par Taine, qui “restent en chemin et ne concluent pas.” … De plus, il sentait bien qu’il n’était pas seul. Il avait avec lui plus que des corréligionnaires, plus que des collaborateurs, plus que les disciples: il avait avec lui et pour lui l’esprit anglais. Les anglais, tout en admirant beaucoup Newman, et en le plaçant au-dessus de Pusey, reconnaissent mieux leur esprit dans Pusey que dans Newman.’[291]
Nothing can be safer for all of us conjointly than to answer ‘No’ at once to that pithless query: Would Froude have followed Newman? Froude would never have followed Newman. Nor would the latter have paced up and down for long lonely years in Oriel Lane, and in the Limbus Innocentium at Littlemore, nor invented Oret pro nobis for an anodyne, had Froude been alive. It is the summing-up of a thoughtful review that ‘most readers of the Apologia are under the impression that [Newman] had started on the road to Rome as soon as Froude’s influence succeeded to Whately’s; and that if he were not unfaithful, he had to go on to the end…. Certainly, it does seem as if, after he had lost Froude, Newman was very liable to be perplexed by opposition, to watch for omens, to be at the mercy of accidents.’[292] Nothing gives one such an idea of the immense propelling force which Hurrell Froude was, as the untoward indecision into which Newman soon fell, though he still had Pusey’s fortress-like strength at his side. Even Keble, without the beloved ‘poker,’ burned with a somewhat darker flame. His silent beneficent career at Hursley was a different matter from his career as Oriel captain of artillery; and no careful student can fail to notice that his later spiritual direction tended more and more towards the nebulous. As for Hurrell, he was bound to be astir, living or dead, in one direction or another. Without being prepared to look frankly upon October 9, 1845, as his true field-day, open-minded persons may harbour a sympathetic wonder whether in the English event which crowns it he were quite unimplicated? ‘Was it Gregory or was it Basil, that blew the trumpet in Constantinople?’ When Newman sadly transferred himself to Oscott, in the
February of 1846, he would have remembered, after his remembering habit, how strangely, yet naturally, in the Providence of God, he was keeping the tenth anniversary of the loss of his dearest friend, no part of whose office could be filled even by an Ambrose St. John, ‘whom God gave me when He took all else away.’
‘Hurrell Froude lives,’ says Principal Fairbairn epigrammatically, ‘in Newman.’ It would be an interesting task for a biographer to examine and define the measure of response with which ‘the Vicar,’ in his historic seclusion, worked into one scheme his ideas, and the ideas bequeathed to him by the least ‘flinching’ Anglican in the world. Froude had managed to give Newman, (and with no more ceremonial pomp than one infant employs in tossing sea-shells to another,) the norm of every single one of his great theories. This short span beside that old age, this quick, forward-reaching, never-ripened thought beside the ‘long gestation’ of the sublime soul whom we know better, may not unfitly be compared to a keynote struck in a grace-note before the full major chord. The chord owes nothing of its position, or its compotent harmony, to the mere sweet hint which announces it and is instantaneously whelmed in it, but it certainly does owe to it almost all of what may be called its idiomatic beauty. To no educated ear is the chord with that apposition, and the chord without it, conceivably the same.
It is his glory that Froude cannot be severed, early or late, from the superior genius once so ‘fain to be his heir.’ As he stands fast with what Mr. Wilfrid Ward has named ‘that great crisis of spiritual animation, unparalleled in our age and country,’ which has transformed the Church of England, and with his Achates, as that Achates was up to 1845, so he walks on with the white-haired Cardinal of all men’s honour, through whom a torrent of new life streamed, and streams, into the English-speaking children of the Apostolic See, but who
‘—came to Oxford and his friends no more.’
Newman’s unnecessary readiness to acknowledge any moral debt, was surely no small part of his delightful greatness.
Never was it better justified than in his lifelong sense of obligation to the clear brain and pure devout heart of a young man of no celebrity, whose full significance is not past, but to come.
To a Catholic, Froude has something yet finer than his ‘totality and universality of character.’ He has the grace of God. He stands in a mysterious place,
‘Beautiful evermore, and with the rays