Living not apart like Keble, but in the same college,
and meeting every day, Froude and Newman could not
but be either strongly and permanently repelled, or
strongly attracted. They were attracted; attracted
with a force which at last united them in the deepest
and most unreserved friendship. Of the steps of
this great change in the mind and fortunes of each
of them we have no record: intimacies of this
kind grow in college out of unnoticed and unremembered
talks, agreeing or differing, out of unconscious disclosures
of temper and purpose, out of walks and rides and quiet
breakfasts and common-room arguments, out of admirations
and dislikes, out of letters and criticisms and questions;
and nobody can tell afterwards how they have come
about. The change was gradual and deliberate.
Froude’s friends in Gloucestershire, the Keble
family, had their misgivings about Newman’s
supposed liberalism; they did not much want to have
to do with him. His subtle and speculative temper
did not always square with Froude’s theology.
“N. is a fellow that I like more, the more I
think of him,” Froude wrote in 1828; “only
I would give a few odd pence if he were not a heretic."[15]
But Froude, who saw him every day, and was soon associated
with him in the tutorship, found a spirit more akin
to his own in depth and freedom and daring, than he
had yet encountered. And Froude found Newman
just in that maturing state of religious opinion in
which a powerful mind like Froude’s would be
likely to act decisively. Each acted on the other.
Froude represented Keble’s ideas, Keble’s
enthusiasm. Newman gave shape, foundation, consistency,
elevation to the Anglican theology, when he accepted
it, which Froude had learned from Keble. “I
knew him first,” we read in the
Apologia,
“in 1826, and was in the closest and most affectionate
friendship with him from about 1829 till his death
in 1836."[16] But this was not all. Through Froude,
Newman came to know and to be intimate with Keble;
and a sort of
camaraderie arose, of very independent
and outspoken people, who acknowledged Keble as their
master and counsellor.
“The true and primary author of it” (the
Tractarian movement), we read in the Apologia,
“as is usual with great motive powers, was out
of sight.... Need I say that I am speaking of
John Keble?” The statement is strictly true.
Froude never would have been the man he was but for
his daily and hourly intercourse with Keble; and Froude
brought to bear upon Newman’s mind, at a critical
period of its development, Keble’s ideas and
feelings about religion and the Church, Keble’s
reality of thought and purpose, Keble’s transparent
and saintly simplicity. And Froude, as we know
from a well-known saying of his,[17] brought Keble
and Newman to understand one another, when the elder
man was shy and suspicious of the younger, and the
younger, though full of veneration for the elder, was
hardly yet in full sympathy with what was most characteristic