his manuscripts. Besides, he was fifty-seven, and naturally preferred an evening siesta on Troy Wall to any chances of war. Newman, looking back, wrote feelingly of him in April, 1842: ‘It is surely mysterious, considering what the world is, how it needs improvement, and, moreover, that this life is the appropriate time for action, or, what is emphatically called in Scripture, work, that they who seem gifted for the definite purpose of influencing and edifying their brethren, should be allowed to do so much less than might be expected…. Left to ourselves, we are apt to grudge that the powers of such a mind as [Mr. Davison’s] have not had full range in his age and country, and that a promise of such high benefits should, owing to circumstances beyond man’s control, have been but partially accomplished.’[192]
Hurrell’s playful use of the word ‘conspiracy’ to indicate the Movement, will be noted. It was habitual with him from the first. It irritated many excellent persons at the time; it irritated Dean Burgon fifty years later. In the chapter devoted to Mr. Rose, in Twelve Good Men, Dean Burgon administers to Hurrell an oblique rebuke. ‘Froude, a man of splendid abilities and real genius, but sadly wanting in judgment and of fatal indiscretion, rendered the good cause the greatest disservice in his power by speaking of the Hadleigh Conference in a letter to a friend as “the conspiracy”: which letter was soon afterward published.’ Yet the word was really employed, and it may have been even invented, a fortnight before the meeting at Hadleigh, by none other than Mr. William Palmer! ‘Now I hope you will be able to join in this little plan and conspiracy,’ he wrote to Mr. Perceval on July 10, 1833. A more recent, and an equally historic use of the word (not ironic in the least, this time), is Archbishop Tait’s, in condemning the publications of the Society of the Holy Cross:[193] ‘to counteract what I feel obliged to call a CONSPIRACY within our own body against the doctrine, the discipline and the practice of our Reformed Church.’
In this later Newman correspondence, as Miss Mozley the Editor of it remarks, ‘R. H. Froude appears more as critic than originator or author. His more intimate friends required his criticism, and rested on his judgment. In his own person, this faculty acted mainly as a check. He often speaks of trial and failure in his own attempts to bring out what was working in his mind; as, for instance: “I have tried to write a criticism on the Apollo [Belvedere], but cannot bring out my meaning, which is abstruse and metaphysico-poetical. I always get bombastic, and am forced to scratch out.” His critical faculty was too masterful to be practised upon himself, but when exercised for the benefit of friends to whom he looked up, he could give free license to a pungent pen, and yet leave the modern reader to understand how anxious those friends might well be to secure his comments, as long as they were attainable. Keble, in his own simple way, sends his papers to his old pupil to be overlooked by him; and Mr. Newman was more at ease with Froude’s imprimatur. Thus, he sends him draughts of papers; for example, “No. 2, Keble’s, No. 1, mine”; with the order: “criticise the whole very accurately in matter and style, and send it back by return of post.” Of course the state of Froude’s health made criticism more possible than authorship, but, also, different intellectual powers and functions are called into play.’[194]
It is certainly noticeable enough, in all the intercourse of these years, between Keble, Newman and Froude, how the ordinary business of the University is completely ignored. It is like necromancy to remember that men were really still hastily reading the Ethics by the fire, and emptying bottles, and, with their pipes, racing off to Shotover, through the white salve-like mud, for a constitutional. ‘The Tracts,’ says Mr. Mark Pattison sadly, ‘desolated Oxford life, and suspended, for an indefinite period, all science and humane letters, and the first strivings for intellectual freedom which had moved in the bosom of Oriel.’ Such æsthetic havoc was never caused in a city, unless under Savonarola, when all the wonted social graces went to the dust-bin, and works of art made acceptable fagots, and Christ was hailed, without legal precedent, King of Florence.
On November 18, 1834, Newman resumes, in reference to complaints from Hurrell, ‘suffering under intolerable delays incident to distant correspondence in those days’:
‘I am so angry with you, I cannot say! Have we not sent you a full box? That up to Sept. 29 you had not received it, is as hard for us to bear as for you. Why will you not have a little faith?… I suppose all this is for your good. You want a taming in various ways. It is to wean you from your over-interest in politics … so you see you are being taught to unlearn the world, the ecclesiastical as well as the worldly world. A strange thought came across me about you some six weeks ago, when I saw a letter from Tucker[195] of C. C. C., giving an account of his prospects in India. He is not at all an imaginative or enthusiastic man; but really, a religious spirit has sprung up among military men at our stations, and having no angel to direct them to Joppa, they have turned Evangelicals. The various sects there have a leaning towards the Church, and the men of colour are forming centres of operation. My thought was, if your health would not let you come home, you ought to be a Bishop in India….’
What Newman did not confess to his friend was that he had dreamed of their fates as one: he, too, would be a Bishop in India. To his sister Jemima he had written from Tunbridge Wells on October 2: ‘I have been much struck with a most sensible account of the state of India just received here from Mr. Tucker, in almost every word of which (it is full of practical and doctrinal matters), I agree. Though he is a Calvinist, I do believe our differences would, in India, almost be a matter of a few words. He gives a most exciting account of his field of labour, without intending it. At this moment, could I choose, and have all circumstances and providences at my disposal, I would go as an independent Bishop to his part of India, and found a Church there. This, you will say, is an ambitious flight. I am sure some one ought to be sent as Bishop; but the State, the State! we are crippled. I can fancy the day coming when India might be a refuge, if our game was up here.’ Froude agreed. He
says elsewhere: ‘The present Church system is an incubus upon the country. It spreads its arms in all directions, claiming the whole surface of the earth for its own, and refusing a place to any subsidiary system to spring upon. Would that the waters would throw up some Acheloides, where some new Bishop might erect a See beyond the blighting influence of our upas trees.[196] Yet I suppose that before he could step in, an Act of Parliament would put its paw upon the κρησφύγετον, and include it within the limits of some adjacent diocese. I admire [Mozley’s?] hit about our being united to the State as Israel was to Egypt.’
To return to the letter sent to Barbados on November 18. Around this half-quaint suggestion of young mitred revolutionaries in unhampered Sees, Newman’s love and genius break forth together.
‘It quite amused[197] me for awhile, and made me think how many posts there are in His Kingdom, how many offices, who says to one “Do this, and he doeth it,” etc. It is quite impossible that some way or other you are not destined to be the instrument of God’s purposes. Though I saw the earth cleave and you fall in, or Heaven open, and a chariot appear, I should say just the same. God has ten thousand posts of service. You might be of use in the central elemental fire; you might be of use in the depths of the sea.’