‘Perceval,’[148] Hurrell writes, ‘is a very delightful fellow in ἦθος, a regular thorough-going Apostolical; but I think Keble should warn him about putting himself in the way of excitement. Some of the things he says and does make me feel rather odd. I am sure he should be set to work on something dull that would keep his thoughts from present interests. I never saw a fellow who seemed more entirely absorbed, heart and soul, in the cause of the Church, and without the remotest approach to self-sufficiency.’
‘Both Rose and Palmer,’ wrote Newman on the other hand, after he had heard from those allies, ‘think Froude and Perceval very deficient in learning, and therefore rash.’ Considerable time had been spent in revising the Churchman’s Manual, by Mr. Perceval. Books, committees, bylaws, and such tangible machinery, seemed important to Mr. Rose, who was intelligently planning a great local campaign, to improve the position of his disadvantaged party. Froude, ahead of Newman or Keble, seems from the first to have outrun anything of this sort. To these three, the very existence of religion, whether expressed in the public worship and formularies, or in the conduct and belief of Englishmen, was at stake. He alone lacked a just conception of minor needs, what was the nature of these, or how far they should be satisfied: he felt only the need of supernaturalism in a society again grown godless since Wesley’s time. He did not, therefore, march forward in order, but by a long leap threw himself half-blindly upon ‘incomprehensibles, and thoughts of things which thoughts do but tenderly touch.’ Certainly, cohesion, as not being the note of the Church of England, was not the note of the conference at Hadleigh. Froude especially, with his terrible consistency, his capacity for getting all there was to get out of the mere innuendoes and half-lights of circumstance, his passion (to employ a serviceable
expression of Locke’s) ‘to bottom everything,’ must have obstructed unconsciously the deliberations of a great liturgiologist and a true ecclesiastical statesman, both born to move with caution, and to end in the deltas of compromise or sheer weariness. Froude felt then, as afterwards, what he calls his ‘stigma of ultraism’; what really worried him more than that, was the slow foot of reform, toiling behind his own. He wished nothing less, as we have seen, than a ‘blow-up,’ and reconstruction. His poetic foresight made him implacable; consequences, not processes, were in his foreground. He had the individual vision. Galahad-like, he saw, while wise men were spurring up and down upon the quest. Mr. Palmer’s adjectives were well chosen: Hurrell was not ‘learned,’[149] and he was ‘rash.’ But it is also true that learning will call anything rashness which travels towards a given goal by a shorter route than its own. An extremely fine definition of Froude’s might be wrested from its context, and applied to his discomfiture at Hadleigh, and his position in general. ‘The understanding,’ he says, ‘pursues something which it does not know by means which it does; while genius endeavours to effect what it has a previous idea of, by means of which it has to ascertain the use.’[150] The ‘bold rider across country’ would perhaps look unnatural as a mounted collaborator in a procession. It is to be feared that the Rev. Richard Hurrell Froude was a difficult factor, a Montagnard, in the debates of nascent Anglo-Catholicism.
In the strife of ideas, during the summer, there were not lacking pastoral interludes.
To the Rev. John Keble, August, 1833.
‘… You can’t think what delicious weather we have had here [at Dartington]. It is like May back again…. I saw the other night what I can hardly convince myself not to have
been a supernatural fire. I and one of the [Champernownes?] and two other boys, and a labourer, were coming up the river in a boat when it was dark, and we all saw as distinctly as possible under a tree, close by the water, what we took for a wood fire: hot embers, which did not blaze, but gave off sparks; the boys thought a wasp’s nest must have been burned out there, and landed to stir up the embers and examine; in landing we lost sight of the fire for a minute behind the bush, and in going to the place found nothing; no smell of burning, no ashes, no marks of fire on the leaves or grass: in fact, there certainly could not have been any fire there! The labourer was really frightened, and I cannot account for my not having been so; but somehow the thing has made an impression on my imagination. I never dream of it, nor think of it in the dark, or anything: yet I am absolutely certain of the facts, and wholly unable to account for them. Sometimes I look on it as a half-miracle, of which the counterpart is in store for us. The return of rough times may revive energies that have been dormant “in the land of peace wherein we trusted.” Is this nonsense?… I am very well, all but my cough, which is exactly what it was, and is likely to continue….’
This touch of mysticism, gracing a phosphoric phenomenon, reminds one keenly of what Newman thought and expressed about the whole Movement, if not of the men who seem to us now ‘of unearthly radiance.’ ‘No mortal incendiary,’ he said, in one of his splendid phrases already cited, ‘is at work.’
To Newman, during this August, Hurrell pours out his mind, with his usual forecasting irrelevance.
‘Aug. 22.—I have written a sermon on the duty of contemplating a time when the law of the land shall cease to be the law of the Church; and I hope to get it preached by a friend of mine at the Bishop’s Visitation. My father thinks it most temperate and satisfactory.[151] If I had strong lungs I should go about the country, holding forth.