‘… To get at Newman, a friend had to appeal to him through the imagination; … indeed, one of the friends whom we shall have before us, did actually, though indirectly, influence Newman’s action at so many points in his career that if we omitted a sketch of him here, we should have to be constantly digressing for explanations afterwards. The three friends are: Edward Bouverie Pusey, John Keble, and, as a climax in respect of influence, Richard Hurrell Froude…. Froude’s opinions, [Newman] says, arrested him, even when they did not gain his consent…. In all these beliefs [enumerated in the Apologia] Froude certainly preceded, and evidence will hereafter clearly prove that he also led, the friend who had been gradually disengaging himself from the Evangelical School. Even in other matters where, at first, Newman and he differed, Newman, in the end, came round to him. Froude was “powerfully drawn to the Mediæval Church,” Newman to the Primitive; but the Mediæval finally triumphed. He set no great store on theological detail, nor on the writings of the Fathers, but “took an eager courageous view of things as a whole.”[372] Omit “courageous,” perhaps also the “eager,” and the sentence will describe the nature of Newman’s final decision. He, too, took “things as a whole”: it was the personified majesty of the vision of Rome that ultimately took him captive. Recognising the difficulty of enumerating all the additions to his creed which Newman derived from a friend to whom he owed so much, the Apologia selects four: admiration for Rome, dislike of the Reformation, devotion to the Blessed Virgin, belief in the Real Presence. But there is perhaps not one in the long list of Froude’s other opinions [on sacerdotal power, ecclesiastical liberty, acceptance of tradition, the intrinsic
excellence of virginity, miraculous interferences, delight in the Saints, and the principle of penance and mortification: see the passage in the Apologia] in which his influence on Newman is not perceptible. If not first planted, some of them were at all events “fixed deep,” and firmly rooted, by the friend who had previously received them. If, therefore, we would understand Newman’s development, we should spare no trouble in attempting to understand that one of all his friends who is shown by evidence, direct and indirect, to have contributed most to it. For this purpose all the more pains are needed, because the very friends who loved him best dealt somewhat hardly with his reputation. In his literary Remains, they gave to the world the most secret records of his private life, in which, besides hinting at deeper “vilenesses,” he sets down in detail, with unflinching severity, if not with exaggeration, the very smallest infirmities of will and deed. The Apologia speaks 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”; and other testimony enables us to believe that in the small circle of those who knew him well, he was really such as he is there described; but if we are to judge from his Remains, it is a question whether this gentleness and considerateness reached far beyond the close company of those who were struggling for the religious cause which he had at heart.
‘… The Journal begins in the year 1826, when he was elected to the Oriel Fellowship. The second line is as follows: “Feb. 1, Oxford. All my associations here are bad, and I can hardly shake them off.” He determines to wrestle with his conceit, affectation, wandering of mind, lassitude…. Then follows an allusion which Newman, devoted by a kind of inward vow to celibacy since the age of sixteen, would well understand: “The consciousness of having capacities for happiness, with no objects to gratify them, seems to grow upon me. Lord, have mercy upon me.” This is the mood which he elsewhere describes to Newman as “sawney”: natural at times to those who are under a kind of vow to serve a cause, without domestic distractions or encumbrances.
‘The problem exhibited in these pages … is the old but never antiquated one: “How to keep the human machine in order.” Roughly speaking, we may say that there are two solutions. Men can be delivered from the beast within them by love, or by fear. The second may be called no deliverance at all by those who have a keen appreciation of the first, but it is deliverance, of a sort; and Froude’s Journal shows us a man of immense strength of will: of acute intellect, and of high imaginations; restless and masterful almost to the extent of tyrannical malignity, in his youth; conscious of grievous lapses in the past and of something (he hardly knew what) terribly wanting in his present moral condition; now at last goaded by bitter remorse, and urged by the pressure of new responsibilities, to reform his corrupt nature, and attempting to work out his salvation through an asceticism dictated, at first, by something like terror…. In 1826, Froude had sent a letter to Keble, curiously tingeing with his own gloom the language of the Psalmist, who prays to be hidden under the “shadow of the wings” of the divine Protection: he speaks of God as a Being whose presence is mainly manifested by control, and by a holy “terror”:
‘“Lord of the World, Almighty King!
Thy shadow resteth over all,
Or where the Saints thy terrors sing,
Or where the waves obey Thy call.”
‘… Froude’s religion, then, so far as it depended upon his conception of God, was a religion of almost unmixed fear. So far as it was of something better, it was purified, first, by a love and admiration for “the holy men of old,” such as the founders of the Oxford Colleges, in whose steps, after his election to his Fellowship, he aspired to tread; secondly, by his affection for Keble, for whom, in the prayer written at the same time, he thanks God, as one who had convinced him of the error of his ways, and in whose presence he tasted happiness; but above all, by his devotion to his mother, in whose recollection he found a consciousness of that blessedness which he had been taught to look for in the presence of Saints and Angels. These were feelings which were better than his religion, and which, if they could have developed and grown with the
latter, might have delivered it from fears, and have converted it into a source of peace as well as of activity: but whether from the irremediable taint of the past, or owing to influence that proved too strong for Keble’s, this growth did not go on.