Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and CommentsGuiney, Louise Imogen
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Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 1803-1836
There was a lifelong strife in Newman’s mind between created and
Uncreated Beauty, or rather, a lifelong choice. He seems to have felt
that he could not be as much of a poet as his own heart prompted, and
be also as much of a hard-working saint as Divine Grace called him to
be. For him, as in the beginning, a loved landscape was ‘pagan’: a
temptation towards false gods. How little his attitude was understood,
during his life, is well illustrated by the published complaint of Mr.
Aubrey de Vere that his friend Dr. Newman of the Catholic University
would never make time to go driving with him through the exquisite
scenery about Dublin, though invited again and again. In all this, as
in much else, he was entirely Augustinian. _Ejiciebas eas et intrabas
pro eis._ It does not seem clear that Hurrell Froude, who outran
Newman in many austerities, shared fully in the exercise of this
signal one. His loneliness of spirit, far more developed than his
friend’s, was also far less conscious, and his boyish relish of the
beauties of moor and sea based itself, rather, on a philosophy which
was Keble’s, and Henry Vaughan’s long before him:
‘Thou who hast given me eyes to see
And love this sight so fair,
Give me a heart to find out Thee,
And read Thee everywhere!’[75]
Certainly, Newman was never so tormented by his affection for music,
or for anything else in the same class, as he was by the glamour of
out-of-doors at Taormina, and the homelier charms of ‘Devon in her
most gentle dimplement.’ Spiritual matters apart, one does not
perceive what else could have inwrought him more effectually with the
very fibres of Hurrell’s being, than his felt infatuation for the
Dartington he visited but twice in his busy life. They shared the same
passion, again, for Rome. The spirit of place can always create a
final test between any two cultivated minds. To differ in kind or even
in degree of response to it, is indeed to differ.
The principle which lay at the bottom of Newman’s renunciation was
one, however, which was equally familiar to his friend. It may not
always have involved, for him, the need of so determined a
depreciation of the loveliness of rural England, as too keen a
reminder of
‘Isaac’s pure blessings, and a verdant home,’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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