Chapter VI: Preface (6)

Secular authority was on the eve of abolishing in Ireland ten Bishoprics, which, in that country at least, it is not pretended that it had not created. But there could be no guarantee whatever that secular authority, so gorged, would be sated; and operations in England being only too likely, it was time for the objectors to rise. Besides, the general change effected during 1832-3, in the relations of Church and State, was the most disheartening or enraging thing in the world to the sentinels at Oxford, according to individual mood. Up to then, ‘spiritual cases were referred by the Sovereign to the Court of Delegates, which contained a majority of spiritual persons. But in those years, the final appeal was transferred, by Act of Parliament, from the Court of Delegates to, first, the Privy Council, and then a Committee formed from it.’[143] In that bondage, a worthy legacy from the ‘unidea’d’ reign of William IV., the Church of England stood, and stands. Things had been bad enough before. Already Hurrell had cried out in private: ‘The Church can never right itself without a blow-up.’ This was more sanguine than Dr. Arnold’s simultaneous jeremiad, and quite as loyal. ‘The Church as it now stands,’ he said, ‘no human power can save.’ But now Froude’s song is: ‘If the State would but kick us off!’ caught from Lamennais and the great democrat-Ultramontane agitation in France. The wish is translated into the weighty and telling pages of the long essay which stands first in his _Remains_, and which he wrote in 1833. _More suo_, he uses in it all the original documents which he can lay his hands on, and furthers his argument by italicisation and capitalisation of leading words and phrases. Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle once remarked that the step of throwing off the supremacy of the State had been dreamed of, in England, only by the Nonjurors, and ‘the first authors of the _Tracts for the Times_.’ Has it not been dreamed of ever since? The deification of a Privy Council was the occasion, not the cause, of the High Anglican onset, itself but one movement of several against the intrenchments of British materialism, but distinct from them all, inasmuch as Scott and Coleridge, riding just before, with the armed protest of Carlyle, of Ruskin, and of Emerson to follow, bore no known emblems of a Christian Crusade. The hour of latent dissatisfaction had crept up to flood-water mark. As we are well aware, no great movement springs full-armed from the brain of any local Jupiter; and this one was a birth, and only a birth, of 1833. For years previously, semi-active agitation, fed by the feeling all over the country, was quite patent and open. There was much popular stir and screaming, all making, no doubt, for righteousness and right ideas. The thinkers, the Universities, were far clearer as to what they did not mean, or wish, than as to what they did. ‘Newman and I are both so consequential,’ Froude writes in a leave-taking letter of 1832, ‘that we fear all sorts of things going wrong while we are away.’ It is perfectly true that these men did not create, but evoke, the religious spirit of their time. The Chinese narcissus bourgeons at a miraculous rate from a bulb a year old. The Platonic theory of individual knowledge should be extended to meet the case of nations: they, too, remember, and have rhythms which antedate the conscious life, and recur throughout it. We are always forgetting the commonplace that a spirit rather than intelligent persons with a polity, a law rather than its visible agencies, is the true operative force. Well-meaning students of the Movement have looked upon one name or another as the generating cause, whereas the real leader is ever nameless, like Odysseus in the cave of his baffled giant. There was ‘an unseen agitator,’ as Newman knew. His earliest friend of undergraduate days, whom he called, afterwards, _Princeps Apostolicorum_, was, for one, independently aware of it, as soon as events began.

‘… What a wonderful drama is going on,’ Mr. Bowden[144] writes, ‘if we could but trace it as a whole, and know the multiplied bearings of each varied scene upon our nation and our Church! However, we can see our own parts, and that must for the present suffice us.’ Newman confessed the same wide vision, writing later in that year to Froude: ‘I do verily believe a spirit is abroad at present, and we are but blind tools, not knowing whither we are going. I mean, a flame seems arising in so many places as to show no mortal incendiary is at work, though this man or that may have more influence in shaping the course, or modifying the nature of the flame.’

‘This man or that’ was not lacking, and there was work for him: work for ‘the bright, vivacious, and singularly lovable figures with whom the eyes of Oriel men were then familiarised.’[145] Mr. Charles Kingsley thought them, as it would appear, not ‘virile’: a necessary opinion for any ‘virile’ Kingsley to hold. So much depends upon definition! It was a passing conversational remark made by Hurrell Froude concerning the great Churchmen of the Middle Ages, that their portraits had ‘a curious expression as of neither man nor woman, a kind of feminine sternness.’ A very similar remark was made at almost the same moment by the prince of English metaphysical critics. Of the coincidence Froude was not aware; but his Editors, in a footnote, fail not to refer to it. ‘[Wordsworth’s] face is almost the only exception I know,’ said Coleridge, ‘to the observation that something feminine, (not effeminate, mind!) is discoverable in the countenances of all men of genius.’[146] This angelic or epicene aspect is, indicatively, the most terrible force in the world. It is certain that the Tractarians lacked the girth, the gait, the entire and triumphant visibility of John Bull going out with his gun. They lived with abstract ideas, and came to look like them.

‘Mr. Froude, if anyone,’ wrote Newman anonymously in _The British Critic_ of April, 1839, ‘gained his views from his own mind.’ But indeed, as is implied, none of us ever gain our views from our own minds: views coming with an underived spontaneous air are born of a man’s superior attentiveness to the working Mind of things. Hurrell, pacing Trinity Gardens, his hand on Williams’ shoulder, with the off-hand edict: ‘Isaac, we must make a Row in the world!’ recalls to us another agitator of whimsical disinterestedness, Camille Desmoulins. Or he is speaking a too free translation of the message of high and urgent poetry which La Pucelle once poured into the ears of Durand Laxart at Domremy. (It is always of French genius that his genius reminds us.) In all the polemics of the day his voice is the Æolian one, fitful and laconic, unexpected and alarming, yet oddly sweet. He is very busy chastising and correcting himself; but that other strife going on is far more interesting: he is a soldier of fortune, he must fight, he must interfere. When the outriders of the whole sea of returning Catholicism charge at first singly and silently, then with uproar, along the levels of the sleeping Protestant kingdom, the Hurrell Froude who loved duty and hard work, and abhorred display and conspicuosity, rises, despite himself, a little dominant, a little spectacular. He is inevitably marked, to ear and eye, as the legendary ninth wave, the foamiest green breaker of the line, ever re-forming and breaking, so long as he is visible, brighter, taller, and farther in-shore than the rest. With the year 1833 he comes into public play, and vanishes almost as soon.

To J. F. CHRISTIE, Esq., July 23, 1833.

‘… By the bye, I write [“Newman”] as if you knew he was returned. He came back last Tuesday week.[147]… He has been delayed by what one can now look back on without uneasiness, as he has not suffered eventually; but the fact is, he has had a very narrow escape of his life, owing to a severe epidemic fever which he caught in Sicily, and in a place where he could get access to no kind of medical aid. At the place where he was seized he was laid up for three days, unable to move, and at the end of that time strangely took it into his head that he was well. In consequence, he set out on his journey, and after having gone about seven miles, was carried almost lifeless into a cabin, just at a moment when, by a strange accident, a medical man was passing. This person relieved him sufficiently to enable his attendants to remove him to a town some way farther on, in which a doctor resided: Enna, or Castro Giovanni. Here he was eleven days before the crisis of his fever arrived, and it was long thought he had no chance of recovering…. He was afterwards delayed at Palermo by the stupid vessel, which did not sail for three weeks after it had promised, and thus lost all the advantages of a good wind. However, he is back safe at last, and really looks well, though his hair is all coming off, and his strength is not yet thoroughly restored. Do something for the [Magazine] and the _Lyra_. Wherefore stand ye all the day idle? I am going to [Hadleigh] in an hour or two to concert measures.’

Hadleigh Rectory, in Suffolk, was the scene of the little four-days’ congress called together on July 25, by the independent Cambridge forerunner of the Movement, the Rev. Hugh James Rose; ‘the most eminent person of his generation as a divine,’ Dean Church calls him. It is interesting to recall that the young Richard Chevenix Trench was Curate of Hadleigh at this time. Neither Keble nor Newman was able to attend. It was the first rally of those willing to fight ‘for the doctrine of Apostolical Succession, and for the integrity of the Prayer-Book’; and means were about to be taken to found a powerful Association of Friends of the Church. Froude, impatient of talk and of preliminaries, distrustful of the need of organisations, cherishing a preference such as Newman was to express long after, writing to Pusey, for ‘generating an ἦθος rather than a system,’ went down from Oxford somewhat grumblingly. The subjects brought forward at Hadleigh were chiefly disciplinary. The complicated relationship of Church and State, the call for Lay Synods, and the ever-burning topic of the manner of the Appointment of Bishops in the Church of England, seem to have engrossed the four men present, Froude then as always, in his extreme abstract way, pushing on to conclusions the others were not ripe for. He found Rose, disinterested as he knew him to be, ‘conservative’; he lamented that Rose and Palmer of Worcester clung to what he calls the ‘gentleman heresy,’ to ‘the old prejudices about the expediency of having the clergy gentlemen, _i.e._, fit to mix in good society; and about “prizes” to tempt men into the Church, and the whole train of stuff…. What I have learned,’ he adds, generalising, ‘is not to be sanguine, not to expect to bring other people into my views in a shorter time than I have been in coming to them myself.’ And again to Newman, with candour: ‘You seem to think I am floored, and in fact, I partly am so; at least the predominant impression left on my mind is that I am a poor hand at entering into other people’s thoughts.’ There follows a description of a fellow-guest, which must have made both Newman and Keble smile, as being possibly applicable to another and more fiery spirit who, as Mr. Rose their host said afterwards, with his delicate Gallic justness of criticism, was ‘not afraid of inferences.’ It can hardly be proved that Hurrell appreciated Mr. Rose, who was a sort of precursor in Pusey’s spiritual dynasty, as Hurrell himself was in Newman’s. But he overrated Mr. Perceval. Newman was given to understand, at the close of the session, on the thirtieth day of July, some of Mr. Perceval’s excellences and moral dangers.

‘Perceval,’[148] Hurrell writes, ‘is a very delightful fellow in ἦθος, a regular thorough-going Apostolical; but I think Keble should warn him about putting himself in the way of excitement. Some of the things he says and does make me feel rather odd. I am sure he should be set to work on something dull that would keep his thoughts from present interests. I never saw a fellow who seemed more entirely absorbed, heart and soul, in the cause of the Church, and without the remotest approach to self-sufficiency.’

‘Both Rose and Palmer,’ wrote Newman on the other hand, after he had heard from those allies, ‘think Froude and Perceval very deficient in learning, and therefore rash.’ Considerable time had been spent in revising the _Churchman’s Manual_, by Mr. Perceval. Books, committees, bylaws, and such tangible machinery, seemed important to Mr. Rose, who was intelligently planning a great local campaign, to improve the position of his disadvantaged party. Froude, ahead of Newman or Keble, seems from the first to have outrun anything of this sort. To these three, the very existence of religion, whether expressed in the public worship and formularies, or in the conduct and belief of Englishmen, was at stake. He alone lacked a just conception of minor needs, what was the nature of these, or how far they should be satisfied: he felt only the need of supernaturalism in a society again grown godless since Wesley’s time. He did not, therefore, march forward in order, but by a long leap threw himself half-blindly upon ‘incomprehensibles, and thoughts of things which thoughts do but tenderly touch.’ Certainly, cohesion, as not being the note of the Church of England, was not the note of the conference at Hadleigh. Froude especially, with his terrible consistency, his capacity for getting all there was to get out of the mere innuendoes and half-lights of circumstance, his passion (to employ a serviceable expression of Locke’s) ‘to bottom everything,’ must have obstructed unconsciously the deliberations of a great liturgiologist and a true ecclesiastical statesman, both born to move with caution, and to end in the deltas of compromise or sheer weariness. Froude felt then, as afterwards, what he calls his ‘stigma of ultraism’; what really worried him more than that, was the slow foot of reform, toiling behind his own. He wished nothing less, as we have seen, than a ‘blow-up,’ and reconstruction. His poetic foresight made him implacable; consequences, not processes, were in his foreground. He had the individual vision. Galahad-like, he saw, while wise men were spurring up and down upon the quest. Mr. Palmer’s adjectives were well chosen: Hurrell was not ‘learned,’[149] and he was ‘rash.’ But it is also true that learning will call anything rashness which travels towards a given goal by a shorter route than its own. An extremely fine definition of Froude’s might be wrested from its context, and applied to his discomfiture at Hadleigh, and his position in general. ‘The understanding,’ he says, ‘pursues something which it does not know by means which it does; while genius endeavours to effect what it has a previous idea of, by means of which it has to ascertain the use.’[150] The ‘bold rider across country’ would perhaps look unnatural as a mounted collaborator in a procession. It is to be feared that the Rev. Richard Hurrell Froude was a difficult factor, a Montagnard, in the debates of nascent Anglo-Catholicism.

In the strife of ideas, during the summer, there were not lacking pastoral interludes.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, August, 1833.

‘… You can’t think what delicious weather we have had here [at Dartington]. It is like May back again…. I saw the other night what I can hardly convince myself not to have been a supernatural fire. I and one of the [Champernownes?] and two other boys, and a labourer, were coming up the river in a boat when it was dark, and we all saw as distinctly as possible under a tree, close by the water, what we took for a wood fire: hot embers, which did not blaze, but gave off sparks; the boys thought a wasp’s nest must have been burned out there, and landed to stir up the embers and examine; in landing we lost sight of the fire for a minute behind the bush, and in going to the place found nothing; no smell of burning, no ashes, no marks of fire on the leaves or grass: in fact, there certainly could not have been any fire there! The labourer was really frightened, and I cannot account for my not having been so; but somehow the thing has made an impression on my imagination. I never dream of it, nor think of it in the dark, or anything: yet I am absolutely certain of the facts, and wholly unable to account for them. Sometimes I look on it as a half-miracle, of which the counterpart is in store for us. The return of rough times may revive energies that have been dormant “in the land of peace wherein we trusted.” Is this nonsense?… I am very well, all but my cough, which is exactly what it was, and is likely to continue….’

This touch of mysticism, gracing a phosphoric phenomenon, reminds one keenly of what Newman thought and expressed about the whole Movement, if not of the men who seem to us now ‘of unearthly radiance.’ ‘No mortal incendiary,’ he said, in one of his splendid phrases already cited, ‘is at work.’

To Newman, during this August, Hurrell pours out his mind, with his usual forecasting irrelevance.

‘_Aug. 22._――I have written a sermon on the duty of contemplating a time when the law of the land shall cease to be the law of the Church; and I hope to get it preached by a friend of mine at the Bishop’s Visitation. My father thinks it most temperate and satisfactory.[151] If I had strong lungs I should go about the country, holding forth.

‘_Aug. 31._――… It has lately come into my head that the present state of things in England makes an opening for reviving the monastic system. I think of putting the view forward under the title of “Project for Reviving Religion in Great Towns.” Certainly colleges of unmarried priests (who might, of course, retire to a living, when they could and liked) would be the cheapest possible way of providing effectively for the spiritual wants of a large population…. I must go about the country to look for the stray sheep of the true fold: there are many about, I am sure; only that odious Protestantism sticks in people’s gizzard. I see Hammond takes that view of the Infallibility of the Church which P[almer] says was the old one. We must revive it. Surely the promise, “I am with you always,” means something?’

It is extraordinary how Hurrell’s talk runs not so much on existing outer problems as on notions which ‘have lately come into my head.’ The others were content to face emergencies the moment they arose. He knew not how to wait till things turned up: he went forward to turn them up. His vocation was less to lead than to prompt the men born to be leaders. The hard necessity of his lot, the denial to so vigorous a spirit of the physical fuel to keep it alight, imposed this upon him: to be what Emerson calls ‘the seeing eye, not the helping hand.’ Yet his enforced contemplative life kept those active brother lives together; he riveted their armour, mounted their banners, and re-tipped their spears. It was his destiny to give very much more than they could use, so highly congested and quintessential were his ideas, and the verbal hints born of them:

‘Such sounds as make deep silence in the heart,
For Thought to do her part.’

He is the vision of a pilgrim entering from the Middle Ages, barely laying down his staff and wallet before turning roadwards again, yet managing to blurt out, irrespective of the tavern conversation, fragments of his own correlated thought, immemorial things which he, at least, seems never to have forgotten. He is no opportunist, and chooses neither the audience nor the hour. ‘What to assume and what to prove,’ as he says, do not sort themselves in his mind. He is only oracular. He instructs Newman, in relation to no particular topic whatever, but on a mere salutary general principle: ‘Do keep writing to Keble, and stirring his rage. He is my fire, but I may be his poker.’ His influence over Keble’s fearless intelligence, felt from the first, was ultimately very great. His influence over Newman will hardly bear analysis, for Newman and he were one: the gnomon and the disk of a dial, or the arrow and the bow of some busy archer. We have all seen just such influence as Froude, invalided, had upon the Movement, privately exercised by Ministers of State, or by wives with a ripe understanding of their husbands’ practical concerns. It is the uncatalogued and intangible power, almost a plaything to its possessor, least known among the powers which move human society; and, therefore, perhaps it is the grimmest reality of all.

On September 9, Newman burst forth with the famous first sentence of his famous first Tract: ‘I am but one of yourselves, a Presbyter.’ Hurrell wrote no comment on the move; he was intimately aware of it from the beginning, and the earliest and hungriest reader. By the 16th, he is deep in study; there is a new historical theory to start, opening with an ironic reference to Mr. Keble’s ‘friends’:

‘… I have been reading a good deal lately about your friends the Puritans in Queen Elizabeth’s time; and really I like poor Penry very much. I think of writing An Apology for the Early Puritans, whose case I think to be this. The Church of England had relinquished its claim to the _jus divinum_, and considered Ordination to emanate ultimately from the Queen. These poor fellows, _i.e._, Penry and Co. (not Beza and Co., nor Knox and Co.), detested so abominable a notion: but what could they do? They had been bred up in a horror of trusting history in matters of religion, so they could look for a divine institution and a priesthood nowhere except in the Bible. Here, then, they looked, assuming as an axiom that they must find; and finding nothing more reasonable than the platform, they caught at this. In the meantime our people, and the smug[152] fellows on the Continent, were going on with their civilities to one another, and servilities to their respective Governments, and left these poor men to fight for a _jus divinum_, though not the true one. It seems to me that Saravia and Bancroft are the revivers of orthodoxy in England, and that the Puritans shielded them from martyrdom. Had it not been for their pertinacity in claiming a _jus divinum_, that tyrant[153] would certainly have smothered the true one. Such are my crude speculations, on a rough survey: if you think me hopelessly wrong, floor me at once, and save me from wasting my time. How do you like my “Appointment of the Bishops?”[154] I have sent one on “State Interference in Matters Spiritual,” very dry and matter-of-fact, and mean to have a touch at the King’s supremacy, which I think Hooker would not justify under present circumstances. I think, if we manage well, we may make the idea of a Lay Synod popular. Its members should be elected by universal suffrage among the communicants, _more primitivo_. I find this view most effective in conversation. I am very well, and don’t think of going abroad this winter, though you seem to say I must. Time and money are two good things, and I don’t like wasting more of them. I have done enough in that line already…. I am quite surprised to see how much less of a conservative [Rose?] is than he was six months since. I do believe the progress of events is converting every one, and that we shall not have much longer to encounter the stigma of ultraism.’

Froude supplied, at most, but four of what George Eliot called _The Tracts Against the Times_, if we are to count as his only what he wrote out with his own hand. Of these, the earliest, briefest, and most comprehensive is No. 8, The Gospel a Law of Liberty, the authorship of which was, and is, frequently assigned to Newman.[155] It somewhat complicates matters that in Newman’s printed correspondence are various remarks addressed to him as responsible for No. 8, which bear no disclaimer in any note or parenthesis supplied by himself. It is also noticeable that he writes to Hurrell on November 13, 1833: ‘Evangelicals, as I anticipated, are struck with The Law of Liberty, and The Sin of the Church. The subject of Discipline, too, I cannot doubt, will take them. Surely my game lies among them.’[156] He might have said ‘our game,’ but he does not. Nor does The Gospel a Law of Liberty appear in Froude’s _Remains_. Dean Burgon, however, prints in the Appendix to his _Twelve Good Men_ an extract from a letter of the Rev. Charles Marriott to the Rev. A. Burn of Chichester, Jan. 29, 1840. ‘You ought to know,’ says that gentle and unimpeachable authority, ‘that Froude was the author of the Tract, The Gospel a Law of Liberty, which is the subject of No. 8.’ Froude and Newman may well have devised this No. 8 in concert. So far as the wording goes, Newman’s light galloping touch is certainly upon it. In idea it is intensely Froude-like in its concentrated suggestiveness: in it we see the very pupa, as it were, of the wide-winged theory of Dogmatic Development, broached at Littlemore so long after. No. 8, with its _staccato marcato_ form, is perhaps the most typical of the early _Tracts_, and most expressive of the spirit in which they were conceived. These shared in common (in the opinion of Dr. Pusey’s conjoint biographers, men who usually see things as they are) a ‘startling and peremptory language.’ ‘First rouse,’ ran Hurrell’s business-like programme, ‘then modify.’ Newman certainly, in his office of rouser, availed to set gentle and simple by the ears. Briefly, pungently, he did his inimitable work. Dr. Pusey, with his serious grasp, his moral weight, his immense learning, by contributing to the series his great signed Tract on Baptism, changed the fashion as we know. To ‘modify’ began with him, and progressed with him. He had the genius of explicit statement. It might even be said that his whole influence and care, especially from 1845 on, were on the side of expounding and applying, as Newman’s and Froude’s had been preponderately on that of naked presentment, full of novelty, excitement, and ‘danger.’ The little guided Israel which had followed the pillar of fire by night, found it well, in due course, to follow the pillar of cloud by day.

Froude’s other contributions to the _Tracts_ were No. 9, On Shortening the Church Services; No. 59, Church and State (incorporated in the _Remains_ as the concluding section of State Interference in Matters Spiritual); and No. 63, on The Antiquity of Existing Liturgies. The last-named was intended to display the novel features of the Communion Service in the Book of Common Prayer, as contrasted with those Uses having inter-resemblance and an unbroken Apostolic derivation. It is shown that every Ordo except the English contains a memento of the dead; a sacrificial oblation; and a prayer ‘that God may make the bread and wine the Body and Blood of Christ.’ The method adopted by Froude in printing the Forms of Consecration is that of the parallel column: an early instance of the employment of that practical and sometimes deadly modern device. He calls the Tract, elsewhere, ‘my analysis of Palmer,’ and it was certainly fitted to concentrate fresh attention on Mr. Palmer’s _Origines Liturgicæ_, as well as on the norm of the matter it deals with.

Hurrell’s hands were full of writing in 1833; and being so busied with larger matters, he ceased to compose and preach sermons. Two very fine sombre ones, on S. John Baptist, and Riches a Temptation, date from June of this year; but they were his last. His true work lay in a less trodden field. The strong essays signed ‘F.’ in _The British Magazine_ are in a happier vein than any of the sermons, and far more spontaneously worded. Like Dr. Johnson, Hurrell had a writing language, and a talking language which made faces at it. The only papers of his which approach in animation the unconventional utterances of his living voice and of all his letters, are just those upon historic-ecclesiastical, not secular subjects. There he sends up rockets too, though with a certain resigned decorum, and would have filled the sky had he not been curbed, as time went on, both by Rose and by Newman.

He came up to Oriel on October 5. Newman, now in the thick of affairs, and overjoyed to have him close at hand, writes privately to Keble, whom it ‘grieved to the heart’: ‘I fear that Calvert,[157] whom you may recollect here, and a physician now, has pronounced about Froude (not _to_ him) a judgment so unfavourable that I cannot bear to dwell upon it, or to tell it. Pray exert your influence to get him sent to the West Indies. I know he has a great prejudice against it; but, still, what other place is hopeful? They say Madeira is not. He might take a cargo of books with him. _N.B._――Could you not manage to send Isaac Williams too?’ On Oct. 26, Hurrell left Oxford for home, Keble going with him as far as Bath. He sailed away on his second long voyage a month later. During the interval, he takes up his tireless pen.

To the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, Oct. 29, 1833.

‘Thank I[saac Williams] for a Thomas à Kempis he sent me, and tell him to know more about the other Sanctus Thomas before he draws invidious comparisons. I have got here without increasing my cough at all…. We will have a _vocabularium apostolicum_, and I will start it with four words: “pampered aristocrat,” “resident gentlemen,” “smug parsons,” “_pauperes Christi_.”[158] I shall use the first on all occasions: it seems to me just to hit the thing…. Love to C[hristie] the prefect, and all the sub-Apostolicals. I am like the man[159] who “fled full soon on the first of June, but bade the rest keep fighting.”… Mind and write me all the news as it comes to hand; else I shall go to sleep at Barbados entirely…. Tony Buller[160] was here yesterday. He is a capital fellow, and is anxious to assist us with trouble and money in any way he can. I told him it was better not to say anything about money yet, till we had given people a longer trial of us. It is no use to form expectations of people, but I am willing to hope that he is a most zealous fellow, and will not start aside like some other broken bows.’

By early November the address of the clergy to the Archbishop (Howley) of Canterbury, which covered much ground, took many revisions, and ultimately was so well received, was afoot. Hurrell was ready, with his own uncompromising diction, to help it into being, leaving it to others to ‘supply the etiquette about “the undersigned clergy, etc.”’ Rhetorical drapery was hardly in his line. He sends to Newman some pithy sentences about ‘the misapplication to which some of the Services [of the Church of England] are exposed by the practical disuse of the Rubrics prefixed to them, and the inefficiency of attempting to act on these Rubrics without first completing the ecclesiastical system they presuppose.’ Also, he would have the reformers declare their conviction that ‘measures such as these, affecting the spiritual welfare of the Church, ought to originate only with its spiritual rulers, and that in such matters they deprecate every kind of extra-ecclesiastical interference.’ ‘_Satis hæc lusisse_,’ he breaks off. ‘I am very well indeed;――not had so little cough as to-day and yesterday, since the Lazaretto at Malta.’

So on Nov. 4; and on the 14th, some affectionate abuse: ‘Ἀγείων ὄχ’ ἄριστε. Have you not been a spoon to allow the Petition to have nothing about “the system presupposed in the Rubrics,” and to leave out your key-words “completing” and “extra-ecclesiastical”? The last word I would introduce thus: “They take this opportunity of expressing their conviction that the powers with which God has entrusted the spiritual rulers of the Church are sufficient for its spiritual government, and that all extra-ecclesiastical interference in its spiritual concerns is both unnecessary and presumptuous.” My father is annoyed at its being such milk-and-water. Do make a row about it. I see already that I shall find in your book[161] sentences which I am sure stood, when they were first written, after some other sentence than that which affects to introduce them now, and seem conscious of being in the neighbourhood of a stranger: “buts” where there should have been “ands,” etc., of which I shall make a catalogue, and pay you off for all the workings you have given me before now. However, it looks very pretty; and when I puff it, and people turn over the pages, they have a very imposing effect. People say, “Ah! I dare say, a very interesting work.”… Love and luck to all the Apostolicals. Why do you say “yours _usque ad cineres_”? If I am wrecked on Ash-Wednesday you will be the cause of it….’

‘My father’ was usually the bridle, not the spur, to his young high-pacing ‘Apostolical.’ ‘I have often told Hurrell he was going too fast,’ the Archdeacon writes a little later to Newman. ‘He alarms people by his speculations, and is incautious in talking to persons who cannot enter into the purity of his motives. I dare say he laid himself completely open on his visit to Archdeacon Lyall.’[162]

Hurrell could not but enjoy his too quickly-ended months at the Parsonage. However, he was never, even in full health, very social, because having tested society, he feared the effect of it upon himself. Much of it, he thought, would wake in him pettiness of various sorts, and lead him to be ‘flash and insincere,’ and tempt him also to value those who thought him clever and charming, and to form ‘wild schemes about becoming popular.’ But he ‘made himself agreeable,’ as it is called, to please his father. He even rode to hounds, though on principle he objected to hunting; and he put up generally, without visible grimaces, with the customs, viands, amusements and conversation of his class. He hated eccentricity, most of all in himself, and very likely from his native fastidiousness, as well as from the supernatural motive. Conscious idiosyncrasy is so cheap! a deliberate escape from the vulgar being essential vulgarity. ‘Any eccentric pleasure we have a fancy for, particularly if we think it a proof of genius,’ had small chances with Froude. His very difficult ideal, borrowed unconsciously from S. Benedict and S. Bernard, was moderation, the mean of things, the spiritual adornment of the ordinary. He would attain to the ‘humdrum.’ ‘Whatever is disagreeable,’ he formulates to himself at twenty-three, ‘whatever, at the same time, makes us like other people, is an opportunity for self-denial,’ and through self-denial he meant, if possible, to remodel Hurrell Froude. That was his fine art and his religion. To ‘make a few saints,’ as he told his friend Rickards, was the way for each man to build up Christianity again for all.

‘I have heard from dear Froude, who is certainly downcast,’ Newman confides to Keble towards the middle of this month of November, in an undated letter. ‘He left home to-day, and was to be with Canon Rogers till Saturday, when the packet sails. He is full of disappointment at the address; but then, say I, it effects two things: first, it addresses the Archbishop as the head of the anti-innovators, and it addresses him, and not the King or Parliament: which has a doctrinal meaning, and is a good precedent. However, Froude calls me names, and bids me stir you up into a fury, if I can.’

Newman’s thoughts continued to play pensively about his friend ‘ordered South.’ He reverts to him, without naming him, on the 22nd, when he writes to Mr. Rickards, in reply to a letter of censure: ‘Nor can I wish anyone a happier lot than to be himself unfortunate, yet to urge on a triumphant cause: like Laud and Ken in their day, who left a name which after ages censure or pity, but whose works do follow them. Let it be the lot of those I love to live in the heart of one or two in each succeeding generation, or to be altogether forgotten, while they have helped forward the Truth.’

Hurrell put to sea, again from Falmouth, this time without Newman or his father. ‘Blowing a full gale … and I to start to-morrow morning!’ And, by way of hygienic consolation: ‘A sailing vessel is as nearly the cleanest thing in the world as a steamer is the dirtiest.’

Mr. Keble, who may have chiefly influenced his decision to go to Barbados, would be intimately interested, for a dozen reasons, to hear of Hurrell’s welfare in a field where he himself might once have found his lifework. As long before as 1824, he had been offered the Archdeaconry of Barbados (worth £2000 a year), and declined his only ecclesiastical dignity, as he declined or accepted pretty much everything, for a pious domestic reason: his father was too infirm.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Jan. 9, 1834. Barbados.

‘With hands bitten sore by mosquitoes, I set to, upon a sheet of paper which will witness many fresh bites before I get through it. The wretches are flitting about me on all sides, and every moment I am forced to put down my pen and hit at them. People soon cease to care for them: that is my only consolation. The weather here is most delicious, the thermometer averaging eighty-three degrees, and showers flying in all directions. When it rains here, they say: “What a fine day!”… The room I am in has seven windows and four doors, with a thorough draught every way; everything is contrived for getting up thorough draughts: long passages open at both ends, for the everlasting east wind to blow through, and windows on every side of a room where it is possible, or immense doors opposite them, where it is not. I suppose before the hurricane[163] this must have been a house fit for a resident gentleman of high pretensions; now it consists only of two rooms, and a number of sheds erected round them against the walls that remain standing…. The sum which was set aside by Government to repair the injury done here is not allowed to go to the repair of Churches, even though 24,000_l._ of it is still in hand, which they do not know how to dispose of, and seven Churches are in complete ruins….

‘I have heard some facts which seem to show a good spirit among the clergy…. Mr. ――――, about whom you may remember the great row that took place some years since for admitting a black to the Communion in company with whites, has now so completely broken down that feeling, that last Sunday, when I received the Sacrament at his Church, at which near two hundred people were present, all colours were mixed indiscriminately. In the Roman Catholic islands this was always insisted on, and carried with a high hand…. This island is very green, and its plants very exotic-looking, but there is a total want of beauty. For all I have yet seen, the coasts of the Mediterranean are the places “_mortalibus ægris munere concessæ Divom_.” Also, the negro features are so horridly ugly, at least the generality of them: now and then indeed one sees finely-chiselled Egyptian features, and among the others one can distinctly trace the difference of caste in all shades from man to monkey…. You will be shocked at my avowal, that I am every day becoming a less and less loyal son of the Reformation. It appears to me plain that in all matters that seem to us indifferent or even doubtful, we should conform our practices to those of the Church which has preserved its traditionary practices unbroken. We cannot know about any seemingly indifferent practice of the Church of Rome that it is not a development of the Apostolic ἦθος; and it is to no purpose to say that we can find no proof of it in the writings of the six first centuries; they must find a _dis_proof if they would do anything…. I have been reading the controversy between Law and Hoadly for the first time. Law’s brilliance quite astonished me: I think it the most striking specimen of writing I ever saw. Yet I own now and then he seems rather wild. Surely one could get such splendid compositions into circulation by puffing them? It was a noble end of Convocation to be put down for censuring Hoadly, and the censure looks well as the last record in Wilkins’s _Concilia_. The sun that set so bright must have a rising!… I have translated all the Becket correspondence, and should go [on] at once to Anselm, if I was not on the point of starting with the Bishop[164] on his Visitation. All I hear makes me wish to go to America, though I do not conceive the views of the clergy in general there to be very high. Preaching goes for everything, and a person that cannot fill his Church gets dismissed. I think that in the present state of religion preaching should be quite disconnected from the Services, and looked on as an address to the unconverted.[165]… We ought to employ itinerant talkers in England; I am sure I could stir up people very much in Devonshire and Cornwall in that way.’

To the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, Jan. 25, 1834.

‘… I have a very poor account to give you of my studies. I have been here near a month, and have not set to work regularly on anything. Although I have not done anything like regular work, I have picked up a good deal. I have been looking about, here and there…. Does not the Archbishop of Canterbury claim patriarchal authority (_qualem qualem_) over as large a portion of the globe as ever the Bishop of Rome did? and are not the Colonial Bishops just as much exonerated from their oath of canonical obedience, by proving that there is no universal Bishop recognised in Scripture, as ever Cranmer was?… I have been much surprised to find that the first Latitudinarians were Tories: _e.g._, Hales, Chillingworth, and that set. How Whiggery has by degrees taken up all the filth that has been secreted in the fermentation of human thought! Puritanism, Latitudinarianism, Popery, Infidelity; they have it all now, and good luck to them.[166] I see the reason Convocation was put down in 1717 was the remonstrance of the Lower House against the Upper, to make them censure Hoadly’s _Preservative_. The Upper House had a very little while before taken part with the Socinianising Bishops against the Lower. Also, what a curious thing it is to see the popularity of High Churchism among the lower orders at the time of Sacheverell’s trial! These matters have opened to my weak mind a field of thought and inquiry which I have no great chance of following up. If I had 5000_l._, I would pay all the clever fellows I could find to analyse the pamphlets, etc., of that time, and make a good History of Protestantism. A continuation of Collier[167] would just take in all I desiderate, and if done well, most curious and amusing it would be…. The most sensible people here seem to think it certain, that, after the emancipation of the slaves, no estate will be profitable enough to pay for a manager, so that all English proprietors who from age or habit, etc., are not able to come out and reside on their own property, must sell at a reduced price; also that since this climate, state of society, etc., suits the coloured people better than the whites, it will answer to them to buy at a higher rate than others, so that the islands will by degrees become what they call “brown” islands, and relapse into a semi-savage state by the gradual withdrawal of those who now keep up the tone of acquirement, etc.; that this will happen without any bloodshed, but will destroy the commercial value of the islands, for that not more than one-fifth of the sugar will be grown, and the rest of the land employed in growing sustenance for the idle population.’

To the Ven. Archdeacon FROUDE, Feb. 6, 1834.

‘… The weather has been very boisterous since I have been here: people say that they should have called the night of Friday 17th [January] a hurricane, if it had been in August or September…. I don’t know whether I may lay any blame on the weather, but certainly my cough has made no progress for the better since I landed. I don’t mean that I am worse, for I certainly have gained flesh, but my cough is exactly where it was when I first got into the warm latitudes: an improvement on what it was in England, but no more. The temperature of the air is quite delightful, but there is nothing to interest one out-of-doors: horridly ugly faces, most uninteresting scenery, an extremely shabby town, the population of which may, in point of morals, be called almost the sink of humanity; and then the vulgar names of all the places (I forget them as fast as I hear them), and money-making associations, which intrude into everything one sees and hears, offer a sad contrast to last winter’s work. But I don’t mention this out of grumbling, only as a reason why I am not more out-of-doors: the fact is, I spend my time in-doors very agreeably indeed. The Bishop stands very high in my estimation as a man of imperturbable equanimity among great trials to his temper, and the footing on which all his clergy are with him is a model. … The Bishop’s library is capital――much better than I expected; and as the daily expectation of setting off on the Visitation has kept me from going to work on anything regular, I have been dipping about, to my great amusement. … They say that if the growth of sugar were discontinued the island would produce sustenance enough for a very much larger population, almost without any cultivation. The vegetation is really wonderful. The guinea corn grows near fifteen feet high: and in the sugar crop there seems to be a mass of solid vegetable matter thrown up, as much as there is in a copse of ten years’ growth. It is an impenetrable thicket of rank iris: the cane part is just like the knotty root of an iris straightened out, and rising six or seven feet out of the ground; its colour is the richest yellow-green that can be conceived.

‘_Feb. 6._――At anchor off Nevis,――between it and St. Christopher’s, which the Protestants have vulgarised into St. Kitt’s. The Bishop is ashore confirming, and I have stayed to fetch up leeway. Since Monday, Jan. 26, when we started on our voyage, I have been in quite a new state of things…. I have a very uncomfortable hot, dark berth, which I could go into amusing details about, if it was worth the trouble; but “beggars must not be choosers,” as they say, so I may think myself well off to have any berth at all. The first place we got to was Antigua. About seven in the morning I came on deck, and found we were close to it: quite unlike Barbados; it put me in mind of Ithaca, or bits of the Sicilian coast: very beautiful, but on a small scale. While we stood off and on before what seemed an iron-bound coast, a pilot-boat emerged from one-could-not-say-where; and when the pilot was on board, we tacked, and sailed straight against a rock. As we got quite close, it began to appear that the shore was not a continuous line, but that one rock overlapped another, and between these there turned out to be an entrance about a gun-shot wide, which took us into a beautiful little lake, where there was just room to anchor. You will find it in the map, under the name English Harbour. And now I will not go on bothering with descriptions. We landed at the dockyard, where a file of soldiers were drawn up in compliment to the Bishop, and as he stepped out of the boat the batteries saluted. That part of Antigua is exquisitely beautiful; very deep bays and rocks, and pasture and wood and mountains, put the sugar and the niggers quite out of one’s head. The people seem a superior set to what you have elsewhere. I liked some of the clergy much, and the resident proprietors are said to be, with some exceptions, intelligent gentlemen…. We were at Antigua six days; since that we have been at Montserrat and Nevis, both mountainous on a large scale, and generally lost in cloud. Nevis is not unlike Pantelaria. Yesterday we dined at the President’s,[168] and had turtle for the first time.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Feb. 8, 1834.

‘Here I am with the Bishop on his Visitation, so that I have the advantage of a good long sea-voyage and some variety of scenery, both [of] which are good for me, though I cannot say they have as yet produced any perceptible effect. I seem to be just as well and no better than I was last summer; in fact, this is nothing else than a protracted summer, and it is unreasonable to expect more from climate here than from the same climate in England. You will see in my letter to [Newman] how I have employed my time in Barbados, and the length that I am being pulled on in anti-Protestantism. Would not Hammond, and Fell, and the rest of those holy humble men of God have altered the Articles?[169]

‘… [Rose?] seems to think anything better than an open rupture with the State, as sure to entail loss of caste on the clergy. Few men can receive the saying that the clergy have no need to be gentlemen….