Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and CommentsGuiney, Louise Imogen
History
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 1803-1836
To talk in paradox, it was his mood
Of playfulness, as one that inly smiled
Mocking at the conceptions which the tongue
Is weak to utter; venting heart-felt truths
In startling shape preposterous; with a smile
At incongruity of our poor thoughts
To match our endless weight of destiny;
Yea, at himself, to see intention yoked
So strangely with performance, which still paced
Unequally, and limped or dragged behind.
His intellect was keen-edged as the sword
Of Saladin, well-matched with battle-axe
Of Cœur de Lion; while in poetry
And arts, his judgement was the sculptor’s nail;
But, like the royal Dane of Shakespeare wrought,
One by himself, not of a class or kind:
Like to himself alone and no one else.
There was within him such repose on Truth,
Absence of self, such heart-controlling fear,
I feel that, had he lived, he had not been
The sport of his own sails, or popular winds
That he had courted for our object’s sake.
Men hurry to and fro; but he the while
Hath found the Haven where he fain would be.’
From ‘CARDINAL NEWMAN,’ by RICHARD H. HUTTON. London: Methuen & Co.,
1891. [English Leaders of Religion.]
[By the kind permission of the executors of Mr. Hutton, and of
Messrs. Methuen & Co.]
‘The friendship between Newman and Mr. Hurrell Froude, the elder
brother of the historian, which commenced in 1826, and became intimate
in 1829, lasting thence to Mr. Froude’s death from consumption in
1836, was certainly one of the most important influences which acted
on Newman’s career at the most critical period of his life. Newman’s
was one of the minds which mature slowly; and it was not till he was
twenty-six years of age that it became clear whether he would be, in
the main, a religious leader, or one of the pillars of the Whately
party; that is, the party who threw their influence into the scale of
minimising the spiritual aspect and spiritual significance of
Revelation, rather than of maximising it. Newman himself mentions that
for two or three years before 1827, he was “beginning to prefer
intellectual excellence to moral,” or, in other words, “drifting in
the direction of Liberalism.” “I was rudely awakened from my dream, at
the end of 1827, by two great blows, illness and bereavement.” And
then, in 1829, came fuller intimacy with Hurrell Froude, which seems
to have fully determined, if anything were then needed to determine,
the direction in which his mind would proceed. Mr. Hurrell Froude was,
as Newman describes him, a man of the highest gifts, gentle, tender,
playful, versatile and “of the most winning patience and
considerateness in discussion.” … I feel little doubt that Dr.
Newman’s wrath against “Liberalism” (as for many years afterwards he
always called it, identifying, as he did, Liberalism with
Latitudinarianism) was, to a very considerable extent, a moral
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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