The Life of Froude | Page 7

health, in spite of all
he had gone through, was good. He had an ample allowance, and
facilities for spending it among pleasant companions in agreeable ways.
He had shot up to his full height, five feet eleven inches, and from his
handsome features there shone those piercing dark eyes which riveted
attention where-ever they were turned. His loveless, cheerless boyhood
was over, and the liberty of Oxford, which, even after the mild
constraint of a public school, seems boundless, was to him the
perfection of bliss. He began to develop those powers of conversation
which in after years gave him an irresistible influence over men and
women, young and old. Convinced that, like his brothers and sisters, he
had but a short time to live, and having certainly been full of misery, he
resolved to make the best of his time, and enjoy himself while he could.
He was under no obligation to any one, unless it were to the
Archdeacon for his pocket-money. His father and his brother, doubtless
with the best intentions, had made life more painful for him after his
mother's death than they could have made it if she had been alive. But
Hurrell was gone, his father was in Devonshire, and he could do as he
pleased. He lived with the idle set in college; riding, boating, and
playing tennis, frequenting wines and suppers. From vicious excess his
intellect and temperament preserved him. Deep down in his nature
there was a strong Puritan element, to which his senses were subdued.
Nevertheless, for two years he lived at Oxford in contented idleness,
saying with Isaiah, and more literally than the prophet,
"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we shall die."
It was a wholly unreformed Oxford to which Froude came. If it
"breathed the last enchantments of the Middle Age," it was mediaeval
in its system too, and the most active spirits of the place, the leaders of
the Oxford Movement, were frank reactionaries, who hated the very
name of reform. Even a reduction in the monstrous number of Irish
Bishoprics pertaining to the establishment was indignantly denounced
as sacrilege, and was the immediate cause of Keble's sermon on
National Apostasy to which the famous "movement" has been traced.
John Henry Newman was at that time residing in Oriel, not as a tutor,

but as Vicar of St. Mary's. He was kind to Froude for Hurrell's sake,
and introduced him to the reading set. The fascination of his character
acted at once as a spell. Froude attended his sermons, and was
fascinated still more. For a time, however, the effect was merely
aesthetic. The young man enjoyed the voice, the eloquence, the
thinking power of the preacher as he might have enjoyed a sonata of
Beethoven's. But his acquaintance with the reading men was not kept
up, and he led an idle, luxurious life. Nobody then dreamt of an Oxford
Commission, and the Colleges, like the University, were left to
themselves. They were not economically managed, and the expenses of
the undergraduates were heavy. Their battels were high, and no check
was put upon the bills which they chose to run up with tradesmen.
Froude spent his father's: money, and enjoyed himself. The dissipation
was not flagrant. He was never a sensualist, nor a Sybarite. Even then
he had a frugal mind, and knew well the value of money. "I remember,"
he says in The Oxford Counter Reformation, an autobiographical
essay--"I remember calculating that I could have lived at a
boarding-house on contract, with every luxury which I had in college,
at a reduction of fifty per cent."* He was not given to coarse indulgence,
and idleness was probably his worst sin at Oxford. But his innocence of
evil was not ignorance; and though he never led a fast life himself, he
knew perfectly well how those lived who did.
-- * Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4th series, p. 180. --
An intellect like Froude's seldom slumbers long. He had to attend
lectures, and his old love of Homer revived. Plato opened a new world,
a word which never grows old, and becomes fresher the more it is
explored. Herodotus proved more charming than The Arabian Nights.
Thucydides showed how much wisdom may be contained in the form
of history. Froude preferred Greek to Latin, and sat up at night to read
the Philoctetes, the only work of literature that ever moved him to tears.
Aeschylus divided his allegiance with Sophocles. But the author who
most completely mastered him, and whom he most completely
mastered, was Pindar. The Olympian Odes seemed to him like the
Elgin Marbles in their serene and unapproachable splendour. All this
classical reading, though it cannot have been fruitless, was not done

systematically for the schools. Froude had no ambition, believing