And again, turning from what he thought an almost unnatural success, he seeks refuge in his own special pun. ‘Crede mihi,’ he confides to Keble on the eve of Candlemas, ‘idem sum ille φροῦδος qui utroque pede claudicans e scholis evasi: me in nulla re scholastica ex illo tempore usque ad hunc diem sentio profecisse.’ In ‘Empty-head’ limping with both feet out of the Schools, we are to recognise an allusion to Hurrell’s unforgotten double-second class. He was too humble to see that for a Romany rye of his sort, a double-second class was really a quite extravagant toll to pay to University conventions.
Oriel soon became a hotbed of revolution, as the consequence of her anti-academical processes of selection. Within two years, troubles began, and Froude, with Newman, R. I. Wilberforce, and Dornford, the other public Tutors, took up and for a long time maintained, against the settled paganism of the College, their own ‘fierce’ views of their duty towards undergraduates. Of this duty Froude and Newman had a particularly clear conviction. Keble had struck, and struck strongly, the pastoral note as early as 1818, and developed it in a letter to Sir J. T. Coleridge.[40] On the other hand, the Provost and the administrators held that intercourse between Tutor and pupil should be a routine of lectures only, and not that and a cure of souls beside. The antagonism lasted for nearly four years, during which Froude’s deep friendship with Newman grew up, and was perfected. The end came with
Hawkins’ express refusal to sanction the further supply of pupils to the would-be spiritual directors who so quietly defied him. They had ‘led the last struggle for the ancient quasi-parental and religious character of the College Tutor.’[41] As the pupils they had went up for degrees and left the University, they fell quite idle, in that respect, by 1831, and with all their smouldering zeal and moral fire within them, the way was open for another onset of the Laudians which was destined to affect the consciences not alone of young Oriel, but of the nation and the age.
Froude’s allotted rooms were directly over Newman’s, in the Chapel angle of the Great Quad of Oriel College. The new Fellow did not, as such, come into residence until after the Easter vacation; during the following month, April, we find him still luxuriating in Devonshire and plunging deep into abstract metaphysics. ‘I have been taken with a fit of writing,’ he confesses to Keble. ‘I am happier than I ever was at Oxford, far: but that is not saying much.’ Apparently, he had posted manuscripts for criticism, and received it as gratefully and as combatively as usual. ‘I am infinitely indebted to you,’ he writes, ‘for your expeditious attention to my concern, and will try my best to set to rights the places you row [about]. However, I still maintain that my end is both relevant and true and my puzzle-headed antithesis a good one; but I bow my head in implicit confidence, as far as practice goes. Distinctions and refinements are growing on me, and I am all in a maze; and it is delightful to have the shadow of a great rock in a weary land to which I may turn for temporary shelter. If I had a year more, I could not make it at all to my satisfaction; so I must make the best of it.’
His note-books for this year and the next are full of the contemned ‘distinctions and refinements.’ In trying to beat out his conceptions of moral growth (a thing he refused to recognise in himself), he jots down some striking and arresting thoughts. Two or three which lie metaphysically not far apart, must suffice for transcription. They show the
coherence, the synthetic power with which Froude’s philosophy knit all worlds into one.
—‘For whatever cause the great Author of Nature contrived that resemblance (as it appears to us) which subsists between the part of His dominions of which He has given us a consciousness, and that other part with which we are acquainted only through our understanding, it seems calculated to assist our conceptions of the one to observe what passes in the other…. The business of our life seems to be to acquire the habit of acting as we should do if we were conscious of all that we know…. It is delightful to see things turn out well whose case seems in some sort to represent to us our indistinct conceptions of our own. Animals fainting under the effect of exercise, and then again recovering their strength which that very exercise has contributed to increase; the slow and, uncertain degrees in which this increase is effected, and yet the certainty in which it is effected: the growth of trees sometimes tossed by winds and checked by frosts, yet, by the evil effects of these winds, directed in what quarter to strike their roots so as to secure themselves for the future, and by these frosts hardened and fitted for a new progress the next summer:—in things of this sort I am so constituted as to see brethren in affliction evidently making progress towards release.’
—‘Some people imagine that there is something blasphemous in the supposition that a finite creature can be conscious in two places at once. This is so far from being true that even our own experience contradicts it. Perhaps there is some absurdity in the very idea which attributes a place to consciousness, or the things capable of it. With regard to ourselves, there is nothing to show us where we are conscious (though most people suppose the conscious thing is somewhere within the body), or that we may not be with equal propriety said to be conscious, or, in other words, to be, wherever anything is of which we are conscious. It seems to me that the question where we are, is one not of fact, but of degree; and that the only facts which make us suppose we are where our body is, give us likewise the same reason for supposing that in the same sense we sometimes are far away from the body.’
—‘Yesterday, before breakfast, while the vacancy produced
by fasting was still on me, and I was reading the Psalms, and craving for a comprehension of the things which I could only look on as words, and was worked up to such a pitch that I felt trying to see my soul, and make out how it was fitted to receive an impression from them,—Merton bell[42] began to go; and it struck me (I cannot tell why) that if such a trifle as that could give me such a vivid idea, my soul must be a most intricate thing; and that when senses were given to the blind part of it, what things would those appear, the apprehension of which I was struggling after! This is as near what passed in my mind as I can find expressions to shape my memory by. This blindness of heart is what, by habit and patience, it is our work practically to remove. We are to shape our souls for its removal, by making it in harmony with the things invisible.’