LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY (continued 6)

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 215 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 216 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 217 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 218 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, 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. 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 220 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 221 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. 222 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 223 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 224 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 225 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 226 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 227 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 228 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. 229 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.

FOOTNOTES:

‘His rapier he’d draw,

And pink a bourgeois,

‘The wild winds rustle in the piping shrouds

As in the quivering trees.’

‘Poor John was a gallant captain

In battles much delighting;

He fled full soon,

On the first of June,

But he bade the rest keep fighting.’

‘Sit poorly, without light, disrobed; no care

Of outward grace to amuse the poor devout.’

‘There present in the heart

As in the hands,’

230

231

HURRELL FROUDE

II

SOME REPRINTED COMMENTS ON HIM AND ON HIS RELATION TO THE OXFORD MOVEMENT

232

233

CONTENTS

PART II.—COMMENTS

PAGE

From ‘The Oxford Movement,’ 1833-1845, by R. W. Church 235

From ‘Apologia pro Vita Sua,’ by John Henry Newman 259

From ‘The Cherwell Water-Lily and other Poems,’ by Frederick William Faber 263

From ‘Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography,’ by the Right Hon. Sir James Stephen 263

From ‘A Memoir of the Rev. John Keble,’ by the Right Hon. Sir J. T. Coleridge 276

From ‘Essays Historical and Theological,’ by J. B. Mozley 278

From ‘Memoir of Joshua Watson,’ edited by Edward Churton 281

From ‘William George Ward and the Oxford Movement,’ by Wilfrid Ward 282

From ‘A Narrative of Events connected with the Publication of the Tracts for the Times,’ by William Palmer [of Worcester Coll.] 287

From ‘Oxford High Anglicanism and its chief Leaders,’ by J. H. Rigg 291

From ‘Historical Notes on the Tractarian Movement,’ by Frederick Oakeley 299

From ‘The British Critic’ for Jan., 1838. (A review of the Remains, Part I., by Frederic Rogers.) 306

From ‘The Autobiography of Isaac Williams,’ edited by George Prevost 320

From ‘Thoughts in Past Years,’ by Isaac Williams 326

From ‘Cardinal Newman,’ by Richard H. Hutton 329

From ‘The Anglican Revival,’ by J. H. Overton 334

From ‘Essays on Various Subjects,’ by Nicholas Wiseman 338

From ‘The Anglican Career of Cardinal Newman,’ by Edwin A. Abbott 344

From ‘Oriel College,’ by David Watson Rannie 356

From ‘Short Studies on Great Subjects,’ by James Anthony Froude 358234

Controversy from ‘The Contemporary Review’ and ‘The Nineteenth Century’ between E. A. Freeman and J. A. Froude 363

From ‘The Remains of Richard Hurrell Froude’ [edited by John Keble and John Henry Newman], 1838 367

Idem, 1839 374

From ‘Reminiscences chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement,’ by T. Mozley 391

From ‘The British Critic’ for April 1840. (A review of the Remains, Part II., by T. Mozley) 398

From ‘Lyra Apostolica,’ edited by H. C. Beeching, with an Introduction by H. S. Holland 402

From ‘Newman,’ by William Barry 405

Excerpts from ‘Memoirs,’ by Mark Pattison; the ‘Life of Samuel Wilberforce,’ by his Son; the ‘Life and Correspondence of the late Robert Southey,’ by his Son; ‘A Key to the Popery of Oxford,’ by Peter Maurice; ‘John Henry Newman, Letters and Correspondences,’ edited by Anne Mozley; and ‘Catholicism, Roman and Anglican,’ by A. M. Fairbairn 406-408

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