Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and CommentsGuiney, Louise Imogen
History
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 1803-1836
I must give up talking altogether except where
civility absolutely requires it. I am not to be trusted with words.’
All this ‘mortal moral strife’ dates from his earliest manhood. He
certainly never relaxed the effort toward humbleness and mental
correction; though a superficial reader might question whether he had,
at the end, succeeded in attaining any appreciable measure of either.
But it is worth while to remember here that his whole effort would be
not to let his friends at Oxford become aware of his victory, if he
gained it. Sooner than face human approval in these matters, he would
say, every day in the week, that he ‘thought ―――― an ass,’ if only to
keep up appearances.
Again, and apart from the amenities, the _Remains_ are not edited in a
way to conciliate the unwilling. In one department, they are
provokingly presented with raggedly-pieced phrases, names suppressed,
and divers eliminations, almost enough to kill interest; in another,
they commit to the general scrutiny amorphous themes, repetitions, the
mere crude bones of theory, fragments never shaped for the press.
Never was it truer, of any book or of any man, that
‘――you must love him ere to you
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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