prospect of a conclusion is rather hard to face. Even so late as yesterday evening I began a letter to you, in which I expressed a hope that when Monday came my brother and I might not part for ever, but that he would be alive on my return for the Long Vacation. But the medical person who has attended him told me, just now, that unless he was relieved from his present oppression, forty-eight hours would end him. In this state I really do not think that the [Oriel] election has claims on me so great as those which retain me here; and, unless his illness take some unexpected turn, I shall write to [the Provost] in a day or two, to apologise for absenting myself. I cannot, indeed, flatter myself that any turn will long retard the encroachment of the disorder; but, unless appearances decidedly indicated that, by staying out the Vacation, I should see all, I think it would be foolish to shrink from my business; for, when the time of parting came, it would be worse a fortnight hence than now…. I have known enough of myself to foresee the return of all my fretfulness and absurdity, when I leave this enchanted atmosphere. I hope you will excuse my not writing a longer letter; for most things now seem insipid to me, except such as I have no right to inflict upon you. So good-bye, my dear [Robert], for the present, and do not expect to see me till the beginning of Term. I should very much wish to take my part in the election, and do not even now wholly abandon the idea. For I know that active occupation is the best resource, and I shall not shrink from it merely to indulge my feelings.’

‘… The feelings under which I wrote to you last, were, as you say, like the effect of a stunning blow, and I was quite surprised, myself, how quickly they evaporated. I cannot indeed call them either groundless or irrational, and I am, in some respects, not contented at being so soon released from them. Yet many things have occurred to me, which, even to my reason, have made things seem better than they did at first. The more I think of B[ob], the more I am struck with his singleness of heart, and the low estimation in which he held himself. I have found, too, some things which he had written, which I regret much that he had not shown me, which give me almost assurance that he was farther advanced in serious feeling, and had taken greater pains to fight against himself than anyone supposed. Among others, there is one which seems to me quite beautiful, On the Legitimate Use of Pleasure; which he has headed with: “My opinion, June, 1827. I wonder what it will be next year.” It is well arranged as a composition, quite elegant in the language, and shows that he must have thought over the Ethics in a common-sense way, and compared it with Bishop Butler. I had often heard him say what a fool he used to be in thinking that the Ethics was only something to be got up, and something quite irrelevant to actual conduct…. But I feel now as if I had been conversing with a person, who, if he had not much undervalued himself, would never have deferred to me….’

‘I have just torn up a letter which I began for you the other day, and fear that you will have cause to wonder how I could reserve this for a better destiny. For the fact is, that I seem to myself to become duller as I grow older, and to have acquired a fustiness independent of place and occupation, an inherent fustiness which idleness cannot blow away nor variety obliterate…. I fear from what I hear of C[hurton][59] that the chance of his recovery is at present very slender. His brother wrote to me the other day to ask what place in Devonshire we reckoned the best suited[60] to complaints of that description, as his enfeebled state put his going abroad out of the question. But I know from experience how little Devonshire air can do … I myself am still, as I indeed have been for a long time, perfectly well. But I find the freshness which at first resulted from a relaxation from College discipline now gradually wearing out; and as the images of impudent undergraduates fade away from the field of my fancy, and the consciousness of what I am released from becomes less vivid, a new host of evil genii take possession of the deserted spot. Till within this last week or so, I felt quite differently from what I ever used to, and reckoned myself to have become quite a cheerful fellow; but now I begin to see with my old eyes, and to feed upon the dreams of faëryland.

‘… I have long been meditating a letter to you, and have put it off from day to day, in hopes that when the fine weather should come at last, it might rekindle in me some spark of poetical feeling. But I was thinking over with myself last night how I could scrape up a verse or two in honour of this long-wished-for revolution, and was, after some fruitless pains, obliged to abandon the undertaking. It is a melancholy fact, yet full often does it force itself upon me, and in too unquestionable a shape, that I get stupider as I get older; and that I either never was what I used to think myself, or that Nature has recalled her misused favours! In vain is it that night after night I have tried to peep through the clouds at Lyra and Cassiopeia, as they chase one another round the pole, and that I have got up at three to see Mercury rise, when he was at his longest distance from the sun; and that I have sailed to Guernsey on a fine day and come back on a finer, when the waves washed in on the deck as each passed in succession; and that (when for a short time off the island in a calm) I found the latitude within a minute by taking the sun’s meridian altitude, and that I have seen him rise out of the water, cut in two by the horizon as sharp as a knife. “This brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,—what seemeth it to me but a pestilent congregation of vapours?” I can partly account for it from the fact that we are so uncommonly comfortable and cosy here, and quite agree with you, that “home by mazy streams” is not the most bracing school in which the recipient of habits can be disciplined.

‘I heard from N[ewman] the other day, with the testimonials,’ he adds, a little later. ‘… He is a fellow that I like the more, the more I think of him; only I would give a few odd pence if he were not a heretic!’ This in reference to Newman’s early Evangelicalism, not yet sloughed away. As between Froude and Newman, so between Newman and Pusey, affection appears to have preceded perfect intellectual confidence. There is a parallel thought, in more sedate dress, in Newman’s private journal of May 17, 1823: ‘That Pusey is Thine, O Lord, how can I doubt? … yet I fear he is prejudiced against Thy children…. Lead us both on in the way of Thy commandments!’[61] Hurrell quickly came to a correct reading of Newman, and he presently made sure that his beloved Keble should share it too. He said once, when conversation ran on the traits of undoubted excellence in criminal characters: ‘Were I asked what good deed I had ever done, I should say that I had brought Keble and Newman to understand each other.’ That mutual love, indeed, despite a long parting, never wavered. There is an odd little footnote to be gathered from Mr. Anthony Froude’s ‘Oxford Counter-Reformation.’[62] He is speaking of events subsequent to 1845.

‘My eldest brother had left to us younger ones, as a characteristic instruction, that if we ever saw Newman and Keble disagree, we might think for ourselves. The event which my brother had thought as impossible as that a double star should fly asunder in space, had actually occurred. We had been floated out into mid-ocean upon the Anglo-Catholic raft, buoyed up by airy bubbles of ecclesiastical sentiment. The bubbles had burst, the raft was splintered, and we—I mean my other brother and myself—were left, like Ulysses, struggling in the waves.’

Says Mr. Thomas Mozley,[63] referring to this time, and to tastes shared in common among Oriel men: ‘I think we all of us found it easier to admire and even to criticise, than to design. Keble, Froude, and Ogilvie undertook a memorial of William Churton, to be placed in S. Mary’s. It was to be simple, modest, and unobtrusive, like the subject. Whether the result carried out this idea, I leave others to say,’ If we are to judge from a letter of Hurrell’s addressed to Keble, the first design emanated from Newman, though drawn by himself. ‘I don’t make much progress in my design for C[hurton’s] monument,’ he writes on May 23, 1829. ‘O[gilvie] decides on its being Gothic; and if this is the case, it will never do to let it take its chance in the hands of a statuary.[64] Yet the responsibility of doing it one’s self makes me so fastidious that I cannot settle on anything,’ He had thought of falling back upon ‘the sort of niches which are used to hold statues of saints, or [stoups for] holy water: somehow it does not seem quite congruous to make one of these merely to frame an inscription.’ However, he draws a narrow pointed arch over a tall pedestal supporting a plain cross, on the suggestion of Newman, adding that he likes it especially, though it may be a bit eccentric.[65] ‘It is to stand in the wall over one of the doorways, between the blank window on the south side, and the window in which the gallery terminates. This is meant to be represented standing under an arch cut out in the wall.’ There were not many Englishmen attempting Early English decoration in 1829. The memorial to William Ralph Churton, Fellow of Oriel, aged twenty-seven, phthisi eheu præreptus, is to be found in S. Mary’s Church, though not in the position allotted it in this letter; and the big ugly white sarcophagus with fussy details in high relief on a grey ground is certainly no design of Hurrell Froude’s.

Froude’s intimate correspondence with Newman began in 1828, their friendship having been forming since 1826. To all to whom the latter spoke or wrote with affection, as Miss Mozley reminds us, he was ever open and confiding. ‘But there is distinction in his confidences. Thus to his mother he writes what it would not occur to him to say to anyone else: experiences, sensations, and odd encounters; dreams, fancies, and passing speculations: while to Hurrell Froude, on another field altogether, there is the same absolute trust, and unlocking of the heart.’[66]

Sometimes, in the early letters, the correspondent at Dartington feels impelled to continue his autobiography, in default of anything better to deal with. ‘When I come to consider my resources,’ he says in his smiling mock-grandiose way, ‘I feel that they will not prove commensurate with my malignity, and that I shall not be able even to bore you with success.’

To the Rev. John Henry Newman, Aug. 12, 1829.

‘Since I left Oxford, little has happened to me, and still less have I done. I have indeed written two sermons, and they lasted near twenty minutes, so that I may hope to get on. But the time that they took me is quite absurd, and that which they gave me an excuse for wasting, under the plea of thought, grotesque indeed. Also, the paper that I wasted on things that turned out to have no reference to the subject would form a distinct object of contemplation; and after all, when I came to preach them, they seemed so rambling and incomplete that I could not fancy, while I was reading them, how anyone could possibly follow me. Besides this, I have done nothing except getting my equatorial put up and adjusted in our garden, and trying provoking experiments on the insensibility of my hearing organs. I find the summit of perception to which I can attain is to observe that a note harmonises better with its octave, twelfth, and fifth, than with their next-door neighbours. I also can acknowledge a discord in a deuce[67] and a seventh; but as for knowing one from the other, unless they come very close on each other, it passes my comprehension how man can do it…. I am quite ashamed of the length of time this has been on the stocks, and of the shabby performance which it turns out. Alas, it is a sad reflection that I am condemned to retrograde in all respects: to find no resting-place for my self-complacency either in my intellectual, moral, or corporeal prowess, and notwithstanding to be as conceited as ever!’

This was a note of needless dissatisfaction only too sincere, repeated in Keble’s ear. ‘As for me, I despair of ever becoming a scholar or mathematician either, beyond just enough to amuse myself when I am a solitary country Curate….’

1829 is a silent year with Hurrell, on the whole. He had lost his beloved brother, and he was preparing for his own Ordination. In the late summer he paid his first visit to his cousins at Keswick.

To the Rev. John Keble, Sept. 17, 1829.

‘The evening I received your criticisms I wrote you three sides of a letter, and did not send it, only because I thought time would produce things better worth writing: and now I am so changed in position and circumstances I think I may as well begin again. So all I will retain of my former letter is a criticism on The Christian Year, suggested by a very tempestuous night, in which all our party were crossing the Channel in a pilot-boat. You must not say “the wild wind rustles in the piping shrouds”:[68] shrouds never “pipe” when trees or rustling can be presented to the fancy, but only on occasions when it is more sublime than comfortable to be a listener. This, in my letter, I endeavoured to enforce by a description of the scene I witnessed, and the night I spent on deck: but I doubt not you will willingly take all this for granted…. I left Devonshire more than a fortnight since for Cumberland. [Dornford?][69] made me stay some time in Dublin, which was my first stage, and is, in point of time, much the nearest way: and also sent me into the north of Ireland after Captain Mudge, who is surveying the coast. In my hunt for him, I saw the Giants’ Causeway, every stone of which is beset by some fellow who claims a fee for describing it. It is certainly well worth seeing; but you can conceive nothing so perfectly unlike any of the pretended representations of it. I made two bad drawings there, which will serve to keep it in my own mind, but will do little to illuminate mankind at large. I am forgetting all this while to tell you that, while at Dublin, I found I was within twenty-five miles of

and immediately hired a horse, to start the next morning at five to see it. I was most unlucky in my day, as it had been fine for the preceding week, and only set in for rain when I got among the Wicklow mountains. I had a very wild romantic uncomfortable ride through a wholly uninhabited country, till I got within the baleful influence of lionisers,[70] and was pestered out of my wits by humbugging guides who dinned into my ears miserable expansions of Tom Moore’s note about St. Kevin, till I was quite out of patience. The day was so misty that it was only once or twice that I could make out the scene distinctly, and so constantly raining, that all my paper was soaked in trying to draw what I could make out. By dint of perseverance, I crawled into poor St. Kevin’s[71] cell, which is hardly large enough to coil one’s self up in, and when I was there hardly a square foot of it was dry: so the day answered the purpose, at any rate, of showing me that there is a dark side to a hermit’s existence. He had chosen himself a most picturesque rocky point, which projects a little into the Lake, with one or two hollies and mountain ashes growing up in its crevices; and cut out a cell for himself in its perpendicular face. It would take too much space to describe the grand gloom of the Lake, the seven ruined Churches on its borders (one of which is still a burial-ground for the Roman Catholics), and that extraordinary Tower, a relic of paganism, which stands in one of the churchyards.

To Newman, on Sept. 27, 1829, he writes more of St. Kevin’s dismal and delightful habitation, and ends with the praises of his mother’s county. ‘I got to Cumberland about ten days since, and I can safely assert that it exceeds anything that imagination can conjure up. I don’t mean that the extensive views of lake and mountain are so especially splendid, for, when the scene is on so large a scale, the trees and rocks become deplorably insignificant, woods seem little better than furze brakes; but, in rambling along the brooks and waterfalls, one comes to such excessively romantic corners, that they have quite put me out of love with Devonshire. The only thing which I desiderate is a Church steeple here and there in the valleys; for the worst of it is, that very few of the Parish Churches here are in exterior little better than a decent barn. What a horrid-looking scribble this is! and I know it is full of false spellings of all sorts, which will in many places make it unintelligible.’

All was grist which came to this preoccupied critic’s mill. He had an unaffected fondness for the classics. His theory about the poet whom he loved and understood best, and whom he is always quoting, is that he was a shy pastoral lyrist driven by officious friends into the epic field. Says Newman in a passing note of interest: ‘It was [Froude’s] notion that Horace and others used to (what is now called) patronise Virgil, as a man who really had a great deal in him; but who, the pity was, would not conform himself to the habits of society, and so lost opportunities of influence. So they set him upon the Æneid, to make something of him.’[72]

On Easter Monday, 1830, the Rev. R. H. Froude preached in the pulpit of S. Mary-the-Virgin, before the University, his sermon on Knowledge. His quiet sober sermons, of which no fewer than twenty appear complete in the Remains, are to a reader searching, pitiless, unforgetable. The undergraduate, however, must have ‘disvenerated’ them.

Froude’s lecturing at Oxford was now quite done; Newman’s and Robert Wilberforce’s likewise; they resigned their Tutorships as gracefully as they might, being joyful over the turn things had taken. The long opposition maintained against their desire to arrange the terminal table in accordance with their own best judgment, ended in total defeat for ‘the erect fighting figures’ of the three friends. The Provost himself, Hampden, Denison, and the junior Copleston rushed into the breach with Lectures many and purposeful; but Oriel felt the change, whether for good or ill, to be a real crisis. According to one distinguished commentator, her regeneration dates from that day; according to another, she never recovered the loss, and could but suffer her scholarly pre-eminence to pass, gradually but surely, to Balliol, which has ever since held it. Two at least of the dispossessed Tutors had conceived already a wider field of action for their energies. They had leisure now to think and to write; and leisure bred consequences. ‘Humanly speaking,’ Newman assures us, in his fragment of autobiography, written throughout in the third person, ‘the Movement never would have been, had they not been deprived of the Tutorship, or had Keble, not Hawkins, been Provost.’

‘I despatched a hasty letter yesterday from Torquay which must have disappointed you from its emptiness; but I wished you to know my progress. As we lost sight of the Needles, twilight came on, and we saw nothing of the coast. The night was beautiful, and on my expressing an aversion to the cabin, Froude and I agreed to sleep on deck…. When I awoke, a little before four, we were passing the Devonshire coast, about fifteen miles off it. By six we were entering Torbay…. Limestone and sandstone rocks of Torbay are very brilliant in their colours and sharp in their forms; strange to say, I believe I never saw real rocks before, in my life! This consciousness keeps me very silent, for I feel I am admiring what everyone knows, and it is foolish to observe upon. You see a house said to have belonged to Sir Walter Ralegh;[73] what possessed him to prefer the court at Greenwich to a spot like this?… I know I am writing in a very dull way, but can only say that the extreme deliciousness of the air, and the fragrance of everything makes me languid, indisposed to speak or write, and pensive. My journey did not fatigue me, to speak of, and I have no headache, deafness, or whizzing in my ears; but, really, I think I should dissolve into essence of roses, or be attenuated into an echo, if I lived here!… What strikes me most is the strange richness of everything. The rocks blush into every variety of colour, the trees and fields are emeralds, and the cottages are rubies. A beetle I picked up at Torquay was as green-and-gold as the stone it lay upon, and a squirrel which ran up a tree here just now was not the pale reddish-brown to which I am accustomed, but a bright brown-red. Nay, my very hands and fingers look rosy, like Homer’s Aurora, and I have been gazing on them with astonishment. All this wonder I know is simple; and therefore, of course, do not you repeat it. The exuberance of the grass and the foliage is oppressive, as if one had not room to breathe, though this is a fancy. The depth of the valleys and the steepness of the slopes increase the illusion, and the Duke of Wellington would be in a fidget to get some commanding point to see the country from. The scents are extremely fine, so very delicate yet so powerful; and the colours of the flowers as if they were all shot with white. The sweet peas especially have the complexion of a beautiful face: they trail up the wall, mixed with myrtles, as creepers. As to the sunset, the Dartmoor heights look purple, and the sky close upon them a clear orange. When I turn back and think of Southampton Water and the Isle of Wight, they seem, by contrast, to be drawn in Indian ink, or pencil. Now I cannot make out that this is fancy, for why should I fancy? I am not especially in a poetic mood. I have heard of the brilliancy of Cintra and still more of the East, and I suppose that this region would pale beside them; yet I am content to marvel at what I see, and think of Virgil’s description of the purple meads of Elysium. Let me enjoy what I feel, even though I may unconsciously exaggerate.’

Newman’s senses were extraordinarily delicate: he writes as if at thirty he was half unaware of some of his most special faculties.

There was a lifelong strife in Newman’s mind between created and Uncreated Beauty, or rather, a lifelong choice. He seems to have felt that he could not be as much of a poet as his own heart prompted, and be also as much of a hard-working saint as Divine Grace called him to be. For him, as in the beginning, a loved landscape was ‘pagan’: a temptation towards false gods. How little his attitude was understood, during his life, is well illustrated by the published complaint of Mr. Aubrey de Vere that his friend Dr. Newman of the Catholic University would never make time to go driving with him through the exquisite scenery about Dublin, though invited again and again. In all this, as in much else, he was entirely Augustinian. Ejiciebas eas et intrabas pro eis. It does not seem clear that Hurrell Froude, who outran Newman in many austerities, shared fully in the exercise of this signal one. His loneliness of spirit, far more developed than his friend’s, was also far less conscious, and his boyish relish of the beauties of moor and sea based itself, rather, on a philosophy which was Keble’s, and Henry Vaughan’s long before him:

Certainly, Newman was never so tormented by his affection for music, or for anything else in the same class, as he was by the glamour of out-of-doors at Taormina, and the homelier charms of ‘Devon in her most gentle dimplement.’ Spiritual matters apart, one does not perceive what else could have inwrought him more effectually with the very fibres of Hurrell’s being, than his felt infatuation for the Dartington he visited but twice in his busy life. They shared the same passion, again, for Rome. The spirit of place can always create a final test between any two cultivated minds. To differ in kind or even in degree of response to it, is indeed to differ.

The principle which lay at the bottom of Newman’s renunciation was one, however, which was equally familiar to his friend. It may not always have involved, for him, the need of so determined a depreciation of the loveliness of rural England, as too keen a reminder of

‘Isaac’s pure blessings, and a verdant home,’

things forsworn by both young men in that ‘highly religious and romantic idea of celibacy’ which they had adopted for good and all, between them, without Keble’s help. As Newman says of S. Basil and S. Gregory, retiring together from the world: ‘somehow, the idea of marrying-and-taking-Orders, or taking-Orders-and-marrying; building or improving their parsonages, and showing forth the charities, the humanities, and the gentilities of a family man, did not suggest itself to their minds.’ Nothing is plainer than that the arch-celibate was Froude, and not Newman: perhaps it would be quite exact to say that the idea, in Froude, as in Pascal, was wholly endemic, and in Newman only so in part. We are told in the Apologia how the idea was strengthened and supernaturalised by contact with Froude. Hurrell sometimes deplored with unmixed simplicity the social disqualifications of a total abstainer. ‘I wrote S[am] a letter the other day,’ he tells Robert Wilberforce, when the future Bishop had plighted his troth. ‘I suspect it was of the dullest! for I have no knack at writing to people in his interesting situation.’ In all this lack of sympathy with ordinary conduct and motive, there was no touch whatever of conscious oddity, but only of childishness. Newman, by far the tenderer heart of the two, never shared it.

Newman has left us an account of the origin of the sermon he mentions, which was preached in the old Church on July 16, 1831: that on the Pool of Bethesda, ‘Scripture a Record of Human Sorrow,’ in the first volume of Parochial Sermons. ‘Twice in my life,’ he writes about 1862, ‘have I, when worn with work, gone to a friend’s house to recruit…. When I was down at Dartington for the first time, in July, 1831, I saw a number of young girls collected together, blooming, and in high spirits; “and all went merry as a marriage-bell.” And I sadly thought what changes were in store, what hard trial and discipline was inevitable. I cannot trace their history; but Phillis and Mary Froude married, and died quickly. Hurrell died. One, if not two, of the young Champernownes died.[76] My sermon was dictated by the sight and the foreboding. At that very visit [from Oxford] Hurrell caught, and had his influenza upon him, which led him by slow steps to the grave. He caught it sleeping, as I did, on deck, going down the Channel from Southampton to Torbay. Influenza was about, the forerunner of the cholera. It went through the Parsonage at Dartington. Every morning the sharp merry party, who somewhat quizzed me, had hopes it would seize upon me. But I escaped; and sang my warning from the pulpit…. I am a bird of ill omen.’[77]

Correspondence of course broke out anew, the moment the two were parted. Hurrell’s Greek reading progressed on his own summary lines. ‘Timæus gets worse and worse. I can see no point in which it is interesting, except as a fact to prove what stuff people have sucked down…. I have cut Timæus,’ he announces a bit later, ‘and have nearly finished Gorgias, which is as elegant and clever and easy as possible.’ His weather comments (such being unavoidable in England) are concise and instructive. By way of letting Newman know that there had been a fortnight of fine weather since the latter’s own rainy experiences at Dartington, he throws out an abrupt postscript of July 29: ‘What a lie old Swith.[78] has told!’

The Rev. Thomas Mozley seems to have received conditional offers or promises from Hurrell of sharing with him a country cure. The former proposed first the vacant Moreton Pinkney, thirty miles north of Oxford, then the parish of S. Ebbe’s, within its ancient limits. But both projects failed of realisation. Hurrell’s strength had to be hoarded, and Archdeacon Froude was averse to any measure which would create new duties, and cause a stricter separation between them. Keble, on behalf of his friend, would have favoured Northamptonshire rather than the city. He saw Newman on August 10 of this Long Vacation of 1831. ‘He wishes you to have a country parish,’ Newman writes; ‘he did not give his reasons.’ Newman himself coveted Hurrell’s parochial co-operation. These plans for an active employment of superfluous energies, formed, one after another, by appreciators of them, were destined to be vain. Meanwhile, relish for historical study was indicating to him how he could be of use, in a day full of most unscholarly conceptions of the past, long before the documentary firmament had been unrolled by Government for the man in the street. Dandum est Deo eum aliquid facere posse. He knew the path he meant to take, and communicates his dream to Newman, prefacing it with a bit of encouraging domestic news: ‘W[illy] continues very steady, getting up at half-past five, and working without wasting time till two or three.’ His next surviving brother William was then twenty years old, and reading for Honours.

To the Rev. J. H. Newman, Aug. 16, 1831.

‘Since you wish to have a definite categorical answer to M[ozley’s] question, I will say, No; and having said this, will proceed to my reasons and qualifications. First, whatever you may think, I have a serious wish, and (if I could presume to say so) intention of working at the ecclesiastical history of the Middle Ages. Now, my father assures me that such a parish as [S. Ebbe’s] would be a complete occupation of itself, so that I am unwilling at once, and without giving myself the trial, to give up the chance of doing what I cannot but think as clerical, as improving, and much better suited to my capacity, such as it is, than the care of a parish. A small parish, and a less bothering one, might be a recreation, almost; but such an absorbing one as this I should be sorry to take, till I found that I could not work at anything else. Secondly, my qualification of the ‘No’ is this: if you either feel very certain I shall do nothing else, or have a strong opinion as to the improvement I should get from the occupation you propose, believe me willing to be convinced that my present view is incorrect.

‘How atrociously the poor King of Holland[79] has been used; but nothing yet is so painful as the defection of the heads of the Church. I hear that the Bishop of Ferns[80] is dying: spes ultima.’

During the early autumn, Froude returns to the curacy question, and reiterates the conviction which his own idiosyncrasy was strengthening in him every day, and which surely was as warranted as it was sincere.

‘I have read the Lives of Wycliffe and Peacocke[81] in Strype; but must read much more about them and their times, before I shall understand them. At present I admire Peacocke and dislike Wycliffe. A great deterioration seems to have taken place in the spirit of the Church after Edward III.’s death. I hope I shall have perseverance to work up the history of the period. If I do this, I shall not think myself bound to take a curacy.’

It is a thousand pities that we can never have on our shelves the Froude of historical verity, to counterbalance the Froude of historical romance. Hurrell, so far as he got, was certainly all for ‘the ideas underlying history, and their organic connection,’ and was but poorly adapted for ‘the insertion of his own ideas into history … the professing to find in history what he had in reality put there.’[82] Is it not clear that such a fault may spring not from perverseness, but from the too pictorial eye? This the elder brother lacked, as likewise the other disadvantage of a magical prose style. That perturbing possession, the luckiest asset of the essayist, seems to delight in playing tricks on historians, for in the past, at least, the dullest have been the safest.

As one who understood the dangers of style, Hurrell chides Newman for the hair-splitting preliminary method to which he was treating The Arians. ‘If you go on fiddling with your Introduction, you will most certainly get into a scrape at last!’ And then: ‘I have for the last five days been reading Marsh’s Michaelis, which I took up by accident, and have been much interested by it. I see that old Wilberforce[83] owes to it much of the profundity which I have before now been floored and overawed by. It has put many things into my head that I never thought of before.’

The first unmistakable symptoms of Hurrell’s chronic illness had developed by the January of 1832. ‘I don’t think he takes care of himself,’ Keble says anxiously, in a letter to Newman, shortly after his election to the Professorship of Poetry. And Hurrell himself had confessed to Newman, as it were, ‘how ill all’s here about my heart: but ’tis no matter.’ Hence the reply from Oxford, on the 13th.

‘Your letter was most welcome, sad as it was; I call it certainly, from beginning to end, a sad letter, and yet somehow sad letters, in their place, and in God’s order, are as acceptable as merry ones. What I write for now is to know why you will not trust your brother to come up by himself? Let him go into your rooms; and do stop in Devonshire a good while, in which time you not only may get well, but may convince all about you that you are well—an object not to be neglected…. Your advice about my work is not only sage, but good, yet not quite applicable, though I shall bear it in mind. Recollect, my good Sir, that every thought I think is thought, and every word I write is writing, and that thought tells and that words take room, and that though I make the Introduction the whole book, yet a book it is; and though this will not steer clear of the egg blunder, to have an Introduction leading to nothing, yet it is not losing time. Already I have made forty-one pages out of eighteen.’ The correspondence between the two, then as ever, gives diverting glimpses of the mordant and ineffably frank critic away from Oxford, and the divine and man-of-letters in residence who continually sought, ‘in the beaten way of friendship,’ the advice he did not invariably need. Thus he sends a rough draft to Dartington of ‘a sermon against Sir James Mackintosh, Knight,’[84] expecting strictures, ‘should you discern anything heretical,’ and calling special attention to the argument: ‘therefore be sharp.’ The young censor was pleased to approve ‘on the whole,’ though with minor reservations. ‘As to your Annotationes in Neandri[85] Homiliam,’ Newman writes cheerfully, ‘to be sure I have treated them with what is now called true respect; for I have spoken highly of them, and done everything but use them! I did not have them till Saturday morning; so having your authority for what I wanted (i.e., the soundness of the main position and the τόποι), I became indolent.’

‘I promised I would give an account of myself, if I did not appear in person by the beginning of Term. I am getting rid, though by slow degrees, of all vestiges of cough, and, what is more to the purpose, my father is quite easy about me, which he was far from being when I first came home…. I have been very idle lately, but have taken up Strype now and then, and have not increased my admiration of the Reformers. One must not speak lightly of a martyr, so I do not allow my opinions to pass the verge of scepticism. But I really do feel sceptical whether Latimer was not something in the Bulteel[86] line; whether the Catholicism of their formulæ was not a concession to the feelings of the nation, with whom Puritanism had not yet become popular, and who could scarcely bear the alterations which were made; and whether the progress of things in Edward the Sixth’s minority may not be considered as the jobbing of a faction. I will do myself the justice to say that those doubts give me pain, and that I hope more reading will in some degree dispel them. As far as I have gone, too, I think better than I was prepared to do of Bonner and Gardiner. Certainly the ἦθος of the Reformation is to me a terra incognita, and I do not think that it has been explored by anyone that I have heard talk about it.’

Again, writing to Newman on Feb. 17, the obsession for historical truth, as the handmaid to religious reform, breaks through some melancholy detail. He has been asked for a full bulletin; he confesses that the doctor states, and that he himself cannot deny, that there has been an attack on the lungs, attended, however, with but little pain or fever. He finds it ‘disheartening,’ for he had been taking long rides, and was in great spirits. Then he runs on to a topic which occurs to him not for the first nor for the last time. Might it not be a good thing to turn journalist, to have a Quarterly, and to speak in it the thing which is? ‘Imagine me in a yellow jacket,’ he says elsewhere to Newman; imagine him seated, and goose-quilled, and editorial. It was never to be. Was it not quite as well? Would not Mr. Froude (if the pun will pass muster) have proved gunpowder in a Magazine? He talks as he always talks of his own inspirations, derisively. But plainly, his heart is in it. He would start, this time, ‘on a very unpretending scale,’ and design his foxy Quarterly ‘to be at first only historical and matter-of-fact, so that writing for it would be the reverse of a waste of time even if it failed entirely, which I really hardly think possible, considering the ridiculous unfounded notions most people have got, and the vast quantity of unexplored ground. A thing of that sort might sneak into circulation as a book of antiquarian research, and yet, if well-managed, might undermine many prejudices. I am willing to think that I could contribute two articles per annum to such a work, without losing a moment of time, indeed getting through more than I should else. Memoirs of Hampden would be a subject [Keble] would take to with zest, as he hates that worthy with as much zeal and more knowledge than your humble servant. However, this is a scheme formed at a distance, which, as Johnson remarks, makes rivers look narrow and precipices smooth. Can you tell me where to go for the history of Lutheranism? I must know something of it, before I get a clue to Cranmer and the rest.’

‘… I trouble you with a few lines of grateful acknowledgment for the concern you are so kind as to take in my welfare, though I cannot at the same time refrain from observing that your advice does more credit to your heart than your head…. I was at Dr. [Yonge’s[87]], where I stayed three days, and was thoroughly examined. He assures me that whatever may have been the matter with me, I am now thoroughly well, and that I may return to Oxford at once without imprudence. At the same time, he says I must be extremely cautious, as the thing which formed in my windpipe proves me to be very liable to attack, and he looks on it as an extraordinary piece of luck that I got rid of it as I did. I am to wear more clothing than I have hitherto done, and to renounce wine for ever; the prohibition extends to beer: quò confugiam?’

Before Hurrell left home, his father had notified Newman of their conditional intention to visit the Continent. ‘If the doctor advises it,’ the Archdeacon writes on Feb. 22, ‘I have offered to be Hurrell’s companion to the Mediterranean, or any other part of the world that may be supposed most favourable in such a case as his. I own [that] my faith in the advantages to be gained by going abroad is not very great, unless they can be procured under the most favourable circumstances. At any rate, I think your suggestion for his giving up the office of Treasurer[88] shall be followed.’ He had held this office of Junior Treasurer since 1828, to the great general satisfaction, sharing with Newman the mental quickness, the ‘constitutional accuracy’ and the conscientiousness which go towards the casting-up of a perfect accountant. Hurrell, however, came up in the spring, whence he blithely reports his improved health.

To the Rev. John Keble, May 5, 1832.

‘… Thinking that you may wish to know something of my concerns, and wishing to know something of yours, … I send you the following. As to myself, about which valuable thing I am most concerned, you must know that I have at last found a κρησφύγετον in barley-sugar; only to think that my stars should let me off so easily! Sucking has had a most wonderful effect on me, and has removed nearly all that F[airford][89] had left of tendency to irritation; I might say all, if I could suck continually, but just now these east winds take advantage of casual intervals, and remind me that I am not perfectly at liberty. However, I have left off my handkerchief, and never feel the want of it; also, I am up at half-past six every morning; and taking an enlarged view of myself, I think my condition to be approved of.’

Up to July 31, Froude remained in Oxford, being and doing with all his usual zest, writing his papers on architecture, proving a very well-head of vitality to his friends, and ‘living his life.’ Could it have been indeed as early as this that he cut across the preliminaries described by Lord Blachford,[90] and paralysed an intended appeal to Bishops and Deans by announcing that he, for one, meant to ‘get on the box’ in person? This is thought to be the moment of Miss Giberne’s inspiration. It would seem as if the date should be a year later. In July of 1832 the Tutorial question was over; and there was no other agendum in debate between Froude and Newman. However that may be, there in the handsome lady’s sketch-book is Hurrell, smoothly, almost infantinely, mischievous, with one obedient Mozley to listen and abet; there is Newman, at an angle of the ottoman, distinctly not surveying with fond adoring gaze and yearning heart his friend (as he says he does, in a poem, part of which, at least, was written that very week), but back to back with him, sulking furiously, and putting on a silent stare which sufficiently expresses human disapproval: that little sudden void stare, entirely characteristic, as of one who is forced to survey, for the time being, an endless vista of Siberian snows.

But it is remarkable that the completed poem is dated Valetta, January 30, 1833: as if to mark the vanishing of the only shadow which ever crossed the united path of Newman and Froude; and that shadow was due, as we shall see, to a fancy of Newman’s, conceived in illness. Abstract and gnomic as his verses are, two human faces, nameless but recognisable, look through them with ‘sad eyes spiritual and clear.’ One is Mary Newman’s, in her sisterly youth;[92] the other is Hurrell Froude’s. Dearly as Newman loved his many friends, then and after (and as Dean Church reminds us, mutual affection as profound as that of the early Christians, was the very hall-mark of the Tractarians), there is but one friend discernible in the long vista of his poetry, most of which was written in his living presence. Hurrell may never have suspected as much. The temper of both, shrinking from the least emotional emphasis, would have precluded any open give-and-take. The privilege of being English has its own system of taxation. The Cardinal, in his old age (possibly when Little Lord Fauntleroy was overrunning the stage), had to assure some inquirer, by post, that he hardly had been in the habit of addressing Hurrell as ‘Dearest,’ in the prose exigences of every day.

‘I am afraid poor [Willy] will make no hand of his Second Class. He has no interest, and can pick up none, for what he is about; and all his interleaves and margins are scribbled over with lug sails. You will be glad to hear that I have made up my mind to spend the winter in the Mediterranean, and my father is going with me, the end of November, and we shall see Sicily and the south of Italy. We are both very anxious that you should come with us. I think it would set you up…. I have read M. Thierry’s stuff.[93] His ignorance is surprising. He supposes Oxford to have been a Bishopric in Henry the Second’s time, and he sticks in Saxons ad libitum, quoting authorities with which I am familiar, and where nothing of the sort occurs. My translations have been at a standstill…. Also, I am getting to be a sawney,[94] and not to relish the dreary prospects which you and I have proposed to ourselves. But this is only a feeling: depend on it, I will not shrink, if I buy my constancy at the expense of a permanent separation from home. I think this journey will set me up, and then I shall try my new style of preaching. We must indulge ourselves and other people with a little excitement on such matters, or else the indifferentists will run away with everything!’