Hurrell Froude by Louise Imogen Guiney

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Title: Hurrell Froude
Memoranda and Comments

Author: Louise Imogen Guiney

Release Date: October 2, 2018 [EBook #58007]

Language: English

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Illustration: Book Cover

HURRELL FROUDE

Illustration: Hurrell Froude as a child

HURRELL FROUDE AS A CHILD

From an unfinished portrait by William Brockedon, A.R.A.

HURRELL FROUDE

MEMORANDA AND COMMENTS

BY

LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

WITH SEVEN ILLUSTRATIONS

METHUEN & CO.

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.

LONDON

First Published in 1904

CARI

COMMILITIS

ACTA

HONORI

ET NOMINI

J·H·N·

IN PACE

CONTENTS

PART I

PAGE

Preface
xi

Some Memoranda of his Life and of his Ideals
1

PART II

Some reprinted Comments on him and on his Relation to the Oxford Movement
231

Index
411

vii

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

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T

PREFACE

HE 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

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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

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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

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H U R R E L L F R O U D E

I

S O M E M E M O R A N D A O F H I S L I F E

A N D O F H I S I D E A L S

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.)

T

HURRELL FROUDE

I

SOME MEMORANDA OF HIS LIFE AND HIS IDEALS

HE 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,

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