Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and CommentsGuiney, Louise Imogen
History
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 1803-1836
‘… As to your Monasticism articles in _The British Magazine_,[244] my
father read the offensive part in the June one, and could see nothing
in it that any reasonable person could object to; and some persons I
know have been struck by them. I cannot see the harm of losing
influence with people when you can only retain it by sinking the
points on which you differ with them. Surely that would be _Propter
vitam vivendi_, etc.? What is the good of influence except to
influence people?’ To Mr. Keble, at the same time, Froude expresses a
generous envy of Newman’s ‘taking’ utterance (what Newman himself
calls his ‘mere rhetorical or histrionic power’), and admits again the
difficulty of winning any such command over souls in England, with his
own very elliptical genius. ‘I find myself so ignorant of the way to
get at people, that I never know what to assume and what to prove!’
Froude’s straightforward case was Jeremy Taylor’s of old, of whom
Chillingworth regretfully said: ‘Hee wants much of the ethickall part
of a Discourser, and slights too much, many times, the Arguments of
those hee discourses with.’
Newman tells his dear sister Jemima, on August 9: ‘I think I shall go
down to Froude for ten days. I am very unwilling to do it; but it is
so uncertain whether he will be able to come to Oxford at all, that I
think I ought to secure seeing him before he goes abroad.’ And again,
to the absent comrade, a fortnight after: ‘I am sick of expecting a
letter; for the last week I have every day made sure of one, and been
disappointed. I cannot help fearing you are not well…. I must (so be
it!) come down to you before Vacation ends, to get some light struck
out by collision.’ For Newman had been trying to work out alone
‘whether Tradition is ever considered by the Fathers, in matters of
faith, more than interpretative of Scripture.’ To Mr. Rogers, at the
same time, he speaks of the contemplated move. ‘I have little to show,
this Vacation, in point of work done. The time seems to have slipped
away in a dream. Perhaps it would be as well to go down to Froude,
were it only to adjust my notions to his. Dear fellow! long as I have
anticipated what I suppose must come, I feel quite raw and unprepared.
I suppose one ought to get as much as one can from him, _dum licet_.’
Newman himself was again over-busied and ailing. No reader can fail to
notice the deepening tenderness of the correspondence between the two
during these last months, where yet sportiveness and candour, and a
certain mutual deference, keep their old due order. Words go quickly
and lightly, without emphasis or strain, as if driven willingly on the
rising wind which is the eternal silence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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