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