Hurrell Froude

“ 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. ”

“ Hurrell Froude’s poet-friend Williams calls him
‘Like to himself alone, and no one else.’
But he is unique without being isolated. His habitual mood was a country of far distances, not unlike his own Devon, where the rote is audible from a stern coast, and the desolate tors stand up abrupt and sharp against the white February horizon: a country which gets, in due season, its own merriment of interlying verdure, and builds a most delicate overhanging opal sky. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Longmans, 1890.
‘Hurrell Froude passed away so early in the work of the Movement, and could work so little for it, that his actual share in it needs to be sought out through contemporary records. Little as his pen did, short as his life was, those who can recall the time feel the influence of his mere presence to have been essential to the original impulse which set all going. They cannot imagine the start without his forwarding, impelling look and voice. His presence impressed persons as a spiritual, though living, influence. ”

“ William Brockedon, before he was famous, once started to paint a life-size head in oil of Hurrell, then aged about eleven. It was left unfinished, and is now in the possession of the young sitter’s namesake and nephew, R. H. Froude, Esq., of Bernstein, Newton Abbot, by whose kindness a half-tone ‘restoration’ of it serves as frontispiece to this book. Outside a casual pencil sketch, it is the only portrait at present known of Hurrell Froude; nor has it ever before been reproduced, save once as a small scratchy characterless detail of a Keble College panorama. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I knew [Hurrell Froude] from a child, and I trace in the somewhat singular composition of his character, what he inherited both from his father, and his highly gifted mother: his father, whom Keble after his first visit to Dartington Parsonage playfully described to me as “very amiable, but provokingly intelligent, one quite uncomfortable to think of, making one ashamed of going gawking as one is wont to do about the world, without understanding anything one sees” ”

“ As was said of a greater than Hurrell Froude: ‘Ce diable d’homme a toujours été en se perfectionnant. Il serait devenu honnête homme, si on l’eut laissé vivre.’
When Mr. Keble went down to his curacy at Southrop, at the beginning of the Long Vacation of 1823, [23] Hurrell went with him to read for his B.A. degree, which he took in December of that year. The summer was to him, as to one 22 of his companions there, Isaac Williams, the turning-point in his career. ”

“ All these half-mystical gymnastics of the reflective faculty are going to tell in 1833 and after, when the hour of action strikes, and when, by his already gathered impetus, Hurrell Froude is going to dart ahead in a still level flight, like a gull’s. He will seem external, as if talking more than he thinks, talking somewhat to the bewilderment of those others who can hardly think for his talking. He will be gay; he will be glib; he will pass care-free amid the sweat of horses and men, simply because of these long hard mental vigils, pen in hand, up Oriel Staircase No. ”

“ He dearly loved children, whom he met upon equal terms. Wherever there were children, Hurrell was always testing their metal, while romping with them. Would they run away from a comrade in danger? Would they throw blame on others? ”

“ 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. ”

“ No labour could be too minute or too precise, which was needful to bend the complete body of energies under the yoke of this dedicated service. Hurrell Froude’s diary, edited by Newman and Keble, startled the easy-going world of the Thirties by its exhibition of the thoroughness and the rigour and the precision with which this self-discipline had been carried out. Such a temper of mind was, of course, capable of 404 becoming morbid, strained, unnatural. And in the hands of smaller men, it would rapidly show traces of this. ”

“ On that ground they win the eye. Vital and unexhausted spirits, under no subjection to results, can afford, if they choose, to die anonymous; and never having established a pact with their times, nor with Time at all, they are contemporary backward and forward as far as thought can reach. Of this strangely numerous company in England, though he be but
—‘a fugitive and gracious light
Shy to illumine,’ stands Newman’s early friend, Richard Hurrell Froude, the lost Pleiad of the Oxford Movement. ”

“ Never to maunder, never to mince matters, never to pet an illusion, never to lay down arms while there are ‘cant and shams’ to fight,—all that is very Devonian; and Hurrell Froude, true at every point, was true Devon in this. ”

“ They have burned their boats. There is no going back. Forward all hearts are set. The opportunity is come. It is now or never. Hurrell Froude was the embodiment to them of this spirit of confidence, with its tinge of audacity. He had the glow and the fascination of a man consecrated to a cause. He wrote very little of the book, but his touch is on it everywhere. And in a poem like “The Watchman,” with 403 its splendid swing and radiant courage, we can see how the subtler brain of Newman was swept by the fire and force of the man who was to him like an inspiration. ”

“ A skeleton style, it must be confessed, has its disqualifications as a miscellaneous entertainer. Anything more unlike the golden, glowing, 219 misleading glide of the language of another Froude with whom this generation is more familiar, can hardly be imagined. Yet it was Hurrell who was the poet. It was Hurrell who, according to all evidence, communicated in even higher degree the extraordinary fascinations of that fascinating family. ”

“ This was the period, as everybody knows, of the Oxford Movement, in which Hurrell Froude acted as a pioneer. Hurrell's ideal was the Church of the Middle Ages represented by Thomas Becket. In the vacations he brought some of his Tractarian friends home with him, and Anthony listened to their talk. Strange talk it seemed. They found out, these young men, that Dr. Arnold, one of the most devoutly religious men who ever lived, was not a Christian. The Reformation was an infamous rebellion against authority. Liberalism, not the Pope, was antichrist. ”

“ Hurrell Froude (as Richard was always called, though there was another Hurrell in the family) had now to submit to be ruled by his anxious relatives. He must spend the winter on the Mediterranean and its shores, ... and Newman was easily persuaded to go with him. In these days, it requires little persuasion to induce ordinary people who happen to be free from pressing engagements, to accept the offer of a Continental trip, especially southward, in the winter. But this did rather take Newman’s friends by surprise: the only reason they could suppose was his great anxiety for Hurrell Froude.... ”

“ He would attain to the ‘humdrum.’ ‘Whatever is disagreeable,’ he formulates to himself at twenty-three, ‘whatever, at the same time, makes us like other people, is an opportunity for self-denial,’ and through self-denial he meant, if possible, to remodel Hurrell Froude. That was his fine art and his religion. To ‘make a few saints,’ as he told his friend Rickards, was the way for each man to build up Christianity again for all. ”

“ The lens of controversy will never bring it nearer; only constant prayer, like an eye purged and made new, can peer forward, and rest on the horizon-brink. If Catholicism indeed triumph in England, Hurrell Froude’s cannot ultimately remain a hidden and homeless name. Is it not undeniable that he is to his own communion to-day, exactly what he was long ago, a Hard Saying? ”

“ And thus, in the abstention which was his lifelong garment, Hurrell sleeps. On the hundredth anniversary of his birth, March 25, 1903, a great garland of leaves and simple Devon blossoms lay there, with a dedicatory good word from his favourite Book of Daniel: ‘O man greatly beloved! peace be unto thee: fear not; be strong, yea, be strong.... But go thou thy way till the end be; for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days.’ It cannot be for ever that ‘Froude of the Movement’ shall lack a less perishable memorial. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He will seem worthy of your love.’ The just apprehension of such an one is never discoverable from what he may write. To be told that here was an Oxford Fellow of genius and culture, and to be shown, in proof of it, no professional arts whatever, but a stripped argument, and ‘the rigour of the game,’ flying personalities, tonic commonplaces, buried first principles,—this was somewhat disconcerting. Those who knew Hurrell Froude would take pride in the Spartan simplicity of his every page, where sincere words are welded with sincere thought. ”

“ John, ‘whom God gave me when He took all else away.’
‘Hurrell Froude lives,’ says Principal Fairbairn epigrammatically, ‘in Newman.’ It would be an interesting task for a biographer to examine and define the measure of response with which ‘the Vicar,’ in his historic seclusion, worked into one scheme his ideas, and the ideas bequeathed to him by the least ‘flinching’ Anglican in the world. Froude had managed to give Newman, (and with no more ceremonial pomp than one infant employs in tossing sea-shells to another,) the norm of every single one of his great theories. ”

“ Like Pusey, Hurrell had a talisman and a safeguard in the love of a pious mother. The extreme natural sympathy between them was heightened by the boy’s fickle health, and his unconscious appeal for continued care. One experience of early invalidism and its results, lasting for some time, drew from Margaret Froude an oblique comment or protest which is enough to make one love and admire her womanliness. She drew up a letter to an imaginary correspondent, which was really intended for her tall son himself. ”

“ Froude, if anyone,’ wrote Newman anonymously in The British Critic of April, 1839, ‘gained his views from his own mind.’ But indeed, as is implied, none of us ever gain our views from our own minds: views coming with an underived spontaneous air are born of a man’s superior attentiveness to the working Mind of things. Hurrell, pacing Trinity Gardens, his hand on Williams’ shoulder, with the off-hand edict: ‘Isaac, we must make a Row in the world!’ recalls to us another agitator of whimsical disinterestedness, Camille Desmoulins. ”

“ To revert to the elder generation—Margaret Spedding, her own mother’s namesake, born, as we have seen, in 1774, was dearly loved at home for seven and twenty years; at that somewhat mature age (as it was considered in 1802) , she married the Rev. Robert Hurrell Froude, Rector of Dartington in Devonshire. His own people were not less interesting, and even more ancient, than hers. Hurrells, an armigerous family, and Froudes, rising yeomen from Kent, had struck deep and wide roots in Devon soil at least as early as the reign of Elizabeth. ”

“ Mr. Hurrell Froude was, as Newman describes him, a man of the highest gifts, gentle, tender, playful, versatile and “of the most winning patience and considerateness in discussion.” ... I feel little doubt that Dr. Newman’s wrath against “Liberalism” (as for many years afterwards he always called it, identifying, as he did, Liberalism with Latitudinarianism) was, to a very considerable extent, a moral contagion caught from Hurrell Froude. ”

“ And it is noticeable, both in his case and that of Richard Hurrell Froude, his chief coadjutor in sowing the seed of the coming Tractarianism in College, that their method was essentially dialectic and modern, even though its effect, on themselves and others, was to lead them into “fierce thoughts” against the modern spirit and the modern trend of things. Pusey might bury himself in theology, and Keble might be the singer and sweet saint of a revived devotion ”