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." 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