Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and CommentsGuiney, Louise Imogen
History
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 1803-1836
Weak self, with thee the mischief lies!
Those throbs a tale disclose:
Nor age nor trial has made wise
The man of many woes.”
‘There you see some trace of the influence of Froude’s high ascetic
nature speaking in the heart of a devotee of music, but a devotee of
music of the most exalted kind. Hurrell Froude, in a letter home,
mentions that the commander of the steamer in which they sailed sang
several songs, accompanying himself on the Spanish guitar, and it must
have been these songs which suggested to Newman “The Isles of the
Sirens.” When the friends reach Ithaca, Newman seems to forget “the
man of many woes” altogether; he is musing on the difficulty of
keeping himself “unspotted from the world”: which is the last thing, I
suppose, that Homer’s Ulysses ever thought about; while Byron, in the
same scenes, thought only of how he could spot himself most
effectually…. Newman’s nostalgia was more in sympathy with that of
Moses than with that of Ulysses: the home he longed for was a home he
had never yet gained. There is something very strange in the
connection between these classical scenes and the thoughts they
excited in the travellers, for I cannot help thinking that most of
these poems must have owed their origin almost as much to Froude’s
suggestion as to Newman’s pen. The lines, for instance, on
England,[359] in which Newman calls her “Tyre of the West,” and
accuses her of trusting in such poor defences as the fortified rock of
Gibraltar, and such poor resources as her rich commerce supplied, look
as if they had owed a good deal of their inspiration to Froude’s
cavalier contempt for the wealth earned by trade, as well as his scorn
for any ostentatious display of power not rooted in a devout
theocratic Faith…. There is, to me, something very striking in the
contrast between the class of thoughts which the old Greek and Roman
localities suggest to a Whig poet like Byron, with a broad dash of
licence in his Whiggery; to classical scholars like Clough, imbued
with what is now called “the modern spirit” (as well its moral
earnestness as its intellectual scepticism), and to grave spirits like
Newman’s and Hurrell Froude’s, dominated not only by a religious, but
by a strongly-marked ecclesiastical bias…. As regards the influence of
this journey on Newman’s future career, it appears that while, in many
respects, it diminished his horror of Romanism, in consequence
especially of the influence of Hurrell Froude, it had a contrary
effect on Hurrell Froude’s own mind, and later (again, through him, to
some extent, I suppose) on Newman’s. Hurrell Froude writes from
Naples[360] on February 17, 1833: “I remember you told me that I
should come back a better Englishman than I went away: better
satisfied not only that our Church is nearest in theory right, but
also that practically, in spite of its abuses, it works better; and to
own the truth, your prophecy is already nearly realised. Certainly, I
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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