‘Thou who hast given me eyes to see
And love this sight so fair,
Give me a heart to find out Thee,
And read Thee everywhere!’[75]
Certainly, Newman was never so tormented by his affection for music, or for anything else in the same class, as he was by the glamour of out-of-doors at Taormina, and the homelier charms of ‘Devon in her most gentle dimplement.’ Spiritual matters apart, one does not perceive what else could have inwrought him more effectually with the very fibres of Hurrell’s being, than his felt infatuation for the Dartington he visited but twice in his busy life. They shared the same passion, again, for Rome. The spirit of place can always create a final test between any two cultivated minds. To differ in kind or even in degree of response to it, is indeed to differ.
The principle which lay at the bottom of Newman’s renunciation was one, however, which was equally familiar to his friend. It may not always have involved, for him, the need of so determined a depreciation of the loveliness of rural England, as too keen a reminder of
‘Isaac’s pure blessings, and a verdant home,’
things forsworn by both young men in that ‘highly religious and romantic idea of celibacy’ which they had adopted for good and all, between them, without Keble’s help. As Newman says of S. Basil and S. Gregory, retiring together from the world: ‘somehow, the idea of marrying-and-taking-Orders, or taking-Orders-and-marrying; building or improving their parsonages, and showing forth the charities, the humanities, and the gentilities of a family man, did not suggest itself to their minds.’ Nothing is plainer than that the arch-celibate was Froude, and not Newman: perhaps it would be quite exact to say that the idea, in Froude, as in Pascal, was wholly endemic, and in Newman only so in part. We are told in the Apologia how the idea was strengthened and supernaturalised by contact with Froude. Hurrell sometimes deplored with unmixed simplicity the social disqualifications
of a total abstainer. ‘I wrote S[am] a letter the other day,’ he tells Robert Wilberforce, when the future Bishop had plighted his troth. ‘I suspect it was of the dullest! for I have no knack at writing to people in his interesting situation.’ In all this lack of sympathy with ordinary conduct and motive, there was no touch whatever of conscious oddity, but only of childishness. Newman, by far the tenderer heart of the two, never shared it.
Newman has left us an account of the origin of the sermon he mentions, which was preached in the old Church on July 16, 1831: that on the Pool of Bethesda, ‘Scripture a Record of Human Sorrow,’ in the first volume of Parochial Sermons. ‘Twice in my life,’ he writes about 1862, ‘have I, when worn with work, gone to a friend’s house to recruit…. When I was down at Dartington for the first time, in July, 1831, I saw a number of young girls collected together, blooming, and in high spirits; “and all went merry as a marriage-bell.” And I sadly thought what changes were in store, what hard trial and discipline was inevitable. I cannot trace their history; but Phillis and Mary Froude married, and died quickly. Hurrell died. One, if not two, of the young Champernownes died.[76] My sermon was dictated by the sight and the foreboding. At that very visit [from Oxford] Hurrell caught, and had his influenza upon him, which led him by slow steps to the grave. He caught it sleeping, as I did, on deck, going down the Channel from Southampton to Torbay. Influenza was about, the forerunner of the cholera. It went through the Parsonage at Dartington. Every morning the sharp merry party, who somewhat quizzed me, had hopes it would seize upon me. But I escaped; and sang my warning from the pulpit…. I am a bird of ill omen.’[77]