Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments — John Shaqi
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and CommentsGuiney, Louise Imogen
History
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 1803-1836
stands Newman’s early friend, Richard Hurrell Froude, the lost Pleiad
of the Oxford Movement. Akin to some others, names earlier and later,
‘which carry a perfume in the mention,’ he left little to prove and
approve himself. Such as he, in the pageant of eternity, are not the
tallest harvesters with the most recognisable sheaves. Like Crichton
and Falkland and Pergolesi, like Arthur Hallam and Henri Perreyve, he
is known to history as it were by a smiling semi-private hint, or a
sort of May-orchard coronal which the wind has no power to scatter,
rather than by virtue of any personal innings in the complex game of
life. He was a mere man of genius. His inheritance was richly varied:
of mental currents possible in one cross-bred island, there could
hardly be a more spirited blend. ‘The thinkers of the West,’ as an
analytic pen has lately written,[6] ‘reveal a certain practical
sagacity, a determination to see things clearly, a hatred of cant and
shams, a certain “positive” tendency which is one of the notes of
purely English thought.’ Exact in the wider application, the sentence
has an almost startling appropriateness when it is narrowed down to
fit the one ‘thinker of the West’ (not in Mr. Ellis’s lists) with whom
these pages deal. Never to maunder, never to mince matters, never to
pet an illusion, never to lay down arms while there are ‘cant and
shams’ to fight,――all that is very Devonian; and Hurrell Froude, true
at every point, was true Devon in this. His ancestral Speddings, on
the other hand, had imagination and a love of letters, and were ironic
and opinionative after another fashion. They had also, for generation
after generation, as an unexpected corollary, a strong turn for
science, and even for mechanical science, as the less bookish Froudes,
to offset their hard common sense, were restless and romantic lovers
of the open air and of the sea. The shy, critical, solitary, but
ardent and adventurous character which belonged not only to our
particular Fellow of Oriel, but in some measure to all his nearest
kindred, seems to have been inherited equally from the contrasted
streams which ran in their blood. All Hurrell’s religiousness, all his
poetry and fire and penetrative thought, came straight from his
beautiful and highly intelligent mother, whom he lost just as he
really came to know her, and whom he worshipped during the rest of his
life. His stature, colour, and expression, as also his delicacy of
constitution, he received through her.
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