‘As simplicity in thought, word, and deed formed no small part of his ideal, his tastes in architecture, painting, sculpture, rhetoric, or poetry were severe. He had no patience with what was artistically dissolute, luscious, or decorated more than in proportion to its animating idea, wishy-washy, or sentimental. The ornamental parts of his own rooms (in which I lived in his absence) were a slab of marble to wash upon, a print of Rubens’s “Deposition,” and a head (life-size) of the Apollo Belvedere. And I remember still the tall scorn, with something of surprise, with which, on entering my undergraduate room, he looked down on some Venuses, Cupids,
and Hebes, which, freshman-like, I had bought from an Italian.
‘He was not very easy even under conventional vulgarity, still less under the vulgarity of egotism; but, being essentially a partisan, he could put up with both in a man who was really in earnest and on the right side. Nothing, however, I think, would have induced him to tolerate false sentiment, and he would, I think, if he had lived, have exerted himself very trenchantly to prevent his cause being adulterated by it. He was, I should say, sometimes misled by a theory that genius cut through a subject by logic or intuition, without looking to the right or left, while common sense was always testing every step by consideration of surroundings (I have not got his terse mode of statement), and that genius was right, or at least had only to be corrected, here and there, by common sense. This, I take it, would hardly have answered if his trenchancy had not been in practice corrected by J. H. N.’s wider political circumspection. He submitted, I suppose, to J. H. N.’s axiom, that if the Movement was to do anything it must become “respectable”; but it was against his nature.
‘He would (as we see in the Remains) have wished Ken to have the “courage of his convictions” by excommunicating the Jurors in William III.’s time, and setting up a little Catholic Church, like the Jansenists in Holland. He was not (as has been observed) a theologian, but he was as jealous for orthodoxy as if he were. He spoke slightingly of Heber as having ignorantly or carelessly communicated with Monophysites. But he probably knew no more about that and other heresies than a man of active and penetrating mind would derive from text-books. And I think it likely enough, not that his reverence for the Eucharist, but that his special attention to the details of Eucharistic doctrine, was due to the consideration that it was the foundation of ecclesiastical discipline and authority: matters on which his mind fastened itself with enthusiasm.’
From ‘Apologia pro Vita Sua,’ by John Henry Newman, D.D., of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1873.
[By the kind permission of the Rev. W. P. Neville of the Oratory, and of Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co.]
‘… Hurrell Froude was a pupil of Keble’s, formed by him, and in turn reacting upon him. I knew him first in 1826, and was in the closest and most affectionate friendship with him from about 1829 until his death in 1836. He was a man of the highest gifts: so truly many-sided, that it would be presumptuous in me to attempt to describe him, except under those aspects in which he came before me. Nor have I here to speak of the gentleness and tenderness of nature, the playfulness, the free elastic force and graceful versatility of mind, and the patient winning considerateness in discussion, which endeared him to those to whom he opened his heart; for I am all along engaged upon matters of belief and opinion, and am introducing others into my narrative, not for their own sake, or because I love them and have loved them, so much as because, and so far as, they have influenced my theological views. In this respect, then, I speak of Hurrell Froude, in his intellectual aspect: as a man of high genius, brimful and overflowing with ideas and views, in him original, which were too many and strong even for his bodily strength, and which crowded and jostled against each other, in their effort after distinct shape and expression. And he had an intellect as critical and logical as it was speculative and bold. Dying prematurely, as he did, and in the conflict and transition-state of opinion, his religious views never reached their ultimate conclusion, by the very reason of their multitude and their depth. His opinions arrested and influenced me even when they did not gain my assent. He professed openly his admiration of the Church of Rome, and his hatred of the Reformers. He delighted in the notion of an hierarchical system, of sacerdotal power, and of full ecclesiastical liberty. He felt scorn of the maxim, “The Bible and the Bible only is the religion of Protestants,” and he gloried in accepting
Tradition as a main instrument of religious teaching. He had a high severe idea of the intrinsic excellence of Virginity, and he considered the Blessed Virgin its great Pattern. He delighted in thinking of the Saints; he had a vivid appreciation of the idea of sanctity, its possibility and its heights; and he was more than inclined to believe a large amount of miraculous interference as occurring in the early and middle ages. He embraced the principle of penance and mortification. He had a deep devotion to the Real Presence, in which he had a firm faith. He was powerfully drawn to the Mediæval Church, but not to the Primitive.
‘He had a keen insight into abstract truth; but he was an Englishman to the backbone in his severe adherence to the real and the concrete. He had a most classical taste, and a genius for philosophy and art; and he was fond of historical inquiry, and the politics of religion. He had no turn for theology as such. He set no sufficient value on the writings of the Fathers, on the detail or development of doctrine, on the definite traditions of the Church viewed in their matter, on the teaching of the Ecumenical Councils, or on the controversies out of which they arose. He took an eager courageous view of things, on the whole. I should say that his power of entering into the minds of others did not equal his other gifts: he could not believe, for instance, that I really held the Roman Church to be anti-Christian. On many points, he would not believe but that I agreed with him, when I did not: he seemed not to understand my difficulties. His were of a different kind: the contrariety between theory and fact. He was a High Tory of the Cavalier stamp, and was disgusted with the Toryism of the opponents of the Reform Bill. He was smitten with the love of the Theocratic Church: he went abroad, and was shocked by the degeneracy which he thought he saw in the Catholics of Italy.