Louise Imogen Guiney

“ In Froude himself there is nothing very cognate to the long development of European Christian thought; but at least he is no slave of conventions, and from that tendency towards shrinkage and encrustation which makes ‘every Englishman an island’ he is always shaking himself free, by a half-unconscious gesture. It is this good chronic revolt, this heroic reaching-forth, which lends to him, in his incompleteness, a sporadic air of greatness. In the spirit, as in the flesh, he was the traveller of the party. His written pages are not, like Newman’s, literature for ever. ”

“ In this respect, then, I speak of Hurrell Froude, in his intellectual aspect: as a man of high genius, brimful and overflowing with ideas and views, in him original, which were too many and strong even for his bodily strength, and which crowded and jostled against each other, in their effort after distinct shape and expression. And he had an intellect as critical and logical as it was speculative and bold. ”

“ He is teaching me, it would seem, to depend on Him only; for, as perhaps Rogers told you, I am soon to lose dear Froude: which, looking forward to the next twenty-five years of my life, and its probable occupations, is the greatest loss I could have. I shall be truly widowed; yet I hope to bear it lightly.’
At intervals of five days, Archdeacon Froude gave Newman his melancholy bulletin. Nowhere is he more admirable than in facing the impending loss of the son who had come to be his pride and glory, and his bosom friend. ”

“ Froude’s case, however, we cannot set down much of this incompleteness to the score of illness. The strength of his religious impressions, the boldness and clearness of his views, his long habits of self-denial, and his unconquerable energy of mind, triumphed over weakness and decay, till men with all their health and strength about them might gaze upon his attenuated form, struck with a certain awe of wonderment at the brightness of his wit, the intensenesss of his mental vision, and the iron strength of his argument. ”

“ If we know aught about the trend of human character, we know that there was a highly integrant strain in Hurrell Froude; his whole short life was a thirst after the coherence and continuousness of the things of faith. If we know aught about the laws of moral motion, we know that he could neither have gone round in a circle, nor stood still. Like the paradoxical Briton he was, il savait conclure. It is far truer, potentially, of him, than of Newman. ”

“ Froude was brimful of irony, and always ready to surprise and even shock men of a slower temperament, when he could by a smile smooth or disarm them. As he talked, so he wrote in his letters. The Editors of his Remains were under a temptation, which they construed into a necessity, to reproduce him as he really had been, to the very words and the life, and let his words take their chance. Upon the whole, they were right; for no one ever charged, or could now charge, on Froude, that his expressions had brought anyone to Rome, or could doubt that Froude himself was Anglican to the last.... ”

“ Which of the great Scripture characters is there, whose conduct, even that part of it which the Holy Spirit seems to mention approvingly, is not, in some respect or another, a riddle and a paradox to us, with our modern views? Are there not things recorded of the Ancient Church which we know not how to enter into, yet must needs venerate because she gave them her sanction? Nay, and is it not very conceivable that every one of those approved in God’s sight would be in like manner, were his history fully disclosed, “a monster” (as the Psalmist phrases it) to every other? ”

“ Hurrell Froude was ‘un-English’ enough to be arrested, but not repelled, while on the Continent, by the spectacle of extra-English human nature. We have heard him longing, at Zante, to ‘live among them a bit, and get into their notions.’ This beautiful and uncommon openness of mind stamps him an ideal traveller, despite his lack of opportunity; at no single point of a hurried route, beset with difficulties, could he look far below the surface of things. ”

“ Keble, along with an outside show of playful criticism and privileged impertinence, there was a reverence which governed Froude’s whole nature. In the wild and rough heyday of reform, he was a Tory of the Tories. But when authority failed him, from cowardice or stupidity or self-interest, he could not easily pardon it; and he was ready to startle his friends by proclaiming himself a Radical, prepared for the sake of the highest and greatest interests to sacrifice all second-rate and subordinate ones. ”

“ But the culminating point, the complete satisfaction of the heart’s desire, was Rome. ‘All the cities I ever saw are but as dust, even dear Oxford inclusive, compared with its majesty and glory,’ writes Newman to the Rose Hill auditory. This enthusiasm of his was not without its scruples and torments. He adds an occasional colophon of genuine self-comfort, being sure that ‘our creed,’ the while, is ‘purer than the Roman’: a matter which, apparently, Hurrell forgot to dwell upon. He never had to rid himself of the least taint of the Pharisee, although he had been scandalised enough at Naples. ”

“ Men are afraid of being frivolous and unreal in their presence; doubtful what will offend them; or what degree of forbearance they may reckon on; suspicious of their motives, as of men who do not speak freely, unless they speak with authority, of what they most deeply mean; and cautious in accepting their friendship, for it is only firmly given to similarity of religious aim. But the loftiness of sentiment which confines, deepens also the flow of their sympathies; their power of severity gives meaning to their affection, and their singleness of aim a high harmony to their thoughts and tastes. ”

“ Keble was full of fun, but Keble had no Hurrellisms, no ‘little language.’ With the other, it is the note of a certain spiritual unrest; an impiety against his own nature which all sensitive human nature resents in some degree: the jest, indeed, of a philosopher who never lost courage, but who never found joy. Self-valuation and its calmly pompous accents are understood, and even commended, all over the intellectual world. ”

“ The correspondence shows in part the way in which Froude’s spirit rose, under the sense of having such a friend to work with, in the cause which, day by day, grew greater and more sacred in the eyes of both. Towards Mr. Keble Froude felt like a son to a father; towards Mr. Newman like a soldier to his comrade, and him the most splendid and boldest of warriors. Each mind caught fire from the other, till the high enthusiasm of the one was quenched in an early death.
‘Shortly after this friendship began, the course of events also began which finally gave birth to the Oxford Movement. ”

“ Biography, a purblind creature, took him at his own valuation, as we have seen, and gathered him not to her bosom. The history of all the other Tractarians was written, the history of the men who lived very long, long enough to see as Cardinal Manning once said, the polarity of England changed, when the one among them who died young was given his chance. Until Dean Church, abetted by Lord Blachford, made his worth plain, in the beautiful subduing art of a book where all is charity and serene wisdom, Froude had inhabited shadow-land, and was less than the phantom of his brother’s brother. ”

“ Those of Newman and his circle were passionately deep and warm, more like those of boys, in some respects, than of men; perhaps still more like those of women who live aloof from the world in the seclusion of mutual intimacy: intimacy suffused with the fascinating but hectic brightness of a sort of celibate consecration to each other, apart from any thought of stronger or more authoritative human ties that might some time interfere with their sacrament of friendship. ”

“ My readers will have observed how Keble writes respecting Hurrell Froude and his Remains. His death was a heavy blow to him, and no wonder: those who knew him but were not on terms of intimacy, could not but regard mournfully the end of one so accomplished, so gifted, so good and so pure; a man of such remarkable promise, worn out in the very prime of life by slow, and wasting, and long-hopeless disease. ”

“ Somehow or other, without having exposed myself that I know of, in any flagrant way, there remains upon my mind a more vivid impression of my incompetence than I expected to await my entrance into the office. I feel called on to act a part for which neither my habits nor my studies have fitted me. I am, and always have been, childishly alive to the pain of being despised, and I cannot but feel that I have not the sort of knowledge to give me any command over the men’s attention, or even power of benefiting the attentive ”

“ Neither at Eton nor at Oxford, with opportunities by the score, did he ever make a single ‘influential’ personal friend; to no position or emolument did he ever aspire, though he was to give unremitting and precious labour to what he believed to be the best cause in the world. ‘Froude and I were nobodies,’ said Newman, two lifetimes later, with a touch of whimsical pride. Like a child of Socrates, our philosopher would fain see how many things there are which he could do without ”

“ But to no one in the Church of England before the Oxford Movement, did it seem an abnormal state of things. Nor was it so, dogma being dead. When poor Hurrell’s decided opinions had formed, he must have felt himself in some domestic difficulty. Ritual was nothing to him except as the language of belief: scant where that is feeble, full where that is steadfast and profound; how it can be anything else to man is not quite apparent to an inquiring mind. ”

“ Nothing gives one such an idea of the immense propelling force which Hurrell Froude was, as the untoward indecision into which Newman soon fell, though he still had Pusey’s fortress-like strength at his side. Even Keble, without the beloved ‘poker,’ burned with a somewhat darker flame. His silent beneficent career at Hursley was a different matter from his career as Oriel captain of artillery; and no careful student can fail to notice that his later spiritual direction tended more and more towards the nebulous. ”

“ Newman was at this time, as he has told us, drifting away from under the shadow of Liberalism; and in Froude he found a man who, without being a Liberal, was as quick-sighted, as courageous, and as alive to great thoughts and new hopes as himself. Very different in many ways, they were in this alike, that the commonplace notions of religion and the Church were utterly unsatisfactory to them, and that each had the capacity for affectionate and whole-hearted friendship. The friendship began and lasted on, growing stronger and deeper to the end. ”

“ Still, there are so many fine points about him: so much distrust of himself, blended with no inconsiderable powers of genius; so much independence of thought, coupled with deference to the sentiments of others, those he esteemed more learned or more virtuous than himself; so much lightness of spirit, united to such seriousness of mind upon religious truths;—in fine, so earnest and sincere a desire to improve and perfect himself, that our feelings lead us to pass lightly over his faults, and dwell with pleasure upon his finer qualities. ”

“ His irony arose from that peculiar mode in which he viewed all earthly things, himself and all that was dear to him not excepted. It was his poetry. Irony is, indeed, the natural way in which men of high views and keen intellect view the world: they cannot find middle terms of controversy with men of ordinary views; they feel a gulf between them and the world; they cannot descend to the level of lower views, or raise others from that level to their own. ”

“ As dear Izaak says in his innocent-seeming irony, this is, perhaps, to impale him ‘as if you loved him.’ But a free hearing is good law and good art; diverging guesses, contrasted points of view, exercised by the competent, have their uses, especially in England; and some natures and motives bear analysis gallantly well. The reason, at bottom, for so catholic a treatment of Hurrell Froude, is that Hurrell Froude, with his singular detachment and sound humour, would not have disclaimed it: that is, if he had come to know that posterity would fain hear of him again. ”