‘“The true and primary author of it” (the Tractarian Movement), we read in the Apologia, “as is usual with great motive powers, was out of sight…. Need I say that I am speaking of John Keble?” The statement is strictly true. Froude never would have been the man he was but for his daily and hourly intercourse with Keble; and Froude brought to bear upon Newman’s mind, at a critical period of its development, Keble’s ideas and feelings about religion and the Church, Keble’s reality of thought and purpose, Keble’s transparent and saintly simplicity. And Froude, as we know from a well-known saying of his,[297] brought Keble and Newman to understand one another, when the elder man was shy and suspicious of the younger, and the younger, though full of veneration for the elder, was hardly yet in full sympathy with what was most characteristic and most cherished in the elder’s religious convictions. Keble attracted and moulded Froude: he impressed Froude with his strong Churchmanship, his severity and reality of life, his poetry, and high standard of scholarly excellence. Froude learned from him to be anti-Erastian, anti-Methodistical, anti-sentimental, and as strong in his hatred of the world, as contemptuous of popular approval, as any Methodist. Yet all this might merely have made a strong impression, or formed one more marked school of doctrine, without the fierce energy which received it and which it inspired. But Froude, in accepting Keble’s ideas, resolved to make them active, public, aggressive; and he found in Newman a colleague whose bold originality responded to his
own. Together they worked as Tutors; together they worked when their tutorships came to an end; together they worked when thrown into companionship in their Mediterranean voyage, in the winter of 1832 and the spring of 1833. They came back full of aspirations and anxieties which spurred them on; their thoughts had broken out in papers sent home from time to time to Rose’s British Magazine (“Home Thoughts Abroad”) and the Lyra Apostolica. Then came the meeting at Hadleigh, and the beginning of the Tracts. Keble had given the inspiration, Froude had given the impulse; then Newman took up the work, and the impulse henceforward, and the direction, were his.
‘Doubtless, many thought and felt like them about the perils which beset the Church and religion. Loyalty to the Church, belief in her divine mission, allegiance to her authority, readiness to do battle for her claims, were anything but extinct in her ministers and laity. The elements were all about of sound and devoted Churchmanship. Higher ideas of the Church than the popular and political notion of it, higher conceptions of Christian doctrine than those of the ordinary Evangelical theology—echoes of the meditations of a remarkable Irishman, Mr. Alexander Knox—had in many quarters attracted attention in the works and sermons of his disciple, Bishop Jebb, though it was not till the Movement had taken shape that their full significance was realised. Others besides Keble and Froude and Newman were seriously considering what could best be done to arrest the current which was running strong against the Church, and discussing schemes of resistance and defence. Others were stirring up themselves and their brethren to meet the new emergencies, to respond to the new call. Some of these were in communication with the Oriel men, and ultimately took part with them in organising vigorous measures. But it was not till Mr. Newman made up his mind to force on the public mind, in a way which could not be evaded, the great article of the Creed, “I believe one Catholic and Apostolic Church,” that the Movement began. And for the first part of its course, it was concentrated at Oxford. It was the direct result of the searchings of heart and the communings for seven years, from 1826 to
1833, of the three men who have been the subject of this chapter.
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‘Hurrell Froude[298] soon passed away before the brunt of the fighting came. His name is associated with Mr. Newman and Mr. Keble, but it is little more than a name to those who now talk of the origin of the Movement. Yet all who remember him agree in assigning to him an importance as great as that of any, in that little knot of men whose thoughts and whose courage gave birth to it…. He was early cut off from direct and personal action on the course which things took. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that his influence on the line taken, and on the minds of others, was inconsiderable. It would be more true to say that, with one exception, no one was more responsible for the impulse which led to the Movement; no one had more to do with shaping its distinct aims and its moral spirit and character, in its first stage; no one was more daring and more clear, as far as he saw, in what he was prepared for. There was no one to whom his friends so much looked up with admiration and enthusiasm. There was no “wasted shade”[299] in Hurrell Froude’s disabled, prematurely shortened life.
‘Like Henry Martyn, he was made by strong and even merciless self-discipline over a strong and for a long time refractory nature. He was a man of great gifts, with much that was most attractive and noble; but joined with this there was originally in his character a vein of perversity and mischief, always in danger of breaking out, and with which he kept up a long and painful struggle. His inmost thought and knowledge of himself have been laid bare in the papers which his friends published after his death. He was in the habit of probing his motives to the bottom, and of recording without mercy what he thought his self-deceits and affectations. The religious world of the day made merry over his methods of self-discipline; but whatever may be said of them, (and such things are not easy to judge of), one thing is manifest, that they were true and sincere efforts to conquer what he thought evil in himself, to keep himself in order, to bring his inmost self into subjection to the Law and Will of God. The self-chastening which his private papers show, is no passion or value for asceticism, but a purely moral effort after self-command and honesty of character; and what makes the struggle so touching is its perfect reality and truth. He “turned his thoughts on that desolate wilderness, his own conscience, and said what he saw there.”[300] A man who has had a good deal to conquer in himself, and has gone a good way to conquer it, is not apt to be indulgent to self-deceit or indolence, or even weakness. The basis of Froude’s character was a demand which would not be put off for what was real and thorough; an implacable scorn and hatred for what he counted shams and pretences. “His highest ambition,” he used to say, “was to be a humdrum.”[301] The intellectual and the moral parts of his character were of a piece. The tricks and flimsinesses of a bad argument provoked him as much as the imposture and “flash” of insincere sentiment and fine talking; he might be conscious of “flash” in himself and his friends, and he would admit it unequivocally; but it was as unbearable to him to pretend not to see a fallacy as soon as it was detected, as it would have been to him to arrive at the right answer of a sum or a problem by tampering with the
processes. Such a man, with strong affections and keen perception of all forms of beauty, and with the deepest desire to be reverent towards all that had a right to reverence, would find himself in the most irritating state of opposition and impatience with much that passed as religion round him. Principles not attempted to be understood and carried into practice; smooth self-complacency among those who looked down on a blind and unspiritual world; the continual provocation of worthless reasoning and ignorant platitudes; the dull unconscious stupidity of people who could not see that the times were critical, that Truth had to be defended, and that it was no easy or light-hearted business to defend it;—threw him into an habitual attitude of defiance, and half-amused, half-earnest contradiction, which made him feared by loose reasoners and pretentious talkers, and even by quiet easy-going friends, who unexpectedly found themselves led on blindfold, with the utmost gravity, into traps and absurdities, by the wiles of his mischievous dialectic. This was the outside look of his relentless earnestness. People who did not like him or his views, and who, perhaps, had winced under his irony, naturally put down his strong language, which on occasion could certainly be unceremonious, to flippancy and arrogance. But within the circle of those whom he trusted, or of those who needed at any time his help, another side disclosed itself: a side of the most genuine warmth of affection; an awful reality of devoutness, which it was his great and habitual effort to keep hidden; a high simplicity of unworldliness and generosity; and, in spite of his daring mockeries of what was commonplace or showy, the most sincere and deeply felt humility with himself. Dangerous as he was often thought to be in conversation, one of the features of his character which has impressed itself on the memory of one who knew him well, was his “patient, winning considerateness in discussion, which, with other qualities, endeared him to those to whom he opened his heart.”[302] “It is impossible,” writes James Mozley in 1833, with a mixture of amusement, speaking of the views about celibacy which were beginning to be current, “to talk with Froude without committing one’s self on such subjects as
these; so that by and by I expect the tergiversants will be a considerable party.” His letters, with their affectionately playful addresses, δαιμόνιε, αἰνότατε, πέπον, Carissime, “Sir, my dear friend,” or “Ἀργείων ὄχ’ ἄριστε, have you not been a spoon?” are full of the most delightful ease and verve and sympathy.
‘With a keen sense of English faults he was, as Cardinal Newman has said, “an Englishman to the backbone”; and he was, further, a fastidious, high-tempered English gentleman, in spite of his declaiming about “pampered aristocrats” and the “gentleman heresy.” His friends thought of him as of the “young Achilles,” with his high courage, and noble form, and “eagle eye,” made for such great things, but appointed so soon to die. “Who can refrain from tears at the thought of that bright and beautiful Froude?” is the expression of one of them[303] shortly before his death, and when it was quite certain that the doom which had so long hung over him was at hand. He had the love of doing for the mere sake of doing what was difficult or even dangerous to do, which is the mainspring of characteristic English sports and games. He loved the sea; he liked to sail his own boat, and enjoyed rough weather, and took interest in the niceties of seamanship and shipcraft. He was a bold rider across country. With a powerful grasp on mathematical truths and principles, he entered with wholehearted zest into inviting problems, or into practical details of mechanical or hydrostatic or astronomical science. His letters are full of such observations, put in a way which he thought would interest his friends, and marked by his strong habit of getting into touch with what was real and of the substance of questions. He applied his thoughts to architecture with a power and originality which at the time were not common. No one who only cared for this world could be more attracted and interested than he was by the wonder and beauty of its facts and appearances. With the deepest allegiance to his home, and reverence for its ties and authority, (a home of the old-fashioned ecclesiastical sort, sober, manly, religious, orderly,) he carried into his wider life the feelings with which he had been brought up; bold as he was, his reason and his character craved for authority, but authority which morally and reasonably