In every fragment multiplies, and makes
A thousand images of one that was,
The same; and still the more, the more it breaks.’
The apprehension of all he was, if not the whole truth about him, should be, in this synod of philosophical friends and deeply interested foes, no difficult thing to win and hold.
It may not be usual to treat a man of genius like an unglossed manuscript, and to set him forth impartially with all his variants. As dear Izaak says in his innocent-seeming irony, this is, perhaps, to impale him ‘as if you loved him.’ But a free hearing is good law and good art; diverging guesses, contrasted points of view, exercised by the competent, have their uses, especially in England; and some natures and motives bear analysis gallantly well. The reason, at bottom, for so catholic a treatment of Hurrell Froude, is that Hurrell Froude, with his singular detachment and sound humour, would not have disclaimed it: that is, if he had come to know that posterity would fain hear of him again. And there is but one conclusion to be drawn from the spirited discussions about him. As M. Henri Malo was pleased to write, not so long ago, of his historic hero: ‘En somme, quelle que soit l’opinion que l’on ait sur son compte, c’est une figure!’[3]
The sole purpose of this unconventional yet homogeneous volume is to show Froude, the mind and the man, in his inferential
completeness, and without primary reference to that application of his best-cherished principles which meant so much then, and which means so much now. Without primary reference, we say: yet to part him by one hair’s breadth from the Oxford Movement, who would, and who could? A book which aims at being not a disquisition, not even a biography, but simply a convenient rearrangement of obvious data for the study of a temperament, may plead its own voluntary poverty as a general extenuation. In the matter not of exegesis but of mere quantity, no reader will complain of too little!
The chronology of many of the footnotes has been compiled from the Alumni Oxonienses, the Registrum Orielense, and the Dictionary of National Biography. In a book of this nature, appealing chiefly to those who know by heart the golden commonplaces of the educated world, it has not been thought pertinent to ‘overset’ or verify the classical quotations.
Something may be added concerning the illustrations. William Brockedon, before he was famous, once started to paint a life-size head in oil of Hurrell, then aged about eleven. It was left unfinished, and is now in the possession of the young sitter’s namesake and nephew, R. H. Froude, Esq., of Bernstein, Newton Abbot, by whose kindness a half-tone ‘restoration’ of it serves as frontispiece to this book. Outside a casual pencil sketch, it is the only portrait at present known of Hurrell Froude; nor has it ever before been reproduced, save once as a small scratchy characterless detail of a Keble College panorama. The painting was unfortunately abandoned while in its half-chaotic condition: eyebrows and ears are but barely indicated; the entire background, the collar, a portion of the hair growing so wilfully on the large shapely head, remarkable then and always for its even convexity, are a mere disordered wash; and it was difficult to follow, and to fix by process after process, a vision of the beautiful boy, with his melancholy and his racial fire. No idealisation, as need hardly be said, has been attempted. Patience and sincerity, brought to a rather discouraging task, have succeeded, in some measure, in recapturing an imperfect
image, and in having it recognised (so far as a man can be recognised in a child), with gratified pleasure, by the one or two known to the Editor who are the enviable rememberers of Hurrell Froude. The reduction of the original head to an almost miniature size justified itself at once in the disappearance of many blemishes. The print from which the block was made is an outcome of the photographic skill and artistic feeling, now historic in England and beyond it, of Mr. Frederick Hollyer. The ‘casual pencil sketch’ just mentioned figures also in this book, and has in even higher degree the preciousness of a unique thing: for the reproduction is made directly from an unaltered original in a portfolio of 1832. Students of that period in England will recall Miss Maria Giberne, the ‘Queen of Tractaria,’ the animated, romantic, and loyal friend of the Newmans, who followed her art with long devotion, and became, later, Sister Maria Pia in the Visitation Convent at Autun, where she died at a great age. Of her, in her early prime, one who knew her well wrote: