‘I have read the Lives of Wycliffe and Peacocke[81] in Strype; but must read much more about them and their times, before I shall understand them. At present I admire Peacocke and dislike Wycliffe. A great deterioration seems to have taken place in the spirit of the Church after Edward III.’s death. I hope I shall have perseverance to work up the history of the period. If I do this, I shall not think myself bound to take a curacy.’
It is a thousand pities that we can never have on our shelves the Froude of historical verity, to counterbalance the Froude of historical romance. Hurrell, so far as he got, was certainly all for ‘the ideas underlying history, and their organic connection,’ and was but poorly adapted for ‘the insertion of his own ideas into history … the professing to find in history what he had in reality put there.’[82] Is it not clear that such a fault may spring not from perverseness, but from the too pictorial eye? This the elder brother lacked, as likewise the other disadvantage of a magical prose style. That perturbing possession, the luckiest asset of the essayist, seems to delight in playing tricks on historians, for in the past, at least, the dullest have been the safest.
As one who understood the dangers of style, Hurrell chides Newman for the hair-splitting preliminary method to which he was treating The Arians. ‘If you go on fiddling with your Introduction, you will most certainly get into a scrape at last!’ And then: ‘I have for the last five days been reading Marsh’s Michaelis, which I took up by accident, and have been much interested by it. I see that old Wilberforce[83] owes to it much of the profundity which I have before now been floored and overawed by. It has put many things into my head that I never thought of before.’
The first unmistakable symptoms of Hurrell’s chronic illness had developed by the January of 1832. ‘I don’t think he takes care of himself,’ Keble says anxiously, in a letter to Newman, shortly after his election to the Professorship of Poetry. And Hurrell himself had confessed to Newman, as it were, ‘how ill all’s here about my heart: but ’tis no matter.’ Hence the reply from Oxford, on the 13th.
‘Your letter was most welcome, sad as it was; I call it certainly, from beginning to end, a sad letter, and yet somehow sad letters, in their place, and in God’s order, are as acceptable as merry ones. What I write for now is to know why you will not trust your brother to come up by himself? Let him go into your rooms; and do stop in Devonshire a good while, in which time you not only may get well, but may convince all about you that you are well—an object not to be neglected…. Your advice about my work is not only sage, but good, yet not quite applicable, though I shall bear it in mind. Recollect, my good Sir, that every thought I think is thought, and every word I write is writing, and that thought tells and that words take room, and that though I make the Introduction the whole book, yet a book it is; and though this will not steer clear of the egg blunder, to have an Introduction leading to nothing, yet it is not losing time. Already I have made forty-one pages out of eighteen.’ The correspondence between the two, then as ever, gives diverting glimpses of the mordant and ineffably frank critic away from Oxford, and the divine and man-of-letters in residence who continually sought, ‘in the beaten way of friendship,’ the advice he did not invariably need. Thus he sends a rough draft to Dartington of ‘a sermon against Sir James Mackintosh, Knight,’[84] expecting strictures, ‘should you discern anything heretical,’ and calling special attention to the argument: ‘therefore be sharp.’ The young censor was pleased to approve ‘on the whole,’ though with minor reservations. ‘As to your Annotationes in Neandri[85] Homiliam,’ Newman writes cheerfully, ‘to be sure I have treated them with what is now called true respect; for
I have spoken highly of them, and done everything but use them! I did not have them till Saturday morning; so having your authority for what I wanted (i.e., the soundness of the main position and the τόποι), I became indolent.’
Meanwhile, towards the end of January, Hurrell sends an asked-for bulletin of his physical progress, and follows it up with several others, in all of which he makes it unconsciously plain that he has more pressing interests than his own sinking barometry. His mind was going forward by leaps and bounds towards convictions then unguessed-at, now quite general, about ‘the Tudor Settlement.’
To the Rev. J. H. Newman, Jan. 29, 1832.
‘I promised I would give an account of myself, if I did not appear in person by the beginning of Term. I am getting rid, though by slow degrees, of all vestiges of cough, and, what is more to the purpose, my father is quite easy about me, which he was far from being when I first came home…. I have been very idle lately, but have taken up Strype now and then, and have not increased my admiration of the Reformers. One must not speak lightly of a martyr, so I do not allow my opinions to pass the verge of scepticism. But I really do feel sceptical whether Latimer was not something in the Bulteel[86] line; whether the Catholicism of their formulæ was not a concession to the feelings of the nation, with whom Puritanism had not yet become popular, and who could scarcely bear the alterations which were made; and whether the progress of things in Edward the Sixth’s minority may not be considered as the jobbing of a faction. I will do myself the justice to say that those doubts give me pain, and that I hope more reading will in some degree dispel them. As far as I have gone, too,
I think better than I was prepared to do of Bonner and Gardiner. Certainly the ἦθος of the Reformation is to me a terra incognita, and I do not think that it has been explored by anyone that I have heard talk about it.’