Feb. 28, 1836.
‘My dear son died this day. Since my last he has been gradually but quietly sinking. After a rather more than usually restless night, he spoke of himself as being quite comfortable this morning, and appeared to hear the Service of the day, and a sermon, read to him with so much attention that I did not think the sad event so near as it has been. About two o’clock, as I was recommending him to take some egg and wine, I observed a difficulty in his breathing. He attempted to speak; and then after a few slight struggles, his sufferings were at an end.’
He was laid to rest on March 3, beside his mother, brother, and sister, close to the Church porch. The burial service was read by the Rev. Anthony Buller, a Devonian and an Oriel man, an old friend who dearly loved him. Apparently neither Newman nor Keble travelled down for the day to Dartington Parsonage, though the former, at least, had arranged to do so from London. But the Archdeacon’s tidings were sent to Oxford, and it was only on the morning of March 1 that Newman learned of his loss. It quite overcame him. ‘He opened the letter in my room,’ writes Thomas Mozley to his sister, ‘and could only put it into my hand, with no remark. He afterwards, Henry Wilberforce told me, lamented with tears (not a common thing for him), that he could not [have seen] Froude just to tell him how much he felt that he had owed to him in the clearing and strengthening of his views.’ Keble, too, at the Hursley Altar, the Sunday after Hurrell’s home-going, which must have been his own first Sunday there as Vicar, broke down completely, and for some minutes could not go on. At Oriel (to overhear again the Rev. T. Mozley addressing his brother John): ‘Froude’s death seems not a gloom, but a calm sadness over the College. Newman showed me his father’s letter written the same day, perfectly quiet and manly, making various arrangements, and telling Newman and his [other] friends to make selections from Froude’s scanty collection of books, to keep for his sake. I suppose Froude never got a book or anything else, in his life, merely for the sake of having it. His absolute indifference to possession was something marvellous. Did I ever tell you that for two years, at least, he has given his Fellowship to Newman, to go towards the Tracts? Yet he was by no means careless about money matters; for he with great pains put the accounts of Junior Treasurer (which I find troublesome enough even now), on an entirely new and simpler plan, to the great convenience of his successor…. I dare say there is no one who has said more severe and cutting things to me, yet the constant impression Froude has always left on my mind is that of kindness and sweetness.’ This testimony, indeed, was general.
On March 2, Newman wrote to his old friend J. W. Bowden, from Oxford:
‘Yesterday morning brought me the news of Froude’s death; and if I could collect my thoughts at this moment, I would say something to you about him; but I scarcely can. He has been so very dear to me, that it is an effort to me to reflect on my own thoughts about him. I can never have a greater loss, looking on for the whole of my life, for he was to me, and he was likely to be ever, in the same degree of continual familiarity which I enjoyed with yourself in our undergraduate days…. It would have been a great satisfaction to me had you known him. You once saw him, indeed; but it was when his health was gone, and when you could have no idea of him. It is very mysterious that anyone so remarkably and variously gifted, and with talents so fitted for these times, should be removed. I never, on the whole, fell in with so gifted a person. In variety and perfection of gifts I think he far exceeded even Keble. For myself, I cannot describe what I owe to him as regards the intellectual principles of religion and morals. It is useless to go on to speak of him: it has pleased God to take him, in mercy to him, but by a very heavy visitation to all who were intimate with him. Yet everything was so bright and beautiful[263] about him, that to think of him must always be a comfort. The sad feeling I have is that one cannot retain in one’s memory all one wishes to keep there; and that as year passes after year, the image of him will be fainter and fainter.’
The long-memoried man who uttered that was only too conscious that he had no portrait of his departed friend.
On the 6th, turning aside from other things, Newman says, in his thrilling undertone, to Keble:
‘… We have indeed had an irreparable loss; but I have for years expected it. I would fain be his heir. When I was with him in October, I so wished to drink out his thoughts, but found they would not flow except in orderly course, as all God’s gifts. It was an idea of Bowden’s, the other day, that as time goes on, and more and more Saints are gathered in, fewer are needed on earth: the City of God has surer and deeper foundations, day by day.’
Some thought of kindred wing crossed at the same time the mind of Charlotte Keble at Hursley. ‘I shall be very glad,’ she says, feelingly, to her sister-in-law Elizabeth on March 9, ‘for poor Mr. Newman to have the comfort of John’s being in Oxford. He seems very much to need it; and nobody, I suppose, can so entirely sympathise with him, both in his distress for the loss, and also in the views and opinions which knit them all three together. I can’t help thinking (at least, one doesn’t know), but that Mr. Froude may in some way or other be of more service now than if he had been kept here longer.’[264]
Perhaps no apology need be made for dwelling on the impression left by Hurrell Froude on the minds of his comrades, above all, on the mind of his best-loved comrade, after he had passed away. This afterglow, this ‘trailing cloud of glory,’ is biographic comment indeed. He had lived so detached a life that it is pleasant to associate him, at the last, with the schwärmerei of much tender common human sorrow, with sorrow sure of his own immortal continued interest in all that he had worked for in England: for it helps to show him less as an elf and a ‘kinless loon,’ than as the Saint-errant which, through his thirty-two years, he was.
The heavy blow of his mother’s unexpected death fell on Newman in May. The association of this loss with the sharp foregoing one, and the remembrance of Froude, whom he had known and lived with so happily since they first became colleagues at Oriel, are palpable enough in the brave sigh of that greatly religious soul, breathed in a letter to Harriett Newman, dated June 21, 1836:
‘You have nothing to be uneasy at, so far as I am concerned. Thank God, my spirits have not sunk, nor will they, I trust. I have been full of work, and that keeps me generally free from dejection. If it ever comes, it is never of long continuance, and is even not unwelcome. I am speaking of dejection from solitude. I never feel so near Heaven as then. Years ago, from 1822 to 1826, I used to be very much by myself, and in anxieties of various kinds which were very harassing. I then, on the whole, had no friend near me, no one to whom I opened my mind fully, or who could sympathise with me. I am but returning, at worst, to that state … and after all, this life is very short, and it is a better thing to be pursuing what seems God’s Will than to be looking after one’s own comfort. I am learning more than hitherto to live in the presence of the dead: this is a gain which strange faces cannot take away.’
Less than a year later, a similar strain comes like a music of triumph over sorrow in such a letter to Frederic Rogers, on the death of his sister, as none but Newman could write:
‘This is only a fresh instance of what I suppose one must make up one’s mind to think, and what is consoling to think, that those who are early taken away are the fittest to be taken, and that it is a privilege so to be taken, and that they are in their proper place when taken. Surely God would not separate from us such, except it were best both for them and for us; and that those who are taken away are such as are most acceptable to Him seems proved by what we see: for scarcely do you hear of some especial instance of religious excellence, but you have also cause of apprehension how long such a one is to continue here…. We pray daily: “Thy Kingdom come”: if we understand our words, we mean it as a privilege to leave the world, and we must not wonder that God grants the privilege to some of those who pray for it, … pray for our eventual re-gathering, but our dispersion in the interval. The more we live in the world that is not seen, the more shall we feel that the removal of friends into that unseen world is a bringing them near to us, not a separation. Our Saviour’s going brought Him nearer, though invisibly, in the Spirit.’ It is all reticent and impersonal, but it rises, before his great battle begins, from Newman’s stricken lonely heart. ‘Thou doomed to die,’ as he had said, long before, in his poem, ‘David and Jonathan’:
Last of all, come from his half-unwilling hand the lines well-known to students of sacred verse.
What beauty is in that word ‘refrain,’ a filament of English feeling kept between the quick and the dead! It occurs in a little afterthought of a stanza, which was the only poetic offering of Newman’s pen to Hurrell Froude gone.[265] Never was there so imponderable an obituary; nor ever any more exquisitely in keeping.
For ‘the rest’ was indeed ‘silence.’ A proposal for a monument in S. Mary’s at Oxford, affectionately brought forward by Robert Wilberforce, as due to ‘our incomparable friend,’ ‘that invaluable friend,’ somehow fell through. A special paper for The British Magazine fell through too, neither Newman nor Keble being able, in his first grief, to write it to his own satisfaction. The only actual notice of Froude’s decease occurred in a bare alphabetical list printed in the April number, 1836. ‘Tributes of Respect’ were usual in the Magazine, but he had none. The Annual Biographer and Obituary, published by the Longmans in 1837, does not include him. Nor had he any epitaph, not even when Archdeacon Froude died twenty-three years later, until Dartington Church was taken down, being thought too remote from the village population, in 1878, and the stones used in a re-erection close to the highway below; then the vault was railed in, where it was left in the lonely grassy space, with only the ancient Hall, the grey ivied tower, and the sun-dial for solemn neighbours, and the name and dates of each of the Froude family were cut on the plain slab. They are unaccompanied even by a text, or a Christian symbol. 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.
DARTINGTON OLD CHURCH, NOW DESTROYED
(The railing by the south porch enclosed the tomb of the Froudes)
THE PRESENT ASPECT OF HURRELL FROUDE’S BURIAL-PLACE
(IN THE FOREGROUND), DARTINGTON OLD CHURCHYARD
In 1836, the ‘vanishing of such a spirit without sign’ was not to be endured. It was the most natural thing in the world that all he had written should be gathered together, that such a lover of books (as Leigh Hunt says somewhere, in one of his happy literary retrospects), should himself become a book. Hurrell became a singular book, as it happened, made up, paradoxically, of matter never prepared by himself for publication; and he and it were put forth as a party manifesto. It may not be uninteresting to review the origin and character of The Remains of the late Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, M.A., Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, printed by the Rivingtons in 1838 and 1839, and consisting of four volumes octavo. The Editors, whose names do not appear upon the title-page, were the Rev. John Keble and the Rev. John Henry Newman. The latter is generally supposed to have done most of the work; there are published letters of Keble’s to Sir John Coleridge, and of Newman’s to Mr. Frederic Rogers, which go to show that the idea of bringing out the Remains, and the initiatory labour, including the first Preface, were Newman’s. But according to Coleridge’s Memoir, Mr. Keble, as collaborator, wrote by far the greater part of both Prefaces. For the very beautiful second one he was certainly responsible.[266]
Of Part I. of these Remains, Vol. i. is devoted to a Private Journal; Memoranda personal and philosophical; Letters to Friends; one Latin and five English poems; seven pages of remembered miscellaneous sayings; and a diary as Appendix. The companion volume is devoted to Sermons complete and fragmentary; three Essays on subjects connected with arts and sciences, and three on subjects purely ecclesiastical. Part II., Vol. i., has five papers and some fragments, none of which are on secular themes; and the final volume is given up to the History of the Contest between Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Henry II., drawn from original documents and State Papers, left unfinished by Hurrell Froude, and carried on and edited by the Rev. James Bowling Mozley.
The collecting of ‘dearest Froude’s papers’ had begun before April, 1836; they were looked over at Hursley in July; by September, Newman, otherwise busy as he was, writes that he is getting on with the transcriptions, and that James Mozley has been hard at work during the whole Vacation on S. Thomas of Canterbury. Archdeacon Froude sends up his auxiliary supplies in October, from Dartington Parsonage.
‘… I sent off a parcel to you, three days ago, by Henry Champernowne: it contains the text of dear Hurrell’s manuscripts. All your letters to him that I can find are also enclosed. With the latter I must confess I have not parted without regret. They are memorials of your affectionate friendship with one whose image is ever before me, and to which I could never turn without a delightful interest that I cannot describe. His correspondence for many years with myself[267] turns principally on little passing incidents, or relates to matters of private concern; but it is of great value to me as a sort of journal from early boyhood nearly to the time of our separation.’
Lyra Apostolica was issued in November, and several of the critics had taken pains to single out ‘β’s’ poems for special commendation, even if at the expense of Keble and Newman: certainly Samuel Wilberforce did so, in his asked-for review, the tone of which was so disconcerting and unexpected to the asker;[268] and The Christian Observer had saluted Hurrell as ‘the most spiritual and least bigoted of the whole set.’ All this was encouraging to the projectors of the Remains, who knew better than outsiders of how keen and high an intellect, how holy an inspiration, their cause had been deprived. Newman’s notes, as the editing progressed, are very sanguine.
To the Rev. John Keble, June 30, 1837.
‘… I have transcribed [R. H. F.’s] Private Thoughts, and am deeply impressed with their attractive character. They are full of instruction and interest, as I think all will feel. I have transcribed them for your imprimatur. If you say Yes, send them to me; I propose to go to press almost immediately. These Thoughts present a remarkable instance of the temptation to rationalism, self-speculation, etc., subdued. We see his mind only breaking out into more original and beautiful discoveries, from that very repression which, at first sight, seemed likely to be the utter prohibition to exercise his special powers. He used playfully to say that his “highest ambition was to be a humdrum,” and by relinquishing the prospect of originality he has but become the more original.’
On July 5, Newman gives to Rogers categorical reasons for his plan of publication.
‘1. To show his … unaffectedness, playfulness, brilliancy, which nothing else would show. His Letters approach to conversation, to show his delicate mode of implying, not expressing, sacred thoughts; his utter hatred of pretence and humbug. I have much to say on the danger which I think at present besets the Apostolical Movement of getting peculiar in externals, i.e., formal, manneristic. Now Froude disdained all show of religion. In losing him we have lost an important correction…. His Letters are a second-best preventative.
‘2. To make the work interesting, nothing takes so much as these private things.
‘3. To show the history of the formation of his opinions. Vaughan[269] was observing the other day that we never have the history of men in the most interesting period of their life, from eighteen to twenty-eight or thirty, while they are forming: now this gives Froude’s.
‘4. To show how deliberately and dispassionately he formed his opinions. They were not taken up as mere fancies: this invests them with much consideration. Here his change from Tory to Apostolical is curious.
‘5. To show the interesting growth of his mind, how indolence was overcome, etc.; to show his love of mathematics, his remarkable struggle against the lassitude of disease, his working to the last.
‘6. For the intrinsic merit of his remarks.
‘If you think the notion entertainable, I wish you could put the MS. into the hands of some person who is a good judge, yet more impartial than ourselves, in order to ascertain his impression of it…. If you and the other agree in countenancing the notion, then send down the MS. to Keble, with an enumeration of [my] reasons for publishing.’
To the Rev. John Keble, July 16, 1837.
‘… Williams has suggested the publication of extracts from Hurrell’s letters. I feared at first they would be too personal as regards others; but then I began to think that if they could be given, they would be next best to talking with him, and would show him in a light otherwise unattainable. Then there are so many clever things in those he sent me: the first hints of principles which I and others have pursued, and of which he ought to have the credit. Moreover, we have often said the Movement, if anything comes of it, must be enthusiastic. Now here is a man fitted above all others to kindle enthusiasm. I have written to William Froude about it, who caught at the idea, which he said had already struck him. Considering the state of the University, everything which can tell against Hampdenism[270] will be a gain.’
Newman continued sanguine.
To J. W. Bowden, Esq., Hursley, Oct. 6, 1837.
‘… I am here for a week to consult with Keble about Froude’s papers, which are now in the press, and require a good deal of attention. You will, I think, be deeply interested in them. His father has put some into my hands of a most private nature. They are quite new even to Keble, who knew more about him than anyone…. All persons of unhackneyed feelings and youthful minds must be taken with them; others will think them romantic, scrupulous, over-refined, etc.’
The ‘papers of a most private nature’ dated chiefly from Hurrell’s twenty-third to his twenty-seventh year. ‘They have taught me,’ Mr. Keble writes to that friend, his own earliest biographer, whom they were to disturb and shock when once in print, ‘they have taught me things concerning him which I never suspected myself, as to the degree of self-denial which he was practising when I was most intimate with him. This encourages me to think that there may be many such whom one dreams not of.’
How Froude came to leave these secret manuscripts behind him is not perfectly clear. Mr. Keble had advised burning them, long before. During the months and even years when there was natural opportunity for disposing of all his affairs, Froude had abstained from destroying his papers. The only explanation is that he was too completely indifferent, in all such matters, to make a move of any sort. He belonged to a journal-keeping age and a journal-keeping family: to write, and to dismiss the writing from memory, were to him easy matters. Neither his kind of memory, nor his degree of self-attentiveness, would have helped him to produce an Apologia. His diaries, properly speaking, have absolutely no egotism: he is merely dramatically concentrated on R. H. F. as a moral ‘dummy’ convenient for observation and correction, and it was quite in keeping with his habit that he should have taken no thought whatever of a testamentary nature, towards the end. He could, of course, have had no suspicion of the ultimate use to which his confessions were soon to be put. Besides, he would harbour no fear of depreciation, but would rather have desired that, even in the grave.
On the fly-leaf of the finished book they placed a sweet motto from the Adeste, sanctæ conjuges, the midnight hymn appointed for the Office of the Commemoration of Holy Women. It came from the Parisian Breviary, in which Froude had delighted. Newman was editing the Hymns included in it at this very time.
Isaac Williams’ sensitive translation is a fit mate for the Latin:
Such a motto, it might be urged, was both too personal and too deprecatory. The perfect posy for the venture would have been, instead, a word of Felippo di Boni:
The Editors felt, no doubt, that anything like this, for all of its fitness, would have imported a note of unnecessary defiance. To print the Remains at all was certainly war-cry enough.
The first Part, comprising two volumes, appeared at mid-winter, 1838. It was much talked of, as was inevitable, among the interested friends and foes of the High Church party, and it bred the most contrary impressions. Beyond the familiar circle, Froude’s comrades and their followers, what success the book won was a frank succès de scandale. Its one tangible result was to urge on Low Church zealots to build the Martyrs’ Memorial at Oxford. It was dedicated in 1841; and subconsciously, it was from plinth to finial what Mr. Keble called it, ‘a public dissent from Froude.’[271] Love for Ridley, Latimer, and the great Cranmer who, as F. Rogers once predicated, ‘burned well,’ were less potent in raising that graceful landmark than heated disapprobation of Froude, Newman, and Keble himself. Sic vos non vobis. Hurrell liked ironical situations. Here was one to his hand.
The sale of the Remains was never great; in fact, it was so restricted that the publishers, about seven months after the launching of the first Part, made considerable demur before bringing the second Part out at all. No extra edition was called for; the work has stood, ever since, among the out-of-print rarities of London catalogues. Of the mass of writing which it comprised, sacred or secular, there has been but a single paper reprinted: the remarkable paper on State Interference in Matters Spiritual, issued by Selwood in 1869, with a strongly corroborative Introduction from the pen of that good militant shepherd, the Rev. William J. E. Bennett, Vicar of Frome.
On March 29, 1838, Newman wrote from Oxford to Keble, on the subject then uppermost in their minds.
‘You must not be vexed to have a somewhat excited letter from Edward Churton[272] on the subject of dear Hurrell’s Remains. I doubt not, too, you really will not be so. All persons whose hearts have been with Cranmer and Jewel are naturally pained; and one must honour them for it. It is the general opinion here that the Journal ought to have been published, and is full of instruction. Yesterday morning I had the following pleasant announcement from William Froude: “My father is much pleased with Hurrell’s book. He had been rather alarmed by some comments made upon it in a letter from Sir John Coleridge; but the book itself has quite reassured him. The Preface says exactly what one wished to have said.”’
If Archdeacon Froude felt satisfied, that would atone for much. Mr. Rose’s opinion was next in importance to the Archdeacon’s, to the Oriel men responsible for this particular exercise of it. Fortunately, he was sufficiently favourable, writing to Pusey from King’s College on March 14, 1838, to ask for ‘an account,’ or ‘a sketch’ of ‘poor Froude’s most interesting Remains. I do not know to whom to give them for review. For very few can understand or appreciate his very peculiar excellences. A book so miscellaneous, touching on so very many points is a very hard matter for a regular reviewer.’[273] Apart from these graded expressions of private sympathy, there was censure and even ridicule to bear; and self-earned troubles are proverbially not the sweetest. Violent denunciations arose on all sides, and especially within the bosom of an ungrateful Church. The Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity fulminated from the very University pulpit; the Bishop of Ferns and Leighlin, the most persevering ‘charger’ of all, thundered against ‘that very rash and intemperate young man.’ Even the House of Commons was, on one occasion at least, disturbed by godly zeal exerted against the book. To James Mozley, during July, Newman wrote: ‘You see Lord Morpeth[274] has been upon me in the House, as editor of the Remains. Gladstone has defended me; Sir R[obert] Inglis the University.’[275] And Rogers sends his vivacious message to Newman: ‘What do you think of Gladstone’s exculpation of you? And what of the face Froude would have made at being quoted in the House of Commons as “an accomplished gentleman” by Lord Morpeth?’[276]
The Remains, quickly as it fell out of print, was a storm-centre. Mr. Gladstone, concerned with defending the good faith of the editor-in-chief, yet handled the oppugned work with repeated regrets.[277] He has left it upon record, referring to an earlier year, and echoing the adjectives of Bishop O’Brien just quoted: ‘My first impressions and emotions in connection with [the Oxford Movement] were those of indignation at what I thought the rash intemperate censures pronounced by Mr. Hurrell Froude upon the Reformers.’[278] Newman’s Correspondence[279] gives quite a roll-call of the Bishops, editors, magazines, and private persons ‘opening on us.’ He adds: ‘I can fancy the old Duke sending down to ask the Heads of Houses whether we cannot be silenced.’
Some who took the Remains to heart were more than half sorry that it was published. The real reasons for that measure had been in the Prefaces a little obscured, because largely taken for granted as obvious. So much is clear: the need had been felt of issuing a book to serve as a dead friend’s only monument. But the moment one came to handle his compositions, all warlike, all new, one foresaw the ethical risk of putting them forward, without first educating a public to read them. Mr. Wilson, representing his own earliest feeling, and that of Mr. Keble his Vicar, sympathised, in the very beginning, with Newman over ‘the great difficulty and perplexity you must be in at present, as to what course to take…. We cannot afford by any shock even to throw back into their former upright posture of indifference or suspicion some who are now leaning our way.’ To publish poor Hurrell at all turned out a large diplomatic matter. Confident that he needed only to be known to be loved and trusted, Newman resolved to make him intimately and unmistakably known, and his opinions, in consequence, heeded as they deserved. The Remains is almost the first among modern English books to expose what is sacredly private: we are all used now, whether with diminishing or undiminishing protest, to exhibitions of the spiritual anatomy of humankind. The Editors’ challenge to an Erastian world seemed based on the belief that their cause had bred its perfect flower in Froude, and that only to show him as he was, with his mighty single-hearted zest, his aspirations towards holiness, and his playful gentleness, would be to show also the attaching loveliness of their cause. They proceeded upon one or two syllogisms which had no flaw, but also no application. For, plainly, Froude was impossible to be understanded of the people, and the more he himself was expounded the worse it was for the system which he personified. An eminent critic led the way in dwelling, not on the question so unmistakably thrust forward, of Præmunire, but on Hurrell’s confessed and repented glance to see ‘whether goose came on the table at dinner!’ That goose is well known to a number of contemporary persons who have never owned a copy of the Remains, nor heard what ascetic theology has to say of such a thing as concupiscence of the eyes. Hurrell, in a secret hour, had named the goose only to his guardian angel, between whom and himself the sense of humour could hardly come into play. Keble’s humour, and Newman’s likewise, were almost incomparably keen: one knows not how these passages survived the proofreading. It was inevitable, however, that public attention should fasten upon them with disrelish and horror. They were unusual, they were not ‘self-respecting’; they belonged to types outgrown and superseded; in short, they were fatally ‘un-English,’ to that most respectable year 1838. It was bidden to admire a humility and disinterestedness in which it could not believe. A completely non-sentimental religion was a trying spectacle, even to the most religious among Early Victorian readers. A young man ever accusing himself, a young man waiving his own profit, and doing these monstrous things by force of will and habit, all his life, was simply an offence to common morals. Natural virtues are well enough: truth, industry, ambition, family affection, are at least legal: they are not a slap in the face to what is called a Christian community. But a temper fed from hidden springs, and full of austerity and detachment, must ever look to the mass of men like an alien thing, the outcome of hypocrisy or sheer foolishness. Nothing but an outward and visible career passed in nursing the sick in hospitals can, to this day, redeem it.
‘The public,’ says a sociologist,[280] with charming scorn, ‘are acquainted with the nature of their own passions, and the point of their own calamities; can laugh at the weakness they feel, and weep at the miseries they have experienced: but all the sagacity they possess, be it how great soever, will not enable them to judge of likeness to that which they have never seen, nor to acknowledge principles on which they have never reflected. Of a comedy or a drama, an epigram or a ballad, they are judges from whom there is no appeal; but not of the representation of facts which they have never examined, of beauty which they have never loved.’ The good public and anything which savours of the merely supernatural, the good public and the Kingdom of Heaven, in short, are incongruous. But it is only fair to them to quote, again, the word of a far more practical observer, which had, from the first, a bearing on those whom the writer calls ‘the firebrands of the Movement’: ‘I do not say the English are a people of good sense, but I say they abhor extremes, and always fly off from those who carry things too far.’[281] They do indeed. But every conclusion becomes an extreme, and a thing carried too far, where they are concerned.
Froude had always trimmed his sails not so much to the wind, as according to a theory of navigation. It follows that ‘the picture of a mind,’ his mind, such as his friends wished to exhibit it, was not a ‘necessity to the times’: in fact, it was an intrusion upon them. It was in deadly hostility not only to their low ideals, but to their ordinary characteristics and best accepted spirit. Froude, or his unconscious influence, was only too well organised to ‘toss and gore several persons,’ and the self-satisfied Establishment which had honourably reared them. An illustration of existing contraries may not be far to seek. Two good men of mark, born and dying in the roomy Church of England, once expressed, each in his turn, his feeling about his epitaph. Mr. Robert Southey was pleased to say (with what his age considered perfect decorum, with what our age must admit to be perfect truth): ‘I have this conviction: that die when I may, my memory is one of those which will “smell sweet, and blossom in the dust.”’ He also repeated the sentiment in verse. But the testamentary ideas of Richard William Church ran in another mould:
It is safe to predicate that thinking persons who sympathise with the one, revolt from the other. Now the cleavage between the dispositions which brought about these irreconcilable expressions, is the cleavage in the national ideals. What is so sure of blossoming in the dust, although professedly it lay all stress upon the Vicarious Atonement, is Protestantism. The belief in the necessity of the co-operative human will in the scheme of Redemption, although it attain only to an awestruck hope of the Almighty Mercy, is, well—not precisely Protestantism! Between the two moods there is no mutual approach, still less, amalgamation: for between them is set up the Sign to be contradicted. It is to be feared that Hurrell Froude, had he known of an admired poet’s intention for ever to ‘smell sweet,’ could hardly have been restrained from quoting his kinsman Hamlet’s ‘Pah!’ Piety which of malice prepense smells sweet, will like Hurrell Froude no better now than it liked him in the Tractarian twilight. It will be seen that Mr. Southey was not enthusiastic over the Remains.
To put the Remains on the open market was too bold a venture of faith, though they would have served their dialectic purpose well, and found their own readily, even had they been privately issued, even if edited with greater reserve. It was quite natural that Froude should have passed posthumously for a mere agitator given up to triviality and impudence. If it were true that for him living, ‘one constantly trembled, in mixed society,’ what can have possessed his Editors to think that his anarchist voice (the voice, really, of a great constructive critic) would be suffered in a four-volume monologue? All he was, all he thought, separated him by whole elements and universes from the ordinary citizen. Accost between them turned farcical in the act: ‘as if a dog should try to make friends with a fish!’ His disqualifications for the final mission given him were intellectual as well as moral. To name but two among them, he was in love with the ‘Dark’ Ages, the fountainhead of hard logic and thorough craftsmanship, and still more in love with the original document, at a period when historical research was not only unfashionable, but inferentially abhorred; and his animus must needs have seemed ‘Popish’ or worse, when it but led him to handle as self-evident fallacies the darling predilections of centuries of British basilolatry.
It would have been bad enough had his convictions been expressed always in academic terms, such as he himself, after all, did employ pretty constantly in addressing the magazine public. But Hurrell’s ‘little language,’ superadded to his strong opinions, was too much for a day of buckramed dignity. His verbal polity spared neither himself nor the species, and it must have been appalling to others beside the Holy Willies. Moreover, there was such gusto and emphasis in all he said, that the effect was almost that, as it were, of calling a spade a spade, with a plebeian ‘swear-word’ before it. Nobody else in that English generation, not even Welby Pugin, dealt in so elastic a vernacular. But surely, private letters may take what tone and pace they please? Why did it not occur to everyone to allow, in extenuation of this too lively fashion of ‘sparks running to and fro among the reeds,’ that the Rev. Mr. Froude was young, and younger, moreover, than his years? The ideas of personal chronology then current were illiberal. We know that men and women aged thirty were looked upon as fairly venerable figures in the world of our grandfathers, and were bound to have shed the last of the pin-feathers of indiscretion. For purposes of general protest against the common vanities of plumage, primitive attire may with profit be retained: but it is likely to enrage the barnyard. There is a good deal to be said for the speech which suggests to us not Court dress, not even dressing-gown and slippers, but overalls. It puts everything at once on a workmanlike basis. A masterly critic has observed how great a debt Newman owed to Hurrell Froude in the development of his peerless ease and naturalness. To go further, it may truly be said that one caught up the living accent of the other. As a good latter instance, take Newman’s famous passage in the Apologia about ‘seeing a ghost’ when the point raised in an article on the Donatists first arrested him in 1839. The echo is yet clearer in a contemporary letter. ‘It gave me the stomach-ache,’ he says. Such sportive phraseology sounds the majestic capacity of educated human expression. But sportive phraseology had its disadvantages, when it was sent forth broadcast to ‘dictate to the clergy of this country,’ or contribute towards ‘the picture of a mind’ known by the picturers to be chastened and grave. The innumerable chapters of the Remains which were sober as a monochrome were quite overborne, in popular estimation, even where that estimation inclined to friendliness, by some few prancing words or lines. The amice and cope of the stately Muse of Theology symbolised nothing to the carpers who believed that they had once caught a handmaid of hers in the neat no-drapery of the corps de ballet. Indisposed to look below the surface of Froude’s puzzling temperament, they found only effrontery in his clear, terse, vivacious call, and only dulness in his underlying mood, master of statement and definition, and of armoured synthesis. It was not altogether their fault: because his slang, it may as well be admitted, constitutes a defect of character. It was a conscious revolt against all that goes to make up ‘donnishness,’ and in so far an element of strength as well as of comedy; but it was also the makeshift of a man who contemned himself almost to the point of eccentricity, and who often could not bear without a mocking grimace, the serious utterance of his most serious thought. 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. But this bitter mood, as of a Cabinet Council plus the Court fool, is too strange and new. There are those now, as there were then, whom it shocks and deters.
Closely allied with all this is the question of his so unceremonious dealing with men and things. As we are reminded by his Editors, most of it was impersonal enough, for his mind was set on principles only. ‘I allow hatred is an imperfect state, but I think it is just young people that it becomes’: is a remark from his remembered talk. ‘The most difficult virtue to attain,’ he went on, ‘seems to me the looking on wanton oppressors as mere machines, without feeling any personal resentment.’ This is akin to a curious axiom of Hazlitt’s, which would exonerate almost any cynic and sluggard, that ‘to think ill of mankind, and not to wish them ill, is perhaps the highest genius and virtue.’ Many adherents, unblessed with imagination, of Froude’s own party, might be brought to bay by his Common Room pronouncement that ‘the cultivation of right principles has a tendency to make men dull and stupid.’ (His friend Thomas Mozley goes even farther in the impious generalisation, and accuses Evangelical goodness, ‘mixed with poverty and a certain amount of literary or religious ambition,’ of producing ‘an unpleasant effect on the skin!’) These endearments were, as was but just, not confined by Froude to the elect. He was a hard hitter also against individuals non-Jacobite and non-Apostolical; he made ninepins of living and dead, great and small. On this faculty, however, he was very far from priding himself. No one could be more keenly aware of his sharp tongue than he. Given events as he saw them, and his naked eye to transpierce them, and his store of natural animation fostered in a home atmosphere which was at all times highly charged with criticism, and we have some explanation of his merciless proficiency in adverbs and adjectives, applied impartially to the Bishop Jewels of a past age, or the undergraduates of his own. From the first, he had felt this smartness of speech to be his pitfall. His journals are full of self-accusations, prayers, and resolutions on the subject. ‘To-day, when —— called on me, I was forced to watch myself at every turn, for fear of saying something irreligious or uncharitable.’ … ‘I have again been talking freely of people.’ … ‘Not to go out of my way to say disrespectful things … not to say satirical things either in people’s presence or behind their backs, or to take pleasure in exposing them when they seem absurd, or to answer them ill-naturedly when they have said offensive things.’ … ‘I said I thought —— an ass, when there was not the least occasion for me to express my sentiments about him. And yet I, so severe on the follies, and so bitter against the slightest injuries I get from others, am now presenting myself before my great Father to ask for mercy on my most foul sins, and forgiveness for my most incessant injuries. “How shall I be delivered from the body of this death!”… I see nothing for it but not to talk at all, and let myself be reckoned stupid and glumpy: and this I will do. I must give up talking altogether except where civility absolutely requires it. I am not to be trusted with words.’
All this ‘mortal moral strife’ dates from his earliest manhood. He certainly never relaxed the effort toward humbleness and mental correction; though a superficial reader might question whether he had, at the end, succeeded in attaining any appreciable measure of either. But it is worth while to remember here that his whole effort would be not to let his friends at Oxford become aware of his victory, if he gained it. Sooner than face human approval in these matters, he would say, every day in the week, that he ‘thought —— an ass,’ if only to keep up appearances.
Again, and apart from the amenities, the Remains are not edited in a way to conciliate the unwilling. In one department, they are provokingly presented with raggedly-pieced phrases, names suppressed, and divers eliminations, almost enough to kill interest; in another, they commit to the general scrutiny amorphous themes, repetitions, the mere crude bones of theory, fragments never shaped for the press. Never was it truer, of any book or of any man, that
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. Those who knew him not might turn away from that as from downright incapacity.
Of Keats, in his marvellous development, Mr. Lowell beautifully says: ‘He knew that what he had to do had to be done quickly.’ So, in a contrasted fashion, with Hurrell Froude, intent not upon his own artistic perfection, but upon the leavening of the national mind. Graces were just what he could best afford to neglect in that too hurried working-hour. He had begun to die at eight-and-twenty, and he was to die unconsummated; therefore speech compacted and anticipative became his sole concern. He is not light reading. His typical sentences, apart from his many paradoxes, move like the Latin axioms which break the heads of unwilling schoolboys in walnut-time. A skeleton style, it must be confessed, has its disqualifications as a miscellaneous entertainer. Anything more unlike the golden, glowing, 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. It is not the least lovely of his attributes that he sacrificed the literary possibilities of a born historian, as he sacrificed everything else, to his holy master-passion, and carried his genius for reigning into a hidden door-keeping of the House of God.
The novelty and unexpectedness inseparable from his original mind appear in print only as by innuendo, and in the conduct of some coherent train of thought. Slyly quiet can be the manner in which he understates, and negatively proceeds through harmless analogies, until, of a sudden, readers find with surprise, and cannot shake off, that ‘sting in their bosoms’ which is referred to in a piercingly apposite phrase, itself of classic origin, of the second Preface (1839) of the Remains. All his papers, at least, of whatever nature, display his faculty, which was like a scout’s or frontiersman’s, of discovering, breaking, and defending border ground. They are remarkable chiefly for their practical far-seeing sagacity. Written over seventy years ago by a mere unconscious young prophet with no conceit of himself, they have an amazing modernity. The keen prescience of the few random secular essays is, however, intensified in the other essays on religious subjects. They ‘look before and after.’ They have not begun to seem out-of-date, nor to label their author as fit only for the never-dusted top shelf. In a day when views of Inspiration and Revelation are no longer Butler’s or Paley’s; when new keys are tried, and new tools taken up, and in the ancient workshops men live and die to a different and far more perplexing spheric music, such staying power, independent of any encouragement of it, is sufficiently remarkable. It gives Hurrell Froude an illustrative importance. His very catchwords have a diverting contemporaneousness; witness his uses of ‘Protestant’ as applied by him to the unloved majority in his Church. The stuff of his intellectual daily life is never altogether the timid, domestic, and amateurish thing which Anglicanism must be, even at its best. 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. Their worth is that they show, with loyal plainness, not only Froude’s dedicated interests, but the weight and depth of his selfless intelligence; his bold adventurings and outridings; his habit of looking unflattering deductions in the face; his preoccupation with framework and foundation, and with them exclusively; his instinct for the essential, for major issues, for one or two premises which matter most, on subjects of faith, and for the events of real significance in the history of England which bear upon the Church. This instinct, in him, was spontaneous and uncompanioned. In the whole field of dogma, he first, of the seeking Wise Men of that generation, was drawn towards the ‘Eucharistic doctrine with its huge wealth of meaning, its promises of light, its complicated connection with the body of revealed truth, to a great extent unexplored, a mine of treasures hardly touched’;[282] in the whole field of ecclesiastical discipline, he alone fastened upon the principle of freedom as the divine prerogative of the Church. He inspired another to write of Hildebrand; he himself wrote of the great Becket who was honoured, we know, by Henry VIII. with a hatred highly intelligent and quaintly contemporary; he notes more than once how Henry VIII.’s tyrannising work, yet active, was in many respects the very work attempted by Henry II., against whose ideals S. Thomas of Canterbury flung his influence and his life. On these topics of incalculable importance, Froude laid his pausing finger. He never occupied himself for one moment with accidents and incidentals. Yet it has been said: ‘The Movement brought into action not a few who, like Mr. Richard Hurrell Froude, could never advance beyond the impertinent minutiæ and the ecclesiastical fopperies which became the badges of their fraternity.’[283] It has been said. Let it pass for ‘funny tormenting.’
Coleridge remarked, in summing up his old friend Charles Lamb,[284] that he had more totality and universality of character than any man he had ever known. In some such terms must be couched the eulogy of Hurrell Froude. He is all of a piece. ‘From his very birth,’ as his mother put it, ‘his temperament has been peculiar.’ He knew his mind, and went his way. He, at least, did not
‘—half-live a hundred different lives.’
He paid for such concentration of purpose with long oblivion. 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. Eventually no mystic, but a wide-awake, matter-of-fact person, he yet had always a sort of seal upon him of the objective, the remote, the unearthly. Now that he has his station and we have our perspective, these qualities increase rather than diminish. The enfranchised vision of him now is his inner self, more like a harper than a trumpeter. We seem to see the thin tender face ‘shine’ out of night air, as it shone at parting on his friend at Dartington, fifty-four years before it smiled again at him out of the Light. Time is the only crystal which gives us the souls of men and things. Whatever looks like idealisation there must be the literal truth.
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. There is in him, though unexpressed, a wholeness and relativity as of this landscape. His saliency and roguery, his affection, his wistful oddity, his extraordinary intensity of life, the endearing charm which has served to keep his memory bright as racing sea-fire, only remind us the more how fully he belongs to the issues to which he gave himself of old. The temptation to think him a good deal like the sworded poets of the Civil Wars, with their scarcely exerted aptitudes for the fine arts, whose names leave a sort of star-dust along the pages of the anthologies, need not blind us to his severer aspect: he is also a good deal like the more militant among the Saints. His first Editors thought so, and say so in that most fragrant and touching Preface of theirs to his volumes printed in 1839. He was wing and talon to them and to their holy hope. ‘Froude of the Movement’: he is that, first and last. Great as is to the mere humanist eye his individual interest, he cannot fairly be separated for a moment from the ideal to which all that was in him belonged; to which he belongs in its present and its yet unrevealed phases; to which he will belong when, as the very vindication of his foregone career, helping to breathe into successive generations the spirit of cleansing scrutiny and renewing faith, Catholicism shall triumph in England.
With that thought, we come suddenly out, as through a black mountain-pass, into a quiet-coloured vista rolling between us and the dawn. It is only too possible, in the beclouded state of fallen man, to mistake some stage of a vast progress for a disconnected trivial episode. But who are they so unblest as to do it in this instance? Chiefly those enemies who belong to the household. It was a convert squire of Leicestershire, the friend of Montalembert, who in the boldness of sanguine charity welcomed the very first Tracts as nothing less than a pledge, given as it were in sleep, of ‘the return of the Church [of England] to Catholic Unity and the See of Peter’;[285] and it was an Oxford Dean, long after, who denied any orthodox future or any legitimate past to the Ritualists of his day, refusing to connect them or their great popularising leaven with the theoretic fathers that begat them. There is little morality in this preference for reducing everything to scraps and segments. Those who dare search for processes rather than for dead issues may at least be respected. To them, in an hour of all Latin degeneracy, the old sap of the strongest of the northern races laughs in a stock long barren but sound. Great outlooks call for great patience, lest they strain the sight; and so with a spiritual event, believed-in, and hardly descried. 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? Who have fought shy of him, who have even belittled, hushed, buried him, if not they? Has a single one of the vital questions which his restless agitation opened, been settled by the exerted authority of the corporate Church of England? In her immense miraculous increase of ‘Catholic-mindedness,’ who has gone beyond this wild, pathetic, precursive child in groping towards the fulness of Revealed Truth, yet groping in the dark? He loved reality, and entity: they were there next his hand, and he felt them not. He seems never to have surmised the existence beside him of the down-trodden Ecclesia Anglicana of Continental sympathy, which in his brief day timidly lifted up her long-shrouded penal head. But she, on her part, saw him reconstruct, as in a worshipping dream, her every lineament. It was a remark of Mr. Bernard Smith’s[286] which impressed Dr. Wiseman, that ‘my friends at Oxford all think and speak of Catholic practices and institutions as past or possible, not as things actually existing and acting.’ That remark would not need to be made now, when a people who owe nothing to their Tudor organisers have won back by the power of what Sir Thomas Browne calls ‘reminiscential evocation,’ so much of the spirit of the religion which is their heritage. But when it was made, the remark was curiously accurate. Even Froude, in his Becket, cites the never-suspended usage of religious houses in having books read aloud in the refectory, as an English custom of ‘those times.’ As in trifles, so in graver matters: Froude, and the contemporaries never quite abreast of him, knew nothing of the continuity of family habit in the historic Church. Newman tells us that while he was in Italy, (and it can hardly have been otherwise with his friend,) he did not guess at the significance of the burning sanctuary lamps in Churches. ‘Radiantly sure of his position,’ as Canon Scott Holland says, Froude was indeed; he had no personal misgivings; his good faith was intact. Yet even he feared for his ‘Branch’;[287] and he laid stress upon something in himself higher than loyalty. If certain reforms did not follow, he would set up for a ‘separatist.’[288] He did not live long enough to make his choice; but those reforms have not followed. It stands for little that some of his nearest relatives, and especially the one friend whom he had most breathed upon, were constrained to go the ‘separatist’ way; it stands for something more that to a group of able observers of various creeds, he himself has seemed a moving aurora, and not a fixed star of the Anglican heaven. The speculation whether or no Froude would have been ‘out in the ‘45’ has no lasting pertinence; but it has its illicit unavoidable interest. No one who studies him tries to blink it. Some among the distinguished High Churchmen who have written of him are practically unanimous in the conviction that longer lease of life would have made no difference in his views, or that in any case he would have dwelt always in the tents where he died. But the majority, having broached the contrary opinion, encourage it, and lean towards it: of this company are the Nonconformists, the Deists, the Catholics. Dr. Rigg, a profound student of ethics, goes so far as to say ‘there can be no doubt’ that Hurrell Froude would have changed his creed; Dr. Abbott’s strong arraignment implies nothing less; many reviewers of Dean Church’s history propound the question and assent to it; and Mr. James Anthony Froude saw fit to play with it. The men of the ‘extreme Left,’ in this convocation, speak after a non-committal fashion, yet there is no mistaking their longing, partly unexpressed: M. Thureau-Dangin, Cardinal Wiseman, and the rest of their following, seem to be ever thinking what only Canon Oakeley quotes: Cum talis sis, utinam noster esses! They might make, with perfect justice, the indisputable claim that the Remains exerted the deeper influence over those very men whose consciences drove them at last to leave the Church as by Law Established in these Realms: the book bore a confessedly vital part in the formation of William Lockhart, of James Robert Hope-Scott, of Frederick William Faber, of William George Ward. It is curious that the Rev. Thomas Mozley should father the statement, that the Remains ‘never brought any one to Rome.’[289] But he may have had only direct or primary causation in mind. That prickly book, moreover, active as Hurrell himself, may be said, without exaggeration, to have reacted on Newman’s ‘young men’ at Oxford, who first disturbed, and then outstripped, their master. It was the very crux of the complaint against them that, as Newman himself was to say so accurately of Froude, they were ‘powerfully drawn to the Mediæval, not to the Primitive Church.’ We know how the cross-currents, coming from Ward, Oakeley, Dalgairns, and the other extremists, cut across the path of Newman turned anchorite, like a spring freshet from unimagined hills. The ‘new party’ spoken of in Stephens’ Life of Dean Hook,[290] as being ‘as different in its teachings from the original Tractarians as they had been from the Evangelicals,’ were men almost all of whom entered the Catholic Church of the Roman Obedience. They were filled with the idea of the ever-living Interpretative Voice, as against the mere bookish appeal to Christian antiquity. They were strong in zeal, will, and prayer, and self-sacrificing; they were also rash, notional, irrepressibly gay. Newman, whom they so worried, did not suspect their descent; no critic seems to have suspected it since: but were they not the true and immediate seed of Hurrell Froude? If they were not, then, in the language of the heralds, obiit sine prole. How difficult it were to accept that as part of the epitaph of so generative a spirit! No school of thought in any communion, since 1836, has reproduced so markedly the singular physiognomy of the author of the Remains. To them alone he was not in the least ‘dangerous.’ But it is clear that in what has been called the Church of Lord Halifax, there are a thousand young Froudians, a collateral kindred with plenty of trouble before them, flying his crest.
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. Says Père Ragey, after the neat and merciless manner of Frenchmen: ‘Pour pousser ses idées jusqu’à leurs dernières conséquences, Newman, n’avait eu qu’à suivre la nature même de son esprit. Il était un de ces esprits (assez rares parmi nos voisins d’outre Manche) qui se laissent conduire par la logique, qui vont jusqu’au bout de leurs idées, et qui savent conclure. La vie et les écrits de Pusey, au contraire, nous montrent en lui un de ces esprits anglais si bien décrits par Taine, qui “restent en chemin et ne concluent pas.” … De plus, il sentait bien qu’il n’était pas seul. Il avait avec lui plus que des corréligionnaires, plus que des collaborateurs, plus que les disciples: il avait avec lui et pour lui l’esprit anglais. Les anglais, tout en admirant beaucoup Newman, et en le plaçant au-dessus de Pusey, reconnaissent mieux leur esprit dans Pusey que dans Newman.’[291]
Nothing can be safer for all of us conjointly than to answer ‘No’ at once to that pithless query: Would Froude have followed Newman? Froude would never have followed Newman. Nor would the latter have paced up and down for long lonely years in Oriel Lane, and in the Limbus Innocentium at Littlemore, nor invented Oret pro nobis for an anodyne, had Froude been alive. It is the summing-up of a thoughtful review that ‘most readers of the Apologia are under the impression that [Newman] had started on the road to Rome as soon as Froude’s influence succeeded to Whately’s; and that if he were not unfaithful, he had to go on to the end…. Certainly, it does seem as if, after he had lost Froude, Newman was very liable to be perplexed by opposition, to watch for omens, to be at the mercy of accidents.’[292] 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. As for Hurrell, he was bound to be astir, living or dead, in one direction or another. Without being prepared to look frankly upon October 9, 1845, as his true field-day, open-minded persons may harbour a sympathetic wonder whether in the English event which crowns it he were quite unimplicated? ‘Was it Gregory or was it Basil, that blew the trumpet in Constantinople?’ When Newman sadly transferred himself to Oscott, in the February of 1846, he would have remembered, after his remembering habit, how strangely, yet naturally, in the Providence of God, he was keeping the tenth anniversary of the loss of his dearest friend, no part of whose office could be filled even by an Ambrose St. 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. This short span beside that old age, this quick, forward-reaching, never-ripened thought beside the ‘long gestation’ of the sublime soul whom we know better, may not unfitly be compared to a keynote struck in a grace-note before the full major chord. The chord owes nothing of its position, or its compotent harmony, to the mere sweet hint which announces it and is instantaneously whelmed in it, but it certainly does owe to it almost all of what may be called its idiomatic beauty. To no educated ear is the chord with that apposition, and the chord without it, conceivably the same.
It is his glory that Froude cannot be severed, early or late, from the superior genius once so ‘fain to be his heir.’ As he stands fast with what Mr. Wilfrid Ward has named ‘that great crisis of spiritual animation, unparalleled in our age and country,’ which has transformed the Church of England, and with his Achates, as that Achates was up to 1845, so he walks on with the white-haired Cardinal of all men’s honour, through whom a torrent of new life streamed, and streams, into the English-speaking children of the Apostolic See, but who
‘—came to Oxford and his friends no more.’
Newman’s unnecessary readiness to acknowledge any moral debt, was surely no small part of his delightful greatness. Never was it better justified than in his lifelong sense of obligation to the clear brain and pure devout heart of a young man of no celebrity, whose full significance is not past, but to come.
To a Catholic, Froude has something yet finer than his ‘totality and universality of character.’ He has the grace of God. He stands in a mysterious place,
and it would be covetous indeed, it might be even impious, to wish to dislodge him. Such as he is, and where he is, he stands pledge enough for Reunion. Meanwhile, let him enjoy the irony for what it is worth, that to compensate for many of his own who esteem him not, many ‘swallowers of the Council of Trent as a whole’ esteem him well. The English Oratory has for him a sort of veneration, as for a little brother lost who had Saint Philip’s very brow and mouth;[293] the Benedictine monks at Buckfast Abbey, near his old home, familiarly remember him, on birthdays, with prayer which is both a gift and a petition; and there are lay hearts which cannot think of his lonely burial-place, in snow-time or in rose-time, without the sense of hearing over it a solemn music from the Purgatorio:
That wonderful prophetic strain, meant for eternity, must linger in the ear of every ‘Roman’ who has learned to love Hurrell Froude.
THE END.