LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY (continued 3)

To the Rev. John Keble, Dec. 12, 1832.

‘We started from Falmouth about eleven, on the 8th. “Jamque tibi e mediis pelagi mirabilis undis,” about sixty-eight miles to the south of Oporto, and thirty from the shore: the sea a perfect sheet of glass, showing the reflection of the stars, particularly Sirius, which is most splendid. The Pole-star sinking perceptibly: I am sure the Great Bear’s tail must have had a dip as he went his rounds. It has been very calm all day, and we have gone seven-and-a-half miles an hour: when the sun came to the meridian our latitude was 41° 36´. In the daytime the sea was a pale blue colour; I will not attempt to describe the sunset. Yesterday was very interesting: when we came on deck in the morning we could just make out Cape Ortegal to the south-east of us, at a distance of about forty miles. It was very pale, and scarcely to be distinguished from the sky, but rose very high above the horizon, and, as we neared it, seemed to be quite precipitous; we did not get within thirty miles, so that it has left on my mind only the ghost of an impression: but it is a grand ghost. We saw where Corunna lay, and must have been within twenty miles of some part of the coast between that and Cape Finisterre, which we doubled in the dark. All of it was of a very singular character, but insignificant compared with Cape 80 Ortegal. All that day the wind was fresh from the east, and the sea very wild and grand, of a deep black-blue, covered with breakers: we went rather more than eight miles an hour, though the ship tossed amazingly. This was the first day that we had had a clear sky, and marvellous it was: a strong east wind in the middle of December, and the climate like May! our latitude at noon 44° 3´. There is something in the colour of the sea out of soundings, which is very striking to one who has only seen the shallow water that surrounds England. There is not a tint of green in it; to-day it has been a pale blue, like a beautiful lake; yesterday it was a black-purple. We find that this steamer is to touch at Cadiz and Algiers, and to spend two days at Gibraltar, in the way to Malta, and that afterwards it is to spend four days between Zante, Cephalonia, Ithaca, and Leucadia, touching at Patras (olim Patræ), then to spend six at Corfu, and afterwards return to Malta the same way; so we shall certainly extend our trip. The commander and the midshipmen are a very gentlemanlike set, and we the only passengers: so it is most luxurious…. And now I am stupid; if there is nothing more to tell to-morrow, I shall fill up the blank between Falmouth and Cape Ortegal, which may be regarded as our Dark Age.

‘Thursday evening.—The day has again been beautiful, and quite summery, with scarcely a cloud. When the sun rose we were off the Berlingas (some small sharp rocks, which you will see in a map), and from thence we kept near shore all the way to the rock of Lisbon. The greater part of the way we could not have been much more than a mile off. The sea has been its old green to-day; the coast all along very peculiar, not very high, but wild, and strongly marked; the rock precipitous, and deeply indented, and every promontory relieved by a thin mist of spray from the breakers of the Atlantic. We watched them curl in upon the shore, each rising in a green transparent line as it came to its turn to break, and then turning partially into a delicate mist where it met the more prominent rocks, till at last the whole line seemed to burst, and another rose behind its aërified relics, and put me in mind of Ἀφροδίτη…. When we passed Mafra we saw the cupolas of the palace of Cintra, and, through an opening of the hills, made out the greater part of 81 it through glasses. The situation is strange for so magnificent a building. And now we had a clear view of the ridge on which the Duke took up his position on the northern side of the lines of Torres Vedras. I will not attempt to describe it, except that it is grand to a degree, rising in spire-like shaggy tops, and cut by deep ravines, the sides of which were fringed with what we were told were cork trees. As we got near we saw many villas about half-way up, and on the two highest points were two convents. The Roman Catholics are queer fellows: they are determined to be admired and not envied; we, unhappily λαχόντες ἀντιοστρόφον τυχὴν, are envied and not admired. We doubled Capo Roca at three, and then went down to dinner. The mouth of the Tagus was too distant to make anything out, except the masts of the English ships, who are there to bully Don Miguel.[95] On Friday we got up at seven to see Cape St. Vincent, and passed close under it. The light on it was very fine, and the form of the rocks bold; but yesterday had spoiled us. The day is fine, cloudless, and windless—almost too hot…. Just now we saw a fishing-boat, and made towards it. The people were in a great fright, and pulled with all their might, while they thought there was a chance to get away; at last they gave up in despair. When we came up we found they had no fish: there were four of them, very dark complexions, and, as well as I could judge, Moorish features: the boat, sails, and all, perfectly un-English (a word which has ceased to be vituperative in my vocabulary). The coast which we are now passing is too distant to be very interesting, but a grey ridge of mountains rises behind, out of a dead flat, reminding one that we are off a strange land. The lateen sails, too, of which many are about, and two turtles which we almost ran over just now, and a shark’s fin just showing above water, all tell the same story…. On Sunday morning it was foggy and disagreeable, and we were in the dreaded Bay of Biscay: however, I was still well enough to do Service on board…. All the ship’s crew attended except the steersman and the stokers, i.e., the fellows that feed the fire of the engine. The commander had them all upon deck 82 in the morning and gave them a practical discourse on good behaviour, which amused [Newman] and me by being so much to the point: he is a nice fellow, I think. After Service I was fairly done up, and lost my character…. Next day we were in the middle of the Bay: still cloudy and damp, and a long gentle swell: but we had served our time, and were all alive and merry…. In the evening we found that the commander was a musician and a painter; he had a very elegant miniature of his wife that he had finished up for his amusement at sea; and he sang us several songs, accompanying himself on the Spanish guitar, in very good taste, as [Newman] said: we the ἀμύητοι liked it much; and we have not had any qualms since: and now I have got on to where the rest begins. We live splendidly on board, have a cabin each, capital dinners, and good company: the three midshipmen, gentlemanlike obliging fellows as can be: yesterday they went out of the vessel’s course, to show us the coast to advantage.

‘Saturday.—On getting up, found ourselves in Cadiz harbour; the convent bells put us in mind that we are in a religious country: it sounded just like Oxford before Morning Chapel. We found ourselves in quarantine and unable to land. The Consul’s boat came off for the letters, rowed by eight Spaniards, such odd-looking fellows! they row without rullocks, having a strap and a τροπωτήρ…. We saw the unfinished Cathedral very distinctly through a glass: it had not at all an ecclesiastical look, but was large and picturesque. It will never be finished now, I suppose, as the day of apostasy seems at hand in Spain.

‘Sunday morning.—Here we are at Gibraltar.’

Newman’s letters, enthusiastic over sky and sea, are full of the horrors of the ship (which he says was not properly cleaned before being sent down from Woolwich), and of the little stuffy rooms which are enough to kill a valetudinarian; but valetudinarian Hurrell seems to have enjoyed it all.

To the Rev. Isaac Williams, Dec. 27, 1832.

‘… We were at Gibraltar only forty-eight hours, and of that we were in quarantine forty. The remaining eight hours, 83 however, we turned to account, under the auspices of the Colonel of engineers, who was kind enough to lend us horses, and go over everything with us: unfortunately we were there so short a time, that we could only see what was curious, and had no leisure for the picturesque; to enjoy which, it would have been necessary to ride away five or six miles, on what they call the neutral ground: the low sandy isthmus which joins the rock to the continent; but from the fortifications we saw enough to convince us what a magnificent object it must be. In our scramble we had the luck to see three or four monkeys, scrambling, with the greatest ease, up and down what seemed a smooth precipice. I know how odious descriptions are, yet I must just tell you that, among other things, we were taken through a gallery cut out in the most precipitous face of the rock, about 650 feet above the base, and 800 feet below the top, so that when you peep out through the port-holes, which are cut every here and there for cannon, you seem suspended in mid-air, and feel giddy, in whatever direction you look. Thanks to Colonel R[ogers] we saw so much that we had no right to grumble at the quarantine: but it really is something so exquisitely grotesque, that one cannot help being provoked. We were moored close alongside of a coal-wharf, and all the day that we were imprisoned, a parcel of fellows of the town were at work, wheeling coals into our vessel, and upsetting them on the deck, so that they were in all but contact with our crew for a whole day; also, all packages were received, after undergoing the ceremony of a partial ducking in the water; and letters had a chisel dug into them, which was supposed to let out the cholera. And while all this absurd farce was going on, we were imprisoned in one of the most interesting places in the world, not knowing when we should be released, or whether at all; however, even in this time, we had some amusement from the variety of curious figures that came down to the Quay to look at us. One fellow, a Moorish Jew, was dressed so picturesquely, and looked so exotic altogether, that I tried to draw him; but he saw what I was at, and first hallooed out: “You no paint me,” and, when I went on, he bolted as fast as he could. The Moors are magnificent-looking fellows, with very high stern 84 features, dark eyes, and very marked nostrils that give to the full face rather a look of ferocity; even the lowest of them look like aristocrats. The Spanish women, too, were worth looking at: three of them came down to visit a merchant who came with us from Cadiz; the high head-dresses were the only peculiarity in their dress, but one of them was very fine-looking, and very unlike an Englishwoman. I should have thought her ladylike, only she spat with the most perfect indifference, just as —— would in C[ommon] R[oom]. We left Gibraltar at ten on Monday night, and had very calm beautiful weather for two days…. We got to Algiers [Thursday morning] about three, and it was then rough, cloudy, and blowing fresh. This is the most wretched, wicked-looking place I ever set eyes upon. I can associate its idea with nothing but a wasp’s nest. It is huddled together, leaving no apparent room for its streets; its windows are loop-holes, as if to fire through. All beyond its walls looks perfectly desolate, except a number of white specks, which are houses where the rich inhabitants retire in time of plague. The town itself is a mass of white, as perfectly white as a chalk quarry; and the monotony of the glare[96] is only relieved by the rust of weather-stains, which are not white-washed by the French so regularly as by the Moors.

‘The Quay, as every one knows, is a strong battery, expressly for the shelter of pirates; and, when one thought of the horrors that had been practised in that detestable place, and felt the personal discomfort of an approaching storm, and saw, for a foreground, the infamous tricoloured flag on the ships, the general impression was as much the reverse of favourable as can easily be fancied. A boat came alongside with the Vice-consul, for letters. His Excellency was an English Jew, and there was an half-starved Frenchman for his πάρεδρος. He was rowed by four fellows, of what race I know not…. Their features were perfect apathy, and looked like stuffed red leather more than flesh and blood. If we had touched any one of the crew we should have been in for a hundred days’ quarantine in every port of Europe, and yet the wretches had the impudence to insist on our slitting all the letters, to let out the cholera. We stayed an hour, and then 85 started; and sure enough, the storm came. The wind was north-west, and blew right across from the Gulf of Lyons, which I shall always think more formidable than the Bay of Biscay. The wind lasted till we got under the lee of Sardinia; and what with the stink of the bilge-water, which was stirred up by the tossing, and the constant noise, and the difficulty of standing and sitting and eating and drinking, we were constantly wretched enough. My father spent the whole time in his berth; [Newman] and I the greater part of ours. But ills have their end. The sea and the stink subsided, and we made the rest of our voyage to Malta stilly and quickly, arriving there on Monday morning after breakfast. [Newman] does not think his health perceptibly improved yet,[97] but he has entirely got over sea-sickness, and has written an immense deal for the Lyra Apostolica.[98] He has written so many letters to his mother and sisters, that I need say no more about him. He will write to you soon. I know you will think this a very dull letter, as it is about places and not people; but we have been so little on shore, that I have not been able to indulge your taste. Kindest remembrances to O.[99] I will write to him soon.—Yours affectionately,

R. H. F.’

From Malta also, on Christmas night, a letter was despatched to Dartington, addressed, apparently, to John Spedding Froude, which carries on the record of the travellers. All the Froudes, like all the Hares, could draw.

‘… There is so much that is picturesque and singular about this place, that I do not despair of occupation for all the 86 fifteen days in drawing, if the weather is only tolerable. The boats, and the dresses, and the colours and forms of the buildings are all as good practice as anything I can fancy, and I shall not be sorry to have time on my hands for studying them at leisure. We shall be allowed to go about the harbour [in quarantine] as much as we like, and there are several places where we may land. This will have to start a day or two after our return, so you will not hear much more of Malta till the next packet. As yet I have made egregious failures in attempts to colour; indeed, I have had no opportunity of doing anything from nature, and recollection supplies one too indistinctly. My father has made many very interesting coast drawings as we have come along, but he has done nothing in a finished way.

‘Corfu, Jan. 1.—We got here the day before yesterday, after a most interesting voyage. The sea has been as still as a lake, and we have had a light breeze in our favour; but it must be owned that we have sailed away from the fine weather. Ever since we got here it has rained torrents, and is now blowing a violent gale, so that we thank our stars we are in harbour. On Friday morning we (as you would say) made Zante on our larboard bow, at a distance of about fifty miles. The high land of Cephalonia appeared at the same time, so they kept her away three-quarters of a point, and made for the passage between the islands. The south point of Cephalonia is a very high mountain; it was covered with snow, which here and there appeared through the clouds. Zante is cliffy, and not so very unlike some of the Isle of Wight.[100] We got to the town just after dark, and went ashore to make out what we could. We went to a billiard-room, a coffee-house, the head inn, and two or three shops. Everything was filthy to a degree, but there seemed to be some really handsome houses, such as Sir John Vanbrugh might have built. The shops are all open to the street, and one would think that the shopkeepers had never taken more than coppers in their lives; yet in a tobacco shop, on asking the price of a cherry-stick pipe, which I should have guessed at twelve shillings in England, they told me it was one hundred dollars, and a midshipman 87 who was with us, and had lived a great deal in those parts, said that it was not at all dear at the money. The mouthpiece was amber inlaid with turquoise, and in that miserable-looking shop there must have been thirty or forty more pipes as costly: I wonder where they get customers? We drank a bottle of Zante wine at the head inn, and very nice it was; on asking the price, the landlord most unaffectedly said there was nothing to pay, and when we gave him a shilling he seemed to think it was most munificent.

‘… The town is now in possession of a Suliote chief, who has taken the castle into his own hands, and has quartered himself and his followers in all the best houses of the town, which is now newly building, and promises to be regular, and even elegant. The streets are quite straight, and cut one another at right angles, and the houses all have piazzas before them; but everything is now at a standstill, and the streets themselves, unpaved, are more like the courses of rivulets than anything else. It was a night of rejoicing, this being the Day of St. Dionysius, and all the common people were assembled in the bazaar, a sort of shambles, and the gentlemen in a coffee-room, smoking and playing cards, in their best dresses: most of them were fine-looking fellows, very quiet and polite. We had coffee there, and very capital it was, but thick and almost like chocolate. I should like to know how they make it. The Greeks there were all dressed in their white linen petticoats, embroidered coats, and shaggy capotes, except one old fellow, who had on an English box-coat, and one other fellow, whom, from his vulgar impudent countenance, I conclude to have been an English blackguard. They all say the Morea is in a most wretched state, full of banditti and pirates, so that you cannot go anywhere without an escort. Next day we found ourselves just off Ithaca, at breakfast-time, and got breakfast over before we entered the strait between Ithaca and Cephalonia. This was the first day that I attempted what is called sketching, and I made a tolerable hand of it; at least, I found out how to make memoranda that did to work upon afterwards. I can make no hand of colour, and think I shall hardly attempt it, till I have time to make 88 some finished studies from nature. You and W[illy] care so little about classics, that I need not trouble you about Ulysses’ castle, Sappho’s leap, etc. We got here on Sunday night, and the rain came soon after us, and has persecuted us incessantly ever since. We got ashore yesterday and walked about the town, which is very picturesque, and exactly like the panorama….

‘We were at a ball at Corfu on the anniversary of the installation of the Ionian Government, at which all the native population were expected; but the day was so stormy that it made a poor show. I meant to have got you a real Albanian capote, but they were not to be had at Corfu, and the cherry-stick tobacco-pipes were too dear.’

To the Rev. Isaac Williams, Jan. 10, 1833.

‘We spent Christmas Day at Malta in an incessant row, taking in coals, while the bells of all the many Churches of Valetta told what was going on in that land of superstition;—watched one poor fellow in quarantine all day, saying prayers to himself, and looking towards the Church nearest on the shore, opposite to the Lazaretto.[101] The time is now drawing nigh when we shall spend fifteen long days in that abode of the unblessed. It is now the 10th of January, and we are just in sight of Malta, on our return from the Ionian Islands. We have not seen them under the most favourable circumstances, as the weather has been wintry, i.e., either very stormy or very cold. I have been often longing for the bright hot Spanish sun which conducted us from the Bay of Biscay to Gibraltar…. Among other things, we spent half an hour in the coffee-house [at Zante] where the Greek merchants were assembled for the holiday evening: a little wretched dirty place, but the company were very 89 polite to us, and we were surprised at the cleanness of their dresses, and a certain refinement in their appearance and manner. We were under the guidance of Major L[ongley] brother of L[ongley] of H[arrow][102] who is Governor of Cythera, and knows something of the habits and language of the people. The company all rose to him, and sat down when he said κάθεστε; but they pronounce so queerly, that one can hardly ever make out a word, although their newspapers are quite intelligible, and differ but little from old Greek. I would give much to live among them for a bit, and get into their notions. As it is, we have seen nothing but the surface, and heard the notions of the resident English, which cannot be relied on…. In Corfu, the breed is very mongrel, mixed up with Venetian and Italian blood; so that, altogether, the sight was uninteresting, except that when one saw a splendid set of apartments, with magnificent English furniture, and brilliantly illuminated, with a band of music, etc., it contrasted itself oddly with the thought of old Thucydides and the Corcyrean sedition. The remains of the old town are very scanty, and one cannot make out anything satisfactory about τὸ Ἡραῖον, etc. There is a rock that they call Ulysses’ ship; but I suspect the name of a Venetian origin. In one place there is the remains of an Ionic temple, on a very small scale, lately discovered; but we had no time to go into antiquarian questions. We rode over most of the island, and saw several of the villages, all of which bear marks of having been tenanted by a rich population; but everything is of a Venetian character. I cannot make out whether the people are religious or not; yet they seem, on the whole, to be an innocent civil set. Every small knot of families have their priest and their chapel, but no parishes that we could hear of. Their Churches are very small, but great numbers of them: two or three to a small village. [Newman] and my father went into one in an out-of-the-way village, in which there [were] fine silver lamps, a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, well 90 executed, and several pictures of Saints, in the hard German style of the fifteenth century. I went twice into the Church which is the depository of the body of St. Spiridion;[103] and people were praying there both times, one person apparently from the higher classes. In the chapel where the body lies, lamps are always kept dimly burning, and the people go in and kiss the shrine. The feet are stained with tears, and there are many splendid offerings there of precious stones. They keep all the Saints’ days by going to Church, and playing cards afterwards; and on the fast days they fast fairly…. On our way back from Corfu, the curtain was drawn back which had before hung over the scenery, and the long ridges of the Acarnanian mountains appeared in full splendour; among these many points in the range of Pindus were visible in the distance; and from Zante we certainly saw the summit of Parnassus, though partially intercepted with clouds. To look at, Mount St. Meri, in the north of Morea, is the most magnificent, but I do not know its classical name.[104] And now I suppose I must bid farewell to these extraordinary places for the rest of my life; having only just seen enough of them to know how well worth seeing they are.’

The fifteen days of detention were not quite so annoying or so monotonous as the travellers had feared. ‘This Lazaret,’ says Newman in the course of a long letter to his sister Jemima, ‘was built by the Knights [of St. John at Malta] for the Turks…. We burn olive wood. I assure you we make ourselves very comfortable. We feed well from an hotel across the water. The Froudes draw and paint. I have hired a violin, and bad as it is, it sounds grand in such spacious halls. I write verses, and get up some Italian, and walk up and down the rooms about an hour and a half daily; and we have a boat, and are allowed to go about the harbour.’ An incident on the quarantine island is responsible, in Newman’s biography, for the 91 one and only tiff between himself and Froude.[105] In reality, it was no tiff at all, as Froude was wholly innocent of offence. (Newman, it may be remarked in passing, had just written his David and Jonathan.) It seems that during the January nights in the Lazaretto, all three of the English travellers used to hear unaccountable footsteps, in the rooms and galleries, their own doors having been locked from the outside. On one occasion Newman thought he heard the noises in Archdeacon Froude’s room. ‘The fourth time it occurred, I hallooed out: “Who’s there?” and sat up in my bed ready to spring out. A deep silence followed, and I sat waiting a considerable time: and thus I caught my cold.’ A week later, there is no clean bill of health to send Mrs. Newman. ‘The weather has been unusually severe here. My cold caught in the Lazaret ripened the day I came out of it into the most wretched cough I ever recollect having, as hard as the stone walls, and far more tight than the windows.’ In short, Newman was housebound, a close prisoner, and miserable enough, despite his successful completing of his ‘Patriarchal Sonnets.’ Archdeacon Froude forbade his going out to Church. The next day, Monday, he confides to the all-sympathetic bosom of his family: ‘I am properly taken at my word. I have been sighing for rest and quiet. This is the sixth day since I left the Lazaret, and I have hardly seen or spoken to anyone. The Froudes dine out every day; and are out all the morning, of course. Last night I put a blister on my chest; and never having had one on before, you may fancy my awkwardness in taking it off and dressing the place of it this morning. I ought to have had four hands. Our servant was with the Froudes…. Well, I am set upon a solitary life, and therefore ought to have experience what it is; nor do I repent…. I have sent to the library, and got Marriage[106] to read. Don’t smile—this juxtaposition is quite accidental! You are continually in my thoughts. I know what kindness I should have at home.’ He ends dismally, not without citing the Apostolic precedent 92 of going not alone but two and two: ‘I wonder how long I shall last without any friend about me!’ One can imagine the anxiety and indignation of the devoted hearts at Iffley. Early in April their unfriended John Henry received his sister Jemima’s answer, distinctly uncomplimentary to Hurrell Froude; whereupon Newman rushed into explanation: he could not have Froude blamed; he had begged to be left alone (‘you know I can be very earnest in entreating to be left alone’): he had refused his repeated solicitations even to let him sit by him and read to him; he had, in short, driven him away. Hurrell, indeed, was not cut out by Nature for a nurse. Be that as it may, would it be far wrong to surmise that it was influenza which had been playing its now-well-understood tricks on Newman? But he made up like a lover for his passing semi-accusation. Froude, as it happened, was singularly well at this time, though the reprieve from discomfort was to be but brief.

The three companions went from Malta to Messina, where, in wretched weather, they had divers small misadventures, shared with Rohan-Chabots. Hurrell kept, that week, a sort of journal of events; and the pages describing the capture of lodgings at Palermo seem worth transcription, since they show the revered Vicar of S. Mary-the-Virgin defeated by female diplomacy, and in the unexpected rôle of a sprinter.[107]

‘We got to Palmero about eleven or twelve next morning [Feb. 11, 1833]: the sea calm, the sun hot, and everything beautiful to a degree. Here we knew that there was to be a scramble for rooms; so when we anchored, [Newman] and I made a rush for the ladder, and were first in the boat; but unfortunately, when we were in it we found that we had mistaken the landing-place. Our boat was nearest the Quay; and we had to clear out round all the others to make for the custom-house and town, which were a mile off; also, our boat had only one man. So we saw two other boats give us the go-by, in one of which was the wife of the Governor of Moldavia and Wallachia:[108] they landed about four minutes 93 before us, and we thought to make up our way by running. I was soon left behind by [Newman] and the boatman. When they passed the Countess, I saw her tap a fellow on the shoulder, who ran off for a coach, in which she set off as hard as she could for the Albergo di Londra. We found afterward that she had secured Page’s whole house by letter; and not contented with this, she had two servants ahead, who, when [Newman] came up with them, raced him; and being fresh, they contrived to keep ahead by a foot or two, so as just to bespeak Jaquerie’s whole house before he could speak to the landlord. On this, we despaired, and put up with the first place we could find to hide our noses in: luckily, it had no fleas! and that was more than we had bargained for.’ Newman, in his own letters, does not single out for praise the one negative charm of their temporary dwelling. “It is astonishing,” he says from the depth of English decency, “how our standard falls in these parts!”

The Archdeacon, with his attendant spirits, was off at four in the morning for Egesta. They had a carriage to themselves, drawn by three mules with bells, and a boy and a guide, besides the driver; much æsthetic rapture and next to nothing to eat, seems to have been their portion. But the culminating point, the complete satisfaction of the heart’s desire, was Rome. ‘All the cities I ever saw are but as dust, even dear Oxford inclusive, compared with its majesty and glory,’ writes Newman to the Rose Hill auditory. This enthusiasm of his was not without its scruples and torments. He adds an occasional colophon of genuine self-comfort, being sure that ‘our creed,’ the while, is ‘purer than the Roman’: a matter which, apparently, Hurrell forgot to dwell upon. He never had to rid himself of the least taint of the Pharisee, although he had been scandalised enough at Naples. That alien city of all badness had given his notions of its nominal religion a rude shock. Frederick William Faber, passing through Cologne in 1839, got, unwillingly, the very same sort of painful disedification which Froude got at Naples.[109] The 94 sadness of the decay of an ideal, even though a misplaced and mistimed one, hangs over some of the letters sped towards holy Oxford.

To the Rev. John Keble, March 16, 1833.

‘Rome.—… I should like to be back at the election much; sed fata vetant. Being abroad is a most unsatisfactory thing, and the idleness of it deteriorating. I shall connect very few pleasing associations with this winter, and I don’t think I shall come home much wiser than I went. The only μάθησις on which I can put my hand, as having resulted from my travels is, that the whole Christian system all over Europe “tendit visibiliter ad non esse.”[110] The same process which is going on in England and France is taking its course everywhere else; and the clergy in these Catholic countries seem as completely to have lost their influence, and to submit as tamely to the State, as ever we can do in England…. Egesta … by good luck we have been able to see, though we were obliged to abandon the rest of our Sicilian expedition. It is the most strangely romantic place I ever saw or conceived.[111] It is no use attempting to describe it, except that the ruins of the city stand on the top of a very high hill, precipitous on three sides, and very steep on the other, literally towering up to heaven, with scarcely a mule-track leading to it, and all round the appearance of an interminable solitude. After going some miles through a wild uninhabited country, you approach it by winding up a zigzag path cut in the face of what looks a perpendicular and inaccessible rock, and, till you have got some way up, it wears so little the appearance of a track, that without guides no one would venture on. At the top the old walls of the town can be distinctly traced, where one would think that mortal foot had never or rarely been, and numbers of tooled stones [are] scattered in all directions, evidently the remains of 95 well-finished buildings. Here and there is a broken arch which makes one fancy the remains to be Roman, and in the most conspicuous place a fine theatre, nearly perfect. When you come to the ascent on the opposite side, you all at once see the Temple, in what seems a plain at the bottom, with its pediments and all its columns perfect, and only differing from what it was at first in the deep rich colouring of the weather-stains. When we saw it there was a large encampment of shepherds in the front of it, with their wolf-dogs and wild Salvator-like dresses; and, by-the-by, as we found afterwards, with no great objection to lead Salvator-like lives; for when by some accident we were separated from one another, they got round [Newman] shouting “Date moneta!” and, he thinks, would certainly have taken it by force, except for a man with a gun who is placed there by Government, as custode of the Temple, and who came up when the others were getting most troublesome. On getting close to the Temple, we found that it stands on the brink of a precipitous ravine 200 or 300 feet deep, which gives a grandeur to the whole scene even beyond what it gets from the mountains and the solitude. Compared with Egesta, Pæstum is a poor concern, and so is Naples when compared with Palermo.

‘But Rome is the place, after all, where there is most to astonish one, and [it is] of all ages, even the present. I don’t know that I take much interest in the relics of the Empire, magnificent as they are, although there is something sentimental in seeing (as one literally may), the cows and oxen Romanoque foro et lautis mugire Carinis. But the thing which most takes possession of one’s mind is the entire absorption of the old Roman splendour in an unthought-of system: to see their columns, and marbles, and bronzes, which had been brought together at such an immense cost, all diverted from their first objects, and taken up by Christianity: St. Peter and St. Paul standing at the top of Trajan’s and Antonine’s columns, and St. Peter buried in the Circus of Nero, with all the splendour of Rome concentrated in his mausoleum. The immense quantity of rare marbles, which are the chief ornament of the Churches here, could scarcely have been collected except by the centre of an universal Empire, 96 which had not only unlimited wealth at its command, but access to almost every country; and now one sees all this dedicated to the Martyrs. Before I came here I had no idea of the effect of coloured stone in architecture; but the use Michael Angelo has made of it in St. Peter’s shows one at once how entirely that style is designed with reference to it, and how absurd it was in Sir C. Wren to copy the form when he could copy nothing more. The coloured part so completely disconnects itself from the rest, and forms such an elegant and decided relief to it, that the two seem like independent designs that do not interfere. The plain stone-work has all the simplicity of a Grecian temple, and the marbles set it off just as a fine scene or a glowing sky would. I observe that the awkwardness of mixing up arched and unarched architecture is thus entirely avoided, as all the arched work is coloured, and the lines of the uncoloured part are all either horizontal or perpendicular. So Michael Angelo adds his testimony to my theory about Gothic architecture.

‘As to Raphael’s pictures, I have not had time to study them with attention. The most celebrated of them, especially your friend Heliodorus, are so damaged or dirty that one cannot see them distinctly except close; they say we should use an opera-glass. All that the painters say of Raphael tends to exalt him as a poet and a man of genius, but rather at the expense of his technical skill; he and Michael Angelo seem, by what they say, to be counterparts. But I wish I could hope to form an opinion of my own about it.

‘There is an English artist here, a Mr. S[evern],[112] to whom [Newman] had an introduction, and who certainly is a very clever man, who gave us a most curious and interesting account of a German school of painters that is now growing up in Rome. He says that several of them are here, living on pensions from German Princes, particularly the King of Bavaria, and are studying Raphael in a very singular way: curious fellows, with a great deal of original enthusiasm (utterly unlike the βαναυσοί of England), who have got it into their heads that the way to study Raphael is not to copy him, but to study the works he studied, and to put their mind into the attitude in 97 which he formed his conceptions. So they poke away at the old hard pictures of early Masters, with stiff drapery and gilt backgrounds, and are so intent on dissociating Christian and classical art, that they think grace and beauty bought too dear, if they tend to disturb the mind by pagan associations. One of these fellows,[113] he said, had become intimate with him in a curious way. Mr. S[evern] has made colouring his principal study; he seems to be a bit of an enthusiast himself, and has been aiming at combining the colouring of the Venetian school with the designs of the Roman. Well, this German, who is a shy, reserved man, having been one day in Mr. S[evern’s] studio, returned the next day with ten or twelve of his German friends, and again, the day after, with as many more; and so on, for some time. At last Mr. S[evern], who took it as a great compliment, asked him what it was that had attracted his notice. He said he had always gone on a notion that colour had nothing to do with the poetry of painting, but was merely sensual, and that a Madonna he had seen of Mr. S[evern’s] made him alter his mind; so he had been bringing friends to see if they felt the same about it. Since this time they have been very intimate; but the man is so reserved, in general, that except for this accident he might have kept his notions to himself. Mr. S[evern] says his designs are quite in the spirit of Raphael, and that his whole mind is so taken up with Catholic ἦθος, that he has given up his Protestantism, and is a rigid conformer to all the ordinances of the Church. I have prosed about this because I was struck with it. I hope it is no mare’s nest…. I don’t know whether I mentioned to you that [Newman] and [Williams] are going to indite verses for The British Magazine, under the title Lyra Apostolica? [Rose][114] would not take a sonnet that I made, because it was too fierce; but says it may come by-and-by. I will write it out for your edification and criticism.

98 ‘ΠΕΡI ΤΗΣ ΜΙΣΗΤΟΥ ΣΤΑΣΕΩΣ.[115]

‘“The Powers that be are ordained of God.”

‘I mean to do one on Lord Grey’s interpretation of the Coronation Oath.[116] Will you do some? A mixture, some fierce and some meek: the plan is to have none above twenty lines…. My cough is just the same as when I left England. The climate is worse than an English autumn, and sight-seeing does no good. I was almost well at Malta, and if I had stayed there should have been quite so now. I expect to see the original Epistolæ S. Thomæ in the Vatican Library.’

Overbeck seems to have attracted Froude purely, or chiefly, on moral grounds, but he found at Rome an abiding object of enthusiasm in the lovely genius of Francesco Francia. One 99 of his letters to his second brother, from Leghorn, illustrates both his own passion for thoroughness, and the range and zest of his lifelong interest in arts and crafts. He was ‘an ingeniose person,’ and constantly invites the application of that favourite and comprehensive seventeenth-century word.

To William Froude, April 12, 1833.

‘… If you choose, you may easily find out in London what is the particular process by which the red colour of glass is produced from gold, and also in what way they would go to work to give glass a vitrified coat of gold, retaining its own colour; and whether any accident in attempting the latter might effect the former. For it has always struck me as a puzzle how so recondite an idea as that of producing a ruby tint from a yellow metal should come into the heads of the early glass-painters; and it has occurred to me that some such accident as I have guessed at above might be the key to the puzzle, for the practice of giving glass a vitrified coat of gold for the purpose of mosaic work was very common, long before the use of coloured glass in windows had been thought of, and specimens of it are to be seen in Rome of almost every age between [A.D.] 400 and [A.D.] 1000. Please not to forget this question, or be contented with vague answers. It will be likely to take some time and trouble to get at the truth, but it is curious, and there is no hurry, and you will at any rate have more opportunities than I shall. The best red colour that has been produced in modern times has been managed by a French chemist, and there is a wholesale house of his goods somewhere in Holborn. The Pope’s mosaic manufactory in Rome is curious: there are eighteen thousand shades of colour in it, which can be looked out as in a directory. Some of the imitations of pictures which they have made are so perfect that you must look close before you can see joinings and transitions of colour; and they have the advantage over every kind of painting, being mellow from the first and brilliant to the last. In St. Peter’s there are many very fine ones, copies of all the most famous pictures, and they are said to have cost 4500l. a piece. St. Peter’s itself is the great attraction of Rome, worth all the classics put together. I think the dome is built with 100 all the layers of stone horizontal, so that the principle of the arch applies not to the vertical section, but only to the horizontal. I am not sure of this, but I think so.’

It does not appear, though Newman and Froude saw the Pope’s mosaic manufactory, that they saw the Pope himself, Gregory XVI. They seem to have gained their chief vistas of Roman society through their acquaintance with the Prussian Chargé d’Affaires, Baron Bunsen,[117] and his English wife, at whose house of all hospitality Sir Walter Scott, then near his end, had been the beloved guest less than a year before. Hurrell must have had his own impressions of the excellent Bunsen, with his pleasant Teutonic habit of holding up his finger and hushing the company, before he began to speak. There is no mention of our modest and all-observing pilgrims in the published correspondence either of Bunsen or of Joseph Severn, for 1832-1833.

On April 13, 1833, Hurrell sends to the Rev. John Frederick Christie one of the most discussed letters in the first volume of the Remains.

‘It would not become me to apologise for not having written before, since I much doubt my capacity[118] to produce anything worth the postage. Nevertheless, I have for some time been intending to write to you, and can’t account for having let so much time slip through my fingers. My father and I are now on our way home, having left [Newman] to retrace his steps to Sicily…. I hope to be at Genoa to-morrow morning…. Between [Lyons] and Paris, I hope to visit and make drawings of some of the Abbeys, etc., which are connected with the history of St. Thomas of Cant. “Sixth and lastly,” if the Fates allow, we shall cross from Havre to Southampton by the first steamer in May … soon after which you may expect to see me in Chapel. I congratulate you on having got over your first audit so prosperously;[119] … it is better occupation than 101 travelling, take my word for it. It is really melancholy to think how little one has got for one’s time and money. The only thing I can put my hand on as an acquisition is having formed an acquaintance with a man of some influence at Rome, Monsignor [Wiseman][120] the head of the [English] College, who has enlightened [Newman] and me on the subject of our relations to the Church of Rome. We got introduced to him to find out whether they would take us[121] in on any terms to which we could twist our consciences, and we found to our dismay that not one step could be gained without swallowing the Council of Trent as a whole! We made our approaches to the subject as delicately as we could. Our first notion was that the terms of communion were, within certain limits, under the control of the Pope … or, that in case he could not dispense solely, yet at any rate the acts of one Council might be rescinded by another; indeed, that in Charles the First’s time it had been intended to negociate a reconciliation on the terms on which things stood before the Council of Trent. But we found, to our horror, that the doctrine of the Infallibility of the Church made the acts of each successive Council obligatory for ever, that what had been once decided could never be meddled with again, in fact, that they were committed finally and irrevocably, and could not advance one step to meet us, even though the Church of England should again become what it was in Laud’s time….

‘… So much for the Council of Trent, for which Christendom has to thank Luther and the Reformers. [Newman] declares that ever since I heard this I have become a staunch Protestant, which is a most base calumny on his part, though I own it has altogether changed my notions of the Roman Catholics, and made me wish for a total overthrow of their system. I think that the only τόπος now is “the ancient Church of England,” and, as an explanation of what one means, “Charles the First” and “the Nonjurors.” When I come home I mean to 102 read and write all sorts of things; for now that one is a Radical, there is no use in being nice![122] I wish you had sent a longer postscript to [Newman] about the position of things; all I have heard, directly or indirectly, has made me long to be home again. You don’t say whether you have done anything for the L[yra] A[postolica]?[123]…. Tell [Isaac Williams] that I think he has used me basely to send me a mere scribble of a few lines, prosing about some theory of poetry, when there were such a lot of atrocities going on on all sides, of which one can get no tolerable account through the papers.

‘Genoa, April 15.—Here we are, as at Leghorn, detained a day beyond our time, though there is a perfect calm, because these absurd fellows are afraid of a swell which was got up by last night’s wind. The more I have to do with these wretched Neapolitans, the more my first impressions about them are confirmed. I wonder how anyone can tolerate either them or their town, which is as nasty and uninteresting a place as I ever set foot in. As to this Genoa, I should not grumble at being detained here, if I were in plight for sight-seeing, for it is truly magnificent, both in itself and in its situation; but, unfortunately, I was taken with a very severe feverish cold the morning we landed, i.e., the day before yesterday; and that day and yesterday was confined to my bed, where I should probably be now but that I had to get up early, in hopes the vessel would keep its appointment…. Never advise a friend of yours to come abroad for his health! It would be very well if one could have Fortunatus’ cap, and wish one’s self at Rome; but travelling does more harm than change of climate does good.

‘While we were at Rome [Newman] and I tried hard to get up the march-of-mind phraseology about pictures and statues, and we hoped we were making some little progress under the 103 auspices of a clever English artist, to whom we had an introduction: but, unfortunately for our peace of mind, just before our departure we became acquainted with [a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge], who, though he had not been in Italy much longer than ourselves, had attained an eminence so far beyond what we could even in thought aspire to, that we gave the thing up in despair, and retire upon the τόπος, that “we don’t enter into [those] technicalities.” Certainly those C[ambridge] men are wonderful fellows; I know no one but [Head][124] that could compete with them at all. They know everything, examine everything, and dogmatise about everything; they have paid particular attention to the geological structure of this place, and the botany of that, and the agriculture of another, and they are antiquaries, and artists, and scholars, and, above all, puff off one another with the assiduity of our friends the [W.]s. W[hewell’s][125] book, and S[edgwick’s][126] Lectures, and T[hirlwall’s][127] research, and H[are’s][128] taste, pop upon one at every turn…. We mean to make as much as we can out of our acquaintance with Monsignor [Wiseman], who (by the by), is really too nice a person to talk nonsense about. He desired me to apply to him, if on any future occasion I had to consult the Vatican Library: and a transaction of that sort would sound well….’

The ‘transaction would sound well’: this, as if the writer’s study were only to heighten others’ opinion of him! Newman was surely right in calling attention, years after, to this habit 104 of Froude’s of depreciating, nay, belying, his own motives. It was not an affectation, but it was a little piece of sheer cruelty.

The friends had parted at Rome, the Froudes very loath to leave Newman behind; and he, on his part, roaming about the Janiculum after they had gone, in a silent passion of grief, reproaching himself for his wilful fancy to return, under a sort of romantic obsession, to Sicily alone. There he was all but destined to meet an untimely death. Hurrell finished his long letter to Mr. Christie as he moved homeward.

‘Marseilles, April 22.—This France is certainly a most delicious place: we landed in Hyères Bay, owing to a storm from the north-west, and found everything so warm and green that I could quite enter into John of Salisbury’s[129] feelings. The people, too, [are] so extremely civil that I cannot help hoping there may yet be the seven thousand in Israel, and that sometime or other we may be able to talk of la belle France with some kind of pleasure. I feel like a great fool here, from not being able to talk French. In Italy half the population kept me in countenance, but here it is a constant humiliation. And what is worst, I can’t hope to make progress; for having learned the little I know by writing and not [by] speaking, I annex wrong-shaped words to all the sounds. It is like talking Latin[130] to a foreigner.’

Again, on May 23, to William Froude, is expressed further commendation of the French people, founded on the keenest instinctive understanding of them: an understanding even more unusual then than now. Newman, until later, was certainly far from sharing it, or wishing to learn to share it. The ordinary attitude of the contemporary Oxford mind was frankly, though playfully expressed, by the young W. R. Churton, some years before. He gallantly addresses France: ‘What have I seen in thee that should make me long to see thee again? Have I seen a gentleman from Calais to Beauvoisin? 105 Have I seen one gleam of poetry in the country or its inhabitants?’[131] Hurrell Froude was ‘un-English’ enough to be arrested, but not repelled, while on the Continent, by the spectacle of extra-English human nature. We have heard him longing, at Zante, to ‘live among them a bit, and get into their notions.’ This beautiful and uncommon openness of mind stamps him an ideal traveller, despite his lack of opportunity; at no single point of a hurried route, beset with difficulties, could he look far below the surface of things. But it is strikingly inaccurate to say of him, as Mr. Mozley does, that he lacked not only opportunity, but curiosity, ‘to see the interior of either the political or the religious systems they came upon.’[132]

‘What I have seen since my last letter ends, has been more interesting than anything else except Rome. We stopped about at many places in the central part of France, to see out-of-the-way things connected with Becket’s history, and found some of them so very curious and striking in themselves, that they would have amply repaid us by their own merits. But what I was most interested with was, that the French seem to me to have been so grossly belied as a nation. I never saw a people that tempted me to like them so much, on a superficial observation. I declare, if I was called upon to make a definition of their national character, I should say they were a primitive innocent people. The fact seems to be that France is governed by a small despotic oligarchy, the aristocracy of wealth, who by their agitating spirit have contrived to get the franchise so restricted as to secure to themselves a majority in the Chamber, and the command of the military, by which they keep France under such a strong hand…. There is now in France a High Church party who are Republicans,[133] and wish for universal suffrage, on the ground that in proportion as the franchise falls lower the influence of the Church makes itself more felt; at present its limits about coincide with those of 106 the infidel faction. Don’t be surprised if one of these days you find us turning Radicals on similar grounds.’

The next communication posted to Mr. Keble, on June 26, contained a nameless poem. The title and the motto here given belong to the version in Lyra Apostolica.

‘Trembling Hope.

“And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.”

‘Very flat, I know,’ the author says, in his usual undecorative manner; but he adds: ‘I wrote it the night before you went; I wanted to show it you, that you might do one on “He that testifieth these things saith: Surely I come quickly”; and then, after the verse, to finish with: “Even so, come, Lord JESUS.” I think that so it might make a composition on which some people’s thoughts would run.[135] You may think all this 107 bother; but I cannot help fancying that this sort of arrangement is worth some little trouble.’ Hurrell’s poem stands collocated with Keble’s ‘Encouragement’ in the Lyra, with its opening ‘Fear not’: and its heartening beauty is almost a direct address to the burdened spirit who called it forth:

Even the text from S. John, which Hurrell had suggested as colophon, stands under his separate β after Keble’s poem, in every edition, as if by some solemn little rubrical observance. Both Keble and Newman were most careful, in all these delicate ways, to preserve their friend’s least touch upon the early printed work of the Movement. It was his death which led to the revelation of the authorship of all the poems in Lyra Apostolica. They would else have remained strictly anonymous. ‘One of the writers in whom the work originated,’ says Newman in his very brief preface, dated at Oxford on All Saints’ Day of 1836, ‘having been taken from his friends … it seemed desirable … to record what belonged to him, while it was possible to do so; and this has led to a general discrimination of the poems, by signatures at the end of each.’

Two days after ‘Trembling Hope,’ on June 28, Hurrell sends to his old Tutor the most beautiful, and also the most characteristic of his verses.

‘Daniel.

εἰσὶν εὐνοῦχοι, οἵτινεσ εὐνούχισαν ἑαυτοὺς διὰ τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν. —S. Matt. xix. 12.[136]

And immediately after, linked with a quotation from the beloved Eclogues: ‘I send you some sawney verses…. Can these be doctored into anything available, or are they dotings?’

‘Old Self and New Self.[138]

NEW SELF.

Four other sacred poems which Hurrell wrote in 1833 may as well be given here. He and Newman burst into song together, though he with far more remote and infrequent music. Probably no lyrist ever had such a poor opinion of himself. But in the qualities of clearness, simplicity, orderly thought and noble severity, there is something very remarkable in Hurrell’s few brief scattered verses. They have a strong singleness and sad transparency, the tone of them a little chilly, yet almost Virgilian, and arrestingly beautiful; they, like himself, are impersonal, and full of character; abstinent, concentrated, true. The unexpected grace is their cunning harmony, and the trick of that is neither derived nor deliberately invented. His every line instinctively sings and flies. He has nothing to match a certain refrain of Newman’s, in what he calls his ‘ecclesiastical carol,’—

110 It is a good instance of an always interesting literary anomaly that such a line, in its raucous sibilation, should have been produced by an accomplished musician, whereas unfailing melody belongs to Froude, who, loving naturally what he once called ‘the bright and silent pleasures of poetry,’ had small sense of music as an independent art. Yet Newman certainly was capable of a sustained grandeur, as in his verses on Greek models, which Froude did not attempt, and could not attain.

‘Tyre.

‘Sight against Faith.

‘“And Lot went out, and spake unto his sons-in-law that married his daughters, and said: ‘Up, get you out of this place; for the Lord will destroy this city.’ But he seemed as one that mocked, unto his sons-in-law.”

‘Farewell to Feudalism.[141]

‘“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.”

‘Weakness of Nature.

‘“Be strong, and He shall comfort thine heart.”

The following fragmentary lines are appended to the poem as given in the Remains, though they do not, of course, appear in Lyra Apostolica:

From poetical ‘dotings,’ Hurrell, having reached England, throws himself gladly into the interests of the young scientist his brother, who was already at work on the unique experiments concerning the resistance and propulsion of ships, which now stand connected, all over the world, with his successful name. He was going forward to be, as Hurrell anxiously wished, no ‘mere engineer,’ no ‘Liberal,’ i.e., agnostic or materialist, ‘at heart.’

To William Froude, July 11, 1833.

‘… I cannot understand how the dock-gates can make any further resistance to the water after the curvature has been squatted out of them, nor how, if the curvature is right, the pressure should have any tendency to alter it. Tell me if you succeed in getting a verdict against them; also, how your resistance experiments succeed. I will never believe that a sail will do as much work if you split it in two; but, if R ∝ area, you might have each cloth independent, and all would do as 113 well. I never gave you an answer about the Book of Job, for I cannot get a distinct idea of its argument. It is said to be a discussion on the moral government of God; but my view of it is not more distinct than what ladies get of Butler’s Analogy.’

Honest Hurrell and his baffled Willy were looking for the sort of intellectual company which misery is said to love, and found it in ‘ladies.’ These, as yet, were certainly busier with worsted samplers than with the problems of the educated.

On July 14, the day of the storming of the feudal Bastille, came the formal start of another revolution which had a quieter, but no less ominous foot. Mr. Keble mounted the pulpit stair of S. Mary-the-Virgin’s at Oxford, and preached his memorable Assize Sermon, which went to press under its title of National Apostasy. It served as a bugle to let men know that the work of recapturing Faith for England had begun, and that ‘things have come to the pretty pass’ (in Lord Melbourne’s celebrated expression), ‘that religion is to invade the sphere of private life!’ There had been long preliminary agitation, and much personal consciousness, especially on Newman’s part and on Froude’s, of ‘a work to do in England.’

Secular authority was on the eve of abolishing in Ireland ten Bishoprics, which, in that country at least, it is not pretended that it had not created. But there could be no guarantee whatever that secular authority, so gorged, would be sated; and operations in England being only too likely, it was time for the objectors to rise. Besides, the general change effected during 1832-3, in the relations of Church and State, was the most disheartening or enraging thing in the world to the sentinels at Oxford, according to individual mood. Up to then, ‘spiritual cases were referred by the Sovereign to the Court of Delegates, which contained a majority of spiritual persons. But in those years, the final appeal was transferred, by Act of Parliament, from the Court of Delegates to, first, the Privy Council, and then a Committee formed from it.’[143] In that bondage, a worthy legacy from the ‘unidea’d’ reign of William IV., 114 the Church of England stood, and stands. Things had been bad enough before. Already Hurrell had cried out in private: ‘The Church can never right itself without a blow-up.’ This was more sanguine than Dr. Arnold’s simultaneous jeremiad, and quite as loyal. ‘The Church as it now stands,’ he said, ‘no human power can save.’ But now Froude’s song is: ‘If the State would but kick us off!’ caught from Lamennais and the great democrat-Ultramontane agitation in France. The wish is translated into the weighty and telling pages of the long essay which stands first in his Remains, and which he wrote in 1833. More suo, he uses in it all the original documents which he can lay his hands on, and furthers his argument by italicisation and capitalisation of leading words and phrases. Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle once remarked that the step of throwing off the supremacy of the State had been dreamed of, in England, only by the Nonjurors, and ‘the first authors of the Tracts for the Times.’ Has it not been dreamed of ever since? The deification of a Privy Council was the occasion, not the cause, of the High Anglican onset, itself but one movement of several against the intrenchments of British materialism, but distinct from them all, inasmuch as Scott and Coleridge, riding just before, with the armed protest of Carlyle, of Ruskin, and of Emerson to follow, bore no known emblems of a Christian Crusade. The hour of latent dissatisfaction had crept up to flood-water mark. As we are well aware, no great movement springs full-armed from the brain of any local Jupiter; and this one was a birth, and only a birth, of 1833. For years previously, semi-active agitation, fed by the feeling all over the country, was quite patent and open. There was much popular stir and screaming, all making, no doubt, for righteousness and right ideas. The thinkers, the Universities, were far clearer as to what they did not mean, or wish, than as to what they did. ‘Newman and I are both so consequential,’ Froude writes in a leave-taking letter of 1832, ‘that we fear all sorts of things going wrong while we are away.’ It is perfectly true that these men did not create, but evoke, the religious spirit of their time. The Chinese narcissus bourgeons at a miraculous rate from a bulb a year old. The Platonic theory of individual knowledge should be extended to meet 115 the case of nations: they, too, remember, and have rhythms which antedate the conscious life, and recur throughout it. We are always forgetting the commonplace that a spirit rather than intelligent persons with a polity, a law rather than its visible agencies, is the true operative force. Well-meaning students of the Movement have looked upon one name or another as the generating cause, whereas the real leader is ever nameless, like Odysseus in the cave of his baffled giant. There was ‘an unseen agitator,’ as Newman knew. His earliest friend of undergraduate days, whom he called, afterwards, Princeps Apostolicorum, was, for one, independently aware of it, as soon as events began.

‘… 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 116 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, 117 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. 118 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 119 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.

‘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 120 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 121 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.

122 ‘Aug. 31.—… It has lately come into my head that the present state of things in England makes an opening for reviving the monastic system. I think of putting the view forward under the title of “Project for Reviving Religion in Great Towns.” Certainly colleges of unmarried priests (who might, of course, retire to a living, when they could and liked) would be the cheapest possible way of providing effectively for the spiritual wants of a large population…. I must go about the country to look for the stray sheep of the true fold: there are many about, I am sure; only that odious Protestantism sticks in people’s gizzard. I see Hammond takes that view of the Infallibility of the Church which P[almer] says was the old one. We must revive it. Surely the promise, “I am with you always,” means something?’

It is extraordinary how Hurrell’s talk runs not so much on existing outer problems as on notions which ‘have lately come into my head.’ The others were content to face emergencies the moment they arose. He knew not how to wait till things turned up: he went forward to turn them up. His vocation was less to lead than to prompt the men born to be leaders. The hard necessity of his lot, the denial to so vigorous a spirit of the physical fuel to keep it alight, imposed this upon him: to be what Emerson calls ‘the seeing eye, not the helping hand.’ Yet his enforced contemplative life kept those active brother lives together; he riveted their armour, mounted their banners, and re-tipped their spears. It was his destiny to give very much more than they could use, so highly congested and quintessential were his ideas, and the verbal hints born of them:

He is the vision of a pilgrim entering from the Middle Ages, barely laying down his staff and wallet before turning roadwards again, yet managing to blurt out, irrespective of the tavern conversation, fragments of his own correlated thought, immemorial things which he, at least, seems never to have forgotten. He is no opportunist, and chooses neither the audience nor the hour. ‘What to assume and what to prove,’ 123 as he says, do not sort themselves in his mind. He is only oracular. He instructs Newman, in relation to no particular topic whatever, but on a mere salutary general principle: ‘Do keep writing to Keble, and stirring his rage. He is my fire, but I may be his poker.’ His influence over Keble’s fearless intelligence, felt from the first, was ultimately very great. His influence over Newman will hardly bear analysis, for Newman and he were one: the gnomon and the disk of a dial, or the arrow and the bow of some busy archer. We have all seen just such influence as Froude, invalided, had upon the Movement, privately exercised by Ministers of State, or by wives with a ripe understanding of their husbands’ practical concerns. It is the uncatalogued and intangible power, almost a plaything to its possessor, least known among the powers which move human society; and, therefore, perhaps it is the grimmest reality of all.

On September 9, Newman burst forth with the famous first sentence of his famous first Tract: ‘I am but one of yourselves, a Presbyter.’ Hurrell wrote no comment on the move; he was intimately aware of it from the beginning, and the earliest and hungriest reader. By the 16th, he is deep in study; there is a new historical theory to start, opening with an ironic reference to Mr. Keble’s ‘friends’:

‘… I have been reading a good deal lately about your friends the Puritans in Queen Elizabeth’s time; and really I like poor Penry very much. I think of writing An Apology for the Early Puritans, whose case I think to be this. The Church of England had relinquished its claim to the jus divinum, and considered Ordination to emanate ultimately from the Queen. These poor fellows, i.e., Penry and Co. (not Beza and Co., nor Knox and Co.), detested so abominable a notion: but what could they do? They had been bred up in a horror of trusting history in matters of religion, so they could look for a divine institution and a priesthood nowhere except in the Bible. Here, then, they looked, assuming as an axiom that they must find; and finding nothing more reasonable than the platform, they caught at this. In the meantime our people, and the smug[152] fellows on the Continent, were 124 going on with their civilities to one another, and servilities to their respective Governments, and left these poor men to fight for a jus divinum, though not the true one. It seems to me that Saravia and Bancroft are the revivers of orthodoxy in England, and that the Puritans shielded them from martyrdom. Had it not been for their pertinacity in claiming a jus divinum, that tyrant[153] would certainly have smothered the true one. Such are my crude speculations, on a rough survey: if you think me hopelessly wrong, floor me at once, and save me from wasting my time. How do you like my “Appointment of the Bishops?”[154] I have sent one on “State Interference in Matters Spiritual,” very dry and matter-of-fact, and mean to have a touch at the King’s supremacy, which I think Hooker would not justify under present circumstances. I think, if we manage well, we may make the idea of a Lay Synod popular. Its members should be elected by universal suffrage among the communicants, more primitivo. I find this view most effective in conversation. I am very well, and don’t think of going abroad this winter, though you seem to say I must. Time and money are two good things, and I don’t like wasting more of them. I have done enough in that line already…. I am quite surprised to see how much less of a conservative [Rose?] is than he was six months since. I do believe the progress of events is converting every one, and that we shall not have much longer to encounter the stigma of ultraism.’