The Oxford Movement; Twelve Years, 1833-1845. R. W. Church
wasted shade Is worse than wasted sunshine."
HENRY TAYLOR, Sicilian Summer, v. 3.
[20] Remains, Second Part, i. 47.
[21] Remains, i. 82.
[22] Apologia, p. 84.
[23] The following shows the feeling about him in friends apt to be severe critics:—"The contents of the present collection are rather fragments and sketches than complete compositions. This might be expected in the works of a man whose days were few and interrupted by illness, if indeed that may be called an interruption, which was every day sensibly drawing him to his grave. In Mr. Froude's case, however, we cannot set down much of this incompleteness to the score of illness. The strength of his religious impressions, the boldness and clearness of his views, his long habits of self-denial, and his unconquerable energy of mind, triumphed over weakness and decay, till men with all their health and strength about them might gaze upon his attenuated form, struck with a certain awe of wonderment at the brightness of his wit, the intenseness of his mental vision, and the iron strength of his argument. … We will venture a remark as to that ironical turn, which certainly does appear in various shapes in the first part of these Remains. Unpleasant as irony may sometimes be, there need not go with it, and in this instance there did not go with it, the smallest real asperity of temper. Who that remembers the inexpressible sweetness of his smile, and the deep and melancholy pity with which he would speak of those whom he felt to be the victims of modern delusions, would not be forward to contradict such a suspicion? Such expressions, we will venture to say, and not harshness, anger, or gloom, animate the features of that countenance which will never cease to haunt the memory of those who knew him. His irony arose from that peculiar mode in which he viewed all earthly things, himself and all that was dear to him not excepted. It was his poetry." From an article in the British Critic, April 1840, p. 396, by Mr. Thomas Mozley, quoted in Letters of J.B. Mozley, p. 102.
[24] Such as the "Daniel" in the Lyra Apostolica, the "Dialogue between Old Self and New Self," and the lines in the Remains (i 208, 209).
[25] A few references to the Remains illustrating this are subjoined if any one cares to compare them with these recollections, i. 7, 13, 18, 26, 106, 184, 199, 200–204.
[26] I am indebted for these recollections to the late Lord Blachford. They were written in Oct. 1884.
CHAPTER IV
MR. NEWMAN'S EARLY FRIENDS—ISAAC WILLIAMS
In the early days of the movement, among Mr. Newman's greatest friends, and much in his confidence, were two Fellows of Trinity—a college which never forgot that Newman had once belonged to it—Isaac Williams and William John Copeland. In mind and character very different, they were close friends, with the affection which was characteristic of those days; and for both of them Mr. Newman "had the love which passes that of common relation."[27] Isaac Williams was born among the mountains of Wales, and had the true poetic gift, though his power of expression was often not equal to what he wanted to say. Copeland was a Londoner, bred up in the strict school of Churchmanship represented by Mr. Norris of Hackney, tempered by sympathies with the Non-jurors. At Oxford he lived, along with Isaac Williams, in the very heart of the movement, which was the interest of his life; but he lived, self-forgetting or self-effacing, a wonderful mixture of tender and inexhaustible sympathy, and of quick and keen wit, which yet, somehow or other, in that time of exasperation and bitterness, made him few enemies. He knew more than most men of the goings on of the movement, and he ought to have been its chronicler. But he was fastidious and hard to satisfy, and he left his task till it was too late.
Isaac Williams was born in Wales in 1802, a year after Newman, ten years after John Keble. His early life was spent in London, but his affection for Wales and its mountain scenery was great and undiminished to the end of his life. At Harrow, where Henry Drury was his tutor, he made his mark by his mastery of Latin composition and his devotion to Latin language and literature. "I was so used to think in Latin that when I had to write an English theme, which was but seldom, I had to translate my ideas, which ran in Latin, into English";[28] and later in life he complained of the Latin current which disturbed him when he had to write English. He was also a great cricketer; and he describes himself as coming up to Trinity, where he soon got a scholarship, an ambitious and careless youth, who had never heard a word about Christianity, and to whom religion, its aims and its restraints, were a mere name.
This was changed by what, in the language of devotional schools, would have been called his conversion. It came about, as men speak, as the result of accidents; but the whole course of his thoughts and life was turned into a channel from which it nevermore diverged. An old Welsh clergyman gave the undergraduate an introduction to John Keble, who then held a place in Oxford almost unique. But the Trinity undergraduate and the Oriel don saw little of one another till Isaac Williams won the Latin prize poem, Ars Geologica. Keble then called on Isaac Williams and offered his help in criticising the poem and polishing it for printing. The two men plainly took to one another at first sight; and that service was followed by a most unexpected invitation on Keble's part. He had chanced to come to Williams's room, and on Williams saying that he had no plan of reading for the approaching vacation, Keble said, "I am going to leave Oxford for good. Suppose you come and read with me. The Provost has asked me to take Wilberforce, and I declined; but if you would come, you would be companions." Keble was going down to Southrop, a little curacy near his father's; there Williams joined him, with two more—Robert Wilberforce and R.H. Froude; and there the Long Vacation of 1823 was spent, and Isaac Williams's character and course determined. "It was this very trivial accident, this short walk of a few yards, and a few words spoken, which was the turning-point of my life. If a merciful God had miraculously interposed to arrest my course, I could not have had a stronger assurance of His presence than I always had in looking back to that day." It determined Isaac Williams's character, and it determined for good and all his theological position. He had before him all day long in John Keble a spectacle which was absolutely new to him. Ambitious as a rising and successful scholar at college, he saw a man, looked up to and wondered at by every one, absolutely without pride and without ambition. He saw the most distinguished academic of his day, to whom every prospect was open, retiring from Oxford in the height of his fame to bury himself with a few hundreds of Gloucestershire peasants in a miserable curacy. He saw this man caring for and respecting the ignorant and poor as much as others respected the great and the learned. He saw this man, who had made what the world would call so great a sacrifice, apparently unconscious that he had made any sacrifice at all, gay, unceremonious, bright, full of play as a boy, ready with his pupils for any exercise, mental or muscular—for a hard ride, or a crabbed bit of Aeschylus, or a logic fence with disputatious and paradoxical undergraduates, giving and taking on even ground. These pupils saw one, the depth of whose religion none could doubt, "always endeavouring to do them good as it were unknown to themselves and in secret, and ever avoiding that his kindness should be felt and acknowledged"; showing in the whole course of daily life the purity of Christian love, and taking the utmost pains to make no profession or show of it. This unostentatious and undemonstrative religion—so frank, so generous in all its ways—was to Isaac Williams "quite a new world." It turned his mind in upon itself in the deepest reverence, but also with something of morbid despair of ever reaching such a standard. It drove all dreams of ambition out of his mind. It made humility, self-restraint, self-abasement, objects of unceasing, possibly not always wise and healthy, effort. But the result was certainly a character of great sweetness, tenderness, and lowly unselfishness, pure, free from all worldliness, and deeply resigned to the will of God. He caught from Mr. Keble, like Froude, two characteristic habits of mind—a strong depreciation of mere intellect compared with the less showy excellences of faithfulness to conscience and duty; and a horror and hatred of everything that seemed like display or the desire of applause or of immediate effect. Intellectual depreciators of intellect may deceive themselves, and do not always escape the snare which they fear; but in Isaac Williams there was a very genuine carrying out of the Psalmist's words: "Surely I have behaved