Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and CommentsGuiney, Louise Imogen
History
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 1803-1836
‘What was it that turned [Keble] by degrees into so prominent and so
influential a person? It was the result of the action of his
convictions and ideas, and still more of his character, on the
energetic and fearless mind of a pupil and disciple, Richard Hurrell
Froude. Froude was Keble’s pupil at Oriel, and when Keble left Oriel
for his curacy at the beginning of the Long Vacation of 1823, he took
Froude with him to read for his degree. He took with him ultimately
two other pupils, Robert Wilberforce and Isaac Williams of Trinity.
One of them, Isaac Williams, has left some reminiscences of the time,
and of the terms on which the young men were with their tutor, then
one of the most famous men at Oxford. They were terms of the utmost
freedom. “Master is the greatest boy of them all,” was the judgment of
the rustic who was gardener, groom, and parish clerk to Mr. Keble.
Froude’s was a keen logical mind, not easily satisfied, contemptuous
of compromises and evasions, and disposed on occasion to be
mischievous and aggressive; and with Keble, as with anybody else, he
was ready to dispute and try every form of dialectical experiment. But
he was open to higher influences than those of logic, and in Keble he
saw what subdued and won him to boundless veneration and affection.
Keble won the love of the whole little society; but in Froude he had
gained a disciple who was to be the mouthpiece and champion of his
ideas, and who was to react on himself and carry him forward to larger
enterprises and bolder resolutions than by himself he would have
thought of. Froude took in from Keble all he had to communicate:
principles, convictions, moral rules and standards of life, hopes,
fears, antipathies. And his keenly-tempered intellect, and his
determination and high courage, gave a point and an impulse of their
own to Keble’s views and purposes. As things came to look darker, and
dangers seemed more serious to the Church, its faith or its rights,
the interchange of thought between master and disciple, in talk and in
letter, pointed more and more to the coming necessity of action; and
Froude at least had no objections to the business of an agitator. But
all this was very gradual; things did not yet go beyond discussion;
ideas, views, arguments were examined and compared; and Froude, with
all his dash, felt as Keble felt, that he had much to learn about
himself, as well as about books and things. In his respect for
antiquity, in his dislike of the novelties which were invading Church
rules and sentiments, as well as its Creeds, in his jealousy of the
State, as well as in his seriousness of self-discipline, he accepted
Keble’s guidance and influence more and more; and from Keble he had
more than one lesson of self-distrust, more than one warning against
the temptations of intellect. “Froude told me many years after,”
writes one of his friends, “that Keble once, before parting with him,
seemed to have something on his mind which he wished to say, but
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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