PART II

SOME REPRINTED COMMENTS ON HIM AND ON HIS

RELATION TO THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 231

INDEX 411

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

HURRELL FROUDE AS A CHILD _Frontispiece_

_From a Photograph by F. Hollyer_

FAC-SIMILE SIGNATURE FROM A LETTER OF HURRELL

FROUDE TO HIS FRIEND GEORGE DUDLEY RYDER, ESQ.

(AFTERWARDS REV.), 1832 xxii

DARTINGTON PARSONAGE 5

COMMON-ROOM GROUP 75

FAC-SIMILE LETTER 160

ORIEL COLLEGE 175

_From a Photograph by H. W. Taunt and Co._

DARTINGTON OLD CHURCH, AND HURRELL FROUDE’S

BURIAL-PLACE 202

PREFACE

THE epistolary matter in the first section of this volume is drawn

from material already in print: chiefly from Part I. of _The Remains

of the Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, M.A., Fellow of Oriel_,

published by the Rivingtons in 1838, and, incidentally, from _John

Henry Newman: Letters and Correspondence to 1845_, published by the

Longmans in 1890: from one notable work, that is to say, which is

wholly forgotten, and from another yet recent, of great and unique

interest, which has not yet won its full public appreciation. For the

unrestricted use of the desired extracts from these books, the

Editor’s grateful thanks are due equally to the representatives of the

elder branch of the Froude family, and to Cardinal Newman’s literary

executor.

The liberal selection from Hurrell Froude’s Letters which appeared in

the _Remains_ is invalidated, to modern curiosity, by manifold

suppressions and omissions necessary for private reasons then in

force. Some clue, however, is to be found, if it be looked for,

towards the identification of those to whom his correspondence was

addressed. The Editors of the _Remains_ silently adopted, for the

Letters, the same system of differentiation as they had already

employed, two years before, in regard to the authorship of the

collected poems in _Lyra Apostolica_: that is to say, in both books γ

stands for Keble, δ for Newman, ε for Robert Wilberforce, and ζ for

Isaac Williams. As Hurrell Froude’s own contributions to the _Lyra_

had appeared over the signature β, it was easy to surmise that _Beta_

in the _Remains_ might refer to his brothers or sisters, and _Alpha_,

by a sort of primacy, to his father: as is certainly the case. But it

was more difficult, for instance, to identify η as Mr. Frederic

Rogers, or θ as the Rev. John Frederick Christie: for to these there

was no key but that of internal evidence of an elusive sort. The Greek

alphabet, in the _Remains_, served only as a heading to marshal the

recipients of the Letters written by Froude; proper names figuring in

the course of the Letters were almost in every instance replaced by a

blank. The verification of these names will perhaps be accepted,

though not all are based on a manuscript reading;[1] and of course no

blank has been filled experimentally without due indication of that

process. Nor has effort been made, at any point, to fill out

sentences, or gaps of any kind, save those caused by the suppression

of proper names. This line of procedure, and, indeed, the entire

scheme of the _rifacciamento_, stands subject first and last to the

circumstance that the Editor has had no access to the great mass of

dated and classified manuscript correspondence now at Edgbaston. As it

was impossible to collate the Froude-Newman Letters with the

originals, there appeared something supererogatory in reprinting any

of the others in their complete form, or including unpublished addenda

most kindly placed at the Editor’s disposal, when an exception had to

be ruled in regard to the most interesting and most important material

of all. Unfortunately, moreover, Froude’s letters to his father, the

Archdeacon, to Robert Wilberforce and to Isaac Williams, have

perished; and those to Mr. Keble, if existent, had not been recovered

by his grandnephew, the Rev. George C. Keble, at the time when this

volume went to press. A few letters have been pieced together by

comparison of passages, as they stand in the _Remains_, and in the

Newman _Correspondence_, issued a half-century later. Examination of

the fac-simile page of the amusing letter from Barbados, written on

December 26, 1834, and of its counterpart in the text here given,

copied from that of the _Remains_, will show that some de-editing

might be called for, under the right conditions, in the matter of

Hurrell Froude’s edited correspondence. It will be seen, on the whole,

that neither close study nor long acquaintance with the subject could

keep the reprinting, as it pressed forward, from degenerating into

more or less of a game of guesswork. Yet exclusions and limitations

may cast a befitting half-light upon used literature of long ago,

which was in itself elliptical, and tends to create new ellipses,

inasmuch as its purpose now is to throw stress less on historic or

theological issues than on human character. Many given data, or few,

yield pretty much the same residuum when the personality which reigns

over them is as rich and strong as Hurrell Froude’s. Says one of the

most penetrating of modern writers:

‘The art of biography has accustomed those who read to expect … as the

word implies, the portrayal of a life, of a process: the record of the

growth and unfolding of a soul and character. This it is which

interests the subjective temper of our days…. Our mind has learnt that

its choicest food need not be sought from afar, but lies scattered

with the wild flowers by the wayside, and that nothing is so

extraordinary as the ordinary. Thus we have come to care less for a

full inventory of the events which make up a man’s life, or for the

striking nature of those events in themselves, than for such a

judicious selection and setting of them as shall best bring out and

explain that individuality which is our main interest. We care less

for what a man does and more for what he is; and it is mainly as a key

to what he is that we study the circumstances which act upon him, and

the conduct by which he reacts upon them.’[2] A selection and setting

to explain individuality: such is the aim, such (it is to be feared)

is only very partially the achievement, of this book.

Concerning its second section a few remarks may be called for. That

section actually had, from the first, in the Editor’s intention, the

right of way. It is quite independent, not called into auxiliary play

as a mere illustrative collection of _pièces justificatives_. Many of

these essays and reviews have authority; a few have great literary

beauty; the Editor’s work, which could not vie with them, has borrowed

almost nothing from them, and thus preserved two integrities. Although

limits of space forbade the reproduction of any one chapter of

appreciable length quite in its entirety, yet there existed no reason,

but only the whim of artistic choice, for the inclusion or exclusion

of one part of any paper at the cost of another part. The process of

making excerpts, at best, has something of disagreeableness and of

danger. Where that process cannot be avoided, it is well, at least, if

its lever be not a preconceived theory. An Editor not of Froude’s own

religious communion should scruple all the more to interfere in any

wise with the witnesses. Such lines or pages as are here scored out

are not inaccessible in their original forms. It will be seen that

they are not deleted to favour any special plea, but are either

somewhat irrelevant to the subject in hand, or a repetition of facts

and impressions more succinctly stated in other accompanying papers.

Where aught of moment is involved, the fullest and clearest expression

of it is in every case allowed to carry the field: _e.g._, Dean

Church’s apologetics concerning Froude’s so-called ‘Romanising’ will

be found more satisfactory to the uneasy than the paler defence in the

first Preface to the _Remains_. A broad selective principle has ruled

the Editor also in minor matters: _e.g._, a poem of Froude’s own,

imbedded in the text of an early review by Lord Blachford, or a poem

of his great friend’s imbedded in an analysis by Mr. R. H. Hutton,

are, though coveted, left where they are, and are not transferred to

the main narrative sketch. A slight overlapping, as it were, is

inevitable: what is super-serviceable sometimes serves more than one

pen. Nothing written in English about Hurrell Froude which has colour

and individuality, has been altogether passed by, though the present

scheme is not in the least bibliographical. On the whole, there is set

forth a richly varied testimony: comment buttressed on comment,

sometimes, and contradiction against contradiction. Everything about

the man calls for criticism, and gets it: his private examen of

conscience, his verses, his letters, his traditional sayings, his

ecclesiastical theory and religious practice; everything, in fact,

except his dreaded arguments. These are conspicuously let alone by

those who disapprove of them. They lurk, however, beyond the borders

of parley, and they constitute the aggressiveness of one, who but for

insistence on them, and whatever they imply, was essentially courteous

and gentle. By his commentators he is incessantly quoted: the ‘party

of the second part,’ whoever may be writing, successfully holds the

stage. It is always instructive to watch reflections of so simple and

boyish, yet powerful a personality, on the complex surface of literary

interpretation. We count Hurrell Froude’s a long-forgotten name; yet

during the sixty-eight years since he died, more serious students than

would seem at first thought likely, have felt for this fighting

recluse true attraction, or the equally legitimate attraction of

repulsion; and their number bids fair to increase.

‘Even as a broken mirror, which the glass

In every fragment multiplies, and makes

A thousand images of one that was,

The same; and still the more, the more it breaks.’

The apprehension of all he was, if not the whole truth about him,

should be, in this synod of philosophical friends and deeply

interested foes, no difficult thing to win and hold.

It may not be usual to treat a man of genius like an unglossed

manuscript, and to set him forth impartially with all his variants. As

dear Izaak says in his innocent-seeming irony, this is, perhaps, to

impale him ‘as if you loved him.’ But a free hearing is good law and

good art; diverging guesses, contrasted points of view, exercised by

the competent, have their uses, especially in England; and some

natures and motives bear analysis gallantly well. The reason, at

bottom, for so catholic a treatment of Hurrell Froude, is that Hurrell

Froude, with his singular detachment and sound humour, would not have

disclaimed it: that is, if he had come to know that posterity would

fain hear of him again. And there is but one conclusion to be drawn

from the spirited discussions about him. As M. Henri Malo was pleased

to write, not so long ago, of his historic hero: ‘_En somme, quelle

que soit l’opinion que l’on ait sur son compte, c’est une figure!_’[3]

The sole purpose of this unconventional yet homogeneous volume is to

show Froude, the mind and the man, in his inferential completeness,

and without primary reference to that application of his

best-cherished principles which meant so much then, and which means so

much now. Without primary reference, we say: yet to part him by one

hair’s breadth from the Oxford Movement, who would, and who could? A

book which aims at being not a disquisition, not even a biography, but

simply a convenient rearrangement of obvious data for the study of a

temperament, may plead its own voluntary poverty as a general

extenuation. In the matter not of exegesis but of mere quantity, no

reader will complain of too little!

The chronology of many of the footnotes has been compiled from the

_Alumni Oxonienses_, the _Registrum Orielense_, and the _Dictionary of

National Biography_. In a book of this nature, appealing chiefly to

those who know by heart the golden commonplaces of the educated world,

it has not been thought pertinent to ‘overset’ or verify the classical

quotations.

Something may be added concerning the illustrations. William

Brockedon, before he was famous, once started to paint a life-size

head in oil of Hurrell, then aged about eleven. It was left

unfinished, and is now in the possession of the young sitter’s

namesake and nephew, R. H. Froude, Esq., of Bernstein, Newton Abbot,

by whose kindness a half-tone ‘restoration’ of it serves as

frontispiece to this book. Outside a casual pencil sketch, it is the

only portrait at present known of Hurrell Froude; nor has it ever

before been reproduced, save once as a small scratchy characterless

detail of a Keble College panorama. The painting was unfortunately

abandoned while in its half-chaotic condition: eyebrows and ears are

but barely indicated; the entire background, the collar, a portion of

the hair growing so wilfully on the large shapely head, remarkable

then and always for its even convexity, are a mere disordered wash;

and it was difficult to follow, and to fix by process after process, a

vision of the beautiful boy, with his melancholy and his racial fire.

No idealisation, as need hardly be said, has been attempted. Patience

and sincerity, brought to a rather discouraging task, have succeeded,

in some measure, in recapturing an imperfect image, and in having it

recognised (so far as a man can be recognised in a child), with

gratified pleasure, by the one or two known to the Editor who are the

enviable rememberers of Hurrell Froude. The reduction of the original

head to an almost miniature size justified itself at once in the

disappearance of many blemishes. The print from which the block was

made is an outcome of the photographic skill and artistic feeling, now

historic in England and beyond it, of Mr. Frederick Hollyer. The

‘casual pencil sketch’ just mentioned figures also in this book, and

has in even higher degree the preciousness of a unique thing: for the

reproduction is made directly from an unaltered original in a

portfolio of 1832. Students of that period in England will recall Miss

Maria Giberne, the ‘Queen of Tractaria,’ the animated, romantic, and

loyal friend of the Newmans, who followed her art with long devotion,

and became, later, Sister Maria Pia in the Visitation Convent at

Autun, where she died at a great age. Of her, in her early prime, one

who knew her well wrote:

‘[Maria Giberne] was always a most excellent talker and narrator, but

her great power lay in the portraits she did in chalks. At a very

short sitting, and even from memory, she would draw a portrait which

was at least perfectly and undeniably true. I have heard her drawings

criticised, and her drapery called conventional, but her faces, to my

apprehension, were proof against all criticism. Perhaps they are

better in outline than when filled up and tinted…. Her interest in the

whole [Tractarian] circle was insatiable, and there was hardly

anything she would not do and dare for a sight of one she had not yet

seen.’[4]

Given, therefore, Miss Giberne’s ardour in the matter, and her

frequently-recurring opportunities as a visitor, it would seem almost

certain that she would not have let slip any chance of portraying so

noticeable a luminary as Hurrell Froude, often absent, like herself,

from Oxford, during 1831-1833, and away from it almost altogether

afterwards. Her discovered sketch-books, preserved in the hands of

relatives and friends, yield, so far, but a single page in which

Froude appears. She groups and labels him with other conspirators’ at

a historic moment,[5] in the one Oxford Common Room which ‘stank of

logic.’ Something in the too quiescent gesture of the graceful person

‘on the box,’ as well as in the nature of the circumstance, make one

suspect that the whole was drawn not on the spot, nor from memory, but

from hearsay at the time. Were such the case, the implication would be

that Miss Giberne had a good prior knowledge of Froude’s face and

figure, and even that she was not committing these to paper for the

first time. This little drawing is the property of her nephew, George

Pearson, Esq., of Manchester; it is owing to his courtesy and kindness

that it is here made public.

The picture of Dartington Parsonage, the antique house in the vale

three miles from Totnes, Devonshire, where Hurrell Froude was born,

and where he died, is from a larger water-colour drawing by Arthur

Holdsworth Froude, in the possession of his sister, the Baroness

Anatole von Hügel. The Parsonage, in its mediæval simplicity, was

first sketched by Archdeacon Froude, then the newly-appointed Rector,

in 1799; this sketch yet exists on a fly-leaf of the Parish records.

He at once rebuilt the whole west wing, planted shrubs and vines, and

drained away the pond; but there were no other alterations until after

his death and the removal of the family in 1859-60, when his grandson

Arthur drew the house from memory. Even now, the porch, and everything

to the right of it, upstairs and down, is practically the very same as

in Hurrell’s time; elsewhere the gables have disappeared, and the

tourelle has changed its place. The Parish Church (of fourteenth

century work, like the Hall) is from an old negative by Messrs.

Brinley and Son, of Totnes. This view from the south-west shows the

low railing over the Froude vault, which lay in the angle of the

porch, next the wall. The Church being taken down in 1878, the strong

plain Tower was left alone and intact, standing sentinel over the

dead; and the large slab shown in the foreground of the modern

photograph, covering the burial-place of Hurrell Froude and of his

kindred, is as it looks to-day. The print of Oriel College great

quadrangle is from a photograph copyrighted many years ago by Messrs.

Henry W. Taunt and Co., of Oxford, and here used by their permission.

The inner top tier of three windows next the angle of the Chapel marks

the rooms occupied by Froude. They are on the second floor of

Staircase No. 3, the door being at the right hand as one mounts the

stairs. The beautiful Porch and the whole front have since been

renovated, and the tall bold _Regnante Carolo_ again runs around the

ruined open stone-work parapet, shown in our illustration, which an

Oriel man of the Thirties saw every day as he went in and out of Hall.

It remains only to thank the family of William Froude, Esq., and the

Rev. Charles Martin, the present Rector of Dartington; the Rev. G.

Kenworthy, Vicar of Bassenthwaite, whose generosity and knowledge have

supplied the Editor with many biographical data of the Spedding

family; the Rev. T. Herbert Bindley for authentic information about

Codrington College; the Rev. J. Christie for much painstaking

friendliness, and the use of a page of one of the Theta letters for a

fac-simile; the Rev. G. A. Williams, and several other kind

correspondents of Tractarian lineage, who have patiently answered

inquiries. Lastly, a more intimate acknowledgment is especially due to

the Rev. W. H. Carey, of SS. Michael and All Angels, Woolwich; for

chiefly through the sense of his steady encouragement, based on an

enthusiasm for Hurrell Froude, the Editor’s task, more than once

interrupted and laid by, was pushed on to its completion.

OXFORD, _October, 1904_

HURRELL FROUDE

I

SOME MEMORANDA OF HIS LIFE AND OF HIS IDEALS

[Illustration: Yours ever affectionately

R H Froude

FAC-SIMILE SIGNATURE FROM A LETTER OF HURRELL

FROUDE TO HIS FRIEND GEORGE DUDLEY RYDER

ESQ., (AFTERWARDS REV.), 1832.

(_By the kind permission Of the Rev. H. I. D. Ryder, D.D., of the

Oratory._)]

HURRELL FROUDE

I

SOME MEMORANDA OF HIS LIFE AND HIS IDEALS

THE persons who most compel our interest in this world are not often

the great, exemplars of what we call intellectual eminence: they are

rather the men and the women of genius. On that ground they win the

eye. Vital and unexhausted spirits, under no subjection to results,

can afford, if they choose, to die anonymous; and never having

established a pact with their times, nor with Time at all, they are

contemporary backward and forward as far as thought can reach. Of this

strangely numerous company in England, though he be but

――‘a fugitive and gracious light

Shy to illumine,’

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.

The Speddings were Anglo-Irish, migrating during the sixteenth century

to Scotland, then, early in James II.’s time, to Cumberland. John

Spedding and his wife Margaret were seated at Armathwaite Hall, in

Bassenthwaite parish, Keswick, when their second daughter Margaret,

afterwards Mrs. Froude, was born in 1774. Her elder sister Mary, her

brothers John, James, Anthony, and William (in order of their age),

comprised with her, her father’s family; and she was but seven when he

died. Armathwaite Hall was left in the hands of trustees, who so

wasted it that when John Spedding, the son, came of age he found his

patrimony gone, and resolved to leave the country to join the army,

then in the thick of the Peninsular War. Meanwhile, four miles away,

at the head of Bassenthwaite Lake lay Mirehouse, the owner of which

was Thomas Story, Esquire, a bachelor, attached to his Spedding

neighbours. In the most opportune and romantic way, he made young John

Spedding his heir, just in time to prevent his self-imposed exile, and

in 1802 died, and was succeeded by him in the estate. It was thus that

the Speddings, who had occupied Armathwaite Hall for over a century,

came ultimately to live at the other end of the Lake. John Spedding

married Miss Sarah Gibson of Newcastle. They lived to old age, and had

a numerous issue. James Spedding, the distinguished scholar, the

intimate friend of Tennyson, and leader of the famous Cambridge set

‘The Apostles,’ known afterwards in the world of letters as the

vindicator of Bacon, was their third son. He spent most of his life

(1808-1881) at Mirehouse, and is buried not far away, in the old

churchyard of Bassenthwaite. He and his knew all the Froudes well;

visits were constantly interchanged; and it was he who introduced

James Anthony Froude, his cousin, and brother-in-law at one remove, as

it were, to Carlyle. For James Spedding’s eldest brother, Thomas Story

Spedding, married his cousin Phillis Froude, the second daughter of

the household at Dartington.

To revert to the elder generation――Margaret Spedding, her own mother’s

namesake, born, as we have seen, in 1774, was dearly loved at home for

seven and twenty years; at that somewhat mature age (as it was

considered in 1802), she married the Rev. Robert Hurrell Froude,

Rector of Dartington in Devonshire. His own people were not less

interesting, and even more ancient, than hers. Hurrells, an armigerous

family, and Froudes, rising yeomen from Kent, had struck deep and wide

roots in Devon soil at least as early as the reign of Elizabeth. The

second of these was probably a place-name, though there are those who

derive it from the Icelandic _frod_, wise, not from the likelier

Celtic _ffrwd_, a rushing stream.[7] We find the race numerous and

active, and settled chiefly about Kingston, and about Modbury, where

in the year of Culloden, Richard Hurrell, gentleman, was married to

Mistress Phillis[8] Collings. Their daughter, Phillis Hurrell, became

the wife of Robert ffroud of Walkhampton, third son of John, to whom

descended the Modbury manors of Edmerston and Gutsford; these two

lived at Aveton Giffard, and are buried there in the Parish Church,

where their monuments still exist. ‘Robert ffroud Armiger’ died young,

four years after his marriage, which had for issue one son, and three

daughters. Phillis the widow, a person of strong character, lived on

for sixty-six years longer, and saw the grave opened, or opening, for

nearly all her brilliant and fated grandchildren. Her babes, left

fatherless in 1770, were Mary, Margaret, and Elizabeth; her son Robert

Hurrell was a posthumous child. The latter was to rise to more than

local eminence, known throughout an exceptionally long life as Rector

of Dartington, and from 1820 on, as Archdeacon of Totnes in the

diocese of Exeter.[9] He matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford, in

January 1788, aged seventeen, and in due course, in 1795, proceeded

Master of Arts. He came from Denbury, of which he was already

Incumbent, to his new parish of Dartington, in 1799. Many children

were born in Dartington Parsonage to him and to Margaret Spedding his

wife, of whom Richard Hurrell Froude, named for his paternal

grandfather Richard Hurrell of Modbury, was the eldest. His birth was

on March 25, 1803. Certain critics who disliked the aroma, real or

imaginary, of the Oxford Movement, seemed to harbour, in after years,

a special grudge against Hurrell for his Marian circumstances. It was,

as it were, piling offence on offence that he entered the world on the

Feast of the Annunciation, and consciously, votively belonged to the

College of S. Mary at Oxford. He was privately baptized at home, and

with his next brother, carried up the hill to be received in the

ancient Church at the Hall gates (again S. Mary’s), on the 17th of

April, 1805. Hurrell seems to have been from the first a stormy sort

of child, handsome, and odd, and adored by his relatives. Like the

young Persians in their national prime, he learned ‘to ride, and to

speak truth.’ He was sent early to the Free School at Ottery S. Mary,

where he lived in his master’s house. This was the Rev. George May

Coleridge, nephew of that poet who has made classic the lovely

neighbourhood to all readers of English. He survived until 1847, dear

to all the Froudes. (Perhaps it is not generally known that Mr. James

Anthony Froude, then in deacon’s orders, was responsible for Mr.

Coleridge’s funeral sermon at S. Mary Church, Torquay.) Hurrell was as

happy at his first School as a dreamy rebel boy always subject to

moods and to home-sickness could well be. Everything was done, at any

rate, to keep him happy. His own memories of the green village, with

its great minster and its bright stream, seem to have been pleasant

ones. A lady who was but a young child during his last months at

Dartington recalls his frank smile at drawing in a lottery a picture

of Ottery Church, which she had coveted, lotteries not being abhorred

then, as now, by Christian folk. Had the winner known of the little

girl’s envy, he would certainly have parted with his treasure on the

spot; for he was a born de-collector. Hurrell began, almost as soon as

he could hold a pen, to draw well, and to write agreeable letters. At

thirteen he was sent to Eton. A year or two before, that is, in or

about 1814, he sat for his portrait to that lovable interesting man

and capable artist, William Brockedon, Archdeacon Froude’s particular

protégé and most grateful friend.[10] It may have been begun as one of

many thank-offerings; for some reason, it was left unfinished.

Brockedon was a patient person, by all accounts. Perhaps wild little

Master Froude, for all his innocent looks, may have been, in the

immortal words of Pet Marjorie, ‘whot human nature cant indure.’ The

Archdeacon, too, was critical, and thought his friend happiest in

sketch-work, and that to finish, with him, was, sometimes, to

over-refine. Who could have foreseen that the abandoned canvas was

long to take on unique accidental value to persons then unborn who

should be interested in his sitter? For though that childish sitter

was to live over a score of years longer, and endear himself to men of

a certain school of thought for ever, there was no discoverable hand

but William Brockedon’s to tell them how he looked. There was not

known until the other day a single other portrait, not so much as a

silhouette, of a draughtsman associated with so many, both at home and

at College, who could draw.

[Illustration:

DARTINGTON PARSONAGE, AS IT WAS THROUGHOUT HURRELL FROUDE’S

LIFETIME

_From a water-colour drawing by Arthur Holdsworth Froude_]

The boy, with his half-indolent, half-clairvoyant way of studying, and

his high spirits in and out-of-doors, got on fairly well at Eton,[11]

though his years there seem to have made no great impress on his mind

and character. He developed, perhaps, too slowly, and too much by

instinct and intuition, to be much harmed or helped by a Public

School. Winthrop Mackworth Praed was one of his memorable

contemporaries there; Edward Bouverie Pusey, though in an upper Form,

was another.[12] Like Pusey, Hurrell had a talisman and a safeguard in

the love of a pious mother. The extreme natural sympathy between them

was heightened by the boy’s fickle health, and his unconscious appeal

for continued care. One experience of early invalidism and its

results, lasting for some time, drew from Margaret Froude an oblique

comment or protest which is enough to make one love and admire her

womanliness. She drew up a letter to an imaginary correspondent, which

was really intended for her tall son himself. It sounds wholly like a

page from the _Spectator_, in Steele’s tenderest whimsical vein; and

it would be an ungenerous lad (her Hurrell certainly knew not how to

be ungenerous) who would not be touched by the genuine foreboding

sorrow breathing through it. Whether it was ever actually left in his

way is doubtful; a passage in his Journal may imply that he knew

nothing of it until after her death. Its date lies early in 1820.

‘SIR,――I have a son who is giving me a good deal of uneasiness at this

time, from causes which I persuade myself are not altogether common;

and having used my best judgment about him for seventeen years, I at

last begin to think it incompetent to the case, and apply to you for

advice. From his very birth his temper has been peculiar: pleasing,

intelligent, and attaching, when his mind was undisturbed, and he was

in the company of people who treated him reasonably and kindly; but

exceedingly impatient under vexatious circumstances; very much

disposed to find his own amusement in teasing and vexing others; and

almost entirely incorrigible when it was necessary to reprove him. I

never could find a successful mode of treating him. Harshness made him

obstinate and gloomy; calm and long displeasure made him stupid and

sullen; and kind patience had not sufficient power over his feelings

to force him to govern himself. His disposition to worry made his

appearance the perpetual signal for noise and disturbance among his

brothers and sisters; and this it was impossible to stop, though a

taste for quiet, and constant weak health, made it to me almost

insupportable. After a statement of such great faults, it may seem an

inconsistency to say that he nevertheless still bore about him strong

marks of a promising character. In all points of substantial principle

his feelings were just and high. He had (for his age) an unusually

deep feeling of admiration for everything which was good and noble;

his relish was lively, and his taste good, for all the pleasures of

the imagination; and he was also quite conscious of his own faults,

and, untempted, had a just dislike to them. On these grounds I built

my hope that his reason would gradually correct his temper, and do

that for him which his friends could not accomplish. Such a hope was

necessary to my peace of mind; for I will not say that he was dearer

to me than my other children, but he was my first child, and certainly

he could not be dearer. This expectation has been realised, gradually,

though very slowly. The education his father chose for him agreed with

him; his mind expanded and sweetened; and even some more material

faults (which had grown out of circumstances uniting with his temper)

entirely disappeared. His promising virtues became my most delightful

hopes, and his company my greatest pleasure. At this time he had a

dangerous illness, which he bore most admirably. The consequences of

it obliged him to leave his School, submit for many months to the most

troublesome restraints, and to be debarred from all the amusements and

pleasures of his age, though he felt, at the same time, quite

competent to them. All this he bore not only with patience and

compliance, but with a cheerful sweetness which endeared him to all

around him. He returned home for the confirmation of his health, and

he appeared to me all I could desire. His manners were tender and

kind, his conversation highly pleasing, and his occupations manly and

rational. The promising parts of his character, like Aaron’s rod,

appeared to have swallowed up all the rest, and to have left us

nothing but his health to wish for.――After such an account, imagine

the pain I must feel on being forced to acknowledge that the ease and

indulgence of home is bringing on a relapse into his former habits. I

view it with sincere alarm as well as grief, as he must remain here

many many months, and a strong return to ill-conduct, at his age, I do

not think would ever be recovered. I will mention some facts, to show

that my fears are not too forward. He has a near relation, who has

attended him through his illness with extraordinary tenderness, and

who never made a difference between night and day, if she could give

him the smallest comfort, to whom he is very troublesome, and not

always respectful. He told her, in an argument, the other day, that

“she lied, and knew she did,” without (I am ashamed to say) the

smallest apology. I am in a wretched state of health, and quiet is

important to my recovery, and quite essential to my comfort; yet he

disturbs it, for what he calls “funny tormenting,” without the

slightest feeling, twenty times a day. At one time he kept one of his

brothers screaming, from a sort of teasing play, for near an hour

under my window. At another, he acted a wolf to his baby brother, whom

he had promised never to frighten again. All this worry has been kept

up upon a day when I have been particularly unwell. He also knows at

the same time very well, that if his head does but ache, it is not

only my occupation, but that of the whole family, to put an end to

everything which can annoy him.

‘You will readily see, dear Sir, that our situation is very difficult

and very distressing. He is too old for any correction but that of his

own reason; and how to influence that, I know not! Your advice will

greatly oblige

‘A very anxious parent,

‘M. F.

‘_P.S._――I have complained to him seriously of this day, and I thought

he must have been hurt; but I am sorry to say that he has whistled

almost ever since.’

The kind relative, who was so ungraciously repaid for her goodness,

was his aunt Miss Mary Spedding, the eldest of all her family, devoted

to her only sister Margaret, and to that sister’s memory; the baby

brother, who must have conceived of the wolf as a perseveringly

disagreeable animal, was James Anthony Froude, then nearly two years

old. A year later, on February 16, 1821, Margaret Froude breathed her

lovely soul away, and was laid to rest next the south porch of

Dartington Church, where her children’s feet passed in and out on

Sunday mornings over the flagstones, between the first spring flowers.

‘The Froudes were eight in family,’ wrote Isaac Williams, on a happy

visit long after. On the morrow of their bereavement, this was the

junior roll-call in Robert Froude’s desolate Parsonage:

Richard Hurrell, aged not quite eighteen.

Robert Hurrell, aged sixteen years, ten months.

John Spedding, just fourteen.

Margaret, aged twelve years, nine months.

Phillis Jane, nearly eleven and a half.

William, aged ten years, three months.

Mary Isabella, not quite seven and a half.

James Anthony, under three.

Hurrell Froude was admitted Commoner by the University of Oxford and

matriculated at Oriel College, within a few weeks of his mother’s

death, on April 13, 1821. His delicate health had kept him back: his

father and his brothers all matriculated at seventeen. Robert Froude,

‘Bob,’ was then entering upon his Sixth Form at Eton. Little Margaret

began at once, under guidance, her tender and long continued task of

comforting her father and mothering the motherless. She found no time

to seek her own happiness, till her marriage in 1844,[13] when only

her father and herself, William and Anthony, survived. John Spedding

Froude died in 1841, thirty-four years old, and, like his two elder

brothers, unmarried. Of Phillis, William, Mary, and (James) Anthony,

Hurrell’s own annals will have more to say. Beside one of the leafy

winding roads of Dartington rose afterwards a little grey almshouse,

and over the doorway a stone tablet with this inscription:

‘IMPENSIS MARIAE SPEDDING

PIA RECORDATIONE SORORIS SUAE

MARGARETAE FROUDE

HAEC DOMUS

IN PERPETUAM ELEEMOSYNAM

EXTRUCTA EST.

AGELLUM CIRCUMJACENTEM IN

EOSDEM USUS EROGAVIT

HENRICUS CHAMPERNOWNE.

A.D. MDCCCXXXV.’

It must have been building during the last year of Hurrell’s life, and

no doubt with his ‘very managing sort of mind’ he worked into it some

of his rather primitive Gothic theories. There still is the home which

Mary Spedding’s love built, where age and poverty have privacy and

peace, and roses at every window, and thankful sweet remembrance of

human kindness, as in the ancient time.

Away from home, and without his mother, Hurrell fell silent enough;

and his sadness would have hurt and corroded him, had it not been for

the exquisite friendship which sprang up between him and his tutor at

Oriel. That tutor was John Keble. It is pleasant to think of these

two, with their spiritual foreheads and strong chins, in that

fashionable Georgian College full of decanters and gold tufts, and

‘rows in quad.’ No one in all England whom Hurrell Froude in his youth

was likely to know could have so fostered in him, even by his

unconscious presence, whatsoever things are lovely and of good report.

According to Mr. J. A. Froude’s _Short Studies_ account, there was no

very high level of supernatural religion at Dartington Parsonage. ‘My

father,’ he says, ‘was a High Churchman of the old school. The Church

itself he regarded as part of the Constitution, and the Prayer-Book as

an Act of Parliament which only folly or disloyalty could quarrel

with.’ This theory perfectly harmonised with the wonted order and

general practice fixed for a century before. The Royal Arms, flanked

by the lamentable monuments of all the local gentry, dominated the

chancel; the Squire’s pew had its fat cushions, and a stove in the

middle, and was walled away from any view of the ignored

Communion-table chastely covered with green baize; plebeian hats were

piled in the Font, and there was a ‘national custom of bending forward

in Church,’ as an almost too fond concession to Christian etiquette.

Truthful observers have given us the whole catalogue in print; and it

has been corroborated on every side within living memory. The finer

spirits who did not turn infidel must have felt all this ugliness to

be dreary and hideous enough, though perhaps necessary to feed the

sacred spite against the Middle Ages, so Popishly ‘dark’ with candles

and incense-coals, pageants and bright Alleluias, brought into the

service of God. But to no one in the Church of England before the

Oxford Movement, did it seem an abnormal state of things. Nor was it

so, dogma being dead. When poor Hurrell’s decided opinions had formed,

he must have felt himself in some domestic difficulty. Ritual was

nothing to him except as the language of belief: scant where that is

feeble, full where that is steadfast and profound; how it can be

anything else to man is not quite apparent to an inquiring mind. As he

never lived to work out his beliefs very far, he had no drastic

changes to suggest in the local ordinances, but he must have dedicated

some uphill work to the excellent parent whom he truly reverenced, and

ended by making over into a valuable defender of sacramentalism. The

numerous clerical progeny of Squire Western, worthies like the famous

fox-hunting ‘Păsson Freüde’[14] of his own blood, in another part of

Devon, remained faithful to the Constitution and Parliament, to pay up

for the Archdeacon’s partial defection.

Hurrell’s attitude towards the mother for whom his heart ached, and

towards those who won his fealty at home, discovered itself day by day

in letters to Mr. Keble, a record of occasional thoughts, and the

private journals which he kept for his own conscience to whet itself

upon. Sacred as these pages are, they have been printed before in the

opening volume of his _Remains_; and they prove how very far he was

from being a mere intellectual theoriser, oblivious of daily duty and

common ties. His strife for perfection, a difficult and joyless one at

best, began with these. Some excerpts, scattered or consecutive, will

serve to show his sincerity and thoroughness: how his thoughts ran;

how he fed upon his mother’s memory; with what lowliness he prayed for

the divine help, and with what merciless constancy he learned to

discipline himself, arraign his own motives, and master the bitter and

sovereign science of self-knowledge.

――‘Yesterday I was very indolent, but … my energies were rather

restored by reading some of my mother’s journal at Vineyard. I did not

recollect that I had been so unfeeling to her during her last year. I

thank God some of her writings have been kept: that may be my

salvation; but I have spent the evening just as idly as if I had not

seen it. I don’t know how it is, but it seems to me that the

consciousness of having capacities for happiness, with no objects to

gratify them, seems to grow upon me, and puts me in a dreary way.

Lord, have mercy upon me.’

――‘Spent the morning tolerably well; read my mother’s journal and

prayers, two hours: I admire her more and more. I pray God the prayers

she made for me may be effectual, and that her labours may not be in

vain, but that God in His mercy may have chosen this way of

accomplishing them; and that my reading them so long after they were

made, and without any intention of hers, may be the means by which the

Holy Spirit will awaken my spirit to those good feelings which she

asked for in my behalf. I hope, by degrees, I may get to consider her

relics in the light of a friend, derive from them advice and

consolation, and rest my troubled spirit under their shadow. She seems

to have had the same annoyances as myself, without the same

advantages, and to have written her thoughts down, instead of

conversation. As yet they have only excited my feelings, and not

produced any practical result.’

――‘Read my mother’s journal till half-past twelve: here and there I

think I remember allusions. Everything I see in it sends me back to

her in my childhood: it gets such hold of me that I can hardly think

of anything else. It is a bad way to give a general account of oneself

at the end of a day: people at that time are not competent judges of

their actions; besides, everyone ought to be dissatisfied with himself

always: it is better to give a detailed account like my mother’s by

means of which I may hereafter have some idea of what was my standard

of virtue, rather than my opinion of myself.’

――‘O Lord, consider it not as a mockery in me, that day after day I

present myself before Thee, professing penitence for sins which I

still continue to commit, and asking Thy grace to assist me in

subduing them, while my negligence renders it ineffectual. O Lord, if

I must judge of the future from the past, and if the prayers which I

am now about to offer up to Thee will prove equally ineffectual with

those which have preceded them, then indeed it is a fearful thing to

come before Thee with professions whose fruitlessness seems a proof of

their insincerity! But Thine eye trieth my inward parts, and knoweth

my thoughts, independently of the actions which proceed from them. “O

that my ways were made so direct that I might keep Thy statutes! I

will walk in Thy commandments when Thou hast set my heart at

liberty.”’

――‘Read my mother’s journal. I hope it is beginning to do me some

serious good, without exciting such wild feelings as it did at first.’

――‘I must fight against myself with all my might, and watch my mind at

every turning. It will be a good thing for me to keep an exact account

of my receipts and spendings: it will be a check on silly prodigality.

I mean to save what I can by denying myself indulgences, in order to

have wherewith I may honour God and relieve the poor.’

(To KEBLE, but never sent.)

――‘Perhaps you may think it very odd, but this summer[15] has been the

first time I have had resolution to ask for the papers which they

found of my mother’s after her death. The most interesting to me are

some prayers, and two fragments of [a] journal, one for the year 1809,

I think, and the other in 1815. The prayers seem to have been a good

deal later.’

(Not sent either.)

――‘All this summer I have been trying a sort of experiment with

myself, which, as I have had no one to talk to about it, has brought

on great fits of enthusiasm and despondency, and being conscious at

the time of most contemptible inconsistencies, both in my high and

dejected feelings, I set to work to keep a journal of them, to answer

the purpose of a sort of conversation between my present and my future

self: an idea which I got from reading an old journal of my mother’s,

which they found after her death, and which I never could make up my

mind to look at till this summer.’

――‘I have confessed to myself a fresh thing to be on my guard against.

Every now and then I keep feeling anxious that by bringing myself into

strict command, I may acquire a commanding air and manner, and am in a

hurry to get rid of the punishment of my former weakness. I sometimes

try to assume a dignified face as I meet men, and am never content to

be treated as a shilly-shally fellow. I must not care the least, or

ever indulge a thought, about the impression I make on others;[16] but

make myself _be_ what I would, and let the _seeming_ take its course;

or, rather, be glad of slights, as from the Lord. This will be a hard

struggle. O Lord, give me strength to go through with it!’

――‘I felt as if I have got rid of a great weight from my mind, in

having given up the notion of regulating my particular actions, by the

sensible tendency I could perceive in them to bring me towards my τὸ

καλόν. I had always a mistrust in this motive; and it seems quite a

happiness to yield the direction of myself to a Higher Power Who has

said: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all

these things shall be added unto you.”’

――‘It seems to me a great help towards making myself indifferent to

present things, to conjure up past events, and distant places and

people before me: things that happened at Eton, or Ottery, or in the

very early times of childhood. I felt again to-day as if … the secret

world of new pleasures and wishes to which I am trying to gain

admittance, is a mere fancy. I must be careful to check high[17]

feelings, [as] they are certain to become offences in a day or two,

and must regulate my practice by faith, and a steady imitation of

great examples: in hopes that, by degrees, what I now have only faint

and occasional glimpses of may be the settled objects on which my

imagination reposes, and that I may be literally hid in the presence

of the Lord.’

――‘I might not indeed be too penitent, but penitent in a wrong way.

Abstinences and self-mortifications may themselves be a sort of

intemperance: a food to my craving after some sign that I am altering.

They ought not to be persevered in, farther than as they are

instrumental to a change of character in things of real importance: …

how hard it is to keep a pure motive for anything!… I will refrain,

rather, by forcing myself to talk, and attend to the wants of others

[at table] than by constantly thinking of myself.’

――‘Made good resolutions about behaviour when I go home. Never to

argue with my father, or remonstrate with him, or offer my advice,

unless in cases where I feel I should do so to the [Provost?]. For

even if it subjects me to unnecessary inconvenience, it would do so

equally in both cases; and, if I would submit to it in one case

through pusillanimity, I ought in the other for a punishment. It would

be a good way to make opposite vices punish each other so, and be

likely to cure both in time. In the same way to behave to Bob and my

sisters as I would to [College equals?]: to comply with their wishes,

and not interfere with their opinions, except where I would with the

latter. I must try at home to be as humble, and submissive, and

complying, as I can; and here as resolute and vigorous, till I get to

be the same in all places and all company. I do not preclude myself

from making amendments in this resolution, till I have left Oxford.’

――‘It has turned out a beautiful day, and fasting will cost but little

pain. I have just been shocked at hearing that ――――’s acquaintance,

Mr. ――――, had shot himself yesterday. How strongly it reminds me that

I understand little of the things invisible which I talk and think

about, when the most terrible occurrences having taken place quite

close to me affect me so little! I could work up my feelings easy

enough, but it is enthusiasm[18] to anticipate in this way the steady

effects of moral discipline; even supposing both effects are, whilst

they last, the same. I could not help crying violently just now, on

reading over my mother’s paper. The ideas somehow mixed up together,

and forced on my thoughts what a condition I may be in as to things

unseen, and yet be unconscious of it. O God, keep up in my mind a

feeling of true humility, suitable to my blindness and the things that

I am among.’

――‘I have just been reading over my account of the time I spent at

home last summer…. The great root of all my complicated misdeeds seems

to have been (1) A want of proper notions respecting my relations to

my father. (2) A notion that I was a competent judge how to make other

people happy, by giving a tone to their pursuits. (3) A craving after

the pleasures which I admire. (4) Arrogant pretensions to superiority.

(5) A wish to make my conduct seem consistent to myself and others.

The first is the main point, and when I have carried that, the rest

will all go easily. The only way we can ever be comfortable is by our

all uniting to make his will our law, and what little I can do towards

this will be better accomplished by example than by presumptuous

advice…. Nor do I see how I can so well repress my arrogance as by

always keeping in mind that I am in the presence of one who is to me

the type of the Most High.’

(To KEBLE.)

――‘Among the other lights which have been gradually dawning on me, one

from following the guidance of which I hope I may derive great

comfort, has made me conscious of the debt of reverence that I owe my

father: not only in that, bearing his sacred name, he is proposed to

me as a type of the Almighty upon earth, but that he has, in his high

character, so demeaned himself as to become a fortress and rock of

defence to all those who are blessed with his protection. Under his

shadow I will, by God’s blessing, rest in peace, and will endeavour

for the future to esteem his approbation as the highest earthly honour

and his love as the highest reward. I feel in this resolution real

peace; and while I am conscious of endeavouring to act up to it, will

try, as you advise me, to quiet my gloomy apprehensions.’

――‘O my God! I dare no longer offer to Thee my diseased petitions in

the words by which wise and holy men have shaped their intercourse

between earth and Heaven. Suffer me, with whose vileness they can have

had no fellowship, to frame for myself my isolated supplication. O my

Father, by Thy power I began to be, and by Thy protection Thou hast

continued to me my misused existence: yet I have forsaken Thee, my

only Strength, and forgotten Thee, my only Wisdom. I have neglected to

obey Thy voice, and gone a-whoring after my own inventions. As soon as

I was born, I went astray and spake lies. I loved the delights which

Thou hast given me more than Thee who gavest them; and I dreaded the

might which Thou hast delegated to man more than Thee the Almighty….

Yet, praised be Thy holy Name, Thou hast not even thus utterly left me

destitute; but with hideous dreams Thou hast affrighted me; and with

perpetual mortifications Thou hast disquieted me; and with the

recollections of bright things fascinated me; and with a holy friend

Thou hast visited me. Thou hast sought Thy servant while astray in the

wilderness; Thou hast shown me the horrible pit, the mire and clay in

which I am wallowing: O mayest Thou, of Thy great goodness, set my

feet upon a rock, and order my goings. Purge me with hyssop, and I

shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Turn Thy

face from my sins, and put out all my misdeeds. Make me a clean heart,

O God, and renew a right spirit within me. O give me the comfort of

Thy help again, and stablish me with Thy free Spirit…. Bless, O Lord,

with Thy constant favour and protection that high spirit whom, as Thy

type upon this earth, Thou hast interposed between me and the evils I

have merited. Fill him, O Lord, with the fulness of Thy grace, that,

running with patience the race which has been set before him, he may

finish his course at Thy good time with joyfulness, and find a rest

from his labours in the portion of the righteous.’

――‘I will be cautious about talking of myself and my feelings: what I

like; whom I admire; what are my notions of a high character; how few

people I find to sympathise with me on any subject; and many other

egotistical, mawkish, useless matters, about which I have suffered

myself to prate. Also, I will avoid obtruding my advice, and taking

high grounds to which I have no pretensions.’

――‘Just now, at breakfast,[19] I felt the inconvenience of not

omitting an oath in a story I told of Sheridan. I felt directly that I

lost ground, and should be unable to make a stand, if conversation

were to take a turn I disliked. I must be watchful and strict with

myself in this respect: for, if I comply with my father’s wishes, and

enter freely into society, I shall have much harder work to fight off

my old shuffling vanity, and shall be drawn, from not feeling my own

ground, into foolishness and flash, and everything that is

disgusting.’

――‘I used to speculate on the delight of keeping fasts upon the river

in fine weather, among beautiful scenery, rather than in my dull rooms

at Oxford; but last Friday was a real fine day, yet I did not at all

turn it to this account. Though I ate little, it was something very

different from my Oxford fasts, and still more so from what I then

used to picture to myself, when I should get home. I waste time in

preparing boats, and thoughts in speculating on schemes for

expeditions, and for improving our appointments. Also, I observe other

bad effects resulting from my misconduct, which I cannot but regard as

signs that good spirits are deserting me. The other evening I had an

argument with my father, almost in a sort of tone which I used to feel

ashamed of last summer, and which, in the Christmas vacation, I think

I was not even tempted to; and when I caught myself getting untuned,

it cost me a [severe[20]] effort to check myself; nor was it till the

next morning that all the effects of it subsided, and I felt quite

good-natured and humble again. In this fight I was greatly helped by

the experience of former conflicts, and recollecting the ways I had

caught myself in self-deceit, so that it gives me some hope as well as

humiliation. I pray God that He will not suffer all my feeble efforts

to be wasted, and prove quite ineffectual, and that He will enable me

to lie down to-night with a better conscience.’

――‘Just now, in riding home from Denbury,[21] I got arguing with my

father about the little chance anyone has of doing good, in a way

rather inconsistent with our relative condition; yet, when I thought I

was going rather too far, could hardly convince myself that, at any

particular moment, it was incumbent on me to stop. It is this

self-deceiving disposition that I am afraid of.’

――‘I will brace myself and keep my attention on the alert on this

S[alcombe?] expedition, by a vow about my food: I will make my meals

as simple as I can, without being observed upon; will take no command

upon myself, but obey my father’s instructions to the utmost of my

power; will try to make no objections or propositions unless called

upon; and that no one may be able to put me out of the way [of

self-denial] everyone shall have theirs, however disagreeable they may

seem to me.’

――‘We returned to-day, and on reading over these resolutions, which I

called a vow, I find I have acted very poorly up to them. I believe

they have operated as a sort of check upon me in some respects, that I

have been less of an epicure and less of an interferer than I should

have been else. But yet, quite at starting, I suggested, when my

father proposed going ashore, that it would take a longer time than he

calculated on: but this was merely a suggestion. And on one of the

evenings when we were by ourselves, I argued about people going to

Church in a way very inconsistent with our relative situations;

neither was I quite cordial in my acquiescence with propositions of my

father’s about minor excursions at S[alcombe?] and feel as if I had

pressed unpleasantly on him some of my opinions about tides, and names

of places.’

――‘Yesterday, I was talking to [Phill?] about [Peg?[22]]; and among

other things, when I said how considerate she was about everybody’s

wants, and how she was always on the lookout for an opportunity to

relieve them, I said (and have reason enough to say it) that things of

that sort did not come into my head. But I am afraid I must confess

that I was a little annoyed at [Phill? allowing] that she did not

think they did! I cannot accuse myself of having been so insincere as

to have laid a trap for a compliment; but I was not quite prepared to

find that my negligence was such as to obtrude itself on the

observation of those who would always make the best of one. O God!

give me grace to look on this as a warning voice from Thee, and let

the remembrance of it brace my energies for the future…. Also, I

yesterday gave way to a covetous inconsistent wish for a beautiful

colt that we happened to see, and which my father had half a mind I

should get for my own. I feel all these selfish wishes crowding on me,

and have no clear decided rule by which to check them. I think I will

always ask myself, when I wish for an elegant superfluity, what

business I have to be so much better off than my sisters, and will not

allow myself anything I can avoid till I have got them all the things

they are reasonably in want of.’

――‘Teach me to be ever mindful of the wants and wishes of others, and

that I may never omit an opportunity of adding to their happiness; let

each particular of their condition be present with me, what they are

doing or suffering. I am most fearfully deficient in this mark of a

child of God. Protect me from all covetous desires of the pleasant

things which money can procure: the D[enbury?] cottage, the new

dining-room window, nice furniture, equipage, musical instruments, or

any other thing, in order to obtain which I must lessen my means of

benefiting others.

――‘I have done many things to-day that I ought to be ashamed of. For

instance: I said to the [Provost?] I had not examined carefully an

analysis that I had hardly read a word of. I have assumed, too, a

harsh manner in examining. I feel too anxious to show my own knowledge

of the subjects on which I am examining. Was very inattentive at

morning Chapel, and not sorry to find that there was none in the

evening. I believe the day before yesterday I made a bungle in

examining W[illy] in Euclid, which made him appear to be doing wrong

while he was quite right, but did not discover it in time to rectify

it by confession (which I hope I should have done).’

The youth who wrote much else thus singularly and severely of himself,

had an almost fierce sincerity. At an early hour, he made up his mind

to be in his strength, what many men are said to be in their weakness,

‘nobody’s enemy but his own,’ and he carried out both clauses implied

in the contract. Neither at Eton nor at Oxford, with opportunities by

the score, did he ever make a single ‘influential’ personal friend; to

no position or emolument did he ever aspire, though he was to give

unremitting and precious labour to what he believed to be the best

cause in the world. ‘Froude and I were nobodies,’ said Newman, two

lifetimes later, with a touch of whimsical pride. Like a child of

Socrates, our philosopher would fain see how many things there are

which he could do without; like a child of Seneca, he would fain enjoy

this life, with the zest possible to those alone who are always ready

to leave it. Enough of this Journal, most practical in all its

self-searching. It appears to concern itself with trivialities only to

those who do not realise how relentless is the ascetic spirit, and how

small a quarry it will still hunt when all the tigers are met and

exterminated. As was said of a greater than Hurrell Froude: ‘_Ce

diable d’homme a toujours été en se perfectionnant. Il serait devenu

honnête homme, si on l’eut laissé vivre._’

When Mr. Keble went down to his curacy at Southrop, at the beginning

of the Long Vacation of 1823,[23] Hurrell went with him to read for

his B.A. degree, which he took in December of that year. The summer

was to him, as to one of his companions there, Isaac Williams, the

turning-point in his career. In those tranquil fields and winding

roads and the solemn little village Church, where he found ‘a man

wholly made up of love, and religion a reality,’ Hurrell began to see

the Last Things: he never could forget the place, the person, and the

occasion which meant so much to him in the Providence of God. His

third companion, Robert Wilberforce, ‘did not feel towards Keble,’

wrote Isaac Williams, ‘as we did at that time, having been brought up

in an opposite school.’ In all the fresh and brave happinesses of

nature and of grace which were round Keble like an aureole wherever he

went, Hurrell brightened and strengthened visibly.

‘You are my Spring: and when you smile, I grow.’

He learned from him to follow conscience and to fear applause. As soon

as he parted from Mr. Keble, their long correspondence began, and the

home-loving pupil was proud indeed when the ‘first man in Oxford,’ as

Newman enthusiastically called him, came on a visit to Dartington. We

know from recent testimony of a delightful pen[24] how dear the

neighbourhood became to Mr. Keble, and how often he would wander away

from the animated household of his friends to the fourteenth-century

priest’s-house hard by at Little Hempston, an almost unique survival,

with its small quadrangle, its hall and solar, of Chaucer’s time. The

lovely old Vicarage, in its still secluded situation, had taken

captive Hurrell’s twenty-year old fancy, as a letter of 1823 to Mr.

Keble shows.

‘I will pledge my own peculiar veracity to the following statement:

The situation is, I am confident (and on this matter experience has

peculiarly qualified me to judge), [by] far the most beautiful place

in the world, the focus of irradiated perfection, the favoured haunt

of romance and sentiment, the very place which, if you recollect the

circumstance, you taxed me with a disposition to romanticity for

encomiasing, when I informed you that I had destined it for my

κρησφύγετον, where, unmolested, _flumina amem silvasque inglorius_.

The Parsonage is situated in a steep and narrowish glen, which

intersects a long line of coppice that overhangs the Dart for the

length of nearly a mile, and rises almost perpendicularly out of the

river to the height of about two hundred feet. The stream there is

still, clear, and very deep; on the opposite side is Dartington; and a

line of narrow, long, flat meadows, interspersed with large oak and

ash trees, forms the bank of the river. The steep woods on the Little

Hempston side are in the form of a concave crescent (thereby agreeing

with Buckland).[25] From the Parsonage to the river is a steep descent

through a small orchard; at the bottom of which, on turning the corner

which the glen aforesaid makes on its north side with the course of

the stream, you come at once on a sort of excavation, of about half an

acre, which, terminated by an overhanging rock, forms a break in the

line of coppice aforesaid. In this said rock young M. found the hawks’

nests. I think they build there every year. On the opposite side,

_i.e._ the Dartington side, is what was formerly a little island, but

now no longer claims that proud title, in the oaks of which I am in

hopes we shall soon have an heronry, as they haunt there all the

summer. After this I should not so utterly despair of success, if I

felt less interested in the event;[26] but as it is, I can hardly hope

for so great a gratification.’

Several months later, he is still in the descriptive vein.

‘When I came home I found things looking most dismal. My father had

cut all the laurels to the roots, in hopes of making them come up

thicker. A field almost outside the windows, which had been put in

tillage, was ploughed so extremely ill that we were afraid it would be

forced to be tilled with turnips (_Dî talem campis avertite pestem!_)

instead of clover…. The copse also, which overhung the river by the

Little Hempston rocks, was in great part gone, “and the place thereof

knew it no more.” I hope the rest may be spared.’

The laurels he had planted gave the energetic Archdeacon some trouble.

In his old age he had them all swept away, and made a needed if

unromantic improvement in the outlook of the beautiful old house.

Hurrell’s implicit differences with his ‘knowing, quick, and handy’

father, so many of whose best qualities he shared, hinged laughably

often on such things as the culture of trees and the make and

management of boats. In all, he did his best to become what the

epitaphs of the time call ‘an humble obsequious son.’

Hurrell took only a second class in Classics and Mathematics

(disappointing and astonishing everyone who knew him) during 1824. But

he had exactly the sort of mind which, sooner or later, would come to

grief with any curriculum.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, March 29, 1825.

‘… Be so good as to write a sermon on “_flumina amem sylvasque

inglorius_,” for the benefit of my father, who objects to our having a

four-oar given us, as infallibly tending to debilitate and torpify the

mental faculties! I am afraid it is not in my stars to be ever

contented; for I confess I do not feel that serene felicity which I

pictured to myself last October as my destiny; though my delight is

not impaired as to the misery I have escaped. I am sure the ghosts of

those who have taken a degree at Oxford will require a double portion

of Lethe before they begin “_in corpora velle reverti_.”

‘_March 31. P.S._――I wrote enclosed the day before yesterday, but, as

you will perceive, incapacitated it for going by the post without a

cover; so I waited for a frank. And, as I am become so prudent as not

to like wasting paper, you are indebted to this circumstance for an

elongation of my epistle. I don’t recollect whether I told you that I

have been reading Clarendon, for which, though I skipped over some

parts, I feel much veneration. I am glad I know something of the

Puritans, as it gives me a better right to hate Milton,[27] and

accounts for many of the things which most disgusted me in his

not-in-my-sense-of-the-word poetry. Also, I adore King Charles and

Bishop Laud!… You prosed me once for not sending regards,

remembrances, compliments, etc., so let everyone choose which they

like best, as I commit to you an assortment of each kind for

distribution.

‘“Tuque vale, sedesque juvet meminisse meorum,

Heu, nunquam rediture.”’

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, May 13, 1825.

‘Αἰνότατε: I have been long intending to thank you for your benevolent

instructions, which (I don’t know whether I ought to be ashamed or not

in confessing it) answered a purpose different from what they were

intended for; viz., they convinced me and (what was more to the point)

my father, that I knew so little about the matter, and had so little

time left, that it was no use to proceed. It certainly was no small

satisfaction to me to have so good an excuse for giving up what I had

exhausted the entertainment of, and had nothing but the laborious to

come. Also, the weather has been so very beautiful this spring, and

the delicious blue sky, with hardly a cloud on it for six weeks, so

very tempting, that it was hardly possible to help being idle. But

somehow my conscience rather misgives me, and what with admonitions

now and then from my father, and my lately having taken up with

reading sermons, I am become “as melancholy as Moorditch or the drone

of a Lincolnshire bagpipe”; so that upon the whole I think I must come

to you to be prosed and put into a better way…. By the by, I am now

officiating as ethical instructor to B[ob?], in which capacity I have

been much humiliated at finding how little I know about the matter;

but it makes me get them[28] up, which perhaps I should never have

done else. I do not think them at all less prosy and long-winded than

I used, and I would bet Bishop Butler against all the ‘stotles in the

world. Among other things I am also becoming something of a florist,

and something of an architect, in which latter I make some

proficiency. I am a powerful coadjutor (though I say it that should

not say it), in the completion of D[enbury], which bears a different

aspect from when you saw it last. It will be a pretty monastic-looking

erection, and if we could but make it old, and buy a ghost or two,

would be somewhat sentimental. For, thanks to my grandmother’s[29]

perverseness, she would not have a new house except in the shape of an

old one repaired, which superinduced the necessity of so many crooked

little passages and such an irregular exterior, that my father had an

excuse for doing what would else have seemed fanciful. Talking about

architecture, a new town[30] is going to be built down by Torbay,

which is to cut out Brighton and every place. The ground where it is

to stand is perfectly unencumbered with houses, and covered with

trees, so that there is every advantage at starting; and all will be

done on a general plan, so that the buildings shall as little as

possible interfere with each other. If you know anyone that wishes for

a delightful sea-residence, send him there. You must know you narrowly

escaped having a poetical effusion from me the other day. I was out in

so magnificent an evening; but being, as you know, a man of few words,

I found that by the time I had made my verses scan and construe, they

would be so remote from an effusion, at least in the quality of being

_effunded_, that it was better to be contented with a prosaic

statement: viz., that coming home from Little Hempston the other

evening after sunset, and having with some difficulty discovered and

scrambled into my boat, which was moored under an old stump at the

bottom of the woods, as I proceeded on my course down the river, the

sky gradually assumed a portentous appearance, and distant flashes of

lightning, growing gradually more distinct, began at regular

intervals. Things however are not so constituted as to allow the

sublime to amalgamate with the comfortable: according to the decrees

of Fate, the storm which had lingered in the upper regions till I had

got so far on my way home as to be out of reach of shelter from

Dartington House, now came down with such violence as to save me the

trouble of running at any rate, by convincing me that whether I was

out five minutes or fifteen I should be in an equally bad case. The

thunder got very loud, and the lightning was so green and brilliant,

that I could see the stiles and gates, and even their latches, like

the spectres of the things from which “_nox abstulit atra colorem_.”

Sometimes the flashes lasted for nearly a second, and dazzled me so

that after they were passed I could make no use of the twilight at

all. Having got thus far, I feel in the awkward situation of having

told a story without a point, and feel inclined to resort to the usual

remedy, and apply to my invention to help me out of the scrape with a

marvellous conclusion. Perhaps however you may be contented with a

moral: so here goes. As good never comes unalloyed with evil, so that

very evil often serves to give it a relish which it might otherwise be

destitute of. I could not have reckoned this as an adventure, if I had

not been forced to change my clothes when I came home.’

To the same ‘holy friend’ for whom Hurrell privately says on his knees

his heartfelt thanksgiving, he writes often, from the first, in a mood

of bantering and almost irreverent freedom.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, 1824.

‘… Now I proceed to vindicate my character from the unwarrantable

aspersions you have been pleased to throw upon it. Be it known then

that since the first of May I have read the four first books of

Herodotus, three of Ethics, two of Thucydides, _Œdipus Tyrannus_,

_Eumenides_, Ἱκέτιδες, and a book of Homer; and all this not

carelessly, but with Scapula and Matthiæ. And though there are several

posing places in the Æschylus and Herodotus with which I shall in

course of time bother you, still upon the whole I flatter myself that

in a short space I shall be at least equal to Peter Elmsley,[31] and I

would advise you to prepare the examining masters for the reception of

such a luminary…. My father, I must assure you, has received no

favourable impression of your moral organisation from the injudicious

exposure which you made in your last letter. But I will urge the

matter no further; … the shortness of the time during which your

ἐνέργεαι have been discontinued may not yet have allowed the

annihilation of the ἕξις. I shall rest in hope that this timely

admonition may awaken you to a sense of your duty, and reinstate your

perceptions of the ἀληθὲς in their full vigour. “Thine by yea and nay,

which is as much as to say, as thou usest him.”’

Mr. Keble was settled in 1825 as Curate in sole charge of Hursley,

Hampshire.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Aug. 16, 1825.

‘… _Suaviter ut nunc est inquam_: but it was not so with poor

[Williams] in the packet, being that he was sick all the way from

Portland Head to Plymouth Sound; and was so completely miserable that

he would not be spoken to, and kept on groaning out that he would give

all he ever expected in the world to be on shore. By this unfortunate

circumstance he was prevented from seeing the sun rise over the watery

element in the very act of “pillowing his chin upon an orient wave,”

and from bearing testimony (which I can do) that there is nothing the

least sublime in the mere fact of being out of sight of land, and

having nothing but the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky. But

what was most melancholy of all, he was unable to get a glimpse of all

the glorious coast of the south promontory of Devonshire…. Next day we

came upon Southampton, while it was under one of the most imposing

magnificent effects possible: a rainbow, lost in a dark cloud which

was raining as hard as it could pelt, was resting one of its ends on

the woods: and the sun on the waters, and the spires, made the misty

smoke that was rising up from the town, quite imposing and

sentimental. However, my complacency was much alloyed by the

tantalising sight of the beautiful yachts, with their glittering

sails, skimming along in the breeze, which had just started up after

the violent rain which had fallen, and the melancholy _Heu, non mea_

rushed on me with irresistible force.’

How well he loved a boat! He complains, in one entry of his Journal,

that the thought of boats distracts him insufferably during his

prayers.

Hurrell was asked to say his say about _The Christian Year_, then in

manuscript. He seems to have been inclined to begrudge the fact that

Keble had set himself to write not as a poet for poets, but as a

challenging voice to ‘earth-drudging hearts.’ That he appreciated the

lasting charm of the book is quite apparent from the singularly

apposite quotation applied to it in the second letter on the subject.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Sept. 10, 1825.

‘About the poems――it is really too ludicrous for a fellow like me to

sit down deliberately to criticise the taste and philosophy of a

production of yours: so that I have no inclination to expose or commit

myself, by detailing to you my remarks on particular passages. There

are, as you may suppose, many places which, in fun, I would show fight

about; and there is something which I should call Sternhold-and-Hopkinsy

in the diction, of which I began to note down the first instances I

met; but, finding it go through, I concluded it was done on a theory.

But though I am not quite such a fool as to think my opinion worth

offering in point of criticism, it may not, perhaps, be quite useless

to confess it as a matter of fact, with which you may begin an

induction as to the probable good you may do by publication. I

confess, then, and not without some shame, that you seem to me to have

addressed yourself too exclusively to plain matter-of-fact good sort

of people … and not to have taken much pains to interest and guide the

feelings of people who feel acutely, nor to have given much attention

to that dreary visionary existence which they make themselves very

uncomfortable by indulging in, and which I should have hoped it was

the peculiar province of religious poetry to sober down into practical

piety. I know all this may be great nonsense, may be even humbug; for

long experience has convinced me how much I can cheat myself as to my

real feelings. But that you may see that it has not been concocted

since, but was the impression made on me while reading, I will extract

a note which I made … I suppose I meant that things like Gray’s

_Elegy_, which turn melancholy to its proper account, by pointing out

the vanity of the world without telling us so, seem to me more to

answer the purpose. And now I will cease making an ass of myself!… I

am half-conscious that the same sort of objections might be made

against the Psalms; and though I cannot but think that they will make

your poems less generally liked and read, I am far from confident that

it may not be better, upon the whole, for those who attend to them as

a religious duty.

‘I can hardly shut up without telling you of such an interesting set

of fellows that we heard of in our peregrinations. They were sixteen

French fishermen and three boys, who had all come over, in one boat,

to get bait on the English coast, and were kept there ten days by the

wind: all that time they sat upon the deck knitting stockings and

nightcaps; and, when Sunday came, they were just so far out at sea

that the people on the coast could hear them singing the Roman

Catholic service so beautifully, and in the evening they came on

shore, and danced, out of mere jollity, for an hour. They were such

grateful fellows, that a gentleman on the coast who had done them some

kindness, could hardly get rid of them without his giving them some

commission to do for him in France, _i.e._ to let them smuggle

something over for him; and, when they could not remove his scruples

as a Justice of [the] Peace, they caught him an immense fish, and were

quite disappointed that he would not accept it as a present.’

The great mass of Keble’s letters to his pupil and friend have

disappeared: but we have the answer promptly sent to this, and written

with his own winning humility. ‘For your telling me exactly what you

think about [the verses] I shall hold you in greater honour as long as

I live.’ He goes on, sweetly and sagaciously, to explain that _The

Christian Year_ but aimed at helping ‘the plain and good.’[32] It will

be remembered that the archpriest of letters, Mr. William Wordsworth,

once offered to go over _The Christian Year_, with a view to

correcting the English. To that height Hurrell could not rise.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Dec. 6, 1825.

‘“Sir, my dear friend,” you cannot tell how much I am obliged to you

for your benevolence to my last letter, but that does not make me the

less a fool for having expressed myself so; and what provokes me most

of all is that I did not give myself fair play by not writing till my

opinions had settled; for as far as my memory goes, I think they are

now undergoing a revolution, and that if I were to see the pottery[33]

in question again, I should think quite differently of it. There is

something about them which leaves (to use the words of our friend Tom

Moore)

‘“A sad remembrance fondly kept

When all lighter thoughts are faded.”

And though I cannot account for the fact, I have been much more

sensible of this since a re-perusal of Genesis.――I wrote the foregoing

not long after the receipt of your letter, but have been such a dawdle

that I have not been able to collect materials for finishing it: and

the circumstance which now at last helps me out is a melancholy one,

no other than the decease of our friend and companion Johnny Raw:[34]

who was taken off, some days since, in the staggers. There was

something peculiarly doleful in the poor fellow’s exit; and there was

a sort of dreariness diffused over all its circumstances, which set it

off with almost a theatrical effect. As B[ob] says, it would have not

been so much if he had wasted away by a long illness, or if he had

heard of his death at a distance; but to have been using and admiring

him till within a few days of his decease, to have watched all the

stages of his rapid illness, seen him bled, given him his physic

(which seemed to distress him very much, though all along the pain he

suffered was evidently very great), and, after all, to have got up at

two o’clock in the night, when the crisis was to take place, and come

into the stable only a minute after his death, where we could just see

him, by lantern-light, stretched out on the straw:――were incidents not

calculated to excite pleasure. Add to this, it was one of those

shivering cold stormy nights which make me feel as if I and the people

with me were the only human beings in the world: a fact, by-the-by,

which I am not yet sufficient psychologist to account for. And the

next day, when we went out to bury him, the weather was just the same,

and there was nothing to excite one cheerful association. Also, it was

somewhat staggering to the speculatively inclined, not to be able to

discover one single reason why he should not be able to gallop about

as well as ever. He was evidently in good condition, his flesh hard,

and his limbs sound: and why I should be able to walk any better than

he, was more than I could elicit. We buried him under an elm tree in

the lawn, and nailed his shoes to it for a monument.[35]

‘… My father has found the Εἰκὼν [βασιλική] among some old books, and

I have been reading it. It puts me in mind of a verse in this

morning’s Psalms: “Thou shalt hide me privily by Thine own presence

from the provoking of all men, Thou shalt keep me secretly in Thy

tabernacle from the strife of tongues”; which seems to point out the

clearest and most beautiful instance of the moral government of God

being begun on earth. I should like to know the Hebrew of the verse

before: “O how plentiful is Thy goodness, which Thou hast prepared for

them that trust in Thee _even before the sons of men_.” For if

“before” means “in the presence of,” then David is drawing the

conclusion I want; but I am afraid it must mean “greater than falls to

the lot of the rest of mankind.” … Please to look, when you are in a

humour for it, in _Medea_, 705, where Ægeus says, εἰς τοῦτο γὰρ δὴ

φροῦδος εἰμὶ πᾶς ἐγώ. The commentators cited by Elmsley have fumbled

much about it, and some of them I do not understand; but may it not

mean: “For as to my name continuing in my posterity, in that respect I

am clean gone.” If εἰς τοῦτο will bear this signification, it is

certainly prettier than as it is commonly explained. I like _Hecuba_

far better than _Medea_…. Another interval has elapsed, and the

leaves, which had held out surprisingly hitherto, have almost totally

disappeared, and now we may reckon winter to be fairly set in. I wish

I could write verses to perform the obsequies of this delicious

summer, the like of which will probably never visit the abodes of

mortals again….’

The little implied joke, celibate and Greek, on his own name, is not

the least adornment of this charming letter.

At the outset of 1826, Hurrell found at least one modern book to his

liking. This was the _Fragments in Verse and Prose, by a Young Lady,

Miss Elizabeth S――――, with Some Account of her Life and Character_, by

H[enrietta] M[aria] Bowdler, a new edition of which, in two volumes

octavo, had just appeared. Elizabeth Smith of Burnhall near Durham,

the Oriental scholar, was born in 1776 and died in 1806. Our present

standard reference, the _Dictionary of National Biography_, which

highly commends her self-won learning and its methods, adds that ‘her

verses have no merit, and her reflections are of the obvious kind,

gracefully expressed.’ But the reflections do not seem obvious to some

readers, save inasmuch as at first all simple and profound little

discoveries of the sort seem so: which is ever their highest praise.

The book is but poorly representative, and badly put together: it

certainly would give no clear idea, to our own more exacting public,

of a personality full of goodness and charm, nor of a remarkable mind

with a dozen hobbies, and not one affectation.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Jan. 12, 1826.

‘Δαιμόνιε: As I am conscious of being one of those imbecile-minded

people who one day admire a thing as if they could never think of

anything else, and soon after cease to think of it at all, I must

write to you while a little book that I took up the other day

accidentally continues uppermost in my thoughts. It calls itself

_Fragments in Verse and Prose, by a Young Lady_; and struck with the

sentimentality of the title, I took it up to laugh at it; nor did I

find anything in the preface to do away with my preconceived opinion.

But on opening the book at random, among some fragments extracted from

her private meditations, I began to like her most extremely. The

mention of Piercefield,[36] and the initials Miss S., made me remember

your having told me of a Miss Smith that lived there, while we were

scrambling up the Windcliff. I am sure if you had admired her half as

much as I do, you would not have let me go till we had hunted out

every corner that she mentions. There is something to my mind very

peculiar in all the turn of her thoughts, and those half-metaphysical,

half-poetical speculations which almost put me in mind of my mother.

Yesterday I mentioned the book to a person who I was surprised to find

knew a great deal about her, and from whom I was still more astonished

to hear that I myself knew very well indeed her intimate friend Miss

H[unt], to whom most of her letters are addressed….’

And again, a little later, winding up an intimate letter in Latin to

Keble, there is more of this pleasant heroine-worship, coupled with

some feeling analysis and amusing self-portrayal. Hurrell’s repugnance

to things German were a foregone conclusion, had he never expressed

it.

‘… I could not find the places you referred me to in Miss Smith, but

am happy to find that we sympathise in the extent of our admiration,

if not in the sources; though indeed, I am willing to believe, both.

But as for old Klopstock, I cannot read about him and his wives;[37]

and am rather horrified at Miss S[mith’s] having taken so much trouble

about him, or any other sentimental old German. What makes me admire

Miss S[mith] so excessively, is more than I can give any intelligible

account of: she either does not admire, or is not acquainted with my

favourite books; and those that she fancies she admires (for I am sure

she does it only in ignorance) are my inveterate enemies. Neither

could I fix upon any passages in her own writings which would seem to

justify me if I quoted them. But somehow I seem perfectly certain I

know her intimately, and that I can trace the feelings in which all

she says and does originates; and all this is so consistent, as far as

it goes, with what I have imaged to myself as the archetype of human

perfection, that I have invested her, in my imagination, with all its

attributes….

‘Lloyd’s[38] immense catalogue of books, that he recommends as

necessary, has frightened me beyond measure: but I am getting to be of

your opinion, that to be fully occupied is almost necessary, in order

to get through life with tolerable ease and comfort….’

Says the Editor of the Newman _Correspondence_, in entering upon the

annals of the year 1826: ‘The Oriel election and Fellowship was this

year a momentous one to Mr. Newman, as bringing him into intimacy with

the friend whose influence he ever felt powerful beyond all others to

which he had been subject.’ Newman writes of the election to his

mother on March 31, 1826, in terms of convinced enthusiasm which are

not unlike Crabb Robinson’s after encountering for the first time the

youthful William Hazlitt. ‘By-the-bye, I have not told you the name of

the other successful candidate:[39] Froude of Oriel. We were in grave

deliberation till near two this morning, and then went to bed. Froude

is one of the acutest and clearest and deepest men in the memory of

man. I hope our election will be _in honorem Dei et sponsæ suæ

ecclesiæ salutem_, as Edward II. has it in our Statutes.’ The Oriel

electors had their own standards, and gloried in them. Fellowships

depended hardly at all on the technical and the prescribed;

indications of the scope and accuracy of acquired knowledge passed for

next to nothing; but what did count, in Oriel’s golden days, was a

man’s whole momentum and equilibrium, his relationship to the

intellectual life, his mastery over his own faculties: ‘not what he

had read, but what he was like.’ Originality, distinction, was the

cachet, and Oriel College was the first in Oxford to throw open her

unhampered Fellowships to the entire University. Like Whately, Thomas

Mozley, and Newman himself, Froude who stood only moderately high in

the books of the University examiners, had been preferred before

candidates who were double-firsts. He took, as was but natural, an

even more rapturous pleasure in the event than Newman had done. He

wrote to Keble, when he was steadying himself under the impact of a

lasting good fortune:

‘My dreamy sensations have at length subsided, and I cannot think how

I could have made myself such a fool as to be so upset! But it was

altogether such a surprise to me, and I knew it would delight my

father so much, that I could not stand it all. I do not mean that when

the news was announced to me I did not contemplate the possibility of

it; for you must know that I am the most superstitious of the species,

and that on the first day of the examination I had a sort of

indescribable sensation from which I augured the event. But such a

confused prophesying as this is so very different from a sober

expectation that it served rather to increase than to diminish my

surprise at its being realised.’

And again, turning from what he thought an almost unnatural success,

he seeks refuge in his own special pun. ‘_Crede mihi_,’ he confides to

Keble on the eve of Candlemas, ‘_idem sum ille φροῦδος qui utroque

pede claudicans e scholis evasi: me in nulla re scholastica ex illo

tempore usque ad hunc diem sentio profecisse_.’ In ‘Empty-head’

limping with both feet out of the Schools, we are to recognise an

allusion to Hurrell’s unforgotten double-second class. He was too

humble to see that for a Romany rye of his sort, a double-second class

was really a quite extravagant toll to pay to University conventions.

Oriel soon became a hotbed of revolution, as the consequence of her

anti-academical processes of selection. Within two years, troubles

began, and Froude, with Newman, R. I. Wilberforce, and Dornford, the

other public Tutors, took up and for a long time maintained, against

the settled paganism of the College, their own ‘fierce’ views of their

duty towards undergraduates. Of this duty Froude and Newman had a

particularly clear conviction. Keble had struck, and struck strongly,

the pastoral note as early as 1818, and developed it in a letter to

Sir J. T. Coleridge.[40] On the other hand, the Provost and the

administrators held that intercourse between Tutor and pupil should be

a routine of lectures only, and not that and a cure of souls beside.

The antagonism lasted for nearly four years, during which Froude’s

deep friendship with Newman grew up, and was perfected. The end came

with Hawkins’ express refusal to sanction the further supply of pupils

to the would-be spiritual directors who so quietly defied him. They

had ‘led the last struggle for the ancient quasi-parental and

religious character of the College Tutor.’[41] As the pupils they had

went up for degrees and left the University, they fell quite idle, in

that respect, by 1831, and with all their smouldering zeal and moral

fire within them, the way was open for another onset of the Laudians

which was destined to affect the consciences not alone of young Oriel,

but of the nation and the age.

Froude’s allotted rooms were directly over Newman’s, in the Chapel

angle of the Great Quad of Oriel College. The new Fellow did not, as

such, come into residence until after the Easter vacation; during the

following month, April, we find him still luxuriating in Devonshire

and plunging deep into abstract metaphysics. ‘I have been taken with a

fit of writing,’ he confesses to Keble. ‘I am happier than I ever was

at Oxford, far: but that is not saying much.’ Apparently, he had

posted manuscripts for criticism, and received it as gratefully and as

combatively as usual. ‘I am infinitely indebted to you,’ he writes,

‘for your expeditious attention to my concern, and will try my best to

set to rights the places you row [about]. However, I still maintain

that my end is both relevant and true and my puzzle-headed antithesis

a good one; but I bow my head in implicit confidence, as far as

practice goes. Distinctions and refinements are growing on me, and I

am all in a maze; and it is delightful to have the shadow of a great

rock in a weary land to which I may turn for temporary shelter. If I

had a year more, I could not make it at all to my satisfaction; so I

must make the best of it.’

His note-books for this year and the next are full of the contemned

‘distinctions and refinements.’ In trying to beat out his conceptions

of moral growth (a thing he refused to recognise in himself), he jots

down some striking and arresting thoughts. Two or three which lie

metaphysically not far apart, must suffice for transcription. They

show the coherence, the synthetic power with which Froude’s philosophy

knit all worlds into one.

――‘For whatever cause the great Author of Nature contrived that

resemblance (as it appears to us) which subsists between the part of

His dominions of which He has given us a consciousness, and that other

part with which we are acquainted only through our understanding, it

seems calculated to assist our conceptions of the one to observe what

passes in the other…. The business of our life seems to be to acquire

the habit of acting as we should do if we were _conscious_ of all that

we _know_…. It is delightful to see things turn out well whose case

seems in some sort to represent to us our indistinct conceptions of

our own. Animals fainting under the effect of exercise, and then again

recovering their strength which that very exercise has contributed to

increase; the slow and, uncertain degrees in which this increase is

effected, and yet the certainty in which it is effected: the growth of

trees sometimes tossed by winds and checked by frosts, yet, by the

evil effects of these winds, directed in what quarter to strike their

roots so as to secure themselves for the future, and by these frosts

hardened and fitted for a new progress the next summer:――in things of

this sort I am so constituted as to see brethren in affliction

evidently making progress towards release.’

――‘Some people imagine that there is something blasphemous in the

supposition that a finite creature can be conscious in two places at

once. This is so far from being true that even our own experience

contradicts it. Perhaps there is some absurdity in the very idea which

attributes a place to consciousness, or the things capable of it. With

regard to ourselves, there is nothing to show us _where_ we are

conscious (though most people suppose the conscious thing is somewhere

within the body), or that we may not be with equal propriety said to

be conscious, or, in other words, to _be_, wherever anything is of

which we are conscious. It seems to me that the question where we are,

is one not of fact, but of degree; and that the only facts which make

us suppose we are where our body is, give us likewise the same reason

for supposing that in the same sense we sometimes are far away from

the body.’

――‘Yesterday, before breakfast, while the vacancy produced by fasting

was still on me, and I was reading the Psalms, and craving for a

comprehension of the things which I could only look on as words, and

was worked up to such a pitch that I felt trying to see my soul, and

make out how it was fitted to receive an impression from them,――Merton

bell[42] began to go; and it struck me (I cannot tell why) that if

such a trifle as that could give me such a vivid idea, my soul must be

a most intricate thing; and that when senses were given to the blind

part of it, what things would those appear, the apprehension of which

I was struggling after! This is as near what passed in my mind as I

can find expressions to shape my memory by. This blindness of heart is

what, by habit and patience, it is our work practically to remove. We

are to shape our souls for its removal, by making it in harmony with

the things invisible.’

These passages mark a great point of divergence between the writer and

the ‘religious genius’ with whom his memory is identified to all

generations. It is something of an anomaly, even, to find the young

Froude, and not the young Newman (rather the less practical of the

practical pair), developing so strong a habit of purely speculative

thought; but it was that which gave him his silent leadership. He

combined with his turn for abstractions (yet with scorn shared with

Newman for ‘formulas which antedate the facts’) an unexpected power of

philosophical application of scientific ideas. All these half-mystical

gymnastics of the reflective faculty are going to tell in 1833 and

after, when the hour of action strikes, and when, by his already

gathered impetus, Hurrell Froude is going to dart ahead in a still

level flight, like a gull’s. He will seem external, as if talking more

than he thinks, talking somewhat to the bewilderment of those others

who can hardly think for his talking. He will be gay; he will be glib;

he will pass care-free amid the sweat of horses and men, simply

because of these long hard mental vigils, pen in hand, up Oriel

Staircase No. 3, while he is hearing Merton bell, and trying to see

his soul.

To Keble, who was still at home during the spring of 1826, Hurrell

confides impressions of the Newman who had already conceived so lofty

an opinion of him, and had probably not taken pains to conceal it: the

Newman who dearly loved, to the last, to be ‘disvenerated.’ Many

important Fellows of Oriel, such as Arnold, Hampden, Jelf, Jenkyns,

Pusey, were absent from Oxford: hence they lack mention in our

critic’s roster.

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, May 25, 1826.

‘I should like to detail to you our [College] proceedings, but no

striking features occur to my mind at present; so I will favour you

with my general impressions. [Whately?][43] is the only one with whom

I have got to be at all intimate; he is not the least of a Don, and I

like him very much indeed. [Davison?] is a person for whom I have a

very great veneration: but he is such an immense person that I hardly

dare bring myself in contact with him.[44] [Newman] is, to my mind, by

far the greatest genius of the party, and I cannot help thinking that,

sometime or other, I may get to be well acquainted with him: but he is

very shy,[45] and dining with a person now and then does not break the

ice so quickly as might be wished. I venerate [Davison?] but dislike

him: I like [Newman] but disvenerate him. Old [Wilberforce?][46] is

very funny, good-natured, and, I think, very much improved. And now

for my ill-fated inconsistent self; I have been trying to be diligent,

and have been horribly idle; trying to be contented, and yet

constantly fidgety; trying to be matter-of-fact, and have nearly

cracked myself with conceited metaphysics. This last is principally

attributable to Lucretius, whom I have been reading with considerable

attention, and intense admiration; I shall very soon have finished

him, as I have got on some way in the Sixth Book. In the end of the

Book, about the mortality of the soul, there are some magnificent

extraordinary reflections on our longings for something indescribable,

and beyond our reach; on our having affections which have no adequate

object, and which we long to forget and smother, because we cannot

gratify them: [reflections] which make a striking preface to Bishop

Butler’s sermons on the Love of God.’

June 15, 1826, was the five hundredth anniversary of the foundation of

Oriel College. Perhaps the observance of it served to stimulate

Hurrell’s filial piety and his spontaneous regard for the past. Few

Fellows of Colleges, then or since, ‘supinely enjoying the gifts of

the Founder,’ as Gibbon says, would have offered, after such an

occasion, this private prayer, found among Hurrell’s papers:

――‘Almighty God, Father of all Mercies, I beg to offer Thee my deep

and unfeigned thanks for all the blessings which Thou hast bestowed

upon me; but in addition to those of Thy favours which I enjoy in

common with all mankind, I more particularly bless Thy Holy Name for

those of which I partake as member of this College; for the means Thou

hast given me of daily sustenance, and of a continual admission to Thy

house and service, through the pious charity of holy men of old. I

bless Thee, O Lord, in that Thou didst put into their heart the desire

of erecting to themselves a memorial, and of leaving to posterity a

great example in the foundation and endowment of a seminary of

religious learning; and I pray Thee that, as it has fallen to my lot

to succeed to this their institution, I may fulfil my part in it as I

believe they would approve if they could be present with me; that I

may not waste in foolish or gross indulgences the means afforded me of

obtaining higher ends; or allow myself to consider as my own that time

which I receive their wages for dedicating to Thy service, by the

advancement of useful learning, and adorning the doctrine of God our

Saviour. But more especially do I beg of Thee to accept my

thankfulness for those merciful dispensations of Thy Providence which

affect my lot in particular. That it has pleased Thee to bring me into

the world under the shadow of my holy mother, in the recollection of

whose bright society Thou hast given me, as it were, a consciousness

of that blessedness which Thou hast taught us to look for in the

presence of Saints and Angels. Also, that my lot has been so cast that

I should fall into the way of one[47] whose good instructions have, I

hope, in some degree, convinced me of the error of my ways, and may,

by Thy grace, serve to reclaim me from them; with whose high

friendship I have most unworthily been honoured, and in whose presence

I taste the cup of happiness.’

The correspondence with Keble continued implicitly confidential at all

times. But Hurrell writes freely at the close of his first Long

Vacation as Fellow, and after his return to Oriel, of his scruples and

self-dissatisfactions and aspirations: ‘thoughts that do wander

through eternity.’

To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Oct. 14, 1826.

‘It will seem rather pompous to announce my determination not to rise

till I have got a letter written to you; but unless I start with some

such resolution, I shall not be able to get one written at all. I have

made three attempts to write … but all of them ran off into something

wild, which upon reflection I thought would be better kept to myself.

The fact is, that I have been in a very strange way all the summer,

and having had no one to talk to about the things which have bothered

me, I have been every now and then getting into fits of enthusiasm or

despondency. But the result has been in some respects a good one, and

I have got to take a very great pleasure in what you recommended to me

when we were together at F[airford], the evening before I left you our

first summer, _i.e._ good books; and I feel I[48] understand places in

the Psalms in a way I never used to. I go back to Oxford with a

determination to set to at Hebrew and the early Fathers, and to keep

myself in as strict order as I can: a thing which I have been making

ineffectual attempts at for some time, but which never once entered my

head for a long time of my life….