The Life of Froude | Page 7

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 that he should soon die. But a reading-party during the Long Vacation of 1839 resulted in an engagement, which changed the course of his life.
Hitherto he had been under the impression that nobody cared for him at all, and that it mattered not what became of