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