one, and [it is] of all ages, even the present. I don’t know that I
take much interest in the relics of the Empire, magnificent as they
are, although there is something sentimental in seeing (as one
literally may), the cows and oxen _Romanoque foro et lautis mugire
Carinis_. But the thing which most takes possession of one’s mind is
the entire absorption of the old Roman splendour in an unthought-of
system: to see their columns, and marbles, and bronzes, which had been
brought together at such an immense cost, all diverted from their
first objects, and taken up by Christianity: St. Peter and St. Paul
standing at the top of Trajan’s and Antonine’s columns, and St. Peter
buried in the Circus of Nero, with all the splendour of Rome
concentrated in his mausoleum. The immense quantity of rare marbles,
which are the chief ornament of the Churches here, could scarcely have
been collected except by the centre of an universal Empire, which had
not only unlimited wealth at its command, but access to almost every
country; and now one sees all this dedicated to the Martyrs. Before I
came here I had no idea of the effect of coloured stone in
architecture; but the use Michael Angelo has made of it in St. Peter’s
shows one at once how entirely that style is designed with reference
to it, and how absurd it was in Sir C. Wren to copy the form when he
could copy nothing more. The coloured part so completely disconnects
itself from the rest, and forms such an elegant and decided relief to
it, that the two seem like independent designs that do not interfere.
The plain stone-work has all the simplicity of a Grecian temple, and
the marbles set it off just as a fine scene or a glowing sky would. I
observe that the awkwardness of mixing up arched and unarched
architecture is thus entirely avoided, as all the arched work is
coloured, and the lines of the uncoloured part are all either
horizontal or perpendicular. So Michael Angelo adds his testimony to
my theory about Gothic architecture.
‘As to Raphael’s pictures, I have not had time to study them with
attention. The most celebrated of them, especially your friend
Heliodorus, are so damaged or dirty that one cannot see them
distinctly except close; they say we should use an opera-glass. All
that the painters say of Raphael tends to exalt him as a poet and a
man of genius, but rather at the expense of his technical skill; he
and Michael Angelo seem, by what they say, to be counterparts. But I
wish I could hope to form an opinion of my own about it.
‘There is an English artist here, a Mr. S[evern],[112] to whom
[Newman] had an introduction, and who certainly is a very clever man,
who gave us a most curious and interesting account of a German school
of painters that is now growing up in Rome. He says that several of
them are here, living on pensions from German Princes, particularly
the King of Bavaria, and are studying Raphael in a very singular way:
curious fellows, with a great deal of original enthusiasm (utterly
unlike the βαναυσοί of England), who have got it into their heads that
the way to study Raphael is not to copy him, but to study the works he
studied, and to put their mind into the attitude in which he formed
his conceptions. So they poke away at the old hard pictures of early
Masters, with stiff drapery and gilt backgrounds, and are so intent on
dissociating Christian and classical art, that they think grace and
beauty bought too dear, if they tend to disturb the mind by pagan
associations. One of these fellows,[113] he said, had become intimate
with him in a curious way. Mr. S[evern] has made colouring his
principal study; he seems to be a bit of an enthusiast himself, and
has been aiming at combining the colouring of the Venetian school with
the designs of the Roman. Well, this German, who is a shy, reserved
man, having been one day in Mr. S[evern’s] studio, returned the next
day with ten or twelve of his German friends, and again, the day
after, with as many more; and so on, for some time. At last Mr.
S[evern], who took it as a great compliment, asked him what it was
that had attracted his notice. He said he had always gone on a notion
that colour had nothing to do with the poetry of painting, but was
merely sensual, and that a Madonna he had seen of Mr. S[evern’s] made
him alter his mind; so he had been bringing friends to see if they
felt the same about it. Since this time they have been very intimate;
but the man is so reserved, in general, that except for this accident
he might have kept his notions to himself. Mr. S[evern] says his
designs are quite in the spirit of Raphael, and that his whole mind is
so taken up with Catholic ἦθος, that he has given up his
Protestantism, and is a rigid conformer to all the ordinances of the
Church. I have prosed about this because I was struck with it. I hope
it is no mare’s nest…. I don’t know whether I mentioned to you that
[Newman] and [Williams] are going to indite verses for _The British
Magazine_, under the title _Lyra Apostolica_? [Rose][114] would not
take a sonnet that I made, because it was too fierce; but says it may
come by-and-by. I will write it out for your edification and criticism.
‘ΠΕΡI ΤΗΣ ΜΙΣΗΤΟΥ ΣΤΑΣΕΩΣ[115]
‘“The Powers that be are ordained of God.”
‘Yes, mark the words: deem not that Saints alone
Are Heaven’s true servants, and His laws fulfil
Who rules o’er just and wicked. He from ill
Culls good; He moulds the Egyptian’s heart of stone
To do Him honour, and e’en Nero’s throne
Claims as His ordinance; before Him still
Pride bows unconscious, and the rebel will
Most does His bidding, following most its own.
Then grieve not at their high and palmy state,
Those proud bad men, whose unrelenting sway
Hath shattered holiest things, and led astray
Christ’s little ones: they are but tools of fate,
Duped rebels, doomed to serve a Power they hate,
To earn a traitor’s guerdon, yet obey.
‘I mean to do one on Lord Grey’s interpretation of the Coronation
Oath.[116] Will you do some? A mixture, some fierce and some meek: the
plan is to have none above twenty lines…. My cough is just the same as
when I left England. The climate is worse than an English autumn, and
sight-seeing does no good. I was almost well at Malta, and if I had
stayed there should have been quite so now. I expect to see the
original Epistolæ S. Thomæ in the Vatican Library.’
Overbeck seems to have attracted Froude purely, or chiefly, on moral
grounds, but he found at Rome an abiding object of enthusiasm in the
lovely genius of Francesco Francia. One of his letters to his second
brother, from Leghorn, illustrates both his own passion for
thoroughness, and the range and zest of his lifelong interest in arts
and crafts. He was ‘an ingeniose person,’ and constantly invites the
application of that favourite and comprehensive seventeenth-century
word.
To WILLIAM FROUDE, April 12, 1833.
‘… If you choose, you may easily find out in London what is the
particular process by which the red colour of glass is produced from
gold, and also in what way they would go to work to give glass a
vitrified coat of gold, retaining its own colour; and whether any
accident in attempting the latter might effect the former. For it has
always struck me as a puzzle how so recondite an idea as that of
producing a ruby tint from a yellow metal should come into the heads
of the early glass-painters; and it has occurred to me that some such
accident as I have guessed at above might be the key to the puzzle,
for the practice of giving glass a vitrified coat of gold for the
purpose of mosaic work was very common, long before the use of
coloured glass in windows had been thought of, and specimens of it are
to be seen in Rome of almost every age between [A.D.] 400 and [A.D.]
1000. Please not to forget this question, or be contented with vague
answers. It will be likely to take some time and trouble to get at the
truth, but it is curious, and there is no hurry, and you will at any
rate have more opportunities than I shall. The best red colour that
has been produced in modern times has been managed by a French
chemist, and there is a wholesale house of his goods somewhere in
Holborn. The Pope’s mosaic manufactory in Rome is curious: there are
eighteen thousand shades of colour in it, which can be looked out as
in a directory. Some of the imitations of pictures which they have
made are so perfect that you must look close before you can see
joinings and transitions of colour; and they have the advantage over
every kind of painting, being mellow from the first and brilliant to
the last. In St. Peter’s there are many very fine ones, copies of all
the most famous pictures, and they are said to have cost 4500_l._ a
piece. St. Peter’s itself is the great attraction of Rome, worth all
the classics put together. I think the dome is built with all the
layers of stone horizontal, so that the principle of the arch applies
not to the vertical section, but only to the horizontal. I am not sure
of this, but I think so.’
It does not appear, though Newman and Froude saw the Pope’s mosaic
manufactory, that they saw the Pope himself, Gregory XVI. They seem to
have gained their chief vistas of Roman society through their
acquaintance with the Prussian Chargé d’Affaires, Baron Bunsen,[117]
and his English wife, at whose house of all hospitality Sir Walter
Scott, then near his end, had been the beloved guest less than a year
before. Hurrell must have had his own impressions of the excellent
Bunsen, with his pleasant Teutonic habit of holding up his finger and
hushing the company, before he began to speak. There is no mention of
our modest and all-observing pilgrims in the published correspondence
either of Bunsen or of Joseph Severn, for 1832-1833.
On April 13, 1833, Hurrell sends to the Rev. John Frederick Christie
one of the most discussed letters in the first volume of the
_Remains_.
‘It would not become me to apologise for not having written before,
since I much doubt my capacity[118] to produce anything worth the
postage. Nevertheless, I have for some time been intending to write to
you, and can’t account for having let so much time slip through my
fingers. My father and I are now on our way home, having left [Newman]
to retrace his steps to Sicily…. I hope to be at Genoa to-morrow
morning…. Between [Lyons] and Paris, I hope to visit and make drawings
of some of the Abbeys, etc., which are connected with the history of
St. Thomas of Cant. “Sixth and lastly,” if the Fates allow, we shall
cross from Havre to Southampton by the first steamer in May … soon
after which you may expect to see me in Chapel. I congratulate you on
having got over your first audit so prosperously;[119] … it is better
occupation than travelling, take my word for it. It is really
melancholy to think how little one has got for one’s time and money.
The only thing I can put my hand on as an acquisition is having formed
an acquaintance with a man of some influence at Rome, Monsignor
[Wiseman][120] the head of the [English] College, who has enlightened
[Newman] and me on the subject of our relations to the Church of Rome.
We got introduced to him to find out whether they would take us[121]
in on any terms to which we could twist our consciences, and we found
to our dismay that not one step could be gained without swallowing the
Council of Trent as a whole! We made our approaches to the subject as
delicately as we could. Our first notion was that the terms of
communion were, within certain limits, under the control of the Pope …
or, that in case he could not dispense solely, yet at any rate the
acts of one Council might be rescinded by another; indeed, that in
Charles the First’s time it had been intended to negociate a
reconciliation on the terms on which things stood before the Council
of Trent. But we found, to our horror, that the doctrine of the
Infallibility of the Church made the acts of each successive Council
obligatory for ever, that what had been once decided could never be
meddled with again, in fact, that they were committed finally and
irrevocably, and could not advance one step to meet us, even though
the Church of England should again become what it was in Laud’s time….
‘… So much for the Council of Trent, for which Christendom has to
thank Luther and the Reformers. [Newman] declares that ever since I
heard this I have become a staunch Protestant, which is a most base
calumny on his part, though I own it has altogether changed my notions
of the Roman Catholics, and made me wish for a total overthrow of
their system. I think that the only τόπος now is “the ancient Church
of England,” and, as an explanation of what one means, “Charles the
First” and “the Nonjurors.” When I come home I mean to read and write
all sorts of things; for now that one is a Radical, there is no use in
being nice![122] I wish you had sent a longer postscript to [Newman]
about the position of things; all I have heard, directly or
indirectly, has made me long to be home again. You don’t say whether
you have done anything for the _L[yra] A[postolica]_?[123]…. Tell
[Isaac Williams] that I think he has used me basely to send me a mere
scribble of a few lines, prosing about some theory of poetry, when
there were such a lot of atrocities going on on all sides, of which
one can get no tolerable account through the papers.
‘_Genoa, April 15._――Here we are, as at Leghorn, detained a day beyond
our time, though there is a perfect calm, because these absurd fellows
are afraid of a swell which was got up by last night’s wind. The more
I have to do with these wretched Neapolitans, the more my first
impressions about them are confirmed. I wonder how anyone can tolerate
either them or their town, which is as nasty and uninteresting a place
as I ever set foot in. As to this Genoa, I should not grumble at being
detained here, if I were in plight for sight-seeing, for it is truly
magnificent, both in itself and in its situation; but, unfortunately,
I was taken with a very severe feverish cold the morning we landed,
_i.e._, the day before yesterday; and that day and yesterday was
confined to my bed, where I should probably be now but that I had to
get up early, in hopes the vessel would keep its appointment…. Never
advise a friend of yours to come abroad for his health! It would be
very well if one could have Fortunatus’ cap, and wish one’s self at
Rome; but travelling does more harm than change of climate does good.
‘While we were at Rome [Newman] and I tried hard to get up the
march-of-mind phraseology about pictures and statues, and we hoped we
were making some little progress under the auspices of a clever
English artist, to whom we had an introduction: but, unfortunately for
our peace of mind, just before our departure we became acquainted with
[a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge], who, though he had not been
in Italy much longer than ourselves, had attained an eminence so far
beyond what we could even in thought aspire to, that we gave the thing
up in despair, and retire upon the τόπος, that “we don’t enter into
[those] technicalities.” Certainly those C[ambridge] men are wonderful
fellows; I know no one but [Head][124] that could compete with them at
all. They know everything, examine everything, and dogmatise about
everything; they have paid particular attention to the geological
structure of this place, and the botany of that, and the agriculture
of another, and they are antiquaries, and artists, and scholars, and,
above all, puff off one another with the assiduity of our friends the
[W.]s. W[hewell’s][125] book, and S[edgwick’s][126] Lectures, and
T[hirlwall’s][127] research, and H[are’s][128] taste, pop upon one at
every turn…. We mean to make as much as we can out of our acquaintance
with Monsignor [Wiseman], who (by the by), is really too nice a person
to talk nonsense about. He desired me to apply to him, if on any
future occasion I had to consult the Vatican Library: and a
transaction of that sort would sound well….’
The ‘transaction would sound well’: this, as if the writer’s study
were only to heighten others’ opinion of him! Newman was surely right
in calling attention, years after, to this habit of Froude’s of
depreciating, nay, belying, his own motives. It was not an
affectation, but it was a little piece of sheer cruelty.
The friends had parted at Rome, the Froudes very loath to leave Newman
behind; and he, on his part, roaming about the Janiculum after they
had gone, in a silent passion of grief, reproaching himself for his
wilful fancy to return, under a sort of romantic obsession, to Sicily
alone. There he was all but destined to meet an untimely death.
Hurrell finished his long letter to Mr. Christie as he moved homeward.
‘_Marseilles, April 22._――This France is certainly a most delicious
place: we landed in Hyères Bay, owing to a storm from the north-west,
and found everything so warm and green that I could quite enter into
John of Salisbury’s[129] feelings. The people, too, [are] so extremely
civil that I cannot help hoping there may yet be the seven thousand in
Israel, and that sometime or other we may be able to talk of _la belle
France_ with some kind of pleasure. I feel like a great fool here,
from not being able to talk French. In Italy half the population kept
me in countenance, but here it is a constant humiliation. And what is
worst, I can’t hope to make progress; for having learned the little I
know by writing and not [by] speaking, I annex wrong-shaped words to
all the sounds. It is like talking Latin[130] to a foreigner.’
Again, on May 23, to William Froude, is expressed further commendation
of the French people, founded on the keenest instinctive understanding
of them: an understanding even more unusual then than now. Newman,
until later, was certainly far from sharing it, or wishing to learn to
share it. The ordinary attitude of the contemporary Oxford mind was
frankly, though playfully expressed, by the young W. R. Churton, some
years before. He gallantly addresses France: ‘What have I seen in thee
that should make me long to see thee again? Have I seen a gentleman
from Calais to Beauvoisin? Have I seen one gleam of poetry in the
country or its inhabitants?’[131] Hurrell Froude was ‘un-English’
enough to be arrested, but not repelled, while on the Continent, by
the spectacle of extra-English human nature. We have heard him
longing, at Zante, to ‘live among them a bit, and get into their
notions.’ This beautiful and uncommon openness of mind stamps him an
ideal traveller, despite his lack of opportunity; at no single point
of a hurried route, beset with difficulties, could he look far below
the surface of things. But it is strikingly inaccurate to say of him,
as Mr. Mozley does, that he lacked not only opportunity, but
curiosity, ‘to see the interior of either the political or the
religious systems they came upon.’[132]
‘What I have seen since my last letter ends, has been more interesting
than anything else except Rome. We stopped about at many places in the
central part of France, to see out-of-the-way things connected with
Becket’s history, and found some of them so very curious and striking
in themselves, that they would have amply repaid us by their own
merits. But what I was most interested with was, that the French seem
to me to have been so grossly belied as a nation. I never saw a people
that tempted me to like them so much, on a superficial observation. I
declare, if I was called upon to make a definition of their national
character, I should say they were a primitive innocent people. The
fact seems to be that France is governed by a small despotic
oligarchy, the aristocracy of wealth, who by their agitating spirit
have contrived to get the franchise so restricted as to secure to
themselves a majority in the Chamber, and the command of the military,
by which they keep France under such a strong hand…. There is now in
France a High Church party who are Republicans,[133] and wish for
universal suffrage, on the ground that in proportion as the franchise
falls lower the influence of the Church makes itself more felt; at
present its limits about coincide with those of the infidel faction.
Don’t be surprised if one of these days you find us turning Radicals
on similar grounds.’
The next communication posted to Mr. Keble, on June 26, contained a
nameless poem. The title and the motto here given belong to the
version in _Lyra Apostolica_.
‘TREMBLING HOPE.
“And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come. And let him that heareth
say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will,
let him take the water of life freely.”
‘O Lord, I hear: but can it be
The gracious word was meant for me?
O Lord, I thirst: but who shall tell
The secret of that Living Well
By whose waters I may rest,
And slake this lip unblest?
O Lord, I will, but cannot do!
My heart is hard, my faith untrue.
The Spirit and the Bride say, Come;
The eternal ever-blessed Home
Oped its portals at my birth;
But I am chained to earth.
The Golden Keys,[134] each eve and morn,
I see them with a heart forlorn:
Lest they should iron prove to me.
O set my heart at liberty!
May I seize what Thou dost give,
Seize tremblingly; and live.’
‘Very flat, I know,’ the author says, in his usual undecorative
manner; but he adds: ‘I wrote it the night before you went; I wanted
to show it you, that you might do one on “He that testifieth these
things saith: Surely I come quickly”; and then, after the verse, to
finish with: “Even so, come, Lord JESUS.” I think that so it might
make a composition on which some people’s thoughts would run.[135] You
may think all this bother; but I cannot help fancying that this sort
of arrangement is worth some little trouble.’ Hurrell’s poem stands
collocated with Keble’s ‘Encouragement’ in the _Lyra_, with its
opening ‘Fear not’: and its heartening beauty is almost a direct
address to the burdened spirit who called it forth:
‘Surely the time is short:
Endless the task and art
To brighten for the ethereal Court
A soiled earth-drudging heart!
But He, the dread Proclaimer of that hour,
Is pledged to thee in love, as to thy foes in power.’
Even the text from S. John, which Hurrell had suggested as colophon,
stands under his separate β after Keble’s poem, in every edition, as
if by some solemn little rubrical observance. Both Keble and Newman
were most careful, in all these delicate ways, to preserve their
friend’s least touch upon the early printed work of the Movement. It
was his death which led to the revelation of the authorship of all the
poems in _Lyra Apostolica_. They would else have remained strictly
anonymous. ‘One of the writers in whom the work originated,’ says
Newman in his very brief preface, dated at Oxford on All Saints’ Day
of 1836, ‘having been taken from his friends … it seemed desirable …
to record what belonged to him, while it was possible to do so; and
this has led to a general discrimination of the poems, by signatures
at the end of each.’
Two days after ‘Trembling Hope,’ on June 28, Hurrell sends to his old
Tutor the most beautiful, and also the most characteristic of his
verses.
‘DANIEL.
εἰσὶν εὐνοῦχοι, οἵτινεσ εὐνούχισαν ἑαυτοὺς διὰ τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν
οὐρανῶν ――S. MATT. xix. 12.[136]
‘Son of sorrow, doomed by fate
To a lot most desolate,
To joyless youth and childless age;
Last of thy father’s lineage;
Blighted being! whence hast thou
That lofty mien and cloudless brow?
Ask’st thou whence that cloudless brow?
Bitter is the cup, I trow:
A cup of weary well-spent years,
A cup of sorrows, fasts, and tears;
That cup whose virtue can impart
Such calmness to the troubled heart.
Last of his father’s lineage, he
Many a night on bended knee,
In hunger many a lifelong day,
Hath striven to cast his slough away.
Yea, and that long prayer is granted:
Yea, his soul is disenchanted.
O blest above the sons of men!
For thou, with more than Prophet’s ken,
Deep in the secrets of the tomb
Hast read thine own, thine endless doom;
Thou by the hand of the Most High
Art sealed for immortality.
So may I read thy story right,
And in my flesh so tame my spright,
That when the Mighty Ones go forth,
And from the east and from the north
Unwilling ghosts shall gathered be,
I, in my lot,[137] may stand with thee!’
And immediately after, linked with a quotation from the beloved
Eclogues: ‘I send you some sawney verses…. Can these be doctored into
anything available, or are they dotings?’
‘OLD SELF AND NEW SELF.[138]
NEW SELF.
‘Why sittest thou on that sea-girt rock,
With downward look and sadly-dreaming eye?
Playest thou beneath with Proteus’ flock,
Or with the far-bound sea-bird wouldst thou fly?
OLD SELF.
I sit upon this sea-girt rock
With downward look and dreaming eye;
But neither do I sport with Proteus’ flock,
Nor with the far-bound sea-bird would I fly.
I list the splash, so clear and chill,
Of yon old fisher’s solitary oar;
I watch the waves, that rippling still,
Chase one another o’er the marble shore.
NEW SELF.
Yet from the splash of yonder oar
No dreary sound of sadness comes to me;
And the fresh waves that beat the shore,
How merrily they splash, how merrily!
OLD SELF.
I mourn for the delicious days
When those calm sounds fell on my childish ear,
A stranger yet to the wild ways
Of triumph and remorse, of hope and fear.
NEW SELF.
Mourn’st thou, poor soul? and wouldst thou yet
Call back the things which shall not, can not be?
Heaven must be won, not dreamed; thy task is set:
Peace was not made for earth, nor rest for thee.’
Four other sacred poems which Hurrell wrote in 1833 may as well be
given here. He and Newman burst into song together, though he with far
more remote and infrequent music. Probably no lyrist ever had such a
poor opinion of himself. But in the qualities of clearness,
simplicity, orderly thought and noble severity, there is something
very remarkable in Hurrell’s few brief scattered verses. They have a
strong singleness and sad transparency, the tone of them a little
chilly, yet almost Virgilian, and arrestingly beautiful; they, like
himself, are impersonal, and full of character; abstinent,
concentrated, true. The unexpected grace is their cunning harmony, and
the trick of that is neither derived nor deliberately invented. His
every line instinctively sings and flies. He has nothing to match a
certain refrain of Newman’s, in what he calls his ‘ecclesiastical
carol,’――
‘For scantness is still Heaven’s might.’
It is a good instance of an always interesting literary anomaly that
such a line, in its raucous sibilation, should have been produced by
an accomplished musician, whereas unfailing melody belongs to Froude,
who, loving naturally what he once called ‘the bright and silent
pleasures of poetry,’ had small sense of music as an independent art.
Yet Newman certainly was capable of a sustained grandeur, as in his
verses on Greek models, which Froude did not attempt, and could not
attain.
‘TYRE.
‘High on the stately wall
The spear of Arvad hung;
Through corridor and hall
Gemaddin’s[139] war-note rung.
Where are they now? The note is o’er:
Yes! for a thousand years, and more,
Five fathom deep beneath the sea,
Those halls have lain all silently,
Nought listing save the mermaid’s song,
While rude sea-monsters roam the corridors along.
Far from the wondering[140] East
Tubal and Javan came;
And Araby the blest,
And Kedar, mighty name.
Now on that shore, a lonely guest,
Some dripping fisherman may rest,
Watching on rock or naked stone
His dark net spread before the sun,
Unconscious of the dooming lay
That broods o’er that dull spot, and there shall brood for aye.’
‘SIGHT AGAINST FAITH.
‘“And Lot went out, and spake unto his sons-in-law that married his
daughters, and said: ‘Up, get you out of this place; for the
Lord will destroy this city.’ But he seemed as one that mocked,
unto his sons-in-law.”
‘Sunk not the sun behind yon dusky hill
Glorious as he was wont? The starry sky
Spread o’er the earth in tranquil majesty,――
Discern’st thou, in its clear deep, aught of ill?
Or in this lower world, so fair and still,
Its palaces and temples towering high,
Or where old Jordan, gliding calmly by,
Pours o’er the misty plain his mantle chill?
Dote not of fear, old man, where all is joy!
And Heaven and earth thy augury disown;
And Time’s eternal course rolls smoothly on,
Fraught with fresh blessings, as day follows day.
The All-Bounteous hath not given to take away;
The All-Wise hath not created to destroy!’
‘FAREWELL TO FEUDALISM.[141]
‘“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God
shall stand for ever.”
‘’Tis sad to watch Time’s desolating hand
Doom noblest things to premature decay:
The feudal court, the patriarchal sway
Of Kings, the cheerful homage of a land
Unskilled in treason, every social band
That taught to rule with sweetness, and obey
With dignity,――swept, one by one, away!
While proud empirics rule, in fell command.
Yet, Christian! faint not at the sickening sight,
Nor vainly strive with that Supreme Decree.
Thou hast a treasure and an armoury
Locked to the spoiler yet; thy shafts are bright.
Faint not: Heaven’s Keys are more than sceptred might,
Their Guardians more than King or Sire, to thee.’
‘WEAKNESS OF NATURE.
‘“Be strong, and He shall comfort thine heart.”
‘Lord, I have fasted, I have prayed,
And sackcloth has my girdle been;
To purge my soul I have essayed
With hunger blank and vigil keen.
O God of mercy! why am I
Still haunted by the self I fly?
Sackcloth is a girdle good:
O bind it round thee still!
Fasting, it is Angels’ food,
And JESUS loved the night-air chill.
Yet think not prayer and fast were given
To make one step ’twixt earth and Heaven.[142]
The following fragmentary lines are appended to the poem as given in
the _Remains_, though they do not, of course, appear in _Lyra
Apostolica_:
‘As well might sun and rain contending
Their sweet influence array
On new-fallen seed descending,
To raise a forest in a day.
Think’st thou prayer and fast alone
Can animate a heart of stone?
_It must be rooted in charity._
_Thinkest thou art fit for fasting at all yet?_
The food of Saints is not for thee!’
From poetical ‘dotings,’ Hurrell, having reached England, throws
himself gladly into the interests of the young scientist his brother,
who was already at work on the unique experiments concerning the
resistance and propulsion of ships, which now stand connected, all
over the world, with his successful name. He was going forward to be,
as Hurrell anxiously wished, no ‘mere engineer,’ no ‘Liberal,’ _i.e._,
agnostic or materialist, ‘at heart.’
To WILLIAM FROUDE, July 11, 1833.
‘… I cannot understand how the dock-gates can make any further
resistance to the water after the curvature has been squatted out of
them, nor how, if the curvature is right, the pressure should have any
tendency to alter it. Tell me if you succeed in getting a verdict
against them; also, how your resistance experiments succeed. I will
never believe that a sail will do as much work if you split it in two;
but, if R ∝ area, you might have each cloth independent, and all would
do as well. I never gave you an answer about the Book of Job, for I
cannot get a distinct idea of its argument. It is said to be a
discussion on the moral government of God; but my view of it is not
more distinct than what ladies get of Butler’s _Analogy_.’
Honest Hurrell and his baffled Willy were looking for the sort of
intellectual company which misery is said to love, and found it in
‘ladies.’ These, as yet, were certainly busier with worsted samplers
than with the problems of the educated.
On July 14, the day of the storming of the feudal Bastille, came the
formal start of another revolution which had a quieter, but no less
ominous foot. Mr. Keble mounted the pulpit stair of S. Mary-the-Virgin’s
at Oxford, and preached his memorable Assize Sermon, which went to
press under its title of _National Apostasy_. It served as a bugle to
let men know that the work of recapturing Faith for England had begun,
and that ‘things have come to the pretty pass’ (in Lord Melbourne’s
celebrated expression), ‘that religion is to invade the sphere of
private life!’ There had been long preliminary agitation, and much
personal consciousness, especially on Newman’s part and on Froude’s,
of ‘a work to do in England.’
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….
‘… We have just left St. Christopher’s; it is the most beautiful of
any of the islands I have yet seen. Mount Miserere is quite fine; a
precipitous granite crag, quite bare, and of a very great height,
rising out of the rich woods with which the mountain is clothed up to
the top, and stooping over a very deep hollow, which has once been the
crater of a volcano. I should have liked much to get up there, but had
not time, and besides, they say it is very difficult. The people here
seem to have very little curiosity: in fact, few tastes except
acquisitiveness…. I see the papers have begun to talk; addresses to
the Archbishop are said to be pouring in. I wish I could get my lungs
right again to make preachments, and give the Yanks a talking over. We
shall be back at Barbados the second week in March, and about then the
weather in New York brightens up. I think I have made up my mind not
to be in England till the latter end of May, whatever news we have, so
I shall certainly have time on my hands, and if I can’t preach I can
prose; so I may as well go at any rate. Do ply the people with Tracts
on the “safest course” principle: the more I think of it, the more
important it seems as the intellectual basis of Church authority…. We
have now got a north-west wind, which a few years since would have
been almost a miracle in these latitudes. It is generally said that
the trade-winds are becoming yearly more irregular, and have been for
this last fifty years. It will make a curious change if they cease
altogether; certainly nothing can be more irregular than we have had
them, both in quantity and direction; it goes from a storm to a calm
in no time, and the other night went all round the compass. This puts
me in mind of an adventure we had the other evening at Nevis. There is
no harbour there, but only a beach to land on, and sometimes a heavy
surf. We landed in the morning, in still weather. In the course of the
day it came to blow on shore, and we had to embark in the dark, in a
very heavy sea breaking on the sands most furiously. The Bishop slept
on shore, but the Commodore, the Captain, the Chaplain, and myself
were carried on men’s shoulders to the boat, which was lying as near
the shore as it could, in the midst of the breakers. I was put in
second, and was only wetted by the water in the bottom of the boat,
but the two last were fairly soused…. I am sure this stuff is not
worth sending across the Atlantic.’
To WILLIAM FROUDE, Feb. 12, 1834.
‘… I will try to scrape together stuff for a letter to you. We are
becalmed with Saba off our starboard quarter, in the _Forte_ frigate,
forty-six guns, Commodore P…. Somehow, this frigate is beyond my
comprehension. I am not up to taking an interest in its movements; it
is 1150 tons and the sails are so large, and the masts so high, and
such an immense lot of ropes, that I see no hope of learning anything
about it. When they get up the anchor they have 100 men at the
capstan, and if they want to tack quickly they put 300 men to work at
once. They do their work to the sound of two fiddles and a fife,
instead of the gibber that one is accustomed to in the _Ranger_ and
elsewhere; so, as the [Provost?] would say, “I don’t comprehend the
style of things.” The day before yesterday we had two adventures. (1)
A man was to be flogged, and as I knew that he would be let off out of
compliment to the Bishop, I went on deck to see the preliminary
ceremony. The whole ship’s crew were mustered, while the fellow stood
under guard; then a grating was lashed to the gangway, and his wrists
and ankles made fast to it, his jacket having been stripped off in
readiness; the officers stood in full dress on one side of him, and
the boatswain’s mates on the other; and the Commodore read over the
articles of war. I watched the fellow’s countenance closely. At first
he seemed very unconcerned, but the ceremony seemed by degrees to work
on his imagination, and just before his pardon was announced he seemed
in considerable dismay. The thing has stuck in my mind deeper than I
expected, and I feel rather sick at thinking of it. The officers say
that letting him off did a great deal of harm. Last night ever such a
lot were drunk, and I suppose they will catch it in a day or two!
Twenty-four hours must elapse between the offence and the punishment.
(2) The other adventure was falling in with a man-of-war by night, so
that we could not distinguish each other’s colours. On nearing them we
heard them pipe to quarters, and on coming up we found them, contrary
to etiquette, with their main-deck lighted up, their guns and rigging
manned, and with every demonstration of readiness for action; so we
had to make similar preparations with all speed: powder was got up,
and both sides loaded and shotted, exactly as if we intended to fight.
On passing them the Commodore asked what they were, and they would not
tell, and nothing more came of it: a beautiful mare’s nest. The
officers say it was a Dutch frigate, and that since our ill behaviour
to them they have made a point of showing our ships disrespect;
however, if a gun had gone off by accident, which might easily have
been, as they all have flint and steel locks, it would have ended in a
fight, most likely…. From St. Thomas’s we go to Santa Cruz, and from
thence to La Guayra, so I shall have a fine cruise altogether; yet
somehow I take no interest in the places I see: there is something so
unromantic among the English, and so unpleasing about the niggers,
that they spoil the scenery altogether. The thing that strikes me as
most remarkable in the cut of these niggers is excessive immodesty; a
forward, stupid familiarity, intended for civility, which prejudices
me against them worse even than Buxton’s[170] cant did…. I want much
to hear about your steam-engine…. I begin to think that the Nonjurors
were the last of English divines, and that those since are twaddlers.
The more I read, the more I am reconciled to the present state of
things in England, and prospects of the Church. It seems to be only
the fermentation of filth which has long been in existence, and could
not be got rid of otherwise…. And now my ideas run slow, and take more
trouble writing than they are worth reading; so, with best love to
J[ack].’[171]
To the Ven. Archdeacon FROUDE, April 2, 1834.
‘… We left the island [Santa Cruz] at four o’clock on Thursday, the
Bishop having been conveyed to Fredericstadt in the Governor’s
carriage and four, escorted by an aide-de-camp, and embarking under a
salute. We were under weigh in about an hour, with a breeze
east-north-east. On Saturday evening we saw, like a pale blue mist
rising above the clouds, the outline of the South American mountains.
The next morning, when I came on deck, we were within nine miles of
the coast, and the gigantic features of the scenery produced the same
effect that we observed between Salerno and Amalfi, viz., of making
distant objects seem so near each other. The mountains rose boldly out
of the sea, as far as the eye could reach before us and behind us, as
we sailed along the coast. Their height varies from 5000 to 9000 feet.
One of them (the highest) is a perpendicular precipice for 8000 feet:
Humboldt describes it as the most remarkable precipice in the world.
However, the effect, as a whole, cannot be compared to that of the
Italian or Sicilian coast. The mountains are richly covered with wood
from the very bottom to the top, except the peaks of the very highest,
which are naked granite, but so high that the rocky features, when
diminished by the great distance and rendered indistinct by the haze
of the hot air, lose all their raciness; so that there is no variety
of colour, but a mass of uniform green, or rather gray, more or less
pale according to the distance. We coasted along about twelve miles
almost under the shadow of the rocks, yet near nine miles from them.
Early in the morning they were visible from top to bottom, but
indistinct from the dazzle of the sun, which was behind them. About
ten o’clock a line of little misty dots formed at a uniform height
above the sea, perhaps 3000 feet. This became denser and denser, till
it became one impenetrable cloud, above which we could see nothing.
About twelve we anchored at La Guayra, which Humboldt says is the
hottest place in the world. The thermometer in the cabin window was
ninety degrees. The Bishop and Commodore disembarked that evening and
rode over the mountains to Caraccas; I and some of the officers were
to follow before daylight. Accordingly, having ordered mules
over-night, we got up at half-past three, breakfasted on board, and
set out for the shore, two boat-loads. There was a very heavy rolling
swell, and the landing-place is a wooden stage upon piles, which does
not keep off the sea at all. We lay by anxiously waiting for a lull,
and all of us in the first boat succeeded in landing dry on the stage,
and running off before a wave had time to reach us; but when the
second boat was lying on its oars, in hopes of a lull like ours, a
wave far above the size of the rest broke just ahead of them; and
really, I never saw such a nervous sight! The boat, in which were ten
rowers and several officers, seemed to stand quite upright on its
stern, so as to leave us doubtful which way it would fall. The whole
was hid for a moment in a mass of spray, except that we could see the
blades of the oars sticking out, all in confusion, as the water took
them. When the wave passed and the boat righted, they say it was full
up to the thwarts. On seeing this Captain H. ordered them to pull off,
and sent a shore boat for them, i.e., two niggers in a canoe, which
took them out one or two at a time. The last load consisted of the
Commodore’s steward, an old Italian for whom I have an affection, and
a midshipman. As they were alongside the stage a wave broke outside
them; the mid was lucky enough to catch hold in time, but the poor
Italian, canoe, niggers, and all, totally disappeared, and were seen
again about thirty yards off progressing with the crest of the wave
towards the beach, on which all were deposited safe, after a dive of
near 600 yards. _N.B._――The niggers and Spaniards, when landing
themselves, never think of going to the stage, but sitting very
steadily in their canoes, wait where the waves begin to break, and
only taking care to keep the boat straight, and paddling a little to
assist it in getting way at first, they are shot in without any
effort, on the crest of the wave, with wonderful velocity, keeping on
the downhill side of it all the time, and at last are deposited high
and dry. When I saw this first, I could hardly believe my eyes.
‘I shall stay here a fortnight longer at least, and then set off for
New York. I am very grateful for your long letters, which come by
every packet.’
There follows a letter on April 8, 1834, conjointly addressed:
‘Joannibus Keble et Newman: _fratres ignavissimi, ut quid fecisti
nobis sic_? as St. Thomas says to the Bishop of Poictiers…. The Bishop
[of Barbados] is a thorough Z;[172] and I can make no impression on
him, though I think I have frightened him. If he had not been as kind
to me as one man can be to another, I should be terribly provoked with
him sometimes…. You may like to know of my health: I really think I am
getting well. I left England in the impression that I was μινυνθάδιος,
as you may see in a scratched-out passage in one of my letters; since
I have conceived hopes, I have become much more careful. I should not
wonder, if I stayed here, till[173] I get quite rid of my cough. The
Bishop’s library is a great piece of luck. I don’t think I am wasting
my time here, independent of my health. I don’t ask how anyone is, for
I shall certainly be gone before I can have an answer; and when I
shall go to Yankland I do not know…. _Valete, et confortamini in
Domino._’
The Rev. J. KEBLE to the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, April, 1834.
‘… As to Froude, I know, of course, no more than the letters have told
us both, and the first was so flattering that I was disappointed at
the other; yet, on consideration, I see no additional reason for
alarm. It seems much as it used to be, and we cannot be wrong in
hoping the best. Anyone who remembers him three or four years ago must
acknowledge that to have him now is much more than we could have been
sure about. I wish him strong enough, please God, to take duty and
wait on some flock. I think he would get more calm and less young in
his notions, or rather in his way of putting them, which makes people
who do not know him think him not a practical man. What a wise
old[174] letter! Well, good-bye.’
On May 2, Hurrell makes to Mr. Keble the frank confession that he is
not well enough to return to England, or to travel at all. He never
saw the United States. He adds, referring to clauses in the Oriel
Statutes, which he seems to have known by heart, ‘Try to satisfy the
College that though my _ægritudo_ is _diutina_, it may not be
_incurabilis_.’ And he goes on to say that a mathematical instructor
is wanted at Codrington College,[175] ‘so I mean to offer myself, on
condition of having a room given me, and being allowed to battel.[176]
Mind, this is mere castle-building as yet, but it is ten to one it
will be realised. In fact, unless I get suddenly and decidedly well
before the end of this month, I see no chance against it; so will your
worships have the goodness to get together a few sets of the [Oxford]
Tracts; also three or four copies of a work[177] which I see much
praised in _The British Magazine_, as coming from the pen of “a
scholar, a man of refined taste, and above all, a Christian”; also a
copy of an anonymous work called _The Christian Year_, which I forgot
to bring with me; also the parts _Autumnalis_ and _Hyemalis_ of my
Breviary; also any newspapers or reviews, or anything else which will
throw light on your worships’ proceedings; and send the package to [my
father]: let it be a good big one; and mind to send lots of Tracts,
for I shall try hard to poison the minds of the natives out here….
There is a most commendable production in the supplemental December
number, signed C.[178] Whose is it? he should be cultivated. I should
like to see a good one on clergy praying with their faces to the Altar
and backs to the congregation. In a Protestant Church the parson seems
either to be preaching the prayers or worshipping the congregation….
The climate out here is certainly delicious, though it alters one’s
metaphors a little: _e.g._, the shady side of the hedge would be the
cheerful one. The only nuisance is that everything is so inelegant:
money and luxury are the people’s sole objects, and their luxuries are
only of the kind that can be enjoyed on the instant: no one counts on
living here, so there are no porticos, no fountains, no avenues,
nothing that makes the south of Europe such a fairyland. Windmills and
boiling-houses, treeless fields and gardenless houses, are the only
things one sees; except at my dreamed-of residence, Codrington
College, where there is a grand avenue of gigantic palms,[179] a
delicious spring of the freshest (nothing is cold here) clearest
water, and a very tolerably nice flower-garden with mowed turf, and
roses that smell, and almost complete seclusion. If I go there I shall
turn sentimental, and sit παρὰ θῖνα θαλάσσης ἀτρυγέτοιο δακρυχέων. I
wish I could be in England now, and see a little of “Nature’s
tenderest, freshest green,” etc. Out here it is the leafless time….’
One circumstance which would turn Hurrell’s thoughts the more readily
to a tutorship was that he could no longer be domestic Chaplain. The
Bishop of Barbados had gone on a long visit to England.
Beginning in June of this year, and lasting into October, appeared in
_The British Magazine_,[180] copious excerpts from the ancient Parish
Books of Dartington. There is a very high value put now upon all such
publications, and a very general interest in them; but one wonders how
many readers of the time, brought up on controversy, begrudged the
space given to the statistics of bygone village people. Archdeacon
Froude sent up copies of his registers to London, in response to the
behest of that busy antiquary in the making, his eldest son: that
seems an obviously safe deduction.
Newman has something to say to the absentee on June 15.
‘Was it not a strange mishap, that much as you abused me for making
you a cat’s paw, yet when the time of danger came, you should get out
of the way, and leave innocent me to trouble? So it was: only think
how mildly I have always spoken of Arnold, and how bitterly you! Never
did I use a harsh word against him, I think, except that once, and
then at Rome, and with but one or two friends.[181] Yet even from Rome
those few words are dragged forth, and I have to answer for them…. In
the next place, my _Tracts_ are abused as Popish; as for other things,
so especially for expressions about the Eucharist. Here, as you well
know, it was you who were apt to be unguarded, not I. I could tell you
much, only it is renewing sorrows, and nothing else, of the plague the
_Tracts_ have been to us, and how we have removed them to Rivington’s.
That the said _Tracts_ have been of essential benefit it is impossible
to doubt. Pamphlets, sermons, etc. on the Apostolic Succession are
appearing in every part of the kingdom…. H[enry] Wilberforce engaged
to marry Miss S[argent] last December, was afraid to tell me, and left
Oxford without; spread abroad I had cut R[yder][182] for marrying. Yet
he has not ratted,[183] and will not: so be it. Marriage, when a
crime, is a crime which it is criminal to repent of.’
Poor Henry Wilberforce, caught red-handed, did not repent. He had
poured forth various misgivings in the ear of the ever sympathetic
Rogers. ‘Indeed, though I did not tell Neander (as who would?) yet I
did tell his sister, and gave her leave to tell him…. I suppose,
however, he will cut me. I cannot help it. At any rate, you must not….
Nor again, am I without a feeling of the danger, as you know, of
married priests in these days of trouble and rebuke; but I have taken
my line.’
‘It is needless to say,’ adds Miss Mozley in her narrative notes,
‘that “Neander” did not “cut” the writer of this letter, whose
firstborn was subsequently his godson.’
But to return to Newman’s letter to Froude, which goes on:
‘I have long come to the conclusion that our time is not come, _i.e._,
that other persons can do the day’s work as well as, or better than we
can, our business being only to give them a shove now and then. You
send home flaming papers, but, after all, I fall back to what I said
last year on your articles about the Præmunire. Not that it is not
right, very right, to accustom men’s imaginations to the prospect of
changes; but they cannot realise the arguments: they are quite beyond
them…. This is our gain, and I intend to make use of it…. Meanwhile
let us read, and prepare ourselves for better things…. As to Rose, he
is a fine fellow, certainly he is, and complains that he has no one,
all through London, in whom he can confide. O that you were well
enough to assist him in London! You are not fit to move of yourself,
but you would act through Rose as spirit acts on external matter
through a body. He has everything which you are without, and is so
inflammable that not even muscles are more sensitive of volition than
he would be of you.’
The ‘flaming papers,’ as Newman calls them, were the disconnected,
wide-branching chapters dealing with various aspects of Rationalism in
relation to doctrine, composed entirely at Barbados during 1834, and
pieced together and published in 1839 from four incomplete
manuscripts. Fragmentary as they are, they would, under careful
editing, and coupled with the _State Interference_ and _Church
Discipline_, display Froude’s tangential and remorseless intelligence
at its very best.
The proposed conjunction of Froude with Rose was less than a dream: a
flat impossibility. It is wonderful that Newman, who loved Rose truly
in a measure, should never have quite sounded the reasons why he and
Froude were not in closer accord and amity. When they were both in
their untimely graves, Newman associated their memories as
fellow-workers of the Will of God, in his comforting letter to Mr.
Rose’s widow. But the two, clearly, were temperamental antipodes,
partners in nothing but their stainless zeal, and their uncomplaining
battle with long disease.
Once settled as instructor of mathematics to his young theologians,
Hurrell pays epistolary dues to his father, and offers some ghostly
counsel of a then drastic kind.
To the Ven. Archdeacon FROUDE, August 22, 1834.
‘… I am now at Codrington College, where Mr. P[inder][184] the
Principal, and his wife, have made me very comfortable indeed. I am
quite ashamed to think how much trouble they have taken. I have two
rooms about thirteen by fourteen each, twelve high; the sitting room
looks out on the Atlantic, which is about half a mile off at the
bottom of a very steep hill to which the Babbacombe[185] one is
nothing. The view is very pretty: the foreground is the Principal’s
garden, which is the most English thing in the West Indies, they say:
then comes some very rough uncultivated ground, some part of which is
quite parkish; and at the bottom a beautiful little bay which just
now, while the wind is south, is as still as a millpond.
‘I give two Lectures a day, which is an amusement, and helps me to
avoid thinking, which is ruination, I am sure. Some of the youngsters
are very stupid, some passable, and one rather clever; so that the
work is not monotonous. I have commons from the College kitchen very
comfortably, and since I have had the ordering of my own dinner, I
have entirely left off animal food. My dinner is a sort of slimy
vegetable, the name of which I forget, but which tastes something like
an oyster; and custard pudding, and a tumbler of water. At breakfast I
eat two eggs, and put lots of butter to my bread; it is only lately
that I have got over my dislike to Barbados butter. The first hour
after daylight, I work myself with dumb-bells, which is very dull, but
they say a good thing; and washing afterwards is a great treat. Also I
sometimes undress in the middle of the day, and have a bout at the
same dull occupation to get an appetite for dinner; and about
half-past five in the evening I get an hour’s walk: so I am doing all
I can for myself if nature will but help me, and if my patience will
hold out. The disheartening thing is, that if I ate a beefsteak and
drank a bottle of porter and six glasses of wine a day, I don’t
believe my pulse would rise or my cough increase an atom. However, I
hope to give this abstemious plan a fair trial; for unless it weakens
me, which I have not yet found, it can do no harm.
‘I wish you did not set your face so pertinaciously against any
alteration in the mode of appointing Bishops; that is the real seat of
the disorder of the Church: the more I think of it, the more sure I am
that unless something is done about it, there must be a separation in
the Church before long, and that I shall be one of the separatists. It
will not do to say that you see great evils in any proposed new plan:
that is a very good argument when the present state of things is good;
but when a man is dying, it is poor wisdom in him to object that the
plans the surgeons propose for his relief are painful and dangerous.
There is another reform, which I have been thinking of lately more
than I did before, though I have long thought something should be done
about it; and it is one which every clergyman can make for himself
without difficulty. I believe it to be the most indispensable of all
the duties of external religion, that every one should receive the
Communion as often as he has opportunity; and that if he has such
opportunity every day of the week, it is his duty to take advantage of
it every day of the week. And further, as an immediate corollary from
this, I think it the duty of every clergyman to give the serious
members of his congregation this opportunity as often as he can
without neglecting other parts of his duty. Now at [Dartington] if you
had the Communion every Sunday you might make sure of a sufficient
number of communicants: and I don’t know of any other duty that you
would have to neglect in consequence. Or, at any rate, you might have
it every month without the slightest difficulty, and need assign no
reason for the change; indeed, people would not find out at first that
there was any change. I wish you would turn this over in your mind. I
dare say you will think my view overstrained, and very likely it may
be a little. Yet the more I think of it, the less doubtful it seems to
me. I know that neither N[ewman][186] nor K[eble], when I left
England, saw the thing in the light in which it now strikes me; they
thought that it was desirable to have the Communion as often as
possible, but still that the customs of particular places ought not to
be changed without particular reason. But it really does seem to me
that the Church of England has gone so very wrong in this matter, that
it is not right to keep things smooth any longer. The administration
of the Communion is one of the very few religious duties now performed
by the clergy for which Ordination has ever been considered necessary.
Preaching, and reading the Scriptures, is what a layman can do as well
as a clergyman. And it is no wonder the people should forget the
difference between ordained and unordained persons, when those who are
ordained do nothing for them but what they could have done just as
well without Ordination! If you are determined to have a pulpit in
your Church, which I would much rather be without, do put it at the
west end of the Church, or leave it where it is: every one can hear
you perfectly; and what can they want more? But whatever you do, pray
don’t let it stand in the light of the Altar, which, if there is any
truth in my notions of Ordination, is more sacred than the Holy of
Holies was in the Jewish Temple.