Chapter 3. Hurrell Froude and the Mediterranean Voyage{34} THE friendship between Newman and Mr. Hurrell Froude, the elder brother of the historian, which commenced in 1826, and became intimate in 1829, lasting thence to Mr. Froude's death from consumption in 1836, was certainly one of the most important influences which acted on Newman's career at the most critical period of his life. Newman's was one of the minds which matured slowly, and it was not till he was twenty-six years of age that it became clear whether he would be in the main a religious leader or one of the pillars of the Whately party, that is, the party who threw their influence into the scale of minimizing the spiritual aspect and spiritual significance of revelation rather than of maximizing it. Newman himself mentions, that for two or three years before 1827 he was "beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral," or in other words, "drifting in the direction of Liberalism." "I was rudely awakened from my dream at the end of 1827 by two great blows, illness and bereavement," and then in 1829 came fuller intimacy with Hurrell Froude, which seems to have fully determined, if anything were {35} then needed to determine, the direction in which his mind would proceed. Mr. Hurrell Froude was, as Newman describes him, a man of the highest gifts—gentle, tender, playful, versatile, and of the most winning patience and considerateness in discussion. He was a man of high genius, "brimful and overflowing with ideas and views, in him original, which were too many and strong even for his bodily strength, and which crowded and jostled against each other in their effort after distinct shape and expression. And he had an intellect as critical and logical as it was speculative and bold. He professed openly his admiration of the Church of Rome and his hatred of the Reformers. He delighted in the notion of an hierarchical system, of sacerdotal power, and of full ecclesiastical liberty. He felt scorn of the maxim 'the Bible and the Bible only as the religion of Protestants'; and he gloried in accepting tradition as a main instrument of religious teaching. He had a high, severe idea of the intrinsic excellence of virginity, and he considered the Blessed Virgin the great pattern. He delighted in thinking of the saints; he had a keen appreciation of the idea of sanctity, its possibility and its heights, and he was more than inclined to believe a large amount of miraculous interference as occurring in the early and middle ages. He embraced the principle of penance and mortification. He had a deep devotion to the Real Presence, in which he had a firm faith. He was powerfully drawn to the mediæval Church, but not to the primitive." Dr. Newman adds, that Hurrell Froude "was fond of historical inquiry and the politics of religion. He had no turn for theology as such. He had no appreciation of the writings of the Fathers, of the {36} detail or development of doctrine, of the definite traditions of the Church viewed in their matter, of the teaching of the Œcumenical Councils, or of the controversies out of which they arose." He was "a high Tory of the Cavalier stamp, and was disgusted with the Toryism of the opponents of the Reform Bill." [Note 1] And I feel little doubt that Dr. Newman's wrath against "Liberalism," as for many years afterwards he always called it,—identifying as he did Liberalism with Latitudinarianism,—was to a very considerable extent a moral contagion caught from Hurrell Froude. There are a few singularly beautiful lines added by Newman after Hurrell Froude's death in 1836 to the exquisite poem called Separation of Friends, written in 1833; and these sufficiently prove the tenderness of Newman's friendship for Hurrell Froude, and the intimacy of the relation between them. The poem as it was first written on the separation between friends caused by death, ran thus—
This was an abrupt close. Nearly three years later it appeared that the true close had but been reserved till the friend with whom in his illness Newman had been travelling, had left him alone here to offer this "speechless intercession" on behalf of him who had departed. Then after Froude's death, on the 28th February, 1836, Newman added the final lines—
Such was Newman's feeling for the friend—already suffering from the commencement of the consumption of which he died three years later—with whom he visited the Mediterranean, between December 1832 and April 1833, when they separated at Rome—Newman to turn to Sicily, where he fell ill, and to spend something like three months of solitude after his four months' voyage along the African, Greek, and Italian coasts. It was on this journey that the remarkable series of verses afterwards published with the signature δ in the Lyra Apostolica,—some of them poems of the purest beauty, {38} some of them mere doctrinal or didactic or theologico-political anathemas,—were first written. The isles of Greece are closely associated with another great name, but it would be hard to find a more marvellous contrast than that between the attitude of feeling with which Byron gazed on the scenes in which "burning Sappho lived and sung," and where, as, with his genuine passion for political liberty, he delighted to remember, there "grew the arts of war and peace," and that with which Newman and Froude, well versed indeed in the classical associations of those rocky shores, but still more deeply interested in the ecclesiastical memories they stirred, gazed upon them. They visited Ithaca, but in his poems written "off Ithaca" Newman never mentions the name of Ulysses, though in passing Lisbon he had recalled that strong pagan figure in the lines which he headed The Isles of the Sirens—
There you see some trace of the influence of Froude's high ascetic nature speaking in the heart of a devotee of music, but a devotee of music of the most exalted kind. Hurrell Froude in a letter home mentions that the commander of the steamer in which they {39} sailed sang several songs, accompanying himself on the Spanish guitar, and it must have been these songs which suggested to Newman The Isles of the Sirens. When the friends reach Ithaca, Newman seems to forget "the man of many woes" altogether; he is musing on the difficulty and duty of keeping himself "unspotted from the world," which is the last thing I suppose that Homer's Ulysses ever thought about, while Byron in the same scenes thought only of how he could spot himself most effectually; or if Newman indulges for a moment in the reminiscence of that strong ideal passion for his native country which made Ulysses pine for the bare and rocky islet amidst the seductions of the isle of Calypso and the flattery of his Phæacian hosts, it only suggests to him to paint that ideal patriotism which inspired the longing of Moses to tread the soil of Canaan in the hour of his death upon Mount Nebo, and which has so often served the Christian in place of patriotism when contemplating a home for which his soul had yearned, but the soil of which he has never trodden.
That was written "off Ithaca," on the 30th December, 1832. Newman's nostalgia was more in sympathy with that of Moses than with that of Ulysses; the home he longed for was a home he had never yet gained. There is something very strange in the connection between these classical scenes and the thoughts they excited in the travellers, for I cannot help thinking that most of these poems must have owed their origin almost as much to Froude's suggestion as to Newman's pen. The lines, for instance, on "England," in which Newman calls her "Tyre of the West," and accuses her of trusting in such poor defences as the fortified rock of Gibraltar, and such poor resources as her rich commerce supplied, look as if they had owed a good deal of their inspiration to Froude's cavalier contempt for the wealth earned by trade, as well as his scorn for any ostentatious display of power not rooted in a devout theocratic faith. Off Zante Newman muses on "the Greek fathers," and passes by "the heathen praise" of Greece, to recall the Christian achievements of Clement, Dionysius, Origen, and Basil, Gregory of Nazianzen, and "royal-hearted Athanase, with Paul's own mantle blest." At Corcyra he cannot forget his Thucydides, it is true, but the turn he gives to the reflections the historian had suggested to him directed his thoughts again to the political ruthlessness of maritime power, and the individual {41} responsibility of each member of a nation for his share in its fierce and cruel deeds.
There is to me something very striking in the contrast between the class of thoughts which the old Greek and Roman localities suggest to a Whig poet like Byron, with a broad dash of license in his whiggery, to classical scholars like Clough, imbued with what is now called "the modern spirit,"—as well its moral earnestness as its intellectual scepticism,—and to grave spirits like Newman's and Hurrell Froude's, dominated not only by a religious but by a strongly-marked ecclesiastical bias. Hurrell Froude writes from Rome—"Rome is the place, after all, where there is most to astonish one, and 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, the marbles and bronzes {42} 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 Autonine's columns, and St. Peter buried in the Circus of Nero, with all the splendour of Rome concentrated in his mausoleum." [Note 2] The effect of all this on Newman, who at this time had not yet got over his strong prepossession against the Church of Rome, was rather to repel him and drive him into dwelling on the simplicity and modesty of the primitive Church, than to pre-engage his imagination for the faith to which he ultimately resigned himself. At Messina, for instance, he complains of the fascination exerted over his heart by "these scenes of ancient heathen fame," and by the associations which the poetry of Virgil and Horace had made so dear to him, and reproaches himself that the "shades of power and those who bore a part in the mad deeds that set the world in flame," should still charm his imagination, excusing himself on the old plea "homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto;" and as a rule the more striking the associations of the place, the more he retreats into reveries on the Divine warnings which rebuke earthly pride, and on that call to renounce their fondest dreams by which the heroes of God's grace have been distinguished. Just as before he started on his tour he had impressed upon himself, at Hurrell Froude's Devonshire home, Dartington, that he must never indulge the enthusiasm he was capable of feeling for "streamlet bright, and soft secluded grove," since he had vowed himself to higher affections; so in the great scenes of classical antiquity {43} he schooled himself to draw back with so much the sterner resolution from the natural associations of the place, to those Divine lessons which Scripture contained. Two of his finest poems on David were written in quarantine at Malta. At Frascati he reproaches himself for feeling so keenly the temptations of the world around him, and hopes for the time when he shall no longer "feel a secret joy that hell is near." At Tre Fontani he thanks God that he has been drawn on so gradually to the conviction that he must lead a lonely life devoted to his missionary work; and it is only at Palermo, after his serious illness in Sicily, and while waiting impatiently for the means of returning home, that he allows himself to take some comfort in visiting the Roman Catholic Churches, and accepting their soothing influence, as the gifts of a good Samaritan to a wounded wanderer. He exclaims—
So that the Church of Rome, though doing for him the office of the good Samaritan, is still to him "a foe." It is when he is fairly on his voyage back to undertake that work which throughout his dangerous illness {44} he was so deeply convinced that he had yet to do in England, as to fill him with the assurance that he should not die, that his most exquisite poems were written,—those verses shining with the softest and the whitest poetic lustre, which have fairly conquered even the admiration of the severest Protestant Churches, addressed to the "kindly light" which he entreated, "amidst the encircling gloom," to lead him on; and the two splendid studies in the style of the tragic Greek chorus, one of which I have given at length in a previous chapter. For grandeur of outline, purity of taste, and radiance of total effect, I know hardly any short poems in the language that equal them. As regards the influence of this journey on Newman's future career, it appears that while in many respects it diminished his horror of Romanism, in consequence especially of the influence of Hurrell Froude, it had a contrary effect on Hurrell Froude's own mind, and later again, through him to some extent I suppose, on Newman's. Hurrell Froude writes from Naples on the 17th February, 1833—"I remember you told me that I should come back a better Englishman than I went away; better satisfied not only that our Church is nearest in theory right, but also that practically, in spite of its abuses, it works better; and to own the truth, your prophecy is already nearly realized. Certainly I have as yet only seen the surface of things, but what I have seen does not come up to my notions of propriety. These Catholic countries seem in an especial manner [katechein ten aletheian en adikiai], and the priesthood are themselves so sensible of the hollow basis on which their power rests, that they dare not resist the most atrocious encroachments of the {45} State upon their privileges." [Note 3] And after detailing the abuses of the Roman Catholic system in Sicily he goes on, "The Church of England has fallen low, and will probably be worse before it is better; but let the Whigs do their worst, they cannot sink us so deep as these people have allowed themselves to fall, while retaining all the superficials of a religious country." [Note 4] When it is considered that this was the impression of Roman Catholicism, judged by its fruits, which that one of the two friends who was by far the most inclined to the Roman system brought away from his life in a Roman Catholic country, we cannot wonder that Newman should have remained for eight more years a zealous Anglican, before he even began to foresee clearly whither he was tending. Top | Contents | Biographies | Home Notes1. Apologia, pp. 84-6. 2.
Froude's Remains, vol. i. pp. 298, 299. 3.
Hurrell Froude's Remains, vol. i. p. 293. 4.
Ibid. p. 294. Top | Contents | Biographies | Home Newman Reader — Works of John Henry Newman |