a ih aigeli phallifoa ena) a ‘ eae - . lt _ 9 Or “gt, ra taeespae ie 1 e ow LITERARY LIVES. EDITED BY W. ROBERTSON NICOLL NEWMAN LITERARY LIVES Edited by W. Robertson Nicoll, LL.D. MATTHEW ARNOLD. By G. W. E. Russell. CARDINAL NEWMAN. By William Barry, D.D. JOHN BUNYAN. By W. Hale White. COVENTRY PATMORE. By Edmund Gosse. ERNEST RENAN. By William Barry, D.D. CHARLOTTE BRONTE. By Clement K. Shorter. SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Andrew Lang. IN PREPARATION R. H. HUTTON. By W. Robertson Nicoll. GOETHE. By Edward Dowden. HAZLITT. By Louise Imogen Guiney. Each Volume, Illustrated, $1.00 net. Postage 10 cts. Cardinal Newman From a Photograph by Barraud 3SIX? Literary Lives NEWMAN BY WILLIAM BARRY (v ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1907 TROW DI PRINTING AND BOO *¢ Cor ad Cor loquitur’” Motto on Cardinal Newman’s Shield. ‘©Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem’’ His Epitaph, written by Himself. af CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE LP ARL Yat GR ARS | Hi shy iti healed Ghat eile tel euithg I CHAPTER II PREsES IE RACBABEANS) 1) file (di aah bal hie) Goo, 1 QE CHAPTER III Rinse CaTHoric Perio) 5 sie be) es 6) 8, 66 CHAPTER IV WeOLOGIA. PRG VITA SUA. (36 ek es OS CHAPTER V RpIED LOGE) ORY BELIEF 2) i) ee \ be) Vas BZ CHAPTER VI Py REANE Ge) GERONTIUS) 0.00) eae oe), BGG Viil CONTENTS CHAPTER VII Tue Man or LETTERS CHAPTER VIII Newman’s Piace 1n Hisrory PAGE - 186 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Cardinal Newman. . . . . . . . Frontispiece FACING PAGE Oriel College and St. Mary’s, Oxford . 14 The Cottages at Littlemore which Newman turned into a House of Studies 28 Cardinal Newman, 1844 . Sauer Shite) AD Cardinal Newman, from the Miniature by Sir W. C. Ross . x 56 The Oratory, meee. Bisathctans : 70 Siumdinal Newman; E8Gb . 250. 8% 84 Cardinal Newman, 1861 : 98 Cardinal Newman, from a one eS Lat Cole- ridge . : Sete \ BED Cardinal Newman, from an Hai . 126 Cardinal Newman, from the ae i Sir John E. Millais eta ho: LAG Cardinal Newman, from a Picea : a ESA Cardinal Newman, from the sin - Miss Emmeline Deane . : . 168 Cardinal Newman, from a Photog Be Father Anthony Pollen aes Sip at beat Ves. Hee x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE Cardinal Newman about 1889 . . . . « « 196 Cardinal Newman’s Grave at Rednal . . . . 210 The Statue of Cardinal Newman at the Bromp- ton Oratory. . 9. 2°. 6 5) NEWMAN ; Ost ai if q } ¥4) ba fe we ‘ Agee ‘ f i Vel fl ! j ‘ . CHAPTER I EARLY YEARS TuHarT in the middle of the eighteenth century a deep intellectual torpor had fallen on the great English seats of learning is well known and has been set on record by Gibbon and Adam Smith. “In the University of Oxford,” observes the Scotch economist, “‘ the greater part of the public professors have for these many years given up al- together even the pretence of teaching.’ Gibbon, who was entered at Magdalen in 1752, is yet more copious and emphatic. ‘‘ The Fellows, or monks of my time,” he says, “‘ were decent easy men, who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder; their days were filled by a series of uniform employments, the chapel and the hall, the coffee-house and the com- mon-room, till they retired, weary and well satis- fied, to a long slumber. From the toil of reading, or thinking, or writing, they had absolved their con- science; and the first-fruits of learning and ingenuity withered on the ground . . . Their conversation stagnated in a round of college business, Tory poli- tics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal; their I 2 NEWMAN dull and deep potations excused the brisk intemper- ance of youth; and their constitutional toasts were not expressive of the most lively loyalty for the House of Hanover.” From this ‘‘ vulgar mediocrity,” as Mark Pat- tison terms it, Oxford was awakened to higher thoughts, although not at once, by the French Revo- lution. A new era begins in 1802, when Eveleigh, Provost of Oriel, a Devonshire man, brought in amid strong opposition the reformed scheme of ex- amination for degrees. At first voluntary, the test was extended in 1807 to all candidates for the Bach- elorship of Arts—New College alone excepted. But Provost Eveleigh had taken a decisive step when, at Oriel, he made literary acquirements the condition of enjoying academical privileges. The Fellows were now selected on that ancient founda- tion not as clubable men, who would sit long over their port, but as men of mind, or, in the vague dis- paraging phrase of unreformed Oxford, as ‘‘ No- etics.” This appellation was changed, by-and-by, into the more modern, though hardly more definite, one of “ Liberals.”” Chosen, not for their congenial habits, but in the hope that they would prove orig- inal thinkers and independent inquirers, these men ‘‘ represented a new idea, which was but gradually learning to recognize itself, to ascertain its char- acteristics and external relations, and to exert an EARLY YEARS 3 influence upon the University.”” They knew little of the past, and nothing at all of Rousseau, Kant, or Goethe. Yet they belonged to the movement of Rationalism; for ‘‘ they called everything in ques- tion; they appealed to first principles, and disal- lowed authority as a judge in matters intellectual.” Any German critic would without hesitation have assigned to them a place in the Aufklarung, or sect of enlightenment which, dating back to Locke, Vol- taire and Hume, had resolved the social, nay the metaphysical order, into atomic forces, and substi- tuting the reason of the individual for public tradi- tion, free contract for Divine Right, self-conscious- ness for religious meditation, was bound to enter upon a conflict with Church and State in England, as it had already overthrown the European system abroad. Such, in tendency, was the school of ‘‘ Noetics,” to which Copleston, Whately, Arnold, and Hamp- den have given a position in the history of Oxford. Its home, as these names bear witness, was Oriel, the college of Ralegh and Bishop Butler; its im- - mediate source we cannot fail to perceive in the French Revolution; yet its pedigree may be traced to English soil, to the Whigs who brought over William of Orange, and to John Locke, who would have banished mysteries from the Christian creed, explained ideas by mechanical association, and es- 4 NEWMAN tablished society on a balance of interests. The logic of all this we may fairly term Baconian, for it reduced first principles to a shorthand summing up of experience, and thus ended in utilitarian re- forms. That many of these were steps towards a better order of things will not be questioned. But that Oxford, which had been in its day Laudian and Jacobite, which prided itself on its loyalty to the Church of England, nay, which was medieval yet in the spirit of its institutions no less than in the style of its architecture—that this “ queen of ro- mance’ and “‘ home of lost causes’ would give in without a struggle to the philosophy it had always detested, who could imagine? It has been well ob- served that “ Oxford carries with it, more than Cambridge, the feeling of a great past, and that it is haunted by the ghost of the Middle Ages.” The eighteenth century itself had called up champions, so unlike yet so recognizably sons of the ancient Oxford, as Wesley, Butler, and Johnson, to de- fend religion against the deist, the Epicurean, the Sadducee. In a large sense, the Catholic reaction which took shape with Andrewes, Bishop of Win- chester, in James I’s time, had never died away. It remained as unreasoning bigotry, as hatred of in- novation; when the Stuarts went down, it clung to “good old” George III; it idolized Burke, who EARLY YEARS 5 smote with lightnings a ‘‘ regicide peace ’’; it was, said Pattison afterwards, still “‘ debating its eternal Church question as under Henry IV.” But it was an instinct devoid of mind, without principle or power of development; and however thorough- going, all it could do was blindly to resist every new thing, to consecrate long-standing abuses, and thereby to call down fresh blows from the reform- ers, who despised with no small show of reason its incorporated and hitherto invincible selfishness. At a moment when the ‘‘ March of Mind” was in full swing; when Parliament had broken with the old English Constitution and entered on the path which leads to universal suffrage; when Premiers undertook to suppress bishoprics, and popular feel- ing was strong against the Established clergy, there appeared in Oriel, the centre of enlightenment, a figure which, at all times rare, was then almost un- known to Oxford and England, that of a religious genius, John Henry Newman. Destined, like Wes- ley, to traverse the century; like him to exercise on all who came near a miraculous influence of attrac- tion or repulsion; like him also to be rejected of his University and his Church, to set a large movement going in many directions, and to live down hatred, suspicion and contempt, so that he did not die until the nation had learned to be proud of him, in one thing Newman far surpassed Wesley; he was a man 6 NEWMAN of letters equal to the greatest writers of prose that his native country had brought forth. The Cath- olic Reaction of the nineteenth century, more for- tunate than the Evangelical of a hundred years be- fore, claims its place in literature, thanks to this incomparable talent, side by side with the German mysticism of Carlyle, the devout liberalism of Ten- nyson, the lyric Utopias of Shelley, and the robust optimism of Browning. Newman is an English classic. From this point of view we propose to deal with him in the following pages. All great literature is autobiography. However impersonal its form, Hamlet soliloquizes on its high stage, regardless yet not unconscious of the audience whose thoughts he brings to a point of light, ex- presses, and for ever stereotypes in his own fashion. Between the age and the man there is a secret cor- respondence. It was written that Oxford should play its part in the drama of the century, but where could it discover a protagonist who might be at once the chief actor during these tumultuous scenes and the meditative choragus, skilled enough to un- fold in subtle trains of thought and winning melody the motives by which it was inspired? A singular concurrence of events, not yet fully un- ravelled, fitted for the task this clerical Fellow of Oriel, who was not by origin either Catholic or English. EARLY. YEARS 7 Born in the City of London, not far from the Bank, on February 21, 1801, John Henry was the son of John Newman and Jemima Fourdrinier his wife, the eldest of six children, three boys and three girls. ‘‘ His father,” says Thomas Mozley, “‘ was of a family of small landed proprietors in Cam- bridgeshire, and had an hereditary taste for music, of which he had a practical and scientific knowledge, together with much general culture.” He was chief clerk and afterwards partner in a banking firm, was also a Freemason, with a high standing in the craft, an admirer of Franklin and an enthusiastic reader of Shakespeare. These particulars, except the last, will prepare us for the fact that in an earlier genera- tion the family had spelt its signature ‘‘ New- mann’; that it was understood to be of Dutch origin; and that its real descent was Hebrew. The talent for music, calculation, and business, the un- tiring energy, legal acumen, and dislike of specu- lative metaphysics, which were conspicuous in John Henry, bear out this interesting genealogy. A large part of his character and writings will become in- telligible if we keep it in mind. That his features had a strong Jewish cast, is evident from his por- traits, and was especially to be noted in old age. It may be conjectured that the migration of these Dutch Jews to England fell within a period not very distant from the death of Spinoza in 1675. But 8 NEWMAN there is not the slightest trace in Newman of ac- quaintance with modern Hebrew literature or his- tory; so far as we can tell he had never opened the Ethics, and the only Mendelssohn he knew by name was probably the author of Elijah. But the qualities which he inherited from his mother’s family cannot be left out of account. The Fourdriniers were French by descent and Hugue- nots into the bargain; they had come into England on the revocation, in 1685, of the Edict of Nantes; had settled in London as engravers and paper-mak- ers; and had conformed to,the Established Church instead of lapsing—as the Martineaus did, for ex- ample—to Unitarian heterodoxy. Mrs. Newman taught her children a ‘“‘ modified Calvinism,” and they were expected at a proper age to go through the spiritual process known as “ conviction of sin,” to be followed in due course by “ conversion.” These experiences John Henry felt and has re- corded; they were very real to him. But equally lasting in its effects was the acquaintance made dur- ing the tenderest years of childhood with the Bible in King James’ version, as he learned it at his mother’s knee. ‘‘ It would be hardly too much to say,’ writes one observer, ‘‘ that he knew the Bible by heart.’’ Another, who lived with him in his Catholic days, tells us that he always took the old tivangelical view of Scripture as being verbally in- EARLY YEARS 9 spired. And both would agree in considering that for him the Authorized Version was the Bible. His ear, delicately attuned to its harmonies, could not endure a novel rhythm. As Ruskin may be said to have built his lofty prose on the sacred text, familiar to his awakening sense of beauty in words, so New- man, while shrinking fastidiously from an applica- tion which he would have thought profane, was taught by it the grave severity, the chastened colour, and the passionate yet reserved tone, that lend to his sermons a more than human power. To them we may apply what he has written of great instru- mental symphonies, ‘‘ they have escaped from some higher sphere; they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in the medium of created sound; they are echoes from our Home; they are the voice of angels, or the Magnificat of saints, or the living laws of Divine Governance, or the Divine Attributes; something are they besides themselves, which we cannot compass, which we cannot utter.”” That something is the message enshrined. in Holy Writ, every figure and emblem of which became to this infant of genius an abiding reality. Undoubtedly he was precocious—imaginative, versatile, headstrong, and withal affectionate and sensitive, beyond any but the most gifted of children. He learned something fresh every day. At nine years old he was keeping a pocket-book diary, writ- 10 NEWMAN ing verses on Nelson and other subjects, but critical of what he wrote—‘‘I think I shall burn it,” he concludes ; at twelve he composed ‘“‘a mock drama ”’; at fourteen “‘a sort of passion for scrib- bling ” came over him; he broke out into periodi- cals, The Spy and Anti-Spy, intended to answer one another; he devised a burlesque opera; and The Beholder which he attempted in 1816, ran through forty numbers. So incessant was his activ- ity until late in life; but the inward sense did not perish under it. On his early school days he made this curious reflection in 1820 or 1823, “I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true; my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers and talismans. I thought life might be a dream, or I an angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow- angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world.” The home atmosphere in which he was brought up had all the gentle refinement which is accounted peculiarly English; but there ran through it a cur- rent of intellectual emotion, as is manifest from the remarkable yet opposite fortunes of John Henry and his two brothers. Francis, who won a brilliant double first at Oxford, went out to Persia as a mis- sionary, lost his faith in orthodox creeds, fell un- der the charm of Mr. Darby (who founded the EARLY YEARS II Plymouth Brethren), separated from his elder brother, and while capable of excellent work in literature, was content to translate the I/iad upon eccentric lines, and wasted his powers in movements that came to nothing. Charles Robert, scarcely known to fame, had a restless intellect and was pe- culiar to the verge of insanity; his views ended in utter unbelief; he became likewise a Socialist, but his temper and habits left him a burden on the Car- dinal down to his death in 1884. Francis survived until 1897. They were a long-lived family. Two of the sisters came to a great age; and of these Je- mima, to argue from her correspondence with John ‘Henry, possessed not only an admirable style, but resolution and character in a high degree. Newman never attended a public school; but he was not much more than seven when his father sent him to Dr. Nicholas at Ealing. There were three hundred boys to meet and overcome; the shy lad passed rapidly before them all, but did not take part in any outdoor game; nevertheless he was already exercising a fascination on all with whom he formed an intimacy. His habit, from a boy, to compose, led him at fourteen or fifteen to imitate Addison; when he was seventeen he wrote in the style of John- son; about the same time he fell in with the twelfth volume of Gibbon; his ears rang with the cadence \ of his sentences, and he dreamed of it for a night 12 NEWMAN or two. Then he began to make an analysis of Thucydides in Gibbon’s style. If the poet is born, the man of letters, though a genius, is made; he cannot simply invent the form in which he will express himself. Newman felt a strong drawing to mathematics and, had he been sent to Cambridge, might have turned out senior wrangler. But his ruling passion was literature, and that meant, under the circumstances of the time, Latin and Greek. It did not contemplate a knowl- edge of any English author, great or small; the world of foreign letters was quite unknown; and even the classic languages were studied with a mere tincture of scholarship, unenlightened by archae- ology and without a suspicion of philosophy, on a system from which every lineament of vital signifi- cance had been blotted out. Splendid as are the names of Porson and Bentley, their influence did not pass beyond a textual criticism with which cult- ure in the true bearing of the word had little to do. We may quote the severe but well authorized judg- ment of Pattison, looking back on that period: ‘‘ Of the world of wisdom and sentiment, of poetry and philosophy, of social and political experience, contained in the Latin and Greek classics, . . . Ox- ford in 1830 had never dreamt.” The Renaissance was a genuine effort to recover from antiquity its secret and to renew its charm. But college tutors EARLY YEARS 13 and “‘ Greek play ’’ bishops were alike incapable of understanding what was meant by the “‘ Humani- ties’ or the ‘“ Arts” they had been appointed to teach. “ Fancy a gentleman not knowing Greek! ”’ exclaimed Hurrell Froude when he was told that such unlearned mechanics sat in the reformed Par- liament. The classics became thus a sign of caste; gentlemen carried Horace in their pockets when they rode to hounds, or quoted lines of Virgil in addressing the House of Commons. But society was swathed in convention, and the great Whig or Tory dynasties ruled supreme. Literature had sunk to the level of an accomplishment; religion took on a different shade as it passed from rank to rank; science was denounced as infidel; the democratic idea was struggling to be born. Never, perhaps, had Britons found themselves more completely di- vided from the whole world than in the twenty years which followed on the abortive Peace of Amiens. Newman remembered as a child staring at the lights which, in the windows of his father’s house near Richmond, were kindled to celebrate the vic- tory of Trafalgar. He belonged to a generation of stay-at-homes, such as Miss Austen paints for us, and until he was over thirty had never left England. Nearly sixteen years junior to De Quincey, he yet breathed as insular an atmosphere and came under much the same influences. Both were omnivorous % Pl 14 NEWMAN bac readers, instinct with refinements and sensibilities which have led some critics to describe them as in character feminine; and they owed not a little to companionship with mother and sisters. Highly self-conscious, brooding on their own thoughts from infancy—and those thoughts concerned with ever- lasting yet invisible realities—they might both “ re- turn thanks to Providence,’”’ as De Quincey did in fact, that they were “‘ dutiful and loving members of a pure, holy, and magnificent Church.” Both again fell early under the charm of English litera- ture—the opium-eater that was to be ranging through his father’s library, Newman at eight years old listening eagerly to the Lay of the Last Minstrel which his mother and aunt were reading aloud, and afterwards on summer mornings de- vouring in bed Waverley and Guy Mannering. We have spoken of the elder Newman’s devotion to Shakespeare, in whom, as he was fond of saying, he recognized a moral guide superior to preachers. It does not appear that John Henry felt any attrac- tion, now or later, towards the mighty Milton; nor does he seem to have wandered in the mazes of The Faérie Queen, or taken pleasure in the old dramatists or in Chaucer. But his versatile pen and inborn talent for rhetoric were already unmistak- able, when, in December, 1816, his father set out with him for Oxford. Qegr ‘YIbr younyy SAIvyY “1S Jo Av suimoaq pur ‘eget ‘Wyler judy [atid jo Me [ Paoa]a SPM UTUIMAN *paojxg ‘Ss, Are 3g pue ‘afal[oD [eto UND A 89 0 ep Ws BG EARLY YEARS 15 He used to relate “‘ in illustration of the seeming accidents on which our course of life and personal history turn,” that even when the post-chaise was at the door Mr. Newman “ was in doubt whether to direct the postboy to make for Hounslow, or for the first stage on the road to Cambridge.” Mr. Mul- lins, curate of St. James’, Piccadilly, helped him to a decision. After failing to get an entrance at Exe- ter, the youth—a mere lad not sixteen—was matric- ulated by Dr. Lee, the Vice-Chancellor, at his own College, Trinity. Dr. Nicholas pronounced it “most gentlemanlike”’; in June, 1817, Newman went into residence; he won a Trinity Scholarship in the following May. His tutor was Mr. Short, ‘of whom it is on record that, meeting the happy father he went up to him and held out his hand ex- claiming, ‘““O Mr. Newman, what have you given us in your son!”” He was now a scholar for nine years at sixty pounds a year. These were not accidents in his eyes. ‘‘ Always waiting for indications,” says T. Mozley, ‘“ what- ever happened, for good or for ill, he acted upon it. It was a providential stepping-stone in a field of uncertainties.’ And again, “ for everything he did there was this foundation in circumstances; the secret of his career cannot be discovered without taking into account everything that happened about him.” Shall we conclude with Dr. Abbott, who 16 NEWMAN has come forward to be the advocatus diaboli when others would canonize Newman, that “ his imagina- tion dominated his reason”? Or will it not be more critically exact to see in this trembling attitude of soul a marvellous sensibility, without which he could never have thrown himself into minds unlike his own, or acquired the exquisite delicacy of touch that renders thought as if it were the painter’s land- scape spread out before him in light and shade? We may go even a step farther. Imagination, with Newman, was reason, as with Carlyle, Words- worth, Goethe, and Shakespeare—not the bare me- chanical process that grinds out conclusions from letters of the alphabet, in what is at best a luminous void, but the swift sudden grasp of an explorer, making his way from crag to crag, under him the raging sea, above him sure ground and deliverance. Life was a game to be played, a task awaiting fulfil- " ment; in its smallest details Newman felt a particu- lar Providence, as Napoleon felt that he had a star, ‘ and as Schopenhauer has delineated the philosophy of all this with a master’s precision. Was not a man’s genius in old days the unseen Mentor that guided him by such passing intimations? It is clear that in Newman we have met once more the lonely pilgrim whose life is a voyage of discovery, and his path over undreamt-of waters. In 1819 his father’s bank suspended payment, EARLY YEARS 17 but after a month settled in full with its creditors. The family appears to have been henceforth in somewhat straitened circumstances, and its mi- grations to Brighton, to Hampshire, and finally to the neighbourhood of Oxford interest us as show- ing Newman ina light at once amiable and pathetic. . For, greatly as his kinsfolk were attached to him, and however frequent their correspondence, no one at home could enter into the ideas which, little by little, melted away his hereditary Calvinism until it was all gone. The reaction from this gloomy but impressive creed which we trace in other men—dur- ing these very years it was that Carlyle underwent the experiences burnt with a pencil of fire into Sartor Resartus—began almost as soon as the young recluse caught a glimpse of the larger world at his University. He worked hard, sometimes as much as twelve hours a day in the twenty weeks pre- ceding his examination (November, 1820) for the bachelor’s degree. But, “ being called up a day sooner than he expected, he lost his head, utterly broke down, and had to retire.” He passed, it is true, but “‘ in the lower division of the second class of honours.” This misfortune he retrieved brilliantly; he be- came Fellow of Oriel on April 12, 1822—a day which he judged to be the turning-point in his life and of all days most memorable. “‘ It raised him,” 18 NEWMAN he said long afterwards, ‘‘ from obscurity and need to competency and reputation”; it “ opened upon him a theological career, placing him on the high and broad platform of University society and in- telligence’’; and it brought him across the teach- ing of those various schools whereby the religious sentiment in his mind was led on, as he considered, to its legitimate issue. But, even yet, he had not decided on taking orders. He never wished anything better than “ to live and die Fellow of Oriel.’ He admired, he loved, Whately, whom he compared to a “ bright June sun tempered by a March north-easter.”” He was bashful, awkward, attachable, a good listener, and showed a “ special facility of entering into ideas as soon as, or before, they were expressed.” Whately, in return, called him the clearest-headed man he knew, took him out walking and riding, made him the anvil on which to hammer into shape his projected Logic, and in 1825, when promoted to the headship of Alban Hall, appointed him Vice- Principal. They often differed on religious ques- tions; but Newman thought he had been under Whately’s influence during the four years from 1822 till 1826; and that from him he learned “‘ the idea of the Christian Church as a Divine appoint- ment, and as a substantive visible body, inde- pendent of the State, endowed with rights, preroga- tives, and powers of its own.” EARLY YEARS 19 After keeping some terms at Lincoln’s Inn, Newman gave up secular ambitions, took orders in 1824, and accepted the curacy of St. Clement’s, a parish lying over Magdalen Bridge. His ambition was now utterly impersonal, his calling fixed, as he tells Francis Newman on the latter’s birthday in 1826, “‘a high employ, nor lightly given, to serve as messengers of Heaven.” He gloried in it— Deep in my heart that gift I hide, I change it not away For patriot warrior’s hour of pride, Or statesman’s tranquil sway ; For poet’s fire, or pleader’s skill To pierce the soul and tame the will. Never robust, suffering from toothache, occa- sional deafness, and weak eyes, he was yet capable of endless work and application. He wrote so much that his wrist ached; his voice, an exceedingly musical one, the memory of which lingers like an echo in hearts beyond counting, was so weak as to form an objection when the new charge was pro- posed; and his whole person, spare and ascetic, re- called the Methodist of a bygone period rather than the flourishing incumbent who made the best of both worlds. But he was ceasing to be an Evan- gelical, so far as he had ever been one. Hawkins, not as yet Provost of Oriel, had taught him the 20 NEWMAN doctrine of a living tradition by which the Bible is to be interpreted; other Catholic dogmas fol- lowed; in 1825 he began the study of Butler’s great but difficult work, the Analogy. Personal experi- ence led him to note down that “ the religion which he had received from John Newton and Thomas Scott would not work in a parish,” and that “ Cal- vinism was not a key to the phenomena of human nature, as they occur in the world.” However, “ for a long while certain shreds and tatters of that doctrine hung about his preaching” ; nor did he, for a whole ten years, altogether sever himself from those ‘‘ great religious societies which were then, as now, the rallying ground and the strength of the Evangelical body.” On the other hand, in 1829 he broke with Whately. The occasion was Sir Robert Peel’s candidature at Oxford as the reluctant advocate of Catholic Emancipation. The cause lay deeper. Newman had no views on the subject; but he was eager to stand up for the independence of the Church and University, even though in doing so he must take arms against the “‘ great Captain,” Well- ington. By this time he was tutor in Oriel; he had won the friendship of Pusey, to whom he looked up as a Saint; he was imbibing every day fresh draughts of medieval Christianity in conversation with Hur- rell Froude; and as Vicar of St. Mary’s, to which. EARLY YEARS 21 he had been collated when Hawkins, thanks to his vote and influence, became Provost, he held a very eminent place, where he might put forward effect- ively his new-found conception of the Catholic Church. In writing to his mother he expresses what he felt with energy and eloquence. The talent of the day was against the Church; its reliance, he says, with a smile of vexation, was on prejudice and bigotry; but the “wisdom of our ancestors,” in- cluding revealed truth, might even thus be trans- mitted from one generation to another, and so it would triumph. ‘‘ Great men alone can prove great ideas or grasp them.” In the Apologia, Newman declares that he took part against Mr. Peel “ on a simple academical, not at all a political or an ecclesiastical, ground’; but his letters at the time exult in asserting that ‘‘ the poor defenceless Church has borne the brunt of it, and I see in it the strength and unity of Churchmen.” Did a philo- sophic historian trace to 1829 and the Catholic Emancipation that movement which was to be called before long the Tractarian, he would have much to say in his defence. For the established system was breaking up; where Catholics came in, Jews and unbelievers must logically follow; “‘ I do believe,” said Newman of the Anglican Church, “‘ it will be ultimately sepa- rated from the State’’; and where then would be 22 NEWMAN its security? The answer he gave was “‘in its Sac- raments’’; and thus we are brought in sight of ‘ Apostolic Succession,” with its appeal to Fathers in East and West, to antiquity, to Alexandria, An- tioch, and Rome, as the undivided communion of primitive Christians. Our concern, we repeat, is with Newman as an English man of letters; but without reference to the texture of his beliefs and the times and moments at which they were acquired, it would be impossible to measure the energy with which he exercised his mental powers or rightly to estimate their char- acter. Carlyle, in a splenetic mood, was for deny- ing to Newman the quality of intellect; he could not imagine a mind intent on visions of churches and creeds as if they were revelations from the Unseen. But to the Oxford student of 1830 they came with a solemn grandeur and a heavenly light upon them, not less awe-inspiring than the symbols beheld by Ezekiel or Isaiah under the ancient Covenant. They were full of poetry as of prophecy. “An imaginative devotion to the Fathers and their times ’’ had been the effect of reading about them at school in Joseph Milner’s Church History—a forgotten book. The first centuries were his beau- ideal of Christianity. He projected writing on them in 1826 for the Encyclopedia Metropolitana. His Life of Apollonius, and Essay on Miracles, EARLY YEARS 23 both dealing with problems of those ages, appeared in 1825. And in 1828 he began systematically to read the Fathers themselves. From this time his tongue was loosened; he spoke spontaneously and without effort; he gained upon his pupils, learned how to preach, not as a pulpit orator, but with insight and authority as having a messuge, and entered into the secret thoughts of Froude and Keble, who were destined to make up with him a famous triumvirate. Keble’s Chris- tian Year came out in 1827, and at once achieved a popularity which it has maintained ever since. Thoughtful and soothing, it is not poetry of the highest order; it lacks the Dantean flame in which all things are transmuted to colours of a super- natural world; neither has it the passion or the pity of Christina Rossetti’s intense white light. ‘‘ With the Prayer-book for his guide,” says Anthony Froude, ‘‘ Keble has provided us with a manual of religious sentiment . . . beautifully expressed in language which every one can understand and re- member. High Churchmanship had been hitherto dry and formal; Keble carried into it the emotions of Evangelicalism, while he avoided angry collision with Evangelical opinions. Thus all parties could find much to admire in him and little to suspect.” This may have been the case; yet he stands to- wards Newman in a peculiar attitude, almost as 24 NEWMAN representing the last of the Nonjurors by his rever- ence for episcopal authority and a Church untainted with concessions to Erastian or lay interference. Keble was an elegant scholar, from whose rarely opened lips pearls and diamonds of wisdom dropped when listeners were congenial; he could not brook, as he did not understand, variety of opinions; and charming as he proved to all who would not contradict him, none was constitutionally less fitted to be at the head of a great party. His genius had in it no elements deserving the name of original thought. Rather did he serve Newman as the living embodiment of institutions now deemed Apostolic and, so to speak, as himself a present antiquity. He possessed none of those gifts which strike and subdue the unconverted. Hurrell Froude, the ‘‘ bright and beautiful,” cut off in the midst of his days, was another sort of man. ‘‘ He went forward,” says his brother An- thony, ‘‘ taking the fences as they came, passing lightly over them all, and sweeping his friends along with him. He had the contempt of an in- tellectual aristocrat for private judgment.” This, which sounds like a bull, but is only a paradox, was equally applicable to Newman, despite his infinite consideration for persons as they came before him. “The Many ” could be neither wise nor right, ex- cept when they listened to the Few who were both. EARLY YEARS 25 It was Froude that made Newman and Keble really known to each other; he boasted of it as the one good thing he had ever done. It was certainly the most important. “ You and Keble are the philoso- phers, and I the rhetorician,” wrote the Vicar of St. Mary’s to him in 1836. There was so much of a foundation in the contrast that Newman did always look to Froude as a standard, a test and a light, by which to judge of his own utterances. He seemed able to write nothing confidently, unless it had Froude’s imprimatur. But he disclaimed being original as other men have prided themselves upon it. Thoughts and speculations, nevertheless, were his daily bread. He stirred, and if he could not convince, he irritated into a dim wonder at his boldness men like H. J. Rose, who were for stand- ing on the old paths, not ambitious to explore the strange new country of the Middle Ages. Alone among Newman’s correspondents he writes as his born equal, criticizing freely, breaking out into the genial humour, so fresh and unconstrained, which lights up this all too serious intercourse of country parsons, London dignitaries, and unfledged Oxford dons. For it was not the great world seething with revolution, yet large in its perplexities, of France or Germany during these years, that roused them to action, but a movement of which the measure 26 NEWMAN was taken from Bentham, Brougham, and the Edinburgh Review. If we turn to Carlyle’s letters and essays—thoughts of a mason’s son amid the wild wet moors of Craigenputtock—which brood over the same problems at that very hour, we shall be struck with amazement to see them so unlike. But the solitary thinker, cut adrift from tradition, who cannot find a place in his University and dare not take orders, has become an Ishmael, eating his heart for savageness. He asks with Novalis or Richter, ‘‘ Canst thou believe man has yet found religion? Where is its flaming tabernacle, then?” The established order had traced its lines about Newman and Froude. But on following them backward—and all Oxford studies tended that way, like the Virgilian oracle “ Antiquam exquirite matrem ’’—how could they not arrive in sight of Rome? Froude, according to his illustrious friend (and shall we say pupil?) had a keen insight into abstract truth, but was “an Englishman to the backbone in his severe adherence to the real and the concrete.” This latter quality is also, in a won- derful degree, Jewish; it marks every page of New-- man’s, even those which seem at first merely specu- lative; and as Froude ‘“‘ delighted in the notion of an hierarchical system, of sacerdotal power, and of ecclesiastical liberty,” he would appear when pro- EARLY YEARS 27 fessing openly his admiration for the Church of Rome and his hatred of the Reformers, to be doing little more than copying out the Old Testament in black letter. How close is the resemblance between the medieval Papacy and the Hebrew theocracy, has often been observed. Nor should we forget with what intense and unremitting meditation the most Jewish chapters of the Bible were dwelt upon in sermons and “ Sabbath schools” down to a period which lies within the memory of men not aged. To substitute Rome for Israel, impossible in the Scotland of John Knox, did not seem out of nature in Oxford, once the surface-colouring of a Puritanism, never there comfortably at home, had been spunged away. Events were now calling for the bold yet not foreign genius that should do this thing. ‘ Newman,”. concludes Mark Pattison justly, being a theologian first of all, ‘“‘ was made a leader, not by the loss of college preferment, but by the pressure of public events on his Church sentiments.” , Most assuredly; yet the interior tragi-comedy of Oriel in 1828-30 bore a singular likeness to the public disaster which eleven years afterwards, on occasion of Tract Ninety, drove Newman out of Oxford to Littlemore. Keen as he showed him- self in judging his fellows, quick as he might be to seize upon every coign of vantage from which to 28 NEWMAN spread his views, he had perpetrated a fatal error in voting for Hawkins rather than Keble as Pro- vost. Hawkins, an able administrator, went on the old scheme which, if it did not further University reform, gave no chance of turning the college into a school or seminary, where the Laudian ideas might be revived, the Fathers read and translated, and the spirit of “‘ Liberalism ” exorcised by a dedi- cation of intellect to Christian uses. “These ends, Newman dreamt, could be successfully achieved, were the tutors entirely responsible—almost, let us say, as spiritual directors—for the undergraduates, and a body of Fellows chosen like-minded with himself, Keble and Froude. As might be anticipated, Hawkins would not abdicate his supremacy; the revolutionary tutors were displaced, and Newman’s occupation within the college was gone. He remained Vicar of St. Mary’s; but Oriel no longer afforded him a regular breeding-ground on which his ideas might grow and flourish. Perhaps, if Hawkins had been more acquiescent, the mind which now sought expression in Tracts for the Times and a correspondence em- bracing all England, would in the calling of a tutor have busied itself with the idea and scope of Uni- versity education, as it did twenty years later, not wandering from its aim, but addressing the culti- vated intellect rather than the unknown public. We *evgi “salpnys jo ashoy] v oyu peur UBUIMOANS TOU *paojxQ JvaU ‘aTOUIA[IITT Je SAAEIIOD AY TL JUNOT A EL &9 070g EARLY YEARS 29 need scarcely remark that literature has gained by the exchange while liberal education has not lost. There are no works in the language more stimu- lating, as there are few more admirably fitted in tone and style to their subject, than the Dublin Lectures, wherein a University is described as being “‘ the special seat of that large philosophy which embraces and locates truth of every kind, and every method of attaining it.” That Newman held this master-key in 1830 who will believe? He was yet insular, like all his gen- eration at Oxford, in idea not less than in knowl- edge. Dean Stanley’s epigram is celebrated: “‘ How different the fortunes of the Church of Eng- land, if Newman had been able to read German! ” Pattison, who reports it, observes that he ‘‘ assumed and adorned the narrow basis on which Laud had stood two hundred years before”; and he adds, not without bitterness, ‘‘ All the grand develop- ment of human reason, from Aristotle down to Hegel, was a sealed book to him.” So far as these words imply that Newman, though familiar with Oxford text-books, which included the Ethics and the Rhetoric, did not feel called to open the great metaphysicians, they are accurate. In ex- treme old age he wrote toa friend: ‘“‘ I never read a word of Kant. I never read a word of Cole- ridge. . . . I could say the same of Hurrell 30 NEWMAN Froude, and also of Pusey and Keble, as far as I have a right to speak of others.” “The academical institutions of some parts of Europe,” said Dugald Stewart, glancing at Oxford half a century earlier, “ are not without their use to the historian of the human mind. Immovably moored to the same station by the strength of their cables and the weight of their anchors, they enable him to measure the rapidity of the current by which the rest of mankind is borne along.” ‘To men so trained culture was synonymous with classic antiq- uity, religion meant unquestioning belief in the Bible, and the Church of England was its guardian. History, not experience, held in it the revelation of all that was true or beautiful; and where was the shrine or habitat of history? On the shores of the Mediterranean; not along the wind-blown paths of Norsemen sailing over misty seas, but in the track of the Crusader, with Rome lifted high between north and south, as inheriting its religion from Sion, its arts and letters from Athens, a con- crete, ever-living reality, mother of Churches and of civilisation. In the curiously symbolic drama which Newman made of all that befel him, what could be more fitting than his pilgrimage (far more significant than Childe Harold’s) to the seas and shores where antiquity had wrought its wonders, and, above all, to the City on the Seven Hills, saint or sorceress, but the home of his life’s idea? CHAPTER II THE TRACTARIANS ALways in delicate health, Hurrell Froude was ordered in the winter of 1832 to try the benefit of a Mediterranean voyage. His father and New- man went with him. It turned out to be exception- ally cold in those latitudes, nor was Hurrell a very prudent invalid. He came back only to die. His friend had been exhausted in writing, which meant endlessly revising, a volume called at length The Arians of the Fourth Century, but always a frag- ment, intended once as a prelude to the histery of the Councils or, as we might now define it, of dog- matic creeds. . This great design failed; the in- spiration which led Newman to entertain it lasted on until, as a Roman Cardinal in 1885, he put forth his amended and very striking translations from St. Athanasius. He was already deep in the school of Alexandria —mystical, ascetic, uncompromising, and yet more liberal in its St. Clement towards Greeks and un- believers generally than the African-Roman, of which Tertullian is the dogmatist and St. Augus- 31 32 NEWMAN tine the philosopher. This was to be Newman’s attitude through life. He is a Greek of Alexan- dria. His Grammar of Assent might have been dictated in its most telling chapters by Dionysius, the false Areopagite, who was in fact an Egyp- tian; his University Sermons go back, for aught I know, directly to the same profound source, that little golden book on the Divine Names from which St. Thomas Aquinas is never weary of quoting. ‘The broad philosophy of Clement and Origen carried me away,” writes Newman in his Apologia, “and I have drawn out some features of it with the zeal and freshness, but with the partiality, of a neophite. Some portions of their teaching, mag- nificent in themselves, came like music to my inward ear. [hese were based on the mystical or sacra- mental principle, and spoke of the various Econo- mies or Dispensations of the Eternal. . . . Nat- ure was a parable; Scripture was an allegory; pagan literature, philosophy, and mythology, prop- erly understood, were but a preparation for the Gospel. The Greek poets and sages were in a certain sense prophets; for ‘ thoughts beyond their thought to those high bards were given.’ There had been a directly Divine dispensation granted to the Jews; but there had been in some sense a dis- pensation carried on in favour of the Gentiles. THE TRACTARIANS 33 . .. In the fulness of time both Judaism and Paganism had come to nought. . . . And thus room was made for the anticipation of further and deeper disclosures, of truths still under the veil of the letter, and in their season to be revealed. The visible world still remains without its Divine in- terpretation; Holy Church in her sacraments and her hierarchical appointments, will remain, even to the end of the world, after all but a symbol of those heavenly facts which fill eternity. Her mysteries are but the expression in human language of truths to which the human mind is unequal.” Long as is the above quotation, it deserves the most careful scrutiny at the hands of those who would enter into the mind of Newman, early or late. It might, indeed, be taken in so many words from the Areopagite, who himself has drawn out felicitously the Catholic view regarding the nature of Deity on the one side and the laws of its mani- festation on the other. But it will be serviceable, above all, when we desire to understand what is meant by calling Newman a “ sceptic,” and how it comes to pass that in his Sermons we may see with ‘Dean Church “the enormous irruption into the world of modern thought, of the unknown and the unknowable.’”’ Here again is the process of devel- opment, since termed evolution, applied to Bible, Church and dogma. Here too is the spirit of a re- 34 NEWMAN fined criticism which, granting to language all it can attempt, is on its guard against the shallow logic that takes words for realities and symbols for what they represent. A slight change of dialect would transport us to Weimar and Goethe med- itating with Faust on the Unnameable. We must bear this in remembrance when it is urged that philosophy was to Newman a sealed book. He had a philosophy of his own, vast and overshadowed with eternal mysteries, akin rather to the poet’s deep creative reason than to the diagrams of a school-teacher. How strongly imaginations like these tend to the rhythmic form will not need proving; Orpheus with his lute in Greek myths, and David in the Psalms, will be suffi- cient examples. Nor could a genius nourished on Sophocles fail to echo the sounding lines of ancient chorus or strophe, not seeking renown, but as a medium for thoughts which were haunting him day and night. Newman wrote verse from boyhood. In the Memorials of the Past poems are given which abound in touches, brief yet noticeable, that suggest an experience of doubt, conflict, terror, and even remorse, parallel with self-accusations, when he is writing to his mother, so vehement that their tone has been censured as morbid. They belong to a stage known in spiritual writers as the “ dark night DHES PRACTARIANS 35 of the soul,” and are morbid if the Valley of the Shadow drawn by a seer and an artist be deemed nothing better than fiction. Newman was terribly in earnest; he believed that there was “‘ some strange original defect in human nature,” meaning, first of all, in his own. ‘“‘ We are in the dark about ourselves,” he told men; ‘when we act, we are groping in the dark, and may meet with a fall at any moment. . . . In our attempts to influence and move our minds, we are making experiments (as it were) with some deli- cate and dangerous instrument, which works we do not know how, and may produce unexpected and disastrous effects. The management of our hearts is quite above us.” These poems now received additions, some of which will endure while English is spoken. They are a sea-cycle, worthy to be inscribed ‘“‘ Mari Magno,” both as written on the great deep, and calling to another of which it was the image in its loveliness, whether of clouds or sunshine. From the day when, waiting for the ship, he asked, ‘‘ Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend?” in De- - cember, 1832, until he quitted Marseilles in the following June, Newman committed to paper no less than eighty-five poems, expressing his thoughts on the life within, the saints of the Old Testament, and the hopes, fears and resolves which, clustering 36 NEWMAN round the Church and its fortunes, impelled him on his future course. The Tractarian Movement, begun politically when Catholic Emancipation was granted, here sprang forth armed in lyrical strains, challenging the world with no uncertain sound. We may register the moment: the Hermes is off Cape Ortegal, which stands up “ magnificent in outline,” on December 11, 1832, and the seer, as with an angel’s voice, calls upon those who have, through “private judgment,” lost their way, to come home, for “‘a mother pleads” who “ now lifts her from the dust, to reign as in her youth.” Himself, he continues to meditate, a bold warder, though but one, will never faint; England is the Tyre of the West, and is warned not to let “ rash tongues the Bride of Heaven defy”; the Church has long been patient, nay “‘ the heathen’s jest,” but ‘‘ now the shadows break, and gleams divine edge the dim distant line”; the “‘ might of truth ” is “‘ lodged in the few, obeyed, and yet unseen.” Reared on lone heights and rare His saints their watch-flame bear. And the mad world sees the wide-circling blaze, Vain searching whence it streams, and how to quench its rays. Thoughts like these, cast into rugged sincere verse, pursue the sea-farer as he drives along by THE TRACTARIANS 37 Lisbon to Trafalgar and Gibraltar, to Algiers, where he gazes on the ruined Church of Africa, glorious in its martyrs and apologists, now the prey of Islam, to Malta and the Isles of Greece. He is more a Christian than a classical pilgrim; Hebrew names inspire the stanzas of his inditing off Ithaca and Corcyra; if he muses on the combatants in Thucydides, it is to reflect that their ‘‘ spirits live in awful singleness, each in its self-formed sphere of light or gloom.” He rebukes his heart at Mes- sina that it still yearns “‘ towards these scenes of ancient heathen fame”’; and in his first Sicilian expedition he has dreams which startle yet cheer, as warnings from on high. He is always alone, even while his friends are near him; in the long succession of lyrics he does not mention them. And so, like Ulysses after an enchanted voyage, he finds himself in Rome. His letter-journals abound in colour, local or picturesque; they belong to the days before steam, and never lose sight of England; medieval Europe is known to them as little as modern; but they speak as if “the whole Western world were tending to- wards some dreadful crisis.” Newman had begun to hope that England might still be the “ Land of Saints.” He was in an apocalyptic mood as he travelled from Naples, which disappointed him, along the Via Appia and over the Campagna to 38 NEWMAN that place called Babylon in his Puritan story books. It overcame him. ‘‘ And now what can I say of Rome,” he exclaims, “‘ but that it is the first of cities, and that all I ever saw are but as dust (even dear Oxford) compared with its majesty and glory?”’ It grew more wonderful to him every day. ‘‘ How shall I name thee, Light of the wide West? or heinous error’s seat?” ‘This had been his question, but it ended in a cry to Christian Rome, “O Mother!” which recalls the tender in- vocation of the Georgics,—“ Salve magna Parens . magna virum! ”—while the famous lines in the First Eclogue describe ‘“‘ keenly and affection- ately ’’ what he was feeling, ‘‘ quite abased ” to be standing in the City of the Apostles. He must in- voke a ‘“‘proper pride” lest he should prove dis- loyal to “‘ sacred”? Oxford. Was it possible that so serene and lofty a place could be the “ cage of unclean creatures’? He would not believe it with- out evidence. These were the impressions, “ like seeds sown in the mind,” under which he went back to Sicily. He was drawn to that loveliest of islands as by a loadstone—wandered solitary by Taor- mina, Syracuse and Catania into the centre, making for Palermo, and was stricken with fever and laid up at Castro Giovanni, where he nearly died. His account of this expedition is pathetic—an THE TRACTARIANS 39 admirable piece of self-portraiture, abounding in dreams, through which runs the cry of deprecation, “ T have not sinned against light.” He had written during the cholera in 1832, “one is destined for some work which is yet undone ”’; he had repeated the thought to Wiseman in Rome, and it was now strong upon him while he seemed at death’s door. Recovering, he was detained, homesick and deso- late, in Palermo; there, soothed by his visits to the sanctuaries of which it has so many, he wrote, ‘‘ O that thy creed were sound, thou Church of Rome!” He sailed at last in an orange-boat, and as a calm held them one whole week in the Straits of Boni- facio, his heart breathed out its deepest aspirations, “Lead, kindly Light!” “This most tender of pilgrim songs may be termed the “‘ March ” of the Tractarian Movement. It is pure melody, austere yet hopeful, strangely not unlike the stanzas which Carlyle has made familiar to the whole English race, the ““ Mason-song’”’ of Goethe, in its sublime sadness and invincible tiust. Both are Psalms of Life, Hebrew or Northern, chanted in a clear- obscure where faith moves onward heroically to the day beyond. Newman reached England and his mother’s house on July 9, 1833. His brother Francis had arrived from Persia some few hours before. On 40 NEWMAN Sunday, the 14th, Keble preached the Assize Ser- mon in St. Mary’s, foreboding “ National Apos- tasy.” To his friend, an observer of days, this became the starting-point which was speedily to involve not only Oxford but the whole country in a religious agitation, the term of which, after seventy years, is far from approaching. ‘I have no romantic story to tell,” wrote New- man with his usual modesty, when he came to the end of that Sicilian episode. But his next ten years in Oxford went through all the scenes of a drama with its due catastrophe, and he was chief actor in it. Now is the time for a comparison no less re- markable than just between the city on the Isis and Florence, between the preacher in St. Mary’s pulpit and Savonarola. It cannot be wrought out here in detail; suffice it that, like the Dominican friar, Newman spoke, Bible in hand, from intense per- sonal conviction which was equal to prophetic in- sight, of a judgment or crisis overhanging the na- tion; that he believed in a Theocracy; that his crowd of followers or penitents displayed a zeal, and often an extravagance, as great as the Piagnoni exhibited round the evangelist of San Marco; that after a season of astonishing success the tide turned; and that, as the one ended in death, inflicted on him with Papal sanction, so the other was driven into THE TRACTARIANS 41 exile and at last was compelled to forsake the Church he had loved with utter self-sacrifice. Savonarola condemned the Pagan Renaissance; Newman the French Revolution. Both were severe in their judgment upon luxury, yet no enemies to Christian art. The Reformers claimed Savonarola; Liberals now and again discover elements in New- man which they would fain appropriate. In neither case will the argument hold good. When the in- fluence of the friar died in his funeral-flames, Paganism triumphed; Newman’s secession gave the sign to his opponents that now they might re- model the University, and “‘ repudiate sacerdotal principles.” High Church went down; John Stuart Mill reigned in its stead; the logic of Nominalism made room for Darwin, Huxley and Spencer; a great reaction had brought upon itself a greater defeat. But Newman’s Apologia is a literary monument to which nothing written by Savonarola can be paralleled. In history the Florentine will always be a discomfited prophet; the Oxford student will survive and be admired even by those who cannot endure his principles. The one is a grand reminiscent, the other an English Classic. “No great work was ever done by a system. . . Luther was an individual,” on these maxims relying Newman “out of his own head” began the Tracts while others were forming associations 42 NEWMAN which came to grief in no long time, or signed in- effectual addresses to the Archbishop of Canter- bury. But, says Mozley, Newman “had seen enough of societies. He did not like committees. He suspected everything Metropolitan.” He was always ready to ‘‘ accept the suggestion of times, circumstances and persons,” and made no scruple of allowing “‘ people to believe themselves the original movers, if it were at all possible.” The Tracts should be a series. He took the idea from Evangelicals, only directing it now upon the clergy themselves. But he, among all the contributors, was the only one who could write this peculiar kind of literature. He did his task supremely well. The short pithy saying, the loaded or italic type, the single line, the crisp dialogue, the confident tone—in all this he showed himself a past master. Tracts really such gave way too soon before the ponderous treatise, the dissertation, or the essay. Newman had the gifts of a journalist, and his first attempts were no less bold than the “‘ petites lettres” which made Pascal famous, or the flysheets of Paul Louis Courier. If, however, we would see him at his best, incisive, convinced, ironical, and keen as a rapier, we should follow him through his letters to the Times in 1841, directed against Sir Robert Peel, and curiously inscribed “‘ The Tamworth 1844. inal Newman, Card. . Wilberforce, Esq. 3 8 o Es A-| % < 8 £ YZ 4 oO i} 8 o B From the o THE TRACTARIANS 43 Reading Room.’ ‘They are short pamphlets, brilliant with epigram, passionate and yet self- controlled, from which we shall quote by-and-by, when we require illustrations of his logical theory. But from the Tracts we need not quote; as litera- ture they are obsolete. When they demand a “second Reformation,” but in a Catholic sense, this belongs to their matter, not their form, and our only question is whether they will be read for style, as Pascal is read in the Provinciales by those who are neither Jansenists nor Jesuits; nay, as Lessing is read in the Anti-Goetze by those who think his “enlightened” views quite as shallow as the Lu- theran Bibliomania which he overthrows. To this query a negative must be returned. No single Tract is immortal. That which deals with the par- allel difficulties of Church and Bible (No. 85) is a rare specimen of courage in stating objections and of subtlety, exercised on the lines of Bishop Butler, in meeting them. ‘There are passages of solemn beauty in the Tract on Antichrist. Speaking gen- erally, however, had Newman composed only tracts he would now be forgotten. His undying fame rests on the sermons which he published as an Anglican or a Catholic; on certain of his Poems; on the originality of thought and grace of manner which distinguish the Essay on Development; on the University Lectures; and on the copious auto- 44 NEWMAN biography which, running through his correspond- ence, gives a singular charm to Loss and Gain, is not absent from Callista, and culminates in that heart-subduing work of genius, the Apologia pro Vita Sua. | Newman’s intense reserve combined with his Puritan training to make him as formal, in his first literary efforts, as Ruskin when he was composing his Modern Painters at twenty-four. But while Ruskin matured his Johnsonian style into one still more splendid, the Oxford preacher, who had to speak face to face with living men, sharpened and shortened his own, until it might be compared to a rapid fire of musketry in which every shot told. It was always academic, never popular. His audi- ence read Cicero as he did; they caught the allu- sions, however passing, to Aristotle and Butler; they expected to hear much of Old Testament his- tory with morals drawn from it. That which was fresh and taking, in sermons bare of rhetoric, was the deep knowledge, conveyed in a style fastidi- ously simple, which they revealed of the heart of man, his conflict with unseen powers, his Prome- . thean pride and solitude where he hung amid the mountain-peaks, defying the God whom he dared not disown. Of the Bible Newman said on his parting with old friends and the Anglican pulpit in 1843, “ its THE TRACTARIANS 45 language veils our feelings while it gives expression to them.” Under that veil his hearers knew that a spirit from the world which lies beyond sense was recording his thoughts, trials, temptations, as if one of themselves. Every sermon was an ex- perience. The still figure, the clear, low, penetrat- ing voice, the mental hush that fell upon his audi- ence while he meditated, alone with the Alone, in words of awful austerity,—“‘ to every one of us there are but two beings in the whole world, him- self and God,” as he told them,—brought out with unexampled force ‘‘ that pale and solemn scene” which faith must ever fix its gaze upon. ‘‘ We have each the same secret and we keep it to our- selves,” he wrote, translating into religion the word of Terence, ‘‘ Nihil humani a me alienum.”’ His discourses were poems, but transcripts too from the soul, reasonings in a heavenly dialectic, and views of life, seen under innumerable lights, as from some Pisgah-mount of vision. They can be read after all the years, for their illustrations, their lucid English, their exquisite brief touches of pathos, their creative faculty, as real as Dante’s yet altogether different, by which they call up the dead or the past or the invisible to our shrinking presence. Newman never paints. He deals not in colours as did Carlyle; he is with- out dimensions; for him (and let us bear it in 46 NEWMAN mind) not the eye but the ear is that spiritual organ to which revelation is vouchsafed. His sentences glide upon a musical scale; he flows along as a river, is not fixed on canvas; in all his pages it would be hard to find a portrait of the outward man. His method may be termed introspection, but so deep and persistent that it leaves a feeling of concrete substance; and this we shall assume to be the Hebrew genius, exemplified in the Psalms, which show us landscape but no human features, or in St. Paul, the artist of moods beyond painting. To Newman, in fact, the lineaments whether of the world or the individual are writ in water, unstable as unreal. The “laws of nature” were referred by him to personal agencies behind the veil: ‘‘ Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beautiful prospect is, as it were, the skirts of their garments, the waving of the robes of those whose faces see God.” It is obvious how medieval is all this rather than Greek; how it runs into symbolism while making light of portraiture for its own sake; and how unlike the character- sketching which was a favourite device with Bour- daloue and other French orators. We may also read the Sermons as soliloquies on the events of the day by which Newman was urged along towards an unsuspected goal. ‘They cry out against the whole Liberal advance. ‘They pierce THE TRACTARIANS 47 with irony the religion of which Mozley declares that it made young Evangelicals “ clever men of the world.” They lay on the dissecting-table that peculiar English creation, Pharisaic and Philistine, which foreigners call hypocrisy, not knowing what else to make of it. Savonarola brought Flor- ence to the “‘ Burning of the Vanities’; Newman would have introduced into the popular religion ideas, ‘first principles in Scripture,’ concerning poverty and self-denial, which it loathed. ‘True, he did not dream, then or afterwards, of convert- ing “the world’’; his judgment of its followers, their grace, refinement, courtesy, even their natural affection, was Maccabean in its severity. But, standing aloof, he sees the Dance of Death as in some Orcagna-fresco, and no prophet has flung over its many-twinkling radiances a gloom more intense. Living like a simple undergraduate in his shabby rooms at Oriel, entrusted with a congregation which was composed of a few shopkeepers and their households, Newman called these remarkable deliverances Parochial Sermons; nor would he print them until 1834, some time after the move- ment had got under weigh. Their success was great and lasting. ‘‘ They beat all other sermons out of the market,” it was said, ‘‘ as Scott’s novels all other story-books.”” So well, indeed, have they 48 NEWMAN succeeded in giving a tone to preachers that we cannot measure their effect who are accustomed to look for sincerity, direct speaking, and an air, at least, of self-forgetfulness in the Gospel-mes- senger. But did they touch the nation’s heart? Neither then nor since, if we may argue from the course of events. Newman was advocating, in language as untechnical as he could make it, a return to the “Church of the Fathers,” and the Fathers were monks, or champions of dogma, unknown except as idle legendmongers, fiercely orthodox, writing bad Greek and worse Latin, addicted to fasting, celibacy, and superstition. Milton’s contemptuous phrase about them represented English thought on the subject in 1830, and would have been echoed by the impenitent Lord Brougham twenty years later. Nay, in 1856, we find Macaulay writing that ‘The Free Inquiry is Middleton’s master- piece. He settled the authority of the Fathers for ever with all reasonable men,” i.e. showed it to be none at all. Church history had fallen into neg- lect. ‘Our popular religion,’ said Newman, “hardly recognises the twelve long ages which lie between the Councils of Nicaea and Trent’; Gib- bon was the chief, perhaps the only English writer who had any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian. From the New Testament to the Ref- THE TRACTARIANS 49 ormation fancy sprang at a bound, leaving Primi- tive Christianity and its successor the Medieval in a chaos unexplored beneath. But, Newman argued, could there be a more violent assumption than that the religion which transformed Europe was merely a sentiment, not a fact? And if a fact, or rather an unbroken, ever-growing series of facts, could it not be ascertained and located as other facts? ‘The first duty, then, was to bring before a careless generation those very Fathers, their lives and their writings, whom Protestants scorned be- cause they did not know them. This was in large measure done. Pusey edited the Library of the Fathers, a vast enterprise, the relics of which encumber secondhand bookstalls at this day. Later on the Catena Aurea of St. Thomas Aquinas, which embodies a world of Patristic commentaries on the Gospels, was trans- lated. Newman’s last undertaking as an Anglican, the Lives of English Saints, carries down the story to medieval times. But we must not look for criti- cism either of text or thought, applied to literature so unequal, multifarious, and yet characteristic, in Oxford men who were slenderly equipped to deal with such recondite problems. It is Germany— the patient, shall we say the “ golden ass” of Apuleius ?—to which we are indebted for critical recensions and surveys, not yet completed, of the 50 NEWMAN first Christian centuries. Nevertheless, what New- man himself undertook, though fragmentary, abides; it has not only the charm of a style that was ever gaining in ease and elegance, but insight, reality, and life as well. He has bequeathed to posterity sketches, not a monument so much as a gallery of studies; but they proclaim the great writer, the possibly first-rate historian that he might have been. It is no exaggeration to say that, by these efforts and all they led after them, Newman enabled the English people to recover their Christian pedigree. Names which had ceased even to be memories re- vived. Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Theodoret, and Chrysostom, became living per- sonages, under a treatment which, though tender, was not sentimental, and if it showed a reverence that Gibbon would have smiled at, was quite as considerate of the facts as his own, and occasionally more so. The little volume entitled Church of the Fathers is perfect in its way; the style strong and persuasive, the drawing firm, the atmosphere steeped in a knowledge of times and localities which was yet to be acquired when its author com- posed his book on the Arians. Beginning with Greece and Asia Minor, visiting in succession Egypt, Africa, Spain, and Gaul, it illustrates as if “a drama in three acts,” that marvellous fourth THE TRACTARIANS Pay century which beheld the Roman Empire turn Christian, the triumph and overthrow of Arianism, the descent upon East and West of our ancestors from the North. In this and the. following period—speaking loosely, from St. Cyprian to the Council of Chal- cedon—Newman lived as at home; he read its documents, selected choice pages from it, to dress up in his incomparable English, took its Church heroes for his pattern, and found in its crises of dogma situations parallel to our own which for him decided the issue. Here again we remark how by means of subtle coincidences, overlooked in previous controversy on both sides, he gave to his life an interest such as he ascribes to the history that so wrought upon him. ‘ The shadow of the fifth century was on the sixteenth,” and on the nineteenth no less—‘‘ like a spirit rising from the troubled waters of the old world with the shape and lineaments of the new.” But in thus reason- ing who could be more modern? With Newman the religious genius turned back in quest of con- tinuity, as did the historical with Layard, excavat- ing the palaces at Nineveh, or with Champollion deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was the method of Lyell, and soon would be the task of Darwin, to build up rocks, plants, animals, and the human races themselves, into a record that should 52 NEWMAN leave no gaps, connect the present with the past, and in both discern a law at once of identity and progress. The day when “separate creations ” should no longer be accepted was dawning. Newman perceived that there can be no such thing as ancient history which is not modern, or modern which is not ancient. He caught sight of a principle, as far-reaching as elementary, in virtue of which the Christian religion, organic because it is objective, stands outside the conscience of in- dividuals, allows of its being handled as scientific men handle their subject-matters, and will yield results on this plan which when stated are capable of verification. ‘The mystic void of Evangelical sentiment was, therefore, to be filled up; history afforded a ground to move upon; out of the cloud we might come to the city of saints and martyrs. But how did views of which the note was unity agree with that violent break at the Reformation, so complete as to have made the Church itself an island, cut off from the rest of the world? What did the Thirty-nine Articles say? ‘““Now the least universal institution in Eu- rope,” it has been remarked, “ is the Church of England, and the most universal is the Church of Rome.” Yet Englishmen, if they tyrannized over their Church in Acts of Parliament, were hardly disposed to look on unconcerned while a THE TRACTARIANS 53 knot of enthusiasts in Oxford, professing that they kept the middle way, were approaching nearer and nearer to the Roman extreme. ‘“ Tendimus in Latium,” which some Oxonians called out as a challenge, provoked countercries of ‘‘ No Popery.”’ The assault which Newman’s friends led in 1836 against Hampden, though few or none had read the Bampton Lectures they so loudly condemned, was sure to be answered with fresh violence; “ the wheel would come full circle.” But in 1839 New- man’s position was at its height. He preached, lectured, wrote, and talked incessantly. The re- sources of his heart and intellect seemed inexhaust- ible. Like Socrates, he was willing to argue with anyone who would venture on an assumption; but his logic was at the service of a creed, and none who lived intimately with him then would have thought of calling him sceptical. “Theld a large bold system of religion,” he says, “very unlike the Protestantism of the day, but it was the concentration and adjustment of the state- ments of great Anglican authorities.’ So he be- lieved when putting forth his Via Media, which despite some fine passages is not now readable; and the Essay on Justification is a similar but much more pleasing attempt to reconcile opposing schools. In the latter volume an extraordinary clearness 54 NEWMAN of spiritual light seems to fall from the sky; per- haps the four or five pages in Lecture XI which account for the success of Christian preaching are more effective, as they are more concentrated than the long chapter on that subject which concludes the Grammar of Assent. Certainly they give us the author’s own philosophy. ‘“‘ The Apostles,” he says, “‘ appealed to men’s hearts, and, according to their hearts, so they answered them.” Faith, as a principle of knowledge, could not be analyzed; it was secret, inexplicable, and spontaneous, higher than the senses or the reason, using arguments “but as outward forms of something beyond argu- ment.” Faith ‘‘ enjoined the law of love for re- taliation; it put pain above enjoyment; it sup- planted polygamy by the celibate; it honoured poverty before affluence, the communion of Saints before the civil power, the next world before this.” Compare such “ evidences of Christianity’ with Paley’s, then the text in both Universities, and it will be felt that revolution was in the air. Heads of houses might well be alarmed. But a succes- sion of startling events, to which that generation had not the key, was preparing, with the result that Newman and his transcendent logic would be driven from Oxford. Since 1836 he had been solitary in his own thoughts. Froude was gone. ‘‘ Ah dearest!” THE TRACTARIANS 55 cries the bereaved friend, passionate beyond his wont— Ah dearest! with a word he could dispel All questioning, and raise Our hearts to rapture, whispering all was well And turning prayer to praise. And other secrets too he could declare, By patterns all divine, His earthly creed retouching here and there, And deepening every line. When preaching on the “‘ greatness and littleness of human life,” he refers secretly to this lofty spirit as among the men who, “ by such passing flashes, like rays of the sun, and the darting lightning, give tokens of their immortality . . . that they are ‘but angels in disguise.” And elsewhere, “ they are taken away for some purpose surely; their gifts are not lost to us; their soaring minds, the fire of their contemplations, the sanctity of their desires, the vigour of their faith, the sweetness and gentle- ness of their affections, were not given without an object.”’ Newman’s friendships were numerous and ro- mantic; he had indeed ‘‘a temper imperious and wilful, but along with it a most attaching gentle- ness, sweetness, singleness of heart and purpose.” These are words of Anthony Froude, who de- 56 NEWMAN scribes him as he might be seen in those critical years. ‘‘ His appearance was striking. He was above the middle height, slight and spare. His head was large, his face remarkably like that of Julius Caesar. The forehead, the shape of the ears and the nose, were almost the same. The lines of the mouth were very peculiar, and I should say exactly the same. I have often thought of the resemblance, and believe that it extended to the temperament.” Down to extreme old age the likeness was marked, and then as always Newman ‘‘ attracted the passionate devotion of friends and followers.” But he paid the penalty of original genius in a deepening solitude; as he observes with a sigh, “St. John had to live in his own thoughts.” After Hurrell Froude his correspondents are his disci- ples; he must give out rather than take in; the strange spiritual conflict which filled his years from the autumn of 1839 to the last sermon at Little- more on September 25, 1843, goes forward almost without witnesses. For even those, like F. Rogers or H. Wilberforce, who stood nearest his heart, did not really know it. Another has asked whether he knew it himself. Here, then, was a situation, tragic in itself, but made still more affecting by the strength of the motives opposed, the unique personality of the hero, and the uncertain issue, Cardinal Newman. After the miniature painted by W..C. Ross in the possession of Mr. Henry Huks Gibbs. Portrait now at Keble College, Oxford THE TRACTARIANS 57° doubtful up to the moment which decided all. Out of such elements is great literature bred. And the hero has given us the tragedy in his Apologia, which will ever be to English readers what Rousseau’s Confessions are to the French and St. Augustine’s to all the world—a portrait of himself drawn by the artist in such taking colours that every other pales before it. The prologue is admirable— “For who can know himself?” cries Newman, “and the multitude of subtle influences which act upon him; and who can recollect, at the distance of twenty-five years, all that he once knew about his thoughts and his deeds, and that during a por- tion of his life when even at the time his observa- tion, whether of himself or of the external world, was less than before or after, by very reason of the perplexity and dismay which weighed upon him—when, though it would be most unthankful to seem to imply that he had not all-sufficient light amid his darkness, yet a darkness emphatically it was? And who can gird himself suddenly to a new and anxious undertaking, which he might in- deed be able to perform well, had he full and calm leisure to look through everything that he has written? but, on the other hand, as to that calm contemplation of the past, in itself so desirable, who can afford to be leisurely and deliberate while 58 NEWMAN he practises on himself a cruel operation, the rip- ping up of old griefs, and the venturing again upon the ‘infandum dolorem’ of years, in which the stars of this lower heaven were one by one going out? I could not in cool blood, nor except upon the imperious call of duty, attempt what I have set myself to do.” As he goes on to tell the story, it is full of strange coincidences, accidents which turn out to have a purpose, even grotesque encounters like that with the Jerusalem bishopric, and what De Quin- cey terms “‘ echo auguries,” by which one sentence does the work of years and volumes. The cham- pion of Anglicanism wounds himself with his own sword. His trembling devotion to truth, sensitive as a lover’s passion, ends in the noblest retractation which has ever been put on record. The genial Wiseman, somewhat of the Spanish grandee about him, arguing on well-worn lines, had quoted in defence of Catholic unity from St. Augustine, “Securus judicat orbis terrarum ’’—Anglicans, similar to the old Donatists of Africa, being di- vided from the Church (Ecumenical, must be in the wrong. The words kept ringing in Newman’s ears like the “ Turn again, Whittington,” of the chime, or like the “‘ Tolle, lege—tolle, lege,” of the child which converted Augustine himself. “ By those great words of the ancient Father, the theory of the Via Media was absolutely pulverized.” THE TRACTARIANS 59 But the listener had brought to them an im- agination already expectant. His summer reading, in that year 1839, which he considered to be his zenith as an Anglican teacher, was about dead heretics like Eutyches, remote and subtle wrang- lers, like the Monophysites of A.D. 450, and the Council of Chalcedon. It had shown him a Pope who was simply in the right, the majestic St. Leo, stretching his rod over East and West, dictating a creed, and saving Christianity. To this visible scene Augustine’s axiom served as an interpreta- tion and an approval. It was a “ divine call,” and Newman, in St. Mary’s pulpit, asked himself, “What gain is it to be applauded, admired, courted, followed—compared with this one aim, of ‘not being disobedient to a heavenly vision’? ”’ The heavens had opened and closed again. But “he who has seen a ghost cannot be as if he had never seen it.” The “ advocatus diaboli’’—as we have termed that strenuous critic of Newman, Dr. Abbott— here draws a happy allusion from Hamlet, uncer- tain whether his preternatural visitant was of heaven or the abyss. Almost in those words New- man shaped his own doubts. He gave up his “positive Anglican theory,” but he would not go to Rome. He fell back on his early arguments and the belief that ruling over the Eternal City 60 NEWMAN ¢ was a ‘‘ genius loci,’ the ‘‘ old dethroned Pagan monster still living, that was Antichrist.” It availed nothing. Rome, as a Church, was the standard of doctrine, and to satisfy impatient fol- lowers he undertook the task of showing in Tract Ninety that the Articles could not have condemned the Council of Trent. Straightway he was denounced on all hands; England blazed into Protestant fury; the Tract was censured as an “evasion’’ at Oxford; the ““ Movement,” hitherto prosperous beyond hope, was broken in two. One wing advanced towards Rome; the other halted, wavered for a time, then split up into sections. The main body, held to- gether by Pusey and Keble, stood staunch to the Church of England; but they had lost their leader. Anthony Froude, though never exactly a Tracta- rian, took refuge with Carlyle. The most intel- lectual of Newman’s younger disciples, Ward, came out with his [deal of the Christian Church, was ‘‘ degraded” in solemn session, all Oxford looking on, and carried into the Roman schools a power of pure metaphysics which brought Stuart Mill to his knees and shattered the materialist dogma called the ‘‘ association of ideas.” Mark Pattison became a ‘“‘ Liberal,” fiercely intolerant wherever he touched on Catholic topics, but the one solitary mind, it appears to us, which by its THE TRACTARIANS 61 keen insight, feeling for the great in literature ancient as well as modern, fastidious scholarship, and detachment from the idols of the market place, might in some degree have done for Newman’s later life what Hurrell Froude did for its less mature period. Pattison had his full share of the spirit of the age. Could the master have subdued him permanently, Oxford and England would not be where we see them to-day, in a languor of ag- nostic doubt fevered over with a craze for enjoy- ment and the money that will purchase it. For Pattison was, pre-eminently, the modern man. Tract Ninety, though a landmark in Church history, is not literature. When the author had defined his Thirty-Nine Articles as “ the stammer- ing lips of ambiguous formulas,”: there was really no need to enter upon details; his work as an Angli- can was done. He discontinued the Tracts by-and- by, retreated to Littlemore, buried himself in his library, and gave up his living. The interest of the play now moves round a single figure: not what the Church or University will do, but what will Newman do? He is ever the hesitating Dane, a prey to shadows, waiting for the omen which is to decide. Hamlet, however, scarcely believed in Providence, though he appeals to it; of Newman it would not be “‘ more than an hyperbole ” to say that he believed in nothing else. 62 NEWMAN His Sermons on Subjects of the Day, preached during this agony of indecision, are in a mingled strain. To read them as they were delivered, is to overhear the soliloquy in which every possible reason is advanced against joining the Church of Rome that could yet afford ground to one whose ideals were monastic, antiquarian, but above all, unworldly. On this point Newman never changed. When he contrasts ‘‘ Faith and the World,” as ene- mies which cannot come to terms, he is laying down principles that we shall find in his discourse at Rome thirty-seven years afterwards; he is denounc- ing the ‘‘ Liberal,” or, as we should now say, the secularist view of society which takes no account of religion because any “‘ other world” is to it an open question. His last apology for the English Establishment brought no comfort to himself or his little flock, ‘‘ We could not be as if we never had been a Church; we were Samaria.” ‘That idea faded from his mind. ‘“‘ New creeds, private opinions, self-devised practices, are delusions,” he Was very soon writing, and “the division of Churches is the corruption of hearts.” He might be lingering on the threshold, but his face was set towards exile. In his own language, ‘‘ From the end of 1841 I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership of the Anglican Church.” Among the correspondence of this interval, THE TRACTARIANS 63 which lasted nearly four years, the letters ex- changed with his sister Jemima, Mrs. John Moz- ley, are equal to the finest passages, whether of the sermons or the Apologia. They should be gone over side by side with Ernest Renan’s to his sister Henrietta, which cover the same period, but end in a determination precisely the reverse of Newman’s. And Henrietta encourages, rebukes, draws her young brother forward to a goal she has herself reached; while the English lady can but plead for delay, or break out in tender expostula- tion with a spirit she reveres. Both series of letters have upon them the stamp of high refinement, in diction as in feeling; they belong to the great things in epistolary literature. The purity of style is perhaps not less in one than in the other; it is French or English written not for effect, but to express the very heart of those who were debating an irrevocable issue. Matthew Arnold would call it “‘ prose of the centre,’ and undoubtedly it is classic as though by definition. Too long to quote here, the letters of November and December, 1844, and still more those of March, 1845, when Newman was giving up his Oriel Fellowship, have in them strokes of pathos, with a stern yet suppressed energy of conviction beneath, which are piercing as we read, and we are but strangers. We cannot recall any English 64 NEWMAN correspondence quite like this, but if a parallel should be found in Cowper, the beloved and un- happy enthusiast, it will be sufficient praise. By October 9, 1845, Renan had arrived in Paris, bade farewell to St. Sulpice, and putting off his clerical habit, gone out of the Catholic Church. On that day John Henry Newman was received into it at Littlemore, by Father Dominic, an Italian Passionist friar. History, which has marked the coincidence, will register its conse- quences for a long while to come. The manuscript of his Development lay unfin- ished on the table, where he had worked standing over it sometimes fourteen hours a day. Newman took a pen and wrote the conclusion of the whole matter in an immortal page— ‘““Such were the thoughts concerning the ‘Blessed Vision of Peace,’ of one whose long-con- tinued petition had been that the Most Merciful would not despise the work of His own hands, nor leave him to himself; while yet his eyes were dim, and his breast laden, and he could but em- ploy Reason in the things of Faith. And now, dear Reader, time is short, eternity is long. Put not from you what you have here found; regard it not as mere matter of present controversy; set not out resolved to refute it, and looking about for the best way of doing so; seduce not yourself THE TRACTARIANS 65 with the imagination that it comes of disappoint- ment, or disgust, or restlessness, or wounded feel- ing, or undue sensibility, or other weakness. Wrap not yourself round in the associations of years past; nor determine that to be truth which you wish to be so, nor make an idol of cherished anticipations. ‘Time is short, eternity is long. Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine; Secundum verbum tuum in pace, Quia viderunt oculi mei salutare tuum.”’ CHAPTER III FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD NEWMAN, in a deeply felt passage of Loss and Gain, makes his ‘other self,” Charles Reding,’ say: ‘‘ Yes, I give up home, I give up all who have ever known me, loved me, valued me, wished me well; I know well I am making myself a by- word and an outcast.” It wastrue. The people of England, its princes, priests, and prophets, ‘““ Lords and Commons, Universities, Ecclesiastical Courts, marts of commerce, great towns, country parishes,” had dealt with him and his doctrine as they would have dealt with St. Athanasius. And more also. ‘Thanks to the imprudent talk about “reserve ’”’ in matters of religion, but above all to the lawyer-like ingenuities of Tract Ninety, many were convinced that he had been a traitor in the service of Rome, undermining the Establishment. Not one of his relatives would follow him; Francis Newman gave up the idea of Revelation, the two Mozleys drifted into Liberal waters. So com- pletely had the great teacher broken with his past, that he “thought of betaking himself to some 66 FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 67 secular calling.” He had given up his sword to Wiseman with a saintly meekness. It was restored to him on fresh terms; he went down to the battle again, and his later campaigns were as full of surprises and vicissitudes as his first, but they ended in victory. Whatever comes of it, the Church of England owes to Newman its revived influence and its pres- ent form. ‘‘ Mysteries which had been dismissed as superstitions at the Reformation,” says Anthony Froude, ‘“‘ and had never since been heard of, were preached again by half the clergy, and had revolu- tionized the ritual in our churches. Every county had its Anglican monasteries and convents.” “The State Church,” adds T. H. Huxley, ‘‘ seems more and more anxious to repudiate all complicity with the principles of the Protestant Reformation. and to call itself Anglo-Catholic.” But where was the man who had wrought these changes? In retreat at Maryvale, an old disused Catholic college in Warwickshire, lonely as he had been at Littlemore. Ora simple student in Rome at Santa Croce, looking out on the Campagna which he had traversed with such different feelings fifteen years previously. Or wearing the habit of St. Philip Neri, a Florentine who was brought up near San Marco, who is called the ‘‘ Apostle of Rome,” and who in his Oratory of the Chiesa 68 NEWMAN Nuova had combined music, literature, divinity, and the common life, in a home which was not a cloister, under a Rule without vows, as of secular priests who should have inherited the large and calm spirit of the Benedictines. But whether in Papal Rome or Protestant Birmingham, he led a life apart, as he had done in Oxford. To the England which cast him out Newman was dead until 1864, when he published the appeal that won all hearts. Yet his contributions to phi- losophy and letters during this banishment are, in point of style, equal, if not superior, to his former writings; in breadth, liveliness, and sparkle they betoken an advance of power, and they address a wider audience. If such a thing there be as a world-literature, they may claim no undistinguished place in that Temple of Fame. Newman’s prose had gained in suppleness; :t could be playful and sarcastic; it lent itself to parable; it touched keys that hitherto had been silent. It was always that of a profoundly religious mind; but Horace or Addison would have admired in it the man deli- cately observant, with a keen sense of the ridicu- lous, and of the finest wit, who delighted in Thack- eray and Jane Austen, who composed choice Latin prologues for the acting of Terence’s ‘‘ Comedies,” who desired that learning should be culture, and the scholar a gentleman, and study an introduction FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 69 to the art of life. To read these beautiful and serene pages—the University Lectures, the His- torical Sketches, Callista, and the Occasional Ser- mons, is a liberal education. However, we must retrace our steps to the De- velopment, which is in so many respects the ‘‘ opus magnum,” or masterpiece, of a long career. One critic describes it as written in a fever-dream; Mr. Wilfrid Ward dwells on its ‘‘ crowded thoughts and vivid imagination,” and quotes Newman’s associates as witnessing to the “ extreme mental tension’ under which it was composed. Its im- mediate hearings may be thus indicated. When Luther broke away from Rome, he appealed to Holy Scripture as all-sufficient for those who were called, and Christianity became the “ religion of a book ’—the Bible and the Bible only. But, in Laud’s view, which was the Anglican, to interpret the Bible we must go by tradition or the rule of St. Vincent of Lerins, ‘‘ That is the Christian faith which has been taught always, everywhere, and by all.” Newman, however, on searching into the. Arian and other controversies, found that the rule could not be simply applied. Antiquity did not present the scene of undivided and, as it were, mechanical agreement which Anglicans took for granted. Chillingworth had written of Popes against Popes and Councils against Councils. 70 NEWMAN Petavius, a great Jesuit theologian contemporary with Bossuet, had allowed that there were, in a certain sense, Fathers against Fathers. And Bull, in his Defence of the Nicene Creed, did but open a larger question, viz., what was the law upon which Christianity, assuming it to be the divine revelation, proceeded? Such was the problem, to which Newman an- swered that ‘“‘ whereas Revelation is a heavenly gift, He who gave it virtually has not given it, unless He has also secured it from perversion or corruption, in all such development as comes upon it by the necessity of its nature,”’ in other words, “that intellectual action through successive gen- erations which is the organ of development must be in its determinations infallible.” This was the Roman position. Development, or evolution, was however neces- sary from the nature of the case. Not the letter of the New Testament, nor any assignable number of books, would ‘‘ comprise a delineation of all pos- sible forms which a divine message will assume when submitted to a multitude of minds.” “ The more claims an idea has to be considered living, the more various will be its aspects; and the more social and political is its nature, the more compli- cated and subtle will be its issues, and the longer and more eventful its course.” And so the whole “URUIMON [PUIPseED Aq papuNnoys WeEYAUIUIIIG ‘UOJseqspy *proy Ao[seH ‘IWAN AI[lItd “1g JO Art0JeIOQ PUL simaT “L &9 904d FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 71 Bible is written on the principle of development. “Can any history wear a more human appearance than that of the rise and growth of the chosen people?’ As with the Bible, so with Creed and Church. ‘“ No one doctrine ”—we might add, no one institution—‘‘ can be named which starts com- plete at first, and gains nothing afterwards from the investigations of faith and the attacks of heresy.”’ All parties do, in fact, develop the Chris- tian ideas in their own way, and a mere identical transcript, as of type committed to paper, is as in- consistent with the laws of our intellect as with the vastness and depth of what is offered us, and its defence and propagation in a world of strife. “There can be no combination on the basis of truth without an organ of truth.” The correlative of a revealed system is an infallible authority. If, then, the Christian be a social religion, resting on ideas acknowledged as divine, and if those ideas make distinct impressions on different minds, and issue in developments, true, or false, or mixed, “what power will suffice to meet and do justice to these conflicting conditions, but a supreme author- ity ruling and reconciling individual judgments by a divine right? ” Apart from his solution of the problem raised, Newman, by exhibiting Christianity as a living system, incarnate in the millions, comprehending rae NEWMAN centuries, touching at all points the concerns of nations and holding up to them its own type of civilisation, had sketched the indispensable pro- logue to every future Church history, greatly en- larged the scheme of Evidences, swept aside a priori reasonings as to what it was or should be, and brought men out of the clouds that they might learn from the facts themselves how to judge of its merits. He was well aware that in England people regarded doctrine and usage, antiquity and development, as so much lumber, the débris which had floated down from the ‘“‘ Dark Ages.” But this contempt for the whole was, in the eyes of a sincere believer, a witness to the whole; since other developments than these from Nicaea to Trent there were none. All the heresies were short-lived: Luther and Calvin had seen their day; were not their disciples running out into sheer unbelief, or carrying to its legitimate term the Pantheism which lay hidden in their princi- ples? But the Reformers had cast away medieval de- velopments on the ground of their being corrup- tions; how bring the inquiry to a touchstone? Newman proposed seven tests—preservation of type, continuity of principles, power of assimila- tion, logical sequence, anticipation of the future, conservative action on the past, and chronic vigour. FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 73 Nearly one hundred and twenty pages are taken up in depicting “the wonderful identity of type which characterizes the Catholic Church from first to last.” Yet the subject is by no means exhausted. “It is confessed on all hands ’—such was the con- clusion—“ that from the time of Constantine the system and the phenomena of worship in Christen- dom, from Moscow to Spain, and from Ireland to Chili, is one and the same.’ This was termed the “analogy of Faith.” Newman’s wide and careful reading in the early centuries, his classical scholarship, and his quick eye for likenesses between things far apart, en- abled him to draw a series of comparisons in which the modern Roman Church recalls the ancient or primitive, with a rhetorical effect seldom surpassed. He shows, too, with convincing logic, how every part of the system supposes or leads on to every other; each is successively means and end; in short, if the type is organic, it is likewise unique, all its elements obeying a sovereign law of assimilation. But, magnificent as are these large historical land- scapes, we cannot reproduce them here. Certainly Gibbon would have read with pleasure and no grudging assent the forty pages in which New- man sums up the view of Christianity taken by the Roman Empire, its statesmen, historians, poets, and philosophers, as equally applicable to the Ro- 74 NEWMAN man Church. It is a brilliant and suggestive par- allel, of which the moral is thus pointed :— ‘There is a religious communion, claiming a divine commission, and holding all other religious bodies around it heretical or infidel; it is a well- organized, well-disciplined body; it is a sort of secret society, binding together its members by in- fluences and by engagements which it is difficult for strangers to ascertain. It is spread over the known world; it may be weak or insignificant locally, but it is strong on the whole from its con- tinuity; it may be smaller than all other religious bodies together, but is larger than each separately. It is a natural enemy to governments external to itself; it is intolerant and engrossing, and tends to a new modelling of society; it breaks laws, it divides families. It is a gross superstition; it is charged with the foulest crimes; it is despised by the intellect of the day; it is frightful to the imagination of the many. And there is but one communion such. Place this description before Pliny or Julian; place it before Frederick the Second or Guizot. ‘ Apparent dirae facies.’ Each knows at once, without asking a question, who is meant by it. One object, and only one, absorbs each item of the delineation.” As if to set the seal on this claim to identity, the book had not long been published when Eng- FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD Hie land went into a frenzy over the “‘ Papal Aggres- sion.” Lord John Russell brought in his Bill against Roman Catholics, but he confounded in one charge with them the Laudian party; in a word, he granted Newman’s argument, “ either accept the whole or reject the whole.” This gave occasion to the raciest and least difficult of Newman’s “Lectures ’—those delivered in the Corn Ex- change, Birmingham, on The Present Position of Catholics in England. ‘ They are full of clever satire and description,’ wrote George Eliot, who read them with great amusement. The humour in which they abounded was really kindness; and the hypothetical Russian who misunderstood Black- stone as John Bull did his suffering Catholic neigh- bours, or the “‘ Prejudiced Man ” who went abroad to see idolatry and superstition everywhere, and the Scripture-reader who thought the service known as Benediction a specious kind of juggling, were true pictures, at which the fiery Tertullian would have smiled. Nevertheless, in spite of their energy, grace, and wit, not a single newspaper quoted or alluded to them. Yet they will be the sole record possessing literary worth of an epi- sode which rivalled the outburst on occasion of Tract Ninety, and which ended as suddenly as it began. Cardinal Wiseman, the storm being over, called 76 NEWMAN his new hierarchy together in synod, at Oscott, on July 13, 1852. The great Tractarian leader preached. His sermon, called “The Second Spring,” marks in literature a moment of the Romantic triumph, not less memorable than -Chateaubriand’s appearance with the Génie du Christianisme in his hand. It should be compared with Newman’s farewell to the Anglican Estab- lishment—that “‘ Parting of Friends ”’ in which he exclaims, ‘“O my Mother! whence is this unto thee, that thou hast good things poured upon thee and canst not keep them, and bearest children, yet darest not own them? . . . How is it that whatever is generous in purpose, and tender or deep in devotion, thy flower and thy promise, falls from thy bosom and finds no home within thine arms?’ His lament is now changed to an almost lyrical note, ‘‘ The past has returned the dead lives. The English Church was, and the English Church was not, and the English Church is once again. This is the portent, worthy of acry. It is the coming in of a second spring.” : The preacher was himself its harbinger, still meditating on man’s mortality, on the winter that overtakes him and all he does; but rapt into a vision of the second temple rising above the ruins of the old. Firm, sensitive, and thrilling with an emotion which runs along all its harmonies, the FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 7 composition is a poem, to be judged by its corre- spondence with a scene in history which could not be acted over again. It is said that Macaulay knew the sermon by heart. And a striking testi- mony to the inevitable grace of Newman’s periods was borne by others, not much conversant with books, who, after reading him once, felt as if they had always known what he set before them. Per- haps the explanation is that, however fresh or re- condite his thoughts, he, like Walter Scott, attired them in the natural yet not commonplace terms of the current language. He never could be quaint, odd, or affected; he went up to the heights as by steps that were visible to all. If, on certain sub- jects, he remained obscure, even to himself, as he confesses in a charming letter of his old age, the reason cannot be found in his choice of words, but lies below them. Thus he is the opposite of Carlyle, whose vo- cabulary we learn as though a foreign tongue, which in fact it is, made harder stil! by what John- son would term its “‘ anfractuosities ’—a prophet’s dialect, not the medium by which men in the street talk to one another. Newman’s, on the contrary, is common English made perfect. To it we may apply what Ernest Renan was taught as the secret of good writing by his sister. ‘She convinced me,” he says, “‘ that everything may be said in the sim- 78 NEWMAN ple and correct style of our best authors, and that novel expressions and violent* images are due to pretension misplaced, or to ignorance of our real treasures.” A hard judgment on modern French literature! Without laying down rules of court for genius —which will be severely unadorned or will pour out its magnificence by an instinct far surer than general prescriptions—we perceive that Newman held the elementary idea of a classic author to be this freedom from pretence. Though individual sermons often bear titles which are poems, as “The Ventures of Faith,” ‘‘ The Church a Home for the Lonely,” and many more, he would not advertise his volumes by glittering names; they come before us with inscriptions as prosaic as can be devised. What should we anticipate from a work called ‘‘ Sermons to Mixed Congregations ’’? Dreary polemics, or expostulation in the nature of those tracts which we see lying about in railroad waiting-rooms? It turns out to be perhaps the most powerful pleading of its kind for religion that our language contains. The inward fire has reached to the surface; it glows with conviction; argument, imagery, example, shine translucent in a prophetic atmosphere, solemn as that of the Sis- tine, with a Last Judgment hanging in our sight, fixed there for ever. This was Newman’s nearest BIRST. - CATHOLIC. PERIOD 79 approach to the pictured style, though always sym- bolic; as Wordsworth says— All things, responsive to the writing, there Breathed immortality, revolving life, And greatness still revolving. But it was a life which had in it fearful possibili- ties, an immortality not of bliss only, but of pain. Exchange this grave melodious prose for lines and stanzas more concentrated, not more earnest, you will be hearing the Dream of Gerontius when it has been set to music. In 1854 Newman was called by the Irish Bishops to be Rector of the Catholic University in Dub- lin. He obeyed, still going by a sign, as we are told in a volume privately printed, My Campaign in Ireland, which is an instalment of a longer nar- rative. He had prepared his way, during the stress of a great anxiety—the Achilli trial—by delivering nine lectures before his Irish friends on the idea and scope of a University. As we read them now, although names and persons are slightly antiquated, the view taken is, in its philosophical aspect, large, and in the topics with which it is concerned, mod- ern. Newman kept in his eye the Platonic form of Oxford, vindicating it against the fashionable London “ bazaar or pantechnicon ” in which wares of all kinds were heaped together for sale, and an 80 NEWMAN examination which was little else than a feat of memory became the decisive test. The new learn- ing, however miscellaneous, was no culture, unless it brought enlargement of mind. Newman defined this to be “ philosophy,” which was “ reason exer- cised on knowledge; the elements of the physical and moral world, sciences, arts, pursuits, ranks, offices, events, opinions, individualities viewed, not in themselves, but as relative terms, suggesting a multitude of correlatives, and gradually, by suc- cessive combinations, converging one and all to their true centre.” He that had acquired this faculty of judging soundly about all things was the educated man; to create him was the end of University teaching, whether it employed the ancient classics, or con- temporary literature, or mathematics, or any given number of sciences. A real University could not live on paper, by examinations; nor would lectures alone do its work; there must be a current of thought set in motion by the daily intercourse of tutors with pupils and of pupils with one another. Quoting Copleston and Davison, who had championed these principles against the utilitarian writers of the Edinburgh, Newman left an open- ing, if somewhat narrow, for the introduction of modern science, history, law, and philology, as the German schools cultivated them; but this far- FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 81 reaching movement seems to lie beyond his hori- zon. In theory such an expansion of studies was provided for; but the difference between an Acad- emy which investigates or discovers, and a Univer- sity which teaches, could never be overlooked. Details and practical distinctions Newman passed by in this general survey; what was to be under- stood by ‘‘a cultivated mind ” he exhibited in his own person and described with a felicity which Plato might have envied. He would not, it is true, give up to critics ‘“‘ that antiquated variety of hu- man nature and remnant of feudalism called a gentleman,” whose features he described in a de- lightful piece of portraiture; as surely no Athenian would either. But he would add to it; he included under its proper notion “ intellectual excellence ”’; as Matthew Arnold said afterwards, the Barba- rians must be made into Greeks. ‘‘ That perfec- tion of intellect,” Newman repeated, “‘ is the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things, each in its place, and with its own charac- teristics upon it. It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history, almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost super- natural charity, from its freedom from bitterness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so 82 NEWMAN intimate is it with the eternal order of things and the music of the spheres.” That little word ‘“‘ almost ” which rings in this passage so loudly, betokens a reservation not always made, and now less than ever, when the claims of culture fail to be discussed. It may not hold aloof from religion, nay nor from theology, on the ground that since these are but sentiments and the expression of them, they have no place in a cur- riculum of knowledge. This false idea Newman combats with an eloquence which broadens into periods majestic as the Alexandrian, but so pointed in argument that, while indicating how finite is our compass, they refute the Agnosticism which was gathering strength under his eyes, though waiting to be named. He calls it “‘ a form of infidelity of the day.” It troubled him more than it did his hearers; he comes back to it again and again. Curious how this long-sighted watchman sees the Spencers and Huxleys marching up from beneath! ‘“‘T may be describing a school of thought which every one will disown; and pointing to teachers whom no one will be able to descry ”’; but men were at hand who would lay down that religion was not the subject-matter of a science; and, therefore, that while its teachers were at liberty to dogmatize in their churches, they must be shut out of the schools. Newman would have it otherwise, and he gives FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 83 reasons which, good or bad, address themselves to the intellect, not to blind prejudice. As Burke de- sired that religion should exalt her mitred front in Parliaments, so would he set up in Universities the chair from which might be taught her science and history by competent professors; and how should any teach doctrines so deep and sacred who had no faith in them? His argument on behalf of a Catholic University was complete. But the enter- prise failed. No blame attaches to the Rector who, though hardly an organizing head, was sympa- thetic, instant on all emergencies, unwearied in bringing home to the public his idea of what such an institution should be. His retirement was a de- feat, a prelude to many more during years which saw Newman isolated, and misunderstood on both sides, a “‘ prisoner pale with Paul’s sad girdle bound,” in his cell at Edgbaston, as once at Oriel or Littlemore. Before quitting Dublin, however, he had en- riched his generation with a number of Essays, genial in tone, pregnant in their half-sentences with such wisdom as reminds us of Goethe’s Prose Say- ings, and not inferior to them. He does not dis- dain elementary studies, on which he writes amus- ing apologues as wittily turned as Addison’s papers in the Spectator. He enforces discipline of mind, still recommending exactness, balance, sharp watch 84 NEWMAN over our own statements to ourselves of what we think we know, in contrast to that ‘‘ barren mock- ery of knowledge which comes of attending great lecturers, or of mere acquaintance with reviews, magazines, newspapers, and other literature of the day which, however able and valuable in itself, is not the instrument of intellectual education.” This implies a habit of order and system, “ the actual acceptance and use of certain principles as centres - of thought, around which our knowledge grows and is located.’”’ And he concludes, ‘‘ where this critical faculty exists, history is no longer a mere story-book, or biography a romance; orators and publications of the day are no longer infallible au- thorities; eloquent diction is no longer a substitute for matter, nor bold statements, or lively descrip- tions, a substitute for proof. This is that faculty of perception in intellectual matters . . . anal- ogous to the capacity we all have of mastering the multitude of lines and colours which pour in upon our eyes, and of deciding what every one of them is worth.” It will be seen that Newman, for all his un- fathomable thoughts concerning the world of spirit, was no mystic dreamer, absorbed in self-contempla- tion. He possessed, in speech as in writing, a gift that De Quincey ascribes to Burke’s conversation, of which he remarks, “‘ one thought rose upon the Cardinal Newman, 1861. From a photograph by Adolphe Beau. FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 85 suggestion, or more properly upon the impulse, of what went before.’’ You could never tell—but neither could he—how, as he followed the idea, his journeying would lead him, for he did not begin with a thesis, but was inspired by the light within; therefore he sought as an enquirer that which, when found, he recognized to be his own. Though wielding always a power to which Cicero’s Latin word auctoritas fitly corresponds, he is, while a dogmatist, never dogmatic. Johnson played the dictator, Carlyle became an oracle; Newman reasoned, and if on assumptions he frankly stated them. His quality is candour, aptly as well as amusingly indicated by his writing out every argument of an adversary before he would reply to it. No medieval schoolman excelled him in the art of distinctions, which prompted a very good judge in earlier times to describe him as “a Lord Chancellor thrown away.” Extreme verbal accuracy delighted him; nor would he be satisfied in himself or his pupils with roundabout phrases; abstract positions must be defined, limited, and made clear by illustration; cognate ideas must not be left without their several signs, and mistakes were to be obviated before they arose. Much of this training, he says, was due to Dr. Hawkins, “a man of most exact mind himself ’’; but acquaint- ance with Aristotle would foster it, and the ex- 86 NEWMAN igencies of controversy, whether as regarded the old Greek heretics or the dispute between England and Rome, would bring it to perfection. Yet there is one drawback to a style so exqui- sitely shaded. The careless reader misses half its meaning; an unscrupulous or hasty critic fastens on terms which, because, as they stand, he is unable to deal with them, he wrenches from their context, daubs with his own colour, and holds up to reproba- tion. Newman hated paradox, but he was often bold, endlessly impatient of words that by contin- ual repetition had ceased to signify anything, and, as Thomas Mozley observes with entire truth, “ he would not be in a current.”” He must say things in his own way, if he spoke at all. These were among the causes why Anglicans, Catholics, and the aver- age Englishman mistook him on various occasions, or attributed to his writings sentiments and views which they do not contain. Without any desire to be mysterious—at all events, in really important questions—he addressed the initiated by mere force of a style which could not stoop to popularity, and by a range of thought in keeping with it. From this point of view his works are not for the multitude; they teach the master rather than the novice, always taking for granted a degree of mental activity which, not common at any time, is threatened in our age by FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 87 the very wealth of material cast upon it, as Tarpeia in the legend was smothered by the golden shields. Various and contrary as the opponents were who troubled Newman for the next twenty years—from his leaving Dublin till he accepted the Cardinal’s hat—and though among them we reckon minds of undoubted ability, the criticism which includes them all is that they failed to comprehend an intellect greater than their own, busy with problems to the vast horizons of which their view could not ex- tend. | Newman was to be the Christian prophet and philosopher of the coming century. ‘“‘ By the soli- tary force of his own mind,” to quote J. A. Froude, he has not only restored Catholicism in the English- speaking world to a place and power which it might seem hopelessly to have lost; he has also re- acted on the mental habits of those whom he joined by teaching them a language they could not have gained without him, modelling afresh their meth- ods of apologetics, making known to the Roman schools a temper of philosophy and style of argu- ment which promise a common ground, a forum or an agora, between North and South where, at least, they may discuss with understanding, and by draw- ing their eyes to the abyss of the unknowable which must ever lie beneath our most certain affirmations. Newman realized, as others did not, that Chris- 88 NEWMAN tianity was fading away from the public order; that Christians would be called upon more and more to exercise their individual judgment, to mix in a society no longer Catholic or Protestant, but free-thinking as was the later Roman Empire, sceptical yet superstitious, corrupt yet polished; and he began to provide against the evil day. His policy would have gone upon lines, novel as re- garded the immediate past, now irrecoverable, but identical with those by which Clement, Origen, Basil, and the early Fathers had guided their course under heathen rule. It was a programme for to- morrow which implied great and permanent losses, not pleasant to think of, a reliance on energy in- stead of routine, and what many took to be a change of front. By this time Darwin had pub- lished his Origin of Species; the Bible criticism familiar to Germany since Lessing had put out feelers in Essays and Reviews; Colenso was apply- ing his arithmetic to the Pentateuch; Hegel had been heard of in Oxford. Newman was alive to the signs of the times; he read and gave them a meaning. Events have shown that he was not de- ceived. Since, however, no published writings are extant by which to determine his attitude towards ques- tions as they arose, it would be hazardous, and something more, to attempt doing that which he BIRST CATHOLIC: PERIOD 89 has left undone. His relations with Cardinal Wise- man were strained by the Achilli trial, an untoward event due to the Cardinal’s own action, and ending in a disaster the blame of which must be laid on his shoulders. Wiseman’s health was giving way; he meant kindly, but his impulses were evanescent. He failed to support Newman in Dublin; did not obtain for him the mitre promised at Rome; and, after entrusting him with full powers to undertake a revision of the English Catholic Bible—known as the Douay version—called them in again at the instance of obscure booksellers. This last disap- pointment was probably of some consequence to English literature, and ought not be passed over without reflection. Neither a Hebrew scholar nor an adept in Hellenistic Greek, little if at all versed in the story, even now not unravelled for the most part, of the Latin Vulgate, it was not as an expert that Newman would have presided over the committee of revision. But he was the greatest living master of English prose; his memory and his heart were steeped in the noble vernacular, of ancient origin, on which King James’ Bible is founded; his ear, always fastidious, was attuned to its periods; and the doctrine which he held concerning translation had been stated in a classic page. He would never have sacrificed a rhythm, beautiful in itself and dear go NEWMAN from long association, to barren uniformity; under his guidance the result, while as exact as real schol- arship could make it, would have been literature, not a sort of key or lexicon, which by force of gram- matical scruples should evaporate the spirit without much enlightening the ignorant. By definition a committee has no genius; but Newman would, at least, have equalled Tyndale and surpassed Luther —individuals to whose mighty influence the Ger- man or the English Bible owes a unity of style amid astonishing diversities of matter, which has fur- nished even to profane authors an example and a standard. It was not to be. In the Revision of 1881 New- man, though invited, took no part. After the ex- panding era of the movement which we term Romantic, when art, letters, and freedom were called upon to glorify the Catholic Church, a time set in the leading spirit of which was Manning rather than Wiseman, represented by Veuillot, Ward, and others less distinguished. With such a party Newman could neither think nor act, out- side the sphere in which all Catholics are agreed. His heart went forth to Lacordaire and Monta- lembert, in whose general line of thought and conduct he enthusiastically concurred, considering them to be before their age. He “ read with a spe- cial interest,” and perhaps some application to him- FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD gI self, in Montalembert’s beautiful volume, “‘ of the unselfish aims, the thwarted projects, the unre- quited toils, the grand and tender resignation of Lacordaire.”” He mused upon the impending loss of the Temporal Power in verses which had once breathed his aspirations for the Church of Eng- land, threatened by the despoiler thirty years pre- viously. Still would religion, though an “ outcast from her awful ancient shrine,” pour her rays on the world, “‘ keen, free, and undefiled.”” But he foresaw the pilgrim Church in a society where she could claim no privileges; and his aloofness from the strife in which others were zealous gave offence. Newman never was an ecclesiastical politician: he looked onward to the morrow, and these were thinking of to-day; hence the misunderstanding which lasted for years. Younger men now came to him for counsel, among them Sir John (afterwards Lord) Acton, who was destined to be in his own department of history and bibliography the most learned scholar of his time. Although Newman did not, perhaps, look into the Origin of Species, just then causing a great explosion of talk all round, he heard of its contents from one well qualified to grasp them, Dr. W. K. Sullivan, and realized the significance of such a crisis in biology, not greeting it, as did Carlyle, with an “ Ernulphus curse,” but prepared 92 NEWMAN to consider what it might mean. But physical sci- ence was no more within his province than Roman politics. He would not, however, limit freedom of dis- cussion in this or any other subject, provided it were carried on as during the palmy days of Scholasticism, when every aspect of philosophy was brought into view—witness the Summa of St. Thomas; but then the Church remained as a Court of Appeal where religion pleaded rand obtained her rights. How, under conditions so altered, the same results were to be secured was, of course, a problem. ‘The rule, as Newman laid it down, is patience: “to bear for a while with what we feel to be error, in consideration of the truth in which it is eventually to issue.” And he said, “‘ if we reason we must submit to the condi- tions of reason. . . . That is no intellectual triumph of religion which has not been preceded by a full statement of what can be said against it.” Long afterwards, in controversy with Mr. Glad- stone, he expressed his views touching the liberty of unlicensed printing; they were moderate and to the purpose. ‘‘ When the intellect is cultivated,” he said, ‘‘ it is as certain that it will develop into a thousand various shapes, as that infinite hues and tints and shades of colour will be reflected from the earth’s surface when the sunlight touches it; and FIRST CATHOLIC PERIOD 93 in matters of religion the more, by reason of the extreme subtlety and abstruseness of the mental action by which they are determined.” Some way might be found, he hoped, of uniting what was free in the new structure of Society with what was au- thoritative in the old—a middle term between the abuses of the censorship and the anarchy of an irresponsible journalism, such as he saw around him. On these lines, with due caution as addressing the general public, Newman would have edited the Rambler, a review to which he contributed some delightful papers on the “* Ancient Saints ’’ and the Order of St. Benedict. But he soon withdrew from the position. In the later fortunes of the magazine he was not concerned. At Edgbaston he had set up an admirable school in which, as Lacordaire at Soréze, he found relaxation from his “ unrequited toils.”’ But an opening appeared at Oxford; he bought five acres, was planning an Oratory, and had to sell the land again; Manning and the friends with whom Manning acted had stepped in the way. The Archbishop writes to Rome in 1866, “I see much danger of an English Catholicism of which Newman is the highest type. It is the old Anglican, patristic, literary Oxford tone trans- planted into the Church.” Next year a painful correspondence which took place between these 94 NEWMAN very different men, each highly endowed, but the Oratorian incomparably the greater, ended in their life-long estrangement. By this time an event had come to pass which, though it could not reconcile to him such critics as, on the Catholic side, mistrusted his views and dreaded his influence, had brought all England to admire, to revere, and in large measure to under- stand, the extraordinary character whose isolation was a tribute to his genius. The Apologia pro Vita Sua had appeared and taken high rank among English classics. CHAPTER IV APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA ENGLAND possessed, in the year 1864, three eminent teachers, or, as was said of old, prophets, remarkable for the strength and splendour of their speech, the fervour of their convictions, and their steady opposition to the axioms, dogmas, and infer- ences of the prevailing Liberal creed. However they might disagree on certain points by no means unimportant, they were at one in denouncing the utilitarian ethics and economics, the virtue which was merely a drawing of bills at long or short dates on a balance of profits, the religion that, being only a form of respectability, was Pharisaism, and, in brief, all that went to make up the “‘ Enlighten- ment ” preached from the days of Adam Smith to the Manchester era. These critics of ‘“‘ progress”’ on the lines laid down by Bentham were Carlyle, Ruskin, and New- man. Strike their names and works out of the nineteenth century, it would be shorn of that which, in the twentieth, is coming to be regarded as Brit- 95 96 “NEWMAN ain’s treasure of wisdom for life and conduct, art, industry, and the ideals whereby we hold of the Infinite and Eternal. So much is plain matter of fact beyond denial. But in that same year, 1864, each of these great ones had become to the multi- tude a stone of stumbling and rock of offence. Newman, above all, as the embodied Reaction, who had gone over to a Church that smote this angel of light with anathema, was thrust on one side, or remembered only as the traitor of 1841 and 1845. He owed his restoration not to any friend, but to an undreamt-of enemy. Hurrell Froude’s younger brother, James Anthony, had never been Catholic in his sentiments, though slightly at- tached to Newman while an undergraduate. His religious beliefs were at all times nebulous; but he combined with them, whatever they might be, a more than Puritan hatred to the Church of Rome. In this feeling he was joined by Charles Kings- ley, whose novel of adventure, Westward Ho, breathes an intense dislike to everything Catholic, and is furiously Elizabethan, as if composed when the Spanish Armada was sailing up the Channel. There is a poem of the first rank, beautiful in diction, bewitching in fancy, that gives to this un-_ kind spirit a renown and adorns it with a grace such as might well prove irresistible to those who, APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 97 like Charles Kingsley, had little or no acquaint- ance with members of the old religion—we are alluding to Spenser’s Faérie Queene. Spenser has been called the Puritan Ariosto; he was Kings- ley’s favourite reading; and the heated atmos- phere of Elizabethan politics struck to the story- teller’s brain, as he dwelt on those far-off times, to reproduce them in his vivid colours. Froude was doing the same thing in his own way. Singularly picturesque, and equally inac- curate, with strokes as enchanting as they were often delusive, he had begun to deliver his ver- sion, which read like a fairy tale, of Henry VIII’s divorce and Queen Elizabeth’s resistance to Rome. But what had this to do with Newman? Nothing apparently; yet he stood in the background, for that generation of Englishmen, as an incalculable force, representing the power against which their fathers had risen up. He wished to undo the settlement of the Reformation; he was now the enemy, as Philip of Spain had been, or Parsons the Jesuit, or the stern Pius V. Moreover, Kingsley, as we may see in Hypatia, detested the Alexandrian schools and saints, to which he ascribed the corruption of Christian morals by celibacy and monasticism; but if ever an Alexandrian wrote in English, it was John Henry Newman. Still, an occasion must be sought for 98 NEWMAN any quarrel, however well prepared. Kingsley found one in reviewing Froude’s History of Eng- land. He was arguing that ‘“‘a deed might be a crime, or no crime at all—like Henry VIII’s mar- riage with his brother’s widow—according to the will of the Pope ’’; and he went on to ask, “‘ What rule of morality, what eternal law of right and wrong, could remain in the hearts of men born and bred under the shadow of so hideous a super- stition? ”’ From the virtue of purity he passed to the virtue of truth. ‘‘ Truth, for its own sake,” he de- clared, ‘“‘ had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not and, on the whole, ought not to be; that cun- ning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage. Whether his notion be doc- trinally correct or not, it is at least historically so.” To this paragraph neither reference nor proof of any kind was appended. Mr. Froude, with characteristic lightness, quotes Kingsley as saying that ‘‘the Catholic clergy did not place truth among the highest virtues,” and “ that Newman acknowledged it.”” The charge was what we have seen. It would not speedily have come round to the accused, had not a friend at Scarborough sent Cardinal Newman, 1861. From a photograph by Adolphe Beau APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 99 him the number of Macmillan’s Magazine for January, 1864, in which it appeared. He wrote to the publishers, drawing their attention, as gen- tlemen, to a “ grave and gratuitous slander ”; but he asked no reparation, and would not dream of expostulating with writer or editor who could put forth such an allegation without appending evi- dence in proof. Kingsley answered, “that my words were just I believed from many passages of your writings; but the document to which I expressly referred was one of your Sermons on ‘Subjects of the Day,’ No. XX, in the volume published in 1844, and entitled ‘Wisdom and Innocence.’”” He concluded, “I am most happy to hear from you (as I understand from your let- ter) your meaning; and I shall be most happy, on your showing me that I have wronged you, to retract my accusation as publicly as I have made i” Sir Leslie Stephen, who knew him well, has ob- served that Kingsley ‘‘ was a man of most quick and generous sympathies,”’ but, as he showed on occasion of the controversy thus introduced, not of any “ logical closeness.” Called upon to make good a definite and categorical charge, he attempts to shift the burden on the man whom he has ac- cused, offering him one reference, not to a passage, but to a discourse of seventeen pages, and that not 100 NEWMAN Catholic in date or place, together with an indica- tion of his writings passim, now some twenty-four volumes. Newman, with grave irony, pointed out these facts, adding merely—‘‘ When I received your letter, taking upon yourself the authorship, I was amazed.” To a third person, who came between, he said something more—-‘‘ I suppose, in truth, there is nothing at all, however base, up to the high mark of Titus Oates, which a Catholic may not expect to be believed of him by Protestants, however honourable and hard-headed.” But still, “‘ for a writer, when he is criticizing definite historical facts of the sixteenth century to go out of his way . . to say of me, ‘ Father Newman informs us that Truth for its own sake need not, and on the whole ought not, to be a virtue with the Ro- man clergy,’ and to be thus brilliant and antitheti- cal (save the mark!) in the very cause of Truth, is a proceeding of so special a character as to lead me to exclaim, after the pattern of the celebrated saying, ‘O Truth, how many lies are told in thy name!’ ” These were scathing words. How “so grave an inadvertence”’ as Kingsley had fallen into should be explained was his affair, not that of the innocent party; but Newman gave the other side fair warning. ‘‘If they set about proving their APOLOGIA ‘PRO .VITA SUA <101 point,” he wrote, “‘ or should they find that im- possible, if they say so, in either case I shall call them men.” If, instead, they proposed to smooth the matter over by publishing to the world that he had ‘‘ complained ” or that “ they yield to my letters, expostulations, representations, explana- tions,” they had better let it all alone, “ for a half- measure settles nothing.” Kingsley should now have grasped the situation, laid before him in this letter with masterly clear- ness. He took a little while to answer. It is probable that he consulted Froude, and there were, it seems, in the background those who would urge him to the attack, if they did not yet interpose. He was so ill advised as to decline giving the proofs, definite and particular, of the accusation to which he had committed himself. He wrote—‘ As the tone of your letters (even more than their lan- guage) makes me feel, to my very deep pleasure, that my opinion of the meaning of your words was a mistaken one, I shall send at once to Macmillan’s Magazine the few lines which I enclose.” What this apology was worth, Newman, keep- ing with admirable skill to his part of disinterested spectator, showed in a brilliant page. Kingsley said—" Dr. Newman has, by letter, expressed in the strongest terms his denial of the meaning which I have put upon his words.” The “ unjust, but 102 NEWMAN too probable, popular rendering,” answered his critic, would be—"“ I have set before Dr. Newman, as he challenged me to do, extracts from his writ- ings, and he has afhxed to them what he conceives to be their legitimate sense, to the denial of that in which I understood them.” Such a proceeding had indeed been challenged, but by Mr. Kingsley | not vouchsafed. Again, the apology went on— “No man knows the use of words better than Dr. Newman; no man, therefore, has a better right to define what he does, or does not, mean by them.” Of which the popular interpretation would be— “He has done this with the skill of a great master of verbal fence, who knows as well as any man liy- ing how to insinuate a doctrine without committing himself to it.’ Finally, this was the amende hon- orable— It only remains, therefore, for me to express my hearty regret at having so seriously mistaken him, and my hearty pleasure at finding him on the side of truth, in this or any other mat- ter.” Which, returned Newman, will be thus con- strued—‘* However, while I heartily regret that I have so seriously mistaken the sense which he assures me his words were meant to bear, I can- not but feel a hearty pleasure also at having brought him, for once in a way, to confess that after all truth is a Christian virtue.” Against this reading Kingsley protested, with- APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 103 drew two passages, but still maintained that “ by referring publicly to the sermon on which my allegations were founded, I have given not only you, but every one, an opportunity of judging of their injustice. Having done this, and having frankly accepted your assertion that I was mis- taken, I have done as much as one English gentle- man can expect from another.”” Newman replied in a calm letter to Messrs. Macmillan, quoting a second judgment in confirmation of his own, that an apology so worded was misleading and utterly inadequate. But in this form it appeared on Feb- ruary I, 1864. It has been necessary to give the text, as far as might be, on which Newman founded the “ Re- flections ” that concluded his publication of this extraordinary correspondence. For he put the whole immediately into print. Those “ Reflec- tions ” took the world by storm. With point and irony, as with merciless precision, they turned Kingsley’s guns upon himself. The sermon in dis- pute was not preached by a Catholic priest; New- man had never said what was charged upon him, either as a Protestant or a Catholic; yet his accuser waived this, which was the main question, con- gratulated him on his “‘ tone,” and ended by taking “the word of a professor of lying’”’ that he did not lie. They ‘‘ were both English gentlemen.” 104 NEWMAN Who was it, then, that did not mean what he said? ‘ Preaching without practising; the common theme of satirists from Juvenal to Walter Scott! ”’ con- cluded Newman, and he quoted from The Fortunes of Nigel a biting passage, ‘‘O Geordie, jingling Geordie, it was grand to heard Baby Charles lay- ing down the guilt of dissimulation and Steenie lecturing on the turpitude of incontinence.” Brought to bay, and yet backed up by unseen allies from the old anti-Tractarian camp, Kingsley argued that the title-page and “‘ Reflections ” of his adversary’s pamphlet were fair game; they entitled him to open a fresh attack in forty-eight pages on all the Oxford leader had published. “ What, then, does Dr. Newman mean?” that was the. question. This indictment came out towards the end of March. It travelled over a wide ground; but the conclusion was not to be mistaken. “I am henceforth in doubt and fear,” said Kingsley, ‘““as much as any honest man can be, concerning every word Dr. Newman may write. How can I tell that I shall not be the dupe of some cunning equivocation, of one of the three kinds laid down as permissible by the blessed Alfonso de Liguori and his pupils? . . . What proof have I that by ‘mean it? I never said it!’ Dr. New- man does not signify, ‘I did not say it, but I did mean it’?” . APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA ios We may pause to observe that this was the very interpretation, deprecated by his critic, of Kings- ley’s paragraph beginning “‘ No man knows the use of words better than Dr. Newman,” against which the writer exclaimed, but which he now adopted. But it wasmuch more. Newman called it “ poisoning the wells,’ and the metaphor is not too strong. Whatever St. Alfonso de Liguori, or any one else, maintained in the chapter Of Equivocation, that was their concern, not his; nor had Kingsley one shred of evidence on which to convict the accused, still less to hold him up as an equivocator—in plain English, a liar—on prin- ciple and in theory. ‘This, at all events, was speedily to be made clear. The deplorable pam- phlet has left a cloud not on the subject of its de- nunciations, but on its author, whose feelings had furiously carried him away, and whose undoubted talents were never those of a critic or a philosopher. His evil fortune led him to employ on the loftiest and deepest intellect then extant among English- men weapons which broke at the first encounter. Yet even this was not the head and front of his offending. He should have been mindful that we are men by our trust in one another; that, more than any one of his generation, Newman had given hostages to truth, for what could have persuaded him to sacrifice position, fortune, prospects, to 106 NEWMAN court obloquy and spend his days in exile from a world which would have showered its favours upon him, did he but speak its language—what, except devotion to duty and the fearless utterance of a most unpopular belief? There was no equiv- ocation here. In his heart Newman took the affront like a Christian, with a calmness that has almost been made a charge against him, as if he ought to have felt more, unless he were guilty. His conduct was, perhaps, as near perfection in a moral point of view as it was daring and effective. He deter- mined on replying, without delay, in a work which, coming out by instalments, would possess the mo- mentum of a pamphlet and, when it was done, the permanence of a record. His powers of continued exertion had always been astonishing. They were now put to the test. On consecutive Thursdays, between April 21 and June 2, he put forth in seven parts the Apologia pro Vita Sua. This work was the fulfilment of a promise tacitly made to himself that, in the improbable event of a challenge being formally put to him by a person of name, it would be his duty to meet it, and to plead his own cause at the bar of England. That opportunity had occurred. And Kingsley’s ques- tion shaped the answer which must be given. “He asks what I mean,” said Newman, “not APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 107 > about my words, not about my arguments, not about my actions, as his ultimate point, but about that living intelligence by which I write, and argue, and act. He asks about my mind, and its beliefs, and its sentiments; and he shall be an- swered. . . . I must give the true key to my whole life; I must show what I am, that it may be seen what I am not, and that the phantom may be extinguished which gibbers instead of me. . . . I will vanquish, not my accuser, but my judges.” His accuser had been vanquished already. The above quotation is taken from the Second Part. In the First of only twenty-four pages, which are nearly all omitted in subsequent editions, a chas- tisement certainly deserved, but, as Rhadamanthus would allow, not inadequate, was dealt out to the offender who had illustrated his own motto and shown that, in attempting to judge of Newman’s acts and writings, a lie had been the nearest ap- proach to truth which he could make. ‘“‘ A modest man or a philosopher,” observed’ the accused, “would have scrupled to treat with scorn and scofiing, as Mr. Kingsley does in my own instance, principles and convictions, even if he did not ac- quiesce in them himself, which had been held so widely and so long—the beliefs and devotions and customs which have been the religious life of millions upon millions of Christians for nearly 108 NEWMAN twenty centuries—for this is in fact the task on which he is spending his pains.” Such being his drift, what was his method of argument? ‘That the great leader must be a knave or a fool, and that he was not quite sure which, probably both. Kingsley did, one is sorry to con- fess it, write of Newman—‘ He would either de- stroy his own sense of honesty, i.e. conscious truth- fulness—and become a dishonest person; or he would destroy his common sense, i.e. unconscious truthfulness, and become the slave and puppet seemingly of his own logic, really of his own fancy. . . . I thought for years past that he had be- come the former, I now see that he has become the latter.” To us who look back on the Tractarian con- troversy it‘seems incredible that any one, however resolute against the Oxford teaching, should deem its professors deliberate, conscious knaves, and Newman above all. But was he, then, a simple- ton? As, in a withering page, the man so taunted drew out the charge, was he, though “ not a born fool,” yet “ a self-made idiot, one who has drugged and abused himself into a shameless depravity,” and ‘‘an intellectual sot’? ? On February 1, the accuser had given up his charge ‘of knavery; March is not out when he reiterates it in such fashion that it may serve as one of imbecility to APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA tog boot. Challenged on his original ground, he could bring no evidence to prove his assertion, and was convicted of false witness by the voice of the world. “Well,” observes Newman, “I should have thought he had now nothing whatever more to do.” But, ‘‘‘ Vain man!’ he seems to make an- swer, ‘ what simplicity in you to think so! If you have not broken one commandment, let us see whether we cannot convict you of the breach of an- other. If you are not a swindler or a forger, you are guilty of arson or burglary. By hook or by crook you shall not escape. Are you to suffer or J? What does it matter to you who are going off the stage, to receive a slight additional daub upon a character so deeply stained already? But think of me, the immaculate lover of Truth, so observ- ant (as I have told you, p. 8) of “ hault courage and strict honour ’’—and (aside)—“ and not as this publican,”—do you think I can let you go scot-free instead of myself? No; xoblesse oblige. Go to the shades, old man, and boast that Achilles sent you thither.’ ” Another classical saying rises to one’s lips on reading, for the twentieth time, this tremendous invective. Littera scripta manet—the words of genius are immortal. Who could stand up against a retort like this, armed to deadly effect by the assailant’s own phrases, winged words which came 110 NEWMAN back as barbed arrows? But more remained be- hind. On the strength of three or four imagined ‘ economies,” that is to say, prevarications, gleaned from the title-page and concluding dialogue of Newman’s pamphlet, Kingsley had pounced upon him as a worthy brother of the “ Roman moral- ists,” and he was ‘‘ merged and whirled away in the gulph of notorious quibblers, and hypocrites, and rogues.” ‘Then it was that the accuser com- mitted that last unpardonable crime of “ poisoning the wells,’ by a process which is not rare in Eng- lish controversy with Catholics. Not without significance had Newman alluded in one of his letters to Titus Oates. ‘“‘ The mul- titude,”” says Macaulay, writing of the so-called Popish Plot, ‘“‘ applauded Oates and his confed- erates, hooted and pelted the witnesses who ap- peared on behalf of the accused, and shouted with joy when the verdict of Guilty was pronounced. It was in vain that the sufferers appealed to the re- spectability of their past lives; for the public mind was possessed with a belief that the more conscien- tious a Papist was, the more likely he must be to plot against a Protestant government. It was in vain that just before the cart passed from un- der their feet, they resolutely afirmed their inno- cence; for the general opinion was that a good Papist considered all lies, which were service- APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 111 able to his Church, as not only excusable, but meritorious.” To this belief Charles Kingsley, who would not, to save his life, have done what he thought base or cruel, was now appealing; and it is hardly too much to say that, were the intended victim any other Catholic, he would have fallen beneath his fury. But the assailant mistook his man. Here was no Italian, no Jesuit of the Spanish faction, no professor of the Roman College who might be attacked with impunity from a thousand miles away, but one whose antecedents were public property, an Oxford man from his youth up, who had taught nothing in secret, who was known all over the country, and who had a gift almost unrivalled of touching the heart when he spoke or wrote. The witness of Thomas Mozley would have been echoed from one end of England to the other had the need of it appeared. ‘ During the whole period of my personal acquaintance and communication with Newman,” he tells us, “‘ I never had any other thought than that he was more thoroughly in earnest, and more entirely convinced of the truth of what he was saying, than any other man I had come across yet.” Anthony Froude, again, does more than exonerate the teacher whom he did not choose to follow. ‘‘ New- man’s whole life had been a struggle for truth,” 112 NEWMAN he said. ‘‘ He had neglected his own interests; he had never thought of them at all. He had brought to bear a most powerful and subtle intel- lect to support the convictions of a conscience which was superstitiously sensitive.” We may be- lieve witnesses, it used to be taught, who have died for their testimony. Newman was a living mar- tyr, and, could he get a hearing, his victory was assured. He had to tell the story of a conversion, a change of mind, or ‘ repentance,” in its literal meaning, as remarkable to the psychologists as Luther’s, but in a contrary direction; as profound as Augustine’s, to which he has himself compared it; and, should the Catholic Church extend its con- quests in the world where Shakespeare is king, not less likely to have enduring results than had the African saint’s on the intellect of the Middle Ages which he formed. The prevision may seem exag- gerated; we will submit reasons in due course why it should be thought, if anything, too little rather than too much drawn out. Moreover, the circumstances were such as make of these things a world’s tragedy, set forth on the high stage of Oxford, in the background St. Mary’s, reminding us of the temple that so often figures in Sophoclean drama, solemn as religion itself. ‘These are elements, sublime or affecting, Cardinal Newman, about 1876. From a painting by Lady Coleridge Reproduced by the courtesy of Lord Coleridge APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 113 to which distance will add a perspective as the movement goes forward and English literature spreads. For Newman’s prose cannot grow obso- lete; it will endure by its own self-centred poise. Thanks to its grave and tender wisdom, and its feeling for that in man’s heart which throbs to some rhythm of eternity, it can never be forgotten. But Newman’s task was one to daunt the bold- est. He understood his countrymen; and, though nothing more subtle or searching exists in any lit- erature than their own will match, they resent ex- planations which travel beyond commonplace, as if Hamlet had never been written. Twice the au- thor incriminated had left one position and passed over to the opposite. From an Evangelical, tinged with Whately’s Liberal dye, he had become a Laudian, a sort of Nonjuror born out of due time, reviving doctrines, calling back men, that modern England, as Dr. Arnold angrily warned him, would as little put up with as Cromwell had put up with the ‘‘ Malignants.’’ His march along the Via Media had involved him in battle on both sides; but whereas he never would yield an inch to progress or reform, he was veering ever towards the Roman camp, and at length entered it a fugi- tive, asking pardon on his knees. The worst an- ticipations, the hardest judgments, were thus ful- filled. And he was aware of it. ‘‘ How could I 114 NEWMAN dare, how could I have the conscience,” he said now, reviewing men’s opinions as they were then, ‘‘ with warnings, with prophecies, with accusations against me, to persevere in a path which steadily advanced towards, which ended in, the religion of Rome? And how am I now to be trusted, when long ago I was trusted, and was found wanting? ” If we would realize what a daring adventure, he had set out upon, we must imagine not one Kingsley, but numbers in every class, prepossessed with a conviction that Newman had intended, from some early unknown date, to sap the foundations of the English Church and open its gates to the enemy. ‘This view is held even yet; “ secret his- tories ’’ of the Oxford movement are devised, with excerpts and half-sentences from his correspond- ence or his books in support of it. Isaac Williams’ Tract on ‘‘ Reserve” played an amusingly serious part in these charges. While the “ Remains” of Hurrell Froude were a standing witness to the con- trary, being frank to the verge of indiscretion, these innocent Fellows of Oriel loomed in the background like conspirators with dark lanterns, intent on kindling a literal conflagration. They were, in fact, obeying a mysterious power, and went on under its influence; but how little could any one of them, not excluding Newman, have given an account of the widespread Romantic cru- APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 115 sade, which all over Europe was in motion, guided by no supreme commander, a reaction or a last attempt of historical Christianity to defend itself against unbelief? Compeers Newman had, beyond a doubt; not, however, “ the Roman moralists ’’ whom he never had looked into, but Chateaubriand, de Maistre, Stolberg, Tieck, Arnim, Brentano, Friedrich Schlegel, and Novalis—to mention only these— whose works throw a broad light on the Apologia. Nay, we must go farther back. Goethe’s early years marked the time, and Strasburg Cathedral is the high place, from which that Romantic move- ment set out. We may connect Goethe with Walter Scott; Johnson and Burke with Cole- ridge, who again is a disciple of Schelling; and Schelling, in the days of Newman’s greatest power at Oxford, was himself the oracle of Munich. Nor can we overlook the learned and devout Southey, writer of epics, or Wordsworth, most spiritual- minded among English poets, both of whom con- tributed to the great restoration, and were heralds of it. Perhaps for those who cannot “‘ grapple with whole libraries,” it may suffice to glance into the astonishing essay, Christianity in Europe, which Novalis left behind him and Tieck published, if they would comprehend how the spirit was brood- 116 NEWMAN ing over the waters and bringing thence a new cre- ation. “* Luther,” says this remarkable pioneer, who died in 1801, “‘ dealt with the Christian re- ligion according to his own fancy, misunderstood its genius, and brought in an utterly new doctrine - —that of the supreme authority of the Bible. This was to frustrate the inspiring and re- vealing power of the Holy Ghost. . . . Then, what was at the beginning hatred of the Catholic Church became by degrees hatred of the Bible, of the Christian faith, of all religion. Nay, more; the hatred of religion developed into hatred of all enthusiasm. It denounced imagination and feel- ing, morality and love of art, the past and the fut- ure; it barely acknowledged man to be the highest among animals; it reduced the creative music of the universe to the monotonous whirring of an enormous mill, driven by the stream of chance.” Readers of Sartor Resartus will fancy that they are listening to Carlyle, ‘‘Oh, the gloomy Gol- gotha and Mill of Death! ””—but it is not so; these great decisive protests find in him their echo, not their starting point. Nevertheless, in pages like these we discern the ground which was common to Carlyle and Newman; here the Puri- tan mystic may embrace his Catholic brother. For Novalis was not precisely orthodox; yet his ex- travagance and that of his kind bred an enthusiasm APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 117 which could no longer keep within the letter of the Bible or the formularies; it panted after the water-brooks of life. Thus another of the school, Eichendorff, admirably defines Romanticism, “ it is home-sickness—longing for the lost home of the universal, the Catholic Church.” “But it was also—we may grant to Dr. Brandes, who judges it to be a sort of decadence—the “ revolt of the individual” against a narrowing prose-conception of reality, seen and unseen. Carlyle, who is its Titan, explains the world by great men or “heroes.” And Newman finds the key to it in personality, which is the same view wearing its academic robes. But the lonely genius, who would escape from all-devouring impersonal science, from dead laws to living powers, and from abstractions to history, cannot overlook the Church that opens a refuge to him. Whether he accepts or refuses, the opposi- tion between ‘‘ Past and Present” will strike his sense and create, if not the home-sickness of Eich- endorff, at least the fierce regrets of Carlyle. And thus we arrive at a philosophy which, because it takes the individual, the Ego, to be first and last of realities, welcomes a Church, the most concrete imaginable, in order to defend itself when algebra in economics, in morals, in politics, and beyond all in religion, has made an end of the self-deter- 118 NEWMAN mining conscience. An exact parallel to New- man’s acceptance of Church authority meets us in Carlyle’s submission to the disciplined or abso- lute State. In both cases the reaction was from anarchy (plus the policeman or plus the preacher), towards something higher because organic, and the more stable by reason that it possessed within itself a principle of divine transcendent right, to what- ever category it belonged. Greatly to realize one’s self by means of institu- tions—the University, the Church, or the State— was an idea congenial to Newman’s temperament, and, as he saw life, this was the problem of re- ligion as of culture. ‘“‘ The moral and social world,” says in Loss and Gain a character who is uttering the author’s sentiments, “is not an open country; it is already marked and mapped out; it has its roads. . . . Forms of religion are facts; they have each their history. They existed before you were born, and will survive you. You must choose; you cannot make.” And Charles Reding answers by granting so much: “I protest to you that if the Church of Rome is as ambiguous as our own Church, I shall be on the way to become a sceptic, on the very ground that I shall have no competent authority to tell me what to believe.” ‘Why not use your private judgment?”’ Thus would no small number have replied and gloried APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA 11g in their freedom; but the Tractarian had flung aside this alternative, which he thought a hollow pretence. ‘‘ The heart is commonly reached,” he told Lord Brougham, “ not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma; no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.” He drives the argument home by appealing to experience: “No religion has yet been a religion of physics or of philosophy. It has ever been synonymous with Revelation. It has never been a deduction from what we know; it has ever been an assertion of what we are to believe . . . a message, or a history, or a vision.” And, to sum up, “ Action flows not from inferences, but from impressions— not from reasonings, but from Faith.” Such is the canon, inductive after Bacon’s manner, upon which Newman goes about to es- tablish religion; such was the guiding clue in his own past. The 4pologia—we have not lost it out of sight one instant—is the story of impressions leading to actions, of a faith made secure by con- duct. Some have pictured Newman as “ fleeing always before the ghost of scepticism.” He need not, on this showing, have denied it. Faith is an \\\ RS eS 120 NEWMAN act, and the reward of acts, else it would be as lit- tle meritorious or heroic as the mechanical opera- tions by which the heart beats; in this high sense it would not be human. Thomas Mozley, in a valuable page, says that “‘ Newman filled up his whole time, taxed his whole strength, and occu- pied his whole future. . . . He reduced retro- spection to very narrow compass, to a few faces, to flowers on a bank or a wall, to a fragrance or a sound. . . . He never took solitary walks if he could help it. . . . Newman would not be alone and left to his own thoughts when he was neither studying, nor writing, nor praying.” _ Herein may be discovered the reason why in friendship he was so strangely dependent on others, and not they on him, wide as the differences must have been if we take mere intellect into account. Johnson, too, preferred the most casual of visitors to his own company; but that was a matter of con- - stitution, although he resented disagreement with his opinions, as making them less certain. But Newman was not of a melancholy temper; though “without a grain of conviviality,” his nature was cheerful; disciples he must have, friends living un- der the same roof, companions in his daily walks. We have seen his intimate relations with Hurrell Froude, and how he leaned on that fine character. Of Ambrose St. John he wrote yet more emphati- APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA si1ar cally, “‘ He was my life, under God, for thirty-two years.” To Newman faith always resided in a goodly fellowship; and again we are called back to Novalis, who made this brotherly consent almost a sacrament of belief. Nor can we wonder, if it is not pure atomic thought that should decide us, but “‘ impressions,” “voices,” a “‘ history,’ and a “ vision.’’ Carlyle in his Journal notes it down: “ Religion, as Novalis thinks, is a social thing. Without a Church there can be little or no religion. The action of mind on mind is mystical, infinite; worship can hardly (per- haps not at all) support itself without this ard.” And so enthusiasm was “ schwarmerei ’’—the swarming of social bees; in far higher language, there could scarcely be faith unless there were a “Communion of Saints”’; or we might go on to infer that this was the scope and essence of St. Paul’s “‘ charity,” which is love of the brethren. Fraternity, then, is the condition of faith; heresy arises when love has grown cold; and, to conclude with Pascal, ‘‘ the heart has its reasons.”’ In this way the Apologia comes to be a book of friendships, “‘ Amicorum Liber”; and he who took for his pattern Moses or Luther, the lonely great man, is found at the head of a party, is a master in Israel, and moves on amid the din, the battle-cries, the confusion which accompany march- 122 NEWMAN ing crowds. But there is an unseen cloud of wit- nesses, over and above these, by whose influence the conflict is decided in the end. To Newman the Fathers were not dead. He consulted them, and as soon as their mind was clear to him he made it his own. This was the influence which proved decisive. ‘‘ What was the use,” he asked, “ of continuing the controversy, or defending my posi- tion, if after all I was but forging arguments for Arius or Eutyches, and turning devil’s advocate against the much-enduring Athanasius and the majestic Leo? Be my soul with the Saints! and shall I lift up my hand against them? Sooner may my right hand forget her cunning, and wither out- right, as his who once sthetched it out against a prophet of God—perish sooner a whole tribe of Cranmers, Ridleys, Latimers, and Jewels—perish the names of Bramhall, Ussher, Taylor, Stilling- fleet, and Barrow from the face of the earth—ere I should do aught but fall at their feet in love and in worship, whose image was continually before my eyes, and whose musical words were ever in my ears and on my tongue!” CHAPTER V THE! LOGIC: OF, BELIEF As we have seen, Newman, after describing his Sicilian adventure, wrote that he “ had no roman- tic story to tell.” But he had one, and it was told so naturally, with such simple good faith, urban- ity, and candour, that the whole nation became a sympathetic, and ere long a convinced, audience. Not the “‘ Letters ” of Pascal, nor those of Junius, won more instant success. The Apologia, as it was given to the world Thursday after Thursday, appeared in all hands, was read in clubs, in draw- ing-rooms, by clerks on the top of omnibuses, in railway trains, and one had almost said, in pulpits, for everywhere its author was discussed, his pathetic or striking sentences quoted, his English more than ever admired. For a moment the Tractarians came on the public stage, in their habits as they lived; the drama was interpreted by its chief actor, without whom it never could have been conceived. Manning wrote to Wiseman that “it was like listening to the voice of one from the dead.” Or, as Church, afterwards Dean of St. ¥23 124 NEWMAN Paul’s, expressed it, ‘‘ Here was to be told not only the history of a change, but the history of a deep disappointment, of the failure of a great design, of the breakdown of hopes the most, promising and absorbing; and this, not in the silence of a man’s study, but in the fever and contention of a strug- gle wrought up to the highest pitch of passion and fierceness, bringing with it on all sides and leaving behind it the deep sense of wrong.” True as these words are, they render only the judgment of a devout Anglican who had been Newman’s disciple, but quitted him at the parting of the ways. To Dean Church the “ argument,” as Milton would call it, broke off in 1845 without a conclusion; failure was the last word. But to those who looked out across the Channel, and sur- veyed the currents of European thought, another view offered itself. The Tractarian was a chapter, as we have said, in the Romantic Movement; and this again took its inspiration (however mingling with it less ethereal elements) from Christian sources, not Anglican, of course, but antique and medieval, of which the outward and visible habitat was Rome. But instead of a fresh volume added to the in- terminable series of controversy, here was a life, revealed in its innermost workings, the heart put under a glass that made it transparent. It had tHe LOGIC OF BELIEF 124 been Rousseau’s boast that he would do this un- paralleled thing in his own person; and he did it —at what a cost to the decencies of human reti- cence, to the laws of friendship, to the claims of gratitude! Newman, observing a punctilious self- respect, nor making free with any other man’s reputation, set up in the Temple of Fame this tablet, on which all might read the story of his days, anticipating, said Gladstone, whom it awed and overcame, the last great Judgment itself. Impossible that the argument should be left in the air with Newman’s farewell to Oxford. He must say whether his quest had ended in delusion, what was this Vita Nuova which he had found; and he felt nowise loth to dwell upon it. His con- fidence, glancing out in rays which sometimes burnt or stung, when—for example in the Anglican Difficulties—he addressed his former disciples, had been thought by them unkind. He had said bitter things about the Establishment; even now he might appear to be satirical; but he did not mean his language for satire. “I recognize in the Anglican Church a time-honoured institution,” he said, “it may be a great creation, though it be not divine, and this is how I judge of it.” With extraordinary prescience he added, ‘‘ Doubtless the National Church has hitherto been a service- able breakwater against doctrinal errors more fun- 126 NEWMAN damental than its own,” but “ how long this will last in the years now before us it is impossible to say, for the Nation drags down its Church to its own level.” He had no desire to weaken it, so far as it maintained dogmatic truth; but he had never as an Anglican loved the Establishment any more than Whately did, or Hurrell Froude, or Keble, who were all enemies of the Erastian idea. In the Roman Church he recognized at once a reality which was quite a new thing to him. “I gazed at her,” he says, ‘‘ almost passively as a great objective fact.” In January, 1846, he had written—“‘ I realize more that we are leaving Littlemore, and it is like going on the open sea.” But only because he must turn his back on old associations, not as if he were drifting towards scepticism. No, from the time he became a Catho- lic he was in perfect peace; he had never had one doubt; ‘‘ it was like coming into port after a rough sea ’—these are his words—“ and my happiness on that score remains to this day without inter- ruption.” The quest had, therefore, ended in discovery and triumph. If by “ Liberalism ” we understand “the tendency of modern thought to destroy the basis of revealed religion ’’—as Dean Church says exceedingly well—“ and ultimately of all that can be called religion at all,” Newman had met it in Cardinal Newman. From an engraving by Joseph Brown THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 127 himself and beaten it down. He put this ques- tion: ‘‘ What must be the face-to-face antagonist, by which to withstand and bafile the fierce energy of passion and the all-corroding, all-dissolving scepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries? ”’ He had no intention to deny that truth is the real object of our reason, and that if it does not attain to truth, either the premiss or the process is in fault; but he was speaking, not of right reason, but of reason as it acts in fallen man. Its ten- dency, in fact, was towards simple unbelief. “Resolve to believe nothing,” he wrote in 1841, “and you must prove your proofs and analyse your elements, sinking further and further, and finding ‘ in the lowest depth a lower deep,’ till you come to the broad bosom of scepticism.” That was Newman’s unalterable persuasion. And, in this form, it would have been counter- signed by one who differed from him through whole diameters on other subjects—we mean Carlyle. ‘That impatient mystic went, indeed, to lengths, as regards the impotence of reasoning in divine things, from which, in wiser moments, he has drawn back. Yet this, concerning “‘ Diderot and his sect,” is worth quoting :— “That in the French system of Thought (called also the Scotch, and still familiar enough every- where, which for want of a better title we have 128 NEWMAN named the Mechanical) there is no room for a Divinity; that to him, for whom intellect, or the power of knowing and believing, is still synony- mous with Jogic, or the mere power of arranging and communicating, there is absolutely no proof discoverable of a Divinity; and such a man has nothing for it but either, if he be a half spirit, as is the frequent case, to trim despicably all his days between two opinions; or else, if he be of whole spirit, to anchor himself on the rock or quagmire of Atheism—and farther, should he see fit, pro- claim to others that there is good riding there. So much may Diderot have demonstrated; a conclu- sion at which we nowise turn pale.” Newman, also, did not set any great store on the “argument from design’ (about which this is not the place to investigate); but while he started with the being of a God, which was as certain to him as his own existence, he looked out into the world of men, and it seemed simply to give the lie to that great truth of which his being was so full. ‘“‘I am far from denying,” he re- peats, ‘the real force of the arguments in proof of a God, drawn from the general facts of human society, but these do not warm or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desola- tion, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice. ‘The sight THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 129 of the world is nothing else than the prophet’s scroll, full of lamentations, and mourning, and woe.” He enforces the lesson in a majestic page, moy- ing as a chorus in some dark tragedy, every line of which is a masterpiece, ending sadly—“‘ all this is a vision to dizzy and appal, and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.” There have ever been two ways, not of attempt- ing to pierce an impenetrable cloud—for specula- tion cannot do it—but of shaping our thoughts so as to bear with the problem. We may suppose that man was once a brute beast who is slowly climbing upward; or that he was made upright and has fallen from his first estate. Newman de- cides for the latter. ‘‘Jf there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity.” The position has been violently assailed; it is none the less ac- cepted now as in every former age by the Chris- tianity of East and West, which set up on this basis a theology of restoration. In the Apologia it becomes an argument for some “ concrete representative of things invisible ” Which, whether miraculous or not, will have in it strength to stand against the “ wild living intel- lect,” the “ universal solvent,”’ whereby every truth 130 NEWMAN is melted into doubt, every institution undermined. What Newman regards as a principle of anarchy appears in Carlyle’s half mournful, half satirical outbursts as “‘ victorious analysis.” In Goethe’s Faust it is dissolving chemistry, experiment which kills in order to anatomize, but which can never create, nor breathe into elements the life it has taken from them; this is the “ spirit that always denies,” or the ‘‘ Everlasting No.” Unlike Car- lyle, however, Newman does not refuse to that demonic power a faculty, in itself prodigious, of simulating life; it can call up a world in its own image and likeness, put on the airs of a prophet, though a false one, and seduce mankind with its Julians, Voltaires, Humes, and other glories of secular civilisation. How shall it be overcome? He answers—by an infallible Catholic Church. It will be remarked that the inquiry is not specu- lative but practical, as the solution might almost be termed political, and it would be strikingly so did we employ, rather than these pale abstract terms, the language, glowing with prophetic col- ours, of the Hebrew Testament. The Catholic Church is to Newman the present, ever-enduring reign on earth of Messiah, who clothes in His great attributes the deputies that rule by His fiat. As we pass along the sentences in which our Chris- tian apologist surveys and measures the enemy, we THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 131 ask if he will brand him with a title from the schools; but never once does Newman speak, though so close to it, of “ methodic doubt,” nor has he mentioned Descartes. Elsewhere his allu- sions to Francis Bacon are kind, if not benevolent. He calls him the ‘‘ most orthodox of Protestant philosophers’; but it was Descartes, not Bacon, who as a modern Socrates taught by questioning; and from the French mathematician is derived that potent but “‘ uncreating ” analysis which in Hume startled the scholastic as the conservative, and in Kant revealed Pure Reason empty of contents though solicited by ideals. With such historical reflections Newman is not occupied, although he felt the momentum of some unprecedented change to which they would have pointed. In any case he meets the “ usurpations of reason’ not simply by counter-reasoning—keen as his dialectics might be when he had need of them—but by authority carried to the highest pitch, acting as a sovereign from whose court there is no appeal, for “‘ this power, viewed in its fullness, is as tremendous as the giant evil which has called for it.” But he will not grant that authority, even on a scale so vast, weighs down and overbears the intel- lect, which, he says, ‘‘ does by opposition grow ”’; he considers the whole history of the Church as 132 NEWMAN giving to this accusation a negative, but especially the debates that have preceded or accompanied all its decisions. He looks on the genius of Rome not so much as going before the thoughts of its great teachers, but as sifting, choosing, and at last ratifying them when opinions have been tested by years of controversy. ‘‘ In the process of inquiry and deliberation, which ended in an infallible enun- ciation, individual reason was paramount.” On the other hand, he observes that in reading ecclesi- astical history, when he was an Anglican, it used to be forcibly brought home to him how “ the initial error of what afterwards became heresy was the urging forward of some truth against the pro- hibition of authority at an unseasonable time.” And being asked in conversation what was the main fault of heresiarchs, he replied after a mo- ment of recollection, ‘‘ Their impatience.” By this time his readers had forgotten Mr. Kingsley; but the charges in detail were to be refuted, and in an Appendix it was done. The high line of apologetics was exchanged for a series of brilliant skirmishes, which we need not fight over again. On subjects demanding the insight of — a Shakespeare into the human heart, Kingsley had not taken the trouble to study, and one may be pardoned for supposing that he would seldom have comprehended, what his adversary taught. He THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 133 was mistaken, over and over again, as regarded the circumstances, outward and accidental, under which Newman wrote his sermons or began to edit the Lives of the English Saints. But the deeper answers, not to him who went his own way, but to earnest-minded students, on matters like the ‘**Economy,” reserve in communicating religious knowledge, the laws of concrete reasoning, and our apprehension of the Divine, were to be given in the Grammar of Assent. We shall proceed to touch upon them in the next pages. Concerning the Apologia two things may be said by way of epigraph or conclusion. It fixed the author’s place not only in the hearts of his countrymen, but in the national literature. It became the one book by which he was known to strangers who had seen nothing else from his pen, and to a growing number at home, ignorant of theology, not much troubled about dogma, yet willing to admire the living spirit at whose touch even a buried and forgotten antiquity put on the hues of resurrection. No autobiography in the English language has been more read; to the nine- teenth century it bears a relation not less character- istic than Boswell’s Johnson to the eighteenth. That is our first observation. Our second is that the Apologia should be com- pared and in due measure contrasted with Renan’s 134 NEWMAN Souvenirs of My Youth. We cannot attempt here the interesting task. A keen critic judges that, as a work of art, Renan’s bears away the palm. New- man, he says, earnest and strenuous as becomes his English breeding, falls into the tone of col- legiate reminiscences which make us feel how se- cluded was life at Oxford sixty years ago. And Renan, though in style not more plastic than his great contemporary—for both preferred musical impressions to those of sight—-was happy in possessing the Breton canvas, Tréguier, with its ancient cathedral, the sea over which his ancestors had voyaged, the legends and the landscape equally wild, from which he went on to Issy, St. Sulpice, and the modern world of Paris. ‘There are, un- doubtedly, these differences. But a more vital one lies in the character: on this side an amiable dilettante, who saunters through his time, gracious and Greek of the Ionian school, the amused ob- server, the artist before all; and on that a solitary, an enthusiast, for whom eternity had an awful sig- nificance and doubt an intolerable anguish. Newman does not often quote from French authors; he was but slightly acquainted with them. ’ Yet, by accident, he gives us in his Grammar of Assent Pascal’s celebrated judgment on Mon- taigne; and such would have been his own did he look into Renan’s Drames Philosophiques or THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 125 Feuilles Détachées. Of the marvellous essayist from whom Shakespeare borrowed, Pascal has written—‘‘ Montaigne involves all things in such universal, unmingled scepticism as to doubt of his very doubts. He ridicules all attempts at cer- tainty. Delighted with exhibiting in his own per- son the contradictions that exist in the mind of a freethinker, it is all one to him whether he is suc- cessful or not in his arguments. The virtue that he loved was simple, sociable, gay, sprightly, and playful; to apply one of his own sayings, ‘ Igno- rance and incuriousness are two charming pillows for a sound head.’ ” To associate Renan with ignorance and incuri- ousness would be merely absurd. But the rest of this description fits him exactly; and what is ‘more, he concludes pretty much as did Montaigne. ““ Man is aware at the present day,”’ he says in the preface to his philosophical comedies, “‘ that he never shall know anything of the Supreme Cause of the universe or of his own destiny.” In Renan’s view philosophy is the most refined of amusements, lending itself to a dialogue in which nothing is- affirmed, and all things are suggested, shading off into the infinite tones of contrast. It will end, he ' says, in the illusions of a lyrical scene. That is remarkable, for Newman also held that music and the form of poetry gave to the spirit 136 NEWMAN a medium in which it might express its thoughts more thrillingly than by logic or syllogism. But whereas to Renan the play was the thing, and the matter only a pretext, his unrecognized yet historic rival has left to after ages in the Dream of Gerontius an act of faith which affirms God and immortality in most touching verse, sincere as his own soul. On all this an admirable book remains to be written. As in living actors, we perceive here the problem that Newman had long since at- tempted to resolve in his University Sermons, and now took up in the Grammar of Assent. Who is in the right, Pascal or Montaigne? “Shall we say,’ he inquires, ‘“‘ that there is no such thing as truth and error, but that anything is truth to a man which he troweth?”’ Or is there some nobler alternative? The 4pologia demonstrated his own love of truth at all costs; he had now to show that it was attainable, and by what method. The truth which Newman has in view, it must never be forgotten, is religious truth, although when he considers how we arrive at it, certain laws of the spirit common to all truth reveal themselves. He is not a philosopher, as Kant was, occupied with intellect for its own sake, analysing, construct- ing, in the realm of pure ideas, after the manner which becomes a metaphysician. What were New- man’s metaphysics? It is impossible to say. An THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 137 observer whose penetration equals his grace of style, M. Ernest Dimnet, has remarked that he does not once quote from St. Thomas Aquinas. Neither does he refer to any treatise of Aristotle’s except the Nicomachean Ethics. He had not given an hour to Descartes, although every line which Newman published concerning the laws of belief modifies where it cannot be said to reject that hardy thinker’s doctrine, by which truth becomes equivalent to a consciousness of clear ideas or, as was afterwards alleged, to Rationalism. Nor, of course, did the Oxford scholar define his attitude towards Hegel, or know the name of ~ Schopenhauer, any more than he could have told you what German critics were saying about the Bible. He lived in the same years with Strauss and Baur; he never opened their works, even in translation. Like Bishop Butler, from whom he learned his method, the greatest English religious philosopher of the nineteenth century dwells apart in a world of his own, original, self-absorbed, free from the vain desires of literary men, belonging to no school, unless it were the inductive school of Shakespeare. He is never a priori; and this very English, or again very Hebrew, dislike of formulas which an- tedate the facts has brought him into trouble with Latin readers who transpose his affirmations to 138 NEWMAN the dogmatic scale. But, in this technical sense, they were not dogmas. He went by experience, which to him was reality; he took things as he found them, and himself first of all. ‘‘ We are in a world of facts,’ he wrote, ‘‘ and we use them, for there is nothing else to use.” He was a dog- matist in this, which is Pascal’s account of the term, not in that other way of starting from an abstract proposition self-certified, to weave thence a long chain of deductions, not drawn from obser- vation and therefore not needing to be verified by means of it. Did he then deny the a priori? No, he left it to those who could handle it. His own gift was different. He began like Descartes, but with more largeness of assertion, or a poet’s in- sight, not as a mathematician. Newman said—“ If I may not assume that I exist, and in a particular way, that is, with a par- ticular mental constitution, I have nothing to specu- late about, and had better let speculation alone. Such as I am, it is my all. . . . I am what I am, or I am nothing. I cannot think, reflect, or judge about my being without starting from the very point which I aim at concluding. My ideas are all assumptions, and I am ever moving in a circle. I cannot avoid being sufficient for myself, for I cannot make myself anything else, and to change me is to destroy me. . . . My only THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 139 business is to ascertain what I am, in order to put it to use. It is enough for the proof of the value and authority of any function which I possess, to be able to pronounce that it is natural.” We may now perceive what is meant by the statement, vague in itself, that for Newman the key to truth is personality. He takes himself for granted, his nature, faculties, instincts, and all that they imply. Metaphysicians have commonly started from the universal to arrive at the par- ticular; but he, who is not of their sect, reverses the process. We have no time to show that his long acquaintance with the Alexandrian Fathers and their discussions on the Trinity strengthened a bias which in him was almost supreme. But we cannot doubt the influence. It is well known how the schools are perplexed when they would define, that is to say, register the abstract equivalents, of this “ I myself I,” and how they have failed to do it. For them it is the problem of squaring the circle;—so far beyond the sounding-line which logic throws out are, in Wordsworth’s language, the “abysmal depths of personality.”” Newman —and that is why, not long ago, we compared him to Shakespeare—boldly took the opposite way. ‘* Let concretes come first,’ he exclaimed, ““and so-called universals second.” He went back to the days of childhood, when he was “‘ alone with 140 NEWMAN the Alone’’; and on this adamantine basis of reality he set up his religion. Soon, however, he found, unlike Descartes, that it was not the clear ideas, with conscious chains of reasoning between, which gave to existence its value, but rather the obscure; not those which we can demonstrate and, as it were, compel others to accept whether they will or no, but intuitions such as flash out upon us in “ high dream or solemn vision,’ passing glimpses and states charged with a significance beyond themselves—resembling in life the scenes or situations by which in drama the whole character of a personage is shown, though merely in specimen. For what other way is there to disclose the infinite of real thought and action? In the known we must apprehend the unknown, and is that to be done by reasoning which we also apprehend at the same moment? Consider the facts. This undertaking, on the whole quite novel, furnished to Newman matter and scope for his University Sermons, the chief of which, on “ Im- plicit and Explicit Reason,” and the “ Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine,” contain his finest as well as his most convincing thought. We have seen how the inevitable, though com- monly unrecognized, premiss of all reasoning is each man’s individual nature, so that if a multitude agree, still it is because every one finds in himself Cardinal Newman. From the painting executed in 1881 by Sir John E. Millais, P.R.A. Reproduced by the courtesy of His Grace the Duke of Norfolk THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 141 a motive for assenting to the view taken by all. Whether the motive be weak or valid we do not now inquire. But what of the process? In many books it is described as an art—the art of logic— and rules have been given for its proper exercise. Newman, as we might expect, denies this old posi- tion, at least in its accepted form. ‘‘ Reasoning,” he says, “is a living spontaneous energy within us, not an art’’; and he illustrates his meaning thus— “One fact may suffice for a whole theory; one principle may create and sustain a system; one minute token is a clue to a large discovery. The mind ranges to and fro, and spreads out, and ad- vances forward with a quickness which has become a proverb, and a subtlety and versatility which baffle investigation. It passes on from point to point, gaining one by some indication; another on a probability; then availing itself of an associa- tion; then falling back on some received law; next seizing on testimony; then committing itself to some popular impression, or some inward instinct, or some obscure memory; and thus it makes prog- ress not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff who, by quick eye, prompt hand, and sure foot, ascends how he knows not himself, by personal endow- ments and by practice rather than by rule, leaving no track behind him and unable to teach another. 142 NEWMAN . . . And such mainly is the way in which all men, gifted or not gifted, commonly reason—not by rule, but by an inward faculty.” So luminous a passage persuades while it exem- plifies the doctrine which it recommends. But if we allow so much, consequences may follow of a startling kind. ‘Truths may be won by processes which we cannot remember, or fail to analyse, or construe erroneously. Descartes’ criterion of evi- dence, clear ideas with lucid chains between them of irresistible argument, breaks down, for it need not exist, although we are in possession of truth. Nay, very often, or always in concrete matters, it does not exist. ‘‘ No analysis is subtle and delicate enough to represent adequately the state of mind under which we believe, or the subjects of belief as they are presented to our thoughts.’”’ Newman gives an exquisite illustration. ‘“‘ The end pro- posed is that of delineating or, as it were, painting what the mind sees and feels: now let us consider ‘ what it is to portray duly in form and colour things material,’”’ and how impossible to represent ‘‘ the outline and character, the lines and shades, in which any intellectual view really exists in the mind!” He concludes, ‘it is probable that a given opinion, as held by several individuals, is as distinct from itself as are their faces.” Endless applications will occur to thoughtful THE LOGIC: OF BELIEF 143 readers; Newman goes on to suggest those which bear on religion. The Bible speaks a human lan- guage; but “‘ this vast and intricate scene of things cannot be generalized,” and earthly images fall far below heavenly realities. Thus we must bear to be told that Revelation is an accommodation to our weakness, an “ economy,” in its nature un- equal to that which it bodies forth. And as is the object, so is the evidence. ‘‘ Almost all reasons formally adduced in moral inquiries are rather specimens and symbols of the real grounds, than those grounds themselves.” They are “hints towards the true reasoning, and demand an active, ready, candid, and docile mind, which can throw itself into what is said, neglect verbal difficulties, and pursue and carry out principles.” Defenders ‘of Christianity, however, are tempted to “ select as reasons for belief, not the highest, the truest, the most sacred, the most intimately persuasive, but such as best admit of being exhibited in argu- ment, and these are commonly not the real reasons in the case of religious men.” | It would be difficult to name a controversial divine who had ever made these admissions be- fore Newman; to the unphilosophical, of whom Froude or Kingsley was a type, they would seem to border on scepticism, to conceal infinite reserve, and to furnish bigotry with weapons of offence. { 144 NEWMAN Newman was engaged upon two inquiries, for which the shallow enlightenment of an age when Bentham was a prophet and Macaulay a preacher could not be prepared. He was grappling with the idea of Evolution and the fact of the Uncon- scious. So have they been termed since; in his language we must call the one ‘ development,” the other ‘“‘implicit reason.’ His claim to be original in philosophy rests on discoveries to which zeal for theology impelled him. That they were his own thoughts cannot be doubted; yet, in another sense, not his own; for evolution had been in the air, a speculation with Schelling and Hegel, a working hypothesis applied to Nature by St. Hilaire and Lamarck, during a long half-century. And in 1819 Schopenhauer had published the volumes, On the World as Will and Symbol, which remain a classic, notwithstanding ail that has since been observed or guessed at in the dim regions where life is most real. Newman was entirely strange to these movements, whether in metaphysics or in biology. If his conclusions, as a whole, are akin to Schopenhauer’s; if when he says “I know’”’ he perceives that the miracle of knowledge is virtually contained in that Ego, and in “I will” the heart, the hidden reality of existence comes to light; if to his imagination, as child, youth, or ancient, phenomena hold up the THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 145 veil of Maya, which shall be rent and must pass away when the ineffable, unknown, yet surely divine world is no longer merely the negative of what we apprehend with hands and eyes; still, unlike the sage of Frankfort, he does not worship a blind lawless energy, but finds in his conscience a “‘ Supreme Governor, a Judge, holy, just, power- ful, all-seeing, retributive.” With Schopenhauer he would affirm that will is the motive-power which acts beneath all the forces of Nature, up- holding and informing them; but for him there is a scope, an end, in the scheme of things visible and invisible, far beyond our naming, yet tran- scendently ethical. Such, to Newman, was “ the master-light of all our seeing.” He inquires, ‘‘ How should any- thing of this world convey ideas which are beyond and above this world?” ‘The Agnostic replies that it cannot be done; our ignorance of the super- natural (if it exist) is absolute; dogmas are words, the Bible is a book of metaphors, religion the echo of our own voice, not a revelation from on high. To refute this “ Que sais-je?”’ by which Mon- taigne exploded, as he dreamt, Natural, and in- deed all, Theology, Newman appeals to the fact within. He is perfectly candid; “‘ Were it not for this voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and my 146 NEWMAN heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a polytheist, when I looked into the world.” Let, however, this one fact be granted, and inferences follow which are as strictly parallel to the knowl- edge we possess of sensible phenomena revealed in space and time, as the initial information is, in ‘either case, sufficient though never adequate— relative to our needs rather than a full disclosure of things in themselves—and, to sum up, a dispen- sation corresponding to the limits of our faculties, like the stories which we tell children who could otherwise learn nothing at all from us. What would the so-called laws of physics be to a mind lifted above phenomena, endowed with pure intel- lectual vision, as we are not? Perhaps not laws at all. Nevertheless, we use them and subdue by their means those incomprehensible powers to our service. The analogy with religious ideas, dogmas, creeds, does not require to be drawn out. All we need remark is that Newman, in these forty pages of a pulpit essay, has achieved the design, in ac- cordance with Butler, of setting side by side relig- ion, which the unbelieving termed ignorance, and science, which these enlightened persons held to be knowledge, demonstrating that each had its value as tested by experience, its limits when the nature of reality was taken into account, its symbolic or THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 147 figured media, whereby to shadow forth verities which neither could compass or exhaust. Views such as these have grown familiar since the new mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology transformed a comparatively simple uni- verse to the one we know. Matter has undergone fresh definitions; the conscious floats upon an abyss which no introspection can fathom; words like “‘ heredity ’” and “ solidarity,” while they en- large the domain of the individual, carry him over the Cartesian border within which he exercised his triumphant analysis, and he has become greater, as well as deeper, than the mere reasoning machine that with Bentham calculated its chances of hap- piness. Feeling and imagination are seen to be modes of knowledge. Action can demonstrate bet- ter than many syllogisms. The will, if it some- times warps motives, is likewise a guarantee for earnestness, a condition precedent to legitimate assent. And search after truth is an heroic pil- grimage, not passive acceptance of conclusions as morally indifferent as the Rule of Three. Newman held that “ it is the mind which reasons and not a sheet of paper’’; but he went a step beyond this judgment upon artificial logic when he brought in as auxiliaries emotion, instinct, and the will to believe. This was escaping from literature to life, subordinating science to action, or rather 148 NEWMAN testing presumptive knowledge by its behaviour in contact with realities; the world was now the school, whereas religious apologists had taken their narrow little class-room for the world. In this truly Aristotelian spirit Newman, after some thirty years of meditation, set about writing, with in- finite pains, his Grammar of Assent. Ten times he went over some of its chapters, we are told; over the last, perhaps twenty times. It bears the marks of revision in a certain weariness which broods upon its pages, and will scarcely compare with the great Oxford sermons where it handles the same topics. But its wisdom, depth, significance, and pathos make of it a work such as St. Augustine might have offered to a century like our own. It is philosophy teaching by expe- rience. How man ought to arrive at certitude has been the subject of many an ambitious treatise. How, in concrete matters, he does arrive at it, was Newman’s concern. ‘‘ No science of life, applicable to the individual, has been, or can be, written.” The logic by which he directs his course will never be a calculus. Is it, then, caprite and mere passion? Between these alternatives a path, reasonable yet not formal, remains to be discovered by the observer who will submit, as Bacon advises, to the nature of things, instead of laying it upon a Procrustean bed. THE LOGIC: OF BELIEF 149 Thus Newman heaps up in his inventory cases for illustration. He abounds in characters, in por- traits, in fine dissection of motives, in contrasts and shaded lights. He is endlessly interesting, as a play or dialogue into which come the personages of a varied and ever-moving world. His manner of composition always was to think aloud, to let objections tell, to imagine his reader as keen as himself in hunting down his quarry, Truth. There is something everywhere of the soliloquy in what he gives us; but how full of knowledge gained at first hand, not from books, how rich in delicate touches, how swift and sure in its diagnosis, pierc- ing to the marrow! We may decline his infer- ences, we cannot fail to be charmed with his exposition, as happy as Moliére’s, of the numerous types with which he deals. From the nature of the case he writes like a dramatist. Nor can he reduce to a formula the boundless variety of mo- tives that lead, in every particular instance, to judgments called universal because so many repeat them on their own grounds. Yet there maybe a law, hinted at, though not formulated. Assent is one thing, the inference which goes before it, another. If we accept ideas, our assent is notional; if objects, it is real. But in either case it is absolute. On the other hand, inference is always conditional—“ given this, that 150 NEWMAN will follow ”; but ‘‘ whether this be given” is a different inquiry. Hence assent and inference cannot be the same thing. We might say, in popular language, that the intellect infers, the will asserts, would we only bear in mind that it is the individual who does both, and that faculties are abstractions which we ought not to view as sepa- rate and real. From inference to assent, in all but purely notional problems, there is a gulf, some- times yawning into abysses, that lies between reasoning and action. This formidable truth is constantly overlooked; and men fancy bad faith, prejudice, or self-interest in those who cannot an- swer their arguments yet will not forsake the old position. Again, conviction takes time, but a syllogism occupies merely three lines. And the same book persuades one, irritates another, leaves the third indifferent. Newman, for example, quotes Walter Scott as an influence which made for Catholic ideas. And such the great story-teller was. Scott himself, how- ever, thought he had not unsettled any one’s re- ligion and took comfort in saying so towards the end of his life. Now comes George Eliot who, on being asked what had first shaken her confidence in Christianity, answered without hesitation that it was reading Scott. Clearly the problem of as- sent has two real terms, subject no less than ob- ’ THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 1St ject; and in stock treatises the former has been forgotten. “‘ But,” says Newman, “‘ every one who reasons is his own centre; and no expedient for attaining a common measure of minds can reverse this truth.” We are brought back to the beginning— if I know, it is I that know, and not another. “‘ Certitude,’’ which denotes the state of knowl- edge, is “‘an active recognition’’ of what is set before the mind; a judgment, and to the faculty of judging it belongs. It is no matter of words, for it may take place without their expression, in- stantaneously; neither must we confound it with apprehension, however complete, since a good judge will enter fully into a scheme of defence which he does not for one moment dream of allowing. It is a mental act, and as such exists apart from conditions, if it exists at all. No real thing is at the same time hypothetical; we are either certain or not certain, we assent or decline to assent; and until we pass from inference to the act of judgment we have literally done nothing. Simple as these observations may appear, they throw a flood of light on the controversies of every kind which, by their number and violence, have furnished to the sceptic plausible grounds for de- nying that certitude can be attained. Evidently, whether it can or no, the battle of syllogisms 152 NEWMAN proves merely that men are loth to judge, and prefer, as the easier task, to argue. When their minds are made up, they argue no more. Thus the convictions by which, in fact, they live, become mute or unconscious; and it has been well re- marked that the foundations of the social order are unseen, sacro tecta velamine. In the Grammar, then, natural or “ informal ” inference occupies the place which machine-made logic had usurped. There is a sound method of reasoning by implicit, unconscious process; the method of genius, common sense, or particular instinct, applied by each in his own way, successful or not, but in any case individual and beyond the reach of art. It is a power which varies from man to man, nay, in the same man at different seasons. It passes, not from one proposition to another, but from concrete to concrete, from object to object, by means rather of impressions than of expressions, with a vital reaction upon all it encounters, and as if framing to itself an image or likeness in which the spirit may appear. The logician would fain write his reasoning on a blank tablet; it can- not be; for assent must proceed from within, and his most cunning argument finds a world of pre- misses already there, into which it will have to be dovetailed, or, to change the figure, assimilated. His abstract must undergo a process of digestion THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 153 according to the laws which rule this concrete organism. Hence, every book addresses the in- itiated; no system but is, in its true nature, secret or esoteric; and the individual is a species—in Newman’s favourite phrase, “‘ like himself, unlike all others.’’ Can we, then, assert of real inference, issuing in assent, more than this, that it is not for- mal, not reducible to technique, nor capable of being taught by a master? Yes, we know that it is occupied with wholes, not parts or aspects merely; that judgment is the form which assent must take; that the man judges, and not anything within him impersonal. When we examine what he does, we find him proceeding, not on a single line of argument, but on all he can get, by accumulation, by multiplying signs and proofs, as a painter adds touches to his can- vas, or a novelist develops his plot, “‘ line upon line, and letter upon letter.” But the proofs which he thus marshals and combines, often with- out adverting to it, as always in a manner too subtle for registration, need not, taken singly, be adequate to his conclusion; they are, for the most part, probabilities varying in strength, capable one by one of being demurred to, yet when bound up sufficient to justify or to require his acting on them. Newman illustrates from the courts of law, from literature, the military art, and even from es Fa 246 _ge€ ye 154. NEWMAN physics, his method of convergence, which he likens with great felicity to Sir Isaac Newton’s celebrated lemma, whereby a regular polygon of infinite sides tends to become the circle in which it is inscribed. Such are the relations, in concrete problems, of inference to assent; ‘“‘a proof is the limit of converging probabilities.” Nothing could be more suggestive; but we need a name for the power, always personal, however multiplied, which enables each one of us to arrive at our conclusions. It exists, for we employ it, and could do no other if we would not perish; in a real world we must use objects or be subdued by them. Newman terms it the “ Illative Sense,” as being parallel to what we call the sense of magnitude, or of beauty, or the moral sense. He describes its nature, range, and sanction. He shows how it is the guiding principle of Con- science. He refers to it, as trustworthy, the whole conduct of life. It is a personal gift or acquisition, supreme over its subject matter, and the ultimate court of appeal. It is not infallible, but is always to be obeyed. It decides, for each man, what assumptions, or premisses beyond proof, he can or ought to admit, and which they are that he must reject under penalty of being disloyal to the Truth as he perceives it. Only by its use can the certitudes be secured or maintained Photo by Barraud Vey at Jour few $.SILS Cardinal Newman, 1888. THE LOGIC OF BELIEF 155 which give to nations as to individuals a stable character, consistency in action, success in life. These are real assents, and perhaps as rare as they are powerful. ““ They create,” says Newman in a passage that may fittingly close this chapter, “heroes and saints, great leaders, statesmen, preachers and reformers, the pioneers of discovery in science, visionaries, fanatics, knight-errants, demagogues, and adventurers. They have given to the world men of one idea, of immense energy, of adaman- tine will, of revolutionary power. They kindle sympathies between man and man, and knit to- gether the innumerable units which constitute a State and a nation. They become the principle of its political existence; they impart to it homo- geneity of thought and fellowship of purpose. They have given form to the medieval theocracy and to the Mahometan superstition; they are now the life both of ‘ Holy Russia,’ and of that free- dom of speech and action which is the special boast of Englishmen.” CHAPTER VI DREAM OF GERONTIUS In April, 1863, Newman, who was now to be a hermit in his Oratory at Edgbaston till the end came, remarked in one of his letters—‘‘ I myself, though I have a fixed place to live in, and so far have a great blessing, am in the most strange way cut off from other people. Out of sight, out of mind, I suppose; but so it is that I know nothing of how things are going on, what there is to do, and who is doing it.’”’ Most strange, did not the same note of isolation sound in the lives of great men from old time. He was the one Catholic who understood his country, who handled its prose as Shakespeare handled its verse, and whose devotion to creed and dogma found expression in undying eloquence. But the lesser spirits, which could not see with his penetration, suspected and thwarted him. Then he took England with the “most beautiful of all biographies,” and if the crowd were not converted to his opinions, they became aware that a second Dante or St. John was DREAM OF GERONTIUS 157 dwelling among them. He had still, however, to win his own. Of the Grammar he said, “‘ it is my last work.” Composed while he felt the estrangement that had sprung up between himself and the party in power, it came out in 1870, the year of the Vatican Council. Newman had been invited to Rome, and had declined. His letter, surrepti- tiously published, denouncing an “ insolent and aggressive faction,’ made no little stir. But, much as he lamented the loss of Dollinger and those who went off into the Old-Catholic move- ment, it would be mistaking him altogether if we supposed that their line of conduct had his ap- proval. He could no more submit Revelation to the test of an autonomous criticism than to any other form in which private judgment should have the last word. Facts, of course, were facts; but the Church exercised in regard to history the same sort of jurisdiction, under Providence, which the illative sense possessed in concrete questions gen- erally. ‘This was, in terms, a principle denied at Munich. Newman, in accepting the Vatican De- crees, could therefore appeal not only to earlier affirmations couched in splendid rhetoric, but to his life-long assumptions or first principles. He has shown as much convincingly in the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, which was a reply to W. E. 158 NEWMAN Gladstone’s Vaticanism, in 1875, and which closed a career of religious polemics dating from 1833. He considered that the statesman did not in- terpret Papal documents according to their true sense; ‘‘ theological language,’’ he said, “‘ is scien- tific, and cannot be understood without a knowl- edge of long precedent and tradition, nor without the comments of theologians. Such comments time alone can give us.’’ He could not assent to the contention that Rome had “ repudiated mod- ern thought and ancient history.’”’ The Vatican dogma seemed to him an instance of development, genuine and no corruption, from ideas which had always governed the Papacy—a view which Renan, lecturing some years afterwards in Lang- ham Place, did more than insinuate, though he could not accept the Council. Newman, on his part, was not sorry that an expostulation such as Gladstone’s should recall extreme partisans to the difficulties and duties which they were overlooking. “ It is but a small thing,” he said once, ‘‘ to gain the praise of those who agree with ourselves.” He was never in love with extremes; his maxim had always been “ Live and let live’; this was his ‘“‘ very nature,” as he told Ambrose Phillips (the Eustace Lyle of Con- ingsby) when writing on another subject, that of Gothic architecture, in 1848. “It is no new DREAM OF GERONTIUS 159 thing with me to feel little sympathy with parties, or extreme opinions, of any kind. I ever felt it in the English Church.” He had not quitted the Via Media which, in Aristotle, was the path of good sense; he knew that to most men, however well-intentioned, religion is a yoke or a burden. He was quite willing, for their sake, to practise a “wise and gentle minimism,” in expounding the credenda of his Church; but this raised him up enemies, who deemed it almost a betrayal. Nevertheless, times were changing. On Feb- ruary 7, 1878, Pius IX died. He had taken kindly to Newman at first, but was afterwards drawn away from him by the letters which Dr. Manning addressed to the Vatican, and perhaps not softened by the Oratorian’s lofty reticence. Another Pope reigned now. Leo XIII had also known what it was to spend his years in isolation, forgotten at Perugia, as Newman at Edgbaston. And he, too, was moderate in language, concilia- tory by disposition, a classical scholar, an elegant writer. He called the great Englishman up to the Sacred College; and on May 12, 1879, John Henry Newman was made the Cardinal of St. George. This unexpected and picturesque event was the crown set on a life, prolonged beyond its term, one would say, that all might do it homage. 160 NEWMAN Oxford led the way. His first college, Trinity, named him in 1878 honorary Fellow. He went back, as from an exile of thirty-three years, dined in academical robes at the high table, and once more preached, though not in St. Mary’s. Month by month he was bringing out his uniform edition, with notes that carry on a singular dialogue, in which the Catholic Newman replies to the Trac- tarian, correcting or instructing him, for it was the irony of his temperament that he must convert himself. He finished his translation of St. Athanasius. He delivered an opinion, cautiously framed, on the inspiration of Scripture, moved thereto indirectly by Renan’s Souvenirs, which he did not read and was not discussing. At home he meditated, pen in hand, leaving a volume of prayers conceived with exquisite tenderness, sim- ple as a child’s thoughts, not rich and stately like those of Bishop Andrewes, which he had long ago at Oxford turned into an English that rivals their Greek. He was frequently consulted, by strangers also, and made them welcome. It has been said that he did not so much answer their questions as his own—the solitary thinker who saw what they could not see, and whose wisdom had grown to be reminiscence. That is likely enough. To the last he was an Oxford scholar of 1830, clerical Fellow of Oriel, not German, or modern, or scien- DREAM OF GERONTIUS 161 tific. or a metaphysician of any sect. His beauti- ful modesty was a compliment which he paid to the truth and his own mind. It gave him an in- comparable charm; it assigned a limit within which he had no equal. But now he might say with Prospero— When I have required Some heavenly music, which even now I do, To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I’]l break my staff. “T have always held,” he wrote to a friend in 1884, ‘that thought was instantaneous—that it takes no time—and now that doctrine is confirmed to me, when I want a subtle shorthand to record what otherwise, like a flash of lightning, goes as rapidly as it comes.’”’ At length, some three years later, the staff is broken: ‘‘ J am too old to write; I cannot hold the pen,” he said, and his tremulous fingers laid it down for ever. But, for a long while, every third thought had been his grave. In 1865, on the death of a dear friend, he had cast his musings into the form of a dramatic poem, but was not satisfied with it, and flung the manuscript aside. By good hap one saw it that had eyes, rescued its pages from the dark, and persuaded him to let others read it. The poem thus perilously nigh to destruction proved to be The Dream of Gerontius. 162 NEWMAN Among his minor pieces, one, entitled ‘“ Wait- ing for the Morning,” might serve as an over- ture to the grand Requiem which, like his beloved Mozart, the poet-philosopher composed against his journey home. He writes, after Venerable Bede, of ‘‘ a meadow wherein the souls, not suffer- ing, were detained, as yet unmeet for the Beatific Vision.”” And thus he describes them— They are at rest : We may not stir the heaven otf their repose With loud-voiced grief, or passionate request, Or selfish plaint for those Who in the mountain-grots of Eden ,ie, And hear the fourfold river, as it hurries by. They hear it sweep In distance down the dark and savage vale ; But they at eddying pool or current deep Shall never more grow pale ; They hear, and meekly muse, as fain to know How long untired, unspent, that giant stream shall flow. When he entered into the full circle of Catholic ideas, the Paradise became a “ golden prison,” still to be desired, but austere as the shadow of suffering fell over it, and the Dirge chanted its lessons from Job. The Dream is a rare poetic rendering into English verse of that high ritual which, from the death-bed to the Mass of Suppli- cation, encompasses the faithful soul. It pierces, DREAM OF GERONTIUS 163 indeed, beyond the veil, but in strict accordance or analogy with what every Catholic holds to be there. Hence we shall best interpret its meaning if we liken it, not to Milton, whose supernatural worlds are his peculiar device, founded upon heathen rather than Christian tradition; nor to Dante, who mingles history and landscape from his time and travels in the solemn sweet Purgatorio which remains his masterpiece; but to Calderon’s Autos Sacramentales, at once an allegory and an act of faith. This ‘‘ Dream ”’ is a true and vivid example of what Berkeley intended, when he represented the whole world as shown to the spirit, though not existing outside it, and on that account the more real. It has no local habitation; we do not once think, in reading it, of the Dantean cosmography. It takes place where the soul is, and the Angels, where we love and suffer. But the solid frame of things, as it lately appeared, is no more. Alone the spirit utters its beliefs, while it seems falling into the abyss; alone, amid litanies and absolu- tions, it passes away, the priest reciting most musically his great anthem, “‘ Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul! ”’ From this moment whatsoever happens can only be in “‘ dreams that are true, yet enigmatical.”’ The Guardian Angel who holds an office of in- 164 NEWMAN terpreter, as Virgil to Dante, tells Gerontius that he lives now in “a world of signs and types, the presentation of most holy truths, living and strong’; but by condescendence merely, lest so stern a solitude should load and break his being, for as disembodied he has by right no converse with aught else beside himself. It is the philoso- phy of St. Thomas Aquinas moulded into lines of Shakespearean weight and precision. A comment on this dialogue, so beautiful in its idea, so feelingly expressed, may be found in the pages where St. Cyprian endeavours to win over Callista from her bright Hellenic religion, centred and summed up as it was in a world of fading charms. ‘The situation is different, for Callista did not then love the “‘ First and only Fair”; it is the contrary of that in the Dream; but the saint pleads as the angel interprets; and the argument is equally subduing. Idealism here passes into something higher—the soul affirms its enduring reality, compared with which what are all the shows of matter and sense but air-drawn pictures, to be blown away by the first breath of wind? Yet, even here, it is not the same imagery for all. A mighty painter would have chosen lines and colours; the musician prefers sounds as less material; he proceeds by harmonies and disso- nances. The Angel chants a hymn of triumph; DREAM OF GERONTIUS 165 a “fierce hubbub” warns that the demon-throng are hovering round the Judgment-seat. “It is the restless panting of their being ” which breaks out in stanzas, uncouth, turbulent, but preter- human, as grim as in medieval mysteries, and as awe-inspiring. These are not the great lords who debate in golden Pandemonium; they have for- feited the dignity which Milton clad in verse of majestic splendour; much more do they resemble earth-powers, elemental and inchoate, as if their high thought had sunk down to blind opposition, their glance of fire been quenched in a medium not its own. Both these conceptions have called forth a poetry so vast and full of terror that we know not how to choose between them. But in The Dream of Gerontius we seem to catch echoes or flying reminiscences from the A‘schylean chorus, and to hear the Furies who went in chase of Orestes like hounds. To the lofty grave tragedian as to the Catholic mystic, these were not so much “ ma- chinery,” fictions devised to startle an audience, but the sternest truth of fact, real in a way which transcended seeming, beyond Nature yet ever mingling with it. As the stage in Athens was an altar, the theatre of Dionysus a church, so this mystery-play is, to speak largely, a sacrament, and its figures are masks for divine or demonic pow- 166 NEWMAN ers. It belongs not to literature—that mere thing too often of words and surfaces—but to the lit- urgy, as if an inspired lection, chanted by answer- ing choirs, under a sacred roof. In the Catholic Sermons, which we have recog- nized as excelling those of Oxford in strength, swiftness of impression, and a quickened pulse, there is one score—as musicians term it—not less moving, nay, with a sense of colour added which to certain minds will be more so, than the gloomy strophes that in Gerontius body forth the “ harrowing of Hell.” ‘‘ Impossible, I a lost soul!’ cries the condemned; “I separated from hope and from peace for ever! It is not I of whom the Judge so spake! There is a mistake somewhere; Christ, Saviour, hold Thy hand— one minute to explain it! My name is Demas; I am but Demas, not Judas, or Nicolas, or Alex- ander, or Philetus, or Diotrephes.”’ He argues with the horrible fiend: ‘“‘ I am a man, and not such as thou! I am not food for thee, or sport for thee! I never was in hell as thou, I have not on me the smell of fire or the taint of the charnel- house!” And then, characteristically, “ I know what human feelings are; I have been taught religion; I have had a conscience; I have a cul- tivated mind; I am well versed in science and art; I have been refined by literature; I have had an DREAM OF GERONTIUS 167 eye for the beauties of nature; I am a philosopher, or a poet, or a shrewd observer of men, or a states- man, or an orator, or a man of wit and humour. Nay, lama Catholic . . . soI defy thee, and abjure thee, O enemy of man!” Here we perceive what is meant by “ strong imagination,” of which in his surpassing rhetoric Theseus, in Shakespeare, says the poet is “all compact.” It apprehends not joy and pain with- out a bringer of them, and is figurative because it seizes on a hidden reality, otherwise not to be detained. Newman, letting go the outward, has taken man’s soul for his stage; the persons of the drama live within it, throb to its vibrations, and surge up into light from its unfathomable deeps, in such degree made concrete as itself is creative, whether of good or evil. But in the Dream we hear the tumult as a far-off thunder; and on the spirit’s apprehension fall more joyful strains as it draws near to the House of Judgment. One choir of ‘Angelicals opens the symphony, another replies; for here are no temples and palaces material, but— Cornice, or frieze, or balustrade, or stair, The very pavement is made up of life— Of holy, blessed, and immortal beings, Who hymn their Maker’s praise continually. 168 NEWMAN They sing of creation, fall, redemption, and the soul’s approaching agony, which from the face of the Incarnate God shall smite it with a keen and subtle pain. The Guardian Spirit speaks— There is a pleading in His pensive eyes Will pierce thee to the quick and trouble thee, And thou wilt hate and loathe thyself. Its “‘ veriest, sharpest purgatory” will be the longing, yet the shame; and while the lintels of the Presence-gate are vibrating with melody, and the entrance is passed, come floating up the voices that it had left on earth, interceding; the Angel of Christ’s agony, “ lone in that garden shade, be- dewed with blood,” murmurs, as in some litany of the Holy Name, its last petitions—all in a moment the soul escapes, And, with the intemperate energy of love, Flies to the dear feet of Emmanuel. But ere it reach them, fire has come forth from that sanctity; and now it lies passive and still, con- sumed yet quickened. It breathes one touching prayer :— Take me away, and in the lowest deep, There let me be, And there in hope the lone night watches keep Told out for me. SPOT TALEO OLR AS re VOM CCDC e600 1) F088 IE LLIIEY ODI ery Fas, £ : , _ é : $ 2 % : < tel Cardinal Newman. From the painting in the National Portrait Gallery executed in 1889 by Miss Emmeline Deane DREAM OF GERONTIUS 169 The golden prison opens its gates; the great powers, Angels of Purgatory, receive their charge from its guardian, a dearly ransomed soul; the spirits which are its brethren recite that most subduing of Psalms, ‘“‘ Lord, Thou hast been our refuge in every generation,” with its pathetic hope and not unmixed sadness; the waters close upon him who must go down deep into them; and above his form as it sinks into the dim distance the Angel speaks farewell— Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here, And I will come and wake thee on the morrow. Such was the answer given at length to ‘‘ Lead, indly Light ”—a revelation of the Unseen, se- vere yet tender, demanding an heroic service, but to One who was entirely human, the simple Chris- tian truth, set in a mystery almost scenic, that it might be the more taking. During the last ten years of his life, Cardinal Newman, “lone but not forlorn,” seemed to abide in this mid-region of prayer, hope, peni- tence, gentle to all who visited him, but apart, and, though not quite silent, ever less disposed to speak. There is a portrait of him in his scarlet which almost renders on those imperial features a sleeping smile; what the American Lowell 170 NEWMAN charmingly described as his gracious senescence became a possession of which England was proud. His mind gave no signs of ageing; serene and luminous, all it asked to be active as ever was that the worn-out instruments by which it wrought should be renewed; and this, we remember, was Goethe’s argument for immortality. The dying Prospero did not suffer; he fell on sleep and passed away without a pang, without parade of death and its sable trappings. The line of Sophocles became his departure well— Slight strokes do bring the aged frame to rest. It was August 11, 1890, late in the evening. To many there seemed “a white star extinguished ” in their mental horizon, a place vacant which no other then alive could fill. Public mourning, and, what is rare indeed when a man of ninety dies, private grief, took up their parable, joined hands over the grave at Rednall in which this perfect friend was laid by his brother in religion, Ambrose St. John. For the motto on his cardinal’s shield Newman had adopted a sentence from St. Francis de Sales’ letters, ‘“‘ Cor ad cor loquitur,” heart speaketh unto heart. For his epitaph he chose words, the nearest form of which occurs in Loss and Gain, a volume wherein he consigned many of his dearest thoughts, ‘‘ Ex umbris et imaginibus DREAM OF GERONTIUS 171 in veritatem ’—as Charles Reding expresses it, “Coming out of shadows into realities.” These great sayings indicate a temperament and a phi- losophy, which together made of John Henry Newman all that he became. CHAPTER VII THE MAN OF LETTERS By this time we have learned something not only of Newman’s intimate convictions, but of the raiment in which he dressed them. Yet we can- not end without speaking of him more distinctly as a man of letters. English critics, unlike the French, are scarcely permitted in books to handle as they ought questions which affect style and lan- guage. ‘There is thought to be a pedantry in such minute investigations, whereas, until they are at- tempted, no proper estimate can be formed of a writer’s place in literature. A volume might well be given to the sources from which this great scholar drew, the laws of composition to which he submitted, the variations in his manner according to the subject dealt with, his affinities, repulsions, triumphs, failures, and limits, strictly as an author, irrespective of his theme. Little as we can un- dertake it within our dwindling borders, at least we may sketch the task to be left for happier students. We may begin with a letter, dated April, 1869, 172 THE MAN OF LETTERS 173 in which Newman, then engaged on his Grammar of Assent, confesses with delightful frankness, “ I have been obliged to take great pains with every- thing I have written, and I often write chapters over and over again, besides innumerable correc- tions and interlinear additions. I am not stating this as a merit, only that some persons write their best first, and I very seldom do.” He proceeds, “however, I may truly say that I never have been in the practice since I was a boy of attempting to write well, or to form an elegant style. I think I never have written for writing’s sake; but my one and single desire and aim has been to do what is so difficult, viz. to express clearly and exactly my meaning.” As to patterns for imitation, he tells his correspondent, ‘‘the only master of style I have ever had . . . is Cicero. I think I owea great deal to him, and as far as I know to no one elses” Every day Newman made a point of translating one English sentence into Latin. He wrote Latin with ease and idiomatically; nor can we doubt his indebtedness to Cicero. But we have quoted the passage where he speaks of imitating Johnson, Gibbon, and Addison, while we have only to turn over his Anglican pages and we shall find in them frequent echoes of Hooker, Taylor, and the Church Prayer Book. Again, they are steeped in 174 NEWMAN reminiscences of the English Bible, as we might expect from his familiarity with it in every part. And many of the Greek plays as well as Thucyd- ides and Herodotus, contributed to form the es- sentially classical mould into which his composi- tions are cast, early and late. Shakespeare, too, we have seen, was his father’s favourite reading. All these elements must be taken into account. Dating, then, from Cicero, Newman belongs to the central tradition of European prose which, since Lysias and the Greek orators made it cur- rent, is good coin in all our dialects. He exhibits the “copious, majestic, unmixed flow of lan- guage,” that he admires in his prototype. ‘True, Attic eloquence was plain and simple, as compared with this Latin; nevertheless, from Athens Cicero derived a style, perspicuous because it was full, rich that it might be found equal to emergencies, grave and dignified as answering to the pride of place which made Consul Romanus a title loftier than the Great King’s. ‘‘ What Livy, and much more Tacitus, have gained in energy, they have lost in lucidity and elegance,” so thought Newman when he published his essay on Marcus Tullius. He repeated and enforced the judgment, many years later, from a different point of view; “Neither Livy, nor Tacitus, nor Terence, nor Seneca, nor Pliny, nor Quinctilian,” he said, “ is THE MAN OF LETTERS 175 an adequate spokesman for the Imperial City. They write Latin; Cicero writes Roman.” Whenever we open Newman, we are not far, it would appear, from this Queen of the World. Almost one had termed him a Latin classic, and on more serious grounds than his tasteful pro- logues to the comedies of Terence. He is Latin by the structure of sentence and period; by the rhythm which his ear, fastidiously keen, demands; by his leisurely rhetoric, and senatorial grace, and instant authority. But it is Roman Latin. He disdains the archaic and the provincial; he has too much sense to be affected; he is too serious for the vain exhibition of a virtuoso—an Isocrates or a Euphues; too sure of himself to employ any but the words which men use in their daily talk. His choice, like Macaulay’s, does not range outside Johnson. He can be idiomatic in lectures to a mixed gathering; brief, but not sententious; to the point, yet hardly ever epigrammatic; ironical or humorous in a natural way, without quitting his air of reserve. He is never unstudied, but just as little self-conscious, for he desires to instruct or to persuade, not to show off what literary art can achieve. For literature, as an accomplishment, he cares not at all. The French critic, M. Dimnet, who so well understands him, knows only of Bossuet among 176 NEWMAN great modern writers to be set beside Newman in this absolute disdain for the praise of excellence. It does not seem that either expected their writings to go down beyond their own time. Bossuet left his works at the mercy of accidents; Newman wrote as occasion served, seldom read what he published after he had corrected his proofsheets, and, as he naively remarks, was not well up in it. He had a message to deliver, and he might say, “ T believe, therefore I have spoken”; but he was no more of a dilettante than was Carlyle. Academic he certainly was, teaching in the form of lecture, as from a chair to those who would listen. He is the opposite of Seneca; he must expound, elucidate, place his subject in various lights, resolve difficulties; he is a rhetorician. Is he also an artist? Yes, if we consider his choice and easy sentences; his love of order in words; not so, perhaps, when a volume is to be wrought out of one single topic, as in the Development or the Grammar. He has bequeathed to us no work, except Gerontius, which does not finish somewhat abruptly. His felicities of diction, numerous in every chapter he published, have led Dean Church to a comparison with French prose; but there is nothing French in Newman, although his philoso- phy lies at no great distance from Pascal. Nor has he marked affinities with English writ- THE MAN OF LETTERS 177 ers of his day. He is strikingly different from Macaulay, whose eloquence betrays the fury, as it is annealed in the fire, of the Western Celt. He composes in a language that seems tame when we read Carlyle’s epic of the Revolution; and, in fact, it is the style of Oxford, not of Ecclefechan. To Ruskin, who deliberately built up a monument, stately as the palace of Kubla Khan, he is a con- trast for the very reason that he does not handle words as if they were settings in architecture or colours on a palette; rather, he would look upon them as transparencies which let his meaning through. He is more like De Quincey, but again no player upon the organ for the sake of its music; and that which is common to both is the literary tradition of the eighteenth century, enhanced by a power to which abstract and concrete yielded in almost equal degree. Like De Quincey, too, Newman could tell the story of his own life, but hardly any other. He was short-sighted, and did not see people very: clearly; absorbed in thought, he knew their mo- tives better than their features; the drama of life was to him a dialogue, not a scene. As in style he is polished and uniform, without deep or bold variations, so his sketches from history, which we read again and again, are not portraits such as Gibbon would paint; they do not fix the place be- 178 NEWMAN fore us, or give the local colour. There is even a tendency in them to fuse together different periods—the Athens of St. Gregory and St. Basil with the Athens of Cicero or that of Pericles; the Rome of St. Philip Neri with Medicean Florence. But this may be an illusion of perspective in such brief studies. Newman could certainly draw the characters which he discriminates so finely. His romances, to give them a name which they do not invite, were byplays of genius; they discover a talent for description, dialogue, and clear outlines, needing only to be cultivated. Their persons are not shadows. In Loss and Gain, Sheffield, the in- ‘cipient sceptic, is drawn with power. In Callista the heroine herself, though no more than a pastel, if you will be exacting, has delightful traits; Jucundus the Epicurean lives and moralizes; and Juba, the demoniac, if preterhuman, is real. But we may treat these figures as designedly symbolic, and they have their charm. Had he taken up the art, Newman could have won distinction as a novelist. And his contributions to Church history, though occasional, are pages perfect in style, in matter select, and to the general reader as stimu- lating as instructive, which is no small praise. He resuscitated the Church of the Fathers by making it present in imagination to a supercilious age, and THE MAN OF LETTERS 179 he broke the barrier which had long divided eccle- siastical from secular story, paving the way to such a method as, in Harnack or Duchesne, is now lit- erally building up for us the vanished world of the first Christian centuries. With so prompt and intense an intellect at his call, there was no subject, outside purely technical criticism, which Newman could not have mastered. He was versatility itself in potentia, as the school- men have it. On the other hand, he never read for reading sake; he was either incurious or de- tached on principle from the pursuit of beauties in literature. By instinct a Platonist, seldom if ever does he quote from Plato; it is hardly prob- able that he knew much of the divine Athenian beyond the Protagoras or Gorgias. He read with an end in view. His singularly practical talent, which “ made a bolt of any tree,” led him to take Oxford as he found it, without exploring new regions; and so we must explain his living all through the crises of German thought, content with his own garden. | In like manner he did not enter into, and he would not observe at first hand, the movement of Democracy. As an Oxford man sprung from the middle class, he disliked and feared it, while he had a presentiment that the Church would be cast off by the State and driven to rely on the People. 180 NEWMAN It is said that he made analyses of political con- stitutions, modern as well as ancient. No trace of that labour can be followed in his books, ex- cept where he parallels the British to the Attic State, in Who’s to Blame?—a piece on the Crimean War, not less brilliant than Thackeray’s Four Georges—and in his philosophical reflections on the Turks. We may question if he had read Montesquieu; he was surely not acquainted with Rousseau; and he remained to the last an old-fash- ioned Englishman, not so much Whig or Tory as insular and even somewhat prejudiced. We smile at these things; all the more if there was scarcely in the veins of our great genius one drop of English blood. He might boast, at all events, what Tertullian styles the ‘‘ consanguinity of doctrine,” for his views are English-Hebrew, and, in the long run, his method is not Greek. This should be clearly understood. Drawing out refined trains of argument, subtle in exposition, he seems to wield a dialectic borrowed from the Porch or the Academy; but it is not so. The Greek moves from reason to reason; Newman goes by experience and authority. They are his own thoughts, but they contemplate things, the concrete, passing over chasms which every Hel- lenic philosopher would have deemed it his duty to fill up. Newman’s assumptions are his life; THE MAN OF LETTERS 181 he affirms them because he cannot exist without them. But if any one calls them in question, he turns away to those who affirm like himself. We cannot imagine a Greek declining the combat of first principles, not even Aristotle, who is more properly a man of science than a metaphysician. Hence the remarkable admission in Newman’s letter above quoted: ‘‘ When I have read over a passage which I had written a few days before, I have found it so obscure to myself that I have either put it altogether aside or fiercely corrected it; but I don’t get any better for practice. I am as much obliged to correct and rewrite as I was thirty years ago.” Yes, “‘system nearly precludes freedom, and depth almost implies obscurity.”” But still more does the influence of what is now known as the Unconscious tell on a mind which could hardly bear to scrutinize the sacred foundations of thought. System is often shallow; as it was ex- tant in Paley and the evidence-writers it seemed irreverent. An epigrammatist observes that “to Newman his own nature was a revelation which he called Conscience.”” No doubt, he found in himself tokens of an order not only ethical but holy, and he dreaded tampering with it. ‘* Con- science,” he declared, ‘‘ is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch 182 NEWMAN in its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas.” Faith had its reserves, love was reticent; never would this true Platonist have ventured on writing the Symposium in which the Master discourses with such unconcerned elo- quence of Eros, the earthly and the heavenly. There is a deep silence in Newman’s works on the hidden springs of life as of thought. He is Alexandrian, a mystic whose belief tempers, when it does not forbid, his utterance, and his pages are composed in the forecourt of the Temple. Coming down from these heights, we are put in mind of Fénelon, whom the Tractarian resembles in his fortunes, his natural disposition, his quality as a writer, and his spiritual affinities. Under a winning smile both are severe; affectionate, and not afraid to show their affection, they stand in- wardly aloof; their submission is a victory, their recantation a triumph; they are continually por- traying themselves, yet do not cease to be modest; they have the energy of genius, and are described as feminine because they meet blows with argu- ment, rudeness with pathos, and possess the divine gift of tears. They charm strangers, but leave in minds unsympathetic a suspicion that these sentiments are too beautiful to be true. They feel and express great changes in the world’s Cardinal Newman. From a photograph taken by Father Anthony Pollen in the summer of 1889 Reproduced by kind permission of the Catholic Truth Society THE MAN OF LETTERS 183 tides; they move in advance of their contem- poraries; they denote, were it even by reaction, the breaking up of an ancient order, and they in turn are marked out as heralds of revolution. They write, not according to rule, abundantly, as they talk persuasively; without show, but like men who have known the best books, and not ex cathedra, however assured that when they open their lips others must listen. ‘They never quite succeed with persons in high places, for they carry with them a sovereign rank. They give up, or do not value, the prizes of ambition; their habits are simple; in seclusion or in exile they hold, as it were, a court to which pilgrims make their way; and their friends worship them, public fame can- onizes them; still they abide at a lofty altitude, not popular, however celebrated, bearing on their brows a sign which is like a star, the perennial raying forth of a spirit which, in its form and pressure, had no second. Thus, at last, Newman fulfils his own definition of a great author. Surely “his aim is to give forth what he has within him; and from his very earnestness it comes to pass that, whatever be the splendour of his diction or the harmony of his periods, he has with him the charm of an incom- municable simplicity. Whatever be his subject, high or low, he treats it suitably and for its own 184 NEWMAN sake. His page is the lucid mirror of his mind and life— Quo fit, ut omnis Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella Vita senis. He writes passionately, because he feels keenly; forcibly, because he conceives vividly; he sees too clearly to be vague; he is too serious to be otiose; he can analyse his subject, and therefore he is rich; he embraces it as a whole, and in its parts, and therefore he is consistent; he has a firm hold of it, and therefore he is luminous. When his imagina- tion wells up, it overflows in ornament; when his heart is touched, it thrills along his verse. He always has the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much. If he is brief, it is be- cause few words suffice; when he is lavish of them, still each word has its mark, and aids, not em- barrasses, the vigorous march of his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but all cannot say; and his sayings pass into proverbs among his people, and his phrases become household words and idioms of their daily speech, which is tessellated with the rich fragments of his language, as we see in for- eign lands the marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of modern palaces.” Nor is it unlikely that opinion will one day THE MAN OF LETTERS 185 ascribe to him, as in the Middle Ages it ascribed to Virgil, the qualities of a prophet or magician. For of Newman also we may say that “‘ his single words and phrases, his pathetic half lines, give utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which is the experience of her children in every time.” CHAPTER VIII NEWMAN’S PLACE IN HISTORY WHEN we ask ourselves what place will be assigned at last to Newman, whether in the scale of English or of European letters, we are met by more than common difficulties. As we have seen, he was before all things a preacher and teacher; he never had any ambition to shine in literature for its own sake; if he became “‘ the leading author of a school,” it was that religion, not learning, or art or style, as such, might gain the benefit. Almost as repugnant to our feelings would be the thought of St. Paul, contemplated chiefly or ex- clusively in his function of a writer, as that of the Oxford apostle who, when he studied, was pre- paring to defend Christian truth, and, when he published, never could lose out of sight edification as his one object. He had, indeed, learnt from the example of Origen and the Fathers how dogma might be upheld and its opponents overthrown by weapons borrowed in the world’s arsenal. Yet he was profoundly convinced that literature is one thing, Christianity another; that ‘‘ the habitat of 186 HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 187 the natural gifts is the natural man”’; and that “not till the whole human race is made new will its literature be true and pure.” Literature, he said, stands related to man as science stands to nature; it his biography, told by himself. And it cannot be made into an edifying story. Hence, he went on to conclude, “ you cannot have a Christian Literature,” if you mean in fact a study of human nature. And as is the subject, such is the instrument by which it must be de- lineated. Various great critics, among whom Carlyle is notable, have insisted that writers of genius cannot be themselves base at heart. New- man would have replied by distinguishing between moral excellence, mental depth, and the gift of ex- pression. He would have taken a farther step. The Bible, so he argued, is “ no picture of life’; it “‘ gives us little insight into the fertile develop- ments of mind; it has no terms in its vocabulary to express with exactness the intellect and its sepa- rate faculties; it knows nothing of genius, wit, invention, presence of mind, resource. It does not discourse of empire, commerce, enterprise, learn- ing, philosophy and the fine arts.” In other words the Old Testament is, pre-eminently, not Greek; and even the New is in texture and spirit Hebrew. Let these comments be somewhat exaggerated— for, certainly, the Bible has much to say of empire 188 NEWMAN and political developments, as it looks forward in the Prophets to an era when social righteousness shall prevail—there is truth enough in them to justify and explain Newman’s handling of litera- ture as not an end but a means, with undeviating reference to a scope outside it, and thus not chiefly as a liberal art, but for practice and utility. This, too, will have been the reason why he was, though versatile to a surprising degree, not curi- ous about books or interested in famous modern authors, or given to criticism of those whom he admired, except as so delicate a taste would be, in- stinctively. The lust of knowledge, libido sciendi, had played a melancholy part in Adam’s fall. There was a lust of natural beauty in speech and thought not more innocent, which would corrupt the ethical temper, excuse vices that do not sin against good manners, because they “ have lost half their evil by losing all their grossness,” and substitute for the art of life, so painful and diffi- cult, the life of art, or at best the religion of phi- losophy. It is a forgotten writer, Lord Shaftesbury, whom in his Dublin Lectures Newman sets up for animadversion as embodying this superficial but dangerous idea. The example is obsolete; not so the doctrine. As regards conduct it has been seductively painted by Matthew Arnold, in whose HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 189 judgment culture—which is the right human deal- ing with words written or spoken—becomes the born foe and predestined conqueror of anarchy. Culture has in view an ideal, and that nothing less than human perfection; but its means are, before all things, intellectual, “the best that has been thought and said in the world,” by men like the Greeks, who took for their province not revelation but reflection. Of such as these Newman tells us, “ they made their own minds their sanctuary, their own ideas their oracle, and conscience in morals was but parallel to genius in art, and wis- dom in philosophy.” Arnold defines the power he would commend as “an inward spiritual activity ”; it is plain, how- ever, that he never understands by the spirit that which Christians mean; for, in their language, lack of culture is no hindrance to its high develop- ment, and this he could not possibly grant. New- man, on the other hand, was unwearied in pointing out that, while the office of religion is elementary, dealing with individuals one by one, if it encour- aged the arts or advanced civilisation it did so for a purpose beyond them. Political convenience is not the standard of heavenly truth; neither is art, in any shape however beautiful, its sovereign. All this the preacher taught in his Oxford days with grave directness, and afterwards, when de- 190 NEWMAN fending Rome against the imputations of a shal- low utilitarian school, with picturesque instances and an eloquence not untouched by passion; for it was a belief close to his heart that the civilized man cared only to seize on the lesser gifts of re- ligion, the “‘ order, tranquillity, popular content- ment, plenty, prosperity, advance in arts and sciences, literature, refinement, splendour,” in which he found his Elysium; but cared nothing for its message from another world. ‘ Why,” asks Newman, “ is the worship of reason so calm? Why was the religion of classic heathenism so joy- ous? Why is the framework of civilized society all so graceful and so correct? Why, on the other hand, is there so much of emotion, so much of con- flicting and alternating feeling, so much that is high, so much that is abased, in the devotion of Christianity? It is because the Christian, and the Christian alone, has a revelation.” But if he could not accept culture as a substi- tute for these powers of the world to come, still less would Newman have permitted to pass un- challenged a formula which, since his time, has been heard on many a lip, “ Art for art’s sake.” Confining ourselves to the art now in question— literature—we may throw some light on an ex- pression at once vague and pretentious, if we refer it to such an author as Gustave Flaubert, HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 191 who patronized it in theory and spent years of toil in the effort to live up to it. Flaubert held that a genuine artist might handle any subject, however remote or opposed his feelings were to the persons and sentiments involved. Again, he should be required so entirely to conceal himself behind the arras of his invention that not a single fold of his private thoughts ought to appear, any more than if they did not exist. Finally, among the innumerable phrases by which an action or a character suffered itself to be described, there was always one unique and adequate, until the dis- covery of which the work remained a travesty or a torso. Literature, transformed by these rules to photographic realism, ceased to be an art, be- came a science, and, as if it were the study of rocks, earths, or chemical elements, needed no object out- side itself. It was exalted beyond good and evil, which, reduced to colours on its palette, might be employed in whatever proportion the experimental philosopher chose, without regard to public opin- ion or possible consequences. | Positions so anarchic Newman has refuted by anticipation. We remember his first great prin- ciple: literature is concerned not, as science, with things, but with thoughts. ‘‘ Science is universal, literature is personal; science uses words merely as symbols, but literature uses language in its full 192 NEWMAN compass, as including phraseology, idiom, style, composition, rhythm, eloquence, and whatever other properties are included in it.’ Moreover —and here is a complete reply to Flaubert’s paradox—‘ while the many use language as they find it, the man of genius subjects it to his own purposes, and moulds it according to his own peculiarities. The throng and succession of ideas, thoughts, feelings, imaginations, aspirations which pass within him; the abstractions, the juxtaposi- tions, the comparisons, the discriminations, the conceptions which are so original in him; his views of external things, his judgments upon life, manners, and history; the exercises of his wit, of his humour, of his depth, of his sagacity; all these innumerable and incessant creations, the very pul- sation and throbbing of his intellect, does he image, to all does he give utterance, in a corresponding language, which is as multiform as this inward mental action itself, and analogous to it, the faith- ful expression of his intense personality, attending on his own inward world of thought as its very shadow; so that we might as well say that one man’s shadow is another’s as that the style of a really gifted mind can belong to any but himself.” Nor is it the style alone which stamps an original writer: he is first of all a mind, an im- agination, sui generis. There are those who regard HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 193 composition as a trick and a trade; but, inquires Newman, “can they really think that Homer, or Pindar, or Shakespeare, or Dryden, or Walter Scott were accustomed to aim at diction for its own sake, instead of being inspired with their sub- ject, and pouring forth beautiful words because they had beautiful thoughts? ‘This is surely too great a paradox to be borne.”” No, we must look on the writer as inspired; ‘‘ his mental attitude and bearing, the beauty of his moral countenance ”’— mark this exquisite phrase worthy of Plato—‘ the force and keenness of his logic are imaged in the tenderness, or energy, or richness of his language.” And so the perfection he achieves in what he has undertaken is ‘‘ the monument, not so much of his skill as of his power.” We pause over this fine critical observation. Skill is an exercise of talent, as the distinction used to run; but power is a second name for genius, which itself implies personality and points to in- spiration. “The artist,’’ says Newman once more, “‘ has his great or rich visions before him; and his only aim is to bring out what he thinks or what he feels in a way adequate to the thing spoken of, and appropriate to the speaker.” It is a final stroke of irony, clenching this argument, that every word in it is applicable to Flaubert as to scarcely another of his time. Not only did he 194 NEWMAN possess an incommunicable style, which those who have read him diligently will perceive in every sentence he has published, but his characters are sealed with their creator’s impress and bear too frequently the marks of his unkind handling. Flaubert lived in one period with men as highly endowed as Balzac, and George Sand was at that time writing some of her most eloquent stories. |, But there was neither man nor woman in France who could have put on paper three sentences the like of which we read in Madame Bovary or A Sentimental Education, except the author, con- vinced as he might be that his work never betrayed him. On the contrary, he was everywhere in it; so different from the processes and formulas of sci- ence are the innermost laws of literature. On the other hand, religion as Newman consid- ered it in his own person and dealing with others, was not a science, though systems of ethics and theology might take their rise from it, as in fact they have done. His attitude, which never wavered, is depicted in the well-known words of Pascal, who had himself taken up the same posi- tion. “I shall not attempt here to prove by natural reason the existence of God, or the Trin- ity, or the immortality of the soul, or anything of that description; not only because I should not feel myself strong enough to find in nature what HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 195 would convince hardened atheists, but because such knowledge, apart from Jesus Christ, is use- less and barren. Were a man persuaded that the proportions of numbers are truths immaterial and eternal, depending on the First Truth in whom they subsist and whom we call God, I should not look upon him as much advanced on the path of salvation.”” And Newman said—“ I would rather be bound to defend the reasonableness of assuming that Christianity is true, than to demonstrate a moral government from the physical world. Life is for action. . . . Knowledge of premisses, and inferences upon them—this is not to live. . . . But if we commence with scientific knowl- edge and argumentative proof, or lay any great stress upon it as the basis of personal Christianity, or attempt to make man moral and religious by libraries and museums, let us in consistency take chemists for our cooks and mineralogists for our masons.” Faith was, then, to him the principle of action, not knowledge or argument. The Christian teach- .ing was ‘“‘a history supernatural, and almost scenic.” It could not be enough to defend it, or reasonable, either, to assail it, by appealing to the logical accuracy of a syllogism, when everything turned on the real meaning of the terms employed, which were only to be understood by the religious 196 NEWMAN mind. And, after all, Divine Truth and human language were incommensurable. Moral charac- ter, as exhibited in thought and conduct, was like the solid figure of a man, which could never act- ually be given on a painted tablet. How, then, did religion spread from its living source in the teacher to multitudes? The answer was, by per- sonal influence, which offered a pattern of it and took hold of others as a charm. If it be the highest of gifts to possess an intuitive knowledge of the beautiful in art or the effective in action, there might be those who had a corresponding insight into moral truth, and who had reached that especial perfection in the spiritual part of their nature, which is so rarely found and so greatly prized among its intellectual endowments. Error could afford to be anonymous; Truth was handed on from witness to witness who sealed it with their life, nay, with their death,—who were its martyrs. In these deep convictions, finding their way to the light by means of a language as sincere and yet subtle as they were far-reaching, we must look. for the ‘‘ miracle of intellectual delicacy’ which Arnold perceives in Newman, and which he seems - to parallel with Shakespeare’s ‘‘ balance of mind.” A message had been entrusted to him, by its very nature a secret, to be delivered in terms and un- Photo by Draycott Cardinal Newman, about 1889. HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 197 der conditions framed to express not only things different, but often things contrary to it; there was needed an art of composition, or of translation, which could never be satisfied by the first words at hand, nor could hope to fulfil its task unless the resources of language were mastered in obe- dience to ideas themselves, hints rather than images of what they represented. Moreover, the age of symbols had passed away; we were left with words, and those not pictures, as in the Hebrew Bible, but abstract, signs of signs, and, if sacred, yet so familiar that they had often ceased to convey any meaning. Again, Newman felt that ‘‘ the natural man has no heart for the promises of the Gospel, and dis- sects its evidence without reverence, without hope, without suspense, without misgivings.” Every part of such truth is novel to an opponent; seen detached from the whole, it becomes an objection. One who has not faith enough to be patient of doubt may have just talent enough to consider perspicuity the chief talent of a writer; whereas it is even a merit in the truly great poet, and he deals but with human experiences, not to be more obscure than we find him. Read, for instance, the Agamemnon of AEschylus: do you expect his choral odes to be plain sailing, or expostulate with him because you cannot in the first glance interpret 198 NEWMAN his deep gnomic sayings as you wéuld a smart epigram of Voltaire’s? Is King t.ear easy to fol- low, or Troilus and Cressida, or the masterpiece of introspection, Hamlet? But when we leave court and camp for the temple, when religion is our theme and Scripture its representative, who will say that Prophets or Psalmists are popular compositions, level at first reading with the under- standings of the multitude? Popularity was the last thing Newman would have aimed at; nor can he be said to have touched the many, whom he did not directly address. During his Anglican period the Church of England ran more than one chance of falling before the onslaught, combined from various quar- ters and led by undaunted captains, of a philoso- phy which Bentham inspired, while the Liberal politicians of the day furnished it with weapons. The popular tone outside Oxford, and finally within it, was aggressively opposed to ideas of mystery, tradition, dogma, and the whole view which Newman draws out in his Sermons before the University.. In a Mechanical Age, when Brougham was laying it down at Glasgow as a great truth, ‘‘that man shall no more render account to man for his belief, over which he has himself no control,” how unpromising was the outlook for one who held that beliefs are de- HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 199 pendent on the affections and stream in upon us through our moral nature? “Considered as a whole,” writes Carlyle in 1831, ‘‘ the Christian religion of late ages has been continually dissipating itself into metaphysics; and threatens now to disappear, as some rivers do, in deserts of barren sands.” This, to the sad-browed thinker, was among those “‘ signs of the times” at hearing of which Macaulay laughed out loud. There were Discourses on the Evidences as utterly external and calculated for a British jury-box as Paley’s, which had been their pattern,—surpassing them, at all events, in style. Deliberate reckoning of interest was the method now put forward to explain man’s duty; and those who did not like it in the abstract were applying it vigorously to all the phenomena of the social order. Newman, though he came in touch with a world of English youth at Oxford, could no more win the country to his side or get a hearing from its rulers, than the Scotch seer who was eating his heart down in the wilds of Galloway. Nor had he, despite amazing industry, the gift which lesser spirits often possess—in Heine’s mocking phrase, the “talent to make his genius avail.” He began the Tracts with admirable dis- cernment; his contributions were, at first, short, sharp, and decisive; but he did not follow up the 200 NEWMAN game. He turned aside to learning and libraries; plunged into abstruse questions—the orthodoxy of the Ante-Nicene Fathers; the distinction be- tween Antioch and Alexandria; how miracles of the Middle Ages were related, or otherwise, to the miracles of Scripture; wherein Luther differed from St. Augustine on the article of justification; and other problems, which, in general, belonged rather to the seventeenth than the nineteenth century. The prophet was turned scholar, and in no fashionable department. His explorations took him away from the track of Sanscrit philologies, Icelandic runes, the origin of Teutons; nor, though an examiner in Greek, did he give his days and nights to Wolf or Brunck or Bentley. A churchman before all things, his pages carry us off, provided we do not let them fall from sheer indifference, to Bull and Petavius, Mosheim, Bricker, and a company (it must be admitted) of pedants whose learning Gibbon has absorbed, by miracle not losing his original brightness. Nor was that all. Even in the sermons at St. Mary’s, but much more in writings destined for a wider circle, Newman’s inbred reserve compelled him to guard his personality with a manner as little familiar as he could make it. Shy men are formalists, and so was he. The clerical style is heightened in his first essays by a gravity of de- HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 201 meanour, and a severity of speech, that have left on critics like Dr. Abbott an impression far from favourable to him, as though he were wrapped in predestinarian gloom. He was utterly in earnest, masterful by temperament, severe on himself, not inclined to hope, and, in any case, melancholy as youth will be until it finds a definite vocation. He never strikes the note of joy in these early dis- courses. He shudders at the sight of his own fail- ings; and the world is so completely out of joint that, were it not for conscience speaking within, he would be an atheist or pantheist. Thus matter and form conspired to hold aloof from his pages a generation which thought itself progressive, enlightened, and prosperous beyond all that had ever been. He came as a ghost to trouble their festivity; no smiling orator, not an Evangelical who, if he began with terrors, would end with a comfortable assurance, but, had his manner been less gentle, a fanatic charged to scourge their pleasant virtues. And scarcely had he opened those prophetic lips than he shocked High Church and Low Church by a resolute turn- ing towards the only Christians he could discover in primitive ages—the unbending Athanasius; Antony the father of Monasticism in Egypt; Basil who was its lawgiver in the East; Ambrose, Martin, Augustine, to whose example or encour- 202 NEWMAN agement it owed its triumphs in Italy, Gaul, and Africa. This might be a ‘‘ second Reformation,” but it was reforming backwards; the nation, then or since, would have none of it, however individ- uals suffered themselves to be drawn by these new- old ideals. The Tractarian Movement has trans- formed the English Church, but not the English people. Had it done this, no doubt Newman’s writings would be in every one’s hands, though read by the serious only. But the efforts of years ended either in creating a High Church party on fresh lines, or in making converts to Rome. Its litera- ture, if we except the 4 pologia, has not yet forced the multitude to own it, as they do, reluctantly or gladly, Wordsworth’s chief poems and some of Carlyle’s prose. A popular classic is, indeed, very nearly a contradiction in terms. But Tennyson is a classic and is popular; by this we may reckon how far Newman ever was from satisfying the conditions that bring a writer of genius into the market-place. He must be judged by other standards. He is essentially for the few, an esoteric author whom the initiated follow with enthusiasm, while to strangers he seems cold and distant. _ Neither did he reveal himself, or discern where his real strength lay, in those first books of his. HIS PLACE IN HISTORY = 203 The Arians of the Fourth Century might appear to Dean Burgon, or other survivals from an extinct order, Newman’s lasting monument, only because it reminded them, as George III said on occasion, that “‘ there were giants in those days ’’—the days when Anglican divinity flourished. But we shall be disappointed if we look for his true character, his penetration, or sympathy, or meditative wis- dom, in a work overshadowed by influences which, as yet, he had not mastered. We are listening to Clement of Alexandria, not to Newman who, on any estimate, was incomparably more original than that amiable collector of anthologies. And if the matter is borrowed, the manner is mostly assumed. Doctrines tinged with mystic purple are rendered in floating and uncertain out- _ lines; the book is not a history nor even a whole; it draws no figure which stays with us, not Atha- nasius, or Constantine, or the Arian leaders, or Theodosius the Emperor; not Gregory of Nazian- zus himself, although studies for his portrait abound in the Saint’s own writings. Its merit con- sists in a bold attack on the belief, long prevalent, that Arius derived his views and principles from the Platonizing schools of Egypt; whereas New- man contends that the birthplace of Arianism was Antioch, its method the syllogism, and its guide Aristotle. But he had much to learn from Gibbon 204 NEWMAN in the art of summing up a situation and endowing its personages with a touch of life. The works which followed, if not invariably so abstruse, had no direct bearing on history. They were polemical, such as The Prophetic Office of the Church of England; and the Eighty-fifth Tract on difficulties in the Bible compared with difficulties in the Creed; or doctrinal, as the Lect- ures on Justification. Of these works it must be said that, notwithstanding beautiful and suggestive passages, they are done with. No theologians, Catholic or Lutheran, have gone to the essay on Justification for ideas; it was probably as little re- garded by Julius Miller in his epoch-making treatise, as by the Jesuit masters in Rome. Yet, considered from the spiritual point of view, it is deep and affecting, not to say exquisitely written. The Tract on Church and Bible was inspired by the Analogy, and contains a defence of its method, which has been taxed with scepticism, as a ‘* kill or cure ’’ system landing the reason in highly dangerous dilemmas. We are here on modern ground, a fact which . did not escape the sharp eyes of Professor Hux- ley. Newman, as he tells us himself, had gathered from Blanco White that there was a way of re- garding the Bible less narrow than the Evangelical in which he had been brought up. And though HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 205 he did not apparently fall in with such liberal practices, yet as an argumentum ad hominem he was willing to bear them in mind. Heretical teachers, with Jews of the Sadducean type, with Theodore of Mopsuestia, who became the chief Doctor of Nestorian Churches, with Latitudina- rians like Hales or Selden, might be sticklers for the literal sense. But Catholic writers had taken another path. Newman says of the true Church, “her most subtle and powerful method of proof, whether in ancient or modern times, is the mystical sense, which is so frequently used in doctrinal con- troversy as on many occasions to supersede any other.” Nay, he concludes, “‘ it may be almost laid down as an historical fact, that the mystical in- terpretation and orthodoxy will stand or fall to- gether.” That which emboldened Newman to attack with the sword of dilemma, was his firm belief of there being two powers, and two only, in conflict, Catholic Truth and Rationalism. ‘‘ Then will be the stern encounter,”’ he said, ‘‘ when two real and living principles, one in the Church, the other out of it, at length rush upon each other, contending not for names and words, or half-views, but for elementary notions and distinctive moral char- acters.” He scoffed at the “ sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons” who were preferred 206 NEWMAN in high places to guide religion “through the channel of No-meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and No.” Whether the ideas of the coming age were true or false, they would be real. And to make his hearers realize what they held, of course in the hope that it would be Christian, the preacher did not hesitate to enforce a parallel between the obscurities of the Bible and the objections to the Church. Professor Huxley states the position with his usual terseness; “ the dogma of the infallibility of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the infallibility of the Pope. If the former is held by ‘ faith,’ then the latter may be. If the latter is to be accepted, or rejected, by private judg- ment, why not the former?”’ Moreover, since all the Protestant creeds were professedly based on the canonical Scriptures, “‘ it followed that, in the long run, whoso settled the canon defined the creed.” We had now the issue, on which hung such momentous consequences, set before us in its real magnitude. ‘‘ The logical acumen of Augus- tine,”’ says Huxley once more, ‘‘ showed him that the authority of the Gospel he preached must rest on that of the Church to which he belonged.” It would be unfair not to give the eminent agnostic’s conclusion; “if with one hand Dr. Newman has destroyed Protestantism, he has an- HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 207 nihilated Romanism with the other; and the total result of his ambidextral efforts is to shake Chris- tianity to its foundations. Nor was any one better aware that this must be the inevitable result of his arguments—if the world should refuse to accept Roman doctrines and Roman miracles— than the writer of Tract Eighty-five.” ‘‘ He be- lieved,” the Professor goes on to say, “that his arguments led either Romeward, or to what eccle- siastics call ‘ Infidelity,’ and I call ‘ Agnosticism.’ I believe that he was quite right in this conviction; but while he chooses the one alternative, I choose the other.” From this it would appear as if Tract Eighty- five still had its bearing on the great world-prob- lems; and so it has for all who will turn to it. Nevertheless, Bible criticism in England now occu- pies such a space, and the points on which Newman dwelt have been merged into inquiries so much larger and more radical, that his treatment can- not fail to seem old-fashioned. Yet there are in it pregnant observations not a few, like the follow- ing: “‘ though the Bible be inspired, it has all such characteristics as might attach to a book unin- spired—the characteristics of dialect and style, the distinct effects of times and places, youth and age, _of moral and intellectual character.” And there is an admirable page, too long for quotation, but 208 NEWMAN which would arrest us in the most accomplished critic, on the simplicity, depth, and consequent in- completeness of the Scripture record. It is no flattery, but a truth which will strike any one who reads it, that this description of the spirit in which the sacred writers come before us, applies accu- rately to Newman’s own manner. His “ half- sentences, parentheses, clauses, nay his words, have a meaning in them independent of the con- text, and admit of exposition. There is nothing put in for ornament’s sake, or for rhetoric; noth- ' ing put in for the mere sake of anything else, but all for its own sake; all as the expressions and shadows of great things, as seeds of thought, and with corresponding realities.” Another remarkable attempt to apply the prin- ciple of Butler’s philosophy, was exhibited in the second Essay on Miracles. Whatever may be the judgment of a reader in our time who gives him- self to these refined and fascinating suggestions, on a subject which has divided churches and agi- tated nations, he will hardly take his ground where Macaulay did in 1843. Writing to Napier of the Edinburgh, the great rhetorician tells him, ‘‘ New- man announces an English Hagiology in numbers, which is to contain the lives of such blessed saints as Thomas a Becket and Dunstan. I should not dislike to be the avvocato del diavolo on such an HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 209 occasion.” And again, “I hear much of the miracles of the third and fourth centuries by Newman. I think that I could treat that subject without giving scandal to any rational person, and I should like it much. The times require a Mid- dleton.” Perhaps it may be well to observe that Con- yers Middleton, here invoked against Newman, was in Sir Leslie Stephen’s judgment, as in De Quincey’s, a confirmed opponent of the super- natural, and if a Christian, which may be doubted, he was one on grounds of social expediency, rather than of spiritual faith, Newman himself grants in the dpologia that science can probably explain, as taking place in the order of nature, various facts which hitherto have been considered by Catholics as simply miraculous. But he adds, “There is this gain accruing from the larger views we now possess of the operation of natural causes; our opponents will not in future be so ready to impute fraud and falsehood to our priests and their witnesses, on the ground of their pre- tending or reporting things that are incredible.” He hopes that “‘ our facts will be investigated, not our testimony impugned.” How Macaulay would have written we know, for we know how Middleton has written. And how much more sensitive to testimony, as well as 210 NEWMAN more modest in negation, a later age can be, we may learn from recent estimates of St. Dunstan, one of the glories of Saxon England, and from so candid an inquiry as Dr. Abbott’s, concerning the Death and Miracles of St. Thomas of Canter- bury. This keen and to some extent sceptical au- thor writes, ‘‘I should be disposed to think that almost all the early miracles were facts, corre- sponding largely to the description of them.” He calls this ‘‘one of the many triumphs of mind over matter.” And he explains it thus: “ Through ballads, sermons, pictures, and above all, through stories of pilgrims passing to and from the Mar- tyr’s Memorial, there was gradually conveyed to the minds of almost all the sick and suffering folk in England, and to their sympathizing house- holds and friends, the image of St. Thomas before the altar, clothed in white, with the streak of blood across his face. This vision, or this thought, re- sulted in a multitude of mighty works of healing.” With that account of St. Thomas of Canterbury and his miracles after death, it is impossible not to compare what Newman has argued in a matter of infinitely greater consequence, which it will also serve to illustrate. What is the explanation, he asks, of the wonderful triumph achieved by Christianity, although Christ Himself had de- parted? He answers that, through His preachers, ‘O68I ‘6I ISNANY UO paling seA ay s194M ‘WIEYAUIULIIG Ie9U ‘[EUpay Je PARI S,UBUIMaN] [BEUIpseD simaT “I, &q oj0yg Lapa rerhacck HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 211 the Image of Christ was found imprinted in the minds of His subjects individually; that image, apprehended and worshipped, became a real bond of those subjects one with another; it was their moral life, as it was the original instrument of their conversion. It was “ the Image of Him who fulfils the one great need of human nature, the healer of its wounds, the physician of the soul; this image it is which both creates faith and then re- wards it.” To such effect Newman in the Grammar of Assent. If that mental vision be called “ cloudy, fanciful, unintelligible,’ he answers that it cannot appear otherwise to the ‘‘ disputer of this world,” since it is really miraculous. A new idea, which produced changes so astounding, moral, religious, political, in the minds and conduct of myriads, is certainly not to be explained away by fraud or cunning; and if we utter the word ‘“‘ enthusiasm ” we are at once taken back to the inward impulse from which it was derived; we have passed be- yond the region of calculable or mechanical forces. The argument a priori which denies whatsoever ‘breaks the monotony of palpable cause and pal- pable effect,” itself breaks down when brought face to face with conditions so peculiar, yet so well- ascertained, as these. Instead of its being im- probable that signs and wonders should occur, it 212 NEWMAN is highly improbable that they should not. The process may be obscure, the psychology too deli- cate for our instruments; but the facts alleged, now that they fall under a rule and motive, cease to be unreasonable, isolated, and incredible. ““ Tf the miracles of Church history,” said New- man in the treatise that Macaulay disparaged, “cannot be defended by the arguments of Leslie, Lyttleton, Paley, or Douglas’’—famous apolo- gists of the eighteenth century—‘‘ how many of the Scripture miracles satisfy their conditions? ” These writers had been willing or desirous to es- tablish the truth of Christianity on miracles such as could be proved in a court of justice by legal evidence. Instead of prophets announcing the year of redemption, lawyers were to come for- ward, with briefs in their hands, skilful at cross- examining witnesses. But why should such evidence be indispensable as a test of truth? Middleton had refrained from attacking the Scripture miracles because, as he said, they were found in an inspired narrative. Suppose the narrative not inspired, would those particular facts never have taken place? Could the artist or poet, summoned before a jury, prove to them by what experiences he had reached his creative designs, or show them more than the effect of a hidden and now unattainable cause? Must HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 213 Revelation either not be given, or come with an array of proofs clear enough to vanquish the obstinacy, while in no degree changing the hearts, of unbelievers? Or could we impose conditions on the Supreme? Nay, rather, Newman replies, “if we only go so far as to realize what Chris- tianity is, when considered merely as a creed, and what stupendous overpowering facts are involved in the doctrine of a Divine Incarnation, we shall feel that no miracle can be great after it, nothing strange or marvellous, nothing beyond expecta- tion.” To his mind this was the antecedent probability on which alleged miraculous occurrences should be judged; and as for the evidence, it might be strong or slight, abundant or scarcely any at all, but it was not invalidated because it failed, if so be, to reach the high-water mark of proofs ten- dered to a jury. ‘Our view of the evidence,” he did not shrink from asserting, “‘ will practically be decided by our views of theology. . . . Men will systematize facts in their own way, according to their knowledge, opinions, and wishes; and they will refer them to causes which they see or believe, in spite of their being referable to other causes about which they are ignorant or sceptical. As the admission of a Creator is necessary for the argumentative force of the miracles of 214 NEWMAN Moses or St. Paul, so does the doctrine of a Divine Presence in the Church supply what is ambiguous in the miracles of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus or St. Martin.”? And, ‘‘ as in the natural world the animal and vegetable kingdoms imperceptibly melt into each other, so are there mutual affinities and correspondences between the two families of miracles as found in inspired and uninspired his- tory, which show that, whatever may be their separate peculiarities, yet as far as concerns their internal characteristics, they admit of being parts of one system.” It cannot fail to strike the reader that Newman is here engaged upon an argument from con- tinuity, very like the thought afterwards to be exhibited by Darwin with such a wealth of detail; and it is manifestly akin to the notion of develop- ment, or rather passes into it so soon as particu- lars come to be handled. Things which are like one another we readily take to be akin; descent will account for their likeness; but a closer scrutiny reveals that they are also unlike, and how shall we meet this more complex problem? Does kinship bring with it an unvarying repetition of one pat- tern? Are real types reducible to formulas which exhaust their possibilities? And can these or similar questions be decided a priori, any more than the law of gravitation and other laws in the HIS: PLACE! IN| HISTORY © 21% physical universe? Could we come to Church and Bible with rules ready-made, Procrustean require- ments, corresponding indeed to our notions of the fitness of things, but rightly waived aside by the deep thinker who reminds us that we have no means of judging how a Revelation shall be made, if given at all? When Newman had reached this point in his meditations, he was on the eve of momentous discoveries. ‘The method familiar to polemics on all sides, by which the present was simply identi- fied with the past and both shut up in an abstract equation, must give place to one more impersonal. “ Christianity has been long enough in the world” —it is thus that the Development opens—‘ to justify us in dealing with it as a fact in the world’s history. Its genius and character, its doctrines, precepts, and objects cannot be treated as matters of private opinion or deduction, unless we may reasonably so regard the Spartan institutions or the religion of Mahomet.” This was the historic method. Not as if the author had forgotten his own declarations touching the ‘‘ antecedent prob- abilities,” or idiosyncracies of the individual, on which he enlarges elsewhere. He knows that men will differ when all is said; but history brings mat- ters to a test and submits them to a tribunal where the issue may be clearly stated, or even decided, 216 NEWMAN unlike the method of arguing from formulas which is pure deduction. Church history, as we saw, had become a dead letter in the English Universities; it found no stu- dents, as it could hope for scarcely any readers, among the public out of doors. The Bible, han- dled piecemeal, by texts and chapters, was the sole source of Revelation; personal caprice took from its teaching what it would and left the remainder. But the most surprising consequence was that a religion which had subdued the Roman Empire, converted the Teutons, Slavs, Celts, Norsemen, absorbed the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, preserved ancient literature and created modern, seemed, if anything was to be concluded from the silence of divines and the neglect of learned men, to have had no history at all. What could be the scope or depth of a philosophy which, allowing the Apostolic age to be a continuation of the Gos- pel, broke off abruptly when St. John died, leaped over twelve or fifteen centuries, and would fain perceive in a small sect creeping through the dark here and there that Universal Church which was magnified by prophets and destined to teach all nations ? Now that we are steeped in the ideas which make evolution our mental form (tending itself to lose contents and sink into a formula) we cannot HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 217 but see on every page of the Development Dar- win’s advancing shadow. As he was to con- template biology—the story of life realizing its potencies in every direction, yet moving up into species more perfect than its starting-point towards adaptation in a world where it must make its home, so Newman tracked religion from its re- corded origins in Scripture along the periods by which it came down, uninterruptedly, to his own day. Darwin set up the law of Natural Selection as explaining how varieties, when once given, brought forth species: Newman, without employ- ing the term, indicates Supernatural Selection as the principle by which truth is winnowed from heresy, and institutions are developed to meet the changing circumstances of mankind. “I saw,” he remarks in the Apologia, that “ the principle of development not only accounted for certain facts, but was in itself a remarkable philosophical phenomenon, giving a character to the whole course of Christian thought. It was discernible from the first years of Christian teaching up to the present day, and gave to that teaching a unity and individuality. It served as a sort of test, which the Anglican could not stand, that modern Rome was in truth ancient Antioch, Alexandria, and Constantinople, just as a mathematical curve has its own law and expression.” 218 NEWMAN But there is a closer resemblance to the Origin of Species than this discovery of one law, or one element, running through all fruitful variation, in Newman’s treatise. What did the latter under- stand by ‘‘ development”? Was it, as the school- men used to distinguish, preformation or epigene- sis? These technical terms have distinct meanings. In the idea of preformation, “all the future products, down to the very last, lie secretly wrapped up in the original germ,” and are simply unfolded as time goes on. ‘That is, evidently, a mechanical notion which would take from living things their mystery as their power. But in epi- genesis ‘‘ every stage of the growth becomes a causative impulse to a new stage,” and the ele- ments supervene as fresh matter, to be assimilated under law in a synthesis not hitherto realized. ‘“* Development,” Newman says roundly, “is a process of incorporation.” For “ doctrines and views which relate to man are not placed in a void, but in the crowded world, and make way for them- selves by interpenetration, and develop by absorp- tion. Facts and opinions which have hitherto been regarded in other relations and grouped round oth- er centres, henceforth are gradually attracted to a new influence and subjected to a new sovereign. They are modified, laid down afresh, thrust aside, as the case may be. A new element of order and HIS. PLACE IN HISTORY 219 composition has come among them.” Clearly, this “‘ eclectic, conservative, assimilating, healing, moulding process”’ is not mere explication, but epigenesis. And, in religious ideas as in forms of life, there is a struggle for existence. “‘In Christianity, opinion, while a raw material, is called philosophy or scholasticism; when a rejected refuse, it is called heresy.”’ It kept its original type, from its perception and love of what had been revealed once for all and was no private imagination. It had always the dogmatic principle by which to accept or reject what was offered. ‘‘ As the first step in settling a question is to raise and debate it, so heresies in every age may be taken as the measure of the existing state of thought in the Church, and of the movement of her theology; they determine in what way the current is set- ting, and the rate at which it flows.” It is ‘no random combination of various opinions, but a diligent, patient working out of one doctrine from many materials. The conduct of Popes, Coun- cils, Fathers, betokens the slow, painful, anxious taking up of new elements into an existing body of belief.” There is even a ‘‘ sacramental prin- ciple,” a certain virtue or grace, which “ changes the quality of doctrines, opinions, usages, actions, and personal characters when incorporated with 220 NEWMAN it, and makes them right and acceptable, whereas before they were either infected with evil, or at best but shadows of truth.” The force of epi- genesis can no farther go; it amounts to trans- formation, yet not of the divine germ, but of that which it subdues to itself. Hence it is that “ the rulers of the Church from early times were pre- pared, should the occasion arise, to adopt, or imi- tate, or sanction, the existing rites and customs of the populace, as well as the philosophy of the edu- cated class.”’ In saying all this, not only was Newman, like Isaiah, very bold, but he was putting forward a philosophy of Christian action which could not be limited to past ages. When he joined the Roman Church he found in its schools and its accredited manuals of teaching a different method at work, which is best exemplified in Bossuet’s famous Variations. To the changes among Protestants Bossuet opposed the uniformity of Catholic dogma and practice. His arguments were forcible; his tone was commanding; and, since by temper he was not critical, the complexities of Church his- tory failed to leave traces on his imagination. Moreover, the scholastic method is deductive, it starts from a synthesis already gained, without inquiring, unless by compulsion, into its previous stages. Newman stood outside the school, as it & 1 CO AN SE OA OR BE es i Photo by H. N. King The Statue of Cardinal Newman at the Brompton Oratory, London. HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 221 were in the public street, and had to win the passers-by on terms which, while faithful to the creed, were intelligible to them. It might be ex- pected, therefore, that as the critical or historical demands of the century grew louder, his way of meeting them would be more in request. This expectation was fulfilled and is in course of larger acceptance wherever the Catholic doc- trine has come into close quarters with Bible studies, the problems of science, physical and metaphysical, and the elements of a new civilisa- tion. On all these great and difficult subjects, the Development will be consulted for its “ hints and seeds of thought” during many years to come; it has an importance for the future surpassing all its reviews of primitive Christianity. Until its work is done, it cannot die. In like manner we may look upon the Gram- mar of Assent as delivering the individual from the yoke of a pedantic and unreal system, which made our apprehension of truth dependent on rules, not otherwise than the authority of the Christian Church was supposed to depend on formal evidence tested by private judgment. Cer- titude in religion or in any other department of action is not thus to be “cribbed, cabined, and confined,” according to the cast-iron logic which would take from poetry, from love, from inspira- 222 NEWMAN tion their dearest elements as not being susceptible of proof. We cannot dispense with personality in concrete and vital issues; if we affect to do so, it is either a pretence or a mistake. Reason, taste, skill, invention in the Fine Arts—and so, again, discretion or judgment in conduct—“ are exerted spontaneously, when once acquired, and could not give a clear account of themselves, or of their mode of proceeding. They do not go by rule.” Genius has its own subject-matter. “We are bound,” says Aristotle, who is on this great question the master of Newman, “ to give heed to the undemonstrated sayings and opinions of the experienced and aged, not less than to demonstrations; because, from their having the eye of experience, they behold the principles of things.” This, which may be called English, nay Shake- spearean, wisdom was the grand attribute of New- man himself. If he wrote of development in Christian doctrine, it was because he had lived through the process, spending years in an effort of mind and heart to pass along with the Church from her beginnings to her latest period. "When he saw in real assents the true motive-powers that lead to action, he was appealing to his own story, which had been always governed by them, as he knew well, and not by arguments on paper, loud HIS PLACE IN HISTORY = 293 rhetoric, or the idols of the market place and the theatre. Did he put forward a view of University education which inculcated a liberal training rather than aimed at creating experts and specialists who should know not a syllable outside their art, he was its manifest example no less than its convinced advocate. If he held up the ancient classics for imitation, he showed how it could be done without sacrifice of originality, as he threw himself into the Catholic tradition yet kept every one of his most characteristic features. In statement he may not be always uniform; he cannot be tabulated, summed up, resolved into parts, and set out in proportions; for he is ever himself, as individual as Goethe, yet not like Goethe isolated, or stand- ing apart from the beneficent institutions, by which the race is preserved from _ barbarism, religious, political, and mental. Newman’s supreme gift was an intellect which detected the logical inadequacy of words, argu- ments, ideas, and systems when confronted with the realities which they bodied forth. On the other hand, he perceived that the individual must be guided by his conscience, and that society lives by revelation and tradition. Hence are derived his four great leading principles—implicit reason, economical representation, symbolic expression, and the necessary development of creeds. Thus 224 NEWMAN he bridges the gulf between reason and experi- ence; he connects the finite with the Infinite; he deduces the Catholic Church from Primitive Christianity; and he protects faith against the assaults of a fictitious enlightenment. Religion and science are brought to the same touchstone, which is reality known or desired, sought by love and possessed by life, of which the guiding motive must be a moral choice in action. 'Whoso accepts this doctrine has escaped from the eighteenth century and overthrown Rationalism. His other works, besides those which we have named, are chapters in self-portraiture, leading up to the Apologia or illustrating it. Letters, stories, sermons, belong to the full description of a man whose language, always sincere, was wrought up little by little to a finish and a refinement, a strength and a subtlety, thrown into the forms of eloquence, beyond which no English writer of prose has gone. It had its limits, at least in the using. But there seems to be no subject and no character to which it would not be equal. It is invariably just, tender, penetrating, animated, de- cisive, and weighty. It is eminently pure. It has learned to smile; it can be entertaining, humorous, pleading, indignant, as its creator wills. It lends grace and persuasive charm to the most recondite of arguments. It is at once English of the centre HIS PLACE IN HISTORY 225 and Newman’s own style, inimitable because it is natural. By it he will live when the questions upon which it was employed have sunk below the horizon, or appear above it in undreamt-of shapes; for it is in itself a thing of light and beauty, a treasure from the classic past, an inheritance be- queathed to those peoples and continents which shall bear onward to far-off ages the language and literature that entitle England to a place beside Rome and Hellas in the world’s chronicle. THE END LITERARY LIVES Edited by W. ROBERTSON NICOLL Matthew Arnold By G. W. E. RUSSELL Extract from Preface: <©WT was Arnold’s express wish that he should not be made the subject of a Biography. This rendered it impossible to produce the sort of book by which an eminent man is usually commemorated—at once a history of his life, an estimate of his work, and an analysis -f his character and opinions. But, though a biography wa. forbidden, Arnold’s family felt sure he would not have objected to the publication of a selection from his correspondence ; and it !ecame my happy task to collect, and in some sense to edit, the two volumes of his letters which were published in 1895. The letters, with all their editorial shortcomings (of which I willingly take my full share), constitute _ the nearest approach to a narrative of Arnold’s life which can, consistently with his wishes, be given to the world; and the ground so covered will not be retraversed here. All that literary criticism can do for the honor of his prose and verse has been done already, conscientiously by Mr. Saintsbury, affectionately and sympathetically by Mr. Paul, and with varying competence and skill by a host of minor critics. But in preparing this book I have been careful not to re-read what more accomplished pens than mine have written, for I wished my judgment to be unbiased by previous verdicts. «