THE BEGINNING OF THE MOVEMENT--JOHN KEBLE
Long before the Oxford movement was thought of, or had any definite
shape, a number of its characteristic principles and ideas had taken
strong hold of the mind of a man of great ability and great seriousness,
who, after a brilliant career at Oxford as student and tutor, had
exchanged the University for a humble country cure. John Keble, by some
years the senior, but the college friend and intimate of Arnold, was the
son of a Gloucestershire country clergyman of strong character and
considerable scholarship. He taught and educated his two sons at home,
and then sent them to Oxford, where both of them made their mark, and
the elder, John, a mere boy when he first appeared at his college,
Corpus, carried off almost everything that the University could give in
the way of distinction. He won a double first; he won the Latin and
English Essays in the same year; and he won what was the still greater
honour of an Oriel Fellowship. His honours were borne with meekness and
simplicity; to his attainments he joined a temper of singular sweetness
and modesty, capable at the same time, when necessary, of austere
strength and strictness of principle. He had become one of the most
distinguished men in Oxford, when about the year 1823 he felt himself
bound to give himself more exclusively to the work of a clergyman, and
left Oxford to be his father's curate. There was nothing very unusual in
his way of life, or singular and showy in his work as a clergyman; he
went in and out among the poor, he was not averse to society, he
preached plain, unpretending, earnest sermons; he kept up his literary
interests. But he was a deeply convinced Churchman, finding his standard
and pattern of doctrine and devotion in the sober earnestness and
dignity of the Prayer Book, and looking with great and intelligent
dislike at the teaching and practical working of the more popular system
which, under the name of Evangelical Christianity, was aspiring to
dominate religious opinion, and which, often combining some of the most
questionable features of Methodism and Calvinism, denounced with fierce
intolerance everything that deviated from its formulas and watchwords.
And as his loyalty to the Church of England was profound and intense,
all who had shared her fortunes, good or bad, or who professed to serve
her, had a place in his affections; and any policy which threatened to
injure or oppress her, and any principles which were hostile to her
influence and teaching, roused his indignation and resistance. He was a
strong Tory, and by conviction and religious temper a thorough High
Churchman.
But there was nothing in him to foreshadow the leader in a bold and
wide-reaching movement. He was absolutely without ambition. He hated
show and mistrusted excitement. The thought of preferment was steadily
put aside both from temper and definite principle. He had no popular
aptitudes, and was very suspicious of them. He had no care for the
possession of influence; he had deliberately chosen the _fallentis
semita vitae,_ and to be what his father had been, a faithful and
contented country parson, was all that he desired. But idleness was not
in his nature. Born a poet, steeped in all that is noblest and tenderest
and most beautiful in Greek and Roman literature, with the keenest
sympathy with that new school of poetry which, with Wordsworth as its
representative, was searching out the deeper relations between nature
and the human soul, he found in poetical composition a vent and relief
for feelings stirred by the marvels of glory and of awfulness, and by
the sorrows and blessings, amid which human life is passed. But his
poetry was for a long time only for himself and his intimate friends;
his indulgence in poetical composition was partly playful, and it was
not till after much hesitation on his own part and also on theirs, and
with a contemptuous undervaluing of his work, which continued to the end
of his life, that the anonymous little book of poems was published which
has since become familiar wherever English is read, as the _Christian
year_. His serious interests were public ones. Though living in the
shade, he followed with anxiety and increasing disquiet the changes
which went on so rapidly and so formidably, during the end of the first
quarter of this century, in opinion and in the possession of political
power. It became more and more plain that great changes were at hand,
though not so plain what they would be. It seemed likely that power
would come into the hands of men and parties hostile to the Church in
their principles, and ready to use to its prejudice the advantages which
its position as an establishment gave them; and the anticipation grew in
Keble's mind, that in the struggles which seemed likely, not only for
the legal rights but for the faith of the Church, the Church might have
both to claim more, and to suffer more, at the hands of Government. Yet
though these thoughts filled his mind, and strong things were said in
the intercourse with friends about what was going on about them, no
definite course of action had been even contemplated when Keble went
into the country in 1823. There was nothing to distinguish him from
numbers of able clergymen all over England, who were looking on with
interest, with anxiety, often with indignation, at what was going on.
Mr. Keble had not many friends and was no party chief. He was a
brilliant university scholar overlaying the plain, unworldly country
parson; an old-fashioned English Churchman, with great veneration for
the Church and its bishops, and a great dislike of Rome, Dissent, and
Methodism, but with a quick heart; with a frank, gay humility of soul,
with great contempt of appearances, great enjoyment of nature, great
unselfishness, strict and severe principles of morals and duty.
What was it that turned him by degrees into so prominent and so
influential a person? It was the result of the action of his convictions
and ideas, and still more of his character, on the energetic and
fearless mind of a pupil and disciple, Richard Hurrell Froude. Froude
was Keble's pupil at Oriel, and when Keble left Oriel for his curacy at
the beginning of the Long Vacation of 1823, he took Froude with him to
read for his degree. He took with him ultimately two other pupils,
Robert Wilberforce and Isaac Williams of Trinity. One of them, Isaac
Williams, has left some reminiscences of the time, and of the terms on
which the young men were with their tutor, then one of the most famous
men at Oxford. They were on terms of the utmost freedom. "Master is the
greatest boy of them all," was the judgment of the rustic who was
gardener, groom, and parish clerk to Mr. Keble. Froude's was a keen
logical mind, not easily satisfied, contemptuous of compromises and
evasions, and disposed on occasion to be mischievous and aggressive; and
with Keble, as with anybody else, he was ready to dispute and try every
form of dialectical experiment. But he was open to higher influences
than those of logic, and in Keble he saw what subdued and won him to
boundless veneration and affection. Keble won the love of the whole
little society; but in Froude he had gained a disciple who was to be the
mouthpiece and champion of his ideas, and who was to react on himself
and carry him forward to larger enterprises and bolder resolutions than
by himself he would have thought of. Froude took in from Keble all he
had to communicate--principles, convictions, moral rules and standards
of life, hopes, fears, antipathies. And his keenly-tempered intellect,
and his determination and high courage, gave a point and an impulse of
their own to Keble's views and purposes. As things came to look darker,
and dangers seemed more serious to the Church, its faith or its rights,
the interchange of thought between master and disciple, in talk and in
letter, pointed more and more to the coming necessity of action; and
Froude at least had no objections to the business of an agitator. But
all this was very gradual; things did not yet go beyond discussion;
ideas, views, arguments were examined and compared; and Froude, with all
his dash, felt as Keble felt, that he had much to learn about himself,
as well as about books and things. In his respect for antiquity, in his
dislike of the novelties which were invading Church rules and
sentiments, as well as its creeds, in his jealousy of the State, as well
as in his seriousness of self-discipline, he accepted Keble's guidance
and influence more and more; and from Keble he had more than one lesson
of self-distrust, more than one warning against the temptations of
intellect. "Froude told me many years after," writes one of his friends,
"that Keble once, before parting with him, seemed to have something on
his mind which he wished to say, but shrank from saying, while waiting,
I think, for a coach. At last he said, just before parting, 'Froude, you
thought Law's _Serious Call_ was a clever book; it seemed to me as if
you had said the Day of Judgment will be a pretty sight.' This speech,
Froude told me, had a great effect on his after life."[14]
At Easter 1826 Froude was elected Fellow of Oriel. He came back to
Oxford, charged with Keble's thoughts and feelings, and from his more
eager and impatient temper, more on the look-out for ways of giving them
effect. The next year he became tutor, and he held the tutorship till
1830. But he found at Oriel a colleague, a little his senior in age and
standing, of whom Froude and his friends as yet knew little except that
he was a man of great ability, that he had been a favourite of
Whately's, and that in a loose and rough way he was counted among the
few Liberals and Evangelicals in Oxford. This was Mr. Newman. Keble had
been shy of him, and Froude would at first judge him by Keble's
standard. But Newman was just at this time "moving," as he expresses it,
"out of the shadow of Liberalism." Living not apart like Keble, but in
the same college, and meeting every day, Froude and Newman could not but
be either strongly and permanently repelled, or strongly attracted. They
were attracted; attracted with a force which at last united them in the
deepest and most unreserved friendship. Of the steps of this great
change in the mind and fortunes of each of them we have no record:
intimacies of this kind grow in college out of unnoticed and
unremembered talks, agreeing or differing, out of unconscious
disclosures of temper and purpose, out of walks and rides and quiet
breakfasts and common-room arguments, out of admirations and dislikes,
out of letters and criticisms and questions; and nobody can tell
afterwards how they have come about. The change was gradual and
deliberate. Froude's friends in Gloucestershire, the Keble family, had
their misgivings about Newman's supposed liberalism; they did not much
want to have to do with him. His subtle and speculative temper did not
always square with Froude's theology. "N. is a fellow that I like more,
the more I think of him," Froude wrote in 1828; "only I would give a few
odd pence if he were not a heretic."[15] But Froude, who saw him every
day, and was soon associated with him in the tutorship, found a spirit
more akin to his own in depth and freedom and daring, than he had yet
encountered. And Froude found Newman just in that maturing state of
religious opinion in which a powerful mind like Froude's would be likely
to act decisively. Each acted on the other. Froude represented Keble's
ideas, Keble's enthusiasm. Newman gave shape, foundation, consistency,
elevation to the Anglican theology, when he accepted it, which Froude
had learned from Keble. "I knew him first," we read in the _Apologia_,
"in 1826, and was in the closest and most affectionate friendship with
him from about 1829 till his death in 1836."[16] But this was not all.
Through Froude, Newman came to know and to be intimate with Keble; and
a sort of _camaraderie_ arose, of very independent and outspoken people,
who acknowledged Keble as their master and counsellor.
"The true and primary author of it" (the Tractarian movement), we read
in the _Apologia_, "as is usual with great motive powers, was out of
sight.... Need I say that I am speaking of John Keble?" The statement is
strictly true. Froude never would have been the man he was but for his
daily and hourly intercourse with Keble; and Froude brought to bear upon
Newman's mind, at a critical period of its development, Keble's ideas
and feelings about religion and the Church, Keble's reality of thought
and purpose, Keble's transparent and saintly simplicity. And Froude, as
we know from a well-known saying of his,[17] brought Keble and Newman to
understand one another, when the elder man was shy and suspicious of the
younger, and the younger, though full of veneration for the elder, was
hardly yet in full sympathy with what was most characteristic and most
cherished in the elder's religious convictions. Keble attracted and
moulded Froude: he impressed Froude with his strong Churchmanship, his
severity and reality of life, his poetry and high standard of scholarly
excellence. Froude learned from him to be anti-Erastian,
anti-methodistical, anti-sentimental, and as strong in his hatred of the
world, as contemptuous of popular approval, as any Methodist. Yet all
this might merely have made a strong impression, or formed one more
marked school of doctrine, without the fierce energy which received it
and which it inspired. But Froude, in accepting Keble's ideas, resolved
to make them active, public, aggressive; and he found in Newman a
colleague whose bold originality responded to his own. Together they
worked as tutors; together they worked when their tutorships came to an
end; together they worked when thrown into companionship in their
Mediterranean voyage in the winter of 1832 and the spring of 1833. They
came back, full of aspirations and anxieties which spurred them on;
their thoughts had broken out in papers sent home from time to time to
Rose's _British Magazine_--"Home Thoughts Abroad," and the "Lyra
Apostolica." Then came the meeting at Hadleigh, and the beginning of the
Tracts. Keble had given the inspiration, Froude had given the impulse;
then Newman took up the work, and the impulse henceforward, and the
direction, were his.
Doubtless, many thought and felt like them about the perils which beset
the Church and religion. Loyalty to the Church, belief in her divine
mission, allegiance to her authority, readiness to do battle for her
claims, were anything but extinct in her ministers and laity. The
elements were all about of sound and devoted Churchmanship. Higher ideas
of the Church than the popular and political notion of it, higher
conceptions of Christian doctrine than those of the ordinary evangelical
theology--echoes of the meditations of a remarkable Irishman, Mr.
Alexander Knox--had in many quarters attracted attention in the works
and sermons of his disciple. Bishop Jebb, though it was not till the
movement had taken shape that their full significance was realised.
Others besides Keble and Froude and Newman were seriously considering
what could best be done to arrest the current which was running strong
against the Church, and discussing schemes of resistance and defence.
Others were stirring up themselves and their brethren to meet the new
emergencies, to respond to the new call. Some of these were in
communication with the Oriel men, and ultimately took part with them in
organising vigorous measures. But it was not till Mr. Newman made up his
mind to force on the public mind, in a way which could not be evaded,
the great article of the Creed--"I believe one Catholic and Apostolic
Church"--that the movement began. And for the first part of its course,
it was concentrated at Oxford. It was the direct result of the
searchings of heart and the communings for seven years, from 1826 to
1833, of the three men who have been the subject of this chapter.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] Isaac Williams's MS. Memoir.
[15] _Rem._ i. 232, 233. In 1828, Newman had preferred Hawkins to Keble,
for Provost.
[16] _Apol._ p. 84.
[17] _Remains_, i. 438; _Apol._ p. 77. "Do you know the story of the
murderer who had done one good thing in his life? Well, if I was asked
what good deed I have ever done, I should say I had brought Keble and
Newman to understand each other."