every form of dialectical experiment. But he
was open to higher influences than those of logic,
and in Keble he saw what subdued and won him to boundless
veneration and affection. Keble won the love of
the whole little society; but in Froude he had gained
a disciple who was to be the mouthpiece and champion
of his ideas, and who was to react on himself and
carry him forward to larger enterprises and bolder
resolutions than by himself he would have thought
of. Froude took in from Keble all he had to communicate—principles,
convictions, moral rules and standards of life, hopes,
fears, antipathies. And his keenly-tempered intellect,
and his determination and high courage, gave a point
and an impulse of their own to Keble’s views
and purposes. As things came to look darker,
and dangers seemed more serious to the Church, its
faith or its rights, the interchange of thought between
master and disciple, in talk and in letter, pointed
more and more to the coming necessity of action; and
Froude at least had no objections to the business of
an agitator. But all this was very gradual; things
did not yet go beyond discussion; ideas, views, arguments
were examined and compared; and Froude, with all his
dash, felt as Keble felt, that he had much to learn
about himself, as well as about books and things.
In his respect for antiquity, in his dislike of the
novelties which were invading Church rules and sentiments,
as well as its creeds, in his jealousy of the State,
as well as in his seriousness of self-discipline,
he accepted Keble’s guidance and influence more
and more; and from Keble he had more than one lesson
of self-distrust, more than one warning against the
temptations of intellect. “Froude told
me many years after,” writes one of his friends,
“that Keble once, before parting with him, seemed
to have something on his mind which he wished to say,
but shrank from saying, while waiting, I think, for
a coach. At last he said, just before parting,
’Froude, you thought Law’s
Serious
Call was a clever book; it seemed to me as if
you had said the Day of Judgment will be a pretty sight.’
This speech, Froude told me, had a great effect on
his after life."[14]
At Easter 1826 Froude was elected Fellow of Oriel.
He came back to Oxford, charged with Keble’s
thoughts and feelings, and from his more eager and
impatient temper, more on the look-out for ways of
giving them effect. The next year he became tutor,
and he held the tutorship till 1830. But he found
at Oriel a colleague, a little his senior in age and
standing, of whom Froude and his friends as yet knew
little except that he was a man of great ability,
that he had been a favourite of Whately’s, and
that in a loose and rough way he was counted among
the few Liberals and Evangelicals in Oxford.
This was Mr. Newman. Keble had been shy of him,
and Froude would at first judge him by Keble’s
standard. But Newman was just at this time “moving,”
as he expresses it, “out of the shadow of Liberalism.”