So on Nov. 4; and on the 14th, some affectionate abuse: ‘Ἀγείων ὄχ’ ἄριστε. Have you not been a spoon to allow the Petition to have nothing about “the system presupposed in the Rubrics,” and to leave out your key-words “completing” and “extra-ecclesiastical”? The last word I would introduce thus: “They take this opportunity of expressing their conviction that the powers with which God has entrusted the spiritual
rulers of the Church are sufficient for its spiritual government, and that all extra-ecclesiastical interference in its spiritual concerns is both unnecessary and presumptuous.” My father is annoyed at its being such milk-and-water. Do make a row about it. I see already that I shall find in your book[161] sentences which I am sure stood, when they were first written, after some other sentence than that which affects to introduce them now, and seem conscious of being in the neighbourhood of a stranger: “buts” where there should have been “ands,” etc., of which I shall make a catalogue, and pay you off for all the workings you have given me before now. However, it looks very pretty; and when I puff it, and people turn over the pages, they have a very imposing effect. People say, “Ah! I dare say, a very interesting work.”… Love and luck to all the Apostolicals. Why do you say “yours usque ad cineres”? If I am wrecked on Ash-Wednesday you will be the cause of it….’
‘My father’ was usually the bridle, not the spur, to his young high-pacing ‘Apostolical.’ ‘I have often told Hurrell he was going too fast,’ the Archdeacon writes a little later to Newman. ‘He alarms people by his speculations, and is incautious in talking to persons who cannot enter into the purity of his motives. I dare say he laid himself completely open on his visit to Archdeacon Lyall.’[162]
Hurrell could not but enjoy his too quickly-ended months at the Parsonage. However, he was never, even in full health, very social, because having tested society, he feared the effect of it upon himself. Much of it, he thought, would wake in him pettiness of various sorts, and lead him to be ‘flash and insincere,’ and tempt him also to value those who thought him clever and charming, and to form ‘wild schemes about becoming popular.’ But he ‘made himself agreeable,’ as it is called, to please his father. He even rode to hounds, though on principle he objected to hunting; and he put up generally,
without visible grimaces, with the customs, viands, amusements and conversation of his class. He hated eccentricity, most of all in himself, and very likely from his native fastidiousness, as well as from the supernatural motive. Conscious idiosyncrasy is so cheap! a deliberate escape from the vulgar being essential vulgarity. ‘Any eccentric pleasure we have a fancy for, particularly if we think it a proof of genius,’ had small chances with Froude. His very difficult ideal, borrowed unconsciously from S. Benedict and S. Bernard, was moderation, the mean of things, the spiritual adornment of the ordinary. He would attain to the ‘humdrum.’ ‘Whatever is disagreeable,’ he formulates to himself at twenty-three, ‘whatever, at the same time, makes us like other people, is an opportunity for self-denial,’ and through self-denial he meant, if possible, to remodel Hurrell Froude. That was his fine art and his religion. To ‘make a few saints,’ as he told his friend Rickards, was the way for each man to build up Christianity again for all.
‘I have heard from dear Froude, who is certainly downcast,’ Newman confides to Keble towards the middle of this month of November, in an undated letter. ‘He left home to-day, and was to be with Canon Rogers till Saturday, when the packet sails. He is full of disappointment at the address; but then, say I, it effects two things: first, it addresses the Archbishop as the head of the anti-innovators, and it addresses him, and not the King or Parliament: which has a doctrinal meaning, and is a good precedent. However, Froude calls me names, and bids me stir you up into a fury, if I can.’
Newman’s thoughts continued to play pensively about his friend ‘ordered South.’ He reverts to him, without naming him, on the 22nd, when he writes to Mr. Rickards, in reply to a letter of censure: ‘Nor can I wish anyone a happier lot than to be himself unfortunate, yet to urge on a triumphant cause: like Laud and Ken in their day, who left a name which after ages censure or pity, but whose works do follow them. Let it be the lot of those I love to live in the heart of one or two in each succeeding generation, or to be altogether forgotten, while they have helped forward the Truth.’
Hurrell put to sea, again from Falmouth, this time without
Newman or his father. ‘Blowing a full gale … and I to start to-morrow morning!’ And, by way of hygienic consolation: ‘A sailing vessel is as nearly the cleanest thing in the world as a steamer is the dirtiest.’
Mr. Keble, who may have chiefly influenced his decision to go to Barbados, would be intimately interested, for a dozen reasons, to hear of Hurrell’s welfare in a field where he himself might once have found his lifework. As long before as 1824, he had been offered the Archdeaconry of Barbados (worth £2000 a year), and declined his only ecclesiastical dignity, as he declined or accepted pretty much everything, for a pious domestic reason: his father was too infirm.