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:
‘Rex tremendæ majestatis,
Qui salvandos salvas gratis,
Salva me, Fons Pietatis!’
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.