Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and CommentsGuiney, Louise Imogen
History
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 1803-1836
Froude supplied, at most, but four of what George Eliot called _The
Tracts Against the Times_, if we are to count as his only what he
wrote out with his own hand. Of these, the earliest, briefest, and
most comprehensive is No. 8, The Gospel a Law of Liberty, the
authorship of which was, and is, frequently assigned to Newman.[155]
It somewhat complicates matters that in Newman’s printed
correspondence are various remarks addressed to him as responsible for
No. 8, which bear no disclaimer in any note or parenthesis supplied by
himself. It is also noticeable that he writes to Hurrell on November
13, 1833: ‘Evangelicals, as I anticipated, are struck with The Law of
Liberty, and The Sin of the Church. The subject of Discipline, too, I
cannot doubt, will take them. Surely my game lies among them.’[156] He
might have said ‘our game,’ but he does not. Nor does The Gospel a Law
of Liberty appear in Froude’s _Remains_. Dean Burgon, however, prints
in the Appendix to his _Twelve Good Men_ an extract from a letter of
the Rev. Charles Marriott to the Rev. A. Burn of Chichester, Jan. 29,
1840. ‘You ought to know,’ says that gentle and unimpeachable
authority, ‘that Froude was the author of the Tract, The Gospel a Law
of Liberty, which is the subject of No. 8.’ Froude and Newman may well
have devised this No. 8 in concert. So far as the wording goes,
Newman’s light galloping touch is certainly upon it. In idea it is
intensely Froude-like in its concentrated suggestiveness: in it we see
the very pupa, as it were, of the wide-winged theory of Dogmatic
Development, broached at Littlemore so long after. No. 8, with its
_staccato marcato_ form, is perhaps the most typical of the early
_Tracts_, and most expressive of the spirit in which they were
conceived. These shared in common (in the opinion of Dr. Pusey’s
conjoint biographers, men who usually see things as they are) a
‘startling and peremptory language.’ ‘First rouse,’ ran Hurrell’s
business-like programme, ‘then modify.’ Newman certainly, in his
office of rouser, availed to set gentle and simple by the ears.
Briefly, pungently, he did his inimitable work. Dr. Pusey, with his
serious grasp, his moral weight, his immense learning, by contributing
to the series his great signed Tract on Baptism, changed the fashion
as we know. To ‘modify’ began with him, and progressed with him. He
had the genius of explicit statement. It might even be said that his
whole influence and care, especially from 1845 on, were on the side of
expounding and applying, as Newman’s and Froude’s had been
preponderately on that of naked presentment, full of novelty,
excitement, and ‘danger.’ The little guided Israel which had followed
the pillar of fire by night, found it well, in due course, to follow
the pillar of cloud by day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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