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
‘—you must love him ere to you