‘… What a wonderful drama is going on,’ Mr. Bowden[144] writes, ‘if we could but trace it as a whole, and know the multiplied bearings of each varied scene upon our nation and our Church! However, we can see our own parts, and that must for the present suffice us.’ Newman confessed the same wide vision, writing later in that year to Froude: ‘I do verily believe a spirit is abroad at present, and we are but blind tools, not knowing whither we are going. I mean, a flame seems arising in so many places as to show no mortal incendiary is at work, though this man or that may have more influence in shaping the course, or modifying the nature of the flame.’
‘This man or that’ was not lacking, and there was work for him: work for ‘the bright, vivacious, and singularly lovable figures with whom the eyes of Oriel men were then familiarised.’[145] Mr. Charles Kingsley thought them, as it would appear, not ‘virile’: a necessary opinion for any ‘virile’ Kingsley to hold. So much depends upon definition! It was a passing conversational remark made by Hurrell Froude concerning the great Churchmen of the Middle Ages, that their portraits had ‘a curious expression as of neither man nor woman, a kind of feminine sternness.’ A very similar remark was made at almost the same moment by the prince of English metaphysical critics. Of the coincidence Froude was
not aware; but his Editors, in a footnote, fail not to refer to it. ‘[Wordsworth’s] face is almost the only exception I know,’ said Coleridge, ‘to the observation that something feminine, (not effeminate, mind!) is discoverable in the countenances of all men of genius.’[146] This angelic or epicene aspect is, indicatively, the most terrible force in the world. It is certain that the Tractarians lacked the girth, the gait, the entire and triumphant visibility of John Bull going out with his gun. They lived with abstract ideas, and came to look like them.
‘Mr. Froude, if anyone,’ wrote Newman anonymously in The British Critic of April, 1839, ‘gained his views from his own mind.’ But indeed, as is implied, none of us ever gain our views from our own minds: views coming with an underived spontaneous air are born of a man’s superior attentiveness to the working Mind of things. Hurrell, pacing Trinity Gardens, his hand on Williams’ shoulder, with the off-hand edict: ‘Isaac, we must make a Row in the world!’ recalls to us another agitator of whimsical disinterestedness, Camille Desmoulins. Or he is speaking a too free translation of the message of high and urgent poetry which La Pucelle once poured into the ears of Durand Laxart at Domremy. (It is always of French genius that his genius reminds us.) In all the polemics of the day his voice is the Æolian one, fitful and laconic, unexpected and alarming, yet oddly sweet. He is very busy chastising and correcting himself; but that other strife going on is far more interesting: he is a soldier of fortune, he must fight, he must interfere. When the outriders of the whole sea of returning Catholicism charge at first singly and silently, then with uproar, along the levels of the sleeping Protestant kingdom, the Hurrell Froude who loved duty and hard work, and abhorred display and conspicuosity, rises,
despite himself, a little dominant, a little spectacular. He is inevitably marked, to ear and eye, as the legendary ninth wave, the foamiest green breaker of the line, ever re-forming and breaking, so long as he is visible, brighter, taller, and farther in-shore than the rest. With the year 1833 he comes into public play, and vanishes almost as soon.
To J. F. Christie, Esq., July 23, 1833.
‘… By the bye, I write [“Newman”] as if you knew he was returned. He came back last Tuesday week.[147]… He has been delayed by what one can now look back on without uneasiness, as he has not suffered eventually; but the fact is, he has had a very narrow escape of his life, owing to a severe epidemic fever which he caught in Sicily, and in a place where he could get access to no kind of medical aid. At the place where he was seized he was laid up for three days, unable to move, and at the end of that time strangely took it into his head that he was well. In consequence, he set out on his journey, and after having gone about seven miles, was carried almost lifeless into a cabin, just at a moment when, by a strange accident, a medical man was passing. This person relieved him sufficiently to enable his attendants to remove him to a town some way farther on, in which a doctor resided: Enna, or Castro Giovanni. Here he was eleven days before the crisis of his fever arrived, and it was long thought he had no chance of recovering…. He was afterwards delayed at Palermo by the stupid vessel, which did not sail for three weeks after it had promised, and thus lost all the advantages of a good wind. However, he is back safe at last, and really looks well, though his hair is all coming off, and his strength is not yet thoroughly restored. Do something for the [Magazine] and the Lyra. Wherefore stand ye all the day idle? I am going to [Hadleigh] in an hour or two to concert measures.’
Hadleigh Rectory, in Suffolk, was the scene of the little four-days’ congress called together on July 25, by the independent Cambridge forerunner of the Movement, the Rev.
Hugh James Rose; ‘the most eminent person of his generation as a divine,’ Dean Church calls him. It is interesting to recall that the young Richard Chevenix Trench was Curate of Hadleigh at this time. Neither Keble nor Newman was able to attend. It was the first rally of those willing to fight ‘for the doctrine of Apostolical Succession, and for the integrity of the Prayer-Book’; and means were about to be taken to found a powerful Association of Friends of the Church. Froude, impatient of talk and of preliminaries, distrustful of the need of organisations, cherishing a preference such as Newman was to express long after, writing to Pusey, for ‘generating an ἦθος rather than a system,’ went down from Oxford somewhat grumblingly. The subjects brought forward at Hadleigh were chiefly disciplinary. The complicated relationship of Church and State, the call for Lay Synods, and the ever-burning topic of the manner of the Appointment of Bishops in the Church of England, seem to have engrossed the four men present, Froude then as always, in his extreme abstract way, pushing on to conclusions the others were not ripe for. He found Rose, disinterested as he knew him to be, ‘conservative’; he lamented that Rose and Palmer of Worcester clung to what he calls the ‘gentleman heresy,’ to ‘the old prejudices about the expediency of having the clergy gentlemen, i.e., fit to mix in good society; and about “prizes” to tempt men into the Church, and the whole train of stuff…. What I have learned,’ he adds, generalising, ‘is not to be sanguine, not to expect to bring other people into my views in a shorter time than I have been in coming to them myself.’ And again to Newman, with candour: ‘You seem to think I am floored, and in fact, I partly am so; at least the predominant impression left on my mind is that I am a poor hand at entering into other people’s thoughts.’ There follows a description of a fellow-guest, which must have made both Newman and Keble smile, as being possibly applicable to another and more fiery spirit who, as Mr. Rose their host said afterwards, with his delicate Gallic justness of criticism, was ‘not afraid of inferences.’ It can hardly be proved that Hurrell appreciated Mr. Rose, who was a sort of precursor in Pusey’s spiritual dynasty, as Hurrell himself was in Newman’s. But he overrated
Mr. Perceval. Newman was given to understand, at the close of the session, on the thirtieth day of July, some of Mr. Perceval’s excellences and moral dangers.