BOOKS.

THE OXFORD MOVEMENT.* [FIRST NOTICE.]

THOSE who did not know the late Dean of St. Paul's, perhaps the ripest scholar among our Oxford divines, certainly the most accomplished man of letters, with a large share of Cardinal Newman's perfect delicacy and simplicity of style, and an independence of thought of his own that rendered it impossible for him to follow Newman to Rome, deeply as he had entered into his genius and sympathised with the ardour of hie spiritual purposes, will find in this book something as near to a literary transcript of his mind as it is often given to men to embody in their writing. No book so vivid and so truthful on the Oxford Movement has been written, or, we strongly suspect, ever will be written in the future, for the men who personally knew what it was, are rapidly passing away, and among those that remain there is probably not one possessed as well of all the late Dean of St. Paul's knowledge of its leading men, as of anything like his literary genius. Dean Church was, of course, one of the younger generation of Tractarians. He did not go to Oxford at all till 1833, taking his degree in 1836, so that he was an undergraduate during all the early part of the Oxford move- ment. He was never personally acquainted with Richard Hurrell Froude, to whom, as every one admits, the Oxford movement owed so much of its impetuous force and intensity of purpose. But he was in its later stages very intimate with Cardinal Newman, and he was one of the Proctors who in 1841 vetoed the condemnation of Tract 90. He was much at Littlemore with Dr. Newman during what the latter called his Anglican death-bed period, and he was familiar with Charles Marriott, with W. J. Copeland, with Isaac Williams, with W. G. Ward, and entered with deep interest into the Hampden controversies and all the various complications of the Traatarian con- troversy in all but its earliest stage. Add to this that his mind had much of the inflexible reality, and his religious feeling much of, the lustre, simplicity, and depth which lend so great a charm to Newman's sermons, and that this book gives full expression to these rare qualities, and we have a group of qualifications which it is very unlikely that any future chronicler of those vivid twelve years of Oxford life will ever possess in a combination so unique.

Nothing can be more perfect than the sketch of Keble, in whom, by the consent of all, the Oxford movement had its origin, though it was not from Keble that it took its main supply of force, but from Hurrell Froude and Newman. Keble was too much of the shy, retiring poet to set any great movement afoot ; but it was his singular reality and disinter- estedness, his humility and his ardent devotion, which kindled first Froude and then Newman (through Froude) into life :— " Mr. Keble had not many friends and was no party chief. He was a brilliant university scholar overlaying the plain, un- worldly country parson ; an old-fashioned English Church- man, with great veneration for the Church and its bishops, and a great dislike of Rome, Dissent, and Methodism, but with a quick heart ; with a frank, gay humility of soul, with great contempt of appearances, great enjoyment of nature, great unselfishness, strict and severe principles of morals and duty." Yet Keble had plenty of vividness of a kind. He was pronounced by his own servant, at the time he was reading with Hurrell Froude, Isaac Williams, and Robert Wilberforce, to be " the greatest boy of them all." Yet he did not scruple to make the intensity of his own religious convictions tell on his pupils. A characteristic story is told by Dean Church of one of the sayings • by which Keble

most impressed Hurrell Fronde Fronde 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

• The Oxford Movement : Twelve Years, 1838.1846. By R. W. Church, M.A., D.C.L., sometime Dean of S. Paul's and Follow of Oriel College, Oxford.. London: Macmillan and Co.

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.' " It was from Keble that Newman contracted his great dread of anything like excitement and fanaticism, and it was from Keble that the Oxford movement contracted its profound dislike of the theatrical elements of the Roman Catholicism of the South. In men like Isaac Williams, this element of the movement dominated its whole course, and Dean Church tells us how sensitive Isaac Williams, in spite of his devotion to Newman, was to something in Newman which appeared to warn him of a less sober and reserved element in Newman's character threatening an issue in something less moderate than Anglican divinity :—

" Fronde was now residing in Oxford, and had become Newman's most intimate friend, and he brought Newman and Williams to- gether. Living at that time,' he says, so much with Froude, I was now in consequence for the first time brought into intercourse with Newman. We almost daily walked and often dined together.' Newman and Fronde had ceased to be tutors ; their thoughts were turned to theology and the condition of the Church. Newman had definitely broken with the Evangelicals, to whom he had been supposed to belong, and Whately's influence over him was waning, and with Fronde ho looked up to Keble as the pattern of religious wisdom. He had accepted the position of a Churchman as it was understood by Keble and Fronde; and thus there was nothing to hinder Williams's full sympathy with him. But from the first there seems to have been an almost impalpable bar between them, which is the more remarkable because Williams appears to have seen with equanimity Froude's apparently more violent and dangerous outbreaks of paradox and antipathy. Possibly, after the catastrophe, he may, in looking back, have exaggerated his early alarms. But from the fast he says be saw in Newman what he had learned to look upon as the gravest of dangers—the pre- ponderance of intellect among the elements of character and as the guide of life. ' I was greatly delighted and charmed with Newman, who was extremely kind to me, but did not altogether trust his opinions ; and though Frauds was in the habit of stating things in an extreme and paradoxical manner, yet one always felt conscious of a ground of entire confidence and agreement ; but it was not so with Newman, even though one appeared more in unison with his more moderate views.' But, in spite of all this, Newman offered, and Isaac Williams accepted the curacy of St. Mary's, Things at Oxford [1830-32] at that time were very dull.' Froude and I seemed entirely alone, with Newman only secretly, as it were, beginning to sympathise. I became at once very much attached to Newman, won by his kindness and delighted by his good and wonderful qualities; and he proposed that I should be his curate at St. Mary's I can remember a strong feeling of difference I first felt on acting together with him from what I had been accustomed to: that he was in the habit of looking for effect, and for what was sensibly effective, which from the Risley and Fairford School I had been long habituated to avoid ; but to do one's duty in faith and leave it to God, and that all the more earnestly, because there were no sympathies from without to answer. There was a felt but un- expressed difference of this kind, but perhaps it became after. wards harmonised as we acted together.' Thus early, among those most closely united, there appeared the beginnings of those different currents which became so divergent as time went on. Isaac Williams' dear as he was to Newman, and returning to the full Newman's affection, yet represented from the first the views of what Williams spoke of as the Bisley and Fairford School,' which, though sympathising and co-operating with the move- ment, was never quite easy about it, and was not sparing of its criticism on the stir and agitation of the Tracts."

Though the Dean of St. Paul's did not personally know Froude, who died in 1836, he has gathered from Cardinal Newman, and Froude's other intimate friends, a singularly

impressive conception of his character. We have seldom met with a more powerful sketch of eager and melancholy ideal passion than is contained in the chapter on the, leader whose early death left the Oxford movement in New- man's hands. The following remarkable passage contains but a fragment of the study, but it is the fragment which,

will best bear quotation :-

" There was yet another side of Froude's character which was little thought of by his critics, or recognised by all his friends. With all his keenness of judgment and all his readiness for con- flict, some who knew him best were impressed by the melancholy which hung over his life, and which, though he ignored it, they could detect. It is remembered still by Cardinal Newman. ' thought,' wrote Mr. Isaac Williams, that knowing him, I better understood Hamlet, a person most natural, but so original as to be unlike any one else, hiding depth of delicate thought in apparent extravagances. Hamlet, and the Georgics of 'Virgil, be used to. say, he should have bound together.' `Isaac Williams,' wrote Mr. Copeland, mentioned to me a remark made on Fronde by S. Wilberforce in his early days : " They talk of Froude's fun, but somehow I cannot he in a room with him alone for ten minutes without feeling so intensely melancholy, that I do not know what. to do with myself. At Brighatone, in my Eden days, he was with me, and I was overwhelmed with the deep sense which possessed him of yearning which nothing could satisfy and of the unsatis- fying nature of all things."' Fronde often reminds us of Pascal. Both had that peculiarly bright, brilliant, sharp-cutting intellect which passes with ease through the coverings and dis- guises which veil realities from mon. Both had mathematical powers of unusual originality and clearness ; both had the same imaginative faculty ; both had the same keen interest in practical problems of science ; both felt and followed the attraction of deeper and more awful interests. Both had the same love of beauty ; both suppressed it. Both had the same want of wide or deep learning ; they made skilful use of what books came to their hand, and used their reading as few readers are able to use it ; but their real instrument of work was their own quick and strong insight, and power of close and vigorous reasoning. Both had the greatest contempt for fashionable and hollow shadows of religion.' Both had the same definite, unflinching judgment. Both used the same clear and direct language. Both had a certain grim delight in the irony with which they pursued their opponents. In both it is probable that their unmeasured and unsparing criticism recoiled on the cause which they had at heart. But in the case of both of them it was not the temper of the satirist, it was no mere love of attacking what was vulnerable, and indulgence in the cruel pleasure of stinging and putting to shame, which in- spired them. Their souls were moved by the dishonour done to religion, by public evils and public dangers. Both of them died young, before their work was done. They placed before them- selves the loftiest and most unselfish objects, the restoration of truth and goodness in the Church, and to that they gave their life and all that they had. And what they called on others to be they were themselves. They were alike in the sternness, the reality, the perseverance, almost unintelligible in its methods to ordinary men, of their moral and spiritual self-discipline."

It adds no little interest and significance to this remarkable book that Dr. Church knew the Oxford of the last years of the third decade, and of the first years of the fourth decade of this century, with an intimacy that gives a singular freshness to his sketch of the academic side of the move- ment. University towns are always cliquish, and these cliques greatly injure them as places of intellectual study. But the Oxford of 1833-1845, though it had its cliques, even as the Oxford of to-day has its cliques, was an Oxford of larger conflicts and more significant divisions than those which now divide Oxford Socialists and Radicals from Oxford Conserva- tives, Oxford theologians from Oxford rationalists, Oxford mathetes from Oxford economists. It is definitely easier to conceive the whole course of the Oxford movement after one has read Dean. Church's very striking ninth chapter, headed "Dr. Hampden," than it ever was before for those who had not lived in that vortex of eager controversy :—

" Oxford stood by itself in its meadows by the rivers, having its relations with all England, but, like its sister at Cambridge, living a life of its own, unlike that of any other spot in England, with its privileged powers, and exemptions from the general law, with its special mode of government and police, its usages and tastes and traditions, and even costume, which the rest of England looked at from the outside, much interested but much puzzled, or knew only by transient visits. And Oxford was as proud and jealous of its own ways as Athens or Florence; and like them it had its quaint fashions of polity ; its democratic Convocation and its oligarchy ; its social ranks ; its discipline, severe in theory and usually lax in fact ; its self-governed bodies and cor- porations within itself ; its faculties and colleges, like the guilds and arts' of Florence ; its internal rivalries and discords ; its ' sets' and factions. Like these, too, it professed a special recog- nition of the supremacy of religion ; it claimed to be a home of worship and religious training, Dominus atuntinatio mea, a claim too often falsified in the habit and tempers of life. It was a small sphere, but it was a conspicuous one ; for there was much strong and energetic character, brought out by the aims and conditions of University life ; and though moving in a separate orbit, the influence of the famous place over the outside England, though imperfectly understood, was recognised and great. Those con- ditions affected the character of the movement, and of the con- flicts which it caused. Oxford claimed to be eminently the guardian of 'tree religion and sound learning ; ' and therefore it was eminently the place where religion should be recalled to its purity and strength, and also the place where there ought to be the most vigilant jealousy against the perversions and corruptions of religion. Oxford was a place where every one knew his neigh- bour, and measured him, and was more or less friendly or repellent ; where the customs of life brought men together every day and all day, in converse or discussion ; and where every fresh statement or every new step taken furnished endless material for speculation or debate, in common rooms or in the afternoon walk. And for this reason, too, feelings were apt to be more keen and intense and personal than in the larger scenes of life ; the man who was disliked or distrusted, was so close to his neighbours that he was more irritating than if he had been obscured by a crowd ; the man who attracted confidence and kindled enthusiasm, whose voice was continually in men's ears, and whose private conversation and life was something ever new in its sympathy and charm, created in those about him not mere admiration, but passionate friendship, or unreserved discipleship. And these feelings passed from individuals into parties ; the small factious of a limited area.

Hen struck blows and loved and hated in those days in Oxford as they hardly did on the wider stage of London politics or general religious controversy. The conflicts, which for a time turned Oxford into a kind of image of what Florence was in the days of Savonarola, with its nicknames, Puseyites, and Neomaniacs, and High and Dry, counterparts to the _Napoli and Arrabbiati, of the older strife, began around a student of retired habits, interested more than was usual at Oxford in abstruse philosophy, and the last person who might be expected to be the occasion of great dis- sensions in the University."

And then follows a most interesting sketch of that most uninteresting personage who in the early days of the Oxford movement gave rise to a controversy of very much the same kind as that which Dr. Mausel's Bampton Lectures on " The Limits of Religious Thought " raised some twenty years later. Dr. Hampden's was a dry and not very powerful mind, but he was just able enough to irritate the High Church section as it was getting into the full swing of its influence ; and hence the excitement which Lord Melbourne's appointment of him to the Regius Professorship of Divinity caused. It was the appoint- ment of a religiously colourless man at a time when definite religious colour was assuming more and more importance in the centre of academic religious feeling ; of a man who had no appreciation of the substantive importance of dogma, at a time when the weakness and uselessness of limp, undogmatic creeds was being more and more keenly felt; the appointment of a man who hardly knew his own mind, at a time when the cry had gone forth that in the religious controversies of the day, mere neutrality was of all forms of thought the least

defensible. No wonder that the appointment gave a definite impulse to the attempt to take up high ground for the Anglican Church and Anglican divinity, and that it stimulated

that feeling of estrangement between -the Church and the Establishment which as much as anything else, perhaps more than anything else, led to Dr. Newman's own secession. But we must leave this delightful and vivid book at this point for the present, and will resume our notice of it next week at the point where the Oxford movement came into full collision with Liberalism in politics and Latitudinarianism in religion.