Chapter VIII: Preface (8)

_Some months ago before I had repented of my radicalism &c,
I was devising a scheme for you which was knocked on the
head by my finding from the Brit Mag. that you were ordained
by the Bp. of Oxford. For my part, I’d rather have had my
Orders from a Scotch Bishop, & I thought of suggesting the
same to you. The stream is purer; & besides it w’d have left
one free from some embarrassing engagements. By the by, all
I know about any of you is through the Brit. Mag. Here it
was I learnt about Ryder & Henry, & N’s sermons, & your
ordination & whatever else I have happened to pick up about
any one――I am very thirsty for more authentic
information――Not that I w’d have you write to me after the
receipt of this letter tho, for by that time I should most
likely be on my way back. I shall start as early as I can in
April: & I really begin now to think that I shall come back
cured: At least people tell me that since the weather has
become cooler I have altered for the better in appearance
rapidly, & certainly I have in strength. I have now left off
animal food for many months_]

‘When I come home, I mean to rat-and-be-married: _i.e._, if I can hook in anyone to be such a fool. The great difference between a wife and a friend is that a wife cannot cut one, and a friend can. It is a bad thing περισσὰ φρονεῖν, so I shall certainly rat.[203] I see that … [Henry Wilberforce][204] has … Old [Ryder’s] apostacy I knew of before. [Isaac][205] cannot hold out long, if he is not fallen already. So why should you and I be wiser than our neighbours?[206] Some months ago, before I had repented of my radicalism, I was devising a scheme for you, which was knocked on the head by my finding from _The British Magazine_ that you were ordained by the Bishop of Oxford.[207] For my part, I would rather have had my orders from a Scotch Bishop, and I thought of suggesting the same to you. The stream is purer, and, besides, it would have left one free from some embarrassing engagements.[208] By the by, all I know about any of you is through _The British Magazine_…. I am very thirsty for more authentic information. Not that I would have you write to me after the receipt of this letter, though; for by that time I shall most likely be on my way back. I shall start as early as I can in April, and I really begin now to think that I shall come back cured. At least people tell me that since the weather has become cooler I have altered for the better in appearance rapidly, and certainly I have in strength…. For the last three weeks, I have had a horse, which I have been cool enough to smug from the Bishop’s stables in his absence;[209] and this, I think, has been of use to me.’

The letter to Newman, as usual, goes deeper, and touches sadly on more intimate matters.

‘… There was a passage in a letter I have just received from my father that made me feel so infinitely dismal, that I must write to you about it. He says you have written to him to learn something about me, and to ask what to do with my money. It really made me feel as if I was dead, and you were sweeping up my remains; and, by the by, if I was dead, why should I be cut off from the privilege of helping on the Good Cause? I don’t know what money I left: little enough I suspect; but, whatever it was, I am superstitious enough to think that any good it could do “_in honorem Dei et sacrosanctæ Matris Ecclesiæ_,” would have done something too “_in salutem animæ meæ_.”

‘… My father’s letter was a dismal one altogether. He tells me Isaac[210] is far from well, and Sir George and Lady Prevost obliged to leave England. Also that my poor sister [Phillis] has just sailed for Madeira to escape the winter, for fear of an affection just like mine…. Also that Mr. Keble[211] is supposed to be on his death-bed. About you personally I hear nothing. As for myself, it really seems as if I was going to have a respite. I have still some symptoms which make me fear it may turn out moonshine, _e.g._, great irritability of pulse, and shortness of wind in walking up hill. But everyone says, and I cannot help observing, that my looks are greatly altered for the better…. Sometimes I seem to myself very ridiculous to give way to such doleful thoughts, considering how very little there is apparently the matter with me; and if it was not for the effect consumption had taken on my … family, I should be ashamed of myself. But the pertinacity of my trifling ailment has sometimes seemed to me like a warning that fate had put its hand on me for the next [world].

‘When I get your letter, I expect a rowing for my Roman Catholic sentiments. Really, I hate the Reformation and the Reformers more and more,[212] and have almost made up my mind that the Rationalist spirit they set afloat is the ψευδοπροφήτης of the Revelations. I have a theory about the Beast and Woman too, which conflicts with yours; but which I will not inflict on you now. I have written nothing for a long time, and only read in a desultory, lounging way; but really, it is not out of idleness, for I find that the less I do the better I am, and so on principle resist doing a good deal that I am tempted to. One of the Bishop’s horses has contributed much to my recovery, as well as amusement. To my great satisfaction, I have found that just beyond the range of my longer walks there is a range of real fine scenery that I had not a dream of.

Οὕρεά τε σκιόεντα θάλασσά τε ἠχήεσσα

‘I start sometimes between three and four, and come back between six and seven, in which interval the thermometer averages between 78° and 76°, and there is generally a roaring wind from the sea…. I wish I knew how you were, and what you are about.’

To the Rev. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, Jan., 1835.

‘I am ashamed of myself for having grumbled at you; your letter[213] almost made me cry! My dumps are my only excuse, and you may guess I have had a good dose of them. Now I am in much better spirits about myself, and flooded with letters to boot, so I ought to be in a good humour; yet I don’t know whether the prospect of being home again soon, and the knowledge of what is going on there, has not made me less contented…. I am sorry to hear such poor accounts of you and Isaac. Keble says you are overworked. So does Christie; yet I would not have you leave any of it except the Deanship. On one or two points I am inclined to grumble at you. You seem to be finessing too deep. Why publish poor Bishop Cosin’s Tract on Transubstantiation?[214] Surely no member of the Church of England is in any danger of overrating the miracle of the Eucharist?… I am more and more indignant at the Protestant doctrine on the subject of the Eucharist, and think that the principle on which it is founded is as proud, irreverent, and foolish as that of any heresy, even Socinianism. I must write you out a sentence of Pascal on this. (My edition is differently arranged from most, so I cannot refer you to it.[215]) Speaking of Isa. xlv. 15, he says: “_Il a demeuré caché sous la voile de la nature qui nous le couvre, jusqu’à l’Incarnation; et quand il a fallu qu’il ait paru, il s’est encore plus caché, en se couvrant de l’humanité…. Enfin, quand il a voulu accomplir la promesse qu’il fit à ses apôtres de demeurer avec les hommes jusqu’à son dernier avènement, il a choisi demeurer dans le plus étrange et le plus obscur secret de tous: savoir, sous les espèces de l’Eucharistie._” And then he goes on to say that deists penetrate the veil of Nature, heretics that of the Incarnation; “_mais pour nous, nous devons nous estimer heureux de ce que Dieu nous éclaire jusqu’à le reconnaître sous les espèces du pain et du vin_.” I believe you will agree with me that this is orthodox…. Also, why do you praise Ridley?[216] Do you know sufficient good about him to counterbalance the fact that he was the associate of Cranmer, Peter Martyr, and Bucer? (_N.B._――How beautifully the _Edinburgh Review_[217] has shown up Luther, Melancthon, and Co.! What good genius has possessed them to do our dirty work?) I have also to grumble at you for letting Pusey call the Reformers “the Founders of our Church,” in that excellent and much-to-be-studied paper on Fasting.[218] _Pour moi_, I never mean, if I can help it, to use any phrases even, which can connect me with such a set. I shall never call the Holy Eucharist “the Lord’s Supper,” nor God’s priests “Ministers of the Word,” nor the Altar “the Lord’s Table,” etc., etc.; innocent as such phrases are in themselves, they have been dirtied: a fact of which you seem oblivious on many occasions. Nor shall I even abuse the Roman Catholics _as a Church_ for anything except excommunicating us. So much for fault-finding…. I am amused to see among your _Sermons_ the Naples one and the Dartington one. I can see the train of thought which suggested the latter.[219] Since then I have never been well, and then came my poor sister’s business, who, by the bye, is now at Madeira…. I have two schemes about the _Tracts_…. 1st, I should like a series of the Apostolical Divines of the Church of England…. 2nd, I think one might take the Jansenist saints, Francis de Sales,[220] the nuns of Port Royal, Pascal, etc., who seem to me to be of a more sentimental imaginative cast than any of our own, and to give more room for writing _ad captandum_…. Must it not be owned that the Church of England Saints, however good in essentials, are, with a few rare exceptions, deficient in the austere beauty of the Catholic ἦθος? K[eble] will be severe on me for this, but I cannot deny that Laud’s architecture seems to me typical.’

This is the letter so charmingly annotated for us by Lord Blachford’s anecdote. ‘There’s a Basil for you!’ said Newman, with humorous deprecation, when he read the grudging advice to lay by, in his great weariness, ever so little of his accustomed work. The comparison rose readily to his lips, for he had been busy writing the chapters of his _Church of the Fathers_, month by month, and he was fresh from the beautiful portraiture of SS. Basil and Gregory Nazianzum.[221] He had called Hurrell his Basil under no mere momentary sense of a certain ineradicable blithe hardness in his friend. Newman, as sensitive and seeing as S. Gregory himself, must have been conscious at the time how mysteriously fragments of modern biography were getting lodged into his Early Christian exegetics: for in truth he and Hurrell were as like Gregory and Basil as their impersonators in a miracle play. The analogy is not irrelevant, and it is the more attractive the more it is followed out, especially as there is in it nothing akin to the painful difference which long severed the loving-hearted great Saints from each other. ‘Basil’ at Dartington pitied no one much, himself least of all; the personal consideration affected him at all times as little as it had affected his mighty archetype, a man of yea and nay, of cloudless vision and unstinted enterprise.

Newman had written: ‘One of the more striking points of Basil’s character was his utter disregard of mere human feeling where the interests of religion were concerned…. This self-sacrifice, which he observed in his own case for the good of the Church, he scrupled not to extend to the instance of those to whom he was related, and for whom he had to act. His brother and his intimate friend, the two Gregories of Nyssa and Nazianzum, felt the keenness and severity of his zeal as well as the comfort of his affection.’ And again: ‘Gregory disliked the routine intercourse of society, he disliked ecclesiastical business, he disliked publicity, he disliked strife …; he loved the independence of solitude, the tranquillity of private life, leisure for meditation, reflection, self-government; study and literature. He admired, yet he playfully satirised Basil’s lofty thoughts and heroic efforts. Yet upon Basil’s death, Basil’s spirit, as it were, came into him…. Was it Gregory or was it Basil that blew the trumpet in Constantinople, and waged a successful war in the very seat of the enemy, in despite of all his fluctuations of mind, misgivings, fastidiousness, disgust with self, and love of quiet? Such was the power of the great Basil, triumphing in his death, though failing throughout his life. Within four or five years of his departure to his reward, all the objects were either realised, or in the way to be realised, which he had vainly attempted and sadly waited for. His eyes had failed in longing: they waited for the Morning, and death closed them ere it came.’ All this amounts to a strange and touching forecast.

Newman writes again most tenderly on Jan. 18, from London.

‘… I could say much, were it of use, of my own solitariness, now you are away. Not that I would undervalue that great blessing, which is what I do not deserve, of so many friends about me: dear Rogers, Williams, ὁ πάνυ Keble, and the friend in whose house I am staying (whom I wish with all my heart you knew as _Apostolicorum princeps_, Bowden); yet, after all, as is obvious, no one can enter into one’s mind except a person who has lived with one. I seem to write things to no purpose, as wanting your imprimatur. Perhaps it is well to cultivate the habit of writing as if for unseen companions; but I have felt it much, so that I am getting quite dry and hard. My dear Froude, come back to us as soon as you safely can; and then next winter, please God, you shall go to Rome, and tempt Isaac, who is very willing, to go with you. But wherever you are (so be it!) you cannot be divided from us.’

Hurrell held an irregular correspondence with some old friends to whom he was warmly attached, and remembered them in his winter leisure.

To the Rev. ROBERT ISAAC WILBERFORCE,
Feb. 25, 1835.

‘I would give twopence if circumstances should ever so turn up that you could make an occasional residence in Oxford compatible with your clerical duties,[222] and that we could concoct a second edition of old times again. It makes me laugh when I think of your old clipped horse, and how I was choused[223] by John G.; and sundry other matters which come into one’s head when more serious matters ought to be there. I wonder if you are the same fellow now that you used to be? I am afraid my old self is determined to stick by me till the last. But to talk sense: I really do indulge the hope that sometime we may be thrown together again. Undoubtedly you owe a debt to your destinies, which as a mere parish priest you can never repay. Your old project about the Mendicant Orders was the sort of thing: though perhaps something connected with later times would tell more just at present. As to myself, θεῶν ἐν γούνασι κεῖται whether I am ever to be of any use, though I now begin to entertain serious hopes that I shall recover. Perhaps you know that I have been out here, in exile _inter nigridas_, for this year and a quarter. The first winter I got very little good; and in the summer the heat kept me in a feverish state, which low diet could not counteract; so I began to think it was up with me; ὅταιν ὕδωρ πνύγῃ, etc., and I own I felt very doleful: but since the cool weather set in I have made a decided start, which has put me in a better humour; and the cooler it is the better I am; so that I dare say if I had gone to Madeira, or to Rome a second time, I might have been well. I shall not be sorry for an excuse for spending another winter in the south of Europe.

‘While out here I have stuck to my old prejudices as tight as I could; yet I fairly own that I think the niggers less incapable of being raised in the scale of being than I used. I don’t mean that, generally speaking, they are at all fit for the situation in which the law has placed them; but that here and there you see specimens which prove them, unequivocally enough, to be of the race of Adam, is not to be denied. Many of them are clever, and some affectionate and even honest, and if a more judicious system had been pursued, I should not have despaired of seeing them become generally so. As it is, the prospect is even in this island a very gloomy one, and in the others, the state of things seems next to hopeless. In Antigua, where they are quite let loose, they have been playing a very clever trick in many places: which is very characteristic of the negro intellect, sharp enough as to the moment, and absolutely without thought as to the next. In making sugar it is very important that the canes should be squeezed as soon as possible after they are cut: a few hours hurts them, and twenty-four spoils them; so our friends Quakoo and Co. cut away very diligently, and then strike for wages. Here in Barbados they cannot play the same trick, as the magistrates would flog them; and indeed flogging is scarcely less common, and more severe now, than under the old system. In this island, the most melancholy result of the change yet discernible is the condition of the emancipated children under six. The mothers, who have gone on hitherto in their lax amours with a certainty that any consequences that might result would be rather in their favour than otherwise, have been bringing a host of wretched urchins into the world and consigning them over to the estate nurses, _sans soin_; and now the produce of the last six years is returned upon their hands, unless they will consent to apprentice them; this they will not do, out of spite to their masters, but take the trouble on themselves they will not: so the squalid little wretches starve and die off shockingly; and those that live are locked up in their mother’s house while she is at work, doing nothing but quarrel, growing up in absolute uselessness, and with no chance of improving…. As to the religious prospects of these colonies, I think them very bad indeed. If the Church was thrown on the voluntary system, and left to make its way as the Wesleyans do among the poorer classes, it would make sure as it went, though perhaps the progress might at first seem slow; but now all is mere show and rottenness…. Another difficulty arises from the views of the Clergy: those who have any deference for Church authority are too generally mere Z’s…. Religious instruction out here means marrying the niggers, baptizing them, and teaching them to read.

‘“The age[224] is out of joint. O cursèd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!”

‘_Vivas, valeas, et Apostolicus fias._ I shall be back in May.’

Sir James Stephen was very wroth with Froude for his attitude towards the slaves of the West Indian Colonies, deducing that attitude from some allusions of Froude’s own to ‘anti-slavery cant.’ The Editors of the _Remains_ attest that Hurrell did not suffer (as later Mr. J. A. Froude was said to do, from other alleged causes) from negrophobia. But certainly his speech about ‘the niggers’ does not always sound reassuring. Perhaps in this, as in other matters, he leans upon the reader’s general knowledge of him, and requires that to supply the marginal comment.

It is a common jibe against reformers, though not always a true one, that their range of ideas is disproportioned or partial. Members of the Anti-Vivisection Society are supposed to be indifferent to wife-beating. Perhaps, if known, Hurrell’s _tendre_ for his only Roman Catholic, Monsignor Wiseman, and for ‘Roman Catholic sentiments,’ as he calls them, would seem enough to account for his limitations of sympathy on an island where he spent an unwilling year-and-a-half. It is interesting that to a Wilberforce, of all persons, he confides his final impressions, still pessimistic enough, of ‘our brothers carved in ebony.’ The Bill for the total abolition of slavery in the British dominions had received the Royal assent on August 28, 1833, and had come at last into full operation as Froude wrote. He was not wont, in other matters, to judge of the justice of a measure by its practical workings, or by the local material it had to work upon.

Hurrell approaches Keble in his most lucid and mischievous argumentative mood on the same day.

‘I have a miscellaneous jumble of things that I want to talk to you about, if I can but arrange them in any sort of order…. And first, I shall attack you for the expression “The Church teaches” so-and-so, which I observe is in the Tract[225] equivalent to “The Prayer-Book etc. teach[es] us” so-and-so. Now suppose a conscientious layman to inquire on what grounds the Prayer-Book etc., are called the teaching of the Church: how shall we answer him? Shall we tell him that they are embodied in an Act of Parliament? So is the Spoliation Bill. Shall we tell him that they were formerly enacted by Convocation in the reign of Charles II.? But what especial claim had this Convocation to monopolise the name and authority of the Church? Shall we tell him that all the clergy assented to them ever since their enactment? But to what interpretation of them have all, or even the major part of the clergy assented? For if it is the assent of the clergy that makes the Prayer-Book etc. the teaching of the Church, the Church teaches only that interpretation of them to which all, or at least the majority of the clergy have assented; and in order to ascertain this, it will be necessary to inquire, not for what may seem to the inquirer to be their real meaning, but for the meaning which the majority of the clergy have, in fact, attached to them! It will be necessary to poll the Hoadleians, Puritans, and Laudians, and to be determined by [the] most votes. Again, supposing him to have ascertained these, another question occurs. Why is the opinion of the English clergy, since the enactment of the Prayer-Book, entitled to be called the teaching of the Church, more than that of the clergy of the sixteen previous centuries; or, again, than the clergy of France, Italy, Spain, Russia, etc., etc.? I can see no other claim which the Prayer-Book has on a layman’s deference, as the teaching of the Church, which the Breviary and Missal have not in a far greater degree…. I know you will snub me for this…. Surely no teaching nowadays is authoritative in the sense in which the Apostles’ was, except the Bible? nor any in the sense in which Timothy’s was, except that of Primitive Tradition? To find a sense in which the teaching of the modern clergy is authoritative, I confess baffles me.[226] …

‘Next, as to _The Christian Year_. In the Fifth of November――[as to]

‘“There present in the heart
Not in the hands,”――

how can we possibly know that it is true to say “not in the hands”?[227] Also, on the Communion … you seem cramped by Protestantism. I desiderate something in the same key with

‘“Shall work a wonder there
Earth’s charmers never knew,”

and

‘“When the life-giving stream,” etc.[228]

So much for quarrelling. I have attacked N[ewman] for some of the Tract Protestantism…. However, the wiseacres are all agog about our being Papists. P. called us the Papal Protestant Church, in which he proved a double ignorance: as we are Catholics without the Popery, and Church-of-England men without the Protestantism…. It seems to me that even if the laity were as munificent as our Catholic ancestors, they could do nothing for the Church, as things are, except in their lifetime. Any Churches they might build, any endowment they might make, would be as likely as not to become in another generation propagandas of liberalism. Certainly we cannot trust the Bishops for patrons…. I don’t feel with you on the question of tithes. They cannot be a legal debt and a religious offering at the same time. When the payment began to be enforced by civil authority the desecration took place…. The Wesleyan system is voluntary … they are the strongest, and most independent of their congregations, of any existing society in the United States, and, I believe, in England….’

To the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, March 4, 1835.

‘… My dearest [Newman], I suppose by this time you will have learned to think as little of my inconsistent reports as I do when making them! I see [that] on one and the same day I must have sent my father a cheerful account, and you a dismal one. I am forced to say something, but have no data to judge by, and so talk at random. Certain indeed I am that my pulse is still progressively calming, and that now it is scarcely more irritable than it ought to be; but in nothing else can I be sure that I change at all…. _Favus distillans labia tua_, as someone said to John of Salisbury.[229] What can have put it into your head that your style is dull? The letter you sent me in the box was among the most amusing I ever received. I have now made up my mind to come back [in] the packet after the next, so as to be in England the middle of May, and am not wholly without hope that the voyage may do something for me. The notion of going to Rome with Isaac is very gratifying. I must learn French for it, though; for I have no notion of trusting “Providence,” as I did last time. The sun has already got almost to his full strength, though the earth is of course [only] beginning to collect its stock of caloric, and the experience of last year assures me that the less I have of it the better…. I am most sincerely sorry to hear of Mr. K[eble’s] death.[230] I suppose if there ever was anyone to whom death was like going to bed, it would be Mr. K[eble]. I have written lots of stuff since I have been out here, some of which I must inflict on you on my return; but none of it will do to publish. When I look over anything long after I write it, I see such jumps and discontinuities as make me despair of ever being intelligible. How I wish to see you all again!’

Shortly after this letter was sent to post, Hurrell left Barbados for good. No personal records of him exist there, and all memories of him have faded away. His face was set at last towards another island where his few remaining days could be crammed full of intelligent toil, and played at their full value. From Bristol, on May 17, he was able to announce: ‘_Fratres desideratissimi_! here I am, _benedictum sit nomen Dei_, and as well as could be expected. I will not boast, and indeed, have nothing[231] to boast of, as my pulse is still far from satisfactory….

‘When we asked our pilot “Who was Speaker?” he did not know; but after much cross-examining he recollected that he had heard it cried about the street that the old one was turned out; who “the other gentleman” was, he could not tell. Our next informant was the Custom House officer, who boarded over night, when we anchored, to see that nothing was taken out of the ship. All he knew was that “there had been a jabbering” about a change of Ministers.[232] The day is as dull and gloomy as possible; but after the torrid zone, any English May day is “a sight for sair e’en.” … I hope to get a sight of you soon. And now goodbye both! also I[saac] and R[ogers], and all that are within reach.’

This is Newman’s narrative note, drawn, thirty years after, from his own retentive memory:

‘R. H. F. made his appearance in Oxford on Tuesday, May 18. On the morrow occurred the Convocation in the Theatre, when the proposed innovation of a Declaration of Conformity to the Church of England, instead of Subscription to the Articles, was rejected by 459 to 57. It was the last vote he gave…. He left Oxford, never to return, on June 4. During this time Bowden was in Oxford; and for the first and last time saw R. H. F.’

Miss Anne Mozley, too, remembered in old age her only sight of Hurrell Froude.

‘It happened to [me], passing the coach office, in company with Mrs. Newman, to see Froude as he alighted from the coach which brought him to Oxford, and was being greeted by his friends. He was terribly thin, his countenance dark and wasted, but with a brilliancy of expression and grace of outline which justified all that his friends had said of him. He was in the Theatre next day, entering into all the enthusiasm of the scene, and shouting _Non placet_ with all his friends about him. While he lived at all, he must live his life.’

Frederic Rogers was of the company at Convocation who protested against a local Repeal of the Test and Corporation Act. He had no very hopeful feelings about the much-welcomed immigrant, and wrote to his sister from Oriel on May 2:

‘Wilson, Ryder, Wilberforce, Harding, spent several days here, with a quantity of other contemporaries, and Hurrell Froude arrived just in time from Barbados to cut into the middle of it. It quite surprises me how little people change! All these gentry, married and single, were so exactly what they always had been, that I could hardly believe I was not a freshman again. The only painful thing was that I fear Barbados has not done much for Froude. I was quite shocked to see him, but I suppose I had been too sanguine; his wretched thinness struck me more than it had ever done. They say, however, that no one ever gains flesh in the West Indies, but that it tells when they come back: I most earnestly trust it may be so. He talks of spending the winter at Rome again, going straight there, and coming straight back. He certainly cannot spend it in England. I cannot describe the kind of sickness I felt in looking at him when just the first meeting was over. I suppose it is a hopeful sign that his spirits are just as high as they always were; at least, were so when he first came here: for I am afraid we must look for a change in that, as Newman tells me he has heard to-day that his sister who was so ill is given over. I have not seen him since his hearing the news. However, I am getting mopish.’[233]

William Froude was still in Oxford also, having moved into Hurrell’s vacant rooms. Says the Rev. Thomas Mozley, in his most entertaining book:[234]

‘William Froude gave his heart in with his brother’s work at Oriel, though his turn even then was for science…. He was the chemist, as well as the mechanist of the College. His rooms on the floor over Newman’s were easily distinguishable … by the stains of sulphuric acid (I think) extending from the window-sills to the ground. The Provost must sometimes have had to explain this appearance to his inquiring guests, as they could not but observe it from his drawing-room window.’

With Hurrell and William, during these May days, was Anthony Froude, a boy of seventeen, coming up to Oriel with his private Tutor (with whom he was reading in the neighbourhood) in order to see his eldest brother.

‘When I went into residence at Oxford my brother was no longer alive. He had been abroad almost entirely for three or four years before his death; and although the atmosphere at home was full of the new opinions, and I heard startling things from time to time on Transubstantiation and suchlike, he had little to do with my direct education. I had read at my own discretion in my father’s library.’[235]

Anthony matriculated during the early December of this very year, two months before Hurrell died. Perhaps not many College rooms have known three such notable successive occupiers of one family, each of strong idiosyncrasy, and alike in nothing whatever but in personal charm.

The happy three weeks ended, Hurrell set out for Devon, with Mr. Keble for companion part of the way. People who had known him ‘looked horribly black at me, at first,’ until they became ‘accustomed to my grim visage,’ he tells Newman, five days later. Doubtless it was a harrowing thing in the pastoral neighbourhood, this continual spectacle of young faces at the Parsonage visibly withdrawing from the summer air. And another indomitable dying Froude was there, poor Phillis Spedding, the tradition of whose pathetic beauty yet lingers about the Cumberland hillsides whither she came as a bride.

To the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, Dartington, June 11, 1835.

‘_Dulcissime_, I got home Friday evening before dark very comfortably. My poor sister is perfectly cheerful, and free from pain, but daily declines in strength. Indeed, she is now very visibly weakened since I first saw her. It is impossible she should live many days. She is quite aware of her state, and seems to be as composed, and almost [as] happy, as if she was going to sleep…. There is something very indescribable in the effect which old sights and smells produce in me here just now, after having missed them so long. Also, old Dartington House, with its feudal appendages, calls up so many Tory associations as almost to soften one’s heart with lamenting the course of events which is to re-erect the Church by demolishing so much that is beautiful! “rich men living peaceably in their habitations.” On my way from Oxford, Keble talked a good deal about Church matters, and particularly about the ancient Liturgies, and my analysis of Palmer,[236] which had put the facts to him in rather a new point of view.’

And he reverts, in his animated vein, to the propaganda never out of his thoughts, saying encouragingly to Newman:

‘I have heard from my sisters and the Champernownes of the efficacy of your opuscula in leading captive silly women. One very curious instance I heard the other day of an exceedingly clever girl who for the last two or three years has been occasionally laid up with a very painful illness, and suffered severely. Nobody that she lives with can have acted as channels for infecting her,[237] as they are all either commonplace sensible people, or Evangelical, or lax. But she has got it into her head that there is a new party springing up in the Church, which she calls “the new men,” and has been pumping my sisters about you, and whether your notions are spreading, etc…. They say she has been working the Dartmouth Evangelicals with your _Sermons_, and made one of the parsons knock under! I have also heard of a learned lady (a very good and sensible person, by-the-bye), poking away most industriously at your _Arians_, and saying that her views had been much cleared by it.’

Phillis Spedding did not long survive her return to England. She died at Dartington three days after the date of Hurrell’s letter, on June 14, 1835, in her twenty-sixth year. Her one little child, Edward Spedding, then aged eighteen months, grew up only to attain his majority, and to be buried in January, 1855, at Bassenthwaite, not with his mother. Thomas Story Spedding, living on at the manor which he had so romantically inherited, married again.

Meanwhile, in Littlemore, Mrs. Newman was about to lay the corner-stone of her son’s Early English chapel, with the plans of which the architectural zeal of Mr. Thomas Mozley, the Vicar’s future brother-in-law, had much to do. The rumour that Hurrell Froude had designed it got some currency; and there is a mirth-provoking growl on the subject in the pages of that watchful worthy, the Rev. Peter Maurice of Yarnton, Chaplain of New College.[238] Upon the return of Newman and Froude from Rome in 1833, he says, ‘we soon found that the malaria of the Pontine marshes, the nondescript fogs of the fatherland of all heresy, began to develop their miasmata in a new diagnosis…. That edifice [Littlemore Church] was constructed from outlines and plans sketched out for the architect by an amateur friend of [Newman’s] own: the Rev. R. H. Froude. It was in a particular style of Church architecture which they were plotting to introduce. It was, in fact, the very first Church in modern times[239] that was ever consecrated with a stone altar, a stone cross, and credentia.’

Hurrell, however, at this very time, 1835, was busying himself with artistic needs nearer home. After his death, Archdeacon Froude wrote to Newman in one of his letters, which affectionately begged for a visit: ‘I hear you have a splendid Altar-table at Littlemore. That which dear Hurrell designed, and had executed for my chancel, is now in its proper place.’ This was in December, 1836. Hurrell’s Altar, practically modelled on the High Altar of Cologne Cathedral, has always been preserved as his gift at Dartington, and constantly used; it has undergone no alteration except that it had to be raised for convenience, after Archdeacon Froude’s death, as he was short, and both his successors have been very tall men. It was brought from the old Church to the new. Hurrell also changed the place of the chancel-screen in the Church now destroyed, moving it eastward, from the entrance to the choir, to enclose the rail at the Altar-foot, so that none but communicants passed beyond it: an irregular proceeding for an ecclesiologist. But it seems clear that he meant by the action to emphasise the sacredness of the Altar itself.

He was ever on the move, physically and mentally, in and about his father’s parish. Neighbours and social equals found it a bracing pleasure to see and hear him again, after absence; he had the greatest possible influence with them; those of his own age, fifty years later, and scattered all over England, were still quoting him. He dearly loved children, whom he met upon equal terms. Wherever there were children, Hurrell was always testing their metal, while romping with them. Would they run away from a comrade in danger? Would they throw blame on others? Would they break promises? He knew of what stuff every lamb of them was made, and it has been quite impossible for any of these, either, to forget him. This sweet solicitude, comeliest in one _auquel une grâce particulière a révélé le prix et la beauté de la virginité sacerdotale_,[240] played in and out among his graver cares. That, and the old preoccupation with architecture, stood for his best diversions, during his final year. It would appear that he also visited London. The admirable critic of the Movement just quoted lays some stress, in passing, on Hurrell’s interview with Dr. Wiseman; he even surmises that it was caused by spiritual anxieties of one sort or another.[241] But he forgets that Hurrell’s intention then was to return to Rome, and to historical work in the Vatican Library, and that, long before, Dr. Wiseman had promised his aid and interest in obtaining for him facilities for research.

The Gothic plotter (no more Gothic, Mr. T. Mozley thinks, than he should be), was employing his July of 1835 in outdoor devices. He tried to allure Newman as far as Torbay. ‘I am sure the lark will do you good, and the money (£2, 15s.) will not be grossly misspent.’ To which his friend replies on July 20: ‘… I should like of all things to come and see you, but can say nothing to the proposal at present, being very busy here, and being, in point of finances, in a very unsatisfactory state. I am at present at Dionysius and the Abbé, whom Oh! that I could despatch this vacation!’

This is the Abbé Jager, the Rev. Benjamin Harrison’s Parisian friend, a lively, learned, and apparently provoking controversialist, author of _Le Protestantisme aux Prises avec la Doctrine Catholique_. Newman received his reply promptly from Paignton, though he put off the visit. ‘_Frater desiderate_,’ says Hurrell, ‘speak not of finances, since all the people here are ready to subscribe for you; as for the Abbé, you can work him here as well as anywhere. It is exquisitely pleasant here: a hot sun with a fresh air is a luxury to which I have long been a stranger. If you were to stay here a fortnight, you might get on with your controversy, and be inspired for the novel! I give out in all directions that you mean to write it, and divulge the plot.’

Miss Mozley thus comments on this inciting of a new literary activity in Newman. ‘There is nothing in the papers before [me] to show that any ground whatever, in fact, existed for the novel Froude here talks of. In the Postscript to _Callista_, the author speaks of being stopped at the fifth chapter “from sheer inability to devise personages or incidents.” Was the attempt to express the feelings and mutual relations of Christians and heathens in early Christian times already an idea in the author’s mind?’ The intrinsic evidence is certainly strong against the likelihood of Newman’s earlier story, _Loss and Gain_, or anything remotely resembling it in subject or framework, being contemplated in 1835. Attentive readers of that very Oxonian book will recall, incidentally, that Devonshire becomes the home of the Redings, and may even, without being too fantastic, detect some faint irregular adumbration of Hurrell Froude, Froude deduced as Newman would fain have him, in the phantom figure, so illusive and attractive, of Willis.[242] Perhaps ‘the novel,’ the plot of which Froude was so pleased to divulge, was but an original inspiration of his own. He had long before formed a critical, if rather despiteful interest in fiction, as the unwelcome supplanter of poetry in a decadent age; and perhaps he had invited Newman to write a story as Newman had invited him to dream of the Indian Bishopric: all _ad majorem Dei gloriam_. At any rate, five weeks before, Froude had mentioned what is apparently the same ‘novel’ as his own affair, in a letter to Newman printed in the _Remains_ but not in the Newman _Correspondence_. ‘My ideas about the novel,’ he says, ‘are but cloudy, as I have no books of reference to get details out of. Would that the stars may let me return to Oxford before long, to work at things,[243] and rub up my intellects!’ It would be pleasant, were there any sure grounds for it, to associate the profound spiritual passion, as Mr. R. H. Hutton calls it, of _Callista_, with the emulating and holy friendship of John Henry Newman and Hurrell Froude.

Newman had been bringing forward in print something very dear to both: the monastic ideal. With his usual scrupulousness, he had begun to fear that he was laying too great a burden upon his well-wishers in leaving them to accept and defend a thesis so inexpedient, because so hostile to the spirit of the time; and Hurrell strikes out against the expressed misgiving before ending the letter of July 31 just quoted. His father, as ever, was his standard of wise moderation.

‘… As to your Monasticism articles in _The British Magazine_,[244] my father read the offensive part in the June one, and could see nothing in it that any reasonable person could object to; and some persons I know have been struck by them. I cannot see the harm of losing influence with people when you can only retain it by sinking the points on which you differ with them. Surely that would be _Propter vitam vivendi_, etc.? What is the good of influence except to influence people?’ To Mr. Keble, at the same time, Froude expresses a generous envy of Newman’s ‘taking’ utterance (what Newman himself calls his ‘mere rhetorical or histrionic power’), and admits again the difficulty of winning any such command over souls in England, with his own very elliptical genius. ‘I find myself so ignorant of the way to get at people, that I never know what to assume and what to prove!’ Froude’s straightforward case was Jeremy Taylor’s of old, of whom Chillingworth regretfully said: ‘Hee wants much of the ethickall part of a Discourser, and slights too much, many times, the Arguments of those hee discourses with.’

Newman tells his dear sister Jemima, on August 9: ‘I think I shall go down to Froude for ten days. I am very unwilling to do it; but it is so uncertain whether he will be able to come to Oxford at all, that I think I ought to secure seeing him before he goes abroad.’ And again, to the absent comrade, a fortnight after: ‘I am sick of expecting a letter; for the last week I have every day made sure of one, and been disappointed. I cannot help fearing you are not well…. I must (so be it!) come down to you before Vacation ends, to get some light struck out by collision.’ For Newman had been trying to work out alone ‘whether Tradition is ever considered by the Fathers, in matters of faith, more than interpretative of Scripture.’ To Mr. Rogers, at the same time, he speaks of the contemplated move. ‘I have little to show, this Vacation, in point of work done. The time seems to have slipped away in a dream. Perhaps it would be as well to go down to Froude, were it only to adjust my notions to his. Dear fellow! long as I have anticipated what I suppose must come, I feel quite raw and unprepared. I suppose one ought to get as much as one can from him, _dum licet_.’

Newman himself was again over-busied and ailing. No reader can fail to notice the deepening tenderness of the correspondence between the two during these last months, where yet sportiveness and candour, and a certain mutual deference, keep their old due order. Words go quickly and lightly, without emphasis or strain, as if driven willingly on the rising wind which is the eternal silence.

‘My dearest Newman,’ opens the awaited missive of Sept. 3, ‘I am afraid you will have been grumbling in your heart at me…. But really, I am not to blame, as I have not put pen to paper for a fortnight, except yesterday, when I began a letter to you upside down. I cannot explain what has been the matter with me; but I am sure that the apothecary into whose hands I fell made a fool of himself…. As to our controversies, you are now taking fresh ground, without owning, as you ought, that on our first basis I dished you! Of course, if the Fathers maintain that “nothing not deducible from Scripture ought to be insisted on as terms of communion,” I have nothing more to say. But again, if you allow Tradition an interpretative authority, I cannot see what is gained. For surely the doctrines of the Priesthood and the Eucharist may be proved from Scripture interpreted by Tradition; and if so, what is to hinder our insisting on them as terms of communion? I don’t mean, of course, that this will bear out the Romanists (which is perhaps your only point?), but it certainly would bear out our party in excommunicating Protestants…. You lug in the Apostles’ Creed, and talk about expansions. What is the end of expansions? Will not the Romanists say that their whole system is an expansion of the Holy Catholic Church and the Communion of Saints?’

Finally, on the 10th, arrives Newman’s definite word: ‘I propose coming to you next week,’ coupled with anxious inquiries about his health. Hurrell replies at once:

‘We shall be ready for you whenever you come. Dr. [Yonge] and a young doctor called Hinkson, who has paid much attention to the stethoscope, examined my chest all over; and they both told my father they never examined a chest in which there was more complete freedom from bad symptoms. Yet they say the disorder in my throat is dangerous unless stopped. Dr. Yonge is decided that I am not to go abroad this winter.’

Newman reached Dartington on the 15th, and was most happy there, among scenes and faces ‘loved long since,’ for nearly a month. Every one who has ever come across it remembers the phrase in which he briefly sums up the end of the visit: ‘I left, and took my last farewell of R. H. F. on Sunday, October 11, in the evening, sleeping at Exeter. When I took leave of him his face lighted up, and almost shone in the darkness, as if to say that in this world we were parting for ever.’ The angel, the ‘beautiful young man girded,’ who knew well ‘the way to the country of the Medes,’ had turned homewards, his mission over, and was to walk with Tobit no more.

Travel was an unconscionably slow business then, especially in the south-west. On the following Thursday Newman wrote from Southampton to Mr. Rogers at Oriel:

‘I have just got here from Lyndhurst, and find the Oxford coach full. Nothing therefore is left for me but to go up to London, and try to get to Oxford in that way. Be so good as to make my excuses to College for my non-appearance: it is the first time, I believe, I ever was away any day of an Audit, (except when abroad) since I have been Fellow. I trust I shall be with you to-morrow.

‘Dear Froude is pretty well, but is languishing for want of his Oxford contubernians. I trust I have been of use, in this way, in stimulating his spirits. So strongly do I feel this, from what I see and hear of him, that I mean almost to make myself responsible for some intimate going down to him at Christmas. He is allowed to read now, which is a great comfort. I am to send him a lot of books. It is wonderful, almost mysterious, that he should remain so long just afloat, and as far as it is mysterious, it is hopeful. Really, it would seem as if he were kept alive by the uplifted hands of Moses: which is an encouragement to persevere [in prayer].’

The delayed traveller wrote to Hurrell the day after his arrival at Oxford:

‘St. Luke’s Day, 1835.

‘I have been obliged to come round by London, and having business there, I did not regret it. Rivington will publish a third volume [of _Sermons_]; and please will you manage to get for me your father’s leave to dedicate it, in a few words, to him? Keble was married on the 10th, and told no one. The College has but heard from him that he resigns his Fellowship on that day, without a year of grace.[245] I engage to undertake and pledge myself to provide a visitor for you next Christmas: Rogers, or [Tom] Mozley, or Williams. But if no one comes, I shall come myself, which would be too great a pleasure: for I cannot put into words, or rather I do not realise to myself, how much the _genius loci_ of Dartington Parsonage draws. I could be very foolish did I allow myself! All my own reminiscences of the place are sad, and I am almost debarred from them; and I seem to have no right, _alienigena_, to intrude elsewhere.’

Newman adds his parenthesis long, long after. ‘This feeling is expressed in the verses I wrote on my first visit to Dartington, in 1831:

‘There strayed awhile, amid the woods of Dart.

I have never seen Dartington since I saw Hurrell there.’[246] He shared to the full, as we have seen, Hurrell’s own passion for the place, a place even yet, despite the profane railway along the very bank of the Dart, of romance and peace; but he held his dedicated heart aloof from it in 1835 as in 1831, as a passage in a letter to his elder sister shows: ‘This country [Devon], is certainly overpoweringly beautiful and enchanting, except to those who are resolved not to be enchanted.’