Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and CommentsGuiney, Louise Imogen
History
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 1803-1836
‘Hurrell Froude was, when I, as an undergraduate, first knew him, in
1828, tall and very thin, with something of a stoop, with a large
skull and forehead, but not a large face, delicate features, and
penetrating grey eyes, not exactly piercing, but bright with internal
conceptions, and ready to assume an expression of amusement, careful
attention, inquiry, or stern disgust, but with a basis of softness.
His manner was cordial and familiar, and assured you, as you knew him
well, of his affectionate feeling, which encouraged you to speak your
mind (within certain limits), subject to the consideration that if you
said anything absurd it would not be allowed to fall to the ground. He
had more of the undergraduate in him than any “don” whom I ever knew:
absolutely unlike Newman in being always ready to skate, sail, or ride
with his friends, and, if in a scrape, not pharisaical as to his means
of getting out of it. I remember, _e.g._, climbing Merton gate with
him in my undergraduate days, when we had been out too late boating or
skating. And unless authority or substantial decorum was really
threatened he was very lenient: or, rather, had an amused sympathy
with the irregularities that are mere matters of mischief or high
spirits. In lecture it was, _mutatis mutandis_, the same man. Seeing,
from his _Remains_, the “high view of his own capacities of which he
could not divest himself,” and his determination not to exhibit or be
puffed up by it, and looking back on his tutorial manner (I was in his
lectures, both in classics and mathematics), it was strange how he
disguised, not only his sense of superiority, but the appearance of
it, so that his pupils felt him more as a fellow-student than as the
refined scholar or mathematician which he was. This was partly owing
to his carelessness of those formulæ, the familiarity with which gives
even second-rate lectures a position of superiority which is less
visible in those who, like their pupils, are themselves always
struggling with principles; and partly to an effort, perhaps sometimes
overdone, not to put himself above the level of others. In a lecture
on the _Supplices_ of Æschylus, I have heard him say _tout bonnement_:
“I can’t construe that: what do you make of it, A. B.?” turning to the
supposed best scholar in the lecture; or, when an objection was
started to his mode of getting through a difficulty: “Ah! I had not
thought of that; perhaps your way is the best.” And this mode of
dealing with himself and the undergraduates whom he liked, made them
like him, but also made them really undervalue his talent, which, as
we now see, was what he meant they should do. At the same time, though
watchful over his own vanity, he was keen and prompt in snubs in
playful and challenging retort, to those he liked, but in the nature
of scornful exposure, when he had to do with coarseness or coxcombry,
or shallow display of sentiment. It was a paradoxical consequence of
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