In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • John Keble and Hurrell Froude in Pastoral Dialogue
  • Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi (bio)

The relationship between John Keble and Hurrell Froude is arguably the bedrock or foundation stone of the Tractarian Movement. Froude himself makes that argument with a characteristically vivid metaphor: "Keble is my fire but I am his poker."1 That is to say, Keble's deeply held religious convictions formed the central Tractarian tenets, including those of its poetics, but their "fire" would not have blazed into view had it not been stirred up by Froude and, through Froude, by John Henry Newman. Yet given the "reserve" also so central to Keble's convictions, there exist only rare opportunities to glimpse interactions between Keble and Froude. Fortunately, through separate accounts from both men, we have the record of such a moment: a dialogue between Keble as intellectual and spiritual mentor and Froude as disciple that illuminates their areas of agreement and of difference, thereby revealing issues at the very heart of pre-Tractarian and Tractarian poetics.2

This significant conversation between John Keble and Hurrell Froude took place on a July afternoon and evening in1825 when the two men visited the ruins of Tintern Abbey. In Froude's mind the expedition to the Wye Valley was to have ongoing significance. More than a year later he harks back to it in letter to Keble dated October 14, 1826. Froude would have had no access to the relevant passage in William Wordsworth's still unpublished Prelude, but he echoes the phrasing of "There are in our existence spots of time" (Bk. XII, l. 208)3 when he writes: "I shall always like scrambling expeditions as long as I can recollect ours up the Wye. Those few days seem like a bright spot in my existence, or perhaps it would be a more apt similitude to compare it to what you quoted as we were going in the boat to Tintern, 'The shadow of a great rock in a weary land.'"4

Although there is no record, of course, of the actual conversation, each participant describes this event in a surviving letter, and from their written words we can ascertain something about the substance of what was said and even the tenor and undertone of what was felt but unsaid. Froude's description of the event appears in a letter to his father, Archdeacon Froude, dated August 2, 1825. Keble's comes in a letter to his friend, Hubert Cornish, dated August 16 of the same year. We get more specific details from Froude's account and will consider it first. Although there are a few extraneous details, even they [End Page 7] provide context, and so I will quote the passage in full:

We got to the abbey about 3 examined it well by day light in spite of 2 Bristol parties who had come to dine there for a holiday a scheme wh you wd consider meritorious + who testified how much they entered into the sentiment of the place by much merriment and jollification. & afterwards we spent 2 hours there by Moon light, of course you remember it well I think taking the situation & all together it carried the enchantment of the scenery very far beyond wht I had ever conceived, & perhaps you may be aware that this is not saying a little. Keble & I were going to make a vow that if we died worth £100,000 we wd leave it to repair the building & endow a choire & chapter but we cd not agree about the statutes.5

Froude's description offers yet another substantiation of Oscar Wilde's paradoxical dictum that Life imitates Art. If, as Wilde proposes, the Impressionists created "those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets," then one might say that Caspar Friedrich created this moment: the ruin, the moonlight, the two men.6 Without direct influence of any kind, the scene described by Froude and analogous scenes depicted by Friedrich show a common impulse toward a symbolic registration of life's meaning.

Or, to turn from Friedrich's visual iconography to Keble's language: their situation is filled with "poetry" in the broad sense in which Keble uses the term...

pdf