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SIX OXFORD THINKERS
GIBBON NEWMAN CHURCH
FROUDE PATER MORLEY

SIX OXFORD THINKERS
EDWARD GIBBON. JOHN HENRY NEW
MAN. R. W. CHURCH. JAMES ANTHONY
FROUDE. WALTER PATER. LORD
MORLEY OF BLACKBURN

BY ALGERNON CECIL, M.A. Oxon.
OF THE INNER TEMPLE, BARRISTER-AT-LAW

LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET W.
1909

PREFACE
My best thanks are due to Mr John Murray for
allowing me to reprint those parts of the follow
ing essays on Church, Froude, and Lord Morley,
which originally appeared in the Monthly Review.
I am also much indebted to Mr J. D. Milner of
the National Portrait Gallery for some help with
regard to portraits of Gibbon ; and to Lady
Margaret Cecil, Miss Froude, and Mr J. B. Rye,
in respect of the essay on Froude. I should
have wished to dedicate this book to Mr Herbert
Fisher as a small, though most unworthy, recol
lection of his inexhaustible kindness to me both
as tutor and friend ; but I felt that he would be
too much out of sympathy with the tenor of it
to make this permissible, even had it not con
tained a modest refutation of a passage in
a very ancient article of his, which Messrs
Langlois and Seignobos have unfortunately
drawn out of oblivion. A. C.
Lytchett Heath,
POOLE, January 1909.

CONTENTS PAGE
Introductory  ... 1-7
EDWARD GIBBON
Elia on the "Decline and Fall "—Gibbon's youth—
Middleton's "Free Inquiry" — Gibbon anticipates the
intellectual process of the Oxford Movement —
Becomes a Roman Catholic — His later scepticism —
His love-affair — His appearance — A militiaman —
His prospects — The "Essai sur la Litterature" —
Rome — No. 7 Bentinck Street and " La Grotte" —
"The Decline and Fall" — Its significance among
great histories — Its motive — Sketch of the narrative
— Its merits — The influence of Christianity discussed
— Finlay's view — The decline of the Roman Empire
due to socialism — Gibbon as a historical artist — His
style — Criticisms of his work — His auxiliaries — His
failure — Place of Constantinople in his imagination
— Gibbon at Lausanne — Gibbon and Pitt — The fall
of the leaf— The end ... ... 8-43
J. H. NEWMAN
The "Character of a Gentleman,'' the touchstone of
Newman's doctrines — And the cause of his secession
— The conditions precedent to the Oxford Movement
— Keble — Hurrell Froude — J. A. Froude's description
of Newman — The " Assize Sermon " — The Hadleigh
meeting : Pusey — The Four o'clock Sermons at St
Mary's ; Newman's style of preaching — The Heads
of Houses and the Bishops ; " The Three Defeats " —
The Jerusalem Bishopric — The young Catholic party ;
W. G. Ward — Newman's difficulties — Littlemore--
The crisis: within — The crisis: without — The
last act — The intellectual development of Newman's

vm

CONTENTS

PAGE

mind— (a) The historical argument embodied in the
"Essays on Miracles" ; (i) The ecclesiastical argu
ment embodied in the "Prophetical Office of the
Church." Newman's conception ofthe Church. Angli
canism " unambitious " of it. Summary of the " Via
Media ofthe Anglican Church." The rider attached to
it; (c) The doctrinal argument embodied in the
" Essay on the Development of Doctrine." Its value.
The biological test. Leslie Stephen's criticism dis
cussed. Mozley's criticism. A philosophy of History.
(d) The theological argument. The inspiration of the
Church — Newman as a Roman Catholic — The basis
of religious belief; "A Grammar of Assent" —
Newman and the Modernists — Conclusion of the
"Grammar of Assent " — Newman'slife inthe Church of
Rome — Pusey^s " Eirenicon " — Gladstone's pamphlet
— The "Achilli" case — The disagreement with
Manning — The occasion of the " Apologia '' — The
" Apologia " — Newman's style. Its place in English
literature — Newman as a historian — The bitterness of
his satire — His severity — " The Dream of Gerontius "
— Newman's foresight — The Cardinalate — The end
— Criticisms — The charge of scepticism — The
charge of credulity — Conclusion . . . .44-122
R. W. CHURCH
The Church of England — R. W. Church a brilliant excep
tion to the common rule — Events of his life : scholar ;
statesman ; saint — As scholar ; (a) " The Gifts of
Civilisation" ; The Roman Empire and Christianity ;
(6) Essay on "Bishop Andrewes" — The Church of
England ; (c) Essay on "Bishop Butler" — The basis
of religion — As statesman ; (a) His high qualities for
statesmanship ; (6) " The Guardian " ; (c) St Paul's
— As saint; (a) His severity ; (i) "The Ventures of
Faith " ; (c) Church and Newman ; (d) The end ;
(e) His impressions of life . 123-155
J. A. FROUDE
Froude's place as a historian — Froude and Tacitus — His
early life — The "Nemesis of Faith" — The outlook
for Catholicism : Newman — The outlook for
Protestanism : Carlyle — Bunsen and Modernism —

CONTENTS ix
PAGE
Froude's " History of England " — Froude's peculiar
qualifications for writing it — Froude and Lecky as
types of historical method — Froude's alleged mis
takes — " A Siding at a Railway Station " — Froude
and Freeman — The " Erasmus " — Froude's handicap
— The great characters of his History — Henry,
Anne, More, Cranmer, Latimer, Cromwell —
The monasteries — The English Bible — The English
Liturgy — The Articles — Cranmer's death the
triumph of the English reformers — The Elizabethan
settlement — The Spanish Armada — The conclusion
— Carlyle's gospel — Life of Carlyle — Froude's divided
allegiance ; Christ and Caesar — " The English in
Ireland " — Froude in South Africa — " Oceana " —
"The Bow of Ulysses" — Tariffs — Froude's con
ception of history — " Caesar " and " Lord Beacons
field" — Froude's style — His personality and
appearance — The "Short Studies "—" The Cat's
Pilgrimage" — Froude's opinions — Literary men —
The Oxford Professorship — The end . . . 156-213

WALTER PATER
Ritualism old and new — Catholicity in Art — Pater's
childhood — The collision with Ruskin — Ruskin's
theory of Art — Pater's divergence — " Diaphaneite "
— The gospel of Culture — Pater's theory of Art —
The essay on "iEsthetic Poetry" — "Renaissance
Studies " ; Leonardo ; Botticelli ; Pico — " Greek
Studies": The " Bacchse " ; " Demeter and Kore "—
Pater's special talent—" Marius the Epicurean " —
Marius and John Inglesant — " Imaginary Portraits ''
— "A Prince of Court Painters"; "Sebastian van
Storck " — London life — The last phase — Oxford
again — The end — His work and style — His religion
sometimes followed to-day  214-251

LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN
Lord Morley — Politics and religion — Newman's
definition of Liberalism — Liberalism as it appears
to-day — Liberal and Catholic ideals contrasted —

CONTENTS

PAGE

Mill— The enthusiasm of Liberty— The Encyclo
paedists — The benefits of Liberalism — Its super
ficiality—In the society of the French Liberals,
Diderot, Helvetius, Holbach, Rousseau, Turgor,
Condorcet, Voltaire ; Lord Morley's debt to them.
Points of resemblance — Utilitarianism the basis of
Liberalism — Conscience up to date — Some Nemeses
of Utilitarianism — "On Compromise"— The unseen
foundations of society undermined by Liberalism —
The meaning of aristocracy — Gladstone and Ruskin
— Lecky on Democracy — The " scientific " politician
of the future— The Toryism of the past — Lord
Morley's " Burke " — Lord Morley's views on religion
— The religion of Science — Doubt and conviction —
Lord Morley in public life — The Irish Secretariate —
Lord Morley's later books on men of affairs :
" Machiavelli," " Cromwell," " Gladstone " — Lord
Morley as a historian — Scientific history fatalist
in tendency — The moralities, insisted upon by Lord
Morley, inconsistent with it — Effect of strong moral
emotion on Lord Morley's style — His resemblance
to Lucretius in temper of mind — His satire —
Newman once more . . ... 252-301

"The great object in trying to understand history, political,
religious, literary or scientific, is to get behind men and grasp
ideas. Ideas have a radiation and development, an ancestry and
posterity of their own, in which men play the part of godfathers
and godmothers more than of legitimate parents.''
— " Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone,'' p. 6.

SIX OXFORD THINKERS
INTRODUCTORY
The quotation from the late Lord Acton's
letters, which stands on the preceding page, is
probably as good a confession of faith as the
student of modern history can require. Very
slowly we are beginning to understand that the
ideas of the past are infinitely more interesting
than its battlefields, and of infinitely greater
consequence to ourselves. To have felt ' the
social tissue' of a society is to have been in
touch with all that is most worth knowing
about it. But the social tissue cannot be properly
examined in an abstract manner by the isolation
of ideas from their temporary hosts. It is not
thus that ideas operate, and it is not thus that
they can be reviewed. They require a dynamic,
not a static, demonstration. They ought always
to be seen in action and reaction against the
lives of the men who stood their sponsors.
This book is an attempt to treat in this

2 INTRODUCTORY
fashion an idea or chain of ideas which exercised
a profound influence upon the nineteenth century.
One of the cardinal distinctions between that
century and its predecessor was its respect for
and deference to history. The philosophers
had had a free hand in the eighteenth century,
until at last Reason sat enthroned in the person
of a woman, not ambitious of particular characteri
sation, on the altar of Notre Dame, and the
Carmagnole was, as Carlyle said, 'complete.'
Those who were wiser than the philosophers
knew better how often Reason is a motive of
action, how often merely a decent cloak to
veil our passions. " The vice of modern legisla
tion," said Napoleon, " is that it makes no
appeal to the imagination." " I never was a
rash disbeliever," says the hero in "Amelia,"
"my chief doubt was founded on this — that, as
men appeared to me to act entirely from their
passions their actions could have neither merit nor
demerit." "A very worthy conclusion, truly!"
cries the doctor ; " but if men act as I believe
they do, from their passions, it would be fair to
conclude that religion to be true which applies
immediately to the strongest of these passions,
hope and fear ; choosing rather to rely on its
rewards and punishments than on that native
beauty of virtue which some of the ancient

INTRODUCTORY 3
philosophers thought proper to recommend to
their disciples."
So that, after Reason had for some years
been written in blood about the squares and
streets of Paris, and human nature was no
longer looked at through the writings of the
philosophers, but as it really happened to be,
the old institutions which had been devised by
the wisdom of ages to put some check upon
the passions of men, began once more to seem
important. History became profoundly interest
ing, and Religion followed along the tracts which
History excavated. The Primitive Church, the
Mediaeval Church, and the Reformation were
closely scrutinised. Men cared to know what
their forefathers had believed and had thought
it worth while to die for, and, whilst they con
tinued to think freely and widely, thought also
reverently, which had not been the case before.
To depict, and in some degree to discuss the
progress of Oxford thought in the nineteenth
century by the light of the careers and characters
of certain powerful Oxford intellects is the aim
of these studies.
Gibbon, whose life lay entirely in the eighteenth
century, and whose residence at the university
was of the shortest, may, at first sight, appear
out of place in such a collection. But, not only

4 INTRODUCTORY
is he something of a link between the philosophic
attitude of the eighteenth and the historic attitude
of the nineteenth century, but hisTime*arOxicrrd
was precisely the most important of his life
from the point of view of this book ; his re
searches, or rather the conclusions he drew from
them, the position at which the Catholic Move
ment was levelled ; and his history the constant
companion of its leader.
Newman is, of course, the central figure of
this, as he must be of any collection, in which
his name appears. He brought the ideas of
the Oxford Movement to a systematic complete
ness which could not have been satisfied anywhere
outside of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Anglican view is exhibited through
the mind of Church, the most beautiful mind
of the nineteenth century. His outlook was
wider and wiser than that of Keble and Pusey,
and less emotional than that of Liddon, who
might all have been chosen as types of the
"Via Media Anglicana."
Froude is representative of a standpoint,
which will, in the writer's view, become in
the end that of all educated religious men who
do not accept the Catholic — the word is used
in the most liberal sense — view of the world.
His Protestantism, not so stubborn as that of

INTRODUCTORY 5
Carlyle, nor so believing as that of Kingsley,
lies somewhere between the creeds of these, his
two great friends.
Pater illustrates the aftermath of the Catholic
Revival ; a vague but beautiful ritualism, tenacious
of old forms not real to those who use them,
which has done very much to soften the hard
lines of controversy, but has brought with it
a certain decadence of genuine religious emotion
and a remarkable intellectual insincerity in really
good people.
The essay on Lord Morley of Blackburn,
which hardly attempts to follow him into practical
politics, stands at the close of the book, as
Gibbon's stands at the beginning, for a foil to
show the final significance for religion and the
theory of politics in England of the Voltairean
Movement. No one can fail to see in the
colouring of Lord Morley's thoughts how deeply
that movement had been modified by the
Catholic Revival, how much more clearly men
understood for what stakes they were playing.
It will be noticed that with four of these
men at least, History is no register of the
observations of an unmoved, disinterested, some
times unmoral, spectator. The great causes
with which they deal appear to them not merely
to have been, but also to be, of vital importance

6 INTRODUCTORY
to us. Always and at every turn there is in
their view a right and a wrong. The Powers
of Light and Darkness, very variously conceived,
never relinquish their contest, never sign a
truce ; and this is exactly what seems to them
to give to the past all its value and significance.
As Lord Morley puts it : " The annals of the
Papacy — in some respects the most fascinating
and important of all the chapters of modern
history — are one thing in the hands of Pastor
the Catholic, another thing to Creighton the
Anglican, a third thing to Moller the Lutheran,
and something again quite different to writers
of more secular stamp like Gregorovius and
Reumont. It is not merely difference in
documents that makes the history of the French
Revolution one story to Thiers or Mignet,
and a story wholly different to Louis Blanc or
to Taine. Talk of history being a science as
loudly as ever we like, the writer of it will
continue to approach his chests of archives with
the bunch of keys in his hand." x
Of Gibbon this is not perhaps always true
— he could scarcely be the idol of the modern
school of historians if it were — but it is true of
those passages which, rightly or wrongly, have
given point and power to his book. And even
1 " Miscellanies," Fourth Series, p. 228.

INTRODUCTORY 7
Pater, although he cared little or nothing for
the moral aspect of an idea or a situation, nor
whether causes were lost or won, and thus on
his own very limited field, and by his inimitable
psychologic method, drew nearer to a scientific
presentation of history1 than many who have
more directly striven after it, is yet essentially
and by choice a selective historian, a literary
artist,2 if a passive, yet never an impassive,
spectator of the past.
So that the author need make the less apology
here for trying to exhibit the opinion of others
without trying to conceal his own, and these
essays will be lavishly repaid if they serve to
awaken a living interest in some of the problems,
which not so long ago appeared to be of the
first moral consequence to mankind. Those,
who debated them, were for the most part men
of very high character and very fine intellect,
and it is no fancy that there are none like
them to take their places. In conclusion, the
reader is asked to remember that these papers
are only essays, and claim the proper privilege
of essays — to be at times a little discursive.
1 Cf. Pater, "Appreciations," p. 72.
8 Cf. Ibid., p. 9.

EDWARD GIBBON

i 737- i 794
Elia on the "Decline and Fall" — Gibbon's youth — Middleton's
"Free Inquiry" — Gibbon anticipates the intellectual process
of the Oxford Movement — Becomes a Roman Catholic — His
later scepticism — His love-affair — His appearance — A
militiaman — His prospects — The " Essai sur la Literature " —
Rome— No. 7 Bentinck Street and "La Grotte"— "The
Decline and Fall " — Its significance among great histories-
Its motive — Sketch of the narrative — Its merits — The
influence of Christianity discussed — Finlay's view — The
decline of the Roman Empire due to socialism — Gibbon as
a historical artist — His style — Criticisms of his work — His
auxiliaries — His failure — Place of Constantinople in his
imagination — Gibbon at Lausanne — Gibbon and Pitt — The
fall of the leaf— The end.
" The other, deep and slow, exhausting thought,
And hiving wisdom with each studious year,
In meditation dwelt, with learning wrought,
And shaped his weapon with an edge severe,
Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer ;
The lord of irony — that master-spell,
Which stung his foes to wrath, which grew from fear,
And doomed him to the zealot's ready hell,
Which answers to all doubts so eloquently well."
— Childe Harolds Pilgrimage, iii. 107.
" I have no repugnances," says Elia.1 "Shaftes
bury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild
1 "Essays of Elia, Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading"
8

i737'794l ELIA ON GIBBON 9
too low. I can read anything which I call a
book. There are things in that shape which
I cannot allow for such. In this catalogue of
books which are no books — biblia a-biblia —
I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket
Books, Draught-boards, bound and lettered on
the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacs, Statutes
at large : the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson
Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and generally all those
volumes which ' no gentleman's library should
be without': the Histories of Flavius Josephus
(that learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philosophy.
With these exceptions I can read almost anything.
I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so
unexcluding." In this imposing list, where court calendars
are at the head and sombre theologians at the
bottom, Elia, we should most of us agree,
made only one mistake. Gibbon has no place
in a company of bores. The monotonous roll
of his periods is but a childish reason for
shutting our ears to a voice which has many
wise and witty things to say about men and
events. We do not weary of the unnumbered
smiles and witcheries of the maj'estic sea
because its waves break with even fall upon
the beach.
Gibbon was born in 1737, the son of that
Edward Gibbon, who had William Law for a
tutor, and is said to have been the original of

10 EDWARD GIBBON imi-
Flatus in the " Serious Call "* — an easy gentleman
who scurries from pastime to pastime in the
comfortable conviction that each in turn will
prove an inexhaustible fountain of delight. How
ever this may be, the historian was a very
different man to his father, both in respect
of ability and perseverance. At Westminster,
indeed, he was too ill, at Oxford too idle, to
do much serious work. "The University," he
said, "would as willingly renounce him for a
son, as he was willing to disclaim her for a
mother." Oddly enough, she is hardly in a
position to do this, because, whilst in her
charge, as Cotter Morison has pointed out,2 he
appreciated and acted upon the central thought
of the leaders of the Oxford Movement in the
nineteenth century.
During his fourteen months of idleness at
Magdalen he read through Middleton's "Free
Inquiry," which had been lately published. The
purpose of the book was to show that the
miracles of the fourth and fifth centuries were
fully as well attested as those of the second
and third ; that, if the latter were believed, then
on every principle of evidence the former must
be ; that the gulf commonly fixed between the
miracles before the epoch of Constantine and
the miracles after it was in fact no gulf at all.
Middleton, who was a clergyman (although too
' Memoirs," p. 186. 2 Morison, " Gibbon," p. 14.

1 «i

•794] THE ARGUMENT FROM MIRACLES n
wealthy to have been the victim of any sordid
motive), was prudent enough to stay his hand
at this point and to re-entrench himself behind
another gulf which he fixed in the days of
Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, and
Clement of Rome. These men, he said, did
not record miracles. It was therefore reasonable
to believe that miracles had ceased about the
time of the death of St John, and, whilst we
must reject all the supernatural occurrences of
the second century, we might as confidently
believe all that had fallen within the Apostolic
age. "This man," Gibbon wrote in his journal
several years later, "was endowed with penetra
tion and accuracy. He saw where his principles
led, but he did not think proper to draw the
consequences."1 Gibbon, who was as French in his love of logic
as Hobbes had been before him, drew conse
quences at the age of fifteen which Middleton
hesitated to draw at sixty-five. It was plainly
unfair to set down Irenseus and Augustine as
purveyors of old wives' fables if the signs and
wonders of the Gospels and the Acts were to
be received without a doubt. There were only
two reasonable alternatives — either to suppose
that the Church had never possessed miraculous
power at all, which would discredit the evidence
of the most venerated saints, or to suppose that
1 Journal, 24th Feb. 1764.

12 EDWARD GIBBON [1737
these powers had never been withdrawn, which
was the view of the Tractarians eighty years
later, and the Catholic view at the time, as
always. Gibbon appreciated the force of the
argument, and in the course of a lifetime chased
it from end to end. His true precursor, as
Leslie Stephen said,1 was Middleton, and his
conduct and his book were only a logical fulfil
ment of Middleton's doctrine. For a moment
he occupied the Tractarian position and accepted
the miracles of the Church. This was, how
ever, only the first milestone on the road to
Rome, since the strait-laced Anglican theology
of the eighteenth century had no room for an
immanent God, nor any belief in the continuance
of supernatural powers through the Middle Ages.
When Gibbon discovered that the doctrines of
the third and fourth centuries were by no means
Protestant, he completed his intellectual journey,
came up to London, being at the time sixteen
years of age, and was received into the Roman
Church. Bossuet's magnificent eloquence had
swept away any lingering doubts. " I . . . fell,"
he says, "by a noble hand."2
Flatus, if Flatus he was, had occasion for a
new and unexpected excitement, and was, in
fact, thoroughly alarmed. Together with the
Magdalen dons, he set to work to expel the
1 L. Stephen, " English Thought in the 18th Century," i. p. 270.
2 " Memoirs," p. 70.

1794] GIBBON'S RELIGION 13
devil from the lunatic boy. Gibbon was exiled to
the house of a Protestant pastor of the straitest
sect at Lausanne, where he presently recanted
his Catholicism in favour of the truths common
to all the churches.1 As no one knew then,
any more than any one knows now, in what
these consist, he probably found this a very
commodious and comfortable half - way house.
But he was far too logical to prolong his stay
unnecessarily, and, after his father's death, when
he had reached the conclusion that Christianity
had contributed to the downfall of the Roman
Empire, he quietly took up his carriages once
more and became a freethinker, as indeed he
had long been to all intents and purposes. " Now
that he has published his infidelity," remarked
Johnson, after the first volumes of the history
had appeared, "he will probably persist in it."2
And so he did. There is a verbal tradition that
he expressed regret for his historicaLattack upon
the Church ;3 a vague letter to a favourite aunt,
in which he contrasts her life of meditative retire
ment with the giddy bustle of the world, and
says, as many an unbelieving philosopher must
have done before and since, that " Religion is the
best guide of youth and the best support of old
age;"4~a passage from Ecclesiasticus (xxi.) marked
in a Family Bible, perhaps by his hand, perhaps
1 " Memoirs," p. 90. 2 Boswell, " Life of Johnson," ii. p. 4,48..
! Meredith-Read, " Hist. StudTrnVaulI,^eirrre;-S'av6y;,'Tirp. 281.
* Ibid.

14 EDWARD GIBBON [1737-
by another's — " He that is not wise will not be
taught, but there is a wisdom that multiplieth
bitterness " J — and we have exhausted all the
evidence that pious hands can accumulate to
show that he was not so unbelieving as was
..supposed; unless we think it worth while to
notice that some proof- engravings of religious
pictures by his friend Reynolds, including that
of the Seven Virtues (the design of the west
window in New College Chapel) hung in his
rooms at La Grotte.2 Atheist, indeed, he never
became, though he probably heard the wildest
atheism talked at Holbach's table at GrandvaL
In one of the latter volumes of the " Decline and
Fall," he says that the religion of Mohammed
is built upon an eternal truth and a necessary
fiction 8 — that there is one God, and that
Mohammed is His Prophet. In the same mood,
after describing the richness and splendour of
St Sophia, he remarks, " How dull is the artifice,
how insignificant the labour, if it be compared
with the formation of the vilest insect that crawls
upon the surface of the temple."4 But, for all
that, the deist of the eighteenth century is the
forbear of the atheist of to-day. A God that is
called up to explain the existence of the world,
cold, hard, and indifferent, the author but not the
1 Meredith-Read, " Hist. Stud., etc.," p. 286.
* Ibid., p. 481.
* " Decline and Fall," v. p. 337.
' Ibid., iv. p. 248.

«794] GIBBON'S LOVE-AFFAIR 15
reliever of pain — who would not rather believe
that the world was the outcome of chance than
that anywhere there should exist a Being so
powerful and so cruel ! When Englishmen had
grasped the real significance of Deism, they
exchanged it for a nobler, if a darker, creed ;
and Gibbon would assuredly have gone with
them. For of the facts, of which religion is the
explanation, he never knew, nor cared to know,
anything at all, and to the impassive intellect
the sceptical hypothesis is always the more
attractive of the two.
Gibbon got through the serious affairs of life
very easily, much as other people get through
the chicken-pox and the measles. He was past
the religious crisis by eighteen, and he had settled
the marriage question a year or so later. Mdlle.
Suzanne Curchod, "the belle of Lausanne," was
the daughter of a Calvinist minister. Gibbon
fancied himself in love. The delusion was re-
ciprocrated, and the pair were engaged. There
was, however, no money. Gibbon's father proved
obdurate, and the match was therefore broken off.
" I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son,"1 says
Gibbon in the imperishable sentence, which lays
bare the recesses of his character. The prudent
suitor and the jilted bride went their separate
ways ; he to become the greatest historian of
his century, she to be remembered, as the wife
1 " Memoirs," p. 107.

16 EDWARD GIBBON t'737-
of the ill-starred Necker, among that strange
company of common-place people on whom Fate
conferred such costly but imperishable distinction.
The funny little affair left no lasting soreness
behind. They used to meet in Paris, and were
the best of friends.
We may pause before we turn the next page
of the story to look at the person of the historian.
His attractions, indeed, were not numerous, but
Mdlle. Curchod credited him with beautiful hair,
pretty hands, great originality of expression
and gesture, and, as she says, "the look of a
well-bred man."1 An early and little -known
portrait of him, painted at this time and photo
graphed by General Meredith- Read at La Grotte,
is all that remains to keep this memory alive.
In the likeness of him by Walton at the National
Portrait Gallery — a likeness which Sheffield
thought the best of all — the eyes have swollen
and lost their lustre, the face is grown coarse
and sensual, the chin has doubled, and the
expression is positively bite. Though he was
only thirty-seven at the time it was done, he
was already qualifying for the last phase at
Lausanne, when he was known as the " Potato"2
and paid his absurd and ungainly addresses to
Madame de Crousaz and Lady Elizabeth Foster,
falling on his knees, as the story goes, and^
1 Quoted in Meredith- Read, " Hist. Stud., etc.," ii. p. 329.
3 Ibid., p. 349.

'794] GIBBON'S APPEARANCE 17
requiring the aid of the servants to restore him
to his feet ; when he would
" Bend forwards stretching his forefinger out,
And talk in phrase as round as he was round about." 1
It may be as proper justice that clever men
should be ugly as that rich men should be sickly ;
but no principles of distribution can excuse the
hideous countenance of the Walton portrait.
From this, as from the pomposity of the Reynolds
and the complacency of the Romney, it is pleasant
to turn back and see him as a bright, alert, young
man, agreeable enough to secure the favours of
the brightest star in the bourgeois circle at
Lausanne. With the collapse of his engagement, the
tenor of his life had been for the second time
rudely distracted. But he was singularly free
from bitterness, and settled down at his father's
house of Buriton to a studious and comfortable
bachelorhood. Variety was afforded by rooms
in London and military service. In 1759 an
invasion-panic had caused the revival of the
militia, and Gibbon, whose home was in
Hampshire, joined the local force. As usual
nothing occurred, but his term of service, if it
did not make him, as he supposed, an English
man and a soldier,2 made him at least a man and
a capable student of strategy. "The captain of
1 Meredith-Read, "Hist. Stud., etc.," ii. pp. 349, 352.
3 " Memoirs," p. 138.

18 EDWARD GIBBON [1737-
the Hampshire Grenadiers has not been useless
to the historian of the Roman Empire." *
All the while he was revolving his prospects.
"Am I worthy," he writes in camp near
Winchester, "of pursuing a walk of literature
which Tacitus thought worthy of him, and of
which Pliny doubted whether he was himself
worthy. The part of an historian is as honour
able as that of a mere chronicler or compiler of
gazettes is contemptible. For which task I am
fit it is impossible to know until I have tried my
strength." 2 Subjects presented themselves only
to be refused — Charles VIII. in Italy, Raleigh,
Swiss Freedom, Florence under the Medicis,
and many more. About this time, however, he
published his " Essai sur la Literature," in which
he laid down the principle, not much remembered
to-day, that the historian should be, in the best
sense of the word, a philosopher, because the
first qualification for his work is the power of
perceiving the relative importance of facts.8 The
"Essai" was of no particular merit, but being
written by an Englishman, in the French language,
served to make him known in Paris where he
spent some time in the winter and spring of
1763. He was by this time a master of French
and Latin, a passable scholar in Greek ("the
language of nature and harmony"4) and in a

1 u

Memoirs," p. 138. 'J Journal, 26th July 1761.
* Section 52. « "Memoirs," p. 141,

«794] THE INSPIRATION 19
position to make the grand tour with real
advantage. Rome was reached in due course,
and on the 15th October 1764, as he sat musing
amid the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare
footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple
of Jupiter, he received the commission which,
one may hope, comes to all men sooner or later.
His life's work was found. "The idea," as he
says, "of writing the decline and fall of the city
started to my mind." 1
There was, however, to be a long interval of
five years, during which he seems to have
recoiled from the magnitude of his idea. He
was partly busy with abortive projects for a
history of Switzerland, partly with the mortal
illness of his father. Most of all, he was harassed
by the seeming waste of life that lay behind
him, the petty distractions of the present, the
uncertainty of the future. He was not envious
but uneasy.2 Others were getting on ; he was
not. There was, however, no real cause to fear
that he would make 'the great refusal,' and as
soon as his duty to his father was discharged and
a competence secured to himself, he settled in
London. From that moment, as we may see
in the relative proportions of his autobiography,
the man begins to lose himself in his work.
Of his house — No. 7 Bentinck Street,* — the
1 " Memoirs," p. 167. 2 Ibid., p. 170.
* See "Letters of Edward Gibbon," i. pp. 178, 181, 183;
" Memoirs," p. 218.

20 EDWARD GIBBON [1737.
porch still remains to protest against a new world
of Portland cement. La Grotte, Deyverdun's
place on the banks of Lac Leman, where the
"Decline and Fall" was completed, has, alas!
lately disappeared, but not before every nook
and cranny, every document and manuscript, had
been explored by the affectionate industry of
General Meredith- Read,1 who has preserved the
last memories of the spacious three - storied i
house with its tapering roof, its suite of rooms
on the first floor reserved to the use of the
historian, its summer-house at the bottom of the
garden where the last lines of the " Decline and
Fall " were written, its covered walk of acacias
whence on that memorable night — 27th June
1787 — beneath a peaceful sky lit with the full
splendour of a summer moon, Gibbon looked
out upon the prospect of lake and mountain, in
the happiness of having accomplished his life's
ambition and the sorrow of parting with an old
and valued friend.3
The "Decline and Fall" took fifteen years
to write (177 2- 1787). The author must have
worked with great rapidity, but without strain.
Nohow else could the result have been obtained.
During part of this period, for nine years, he
was supporting Lord North's ignoble adminis
tration as member for Liskeard, and later
1 Meredith- Read, " Hist. Studies, etc.," i. c. i.
8 On the south side. » " Memoirs," p. 225.

'794] GIBBON AS A STATESMAN 21
for Lymington, with all the cynicism of an
abandoned parliamentarian. He got a post as
Lord Commissioner of Trade and Plantations
for his pains, and a salary of ^750 a year. The
Board of which he became a member was of
no public service, and was eventually abolished
by the Rockingham ministry under the influence
of Burke, and he himself had been so much
engaged in assisting his party with his vote that
he forgot to assist his country with his judgment.
It was altogether a disgraceful episode, but he
felt no shame. " Let it suffice you to know,"
he wrote to Deyverdun, "that the Decline of
the Two Empires, the Roman and the British,
advances with equal steps. I have contributed,
however, much more effectively to the former."1
After this one is inclined to wonder whether his
suggested dedication of the "Decline and Fall"
to Lord North2 was not a piece of irony. His
own share in the public blunders was, as he said,
unimportant. Too slow to be effective in debate,
he thought it wiser to hold his tongue and
make the House "a school of civil prudence, the
first and most essential virtue of an historian."8
"Slow-witted men," says Aristotle, "have
retentive memories."4 Gibbon knew his own
strength as well as his weakness, and turned
1 Meredith-Read, " Hist. Stud., etc.," ii. p. 424.
* Preface to " Decline and Fall," p. xii.
* " Memoirs," p. 193.
' Aristotle, " De Mem."

22 EDWARD GIBBON [1737-
his energies into their proper channel. Under
the influence of Voltaire l a new fashion in history
was beginning very slowly to make its way.
Sociology was struggling into life, a feeble child
without a name, still swathed in the tawdry
wrappings of its forerunners. Men were coming
to be studied in the aggregate, and an observa
tion of the movement of societies was soon to
replace that of the achievements and adventures
of heroes and kings. Hume and Robertson are
commonly reckoned the pioneers of scientific
history among English-speaking people. But
the former had merely turned from the sensa
tions of philosophy, which he had exhausted, to
the curiosities of history, which he was casually
to explore ; and the latter, a greater man perhaps
than we realise, had the misfortune to be incurably
tedious. Their placid and spacious works have
now been finally displaced, and are passing into
a last neglect.
It was a great chance for the man who, to
the stately English that Johnson encouraged,2
should unite the notions of the new philosophy
and a real sense of the grandeur of the past. At
Rome Gibbon had seen something he never
forgot : Hume and Robertson had never in the
proper sense seen anything at all. England,
besides, was ambitious of a historian of her own,
1 See Condorcet, " Vie de Voltaire," p. 94.
3 Boswell thought Gibbon had stolen his style from Johnson.

'794] MOTIVE OF HIS BOOK 23
Scotsmen, then as now, possessing something
more than their proper share of the intellect of
the age. Gibbon seized the occasion and won
an immortal name.
There can be no dispute as to the motive of
the "Decline and Fall." "I believed," he
remarks, "as I still believe, that the propagation
of the Gospel, and the triumph of the Church
are inseparably connected with the decline of the
Roman monarchy."1 "I have described," he
says in the concluding epigram of the book,
"the triumph of barbarism and religion."2 The
bare - footed- friars, that is the burden of his
lament, had possessed themselves of the Temple
of Jupiter. It was no mere whimsical curiosity
about an attack on Christianity which selected
the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters as the most
noticeable in the book. Susceptible, as Gibbon
thought them, 3 of more severe compression,
desiderating, as Professor Bury thinks,4 a thousand
reserves, they yet introduce the chief element
in the drama.
A world, highly organised and intellectually
brilliant as our own, had fallen, not suddenly by
some strange chance, but slowly and after a
prolonged trial of strength before the attacks of
barbarous hordes. That was, as it seemed to
Gibbon, the greatest tragedy of which history
1 " Memoirs," p. 183. 2 " Decline and Fall," vii. p. 308.
* " Memoirs," p. 190.
Introduction to " Decline and Fall," p. xxxix.

24 EDWARD GIBBON [1737-
has to tell. The barbarians alone could not have
done it. For so unnatural an event there must
have been an unnatural reason. That reason
he found in Christianity, with its doctrines of
a supernatural life and miraculous intervention.
He fixed upon the miracles of the Church as
the complement or object of faith, the distinctive
feature, or, as he says, " merit " of the Christians.1
What he thought of the faith, which in his view
overcame, or at least undermined, the world of
culture and civilisation, may be read in a famous
passage at the close of the fifteenth chapter of
the " Decline and Fall," where he transfers the
objections of Middleton from the second to the
first century. Innumerable prodigies, he remarks,
had attended the coming of Christ and His
apostles. The lame had walked, the blind had
seen, the sick had been healed, the dead had been
raised. Not the least conspicuous of the Gospel
miracles had been the preternatural darkness at
the Passion, when the whole world, or at least
a celebrated province, was overcast with gloom
for the space of three hours. None of these
extraordinary events had attracted the notice of
the eminent men of the age. We might draw
our own conclusions.2
Christianity had lived on. The world had
first despised it, then laughed at it, at last
1 "Decline and Fall," ii. pp. 31, 32.
1 Ibid., pp. 69, 70.

'794] THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE 25
had persecuted it. The disdain of Tacitus, the
mockery of Lucian, the angry violence of
Diocletian, had been spent in vain. In the
end the world had submitted, drunk the cup
to the dregs, and taken the slow poison into
its blood. This was the theory of which the
"Decline and Fall" was a masterly exposition.
Gibbon was, however, too brilliant a contro
versialist, too honest a historian, ever to be
afraid of the facts. He points out with perfect
fairness in his opening volume that so early
as Commodus luxury and security had eaten
deep into Roman character. Yet even so the
innuendo runs against the Church. She had
come to bring virtue, but the virtue she brought
was not virtus. Rome — that was the shame of
it — could not face her foes so well as before.
Neither the milk nor the meat of the Church
had sufficed to restore as -fine a race as once
had been. And when he, comes to speak of
the adornment of Constantinople by its founder
he recalls with cynical amusement the remark
of the historian, Cedrenus, " that nothing seemed
wanting except the souls of the illustrious men,
whom those admirable monuments were intended
to represent."1 And he has much to say of
all the theological controversies by which the
Roman Empire was little by little torn to
fragments — of schisms between Arian - Goth
1 "Decline and Fall," ii. p. 151.

26 EDWARD GIBBON [1737.
and Catholic- Roman, Pope and Patriarch, Pope
and Emperor, Iconoclast and Iconodule, between
Nestorian and Coptic nationalists in Syria and
Egypt and the Imperial Government at Con
stantinople. With his feet planted always in
Rome and Constantinople 1 he follows the decay
ing fortunes of those cities, and closes the book
suddenly when the one has fallen finally under
the dominion of the Church, and the other is
trampled beneath the heel of the Turks. Before
superstition and barbarism the glories of the
Roman Empire had for ever passed away.
" The spider had woven his web in the Imperial
palace, and the owl had sung her watch-song
on the towers of Afrasiab." 2 The words which
rose to the lips of Mohammed the Conqueror,
as he rode across the Hippodrome, haunt us still
as from the Capitol we make our last survey of
the ruins of pagan Rome, falling away so rapidly
before time and Christianity and convenience.3
Yet it is the decline and not the fall of the
Roman Empire that we have witnessed. The
succession of the Caesars was only relinquished,
as Mr Bryce4 has taught us all, in 1806.
"The author himself," says Gibbon, "is the
best judge of his own performance. No one
has so deeply meditated the subject; no one

1 Preface to " Decline and Fall," p. xiv.
2 "Decline and Fall," vii. p. 199. ' /hid., p. 305.
4 Bryce, " Holy Roman Empire."

•794] MERITS AND DEFECTS 27
is so sincerely interested in the event."1 None
the less, very many criticisms, pleasant and un
pleasant, have been passed upon his work from
the filthy and Jbolish^ abuse of Whitaker2 down
to Newman's sunny and beaufiful"7eply? Cotter
Morison has drawn attention to the peculiar
excellence of the geographical pieces ; 4 Stanley
has given special praise to the accounts of
the heretical churches of the East ; 5 Bosworth
Smith6 and Professor Margoliouth7 notice the
eloquence and insight of his biography of
Mohammed ; foreigners were quick to value
and utilise his summary of Roman law ; 8 fair-
minded men have set much store by his modera
tion in dealing with Julian the Apostate.9 It
is mostly, and perhaps inevitably, where he
paints with a broad brush that there has been
room for complaint. Professor Oman 10 blames
the inadequacy of his account of the Byzantine
Empire as others have blamed his confused
record of the Crusades.11 Yet Professor Bury
is there to assure us that "if we take into
1 " Miscellaneous Works," i. p. 220 (quoted in Boswell's
"Johnson," iv. p. 251).
' Whitakerj.1' Review of Gibbon, vols. iv. v. vi.^_p_. 286.
3 Newman, "Grammar of Assent," p. 462.
4 "Gibbon," p. 107. 5 " Eastern Church," p. 5.
6 Smith, " Mohammed and Mohammedanism."
7 Margoliouth, " Mohammed," Preface.
* See Cotter-Morison, " Gibbon," p. 154 ; Bury, Introduction to
" Decline and Fall," p. Iii.
9 Bury, Introduction to " Decline and Fall," p. xl.
10 Oman, "Byzantine Empire," Preface.
11 Morison, " Gibbon," p. 164.

28 EDWARD GIBBON [1737.
account the vast range of his work, his accuracy
is amazing." J
About the origin of Christianity and its place
in the world's history Gibbon started a debate,
some of the echoes of which will resound in
the pages of this book. Newman suggested
to him that faith, hope, and charity were a
better explanation of the success of Christianity
than his five reasons,2 and Church remarked
that Christianity was a more wonderful thing
if it was not true than if it were." These were
theological answers, although the Oxford leaders
gave them a wealth of historical illustration.
Finlay wrote from a different standpoint, and
gave" ah equally confident traverse. He was
in every way the antithesis of Gibbon ; a single-
hearted Liberal, who had been associated with
Byron in the War of Greek Independence; an
economist, who held that the prosperity of the
people was the proper business of the historian ;
and a man of genuine simplicity who had no
taste for show, but moved by instinct among the
elemental forces of national life. His " History
of Greece " is really a critical essay upon'the
theme of the "Decline and Fall." Christianity,
he maintained, did not accelerate the. downfall;
it retarded it.
" It appears certain," he says, "that the Latin
1 Bury, " Gibbon," p. xii.
! Newman, " Grammar of Assent," p. 462.
* Church, " Human Life and its Conditions," p. 81.

'794] CRITICS OF GIBBON'S THEORY 29
provinces were ruined by the strong conservative
attachment of the aristocracy of Rome to the
forgotten forms and forsaken superstitions of
paganism, after they had lost all practical in
fluence on the minds of the people ; while there
can be very little doubt that the Eastern
provinces were saved by the unity with which
all ranks embraced Christianity."1
More recent historians than Finlay take
the same view. Professor Ramsay, following
Mommsen, goes so far as to say that
" Christianity was in reality not the enemy but
the friend of the Empire, that the Empire grew
far stronger when the Emperors became Christian,
that the religious attitude of the earlier centuries
was a source of weakness rather than of strength."2
Finlay made a cognate point by drawing
attention to the immense services of Leo the
I saurian and the Isaurian dynasty, not only to
the Byzantine Empire, but to civilisation. From
Gibbon's account one might infer that the East
suffered a steady decline in courage and virtue.
The reverse was the truth. Under Constantine
Copronymus — the son of Leo — the masses
enjoyed a singular prosperity. The Eastern
Empire had undergone a complete regeneration
— political, financial, military, and religious3 —
and the real period of decline did not begin until
the days of Isaac Comnenus, about the time
1 "History of Greece," i. p. 138.
8 Ramsay, "Church in the Roman Empire," p. 192.
» Finlay, " History of Greece," ii. pp. 55, 56.

30 EDWARD GIBBON ['737-
when William the Conqueror overran England.
Leo by his great ability averted a European
catastrophe, and prevented the Roman Empire
from falling under the dominion of the Prophet.
Charles Martel, thanks to the vanity of the
Frankish writers, earned an eternal fame by
repelling a Saracen raid.
In another direction Gibbon was guilty of some
injustice. The decrees of the Oecumenical
Councils can be satisfactorily shown to have
been no more than restatements of primitive
doctrine in dogmatic language.1 Gibbon makes
it appear as if the conflict were between rival
dogmas of equal novelty. Carlyle, who in his
time had made merry over the proceedings at
Nicea, came at last to recognise that mono
theism had all the while been at stake.2
To what, then, it may be asked, if not to
Christianity, was due the fall of civilisation before
the hordes of the barbarians ? Modern research
returns no uncertain answer. Socialism has
sharpened the eyes of our historians,3 and in the
economic conditions of the third century they
have begun to discern the prototype of our own.
The Roman nobility had not survived the pro
scriptions of the last century before Christ. The
1 See Balfour, " Foundations of Belief," pp. 377, 378.
2 Froude, " Carlyle's Life in London," ii. p. 462.
3 Finlay, "History of Greece," see especially i. pp. 91, 104;
Waltzing, "Corporations Professionelles " ; Flinders Petrie, "Janus
in Modern Life," ch. iii. ; Dill, " Roman Society in the Fourth and
Fifth Centuries," bk. iii. ch. ii.

1794] SOCIALISM 31
factitious aristocracy which sat in their seats was
a model of all that an aristocracy ought not to
be. They had few duties and wanted none.
Comfort they mistook for prosperity, and luxury
for culture. They toyed with literature, with
the result that in Gibbon's phrase "a crowd of
critics, compilers, and commentators darkened
the face of learning."1 Partly from impotence,
partly from selfishness, they left the empire to
drift. Social solidarity became an idle dream.
The proletariate was all-powerful, and the empire
liberal perforce.
Rulers have to be kept in good temper, be
they many or few. If they are few the process
is inexpensive ; if they are many the process
becomes costly. In the days of the Roman
Empire ' panem et circenses ' was no idle catch
word, but a very present reality. The people
required to be fed, housed, and amused without
paying for it. It was a large order and entailed
liberal measures of spoliation. Employers were
compelled to associate in unions. Each union was
then compelled to ply its trade for the benefit of
the poor at a less rate than the cost of production.
The larger employers were required to do more
of this unremunerative work than the smaller.
Finally, they were not allowed to take their capital
out of their business. Diocletian's legislation
threw that of Aurelian into the shade. Wages
1 "Decline and Fall," i. p. 58.

3a EDWARD GIBBON [1737-
and prices were fixed by law. Ability went to
the wall, and political economy was banished to
Saturn. In municipal government it was the
same. The rich paid the piper ; the poor called
for the tune. The curiales — the city and
suburban corporations — were personally respon
sible for the levy of heavy contributions, the
greater part of which was devoted to a satis
faction of the demands of the imperial exchequer
in the matter of revenue and of the locality in
the matter of shows. They were not allowed
to escape their duties, and the fell inheritance
passed from father to son.
The end of these things was slow in coming,
but certain enough. Class preyed upon class.
Public spirit took to its wings. The government
grew to be detested or disliked, and home rule,
whether under some Roman governor enjoy
ing the shadow of the imperial title, or some
barbarian, smoothed over with a veneer of
Christianity and offering an unsubstantial defer
ence to the Emperor, seemed no uncompensated
misfortune. The tendencies, here loosely summarised with
out too nice a regard for chronology (as is
pardonable in an essay, and particularly one on
Gibbon, who is not too nice in the matter him
self) were developed between the third century
and the fifth, and constitute the real reply to the
innuendo of the " Decline and Fall." A kind of

1794] GIBBON'S MATTER AND STYLE 33
mystical security seemed to all men to hang
around the Roman Empire. The calamity of an
utter dissolution seemed always very far away.
Roman citizens were convinced that the fabric
had lasted so long as to be immortal, in
destructible, eternal.1 This belief obtained to
the bitter end. Even the huddled crowd of
refugees in Saint Sophia, when the Turks were
streaming into the city, confidently awaited a
divine intervention — an angel from heaven, who
should drive the enemy back to the frontiers of
Persia. The majesty of the Roman Empire, and the
pathos of its decay, exactly suited the cast of
Gibbon's imagination, and he created a style
capable of conveying his thoughts to his readers.
Any one can see that he was a consummate
artist. It is the supreme excellence of his work
that his manner precisely balances the weight of
his subject ; that all his conclusions are embalmed
in choice and appropriate aromas. The Cssars
pass before our eyes in their long procession like
the Sultans in the Rubaiyat, each bearing his
load of splendour, so alluring in its appearance
of immeasurable dominion and dazzling oppor
tunity ; yet the mind is never for an instant
forgetful of that age-long fabric of Empire, a
mere empty shell crumbling into ruin, yet still
infinitely impressive in its power to strike terror
1 Cf>. Dill, "Roman Society in the Fifth Century," p. 147.
C

34 EDWARD GIBBON [m7.
into the wandering tribes of west and north by
its name alone.
" Think in this battered caravanserai
Whose doorways are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his pomp,
Abode his hour or two and went his way." 1
Gibbon's style expresses it all perfectly. Behind
every paragraph, behind many a phrase, there is
the sense of the majesty of form, of the factitious
power of antiquated institution and bygone custom
to mould men's habit and imprison their life.
A fine example occurs towards the end of the
third chapter.
" The slave of imperial despotism, whether
he was condemned to drag his gilded chain in
Rome and the Senate, or to wear out a life
of exile on the barren rock of Seriphus, or the
frozen banks of the Danube, accepted his fate in
silent despair. To resist was fatal, and it was
impossible to fly."
Sound and sense combine for the effect. The
hopeless victim is not more present to the mind
than the monstrous system, with a hundred eyes
and a hundred hands, in whose grip he writhes.
The style is, of course, very artificial. It needed
to be so, in order to reflect the movement of an
institution which had itself become the embodi
ment of artifice. Fortunately for Gibbon the
society of his own time, like the society of the
" Decline and Fall," sustained its existence very
1 Omar Khayyam.

17941 GIBBON'S STYLE 35
generally upon externals — upon ceremonies,
bows, conventions, upon a philosophy of clothes ;
he himself did not disdain to rejoice over 'the
handsome liveries ' of the lackeys he engaged
to stand behind his coach in Paris.1 It was the
perfect moment to acquire the manner that was
best suited to his work.2
Yet even so he found it necessary to write the
first chapters of his work more than once before
he could get the effect he desiderated. After
wards the style must have become second nature.
The recurring periods roll smoothly off his pen,
nor does he ever seem to tire of their endless
revolution. Unfortunately the twentieth century
reader, a feeble and pampered creature, needing
to be constantly awoken by something abrupt or
paradoxical, is less well satisfied. For Gibbon
is lucid but not lively. With all his marvellous
capacity of arranging facts, he cannot illuminate
them. As Sainte - Beuve says : " II excelle a
analyser et a d6duire les parties compliquees de
son sujet mais il ne les rassemble jamais sous un
point de vue soudain et sous une expression de
gdnie."3 ^~'
Bagehot made another and far more subtle';
criticism. Gibbon's style was, he said, one in which
you could not tell the truth. "A monotonous
writer is suited only to monotonous matter. Truth
1 Prothero, "The Letters of Edward Gibbon," i. p. 313.
* Bagehot makes a great deal of this — " Literary Studies," ii. p. 36.
' " Causeries du Lundi-Gibbon."

36 EDWARD GIBBON [I737.
is of various kinds — grave, solemn, dignified,
petty, low, ordinary." 1 This is so true as to be
often forgotten. Style is an excellent servant,
but a bad master. Gibbon is admirable, so long
as he is busy with the showy parts of his subject
— the intrigues of the palace and the Cabinet,
the Csesar in court or camp, the appearance of
any new people of strange habits — just such
matters as would deserve the attention, and amuse
the ear of a well-bred man of the eighteenth
century. Tacitus, "the first of historians," as he
calls him, " who applied the science of philosophy
to the study of facts " 2 — had narrated these
sort of things to the court of Trajan. When
Gibbon comes in contact with the base things of
the world and the things that are despised —
the condition of the proletariate, the laws of
political economy, the rise of the Christians —
he is as ineffective as his famous pagan model.3
Yet into these things also, if he is to do his
work, the historian must learn to enter. Gibbon
paid for his neglect in his judgment. That
deeper insight into contemporary events, which
the study of history ought to give, was never his,
and the French Revolution, which Chesterfield
had foretold as early as 1753, took him entirely
by surprise.
1 Bagehot, " Literary Studies," ii. p. 37.
* " Decline and Fall," i. p. 213. /
3 For Gibbon on Tacitus see especially, "Essai sur la Litt,
sec. Iii.; "Decline and Fall," i. pp. 195, 213.

1794] DEBT TO PASCAL AND TILLEMONT 37
By a curious irony the two men, to whom he
owed the most, belonged to that inspired com
pany of laymen, who practised the extremest
asceticism at the manor house of Les Granges
in emulation of the nuns of Port Royal, and were
the ardent admirers of all that Gibbon detested.
From Pascal, whose " Provincial Letters " he
read over almost every year,1 he derived his
power of sarcasm, and something, perhaps, of
the foreign flavour of his writing : from Le Nain
de Tillemont he took a great part of his informa
tion.2 He got, indeed, too much enjoyment out
of his ironical commentaries ever to approach
the delicate finish of Pascal's satire, and with
them there came the dangerous habit, which
Mackintosh notes,3 of insinuating instead of
relating; but the wounds he inflicts are trenchant
and apt to fester. No one experienced a more
complacent satisfaction in exposing mean motives
and low aims. "History," he thought, "was
little more than the register of the crimes, follies,
and misfortunes of mankind."4 h^ -•-'¦--» '" <* •*- ¦ **¥
It was a low estimate, and it drew its penalty
behind it. Incidentally, as we have seen, he
had to deal with the origins of Christianity and,
in so doing, he suffered the greatest disgrace
that can befall an historian. He observed and
recorded facts, the significance of which entirely
1 "Memoirs," p. 97. 2 Ibid., p. 182.
' " Life of Mackintosh," ii. p. 476.
« " Decline and Fall," i. p. 77-

38 EDWARD GIBBON [1737.
escaped him. The purity, the enthusiasm, the
calm serenity of the Primitive Church passed
before his eyes. He treated of them with the
same cold and critical indifference as he meted
out to the vices of Elagabalus ; unaware, appar
ently, that he was reviewing the rise of a move
ment, the like of which had never been seen
before, nor ever will be again while time is.
It is not that he misstates facts, but that the
facts as we know them admit of two possible
explanations, and that he has preferred to adopt,
apparently without a shadow of regret, the baser
one. Fifty years later, from the pulpit of St
Mary's, Newman surveyed the same ground with
an eye trained to discern spiritual things.
The works of Le Nain de Tillemont were
Gibbon's note-book. In a laborious life of sixty
years the Port Royalist had put together several
heavy tomes, containing the lives of the Saints
and the history of the Emperors in the first
five centuries. The one is a kind of forerunner
of the " Dictionary of Christian Biography,"
the other is conceived on the principle of the
" Annual Register." Neither is readable ; both
are accurate. To Gibbon they must have been
of priceless value. When Tillemont forsakes
him, he adopts a new method on the plea that
a continuance of the old would be tedious,1 and
packs the history of eight centuries into half the
1 " Decline and Fall," v. p. 169.

,794] FASCINATION OF CONSTANTINOPLE 39
space he had before allocated to five. It is a
cardinal defect, indeed, in the " Decline and
Fall," that it has no uniform proportions, that
it shows as it were the work of two architects.
The ingenuity and resource of the workman have
concealed the defects of the design. No proper
attempt is made to realise the idea of the mediaeval
empire, the constructive result of the concussion
of Christianity and Roman imperialism ; there
is not so much as a mention of Dante's " De
Monarchia." At the turn of the book, with the
eye of an artist, but not of a historian, Gibbon
virtually abandons the west to depict the tragedy
in the east.
Constantinople had always a peculiar fascina
tion for him, and his famous description of it
in the seventeenth chapter contains the nearest
approach to poetic enthusiasm of which he was
capable. Yet the story of its downfall is the
masterpiece of his skill. One by one in successive
chapters the nations group themselves around
the devoted city — Arabs, Bulgarians, Northmen,
Venetians, Latin Crusaders, Moguls, Turks —
each picking off a few provinces from the
Imperial dominion, or weakening the defence
on this side or that, until amid the blare and
flash of cannon (for that generation of men a
new and terrible discovery) the metropolis of
the East, encompassed by armies on land and
sea, passed with all its wonderful adornments,

40 EDWARD GIBBON [I737.
with all its costly spoil, under the hand of
Mohammed the Conqueror; that great city that
was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet.
Gibbon finished the " Decline and Fall " in
1787. It was, as he said, the everlasting farewell
of an old and agreeable companion. Whatever,
he reflected, might be the life of his history,
his own must be short and precarious.1 He had,
in fact, just over six years to live.
The move to Lausanne was never regretted.
He was in Paradise although alone there.2 We
may entertain, with Miss Holroyd,3 an uncom
fortable suspicion that the creeping things over
whom he bore rule included a certain proportion
of flatterers. If it was so, Sheffield's visit in
1 79 1 must have been a wholesome as well as
a pleasant variety. For the rest these years
of well - deserved idleness were spent in the
composition of his autobiography. It was
written in six fragments, each incomplete, and
confided by his will to the care of Sheffield,
who, with the help of Hayley, the poet,4 and
possibly of Miss Holroyd,5 picked out the plums,
washed them free of some impurities, and served
1 " Memoirs," p. 225. 2 Ibid., p. 236.
5 Adeane, "Girlhood of Maria Josepha, Lady Stanley of
Alderley," p. 63.
4 Ibid., p. 303.
8 The present Lord Sheffield in his introduction to the auto
biographies of Edward Gibbon states this as a fact. It would
be interesting to know the evidence. Miss Holroyd's letters do not
_ give a corresponding impression.

,794] GIBBON'S CONVERSATION 41
them up as the "Memoirs of Edward Gibbon."
The style was exactly that of the author's con-
versation,1 so that he lives in them as really
as Johnson lives in Boswell, and we may fancy
ourselves spectators of that famous supper-party
at Lincoln's Inn in 1780, when Pitt, then just a
gawky youth of twenty-one, successfully disputed
his conclusions and sent him flying from the
room- JU.

"His conversation," said the host on that
memorable occasion, "was not . . . what Dr
Johnson would have called talk. There was no
interchange of ideas, for no one had a chance of
replying" (Pitt, as we see, had broken the rules),
"so fugitive, so variable, was his mode of dis
coursing, which consisted of points, anecdotes
and epigrammatic thrusts, all more or less to the
purpose, and all pleasantly said with a French
air and manner which gave them great piquancy,
but which were withal so desultory and uncon
nected that, though each separately was extremely
amusing, the attention of his auditors some
times flagged before his own resources were
exhausted."2 This is a digression, but we are close on the
end of the piece. Other friends had been leaving
him besides his book ; Deyverdun, the companion
of his early manhood, in whose house he had
been a guest ; De SeVery, his most intimate
neighbour ; his aunt, Mrs Porten ; Lady Sheffield,
1 Adeane, " Girlhood of Maria Josepha, Lady Stanley of
Alderley," p. 273.
2 "The Bland-Burges Papers," p. 60.

42 EDWARD GIBBON [1737-1794
the wife of his friend. The last event took him
back to England to discharge the offices of friend
ship. He was in no state physically to perform
a journey, which the French Revolution made
daily more perilous ; but from all we know of
him he may well have felt with Laelius in Cicero's
beautiful dialogue that, as well for those who
delight in knowledge and learning as for those
who give themselves up to public business, life
is nothing — cannot even be got through respect
ably — without friendship, which insinuates itself
into the circumstances of all men, and allows
no manner of life to continue without it.1 For
his own part, he accepted the falling of the
leaves with a stoical calm. But he was grown
impossibly corpulent and operations delayed, but
did not dispel the evil. He died in 1794, com
placent, jesting, worldly, courageous to the end.
The last passages, so carefully preserved by
Sheffield, leave, indeed, a rather disagreeable
impression. The best men go reverently to their
long home. Still, it was not inappropriate as
it was. " Populus Romanus moritur et ridet."2
The Roman people went laughing to the grave.
1 " De Amicit.," xxiii.'
2 Salvian, "De Gub.," vii. 6. "Sardonicis quoddammodo
herbis omnem Romanum populum putes esse saturatum : .TORUS'
et ridet."

AUTHORITIES 43

AUTHORITIES
Bury's edition (1900) of the " Decline and Fall," Birkbeck
Hill's edition of the " Memoirs," and Prothero's " Private
Letters of Edward Gibbon," have been used in compiling
this article.
There is a life of Gibbon by Cotter Morison in the English
Men of Letters series, and an excellent essay on him by
Bagehot in "Literary Studies," vol. i. Birkbeck Hill has
collected a vast amount of information about and criticism
upon him in the above-mentioned edition of the " Memoirs."
Sainte-Beuve ("Causeries du Lundi"), Leslie Stephen
("Studies of a Biographer"), and Mr Birrell ("Collected
Essays," vol. ii.), have also written essays on him, and there
are, of course, the introductory remarks of Guizot, Milman,
and Bury, to their respective editions of the " Decline and Fall."
Gibbon's relations with Madame Necker are treated of in
D'Haussonville's " Le Salon de Madame Necker " ; his relations
with the Holroyds in Adeane's " Girlhood of Maria Josepha,
Lady Stanley of Alderley."
The two periods of his residence at Lausanne are exhaustively
treated in Meredith-Read's " Historic Studies in Vaud, Berne,
and Savoy."
Scattered References to him will be found in Boswell's
" Johnson," and Horace Walpole's " Memoirs." The " Bland-
Burges Papers " contain the account of his passage with Pitt.
The conflicting criticisms of some eminent men on the
" Decline and Fall," will be found in Appendix 57 of Birkbeck
Hill's edition of the " Memoirs."

J. H. NEWMAN
1801-1890
The " Character of a Gentleman," the touchstone of Newman's
doctrines — And the cause of his secession — The conditions
precedent to the Oxford Movement — Keble — Hurrell Froude
— J. A. Froude's description of Newman — The "Assize
Sermon " — The Hadleigh meeting : Pusey — The Four
o'Clock Sermons at St Mary's ; Newman's style of preach
ing — The Heads of Houses and the Bishops ; " The Three
Defeats" — The Jerusalem bishopric — The young Catholic
party: W. G. Ward — Newman's difficulties — Littlemore —
The crisis: within — The crisis: without — The last act —
The intellectual development of Newman's mind — (a) The
historical argument embodied in the "Essays on Miracles";
(b) The ecclesiastical argument embodied in the " Prophetical
Office of the Church." Newman's conception of the Church.
Anglicanism " unambitious " of it. Summary of the " Via
Media of the Anglican Church." The rider attached to it ;
(c) The doctrinal argument embodied in the "Essay on
the Development of Doctrine." Its value. The biological
test. Leslie Stephen's criticism discussed. Mozley's
criticism. A philosophy of History, (rf) The theological
argument. The inspiration of the Church — Newman as a
Roman Catholic — The basis of religious belief; "A
Grammar of Assent" — Newman and the Modernists — Con
clusion of the " Grammar of Assent " — Newman's life in the
Church of Rome — Pusey's Eirenicon — Gladstone's pamphlet
— The "Achilli" case— The disagreement with Manning—
The occasion of the "Apologia" — The "Apologia" —
Newman's style : its place in English literature — Newman
as a historian — The bitterness of his satire ; his severity
— The "Dream of Gerontius" — Newman's foresight — The
Cardinalate — The end — Criticisms — The charge of
scepticism — The charge of credulity — Conclusion.
44

isoi-go] "CHARACTER OF A GENTLEMAN" 45
" Irresistible as the proof seems to him to be, so as even to
master and carry away the intellect as soon as it is stated, so that
Catholicism is almost its own evidence, yet it requires, as the great
philosopher of antiquity reminds us, as being a moral proof, a
rightly-disposed recipient."
("Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in
England," p. x.)
In one of his early sermons,1 preached before the
University of Oxford in 1832, Newman pointed
to the author of the " Decline and Fall " as a
master in that school of sceptical culture, which
he did not hesitate to identify as the anti-Christ
of the future. And twenty years later, writing
as a Roman Catholic, he reverted to Gibbon's
sympathetic portrait of Julian the Apostate as a
perfect illustration of an early stage in the
development of that finished man of the world,
whom the world itself had fashioned so cunningly
after the manner of a Christian hero, that the
very elect were deceived, and who is indeed
very commonly delineated in his final perfection
(without too much suspicion, perhaps, of the
author's real opinion of him) by the aid of
Newman's own just, beautiful, but gently ironical
portrait of a gentleman.2 For it is, as Newman
perceives, of the essence of a gentleman — of one
who is that and no more — to be great in small
situations and deficient in the supreme moments
of life. Pilate and Gallio and Agrippa were
gentlemen, and they missed their opportunities
because they were just that and nothing beyond it.
1 "Oxford Univ. Serm.," p. 126. 3 " Idea of a Univ.," p. 209.

46 J. H. NEWMAN [l8oi.
Like their modern antitypes, they hated scenes,
emotion, extravagance ; they feared ridicule and
disliked responsibility ; they avoided clashing
opinions and colliding sentiments; they would
have been puzzled to see anything admirable in
such controversial utterances as are recorded
in the seventh and eighth chapters of St John's
Gospel. They made, in fact, no ventures, and
their accomplishments died with them.
Newman was far too clear sighted to confound
a type of character which in its excellencies and
its defects appeals peculiarly to the English
temper with that other type which came into
the world with Christ. He saw that the gentle
man, considered as such, worships only (if he
worships at all) "a deduction of his reason or a
creation of his fancy,"1 while the other is from
the first in the presence of a Person, to whom
all thoughts and actions are referred for praise
or blame. And this antithesis, so naturally veiled
by the forms and traditions of the English
Church, that it still, to a great extent, escapes
the eye of the educated Englishman, was in the
opinion of the most competent of his critics,2 the
key that unlocked the lowest door of the treasure-
house in his deep-seated being. He could not
find in a society, which, in its efforts after
Christianity, never lost sight of culture and social
order, anything that would remind him of the
1 " Idea of a Univ.," p. 21 1. s Dean Church.

,890] NEWMAN'S CHILDHOOD 47
shepherdless multitudes that went out to seek
Christ on the hills of Galilee,1 nor in the trimming
diplomacy of an Established Church, which sails
always a little behind the times, an ark strong
enough to protect the Kingdom of God against
the all-invading flood of Liberal thought.2
There are one or two recollections of Newman's
boyhood which strike the imagination with rare
force — the childish games with Benjamin Disraeli
in Bloomsbury Square ; 3 the early drawing of a
rosary in a school verse-book, long afterwards
unearthed during the crisis at Littlemore ; 4 the
resolution at the age of fifteen to lead a celibate
life.5 And it is plain, from his own account of
his childhood, that he was a born solitary, very
far removed in temper from the beautiful motto
of his Cardinalate — " Cor ad cor loquitur." One
is often reminded of that meeting of his, in the
early days of his Fellowship, with the Provost of
Oriel, when the Provost made him a kindly bow
and said : " Nunquam minus solus quam cum
solus."6 Every great career, of course, has what we
call its accidents. It was the accident of his that
he came to manhood at one of those exciting
moments in the life of a nation when its youth
is casting about for a new enthusiasm. The
1 Church, " Occasional Papers," ii. p. 473-
2 Ibid.
' Hutton, "Cardinal Newman," p. 16. * " Apologia," p. 3.
s Ibid., p. 7. * MM; P- l6-

48 J. H. NEWMAN [,8o,-
Napoleonic Wars were long enough over to have
lost their glamour, and the movement for reform,
which had been set back by the excesses of the
Revolution, was rising once more in its strength.
Liberalism came out after the death of Lord
Liverpool like the winter - floods after the
November rains. Reforms whirled about the
three kingdoms. Irish bishoprics, established by
law, came toppling down. Catholics, as English
Churchmen were accustomed to call them, lost
their disabilities. Bishops were bidden put their
house in order. Even "the sacred fabric of the
constitution," so zealously repaired by Burke
forty years earlier, was seen to be swaying.
In quiet Oxford there was, as there has always
been since, a body of advanced opinion, strong
enough to attract a certain amount of intellectual
interest, not strong enough to overthrow the con
servative genius of the place. The time was one,
as the advertisement to the "Christian Year"
reminds us, "of much leisure and unbounded
curiosity," and the reception accorded to that
beautiful little book is the proper measure of the
spiritual energy that was seeking an outlet. The
harbinger of the Catholic Revival (whether or
not the critics are right in contemning its verse)
was at least perfect in tone and temper. Parties
in the Church could forget themselves in its
awful, ever - present sense of that which lay
beyond party. Sectarianism was cajoled to sleep

1890] KEBLE 49
by its simple melodies. Even Lord Chancellor
Eldon, stoutest of Protestants, thought well to
present a copy of it, still extant, to his grandson.
Yet for all this, in the conventional phrase, the
calm was that which foretold a storm.
Keble, indeed, as Newman was afterwards at
pains to show, was beyond question the first
parent of the coming change. One of the many
beautiful things in the "Apologia" is the descrip
tion extracted years later from a contemporary
letter, of Newman's reception by the Fellows of
Oriel on his election to a fellowship. " I bore
it," he had written, "till Keble took my hand,
and then felt so abashed and unworthy of the
honour done me, that I seemed desirous of quite
sinking into the ground." Keble, as if conscious
of the impending tempest, had withdrawn even
before the publication of the " Christian Year "
into the country parish, where in the main he
spent his life ; he would have hated, even if he
could have borne, the accidents of controversy.
To one of his pupils — a born ecclesiastic in the
better as well as the worse sense of the term —
he passed on his convictions and beliefs1 with
more than a double measure of his spirit. When
this keen intellect joined Newman at Oriel the
elements were mixed, and the skies began to
lour. Hurrell Froude is without doubt the most
1 Church, "Oxford Movement," pp. 26, 27 ; "Apologia," p. 23.
D

50 J. H. NEWMAN [,8o,-
romantic figure in the Movement. Dean Church
thought of him as a Pascal 1 come to life in the
nineteenth century, and Dr Abbott, the pitiless
critic of Newmanism, picked him out as the real
instigator of the whole wonderful tragedy, the
medicevalist who, even in death, by the legacy of
the Roman Breviary, led Newman away from the
Primitive Church to which he really belonged.2
Nor would Newman himself have denied it.
Hurrell, he said, was the author, if any one was,
of "the Movement altogether,"3 that is of the
Roman conclusion of it. We can think about
this as we please. What we need to know is
that Newman never had another friend like this
one, so beautiful, so intense, brilliant, fiercely
intellectual, profound in his self-abasement.
We have glanced at Froude ; we may as well
look at Newman's exterior before we pass on
to look into his mind. The liveliest description
of him, and perhaps the best, was written by
one who had peculiar opportunities of observa
tion but was never entirely fascinated, Hurrell's
brother, Anthony, the historian.
" Newman was above the middle height, slight
and spare. His head was large, his face remark
ably like that of Julius Caesar. The forehead,
the shape of the ears and nose, were almost the
1 Church, " Oxford Movement," p. 56
2 Abbott, "Anglican Career," p. 177.
3 Newman, "Din", of Anglicans," i. p. 36.

iSgo] NEWMAN'S APPEARANCE 51
same. The lines of the mouth were very peculiar,
and I should say exactly the same. I have often
thought of the resemblance, and believed that it
extended even to the temperament. In both
there was an original force of character which
refused to be moulded by circumstances, which
was to make its own way, and become a power
in the world ; a clearness of intellectual percep
tion, a disdain for conventionalities, a temper
imperious and wilful, but along with it a most
attaching gentleness, sweetness, singleness of
heart and purpose. Both were formed by nature
to command others, both had the faculty of
attracting to themselves the passionate devotion
of their friends and followers, and in both cases,
too, perhaps the devotion was rather due to the
personal ascendency of the leader than to the
cause which he represented. It was Caesar,
not the principle of the empire, which over
threw Pompey and the constitution. ' Credo in
Newmannum ' was a common phrase at Oxford,
and is still unconsciously the faith of nine-tenths
ofthe English converts to Rome."1
Froude, with his usual cunning, has led us on
past our point, but the comparison to Caesar,
physically if not intellectually true, is worth all
the more precise attempts of others to make
Newman live again for a later generation. He
was at any rate the dictator of that beautiful city,
which, as Dean Church said,2 had at the distance
of over three centuries revived in its parties and
1 J. A. Froude, "The Oxford Counter Reformation" in "Short
Studies." 2 Church, " Oxford Movement," ch. ix.

52 J. H. NEWMAN [l8oi.
its enthusiasms the Florence of the Middle Ages.
With the by-play of the Movement, indeed, we
have here no proper concern. Gossip is still
gossip, even when the subjects of it are men of
singular austerity. But for the elucidation of
what is to follow, it is necessary to throw the
eye along the chain of events.
Newman has fixed the birthday of the Move
ment on the 14th July 1833.1 It was, as we
hardly need to remind ourselves, the anniversary
of the capture of the Bastille, the commemora
tion of the Movement which had sent kings
and priests, consecrated with holy rites, flying
from their benefices. Newman himself was just
back from the memorable journey to Sicily,
when he had nearly lost his life by a fever, and
had written the most pathetically beautiful of all
English hymns — " Lead kindly light." As he
entered Oxford health and spirits overtook him
in a flood. A few days after, on the eventful
14th, Keble preached the Assize Sermon; a
political sermon aimed at Lord Grey and the
Liberal Ministry. Disestablishment, English or
Irish, was, the preacher urged in effect, a re
pudiation of divine governance, and the nation
which admitted it apostate. His words were
only the echo of the audacious, yet as it proved
not misplaced, motto which Froude and Newman
' "Apologia," p. 35.

iggo] THE HADLEIGH MEETING 53
had chosen for the " Lyra Apostolica" during the
Italian journey : —
" Tvoiev S wf Sri Stjpbv eyce troKefioio ireTravfiai." l
"They shall know the difference now that I
am back again," says Achilles to Thetis, when
rage at the death of Patroclus brings him once
more into battle; and the speech was not unsuited
to a conflict which was to cause so many wounds,
and leave so many ugly scars behind.
The Assize Sermon was followed by a meet
ing at Hadleigh, of which Taylor, one of the
Protestant martyrs of the Reformation, had
once been Rector. Hurrell Froude was there
in person ; Newman and Keble only in spirit.
The others were Rose, William Palmer, and
Perceval — names now almost forgotten, but, two
of them at least, at that time of considerable
weight. A plan of campaign was decided upon,
and accordingly in the following September
Newman published the first "Tract for the
Times." The pamphlet was just a simple exhor
tation to consider the form and meaning of the
Ordination Services, and the implications which
they contain of an apostolic succession ; a thesis
very familiar to-day, very novel then. A year
later Pusey joined the agitators and gave his
name to a party, of which he was beyond all
doubt the most learned member. He gave some-
1 Iliad, xviii. I. 125.

54 J. H. NEWMAN [l8o,.
thing even more valuable in a tract on the
meaning and purpose of Baptism, which appeared
soon after his adhesion. There could be no
doubt, after that, that the Tractarians were a
force to be reckoned with.
In the wrangle over the latitudinarian appoint
ment of Dr Hampden to the Professorship of
Divinity, they were supposed to have won a
petty victory ; in the erection of the Martyrs'
Memorial (the martyrs being the Protestant
dignitaries who were burnt there) they suffered
a petty defeat. In the meanwhile, Newman's
" Parochial and Plain Sermons " at St Mary's had
taken the undergraduate world by storm. They
united, as it is almost needless to repeat, a simple
earnestness of expression with a profound know
ledge of the human heart. Good men, as they
heard him, resolved to forsake all and follow
Christ ; worldlings went shuddering away like
Felix, after Paul had reasoned with him.1 Two
sermons in particular were long read and re
membered : "Holiness necessary for Future
Blessedness," and " The Ventures of Faith."
Froude has described the tremendous emotion
produced in the hearers by a sermon on the
sufferings of Christ.2 An admirable piece of
psychology, based no doubt on Butler's famous
1 Abbott, " Anglican Career," ii. p. 2.
2 "Parochial and Plain Sermons," vol. vi. Sermon vi. The
Incarnate Son a Sufferer and Sacrifice. Cp. Froude's, "The
Oxford Counter Reformation."

1890] NEWMAN AS A PREACHER 55
sermon on the same subject, is contained in the
sermon on Balaam,
"a man divinely favoured, visited, influenced,
guided, protected, eminently honoured, illumin
ated — a man possessed of an enlightened sense
of duty and of moral and religious acquirements,
educated, high - minded, conscientious, honour
able, firm ; and yet on the side of God's enemies,
personally under God's displeasure, and in the
end (if we go on to that) the direct instrument
of Satan, and having his portion with the
unbelievers."1 If Newman's sermons were delivered to-day,
they would not be popular. People approve
"nice, bright sermons," adulterated with cheap
solutions of grave religious difficulties. But great
preachers rarely stray from St Paul's topics — sin
and righteousness and judgment — and Newman
is no exception. M. Bremond has noticed that
the essential difference between his presentation
of a subject and that of any great French preacher
— Massillon, Bossuet, Lacordaire — lies in his
preference for particular, rather than general
treatment.2 Bossuet will take "Providence" as
his subject, and fill in a large canvas with broad
dashes of colour. Newman's theological and
moral teaching falls naturally, like the scenery
of his own country,3 into vignettes. Thus, for
1 " Parochial and Plain Sermons," iv. p. 26. Obedience without
Love. 2 Bremond, " Mystery of Newman," p. 197.
* A remark of Walter Pater's (" Miscellaneous Studies," p. 200).

56 J. H. NEWMAN tl8oi.
instance, he draws out the thought of "A
Particular Providence as revealed in the Gospel."
The years from 1833 to 1840 were the fat
years of success ; the lean years had yet to run.
The Heads of Houses, good, easy men, at last
took alarm. The movement threatened at once
their peace, their comfort, and their traditions.
The Bishops followed in their wake. "Les
natures profond£ment bonnes," says Renan, "sont
toujours ind^cises." x For this, or other reasons,
the Anglican Episcopate suffers from constitu
tional debility. Its representatives have too often
been found wanting in serious crises. They find
"the pain of new ideas" more than ordinarily
painful ; first bury their hands in the sand ;
then, discovering that the foe has only advanced,
take refuge in ignorant violence. As it was in
the days of the Pilgrim Fathers and Wesley and
Darwin, as it is perhaps at the present moment,
so in Newman's time the real issue evaded the
episcopal vision. One excellent prelate, it is said,
was at a loss to determine if he held Newman's
doctrine as to the origin of his order or no.2
Men get frightened at what they cannot under
stand or account for. As the Movement grew
in breadth and intensity, condemnations, thick as
hail, began to rain upon the Tractarians. The
Heads of Houses publicly adjudged Tract 90, in
1 Renan, " St Paul," p. 84.
2 Newman, " Apologia," p. 44 ; Church, " Oxford Movement,"
p. 106.

i8go] TRACTARIANS AND THEIR FOES 57
which Newman had claimed a Catholic interpre
tation for the XXXIX. Articles (by reading them
in the light of the works of the high church
divines of the seventeenth century, and thus
craftily giving them " the literal and grammatical
sense," which their Calvinist authors had, all
unwittingly, desiderated for them)1 to be a
treacherous attempt to import Roman Catholic
error into the Church of England. Isaac
Williams, a Tractarian, gentle and modest as
Keble, was thrown out in the contest for the
Professorship of Poetry on account of his religious
opinions. Macmullen for the same reason was,
somewhat ungenerously, refused his B.D. degree
by Dr Hampden, and had to sue for it in the Vice-
Chancellor's court. Even Pusey did not escape,
and was condemned unheard for preaching high
doctrine about the sacrament. The Bishop of
Chester, Sumner, one day to be Archbishop of
Canterbury, was not to be outdone by the Oxford
authorities, and made up in violence what he
lacked in power. The Movement, he declared,
in his Charge, was the work of the devil.2 This
statement took the wind out of every one else's
sails, but his brother bishops said what they
could. Words, perhaps, were not of great consequence,
but a proposal set on foot by Bunsen, the Prussian
1 "Via Media," ii. p. 344.
- Church, "Oxford Movement," p. 219.

58 J. H. NEWMAN [ltol.
Minister — a sort of Protestant De Maistre — that
the English Church should coalesce with the
Lutheran Church of Prussia in the appointment
of a bishop of Jerusalem, cut at the very heart
of the theory which the Oxford Movement was
designed to propagate. The scheme was favour
ably entertained by the Archbishop of Canterbury
and the Bishop of London (Howley and Blom-
field), and for a moment seemed as if it might
come to fruition ; though in the end it perished
untimely, not, however, before it had carried
Newman a long stride further on the road to
Rome.1 If the old men were against him young
Oxford was well at his back. His supporters
hurried to the front, and in a little time were
hurrying their leader after them. Oakeley,
Ward, Faber, and Dalgairns were the more
distinguished ; and of these Ward, by reason of
his kindliness, brilliant talk, and clever dialectic,
was the most noticed. He was no doubt as
sincere as it was in his nature to be, but he
was a humorist and, like all humorists, knew
that a great deal of fun was to be got out of
games with logic. Such men doubtless have
their place in the economy of human affairs, but
it is not in the vanguard of spiritual thought.
Ward made fun with logic, and logic made fun
of him. In the end his mental gymnastics took
1 "Apologia," p. 146.

i89o] W. G. WARD 59
him clean over the boundary, although he con
tinued to assure the spectators that he was still
on the same side of the fence. His " Ideal of
a Christian Church" was in fact the apotheosis
of the Church of Rome. It was determined to
deprive him of his degree for writing it. He
made an excellent speech before convocation,
defended his loyalty to the Church of England,
and assured his hearers that he held " the whole
cycle of Roman doctrine." 1 Condemnation was
of course pronounced, but consolation followed
in its wake, and the staunch advocate of clerical
celibacy became, before the week was out, the
recipient of congratulations on his engagement
to be married.
All this was vastly entertaining ; but for one
man it greatly increased a cruel embarrassment.
An exchange of one communion for another
might be accomplished by Ward without a day's
inconvenience. To Newman it meant no less
than a surrender of all the beliefs and hopes,
charities and friendships, consecrated by long-
sustained endeavour. It was the peculiar secret
of his influence that all his thoughts were bought
with a price, that they had been grafted into his
life before he tried to pluck their fruit. Few
men care for the pain and labour of this ; fewer
can effect it even at that cost. Yet thoughts,
1 Wilfrid Ward, "W. G. Ward and the Oxford Movement,"
pp. 340-341.

60 J. H. NEWMAN Il8oi.
elsewise produced, have little flavour in them.
Newman knew, as most great men have known,
that the highest sort of friendship is built upon a
common purpose, social or spiritual. When Fox
cried out to Burke, who was fiercely denouncing
the French Revolution and its English sup
porters across the floor of the House, that he
hoped there was no loss of friends, Burke
answered, " Yes, yes ! there is a loss of friends.
I know the price of my conduct. I have done
my duty at the price of my friend. Our friend
ship is at an end." These no doubt were extreme
measures, not to be admired or adopted, but the
sentiment rings true, and only so long as men
are toying with religion or politics will they have
their real friends in the opposite camp. The
moment Church or State is seriously imperilled,
all private feelings must be ruthlessly cauterised.
What Newman suffered, as his disciples began
to secede and his own doubts to thicken and
encompass him, may be read in the last five
" Sermons on Subjects of the Day," the last
sermons he preached at St Mary's. Now he
sees himself as Balaam,1 casting the blame of
his own blindness on another ; now as Elijah
fulfilling his mission in a world where the heaven
above is dark and the stars hidden ; 2 now as the
forlorn Israelite, singing the Lord's song in a
1 " Sermons on Subjects of the Day," pp. 337, 357.
2 Ibid., p. 369.

,890] LITTLEMORE 61
strange land ; l at last as Jacob, ' parting with
all that his heart loved,' and setting out upon a
dreary way over Jordan into a strange country.2
These were perhaps the most wonderful
sermons he ever preached, for the tension was
very great, and the soul, poised between hope
and fear, could no longer maintain its reserve,
but breathed out again and again its passionate
secrets. " Lusisti satis, edisti satis, atque bibisti
Tempus abire tibi est ; ne potum largius aequo
Rideat et pulset lasciva decentius setas,"
he wrote of himself to his sister on 6th February
1842, quoting in his distress a poet little con
genial to his nature.3
A day or so later he had left Oxford for
Littlemore, an outlying, much neglected district
of his parish ; this little change of abode mark
ing a long stage in the progress of his opinions.
Already, since the end of 1841, he had been,
as he afterwards affirmed,4 on his death-bed in
respect of his Anglican opinions. It was at
Littlemore that Ward's ecclesiastical conundrums
became so insistent.5 Newman, even in retire
ment, was made aware, like many another party
leader, that his thoughts were not his own, that
1 "Sermons on Subjects ofthe Day," p. 384.
2 Ibid, p. 399.
3 " Letters and Correspondence of J. H. Newman," ii. p. 386.
* "Apologia," p. 147. 5 Ibid., p. 171.

62 J. H. NEWMAN [l8oi.
a whole party hung upon his words, or, as he
probably felt, that a number of souls lay in his
hand. What Newman let fall at Littlemore,
Ward reported in Oxford. It is significant, as
a French critic observes, that the "Apologia"
seems to avoid the mention of Ward's name.1
Archbishop Benson said that Oxford men never
seemed to realise what a weak man Newman
was.2 Very possibly not ! since few men were
stronger. Benson, who never had a religious
doubt himself,3 was quite unfitted to understand
the awful pain which a mind intensely acute,
subtle, and imaginative, must from time to time
experience as it probes the very foundations of
the mysterious world in which it finds itself,
when the firm ground begins to rock under the
feet, and the mind grows dizzy with the know
ledge of its own insufficiency, and the temptation
is to have done and let oneself go and end the
misery without further thought or struggle. The
crisis was never for Newman, as it was for Ward,
the resolution of a nice problem in dialectic. It
reached to the very recesses of his heart, so
that afterwards he felt that there was no logical
halting-place between Atheism and Catholicism4
— that the Roman Question was but one aspect
1 Bremond ("Mystery of Newman," p. 28) says there is no
mention of Ward in the "Apologia." This is not so. He is
mentioned on p. 171.
2 A. C. Benson, " Life of E. W. Benson," ii. p. 553.
' Ibid, i. p. 103. « "Apologia," p. 198.

,890] THE CRISIS 63
of the enigma of our present being and its proper
attitude toward God. If there were a Creator,
if there had been a Revelation, if a Society of
divine institution had been set in the world for
the enlightenment of poor humanity, could it be
that a Church, whose laity claimed independence
of thought as their chiefest privilege, whose
clergy were jolly sportsmen in well - appointed
parsonages, whose bishops repudiated the idea
of an apostolic commission, was anything but a
rotten branch, a slip of wild olive, unfit to be
grafted in the parent tree? In what manner did
she differ from the semi-Arians of the fourth
century,1 who would have none of the Nicean
symbol because it was a development of the
primitive apostolic faith, or the Monophysites who
had refused the Tome of St Leo in the contro
versy about the continuance of the Two Natures
in Christ after the Ascension ? 2 Augustine had
said : " Securus judicat orbis terrarum," and lapse
of time had in effect discovered the judgment
of the Church against Arius, and Donatus, and
Eutyches 3 to be just, and the Bishop of Rome
in each case4 had focussed the dawning wisdom
of the Church.
These were the thoughts that burnt within.
And without there was a situation not unlike
that which George Eliot, with her wonderful eye
1 " Apologia," p. 139. 2 Ibid., p. ,17. * Ibid.
4 " Development of Church Doctrine," pp. 279, 283, 309.

64 J. H. NEWMAN [l8oi.
for the psychology of a crisis has imagined for
Savonarola, as he stood in the wooden pulpit in
the Piazza of San Marco and asked a sign to
reassure the expectant, anxious people beneath :
"His faith wavered but not his speech : it is
the lot of every man who has to speak for the
satisfaction of the crowd that he must often speak
in virtue of yesterday's faith, hoping it will come
back to-morrow." Yet for all this the mortal
sickness of Newman's "Anglicanism" was pro
longed over four years. Weaker men would
have hastened the inevitable conclusion by a
kind of suicide, but he would take no opiate, and
when the end came at last it was by natural
means. On the 9th October 1845, on a wild and
tempestuous day, when the heavens seemed
broken with weeping,1 having finished all that
he ever wrote of his " Doctrine of Development,"
he was received by Father Dominic2 into that
which he ever afterwards held to be the only
Catholic Church of Christ. Five months later
he left Oxford. His departure has always been
felt to have possessed that sort of dramatic
propriety, which requires some definitive outward
catastrophe to determine, and as it were fix
irrevocably in the mind of the spectator the
close of a period of intense moral difficulty. He
1 See Meynell, "Newman," pp. 61, 62.
2 The curious history of Father Dominic will be found in
Purcell's " Life of Manning," i. p. 369.

«89oJ OXFORD MOVEMENT HISTORICAL 65
seems to have been conscious of this himself,
and did not return to the gracious city of the
mystic spires until the old actors were mostly
gone, and the old controversies half- buried by
the new school of latitudinarian thinkers.
When the play is played out we begin to
look for the superhuman forces — Eternal Verities,
Spirits of the Age, Powers angelic or demoniacal
— that have moulded the conduct of the players.
Newman said, and no doubt quite truly, that
the semi-Arian, and Donatist, and Monophysite
schisms had risen before him, once and again,1
like ill-laid ghosts, to warn him away from the
"Via Media" of the Anglican Church. But, if
we care to search for them, we can see that
the phantoms had been hovering about his path
earlier than he knew, and that converging lines
of thought had almost from the first been driving
him along the road to Rome.
It is the particular distinction of the Oxford
Movement among efforts after a nobler life
that it was rooted in history as no other move
ment has ever been. In ecclesiastical historians
England was, as Newman saw, singularly
deficient. Gibbon was the only man worthy
of the name,2 and he had been an infidel.
Newman took up the study just where the author
of the " Decline and Fall " had laid it down.
That wonderful book had always possessed a
1 "Apologia," pp. 118, 139.
2 "Development of Christian Doctrine," p. 8. £

66 J. H. NEWMAN ti8oi-
fascination for him1 — it is said that he read it
through once every year for style alone — but
it was the fascination of terror or at least of
antagonism. In Gibbon and Gibbon's pupil,
Milman, he recognised the real foes of the cause
of which he was the champion ; 2 nor can there
be much doubt that his judgment was right.
Systems of philosophy are too speculative per
manently to endanger the doctrines of religion.
No one, perhaps, quite believes in them, not even
their inventors. But from the facts of history
it is hard to get away, and, for the plain man
at least, they are, as Napoleon claimed, 'the
only true philosophy.' Newman saw, as Gibbon
had seen before him, that the one matter which
the ecclesiastical historian can by no means
afford to ignore is the miraculous narratives.
They run from end to end of Church history as
from end to end of Judaism. You may be
sceptical like Gibbon or believing like Newman,
but you cannot avoid them. Newman himself
had never doubted that miracles were necessary
to a revelation. He saw, plainly enough,3 what
Harnack and his latter-day adherents can never
be brought to see — that a non-miraculous revela-
1 Cp. "Letters and Correspondence I., Autobiographical Memoir,"
p. 41 : "When I reflect, etc."
2 See "Ess. Crit. and Hist.," ii. pp. 186-248. There is, of course,
no intention on the part of the present writer to suggest that
Milman was himself a sceptic or intended to promote scepticism.
But he used the historical method of Gibbon in dealing with the
Christian Church, and thus, as Newman thought, insensibly
sacrificed the kernel of ecclesiastical history for the husk.
3 "Essay on Miracles," p. 12.

isgo] NEWMAN AND MIRACLES 67
tion is utterly unconvincing. The point was best
put by J. B. Mozley : —
"Would not a perfectly sinless character be
proof of a revelation ? Undoubtedly, that would
be as great a miracle as any that could be con
ceived ; but where is the proof of perfect sinless-
ness? No outward life and conduct, however
just, benevolent and irreproachable, could prove
this, because goodness depends upon the inward
motive, and the perfection of the inward motive
is not proved by the outward act." 1
The necessity of the gospel miracles being
for this reason conceded, it became ipso facto
a question by what right the miracles of the
Church were disbelieved. The Protestant view,
which, as Gibbon had discovered, ran counter /
to history, draws a convenient line between the
miracles of Scripture, which are true as resting
upon unimpeachable testimony, and the miracles
of the Church which are popish fables, the
exuberant fancies of a disordered imagination.
For a time Newman was content with some
such distinction as this. Further study convinced /
him that history is no friend to Protestantism. \
The difficulty is simply that no one has been
able to fix the moment of time, nor even the
century, in which the Church lost her miraculous
powers ; that the theologians of the Middle Age,
although they suppose the miracles of their own
time not so great as those that had gone before,
yet speak of them as common occurrences in
1 Mozley, "Bampton Lectures," i. p. ii.

68 J. H. NEWMAN [itoi.
the life of the Church. The classical passage is
in the twenty-second book of the "Civitas Dei."
Augustine gives a full and particular account of
several miracles, which he could either personally
attest or whose patients he had himself inter
rogated. He adds that volumes would be
required to record the miracles which had been
wrought in Hippo and Calama by the relics of
St Stephen. The Synoptics are not closer to
the wonders they relate than this ; hence the
great importance of the authorship of the Fourth
Gospel. Nor does Augustine stand alone. His
testimony is echoed by a very cloud of witness,
reaching into our own time. Mutatis mutandis, as
much can be said for the marvels of Loretto and
Lourdes as for those of the third and fourth
centuries. Such evidence as is collected, for
instance, in M. Bertrin's " Histoire Critique des
Evenements de Lourdes" is superior — if the
rules of evidence are put in force — to that which
exists for the miracles of the New Testament,
and as certainly precludes any natural explana
tions. If you begin, in fact, where are you to
stop ? If you accept the evidence of the first
century, why do you refuse the evidence of the
tenth or the twentieth?
Gibbon had seen all this, and it had made
him a sceptic. Newman saw it, and it made
him a catholic. There is indeed no middle
way. The evidence for particular miracles may
be strong or weak : Newman held in fact that

,89o] NEWMAN AND MIRACLES 69
the miracles of the New Testament were better
proven than those of ecclesiastical history.1
There may be a difference of character ; Scripture
miracles mostly possessing a beauty and dignity
denied to the rest.2 But, when all varieties have
been noticed, they are essentially of the same
blood, related, as Newman says, in one of those
beautiful passages of simple imagery in which
he excels, like smiling valleys and 'luxuriant
wildernesses ' or tame and savage animals.8 The
distinctions are superficial ; the similarities funda
mental. More, if you meet Hume's argument
against miracles, as Newman virtually did,4 by
saying that it is not a question between the
probability of an alteration in the course of
Nature and the false witness of twelve men, but
between the former and the witness of twelve
particular chosen men, you make character, as
it ought to be, the ultimate test of truth. But
all the men of character in the Middle Age
believed in miracles. You could hardly, for
example, wish a better witness than Augustine —
a trained lawyer, a master in thought and know
ledge, a man of the highest excellence. To
expect that good people should be sometimes
mistaken in particular cases is not unreasonable
in a world which is at a loss to give an adequate
1 " Essay on Miracles," p. 334.
2 Ibid., p. 160. ' Ibid., p. 151.
* "Oxf. Univ. Serm.," pp. ,95, 196. Cp. Froude, "The Oxford
Counter-Reformation."

70 J. H. NEWMAN [i&h-
metaphysical explanation of Error. To suppose
that good people have been always and every
where utterly deceived in the whole matter of
divine interventions is impossible for a Christian
— impossible, perhaps, for any one who does not
wish to end in unbounded scepticism and despair.
Newman's rare logic was bearing him far out
of the old paths. There can hardly have been
an English Churchman of that time who believed
that the Church anywhere possessed or might
possess miraculous powers. Jolly old clergymen,
somehow exalted to comfortable pre-eminence,
must have rubbed their eyes if they had the
curiosity to follow the track of Newman's thought.
Other kindred considerations led him the same
way, for he was always learning. Hawkins,
Provost of Oriel, early showed him that it was
the Church that taught doctrine, not the Bible,
which did no more than prove the truth of it.1
This theory, which fell in so well with the con
ception of the Church as a living body possessed
of miraculous powers, grew into a volume called
"The Prophetical Office of the Church," which
was designed to put forward the Anglican claim
in systematic shape. The author begins by
securing a position which, although Protestants
sometimes ignore it, they have never been able
to turn. The argument runs in this wise. The
Church of England appeals to Antiquity as the
1 " Apologia," p. 9.

i«9o] THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE ^\
test of true doctrine, inasmuch as she professes
her belief in an Apostolic Church. In the Church
of the Apostles there was no New Testament.
What was passed from man to man was a tradi
tion. When the New Testament was at last
formed it appeared as the guarantee of the existing
tradition. Yet it is evident that it was the tradi
tion that had first guaranteed the veracity and
authenticity of the books. The test of true
doctrine, therefore, is held to have been stated
by Vincent of Lerins in his Commonitorium.
What had always, everywhere, and by all been
believed, that was the Catholic faith. Newman's
mind was far too precise to find this test more
than a rough one. It may well be doubted if it
is so much. The Creed of Chalcedon (the
"Nicene" Creed) would have astonished by its
detail the primitive Christians, who were content
to confess that " Jesus is the Lord." The Double
Precession, rejected by the Orthodox Church, is
an article of faith in the West. Patristic opinion,
again, is difficult to ascertain, nor always self-
consistent when ascertained. So that the rule
appears to possess a minimum of practical value.
All this Newman came to see later on. But,
indeed, throughout the book he is at his weakest.
He does his work after the manner of Butler,1
but by temper of mind he is no disciple of
Butler at all. He cannot give to his arguments
1 " Via Media," i. p. 56.

72 J. H. NEWMAN [itoi-
the logical cogency which the form of them so
much desiderates. The Romans, he said, made
the mistake of supposing the Church to be infall
ible,1 and yet he himself believed her indefect
ible.2 She erred in details he thought — never in
fundamentals. How the one are distinguished
from the other does not appear. To say that
the essentials of Christian doctrine — the nature
of the Person of Christ- — were determined before
the breach between East and West,3 is to ignore
the fact that the proper relation of man to his
Maker, at least as important for poor humanity
as the other, was the great problem which the
Church was called upon to resolve in the Middle
Ages, just as now in modern civilisation she is
faced with the question of his proper relation to
the world. Again, on the doctrine of Papal
Infallibility he delivers a violent assault, not
apparently perceiving that every single argument
which lies against the Pope lies with equal or
greater force against the claim of the Councils
to be regarded as divine oracles. Of the central
difficulty of the Anglican position he is indeed
awkwardly aware. He perceives with discomfort
that the Anglican works upon one theory, until
some moment not exactly defined between 600
and 800, and then adopts another : that for the
first eight centuries (the period of the Undivided
Church as it is called, though indeed it had
1 " Via Media," i. pp. 85, 86. 2 Ibid, Lect. viii
3 Newman says this somewhere, but I have been unable to
recover the reference.

'890] TRUE CATHOLICITY 73
been sufficiently divided by the Nestorian and
Eutychian schisms) the English Church supposes
a close divine guidance, while for the next twelve
the divine guidance has been so far relaxed that
a perfect expression of Catholicity is only redis
covered by human reason at the Reformation in
a small island of the west of Europe.
In what, then, does a truly Catholic attitude
seem to him consist ?
"According to English principles the religious
faith has all it needs ... in knowing that God
is our Creator and Preserver, and that He may,
if it so happen, have spoken. This, indeed, is its
trial and its praise, so to hang upon the thought of
Him, and desire Him as not to wait until it knows
for certain from infallible informants whether or
no he has spoken, but to act in the way which
seems on the whole most likely to please Him.
If we are asked how Faith differs from Opinion,
we reply, in its considering His being, govern
ance, and will, as a matter of personal interest to
us, not in the degree of light and darkness under
which it perceives the truth concerning them."1
Faith is thus linked to opinion, though not
identical with it, and opinion is private judgment.
At one end of the scale is the note of obedi
ence, at the other of independence. The English
Church holds both in harmony or, according to
Newman's own metaphor, follows the "Via Media."
But obedience is nobler than independence, just
as credulity is nobler than scepticism. If the
1 "Via Media," i. p. 86.

74 J- H. NEWMAN [180,-
two principles seem to conflict, a man's duty is
to submit to Church authority, and wait for light ; *
yet this only in so far as he does not lose sight
of Antiquity, to which his first obedience is due.
"The Roman Catholic would simplify matters
by removing Reason, Scripture, and Antiquity,
and depending mainly on Church authority;
the Calvinist relies on Reason, Scripture, and
Criticism, to the disparagement of the Moral
Sense, the Church, Tradition, and Antiquity ; the
Latitudinarian relies on Reason, with Scripture
in subordination, the Mystic on the imagination
and the affections, or what is commonly called
the heart ; the Politician takes the National Faith
as sufficient, and cares for little else ; the man
of the world acts by common sense, which is the
oracle of the indifferent ; the popular Religionist
considers the authorised version of Scripture to
be all in all. But the true Catholic Christian
is he who takes what God has given him, be
it greater or less, does not despise the lesser,
because he has received the greater, yet puts it
not before the greater, but uses all duly and to
God's glory."2
This is beautifully said. So, again, the poet
comes to the aid of the logician, when Newman
has to explain why the power of spiritual vision,
once confided to Christ's society, and so necessary,
one would suppose, to her progress, has been
clouded, if not altogether lost. "Any one," he
said, "who maintains that the Church is all that
Christ intended her to be has the analogy of
1 "Via Media," i. p. 135. 2 Ibid, p. 133-

«8go] THE CRUX OF THE "VIA MEDIA" 75
Judaism full against him.1 ... A continual
Infallibility, were it ever intended, might require
the presence of a superhuman charity and peace."2
Yet he apparently believed that for seven cen
turies in the midst of howling anathemas this
Infallibility had been deserved or at least granted.
To fix the exact date, he adds, when the Church
fell from her first holiness, is a matter, not
theology, but of history. If the theological of
admission involved be granted, Roman Catholics
have nothing to complain of when Anglicans
leave the date vague, placing it with Ken in 800,
or with Bramhall in 600.
Out of a book, which is not easy to analyse,
two seemingly contradictory conclusions emerge.
On one side it has been shown that doctrinal
faith rests historically upon tradition, not upon
the Bible. On the other tradition itself has been
shown to be untrustworthy. How then are we
to decide what is of faith ? This brings us to
the crux of the Anglican argument, and Newman
was never more skilful than when he dealt with it.
Tradition, he says in effect, shall be confronted
with itself, brought before its own tribunal, and the
verdict will be in favour of the English Church.
" We do not discard the tradition of the
Fathers ; we accept it — we accept it entirely ; we
accept its witness concerning itself and against
itself; it witnesses to its own inferiority to
1 " Via Media," i. p. 198. 2 Ibid., p. 202.

76 J. H. NEWMAN [itoi.
Scripture, it witnesses, not only that Scripture is
the record, but that it is the sole record of saving
truth."1 The formation of a Canon had in fact cut
asunder the Roman argument by cutting asunder
tradition. The fathers had themselves recognised
two sorts of tradition, authoritative and question
able. The former could claim scriptural authority,
the latter was just pious opinion, and in the
sphere of private judgment. The one was
summarised in creeds, which are an "episcopal
tradition " ; the other was a vast but vague
and incoherent mass of truths, legends, fancies,
customs, hopes, and prejudices,2 of only secondary
interest and importance. To maintain this distinc
tion, much obliterated by mediaeval piety and
superstition, was the work of the Protestant
Reformation, and the Bible was the sword which
effected the cleavage.
It is perhaps worth while to pause here a
moment before we pass on. Newman's argu
ment is strong, so long and only so long, as the
Bible is regarded with Bishop Stubbs3 as a
book unlike other books ; different in its nature
and origin. The Lux Mundi school, and the
critics after them, have very much weakened this
view of it, and in so doing have, unintentionally,
weakened the Anglican claim. Roman Catholics
1 "Via Media," i. p. 2S6. 2 Ibid, p. 250.
s Stubbs, "Visitation Charges," pp. 140, 141.

1890] THE RIDER OF THE "VIA MEDIA" 77
of the advanced type have not been slow to see
this.1 If it were not for the Tridentine decision2
on the inspiration of the sacred text, the Vatican
could afford to recognise the Higher Criticism far
more conveniently than any Protestant Church.
But ecclesiastical politics are of all party politics
the most hateful, never tolerable indeed at all
unless one knows, as Newman did, how to find
the favoured spot in the high hills,3 where things
cease to rush and flow, and a brightness settles
over the battlefield, and time catches the look
of eternity.
We have to finish our analysis of the "Via
Media." Newman uses, once again, the analogy
of the Jewish Church to defend the Church of
England against the charge of being no better
than a parliamentary creation. The Establish
ment was no worse a thing, he thought, than the
consecration of Saul to rule over the theocratic
state of the Hebrews.
To his whole argument he added a curious
rider. The idea of the "Via Media" had, he
declared, never yet been reduced to system,4 nor
visibly realised.5 It existed only on paper,6 in
1 Briggs and Von Hiigel, " The Papal Commission," p. 48. (The
reference might suggest that Dr Briggs is a Roman Catholic.
This, of course, is not so.)
3 For a discussion of what is involved in this decision, see
Manning, "Essays in Religion and Literature," series ii. pp. 357,
358- 3 Lucretius, De Rerum, ii. 1. 331.
* "Via Media," i. p. 23. 6 Ibid, p. 129. ' Ibid., p. 16.

78 J. H. NEWMAN [,8o,-
the writings of the seventeenth century divines
— Bull and Hammond and Andrewes — with
Wilson and Butler to support them in the
eighteenth.1 It had yet to be forged into shape,2
and for this a revival of the power of excom
munication was absolutely necessary.3 Any
attempt to do so, however, must be made subject
to three conditions : loyalty to the Prayer-Book,
submission to the Thirty - Nine Articles, and
deference to the Episcopate.4 In the event the
rider upset the main proposition. The Prayer-
Book failed to satisfy the advance - guard of
the Tractarians ; Tract 90, setting a Catholic
interpretation upon the articles was pronounced
treacherous ; and the Bishops, as we have
seen, renounced their birthright.
The "Via Media" was published in 1837. By
1 84 1 it appeared unworkable, and Newman was
fixing his eyes with the earnestness of a dying
man upon Rome, which he had formerly supposed
to be the abode of anti-Christ. Once again his
thoughts shaped themselves into an essay, half
history, half theology, upon the Church. At
least his conception of it as a society external
to himself, and to whose doctrines his allegiance
was imperatively due, had never wavered.5 If
God had revealed Himself in human shape, the
Heavens had never wholly closed again, nor the
1 "Via Media," i. p. 23. 2 Ibid, p. 22.
1 Ibid, p. 140. * Ibid, p. 23.
' " Apologia," pp. 48, 49.

i«9°] THE DOCTRINE OF DEVELOPMENT 79
means of grace been left to human invention.
" Who is she," he had asked, " that looketh forth
as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the
sun, and terrible as an army with banners."1
That was the quest to which he had devoted
the best years of his life, and in the essay on
the "Development of Doctrine" he gave to the
world the results of his search.
That famous book, the first word, it seems, of
spurious,2 the last word, perhaps, of genuine
Roman Catholic theology, is the narrative of
Newman's mental progress during the dark years
at Littlemore. Fancy, eager to have all things-
nice, told how, as he wrote it standing at his
desk, his body wasted to a shadow, till at last
when doubt was gone and Rome assured, he
appeared transparent,3 the very kinsman of "the
humble monk and holy nun," whom, four years
before, he had held up at St Mary's as the true
and only remaining representatives of Apostolic
Christianity.4 If his body suffered, his intellect
was never clearer, more persuasive, more un
relenting. Once more he laid the foundation of
his argument in history. It is a "safe truth"
that "the Christianity of history is not Pro
testantism."6 Once more he appealed to Gibbon,
1 Motto for the ist edition of the " Church of the Fathers."
2 See Loisy, " L'Evangile et l'Eglise," p. 205 ; Tyrrell's Introduc
tion to Bremond's " Mystery of Newman," pp. xiv., xv.
3 Hutton, " Cardinal Newman."
* " Sermons on Subjects of the Day," xix.
* " Development of Christian Doctrine," p. J.

80 J. H. NEWMAN [ifai-
" perhaps the only English writer who has any
claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian." l
Once more he took up the quod semper rule
of faith, this time to rend it. Always, every
where, there had been as great, or a greater, con
sensus of patristic opinion in favour of the Papacy
as in favour of the Real Presence 2 or the Trinity.3
If the evidence was sufficient to assure the
antiquity of these latter it was also sufficient to
assure that of the former. That a certain ex
pansion or development of doctrine had taken
place in the Catholic Church was more than an
Anglican could afford to deny without stultifying
his own argument. The monarchical episcopate,
as it appeared in the Ignatian epistles, was a
decided advance upon the loose bishoprics of the
first times. In the Apostolic Age the presence
of the twelve had retarded the growth of the
episcopal order, as well as that of the Papacy.4
Two special circumstances besides had contributed
to check the just claims of the Roman See. One
was the love which the early Christians bore
towards each other, for "love dispenses with
laws,"5 and the other was the repressive policy
of the Empire.6 When the Apostles were long
gone, and the first love of the Christians had
waxed cold and persecution had ceased, the
Bishop of Rome grew to his proper stature. So
1 " Development of Christian Doctrine," p. 25.
2 Ibid., p. 24. 3 Ibid., p. 19. 4 Ibid., p 149.
' Ibid., p. 150. 6 Ibid., p. 151.

,890] THE PAPACY IN HISTORY 81
also and contemporaneously did the doctrine of
the Godhead of the Son, for " that the language
of the anti-Nicene Fathers, on the subject of
our Lord's Divinity, may be far more easily
accommodated to the Arian hypothesis than can
the language of the post- Nicene, is agreed on
all hands."1
The Papacy was the complement of the
Councils; "first, local disturbances gave exercise
to Bishops, and next, oecumenical disturbances
gave exercise to Popes."2 Monarchical power
was essential to the consolidation of Christendom., 8
To deny it was to blot out the Church for the
twelve centuries which lay between the rise of
the Papacy and the dawn of the Reformation.4
To the present writer the main line of
Newman's argument appears perfectly sound.
The promise to St Peter is as good scriptural
evidence as exists for more than one now uni
versally accepted, but once fiercely contested,
doctrine, and twelve centuries of ratification in
the West culminating (thanks to friendly circum
stances) in a formal recognition by the East lie to
the credit of the Roman Primacy, and are not
lightly to be explained away. If ever the English
Church succeeds in convincing the world of the
soundness of its position, it will be by confession
and avoidance, by admitting on the one hand
1 " Development of Christian Doctrine," p. 135.
2 Ibid, p. 151. 3 Ibid, p. 151. i Ibid, p. 8.
F

82 J. H. NEWMAN [ifai-
Newman's account of the rise of the Papacy,
and denying on the other that the fusion of
Church and State under Constantine was a true
development. The Roman Papacy would then
appear like a Roman dictatorship ; a notable
expedient to provide against a temporary evil.
Newman did not leave the matter here, but
put his interpretation of the facts to a very
singular test. In the manner of a Darwinian
biologist he set the living Roman Church of the
nineteenth century beside the Church of the
Fathers, so as to see whether their likenesses
proved them essentially the same, and if their
distinctions could be attributed to a long evolu
tion. A genuine development would, he main
tained, be shown in the following points : (a) by
a preservation of the original type ; (b) by a
continuity of principles ; (c) by a power of assimi
lating the food required for nourishment ; (d)
by a logical, if unconscious, sequence of ideas
directed by a moral energy ; (e) by anticipations
of future developments, illustrated in such points
as the primitive devotion to the relics of saints
and martyrs, a life of virginity, the cult of saints
and angels ; {/) by a conservative action of the
subject on its past, as when in the days of her
temporal greatness the rulers of the Church were
monks for remembrance of the poverty and
humiliation of the first times ; (g) by an historic
continuity.

'8901 EVOLUTION IN RELIGION 83
The conclusion arrived at, as the reader
is aware, was in favour of the identity of the
Primitive and Roman Churches. Leslie Stephen
remarked in effect that it was conclusive against
Protestants of all sorts, but not conclusive in
favour of Catholicism. Protestant creeds, as he
pointed out, were essentially eclectic, and as such
analogous to artificial, not to natural, products.1
They were grafted, not grown. On the other
hand, how was it fair to say that Catholicism
was true for more than a time? If the fact that
the more progressive races of mankind once
accepted it is a proof of its spiritual vitality, by
virtue of the "securus judicat orbis terrarum "
maxim, then the fact that they have now rejected
it is a proof of its spiritual decay. Newman
could afford to use the theory of evolution,
but not the theory of natural selection. The
one would dethrone the Protestant creeds as
unnatural freaks, but the other would dethrone
Catholicism as decadent species. Stephen's bitter
logic, however, appears to have been in one point
deficient. There is no kind of reason for supposing
that what is fittest to survive is therefore abso
lutely the best. Catholicism is evidently unsuited
for a life of material comfort, such as the modern
world supplies. It came to its strength in fact
in a time of great spiritual necessity. It will
evidently appear to decay at a moment of great
> Stephen, "An Agnostic's Apology," p. 189.

84 J. H. NEWMAN [i&»-
temporal prosperity. But it is a long leap in
logic, as well as a wild sally in optimism, to
assume that change is always improvement ; that
because a body of belief, positive or negative, is
well fitted to its conditions, the conditions them
selves are therefore well calculated to produce
the noblest beliefs.
J. B. Mozley made another criticism. The
tests which Newman had applied to show the
orthodoxy of the Roman Church would equally
establish, he said, that of the Greek.1 This is
hardly the case. After the first, the Greek
Church has shown no power of assimilation.
Wrapped in idle abstraction she has allowed
the current of the world's thought to pass by
unheeded. Anyway, whether or not Newman
established the identity he was seeking, there can
be no doubt that he made a serious contribution
to the philosophy of history. If history is to be
more than a kaleidoscopic picture of the past,
the historian must determine what developments
are true and what false to national or spiritual
genius, and Newman's tests of a true development
(except the last which is superfluous) are perhaps
as good as can be found. Historians, have, it is
true, been of set purpose slow to make use of
this method, yet nearly all the practical value of
their art springs from something of the sort.
Behind the historical problem with which
1 Mozley, " Theory of Development," p. 3,

i«*>] INFALLIBILITY OF THE CHURCH 85
Newman had dealt, there lay, as he was aware,
a theological one, to which, however, history also
has something to say.
"The one essential question," he says, "is
whether the recognised organ of teaching, the
Church herself, acting through Pope or Council
as the oracle of heaven, has ever contradicted
her own enunciations. If so, the hypothesis
which I am advocating is at once shattered, but,
till I have positive and distinct evidence of the
fact, I am slow to give credence to the existence
of so great an improbability." 1
Whether, and if so at what time or in what
place, the Church was the oracle of heaven is,
of course, a matter of theology. Two Councils 2
certainly, which to the untutored eye would seem
to have had a nearly equal claim in point of
numbers and distinction with those acknowledged
to be oecumenical, made statements which were
afterwards, if they had not been before, publicly
repudiated. Three Popes — Liberius, Vigilius,
and Honorius — fell into something painfully like
heresy, and as Newman himself points out,
"have left to posterity the burden of their
defence."8 The strength of a theory, like the
strength of a chain, is its weakest link. Those
who believe that divine oracles, like human ones,
speak only in response to a long and patient
1 " Development of Doctrine," p. 121.
2 "Ariminum"(3S9); " Ephesus " (449).
3 " Development of Doctrine," p. 439.

86 J. H. NEWMAN [i8o,.
pursuit of truth, that right opinions do in the long
issue of events make for life, and wrong ones
produce stagnation and decay, may find their faith
a far easier one to defend than the indefectibility
of Popes and Councils, unless, indeed, they adopt
the naive device of an Anglican bishop and
historian, and argue that "it may be said that
general councils do not err, for when they err
they are not recognised as general by the true
mind of the Church." 1 But they may also find
that they have been fighting for a shadow, for
an ecclesiastical infallibility that operates only by
lapse of time is little better than a pretentious
name for the vitality of an idea, and a strange
display of that infallibility of the Church, which
is surely " a necessary consequence of the Third
Person of the Blessed Trinity, and of his perpetual
office beginning from the Day of Pentecost." 2
Newman passed into the Church of Rome,
having been the first for three hundred years
to awaken a serious doubt in the mind of his
countrymen as to the wisdom and excellence of
the Reformation. But, as he had been aware
throughout,8 a deeper question than any doctrinal
1 Collins, "Authority of General Councils" (S.P.C.K.), p. 186.
2 This consideration greatly influenced Manning at the time of
his secession from the English Church. See Purcell's " Life of
Manning," i. p. 471 : " Is not the Infallibility of the Church a
necessary consequence of the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity,
and of his perpetual office beginning from the Day of Pentecost ?
This seems to me to be revealed in Scripture."
' " Oxf. Univ. Serm.," p. 69.

»8go] CERTITUDE AND PROBABILITY 87
one had been in issue, all unperceived by the
divines, in the struggles of the sixteenth century
— the question of the attitude which a man should
adopt towards religion and religious truth. Was
he blindly and without enquiry to accept the
assurances of priests, something in the same way
as we accept the dicta of men of science at the
present day, or was he to trust his own intellect,
when the worst has been said of it, a God-given
thing ? Was the truth of dogma absolutely final,
as true for the next world as for the one that now
is ; or was it just shadowy appearance, the best
that could be hoped for in a universe abounding
in cheats and deceptions? Was it possible to
have hold of certitude, or must we be content,
as Butler had advised, to take probability as our
guide and make the most of it ? These under
currents of the Reformation had been slowly
rising to the surface through the mud and debris
of the controversy, and Newman in attempting to
turn the stream was well aware that, unless he
could found his dam in the bed of the river, it
must quickly be swept away.
The "Grammar of Assent" is a philosophy of
Catholicism, and Newman was probably right
in thinking that some such system as his is
at the root of any religious belief whatever.1
In those early Sermons regarding the proper
relation of Reason and Faith, preached before
1 " Grammar of Assent," note ii.

88 J. H. NEWMAN [1801.
the University of Oxford, he had indeed fore
shadowed its conclusions. A curious inquirer
might, perhaps, trace the source of his thought
further still, to his close yet incongruous inter
course with Whately, the author of those delight
ful " Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon
Bonaparte," which must have made every one
feel how curiously thin is the line between
the findings of reason and absolute scepticism.
Newman at least had as much desire to possess
certitude as he had reason to distrust the rational
process. In a world of mysteries, which think
ing does little or nothing to fathom, and where
guides are so necessary that we cannot move a
step without them, we are compelled to trust our
intuitions. This is true as well for the man of
science as for the man of God. Memory is
an intuitive power, the fidelity of which is not to
be established by any process of argumentation.
If we trust it we commit an act of faith, for it
may be cheating us all the while. And yet,
without trusting it, neither science, nor philosophy,
nor anything else can advance a single step.1
All our knowledge was acquired, he argued,
subject to this condition, and that knowledge,
such as it was, was drawn from two sources —
the images that we perceived for ourselves, and
to which, therefore, we gave a real assent and
1 "Grammar of Assent," p. 23; " Oxf. Univ. Serm.," p. 213.
This point is pressed home in W. G. Ward's "Philosophy of
Theism," Essay I.

i«9o] "A GRAMMAR OF ASSENT" 89
the abstractions that we accepted from others,
and which, therefore, were no more to us than
notions. Each kind of knowledge had its
advantages. " To apprehend notionally was to have breadth
of mind, but to be shallow, to apprehend really
was to be deep, but to be narrow-minded. The
latter was the conservative principle of know
ledge, and the former the principle of its
advancement." 1
Yet of the two it was plain which was to be
preferred. That of which we could speak from
personal experience, to which our assent was a
real one, was that alone which we were com
petent to appreciate at its proper value. This
was the reason that boys who showed little
ability in school often showed most in the world.
A man who had no mind for theory constantly
proved a master in war or trade or engineering,
even in literature or speculation, because he had
the power of real apprehension,2 a genius, as we
say, for this or that particular study, upon which
his mind was concentrated. The highest matters
— doctrine, dogma — were equally susceptible with
the lowest of being treated as notions or as
objects. The first way was that of theology, the
second was that of religion.3
Newman was strangely English, or, as his
1 " Grammar of Assent," p. 34.
Ibid., p. 76.
3 Ibid, p. 98.

go J. H. NEWMAN Utoi-
opponents thought, strangely clever. By a few
strokes of the pen he had rid himself of the
charge of abstract speculation in sacred things,
and was building up his argument on the only
philosophy that Englishmen will listen to — a
philosophy of experience. To a man of his
temper the rest was easy. In a passage, half
poetry, all truth, he discovers the meaning of
conscience. He is in no fear of its being said
that conscience is emotional ; it was exactly
because it was always emotional that it was so
significant. " Inanimate things cannot stir our affections ;
these are correlative with persons. If, as is
the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed,
are frightened, at trangressing the voice of
conscience, this implies that there is One to
Whom we are responsible, before Whom we are
ashamed, Whose claims upon us we fear. If,
on doing wrong, we feel the same tearful, broken
hearted sorrow which overwhelms us on hurting
a mother ; if, on doing right, we enjoy the same
sunny serenity of mind, the same soothing satis
factory delight which follows on our receiving
praise from a father, we certainly have within
us the image of some person, to whom our love
and veneration look, in whose smile we find our
happiness, for whom we yearn, towards whom we
direct our pleadings, in whose anger we are
troubled and waste away. . . . ' The wicked flees,
when no one pursueth ; ' then why does he flee ?
Whence his terror? Who is it that he sees in
solitude, in darkness, in the hidden chambers
of his heart? If the cause of these emotions

1890] " A GRAMMAR OF ASSENT " 91
does not belong to this visible world, the object
to which his perception is directed must be Super
natural and Divine ; and thus the phenomena of
Conscience, as a dictate, avail to impress the
imagination with the picture of a Supreme
Governor, a Judge, holy, just, powerful, all-see
ing, retributive, and is the creative principle of
religion, as the Moral Sense is the principle of
ethics."1 Plato and Kant had joined hands and laid
them on Newman. Conscience, imperative and
absolute, drawing from out of its purity images of
the real things that are not seen, is described in
these few and beautiful pages with a terseness,
simplicity, and distinction, which a man might
think it worth the surrender of a lifetime to
achieve. All the theology of the Oxford Move
ment, from Keble's "Christian Year," and
Pusey's sermons down to Ward's articles in the
"British Critic" and "Ideal of a Christian
Church " was contained in the saying that the
pure in heart shall see God ; which, as Newman
said, was not primarily theology at all, but
religion. And the importance ofthe "Grammar
of Assent " lies in this that it has finally trans
ferred the vindication of creeds from the schools
to the market-place, from deduction to experience.
The claim that it makes can be put on its trial
by all. It is simply that if a man is not to stunt
his religious growth he will be driven along the
path of doctrine by a movement as irresistible
1 "Grammar of Assent," p. no.

92 J. H. NEWMAN t'Soi-
as it is slow ; that from the belief in moral
obligation he will be forced into a belief in God,
and from a belief in God into a belief in the
Trinity, and from a belief in the Trinity1 into
a belief in the Real Presence, and so on until
the cycle of doctrine is all complete, and each
and every part of it taken into a man's self as
sustenance like the elemental nutriments of the
human frame without which the body will sicken
and pine.
It was at this point that Newman is thought
to have touched a famous movement of to-day.
For Biblical criticism indeed he cared next to
nothing,2 though one can imagine from some
pages on an emendation of Shakespeare,3 how
sharply he would have put the critics to the
question, forcing them down from the vastest
fabric of erudition to the yet vaster substructure
of assumption that must always lie below. And
for the monstrous philosophy of Modernism, which
perverts the very name of truth, and feeds the
will with "facts" which the intellect refuses; which
dissolves the Easter faith in Christ's physical
resurrection into some figment of a message about
immortality, or the incarnation of the Son of
God into a beautiful but unsubstantial legend, he
1 " Grammar of Assent," p. 127.
2 He wrote, however, a very interesting, though very tentative,
reply to Renan's strictures upon the Roman theory of the inspira
tion of Scripture, in the Nineteenth Century for Feb- 1884.
' "Grammar of Assent," pp. 271-277.

i8go] "A GRAMMAR OF ASSENT" 93
would have felt nothing but disgust. But like the
Modernists he did take the will as guide, believ
ing (as they do not believe) that it will lead the
intellect into all truth. The second part of the
" Grammar of Assent " is therefore a vindication
on rational grounds of the truth of Christianity.
The simple unquestioning assent, identified as
material certitude, which the devout but unin-
structed Christian gives to the Catholic faith,1
needs to be amplified in the complex assent or
intellectual certitude of the thoughtful believer.
Reason now comes into action, and doubts
follow close upon its heels. For one does not
need to live long to discover that many more
people appear to enjoy certainty than can possibly
be right. Liberal politicians and Tory states
men, Catholic inquisitors and Protestant heretics,
Christian martyrs and pagan judges all appear
to have possessed at least the appearance of
assured principles. They cannot all have been
right, and it is impossible to prove to demonstra
tion that they were not all of them wrong. Of
what earthly use then is certitude? Newman
gets out of this by drawing a distinction (not to
be confused with a difference) between certitude
and conviction. Considered assent, he says in
effect, with fine, if unconscious, humour, is certitude
until it be abandoned ; if it be abandoned, it is
1 It has been cleverly said that Newman places Authority (i.e.,
the Catholic Church) in the same place in his philosophy of
religion as Hume places Custom in his philosophy of sensation.
Fairbairn, " Catholicism, Roman and Anglican," p. 208.)

94 J. H. NEWMAN [rtoi-
shown to have been no more than a conviction.1
Thus — to supply an illustration — when Manning
said that nothing could shake his belief in the
presence of Christ in the English Church and
Sacraments,2 he had only conviction ; when he
became convinced of the truth of the Roman
Catholic doctrine about these things, he pos
sessed certitude.
Delivered of its subtleties, the argument once
more becomes forcible. Convictions, of some
sort, it is clear, are a necessary of life. If you
do not believe the sun will rise to - morrow,
you will hardly do the work of to-day. But
these convictions lack intellectual cogency, are
conclusions which break away into a thousand
doubtful premises, if we care, as we do not, to
press them back upon their sources. "As to
logic," as Newman puts it, " its chain of conclu
sions hangs loose at both ends, both the point
from which the proof should start, and the points
at which it should arrive, are beyond its reach
— it comes short both of first principles and of
concrete issues."3 His genius was astonishingly
varied. He was no biologist or metaphysician,
but as before in his theory of development he
had hit upon the method of Darwin, so now he
anticipated the "Foundations of Belief."4
1 "Grammar of Assent," p. 258.
2 Purcell, " Life of Manning," i. p. 329.
3 " Grammar of Assent," p. 284.
* Wilfred Ward, " Problems and Persons," p. 147.

,89o] «a GRAMMAR OF ASSENT" 95
Formal inference in life being proved impossible,
we are driven to admit that in all our practical
judgments we have parted company with logical
demonstration. Our reason has been forced to
accept much less proof than it pretends to require.
The greatest minds show this in a marked degree ;
genius transcending knowledge, and reaching its
goal by intuition.1 Though our mental horizon
is shut in by probabilities we must act as if we
are sure. For if probability be the guide of
life, certitude is its vital spark. Is it not, then,
plain that in our complex frame there exists some
faculty which keeps the fire alive as zealously as
a vestal virgin ? This faculty Newman names the
Illative Sense, and by it we can survey with effect
whole series of phenomena which it would take
us a lifetime to appraise and classify according
to logical method. It enables us of its own
intrinsic merit to take different standpoints in
regarding the universe — the scientific one, or
that of initial causes, and the theological one,
or that of final causes.2 But it is defective, inas
much as it furnishes no common measure between
mind and mind, as logic can and does.3 For
this reason its inferences are intensely personal.4
No one knew his own strength better than
Newman. He had carried men with him from
the first because of his wonderful gift of unaffected
self-revelation. He had never, any more than his
1 "Grammar of Assent," pp. 331-333. " Ibid., p. 372.
s Ibid., p. 362. * Ibid., p. 373.

o6 J. H. NEWMAN [ifei.
Master, made religion primarily dogmatic. He
had rested it always on experiences — experiences
felt and experiences desired. Now as he drew
towards his threescore years and ten, he was
not likely to be unfaithful to that method of
evangelisation, of which in his time he was
the greatest master. The last chapters of the
"Grammar of Assent" on Natural and Revealed
Religion, are just a confession of faith, beautiful
as the confession of Polycarp before the Pro
consul : " Eighty and six years have I been His
Servant, and He has never wronged me, but ever
has preserved me ; and how can I blaspheme
my King and Saviour?"1
It is nothing, after all, but the old intuitive
conviction brought to demonstration in his own
long life, and urged once again with increasing
force and pathos, as time drew to its close for
the writer — that the pure in heart, not only shall
see God, but do see Him.
The arguments, too, are the old ones — con
science and duty and a Moral Governor, prayer
made and answered, sin confessed and taken
away, a particular providence — things of which
the world is mostly tired of hearing, but that fall
upon the ear like a long-forgotten melody, learned
at a mother's knee, when Newman repeats them.
He never feared a difficulty nor shirked one, and
the strength of his reason is the strength of one
1 Quoted on p. 480 of the " Grammar of Assent."

«89o] "A GRAMMAR OF ASSENT" 97
who has measured the forces of opposition. The
criticism of Christianity, which has most weight
with thinking men at the present time, he meets
very differently from the popular preacher. He
never attempts to deny that beside the sunny
religion of Greek culture and civilisation, the
Christian faith looks stern and forbidding. It
would be strange if it were otherwise, when the
fact of sin is the one postulate of Christianity —
the corner-stone upon which the whole fabric is
reared. The real question, as he sees, is not
which of the two views of life is the more alluring,
but which is the more conformable to Nature.1
And Nature speaks with no uncertain voice. In
the dim mysterious rites of primitive peoples —
hideous sacrifices to propitiate angry gods, dark
sayings seeking to uncover the mysteries of the
tomb, haunting fears of an underworld governed
by ministers of vengeance — the intuitions of
humanity are apparent. Culture and philosophy
sweep them aside with easy grace. Christianity
reads their meaning and consecrates it.
Leslie Stephen, busy always with a religion
in which he was sure he did not believe, said
1 "Grammar of Assent," pp. 395, 396. Newman's argument
does not seem to the present writer to suffer any vital injury,
because we can now (or think we can now) penetrate to a yet
earlier period " in which the sense of sin, in any proper sense of
the word, did not exist at all, and the whole object of ritual was to
maintain the bond of physical holiness that kept the religious
community together." (Robertson Smith, "Religion of the
Semites," p. 401.) G

98 J. H. NEWMAN [Itol.
with his usual trenchant candour that Newman
had intuitions, but that he had none.1 Good
people, who are proud to call themselves men
of the world, have no doubt felt the same.
Newman would not have been much discon
certed. He would have said that if a man paid
so much attention to such faculties as his senses
and his reason he was eminently irrational to
neglect the leadings of his conscience ; 2 and, if
it had been retorted (as it certainly would have
been) that conscience is no more than an inherited
register of the experience of the race, he would
have said it was impossible to argue against
what was as extraordinary a piece of wilful self-
depreciation as of blatant self-assertion. But he
would have added in tones, to which we are now
better accustomed, that we know far too little
of other men's hearts and opportunities to
draw conclusions ; that our business is with
ourselves.3 We are done with Newman's theology, and
must presently be done with him. Yet some
thing remains to be said. The years in the
Church of Rome were- years of a great peace
untroubled by doubts.4 From time to time,
indeed, public events drew him from his shell.
Pusey in 1864, and Gladstone ten years after,
excited him by their attacks to vindicate the later
1 L. Stephen, "An Agnostic's Apology," p. 12.
2 " Parochial and Plain Sermons," i. p. 200.
3 Ibid, pp. 78, 82. * " Apologia," p. 238.

1890] PUSEY'S "EIRENICON" 99
dogmas of the Roman Church — the Immaculate
Conception of the Virgin,1 and the Infallibility
of the Pope.2 In each case he had been wounded
in an especially tender spot. Students of his
works have noticed that for all his Catholic learn
ings he had been from the first essentially an
Englishman,* and the English character is, or was,
peculiarly sensitive to accusations of effeminacy
or disloyalty. Pusey charged Roman Catholics
with the one on account of the veneration
accorded to the Virgin Mary ; Gladstone with the
other on account of the decrees of the Vatican
Council. The " Eirenicon" of 1864, indeed, cried peace,
but went on to show that there was none.
Pusey found the Roman Church fascinating in
her appearance, but incredible in certain of her
beliefs, and intolerable in some of her prayers.
Roman forms, in fact, would not fit with English
feelings. Most of all he fixed upon the cult of
Mary, whom, as Newman reminded him, the
Council of Ephesus had called (according to the
popular but too highly-coloured translation) the
Mother of God. Newman's reply was a dignified
one, traced the doctrine back to Justin Martyr,
and deprecated the excesses of Roman Catholic
devotion. "Of all passions," the writer said, "love is the
1 Published in 1854. 2 Published in 1870.
1 E.g., Thureau-Dangin, " La Renaiss. Cath.," iii. p. 99.

io© J. H. NEWMAI^ [,soi-
most unmanageable ; nay, more, I would not give
much for that love which is never extravagant,
which always observes the proprieties, and can
move about in perfect good taste under all
emergencies." l
Gladstone's pamphlet of 1874 on the Vatican
Decrees made no attempt to keep its rebukes,
like Pusey's, plaintive as the murmurings of a
river. It was all violence, storm, and flood.
Rome had set her face against civilisation ; In
fallibility was a hideous mummy torn from a
sarcophagus ; Roman Catholics were traitors in
principle to their secular sovereign. Newman
was pained at the quarter from which this
language came, but answered it with the modera
tion that became a gentleman. The " Encyclical "
of 1864, in which Pio Nono had set his face
against the modern temper, was, he pointed out,
the exact expression of a habit of mind, manifest
not so long before in Test and Corporation
Acts in the statute-book of Protestant England.
Times had changed ; it was not evident that
they had changed for the better. The Pope
might be right after all, and at least had stuck
to his guns. " Toryism, that is loyalty to
persons, springs immortal in the human breast ;
. . . religion is a spiritual loyalty ; and . . .
Catholicity is the only Divine form of religion."2
As for the Infallibility doctrine, of the promulga-
1 " Diff. of Anglicans," ii. p. 80.
2 "Diff. of Anglicans," ii. p. 268.

,89o] GLADSTONE'S PAMPHLET 101
tion of which he had been no advocate, it was
as well to understand it. The Pope was infallible
only when he spoke on matters of faith or morals
in his capacity as Universal Shepherd, and for
the edification of the whole Church. Guarded
in this way, the dogma became, as a later
historian has thought it,1 rather a safeguard than
a stumbling-block, for Catholic obedience had in
some quarters run almost into servility. In this
way, too, Pope Honorius, condemned by an
oecumenical council for heresy, was got off — none
too easily. He was not exercising his pastoral
office, Newman said, when he fell into error.2
Gladstone's alarm about the loyalty of British
Roman Catholics would, his opponent added,
subside if that statesman would reflect that con
flicts between the religious laws of Pio Nono,
and the secular ones of Queen Victoria, far from
being matters as he appeared to suppose of daily
occurrence, could scarcely happen.3
Time has made Gladstone's pamphlet with its
tremendous language and its vast circulation
look uncommonly foolish. Beautiful Liberalism.
embodying the spirit of progress and denounced
by Pope Pius, by the casting of its skin has slid
somehow into ugly Labour. Liberty has got lost
in Equality and Fraternity. Roman Catholics,
open to strong suspicion of divided allegiance,
1 Thureau-Dangin, " La Renaiss. Cath," iii. p. 114.
1 " Diff. of Anglicans," ii. pp. 316, 317. ' Ibid., p. 240.

102 J. H. NEWMAN [l8oi.
sit in Cabinets, sat even in one of Gladstone's
own making. An English sovereign, sworn
against Popery, has attended service in a Roman
Cathedral at Westminster. An English Princess
sits beside the Most Catholic King. Nor, unless
the signs of the times are strangely misleading,
is that to be the end.
Also, in one or two private contests, Time,
' that great auxiliary of the Church and of
Truth,' as Montalembert called it, has been on
Newman's side. The libel action brought against
him by a renegade priest called Achilli for a
very plain attack upon this person's character,
incorporated in his " Lectures on the Present
Position of Catholics in England,"1 is hardly
worth a mention. The jury, it is true, found for
Achilli, but it was middle-class and in the fashion
of the time ultra - Protestant, so that there is
pretty good reason, as Newman's biographers2
have contended, to distrust its competence.
Then there was a constant antagonism with
Manning, which neither letters nor masses3
served altogether to dispel. The real cause of
division lay, as in these cases it generally does,
in the natures of the men themselves — one was
a statesmen and the other an evangelist — but the
question of policy, in which the division was dis
closed, regarded the proper attitude to be adopted
1 Pp. 207-2,0. 2 Hutton ; Meynell.
' Thureau-Dangin, " La Renaiss. Cath.," iii. p. 89.

,890] NEWMAN AND MANNING 103
toward the Anglicans. Newman, eager to make
his countrymen into his co - religionists, and
his co-religionists into his countrymen, saw in
the abolition of University tests (in 1854) an
opportunity of getting a definitely English edu
cation for the Roman Catholic youth, and of
establishing a missionary settlement of Oratorians,
with himself at the head, to shield them from
contamination, and to be at the same time the
centre of an active propaganda.1 Manning, on
the other hand, was ultramontane to the core,
cared nothing for Anglicans as such, and wished
to keep the breach between the two communions
wide and difficult. The chief point was, of
course, to get the ear of the Vatican, and for
that he was better qualified than his opponent.
But his power ended with his life, and Newman
had the English Romans at his back all the
while, so that Roman Catholics, as every one
knows, run the religious risks of a University
education like the rest of the world, and with far
better success.
The other controversial affair which marred
the peace of the Birmingham Oratory was
Kingsley's unwise attack on Newman's innocence.
The Protestant novelist affirmed that the Catholic
clergy condoned falsehood, and that Newman was
no exception to the rule. The world was grateful
to him, not for his allegations (which so far as
See Thureau-Dangin, " La Renaiss. Cath.," ii. p. 374 ; iii. p. 82,

104 J. H. NEWMAN [l8o,.
they were general, were about as true as other
charges against the good faith of the human race,
and so far as they were particular, were not true
at all), but for the effect of them, which was to
draw Newman to vindicate his career in an
" Apologia." That beautiful book sets him beside
the four or five famous people who have dared
plainly and without reserve to write their own
spiritual biography. It is a task which requires
either great conceit or great humility. Augustine
did it to catch souls for the kingdom of God ;
Rousseau did it to prove himself a good citizen
of the world ; Amiel (if Amiel was a great man)
did it to be quit of the groanings which could
not be uttered. But of the four that have been
named, Newman's book, like his character,
because of his character, is by far the noblest.
Neither the sensuality of Augustine, nor the
egotism of Rousseau, nor the weakness of Amiel
soils his pages. From first to last his candle had
burnt with a clear, steady flame, and Kingsley
had taken away the bushel that covered it.
These things are obvious. It is obvious, too,
that the "Apologia" is the book by which his
great claims as a writer of pure English will be
carried down from generation to generation.
Time had mellowed his style. The ruggedness,
which is apparent in the "Parochial and Plain
Sermons," had changed to a tender, graceful,
almost effeminate diction ; an effect which is

l89o] NEWMAN'S STYLE io5
directly traceable to the cult of the Virgin and
of St Philip Neri, both of whom were very con
stantly in his thoughts. What had been lost in
power had been more than recovered in pathos.
He had always been a musician, as became one in
whose veins there ran a strong current of Jewish
blood, and the quality of his language grew ever
more musical. One might say that he plays
more truly than that he colours.1 Yet it is a
mistake to think that the excellence of his writing
is apparent to the casual observer. The critics,
indeed, are agreed for once, and because of their
agreement they have fixed public opinion beyond
a chance of change. But, whilst any man of
ordinary literary perceptions could not fail to
recognise in the presence of Macaulay or Froude
or Pater that he had met with something very
rare and good, it is more than doubtful how
many men, ignorant ofthe context, would be aware
of anything especially remarkable in a page of
Newman. This is no doubt partly due to the
fact that his manner was as businesslike as it was
delicate, and proved a model which ordinary men
found serviceable and made common. Lawyers,
for example, say that Newman would have
written a very good Opinion. But besides this
it is certain that, like all very perfect things, his
style requires to be much looked at before it is
truly admired, and that the homage paid to it is
1 See W. Barry, " Newman," pp. 9, 34, 35, 60.

106 J. H. NEWMAN [l8oi.
often simply conventional. Devoid of all show
and glitter, simplex munditiis, always very
plain and neat, it made its way because it was
the vehicle of thoughts that much needed to be
spoken ; and only afterwards did men realise
that the vehicle itself was beautiful. The proof
of its excellence, if proof be required, is that it
is impossible to caricature it. Newman was so
great that he was able to model it upon its
antithesis. As in his teaching he set up the
simplicity of the primitive Church against the
splendour of the Roman Empire, so in his style
he chose the household words of common talk
to rebuke the classical tongue of Gibbon and
Johnson. Rolling sentences and majestic periods
had to give way before the filtered language of
the street and the market-place. His limpid
English was the purest current in the stream of
imaginative writing which Carlyle and Ruskin
had set in motion, and which, as has lately been
suggested, served in the end to confuse the true
functions of poetry and prose. Newman at least
never fell into fault, never framed turgid or
tumultuous sentences. Like Bunyan he was a
conservative liberator, and freed the language
from a certain stiffness of diction, whilst pre
serving for it an easy dignity. Nor is it any
accident that these two writers of the purest
English were deeply religious men. Stateliness
and majesty he had not, nor cared to have.

,890] NEWMAN'S VIEW OF HISTORY 107
The description of Athens in his " University
Sketches " 1 — at once a contrast and a parallel to
Gibbon's description of Constantinople — has long
been recognised as possessing the highest merit.
Such English had not been written since the
days of Addison, and goes far to show that, but
for the deep vein of religion in him, he would
have been a purveyor of that light scholarly
literature which began with the Spectator, and
concluded in the " Essays of Elia." Of Jane
Austen's novels he is said to have been very
fond. The impulse, which the Oxford men gave to
historical study, was more than once commended
by Mill. Newman's own most serious historical
work was upon "The Arians." It suffers from
want of proportion, but three cognate points,
probably unfamiliar to English readers at that
time, were well brought out — that the absence
of theological definition is primitive and ideal ; 2
that the Arians were the successors of the
Judaizers,3 and that they really emanated from
the school of Antioch, not of Alexandria.4 But
he always wrote history with a purpose. " Never
make a mistake in your logic," said a famous
counsel to his devils; "the facts remain at your
disposal." No one knew the truth of that better
than Newman, nor did he attempt to conceal
1 "Hist. Sketches," iii., pp. 18-46.
2 " The Arians of the Fourth Century," p. 36.
8 Ibid., pp. 18-24. * Ibid., section 2.

108 J. H. NEWMAN [ltol.
it. " It is the Church's dogmatic use of History,"
he said, "in which the Catholic believes."1
Of one of his greatest literary talents, he only
became sensible in middle life. There is not
much trace of irony in his Oxford work ; yet in
the end he proved a master in the craft, keen,
finished, able to pierce the very joints and
marrow. Of this his reply to Kingsley, which
he did not allow to appear in the "Apologia,"
the opening chapter of the " Lectures on the
Present Position of Catholics in England," and
his novel, " Loss and Gain," depicting the young
men of the Oxford Movement, are probably the
best examples.
Irony is humour in the hands of a moralist.
Christ used it, and some of his noblest labourers
have kept it among their tools. But Newman
gave it an edge, which makes one shudder. In
one of his Roman Catholic sermons, the soul,
life's little journey past and over, is brought face
to face with Christ. The recording angel opens
his books ; the long roll of sins and follies is
read out ; the sinner stands condemned.
" ' Impossible,' he cries, ' I a lost soul. I separ
ated 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 Alexander, or Philetus, or Diotrephes. What ?
1 " Diff. of Anglicans," ii. p. 312.

,890] NEWMAN'S IRONY 109
hopeless pain ! for me ! Impossible, it shall not
be.' And the poor soul struggles and wrestles
in the grasp of the mighty demon which has
hold of it, and whose very touch is torment.
' Oh, atrocious ! ' it shrieks in agony, and in
anger, too, as if the very keenness of the affliction
were a proof of its injustice. ' A second ! and
a third ! I can bear no more ! stop, horrible
fiend, give over ; 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, nor the taint of the charnel-house. I
know what human feelings are ; I have been
taught religion ; I have had a conscience ; I
have a cultivated mind ; I am well versed in
science and art ; I have been refined by literature ;
I have had an eye for the beauties of Nature ; I
am a philosopher or a poet, or a shrewd observer
of men, or a hero, or a statesman, or an orator,
or a man of wit and humour. Nay — I am a
Catholic ; I am not an unregenerate Protestant ;
I have received the grace of the Redeemer ; I
have attended the Sacraments for years ; I have
been a Catholic from a child ; I am a son of the
martyrs ; I died in communion with the Church ;
nothing, nothing which I have ever been, which
I have ever seen, bears any resemblance to thee,
and to the flame and stench which exhale from
thee ; so I defy thee and abjure thee, O enemy
of man ! '
" Alas ! poor soul, and whilst it thus fights with
that destiny which it has brought upon itself, and
with those companions whom it has chosen, the
man's name, perhaps, is solemnly chanted forth,
and his memory decently cherished among his
friends on earth. His readiness in speech, his
fertility in thought, his sagacity, or his wisdom

no J. H. NEWMAN t,goi.
are not forgotten. Men talk of him from time to
time, they appeal to his authority ; they quote his
words ; perhaps they even raise a monument to
his name, or write his history. ' So compre
hensive a mind ! Such a power of throwing light
on a perplexed subject, and bringing conflicting
ideas or facts into harmony ! ' ' Such a speech it
was he made on such and such an occasion ; I
happened to be present, and never shall forget
it,' or, ' It was the saying of a very sensible
man,' or, ' A great personage, whom some of us
knew'; or, 'It was a rule with a very worthy
and excellent friend of mine, now no more,' or,
' Never was his equal in society, so just in his
remarks, so versatile, so unobtrusive,' or, ' I was
fortunate to see him once when I was a boy,'
or, ' So great a benefactor to his country and to
his kind!' 'His discoveries so great,' or, 'His
philosophy so profound.' O vanity! vanity of
vanities, all is vanity. What profiteth it? His
soul is in hell. . . . Vanity of vanities ! misery
of miseries! they will not attend to us, they
will not believe us. We are but a few in
number, and they are many, and the many will
not give credit to the few. . . . Thousands are
dying daily ; they are waking up into God's
everlasting wrath " 1
This is the same voice that said with reiterated
emphasis that it was a mere preamble to the
faith of the Catholic Church,
"that it is better for the sun and moon to drop
from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all
the many millions on it to die of starvation in
extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction
1 " Discourses to Mixed Congregation," pp. 39, 40.

,890] LOSS AND GAIN in
goes, than that one soul not only should be lost
but should commit one single venial sin, should
tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor
farthing without excuse."1
Jeanie Deans, who was nota Catholic, behaved
as if she believed something of the same kind.
But Sir Leslie Stephen remarked with much
asperity that the statement was either shocking
or meaningless.2 And modern society, without
troubling overmuch to find its reasons, has decided
that this sort of thing is inconvenient, and shall
be said no more, so that Church dignitaries have
to be busy in interpreting texts and clipping
creeds. Such hard work is it to preach the
Gospel !
Ironical humour it is reasonable to suspect was
Newman's besetting temptation. On the one side
it led him to indulge in a luxury of horror ; on
the other it betrayed him into strange sallies of bad
taste. Charles Reding, the hero in " Loss and
Gain," brought after many struggles to the very
edge of the Roman Communion, is beset in
his last moments of hesitation by numberless
officious Protestant secretaries anxious to turn
the tide. A kind of John Kensit at length
appears and proves more intolerable than the
rest. Reding, his patience utterly worn out,
snatches up a crucifix as the most popish symbol
1 "Apologia," p. 247 ; "Diff. of Anglicans," i. p. 240.
* " Science of Ethics " (2nd ed.), p. 369.

ii2 J. H. NEWMAN [l8oi.
at hand, and, advancing upon the intruder,
drives him forth as effectually as if he had
threatened his eyes with vitriol.1 When one
considers what a crucifix represents, most of all to
a Roman Catholic, one is disagreeably conscious
that Newman's anti - Protestant enthusiasm has
carried him beyond the limit of what is decent.
Jean Paul, in one of those paradoxes which
one remembers, said that no one really believed
in his religion who could not afford to jest about
it.2 On some such principle as this, as Kingsley
thought,8 it is alone possible to defend the
mockery of the demons in the "Dream of
Gerontius." Their language shows at least that
Newman had taken the full measure of the forces
against which he set his face, and of the service
to which he had given in his allegiance. And
that wonderful poem, tossed into a rubbish-
basket, and saved only by the diligence of a
friend, is indeed and in every respect the
embodiment of the author's most intimate
thoughts, the crown and prize of a long day
of toil and struggle.
Any one who can enter into the spirit of it,
has understood Newman, and those who think
with him, and what they are about ; for Gerontius
explains, as no other has ever explained to the
modern world, why it is that life needs to be
1 " Loss and Gain," p. 412.
" Quoted in the " Life of Charles Kingsley," ii. p. 271.
» Ibid.

i8go] THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS 113
hard, rough, and difficult, and full of prayers and
watchings. He had not been a bad man, and
in his last sickness the prayers of friends and the
administration of the sacraments have greatly
consoled him. Yet he has died alone,1 and as
he passes up in a moment of time into the
presence of God, he becomes aware of his awful
loneliness. He is no longer sheltered by his
fellowmen, nor can any more think of himself as
a social unit. Then at last, as he beholds the
Beatific Vision, he grows sick with love and
horror — love for the "pleading in His pensive
eyes," and horror that a thing like himself, foul
with every defilement, should have drawn so
near to One, altogether pure. The famous lines
follow : —
" 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
There, motionless and happy in my pain —
Lone, not forlorn,
There will I sing my sad perpetual strain
Until the morn.
There will' I sing, and soothe my stricken breast,
Which ne'er can cease
To throb, and pine, and languish, till possest
Of its sole Peace.
There will I sing my absent Lord and Love —
Take me away,
That sooner I may rise, and go above,
And see Him in the truth of everlasting day."2
1 Cp. Pascal, " On mourra seul."
2 Verses on Various Occasions? p. 367. H

n4 J- H. NEWMAN [l8o,.
But what need is there to repeat lines which
every one knows who is at all worthy to know
them! Gerontius, says an ardent Spencerian of the
first scene in the poem, died in an improper
frame of mind ; he ought to have been thinking
unselfishly of others right up to the end.1 And,
indeed, it was a very foolish frame of mind, if our
main business in this so brief life is to rear a fine
breed of citizens, like fowls or cattle, with the aid
of expert advice. It was, in fact, one of the main
effects of Newman's life and teaching that he
disentangled issues which had long been con
founded and sharply distinguished the super
natural life, which is exacted of all Christians,
from the natural existence, admirable in its way,
but also animal, which is pursued by the vast
majority of us. He never flinched from uphold
ing ' the humble monk and holy nun,' whom
nearly every one has laughed at, although with
no better reason perhaps than the cultured
society of the Roman Empire laughed at the
early Christians. And it is because he so
mercilessly brought to the light the real claims
and obligations of Christianity, that, as a recent
Bampton lecturer 2 has seen, the world is no
longer so busy considering whether the Christian
faith be true as whether the Christian life be
possible. Though he anticipated, before 1833,
1 Saleeby, "Ethics," p. 115. 2 Peile's Bampton Lectures, 1907.

1890] THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 115
the coming attack on the authenticity of the
Bible narratives,1 his diagnosis of the malady of
the body ecclesiastic went far deeper than that,
and his life became a prolonged attack on
Liberalism. His insight was so rare and fine
that the historian who condemned his secession
to Rome on grounds of expediency would be
singularly audacious. Pan Anglican Synods,
multiplied services, signal examples of clerical
heroism, do not veil the fact from the shrewd
observer that the English Church is but poorly
equipped to meet the exigencies of the religious
situation. It was as a society of gentlemen that
she made her way. When gentlemen are no
longer of much account, it is not clear how
she can retain her hold on the public affections,
except it be by an adoption of the Roman system.
But this is to give away more than half her case.
Perhaps it may some day be considered the
highest evidence of Newman's judgment that he
perceived with De Maistre that Rome with her
wonderful tradition of spiritual culture is the best
bulwark against the advances of a material
civilisation, the only fortress strong enough to
fly the flag something more than half-mast high.
But it is not the business of the student of
history to try to read the signs of the times. On
his own generation Newman's influence, apart
from its moral bearing, told in the direction
1 " Apologia," p. 9.

116 J. H. NEWMAN l8o,.
of making Englishmen respectful and tolerant
towards Roman Catholicism. This he had in
common with Wiseman and Manning. Like
them he passed through a long fire of
unpopularity to be loved and honoured and
accounted a national distinction. The Cardinal's
hat came to him in 1879, when Leo XIII. had
replaced Pio Nono ; and England was proud of
it. He himself was, of course, long past the
age — if he had ever known it — at which hats or
eoronets are of any consequence whatever. But
he was gratified to see that the long censure
upon himself had been reversed as well among
his countrymen as in Rome. The event, how
ever, appeared too astounding to be altogether
comfortable, and his thoughts ran off to
Polycrates.1 Then, after ten more quiet years at Birmingham,
the end came. He died in the fulness of his
days, having vindicated in his life the excellence
and purity of his ideals. For those who agree
with his main contention — that a pursuit of the
highest attainable life is the only guarantee of
a right judgment in all matters of spiritual
importance, that as he was fond of saying " non
in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere
populum suum " — and who yet cannot follow
him into the Church of Rome, the difficulty
remains (and it is a very great one) that a
1 "Addresses to Cardinal Newman," p. 319.

,890] NEWMAN'S SCEPTICISM 117
man of such purity, goodness, and self-devotion
should have fallen into error in the very maturity
of his powers.
The criticisms that have been directed against
him fall into two classes. On the one hand he
is accused of unbelief, on the other of credulity.
Huxley, in an oft-quoted sentence, said that
he would engage to extract a little manual of
scepticism from the Cardinal's writings. So
Mght a little manual of religion be extracted
>m those of Huxley.1 But the charge, of
urse, goes deeper than this, and in this deeper
ise it is justified. Newman, however, is in
>d company. The same thing was said of
1 ;cal and Butler, and will be said of every man
who brings a keen and patient intellect to bear
upon the mysteries of religion. It is in the very
nature of things that this should be so. Faith
is necessary because sight is unattainable, and
cannot by hypothesis give any complete present
intellectual account of her beliefs. But she is
innocent of any sort of fraud, for it is precisely
belief, not knowledge, that she offers. The man
of science has less reason to complain of her
than she of him, for his knowledge, so solid and
convincing in the laboratory, dissolves afresh in
the study of the metaphysician, and we become
once more the little children of Newton's simile
A remark of Hutton, " Cardinal Newman," p. 59.

n8 J. H. NEWMAN [l8o,.
picking up a few shells on the sea-shore of time.
To this extent, indeed, Newman was sceptical,
that he never encouraged us to expect to be very
much else. He thought it rationalism to ask
to be told ' the why and how of God's dealings
with us.'1 For him, as for Pascal, the world
had been the theatre of some aboriginal calamity
of so dire and disastrous a character that it has
left man as we see him — the negation of his own
nobility. It is at this point that the alternative charge
comes into view. Newman, it is said, despised
reason, and in consequence fell a prey to
credulity. He took imagination as his guide,
thinks Dr Abbott,2 and became as the blind that
lead the blind. Dr Barry says the same : " With
Newman Imagination was Reason."3 Newman
himself was not of this opinion.4 Had it been
so, he said, he would have been a Roman
Catholic sooner than he was.5 The question,
of course, really is, whether any one can get
through life by making himself a reasoning
machine ; whether, indeed, such a thing is
possible at all ; whether tradition, circumstance,
temperament, success and failure, above all and
for the best men, as Newman himself thought,
personal influence,6 are not always and in the
1 " Ess. Crit. and Hist." i. p. 32 ; Cp. "Ess. on Develop.," p. 191.
2 Abbott, " Anglican Career," i. pp. 58-60.
* Barry, " Newman," p. 21. " "Oxf. Univ. Serm.," p. 9.
• "Apologia," p. ,19. • "Oxf. Univ. Serm.," Sermon v.

,890] NEWMAN'S CAREER 119
nature of things the predominant sources of
opinion. If they prove to be, Newman's method
was amply justified. Religion and her daughter
Poetry then become the channels of spiritual
vitality, and Reason just no more than the
corrective of extravagance. However this may
be, Newman never flinched from his view that
credulity was better than scepticism.1 On the
other hand, he kept his mind open, and was
always ready to admit evidence in disproof of
particular cases of miraculous intervention.2
The interest of his life and character is inex
haustible. Romance, which he, following in the
wake of Scott and Coleridge, did so much to
revive, clings about his own career. He seeks
the vision of the Holy Grail, like a mediaeval
knight, confident that it is for the appointed
time, and will surely come and will not tarry ;
and his patience is at last rewarded, and he
attains the perfect resignation, which he holds to
be the purpose of this life, and the earnest of
the next.8 His career is checked, of course, by
mistakes and confusions. The historian, as Seeley
somewhere points out, only knows of one career
that was achieved with unerring wisdom.4 Yet
1 " Oxf. Univ. Serm.," p. 220. a " Apologia," p. 309.
3 " Parochial and Plain Sermons," viii. Sermon ix.
4 Seeley, " Ecce Homo," p. 20. " No other career ever had so
much unity. . . . Christ formed one plan and executed it : no
important change took place in his mode of thinking, speaking,
or acting ; at least the evidence before us does not enable us to
trace any such change."

lao J. H. NEWMAN [itoi-iggo
this essay has sadly missed its point, if his in
consistencies appear anything but superficial.
Again, a recent critic has pronounced him
a mystery.1 But indeed he is no mystery, ex
cept to those who make it. He strove always,
and with all his faculties, to recover for mankind
the Highest Life that the earth has seen, and
the real mystery, as he would have said, is that
so few men care to do the same.
1 Bremond's psychological essay on Newman is translated under
the title of "The Mystery of Newman."

AUTHORITIES 121

AUTHORITIES
A collected edition of Newman's more important works is
published by Longmans, Green & Co., and has been used
here. The authorities for his life and work, and the criticisms
of them are, of course, very numerous. The following list
does not lay claim to any completeness : —
There are lives of Newman, by R. H. Hutton — the best ;
by Dr Barry — the most suggestive ; by W. Meynell and H. J.
Jennings. The authoritative life of Newman is being written
by Mr Wilfred Ward.
The principal contemporary authorities for his life are the
" Apologia pro vita sua," by himself; R. W. Church's " History
of the Oxford Movement," and various essays in " Occasional
Papers " ; J. A. Froude's " The Oxford Counter-Reformation "
in "Short Studies"; Mark Pattison's "Memoirs"; Shairp,
"Studies in Poetry and Philosophy"; F. W. Newman,
"Contributions to the Early History of Cardinal Newman " ;
"The Memoirs of W. C. Lake"; and "The Letters and
Correspondence of J. H. Newman during his life in the English
Church," by Anne Mozley.
There are studies of Newman by M. Bremond (translated
under the title of "The Mystery of Newman"); by M.
Dimnet in "La Pensee Catholique dans l'Angleterre Con-
temporaine " ; and by Mr Wilfred Ward in " Problems and
Persons " and " Ten Personal Studies." Thureau-Dangin ("La
Renaissance Catholique en Angleterre") has written an
exhaustive history of the Oxford Movement.
Attacks upon Newman are contained in —
Dr E. A. Abbott's "The Anglican Career of Cardinal
Newman"; and in F. W. Newman's "Early History of
Cardinal Newman."
Leslie Stephen wrote a very valuable criticism of Newman's
position from an adverse standpoint in "An Agnostic's

122 AUTHORITIES
Apology " — the chapter entitled " Newman's Theory of
Belief." J. A. Froude wrote a criticism of the "Grammar
of Assent" in Short Studies; and J. B. Mozley of "The
Theory of Development " under that title. Dr E. A. Abbott's
" Philomythus " is an attack on Newman's doctrine of miracles.
Dr Fairbairn's " Catholicism, Roman and Anglican " is a reply
to many of Newman's conclusions ; and Mr W. J. Williams'
" Newman, Pascal, Loisy and the Catholic Church " contains
a rejoinder to Dr Fairbairn.
Mr Benn's " History of English Rationalism in the
Nineteenth Century" contains much hostile criticism of
Newman, and the school of Newman.

R. W. CHURCH
1815-1890
The Church of England— R. W. Church a brilliant exception to
the common rule — Events of his life : scholar ; statesman ;
saint — As scholar; (a) "The Gifts of Civilisation"; The
Roman Empire and Christianity ; (b) Essay on " Bishop
Andrewes " — The Church of England ; (c) Essay on " Bishop
Butler " — The basis of religion — As statesman ; (a) His high
qualities for statesmanship ; (b) " The Guardian " ; (c) St Paul's
— As saint ; (a) His severity ; (b) " The Ventures of Faith " ;
(c) Church and Newman ; (d) The end ; (e) His impressions
of life. " I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright ;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv'n by the spheres,
Like a vast shadow mov'd, in which the World
And all her train were hurl'd."
—Henry Vaughan, The World.
The Church of England, when Newman came
to examine it in his latter years, seemed to him
a great national institution of noble memories,
ancient wisdom, and political strength.1 And no
one, who looks back over its history, can feel that
(at least until very recent times) it has been
otherwise than aristocratic in character ; remark
able among the Protestant churches for its
Newman, " Apologia," pp. 339, 340.
123

124 R- W. CHURCH r,8,5.
dignity, scholarship, moderation, and reverence
for the past ; intolerant of cant, as of fanaticism,
and associated all too closely with the fortunes
of the gentlemen of England. The Church of
the Reformation settlement did not originate, like
the churches of Scotland and northern Europe,
in an irrepressible explosion of popular rage at
clerical abuses, but was contrived by the three
Protestant Tudors, the early Stuarts, and the
new nobility established on the abbey - lands.
We see this very well in the English wars of
religion. When the people first got hold of the
Protestant idea, they were carried off their feet
by it, and heads were broken and lost that the
Establishment might be saved. A hundred and
seventy years later, when a revival of spiritual
life was as long overdue as it was sorely needed,
and after Wesley had failed precisely because
he was so little of an aristocrat, it was once more
a set of English gentlemen (men of letters this
time instead of swordsmen) who restored the
fortunes and influence of the English Church.
And, indeed, this is at once the strength and the
weakness of the English communion, that it
discourages all extravagance and excess ; that it
does all things decently and in order, is prudent
for this world as well as the next, and avoids
enthusiasm as well as folly. Very seldom
indeed do its ministers attain any extraordinary
reputation for sanctity.

,890] EVENTS OF CHURCH'S LIFE 125
Dean Church is one of the brilliant exceptions
to the common rule, who have done more perhaps
by their personal holiness to vindicate for the
English Church its claims to be truly a limb of
Catholic Christendom, than all the elaborate
argumentation of divines from the days of
Bishop Laud to our own.
The events of Church's life are few, and shall
be written of with all the brevity which he would
have desired. Born in 18 15, and elected in 1838
to an Oriel Fellowship, he passed through the
crisis of the Oxford Movement at the most
impressionable period of his life. In 1852, on
his approaching marriage, he left Oxford for
Whatley, a small Somersetshire parish where
he worked as rector until 1871. In that year
Gladstone forced him to accept the Deanery of
St Paul's, which he retained until his death in
1890, in face of several offers of promotion,
virtually including that of the Archbishopric.1
It was a period which saw great changes, and
in which great issues were tried both at home
and abroad, yet probably the most public occasion
in his life was when, as Proctor, he vetoed the
proposed vote of censure on " Tract Ninety,"
thus saving his master from dishonour, and his
University from disgrace. He was one of those
who influence the world, not by what they do,
but by what they are.
1 Mary Church, "Life and Letters of Dean Church," p. 307.

126 R. W. CHURCH tl8,s.
A convenient setting for his life is suggested
by the subject of some of his earliest and most
congenial work — St Anselm. Doubtless his
catholic spirit found a particular pleasure in
writing of one so eminent for excellence in the
three great departments of human life — morality
and thought and action. It is, at any rate, not
inappropriate to group his life after the mediaeval
model, and consider him in turn as scholar,
statesman, and saint.
Church had no enemies, but had there been
such, they would scarcely have denied him the
palm of wide and accurate knowledge. He knew
something of science, and his review of " Vestiges
of Creation," won the praise of Sir Richard
Owen.1 Of languages he knew more than some
thing. Italian he had been familiar with since
his childhood, and in his time he must have been
the best Dante scholar in England. Besides
Dante, Lucretius and Sophocles were con
stant companions, Shakespeare and Goethe old
acquaintances, Heine not unvisited. With
Montaigne and Pascal, the two eternal types,
between whom men of letters pass to and fro
in ceaseless flux, he was equally familiar, and
had written with equal sureness of touch about
both. Theology he handled with the grasp of
one who has proved by experience that his beliefs
are true ; and of metaphysics he had a working
1 Mary Church, " Life and Letters of Dean Church," p. 63.

,890] TRUE MEASURE AND FALSE 127
knowledge. But it was assuredly history that
he found most congenial. He possessed the two
essential qualities of the old type of historian —
sympathy and severity. Beneath his searching
eye the movements of societies and the characters
of men seem to be tried and valued by no
ordinary standard. He is exquisitely sensitive
to all that is noble or beautiful or grand in the
life of nations or of statesmen. To every quality
and every aspiration he gives its proper praise.
But behind the criterion of intellectual attainment
he never allows us to forget there is another —
infinitely more exacting ; so that what he says
of Dante among poets becomes true of himself
among historians : —
" No one who could understand and do homage
to greatness in man, ever drew the line so
strongly between greatness and goodness, and
so unhesitatingly placed the hero of this world
only — placed him in all his magnificence,
honoured with no timid or dissembling reverence
— at the distance of worlds below the place of
the lowest saint." 1
And Church never wavers in his affirmation of
this uncomfortable doctrine. We find him paying
the loftiest tribute to Newton, and then warning
us in the immediate sequence that St Paul in
one order of greatness — the greatness of good
ness — was immeasurably superior to Newton in
1 "Dante," p. 189.

128 R. W. CHURCH [l8,s.
another.1 But this is only what we should
expect from one who had so perfectly assimilated
all that is best in Pascal : — " Tous les corps
ensemble et tous les esprits ensemble, et toutes
leurs productions, ne valent pas le moindre
mouvement de charite- car elle est d'un ordre
infiniment plus eleveV' Indeed, if Acton had
wished to enforce by illustration that duty of
the historian to which he attached so great
importance — the duty of reviewing the events
and characters of history in the white light of
the highest moral standard — he could have found
no better example than the work of Church.
What other biographer would have dreamed of
opening a life of Bacon with the warning that
" the life of Francis Bacon is one which it is a
pain to write or to read?"2 The judges of
history are themselves brought before the bar.
Is there elsewhere so just an appreciation of
Gibbon's merits and defects as Church has con
trived to fit into a sentence ?
" Gibbon, who in his taste for majesty and
pomp, his moral unscrupulousness and his
scepticism, reflected the genius of the Empire,
of which he recounted the fortunes, but who~in
his genuine admiration of public spirit and duty,
and in his general inclination to be just to all,
except only to the Christian name, reflects
another and better side of Roman character."8
1 " Human Life and its Conditions," p. 21.
* " Bacon," p. 1. 3 " Gifts of Civilisation," p. 1 17.

,89o] THE WHITE LIGHT OF ETERNITY 129
To his austerity Church unites sympathy.
He has the power of throwing himself into the
difficulties of a crisis, of ^ laciag " ^hiffio If /with
a single exception, perhaps^ in tne case of
Cromwell1) at the standpoint of the character
he has to judge, and of measuring, at least
approximately, the possibilities of morality in the
age of which he is writing. But when every
allowance has been made, and every plea con
sidered, the scales are dressed with rigid justice,
and we seem to see the man as he will appear
when the judgment is set and the books are
opened. Assuredly, he who can deal thus with
great causes and great characters, who can
balance all without bias or prejudice, who can
refrain from making surrenders to an alert and
ever ready sympathy, has won the great prize
of the historian, and sees things no longer in the
light of time but in the light, if not of eternity,
at least of its brilliant and dazzling reflection.
Beside the monographs on Dante, Anselm,
Spenser, and Bacon, Church wrote a short
account of the beginning of the Middle Ages —
a fine attempt to execute an impossible task —
and a volume of lectures on " The Gifts of
Civilisation," which, partly because of the fusion
of theology and history, congenial to himself and
necessary to the subject, partly because of its
beautiful treatment, is perhaps the most valuable
1 " Occasional Papers, Carlyle's Cromwell." I

i3o R. W. CHURCH [l8lJ.
and characteristic product of his genius. The
real purpose of Christianity in the world is still
perhaps as- electable a question as the real
effect of Christianity upon human society. To
both these problems Church endeavoured to give
an answer. Newman had distrusted culture,
seeing in it an ' enchantress ' 1 more subtle
though less gross than that of the sensual
appetites which it had helped to banish.2 The
conflict between a visible Church and a visible
world was always very much in his mind, and
was not perhaps the least of his reasons for join
ing the Church of Rome, where the institution
of the Papacy gave effect to it in a far more
striking manner then any national church could
ever hope to do. Until theology were once more
enthroned as 'queen ofthe sciences,' education
seemed only to spread the kingdom of anti-Christ.
Church's point of view was different. He had
no exaggerated admiration of the patristic period.
He saw with an unshrinking eye that the modern
world is full of gifts and graces, sweetness, and
light ; and he was thankful that it was so.8 He
did not hesitate to recognise in civilisation a
great ally. But with this there came a great
anxiety (which must beset every one who does
not believe in an infallible society, divinely
instructed to direct the moral destinies of man-

i " Idea of a Univ.," p. 235. 2 Ibid., pp. ,87, 18
3 " Gifts of Civilisation," p. 93.

l89o] THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD 131
kind) lest Church history should have been, after
all, the spectacle of a great evasion.1 The first
Christians had fled from war and competitive trade
and legal process ; those who are reckoned good
Christians to-day are employed in all of them.2
"The obvious answer," he reflects, "and we
hope the true one, is that God has appointed
society, and that society means these conse
quences."8 This is not, perhaps, the most
forcible way of putting the case. Christ dealt
with man as man ; society deals with him as a
citizen. If Slavery was not incompatible with
Christianity, neither War nor Trade nor Law
can have been so.
The second part of the book is occupied with
the other question — the effect of Christianity
upon the tissue of society. Church begins by
enquiring into the state of the Roman Common
wealth in the first century before Christ, and
finds it, as many, but not quite all,4 have thought
it, rotten to the core. A period of unequalled
triumph had been succeeded by a painful decay.
It was not so much that aspiration had diminished,
or ability declined, or devotion to the public
service disappeared ; but somehow the old forces
were no longer producing the old effects. Men
had outgrown the religious conceptions of their
forefathers, and the popular new-fangled creeds
1 " Gifts of Civilisation," p. 36. 2 Ibid p. 34.
» Ibid., p. 37. * E.g Dill.

132 R. W. CHURCH [l8is.
had no power to stir their souls. So the baser-
minded citizens had steeped themselves in licence,
and the nobler in despair. At the crisis of this
unaccountable lethargy Rome came into contact
with Christianity, and bathed herself deeply at
the sources of life. Emerging rejuvenated and
restored, she entered upon another epoch and
fulfilled another destiny. In her fresh strength
she> kept the gate of civilisation against the
Moslem invader, she replaced the book of
resignation by the book of hope, Marcus Aurelius
by St Augustine, and to the very nations which
sucked her life-blood she communicated a new
and marvellous vitality. It was Christianised
Rome which developed imagination and chivalry
in the Gaul and the Italian, stubborn determina
tion in the fickle Greek, an insatiable pursuit of
truth in Teuton. It was Rome transfused by
Christianity, which, alone in the world's history,
furnished an example of a nation returning upon
its age.
This is a theory which carries us to the farthest
limits of history, and beyond. It is interesting
as the opinion of a historian of admittedly sober
judgment, who thought he could discern at a
time of transcendent importance in human history,
the visible hand of God. It is more interesting
as a direct traverse of the innuendo of Gibbon,
that Christianity had been the ruin of the Roman
Empire. To such a denial the Tractarians by

,89o] THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD 133
taste, temperament, creed, conviction, were deeply
pledged. Just as Newman had reaffirmed the
miraculous narratives, so Church reaffirmed the
peculiar, regenerative efficacy of the Christian
faith. In the long resistance of the Romans of
the East to the hordes of barbarians that rolled
up one after another towards the stubborn
defences of New Rome, like the storms of the
inhospitable sea that lies beyond it — Goths,
Huns, Arabs, Moguls, Tartars, Turks, to say
nothing of the Venetian merchantmen and the
Latin Crusaders — he claimed to discover a moral
fibre very much undervalued in the pages of the
" Decline and Fall." People of strong convictions
are rather apt to determine these matters as
their intuitions prompt them. Newman placed
the moral in another place. Writing as a Roman
Catholic, he pointed in phrases most exquisitely
attuned, to
"the divinely appointed shepherd of the poor
of Christ, the anxious steward of His Church,
who from his high and ancient watch-tower, in
the fulness of apostolic charity, surveyed narrowly
what was going on at thousands of miles from
him, and with prophetic eye looked into the
future age."1
New Rome, he meant, had perished because
it had cut itself adrift from old Rome. Denial of
the papal claims had led on to schism ; schism
1 Newman, " Historical Sketches," i. p. 97.

134 R- W. CHURCH [Igls.
to moral and material destruction.1 Finlay, who
knew more about the Byzantine Empire than
most people, and who, as we have seen, had
given full credit to Christianity as the unifying
force in the East, which at an earlier epoch had
compassed the defeat of the Goths and Huns,2
thought that as time went on the Christian faith
had been not so much a preserver as a thing
preserved. It was to the wonderful organisa
tion of the imperial policy that he attributed the
long contest with the Saracen. " The laws of
Rome, rather than the military power of the
Emperor, saved Christianity."3 And indeed, in
that turbulent society of Constantinople where
theological controversies, often in themselves idle,
and worse than idle, were degraded besides into
being the party politics of the day, it is hard
to believe that religious professions added any
spark of vitality to the declining vigour of the
Empire. Is not the Byzantine history ofthe eighth century
a complete refutation of the view to which Church
gave expression ? The mysteries of Christianity
had by that time taken such a hold of the
popular imagination as they have never done,
perhaps, anywhere before or since. Men thought
about them, talked of them, argued them at
the street corners, in the market-places. The
1 Newman, " Historical Sketches," i. p. 1 50.
1 Finlay, " History of Greece," i. p. 138. 3 Ibid., ii. p. 23.

,890] THE GREEK CHURCH 135
people were intoxicated with the subtleties of
theological discussion. There was a licence of
thought all the more remarkable because there
was no liberty of opinion. Painting and sculpture
grew to be a public peril. Leo the Isaurian, the
Charles Martel of the East, is best remembered
as Leo the Iconoclast, the enemy of monks,
priests, silly women, and superstitious observances.
In the pious practices of devotion, he discovered
the cancer of the national life, and his reforming
zeal was suggested by the simplicity of that very
religion of Islam,1 whose adherents he repelled
from the walls of Constantinople. One may say,
with some show of reason, that the Greeks were
not Catholic enough or not Protestant enough for
final success, but of all alternatives the most
difficult to maintain is that the 'orthodox' faith
deferred the capture of Constantinople.
Church, however, was working out quite
logically the philosophy of history imposed by
the tenets of the Tractarians. As the Catholic
faith was one, so the expressions of it were
many. Unity was to be pursued, uniformity
abandoned. National churches were to draw
out the spiritual genius of each race, and the
Temple not built with hands was to be of
many styles and colours. Except to Englishmen
this sort of catholicity is very strange. The
history of the later Roman Empire, so peculiarly
1 Finlay, " History of Greece," ii. p. 35.

136 R. W. CHURCH [l8is.
instructive to read at the present day, shows that
heretical churches sprang up precisely in this
manner. Nestorians were Syrian nationalists ;
Monophysites Coptic.1 The one was under the
dominion of positivism, the other of mysticism ;
the national genius in each case ran in those
channels. And every body of Christians which
has broken off from Catholic unity has been
markedly national, even the Protestant Reforma
tion exhibiting a curiously different cast in
Germany and Switzerland and England. It is a
bold thing, to say no more, to maintain that the
Established Church in this country has drawn
out the national genius without impairing her
catholicity, and that the Established Church in
Scotland has distorted the national genius and
lost catholicity. Church never quite faced this
difficulty, and his book is much the poorer for
it, because it is really the crux of the whole
question. But in his essay on Bishop Andrewes
he says all that fairly can be said in defence
of the Reformation Settlement. Like Queen
Elizabeth he was ' mere ' English, the most
English, perhaps, of all the Tractarians, with a
strong vein of Puritan severity running through
all the channels of his rich nature. He was,
besides, too good an historian to minimise the
great and, as he says, 'inevitable'2 influence
1 Stanley, " Eastern Church," p. 4.
a " Pascal and other Sermons," p. 74.

,890] THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 137
of the foreign reformers on the English Reforma
tion. He recognised without flinching how
nicely the idea of royal supremacy was fitted
into the place in men's minds, formerly occupied
by the Bishop of Rome ; that the ' divine right '
of the Stuarts was really the outcome of the
'divine claim' of the Vicar of Christ.1 But —
and this is his special contribution to the vexed
argument — he remarks that " it cannot be
sufficiently remembered that in James l.'s time,
and in Charles I l.'s time in 1662, the Reforma
tion was still going on as truly as it was in the
days of Edward VI. and Elizabeth."2 In the
replies of Andrewes to Bellarmine and Duperron
he finds a sufficient vindication of that appeal
to Antiquity, by which the Church of England
must stand or fall. She had aimed, he said, not
so much at a via media, but at a synthesis of
religious advantages, "perhaps," as he admits,
"incompatible and inconsistent ones,"3 but for
that very reason plastic and flexible as was
neither the system of Luther nor Calvin, nor
yet of Rome. His, at least, is a standpoint from
which it is possible to view with reasonable
confidence the confused and sometimes conflict
ing acts of the men, who, without really adequate
knowledge or well-defined purpose, did manage,
no doubt clumsily, and with many blunders, to
1 " Pascal and other Sermons," p. 71.
* Ibid., p. 65. 3 Ibid, p. 68.

138 R. W. CHURCH [l8is.
refashion a Church in England. He looked
upon their work as upon the changes in some
old and time-honoured castle which has been
often refaced and often adapted to new uses.
There was much to displease and distress him.
There were seams and scars ; and beside them the
modern renovations and improvements looked
insolent and ugly. But, through all, the design
seemed to stand out sharply and, if he had to
recognise in the work the hand of many masons,
he was confident also that there had been but
one architect.
The main objection which lifts itself again and
again, never more pertinaciously than at the
present time, against this view — the most tenable
one — of the Anglican claim, has been perhaps
sufficiently considered in the last essay. The
Church of England professes to appeal to the
Primitive Church ; in fact, she appeals to the
Church as it was at some period between the
fifth and ninth century. Her creed is not the
faith of the first disciples, "Jesus is the Lord" —
a confession which would just now rally so many
unquiet spirits to her banner — but the creed
of Chalcedon and the school of Lerins. She
thinks of these as the creeds of the Undivided
Church, but the Undivided Church had been
divided again and again before they were fully
framed by Arians, Nestorians, Eutychians, and

i89o] CHURCH AND NEWMAN 139
as many more. Between Nicea and Trent where
is there any gulf fixed ?
Church never explained very clearly why he
did not follow Newman over to Rome, but the
reasons are not far to seek. It is obvious to
remark that he was more of a mystic, less of
a rationalist, than his master. Then, although
he said he was a conservative by ' instinct
and feeling,'1 he was a liberal2 by conviction,
and between Liberalism and Protestantism, Con
servatism and Catholicism, there is a correspon
dence which can seldom be long suppressed.
When Newman went over there was no effective
Catholicism in the English Church ; a Whig
theology had been dominant since the Bangorian
controversy. To think of Church, indeed, as a
party politician would be absurd enough. He
was a historian, and for such a one politics —
true policy — appears always as a slowly moving,
irresistible river, as impatient of sudden currents
as of stagnant pools. But he believed — that was
the great point — in free discussion ; he believed
that the truths of religion, as 'the analogy of
things' suggested,3 were reached like the truths
of science or government through mistakes ; he
felt, as he says, that "a future of which infalli
bility is the only hope and safeguard," was "a
prospect of the deepest gloom." 4
1 G. W. E. Russell, " Pocketful of Sixpences," p. ,43.
2 Cp. " Life and Letters," p. 304.
J " Occasional Papers," ii. p. 393. ' Ibid.

140 R. W. CHURCH [l8,s.
Ecclesiastical history is in the main a history
of the repression of freedom of thought.
Christianity, as it was delivered authoritatively,
was maintained by authority. The Church of
England has placed it before the bar of public
opinion ; with what results the next fifty years
will show. No experiment more audacious, more
unprecedented, has, perhaps, ever been tried.
Church himself was alarmed at the results.1 He
felt keenly the charge of hypocrisy which must
attach to any moral society which allows its
priests without disgrace to confess one belief
before God and another before men.2 But it is
not a little in favour of the experiment that such
a man as he should have countenanced it.
The Church of England, as he conceived her,
would rest her authority wholly on consent, and
rule by love. Generous and patient to the last
degree, she would appeal to the loyalty and
honour of her ministers to think and act, as they
had promised, after the manner of gentlemen.
The enthusiasm of Christian ideas,3 rather than
courts of law, or any invocation of the ban of
the Church such as Newman has desired, would
determine the vagaries of latitudinarians and
ritualists. The mind of the Church and the will
of the Churchman would come to move naturally
in perfect accord. The compulsion of holiness
would be everywhere experienced.
1 " Life and Letters," p. 228.
* Ibid., p. 324. ' Ibid.

,890] THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 141
With his keen sense of artistic proportion he
may have felt that by a happy chance the Church
of England had hit the exact right point between
licence and coercion, and that just as men learn
after much striving to forsake extremes in art
or literature — .^Eschylus for Sophocles, Botticelli
for Raphael, Wagner for Beethoven — so at last
they may come to find in her the quiet place
where the quarrelsome principles of authority
and individual freedom are somehow laid to rest.
He would certainly have been in perfect agree
ment with that best of all defences of the Church
of England at the close of "John Inglesant,"
which one may be forgiven for citing.
" This is the supreme quarrel of all," said
Mr Inglesant. "This is not a dispute between
sects and kingdoms ; it is a conflict within a
man's own nature — nay, between the noblest
parts of a man's nature arrayed against each
other. On the one side obedience and faith, on
the other freedom and the reason. What can
come of such a conflict as this but throes and
agony? . . . The Church of Rome . . . has
traded upon the highest instincts of humanity,
upon its faith and love, its passionate remorse,
its self-abnegation and denial, its imagination and
yearning after the unseen. It has based its
system upon the profoundest truths, and upon
this platform it has raised a power which has,
whether foreseen by its authors or not, played
the part of human tyranny, greed, and cruelty. . . .
You will do wrong — mankind will do wrong — if
it allows to drop out of existence, merely because

142 R. W. CHURCH

[1815.

the position on which it stands seems to be
illogical, an agency by which the devotional
instincts of human nature are enabled to exist
side by side with the rational. The English
Church, as established by the law of England,
offers the supernatural to all who choose to
come." As the essay on Andrewes contains Church's
deep thoughts on the Anglican communion, so
the essay on Butler contains those deeper ones
on the basis of all religion. Butler is, of course,
by virtue of his moderation, patience, agnosticism,1
and love of understating his own case, the most
English of theologians. The certitude for which
Newman craved, he was content to be without.
He was no prophet or seer ; his imagination
never anticipated the rational process ; but where
reason led him vision followed. As Church him
self puts it,
"It was his power, the greatest power perhaps
that he had, that what his reason told him was
certain and true he was able continually to see
and feel, and imagine to be true and real. He
had the power of faith."2
This was true also of the pupil on whom at
the distance of a century his mantle had fallen.
Church not Newman, was his spiritual child,
the perfect fruit of a slow and laborious ripening.
The great argument of the "Analogy" — con-
1 I am using the word in its natural, not its acquired, sense.
a " Pascal and other Sermons," p. 35.

,890] THE BASIS OF RELIGION 143
elusive against all who believe in a spiritual
principle of good in the universe, but conclusive
only against them — that the difficulties and
seeming imperfections of revealed religion are
no greater than those of natural morality, are
in fact what we ought to expect from a fair and
impartial consideration of the constitution of the
world, had sunk very deep into his mind.
"Pitt," he remarks, "is reported to have said
of the ' Analogy,' that it was a book which opened
as many questions and raised as many doubts
as it solved. Of course it does. No one can
expect to sound the ' great deeps ' of God's
judgments, the mysteries of His Being and
Government, without meeting difficulties which
defy human understanding. This would be true
of any discussion going deeply and sincerely
into a subject in which our only possible know
ledge can be but 'in part,' seeing 'through a
glass darkly.' But Butler's object is not to
remove all doubts and difficulties, which, in such
a matter as religion, with light and faculties
like ours, is obviously impossible, but to put
doubts and difficulties in their proper place and
proportion to what we do see and know in a
practical scheme of life and truth, and in a
practical choice between God and the rejection
of Him."1
" I do not think," he says elsewhere, speaking
of what, rightly or wrongly, is called the conflict
between religion and science, "that the majority
of those who follow this tremendous debate
1 " Pascal and other Sermons," p. 32.

144 R- W. CHURCH t,8,s.
reflect, or in any degree realise, what is involved
in victory or defeat. It is not victory or defeat
for a mere philosophical theory or criticism. . . .
If the opponents of Christianity are right, if the
victory lies with them, it is much more than
that Christians are mistaken as men have been
mistaken about science, about principles of govern
ment, about the policy or economy of a State.
It means that now as regards religion, as widely
as men are living and acting, all that is now is
false, rotten, wrong. Our present hopes are
utterly extinguished. Our present motives are
as unsubstantial as bubbles. We are living in a
dream. We are wasting on an idol the best love,
the highest affections, the purest tenderness which
can dwell in human breasts."1
" Reason," he adds in a sentence which might
have come straight from Butler, " is wide, and
manifold, and waits its time, and argument is
partial, one-sided, and often then most effective,
when least embarrassed, by seeing too much."2
He looked to Butler, not only as a master in
theology, but also as a master in the truest prin
ciple of style. It is at the first glance astonish
ing to find this writer of rich and exquisitely-
turned sentences warning us not to despise the
cumbrous diction of the " Analogy."
" A qualm," he says, " comes over the ordinary
writer as he reads Butler, when he thinks how
often heat and prejudice, or lazy fear of trouble,
or the supposed necessities of a cause or conscious
incapacity for thinking out a difficult subject
1 " Human Life and its Conditions," p. 76.
8 Ibid., p. 85.

,890] CHURCH'S STYLE 145
thoroughly, have led him to say something dif
ferent from what he felt authorised to say by his
own clear perceptions, to veil his deficiencies by
fine words, by slurring over or exaggerations."1
Butler, at whatever cost, at whatever loss of
effect and brilliancy, was real. But in Church's
own writing there is the happiest combination of
sensibility with sincerity. He was not afraid of
passion, but his enthusiasm was never ill-regulated.
His diction is very pure and careful, but the
language never overpowers the thought. He
says much that is difficult to say ; but as he draws
nearer to the sublime, his tread grows the more
sure. If, as he tells us somewhere, there are
two great styles — the self-conscious and the
unconscious, or, in other words, the style of
Gibbon and Macaulay, and the style of Swift
and Pascal and Newman, there can be no doubt
to which school he himself belongs. His debt
to Newman is, indeed, very apparent. Some of
the " Village Sermons " might have been preached
in St Mary's. And it is only natural that one,
whose being had no separate compartments, who
was the same man as author that he was as father or
citizen or priest, should have carried his disciple-
ship into his literary work. Among his University
Sermons on " Human Life and its Conditions "
there are some2 whose restrained beauty and
1 " Pascal and other Sermons," p. 30.
a " Responsibility for our Belief" ; " Sin and Judgment " ; " The
Call of God." K

146 R. W. CHURCH [l8is.
mystic intensity are not surpassed by anything
that Newman ever wrote.
Of his other work it is only possible to say «a
word. Although a fine classical scholar, he was
at heart a thorough romantic, and his writings
very seldom dealt with the world as it was before
the Christian era. The great masterpieces of
his criticism are the essay on Dante, familiar to
every student of that prince of romantics, and a
review of Browning's " Sordello," very apprecia
tive and discriminating. His judgment on Mon
taigne, also, is very characteristic : —
" Montaigne's practical lesson, is, that man
was not made for truth, and does not want it ;
that he may go through life very well without
truth, and without the pains of looking for it ;
that if he is fool enough to be anxious and
in earnest about it he will but bring himself into
endless difficulties merely at the end to lose his
labour ; but that he will find it a pleasant and
healthful exercise to turn his inquiries after it
into an amusing toy, to be taken up and laid
down as a change from his other pleasures."1
It is time to look at Church in another aspect
— as a statesman. Here, of course, capacity has
mostly to stand for performance. If he lacked
that keen interest in detail, which is indispensable
in a man of affairs, if he was too good a man
to be a good diplomatist, at least he possessed
all the qualities which are required of one who
1 " Miscellaneous Essays," p. 76.

,890] AS STATESMAN 147
has to make wide and far-reaching decisions.
Best of all he had patience, the virtue which
Pitt marked down as the most essential for a
statesman,1 and which is surely yet more essential
for a Churchman since the absence of it has
been the parent of all schisms and heresies
since Christianity began. There is a striking
passage in which he contrasts the fortunes of
Lamennais and Lacordaire to show how great
a part ' temper ' (as he calls it) plays in human
affairs.2 But long before he commended it he
had made it his possession. In the crisis of
1845 ^e showed a perfect independence of mind.
Exceptionally intimate as had been his friendship
with Newman, exceptionally faithful as had been
his discipleship, he never wavered for a moment
in his fidelity to the Church of England.3 And
in the years which followed 1845, when the
Tractarian party seemed no more than a divided
remnant, it was he who, together with Mozley
and Bernard, Haddan and Rogers, established
the Guardian newspaper, which it is not too
much to say has made the Church of England
what it is. This was a great stroke of policy,
in which he played a great part. Twenty-five
years later,4 when he was called to the Deanery
of St Paul's, he played an even greater one.
In the gradual restoration, material and moral,
1 Lord Rosebery, " Pitt."
1 " Cathedral and University Sermons," pp. 199, 200.
3 "Life and Letters," p. 59. * 1871.

148 R. W. CHURCH [l8,s.
of St Paul's to its proper place as the spiritual
centre of the metropolis of the world his reign was
the decisive, critical juncture. Beside Gregory,
Liddon, and Lightfoot, he was no cipher. On
every point of taste and order they referred to
him and deferred to his judgment.1 If theirs
were the hand and tongue and brain of that
organic confederacy, his was the heart.
His name ranked high as scholar, and ought
to have ranked higher as statesman. No one
ever thought of him as less than a saint.
Sanctity and piety have for many of us an ugly
sound ; but Church was quite free from that
sickliness which the Italian painters have done
so much to associate with the devout mind.
Manliness in thought and conduct is a virtue
which he is at no little pains to enforce, and there
is a passage where he notes the absence of it as
the radical defect in Fenelon's otherwise beautiful
character.2 He had about him, indeed, some
thing of that austerity of disposition which is
part of the absolutely necessary equipment of
every student of Dante. He noticed as a thing
to be wondered at that men should be able to
read the New Testament and not perceive that
it was a very severe book as well as a very
hopeful one.8 Nothing, he said, in the whole
gospel, was more plain and certain than that the
1 " Life and Letters," p. 221.
' "Cathedral and University Sermons," p. 212.

S (I

Human Life and its Conditions," p. 102.

,890] THE SEVERITY OF CHRIST 149
punishment of unforgiven sin would be "some
thing infinitely more awful than we had faculties
to conceive of.'1 He was amazed at the short
views which Christians were content to take of
life. To him, at least, belief or disbelief in
eternity was not an interesting opinion, but the
dominant factor in life. He had a high regard
for all who, after a patient and conscientious
examination, had rejected what he held to be
the truth, but he was intolerant of those others
who through indifference or indolence had failed
to consider the supreme question, of those who
by their insolent neglect provoked the biting
sarcasm of Pascal and the proud disdain of
Butler. He could recognise the merits of Greg2
and Huxley,3 and really appreciate, as Pusey
could not, the work of Seeley : 4 for the shallow
self-complacency of Renan he felt an ill-disguised
contempt.5 It was impossible for a man of his
rare and finished culture not to resent the
execrable taste which was content to treat of
the deepest and most momentous issues of life
in a spirit of sensuous trifling.
He was what he was because his religion with
all its claims and all its promises was so real to
him. All his life he was engaged in that mortal
conflict, which he had learned from Newman to
1 " Human Life and its Conditions," p. 115.
2 " Life and Letters," p. 263.
8 "Cathedral and University Sermons," p. 13.
4 " Occasional Papers," ii. pp. 133-179. * Ibid., pp. 199, 212.

150 R. W. CHURCH [l8is.
consider as the proper business of life. The
crisis occurred, the die was cast for him, as for
so many other of his contemporaries, during one
of those imperishable sermons at St Mary's.
"In a memorable sermon," he tells us, "the
vivid impression of which still haunts the recol
lection of some who heard it, Newman gave
warning to his friends and to those whom his
influence touched, that no child's play lay before
them ; that they were making without knowing
it the 'Ventures of Faith.'"1
Again, in his method of preaching the Gospel,
Church was typically a Tractarian. He knew
well enough how unpersuasive and how little
cogent what are called robust views of religion
always appear to minds deeply reflective and
cultured. He possessed that marvellous quality
of reserve, which sets so wide a gulf between
the manner of Christ and the manner of St Paul.
As he says of Newman, so of himself, it is true
that " he did not try to draw men to him. He
was no proselytiser ; he shrank with fear and
repugnance from the character — it was an invasion
of the privileges of the heart,"2 There was in
both of them a sense of the littleness of man's
knowledge and the grandeur of his destiny which
enabled them to combine the loyal confidence
of the childlike mind with the force and deter
mination of men. The word awful, restored for
1 "Oxford Movement," p. 185. 2 Ibid., p. 184.

,890] HIS IMPRESSIONS OF LIFE 151
once to its proper meaning, was constantly on
their lips,1 and it was, as it seemed to those who
watched him, ' under the shadow of a great awe ' 2
that Church passed through the last weeks of his
life here.
We know a man well if we can at all share
his impressions and ideas, and it is worth while
in concluding to collect a few of those of which
Church has left us a record. One of them is
that excited by the contemplation of great crowds.
He cannot look upon many faces without wonder
ing what personality each carried with it, without
wishing to individualise these lives, to learn their
history, their good and evil, their possibilities and
limitations. He ponders over the question, why
"of all the countless faces which he meets as he
walks down the Strand, the enormous majority
are failures — deflections from the type of beauty
possible to them."3 He feels the "relation of
the sexes ; the passion of love," to be as much
"the crux of our condition" as pain itself —
" strange, extravagant, irrationally powerful . . .
at the root of the best things of life, and the
worst " : facts and phenomena, he adds, patent to
all, yet which it seems impossible to imagine that
any one will really get beyond. Some make for
belief, some for unbelief; for belief in a God of
1 Bremond, "The Mystery of Newman," p. 197, notices this of
Newman. 2 " Life and Letters," p. 348.
» Ibid., p. 275.

152 R. W. CHURCH [l8,s.
love and goodness, or for denial of Him. Either
attitude is reasonable. Phenomena come crowd
ing in upon the mind to satisfy any and every
hypothesis. Religion offers no solution of the
problem, but only a side of the conflict. " Our
Lord came among us, not to clear up perplexity,
but to show us which side to take."1
He is never tired of exalting the glories of the
Psalms ; their wonderful thoughts of God and
the soul and the purpose of man's life, worthier
and wider than the highest modern culture can
often understand, so that to pass to them from
many a famous book of modern speculation is
"like passing into the presence of the mountains
and the waters and the midnight stars from
the brilliant conversation of a great capital."2
In Bishop Andre wes' devotions he found the
secret of Bishop Andrewes' influence.' He
notices, surely with the eye of one who habitually
uses them, how comprehensive, concise, tender,
solemn they are ; how ' the full order of prayer
and all its parts' is contained in them — the
introductory contemplation, the confession, the
profession of faith, the intercession, the praise
and thanksgiving, "the consciousness," as he
says, " of individual singleness and wide corporate
relations." 4
1 " Life and Letters," p. 276.
2 "The Gifts of Civilisation," p. 94.
s " Pascal," p. 86. 4 Ibid., p. 87.

,890] CHURCH'S MYSTICISM 153
Towards the end of his life he has a waking
vision constantly present in his mind : —
". . . . up one road the image of a man
decked and adorned as if for a triumph, carried
up by rejoicing and exulting friends who praise
his goodness and achievements, and, on the other
road, turned back to back to it, there is the very
man himself, in sordid and squalid apparel,
surrounded not by friends but by ministers of
justice, and going on, while his friends are
exulting to his certain and perhaps awful
judgment." 1
He would have us humble ourselves by reflect
ing what a hundred years more or less in the
world's history, or a change of climate or
language, would have made of us individually.2
He is haunted by the mystery of all he feels and
sees — of his own being and its growth from
childhood to old age, from time into eternity ;
of the natural world "so incomprehensible," he
writes, borrowing Butler's words to express his
thought, " that a man must, in the literal sense,
know nothing at all who is not sensible of his
ignorance of it."8
"It was the saying," he remarks, "of an old
Greek in the very dawn of thought, that men
would meet with many surprises when they were
dead. Perhaps one will be the recollection that
1 " Life and Letters," p. xxiv.
2 " Human Life and its Conditions," p. 48. * Ibid., p. 108.

154 R- W. CHURCH [,815-1890
when we were here we thought the ways of
Almighty God so easy to argue about."1
So that one may think more wisely than one
can talk.
Then what a strange comment is this upon
Rome : —
" I had the feeling that it is the one city in
the world, besides Jerusalem, on which we know
God's eye is fixed, and that he has some purpose
or other about it — one can hardly tell whether
good or evil."2
And the words from the Dies Irce, which he
caused to be inscribed on his tomb at Whatley : —
" Rex tremenda? majestatis
Qui salvas salvandos gratis
Salva me, fons pietatis,
" Quaerens me sedisti lassus ;
Redemisti crucem passus.
Tantus labor non sit cassus,"
come to us from the wild hills of Assisi with a
breath that is not of to-day or yesterday, and
lift him into the company of good men, who in
all ages and in all countries have proved the
truth of St Augustine's words : — " Fecisti nos
ad Te, Domine, et inquietum est cor nostrum
donee requiescat in Te."
Who can measure the value of such a life as
this, until the long issue of events is disclosed,
and the deep under-currents are revealed and the
things of time are seen in the light of eternity ?
1 " Life and Letters," p. 338. 2 Ibid., p. 296.

AUTHORITIES 155

AUTHORITIES
Church's historical works are quoted from the Eversley
edition. The "Life and Letters of Dean Church" used is
the 1895 reprint of the first edition.
The authoritative biography of Church is by Miss Mary
Church — "Life and Letters of Dean Church."
There is also a biography of him by Mr D. C. Lathbury ;
sketches of him by Canon Donaldson in " Five Great Oxford
Leaders," and by the Rt. Hon. G. W. E. Russell in "A
Pocketful of Sixpences '' ; and an article on him, reprinted
from the Spectator, in R. H. Hutton's "Contemporary
Thought and Thinkers," vol. ii.
No one, so far as the present writer is aware, has ever made
an attack on Church.

J. A. FROUDE
1818-1894
Froude's place as a historian — Froude and Tacitus — His early
life— The " Nemesis of Faith " — The outlook for Catholicism :
Newman — The outlook for Protestantism : Carlyle — Bunsen
and Modernism— Froude's " History of England"— Froude's
peculiar qualifications for writing it — Froude and Lecky as
types of historical method— Froude's alleged mistakes — " A
Siding at a Railway Station " — Froude and Freeman — The
"Erasmus" — Froude's Handicap — The great characters of
his History : Henry, Anne, More, Cranmer, Latimer,
Cromwell — The Monasteries — The English Bible — The
English Liturgy — The Articles — Cranmer's death the triumph
of the English Reformers — The Elizabethan settlement — The
Spanish Armada — The conclusion — Carlyle's Gospel — Life
of Carlyle — Froude's divided allegiance ; Christ and Caesar —
"The English in Ireland" — Froude in South Africa —
" Oceana " — " The Bow of Ulysses " — Tariffs — Froude's
conception of History — "Caesar" and " Lord Beaconsfield "
— Froude's style — His personality and appearance — The
"Short Studies" — "The Cat's Pilgrimage" — Froude's
opinions — Literary men — The Oxford Professorship — The
end. " One seem'd all dark and red — a tract of sand,
And some one pacing there alone,
Who paced for ever in a glimmering land,
Lit with a low large, moon."
—Tennyson, The Palace of Art.
The great historians of the ancient world had
one advantage which their successors have not
continued to enjoy. Their narrative and selection
of events passed for the most part uncriticised
156

,8,8-i894] FROUDE AND HIS CRITICS 157
and uncontradicted in their own age, and lapse of
time has rendered criticism and contradiction in
effectual, if not impossible. We may disbelieve
their miracles and challenge their conclusions,
but there will be no Spartan story of the Pelopon-
nesian War, nor will Tiberius and Nero escape
from the clutches of Tacitus. It is a great thing
to have had the field to yourself.
If he had lived in an age less competitive than
his own, Froude would have been held one of
the first masters of his art. In narrative power,
style, charm, interest, pathos, insight, he is the
equal of any one that can be named. His
critics pretty nearly admit as much. But they
add that he misread his authorities, and mis
stated his facts. This may or may not be. The
uncertain breeze of public opinion is veering
round once more in his favour, and some day
we may hope to have an edition of his works,
like Professor Bury's edition of Gibbon, which
will put the whole matter beyond dispute. But
those who keep the old books in repair perform
one of the most unselfish and most thankless tasks
known to mankind. So that we may have to
wait. The present essay has no pretence to carry
the vexed dispute between Froude and his critics
a stage further towards decision. Rather, it
aims at displaying his work, as that of Tacitus
may be displayed, in the light of a magnificent

158 J. A. FROUDE t,SiS-
pamphlet bearing upon the politics, ecclesiastical
and civil, of his own time. His history was very
much more than this, but it was intended to be at
least so much.1 As Tacitus is supposed to have
condemned the government of Domitian through
the history of Tiberius, so Froude disputed and
opposed the ideas of the Oxford Movement
through the history of the Reformation. Latter-
day students of history hardly remember that
there is a right and wrong in human affairs.
Froude never forgot it, and, rightly or wrongly,
staked the whole sum of his wonderful talents
on the justice of the Protestant Revolution.
He was born in 1818. An unhappy motherless
boyhood, aggravated by rough usage, which
after the fashion of those days was regarded as
judicious hardening ; three years of mismanage
ment at Westminster School ; a reckless under
graduate career at Oxford, lived like a sort of
gamble in daily expectation of being overtaken
by the fatal family disease which had carried off
his brother Hurrell ; an Exeter fellowship with
its concomitant deacon's orders ; theological in
vestigation and religious revolt, ending in the
abandonment of creed and profession, and means
of livelihood — and with these his stormy youth was
at an end. The story of his mental difficulties
was set out in a little book called the " Nemesis
of Faith." Carlyle read it, disapproved, and
1 Preface of ,870 to his " History of England."

,894] "THE NEMESIS OF FAITH" 159
told him coldly some years later that a man
should consume his own smoke.1 Froude's life
was full of smoke, but he never let it blow in the
face of the public again, and his later writings
show us only the glowing embers of his griefs.
The book itself was no doubt a mistake, but its
thesis — that without religion morality will waste
away — was never recanted, and runs like a silver
stream through all the varied products of his
genius. And — for those who care to touch sacred
things with common hands — the " Nemesis "
contains the spectacle of a soul in unbearable
doubt. "The most perilous crisis of our lives," says
the hero, who is not a hero, " is when we first
realise that two men may be as sincere, as
earnest, as faithful, as uncompromising, and yet
hold opinions as far asunder as the poles."2
This was exactly the point. Froude was by
nature a disciple. He had dwelt first in the
tents of Newman and of Newman's masterful
lieutenant, his own brother, Hurrell. But his
shelter was carried bodily away when Newman
told him that we could not properly pronounce
on the miracle in the Valley of Ajalon, until we
understood the metaphysics of motion.3 Mean
while, he had travelled in Ireland and stayed
with an Evangelical clergymen, whom he found
1 Froude, " Carlyle's Life in London," i. p. 458.
2 " Nemesis of Faith," p. 156. 3 Ibid, p. 157.

160 J. A. FROUDE tl8l8.
not one whit the worse Christian or worse gentle
man because he abhorred Tractarian tenets.
Then he had begun to read Carlyle. That pro
found, mournful, dissatisfied spirit laid on his
sensitive frame an even stronger spell than the
delicate, austere soul of Newman. He felt, like
his hero, "obliged to look for himself at what
men said, instead of simply accepting all because
they said it." The question of miracles, as with
Gibbon and Newman, proved to be the weight
that turned the balance. He had been asked
by the Tractarian leader to contribute a bio
graphy of St Neot to the Lives of the Saints,
and the material dissolved as he studied it into
fairy tales. St Patrick went the same way, crum
bling into nothingness under the vigour of his
criticism.1 After this the end was sure.
Public indignation at the " Nemesis " drove
him from Oxford. There was a time of great
distress. Then he married and settled down,
mind and work at last determined. His religious
opinions never underwent any further changes.
Carlyle had taught him that the test of all
religious belief or unbelief was vitality. Atheism
did not seem to him to pass it. He never felt,
he says, any kind of inclination2 towards what
was after all only nature-worship dressed up in
the formulae of science.8 At the bar of history
1 Paul, " Life of Froude," p. 34.
2 Unpublished Fragment.
3 " Short Studies," ii. pp. 21, 22 (Calvinism).

1894] THE OLD WORLD 161
in the last days of the Pagan Empire, it had been
tried and found wanting. Christianity was the
answer of the human mind to its theories.
Catholicism fared but little better. It was
beautiful, but it was dead. To all things there
is a time, and its time had gone by. With real,
if incomplete, understanding he wrote its epitaph.
The passage is the most musical in all his
writings, and we may as well pause to hear it.
He is speaking of the Elizabethan Renaissance.
" For, indeed, a change was coming upon the
world, the meaning and direction of which even
still is hidden from us, a change from era to era.
The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were
broken up ; old things were passing away, and
the faith and the life of ten centuries were dis
solving like a dream. Chivalry was dying ; the
abbey and the castle were soon together to
crumble into ruins ; and all the forms, desires,
beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing
away, never to return. A new continent had
risen up beyond the Western sea. The floor of
heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an
infinite abyss of immeasurable space ; and the
firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations,
was seen to be but a small atom in the awful
vastness of the universe. In the fabric of habit,
in which they had so laboriously built for them
selves, mankind were to remain no longer.
" And now it is all gone — like an unsubstantial
pageant faded ; and between us and the old
English there lies a gulf of mystery which the
prose of the historian will never adequately
bridge. They cannot come to us, and our
L

i62 J. A. FROUDE [18,8
imagination can but feebly penetrate to them.
Only among the aisles of the cathedral, only as
we gaze upon their silent figures sleeping on
their tombs, some faint conceptions float before
us of what these men were when they were alive ;
and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that
peculiar creation of mediaeval age which falls upon
the ear like the echo of a vanished world."1
Catholicism, as he understood it, was dead —
Christianity was alive. The progressive nations
were Protestant, and the stern religion which
they professed appeared to him a truer criticism
of life than what had gone before it, or than any
philosophy that was likely to come after it.8
The world was a hard place, devised for the
formation of character. And men were the
children of the world, elect or reprobate by force
of circumstances over which they had no manner
of control ; so at least it had seemed to one of
the finest breeds of men that had ever lived, and
he was content to believe substantially what they
had believed. For the changes that Time had
worked in their creed did not seem really
significant. Religion, anyway, was necessary.
The point of the " Nemesis " had been that
infidelity led to immorality. The law in its
wisdom had established a Church to do that
1 " History of England," ch. i.
2 Unpublished Fragment. Cp. Froude's Article "A Few Words
on Mr Freeman " (Nineteenth Century, April 1879) : " I found myself
unfitted for a clergyman's position, and I abandoned it. I did not
leave the Church. I withdrew into the position of a lay-member
in which I have ever since remained."

'894] RELIGION 163
which itself could not do, and make men clean
and brave and truthful.
" Religion," as he had learnt it in his father's
Devonshire parsonage at Darlington, " meant,
essentially," he says, "doing our duty. It was
not to be itself an object of thought, but a
guide to action. Life was a journey in which
there were many temptations and many pitfalls.
Religion was the lanthorn by which we could see
our way on the dark road. Let the light be
thrown on the road and you will see your way.
Keep your eyes fixed on the light itself and you
will fall into the ditch. The Christianity of my
childhood was the light to our feet and the lamp
of our ways, perhaps the ideal conception of what
religion ought to be."1
So also thought the man whom he considered
the noblest and truest he ever came across.2
With Carlyle he felt that the age had outgrown
the formularies of the sixteenth century ; that as
the word of God had once been used to sweep
away a whole body of traditions which had made
it of none effect, so the time had come when
the religious consciousness ought to assert itself
against clean-cut formularies no longer agreeable
to the advance of thought. The Reformers had
no proper ground of complaint if they too were
reformed, and obsolete definitions and subscriptions
swept away. He had the same horror of verbal
untruthfulness that characterised Carlyle, but, as
a God-fearing Englishman, he attended Church,
1 Unpublished Fragment. 2 " Oceana."

164 J. A. FROUDE [i8«8-
and found in the Reformation liturgy, grown old in
the service of his country, an adequate expression
of his own thoughts about that other world which
was never long absent from his mind. Some of his
last words, " Shall not the Judge of all the earth
do right?" were probably the exact measure of
his belief. His faith was always an interrogation,
which he persistently answered in the affirmative.
Conscience alone he held for certain.1
At times, indeed, he was curiously near the
view, to which he had listened, not unamused,
when Bunsen had propounded it to him soon
after he had thrown off his orders. The
scholar-diplomatist gave him a demonstration
of Christianity, which lasted five hours, and con
cluded by saying : —
"That is Christianity — that is everlastingly
true. Nothing can touch that. As to the facts,
we know nothing about them, nor does it matter
whether they can be proved or not. Spiritual
truth is not dependent on history."*
This was Modernism, as we have come to call
it, pure and simple, and Froude never accepted
it as the equivalent of honest, objective faith.
Yet in his tentative way he makes it plausible
and recalls the remark of Alcinous when Odysseus
is excusing the strangeness of his traveller's tales
— ""Sol S'eiri /xev ixop<ph iiriwv,"3 "Beauty crowns
thy words" — to show that anything that can
1 Paul, " Life of Froude," p. 431.
* Unpublished Fragment. * Odyssey, xi. 1. 367.

3

i«94] THE REFORMERS 165
assume form is true, has at least a sort of truth ; 1
of which precious virtue there were, indeed, so
many kinds — mathematical, scientific,2 historical,
legendary, moral.4 Was Caesar a jot more real,
he asks, because for a few years he was subject
to the conditions of time and matter?5 — more
real than Hamlet or any other of those starry
creations that shine above the firmament of human
suffering and failure ? And if not, was there any
thing to prevent our transferring the principle,
to Scripture history ? Yet the thought, after all,
was itself a shadow, " too good to be true." 6
"Shadows we are and shadows we pursue!"
says Burke in the famous apophthegm. Froude
went down among the shades and brought them
back alive. People had pretty nearly forgotten
the Reformers, when Newman began to write,
as they had forgotten the saints who went before
them. Clarendon was every man's reading and
many men's limit. The excellence of the
Reformation had been supposed unassailable.
Froude made himself the proprietor of a great
tract of English history, and of that possession
no man may rob him. Historians may dispute
his title-deeds, harry his land, and remove his
land-marks, but as long as men are men, agitated
by human passion and ennobled by human
achievement, so long will they prefer to hear
1 " Oceana," p. 69. 3 I.e., experimentally proved.
3 I.e., asserted only. * Unpublished Fragrrent.
6 " Oceana," p. 27. * Ibid, p. 69.

166 J. A. FROUDE [i8«8-
the story of the Tudor epoch from his voice.
" Full of admirable research and political insight,
the four volumes devoted to the reign of
Henry VIII. are still the best general picture
of the times," says the latest historian of that
period.1 "Only the man or woman," said Skelton,
" who has had to work upon the mass of Scottish
material in the Record Office can properly
appreciate Mr Froude's inexhaustible industry
and substantial accuracy. His point of view is
very different from mine, but I am bound to
say that his acquaintance with the intricacies
of Scottish politics, during the reign of Mary,
appears to me almost, if not quite, unrivalled."2
The twelve volumes of the History of England
are, and must remain, the best pictures, if not
of the completed Reformation, at least of the
English Reformers, because no one will ever, in
all probability, be able to enter again quite so
heartily into their temper. A peculiar combina
tion of experience and temperament not likely
to recur gives Froude the advantage here. He
was, in the first place, himself a Protestant
revolutionary. He had listened with the question
ing admiration of a younger brother to the
fiercest, most uncompromising, most brilliant
spirit of the Oxford Counter- Reformation. He
had been himself almost a Tractarian, thinking
1 Fisher, " Political History of England," p. 495. Mr Fisher to
some extent modifies his praise in his following remarks.
2 Skelton, " Maitland of Lethington," i. p. xxxv.

>894] HIS QUALIFICATIONS 167
there was no other sensible theology, and deeply
impressed by the holiness of Newman. Then
he had, as he thought, recovered his balance and
become what he ever after remained — a free-
thinking Protestant. Whether he formed a right
estimate of the Oxford Movement is not the
point. Of the two pioneers who had influenced
him, one became the greatest Roman Catholic
apologist of modern times, and his own brother,
Hurrell, had he lived, would almost certainly have
professed the Roman faith. Anthony Froude
grew to dislike Rome with all the vigorous
prejudice of an Elizabethan sailor, and set out
to satisfy himself that after all the Reforma
tion was no mistake.1 Upon an age, which was
in fact far more occupied with morality than
theology, he brought to bear a mind, at times
heedless of suffering, but passionately hostile to
corruption, cowardice, and treachery, and as glad
of every manly virtue — of dash, adventure,
courage — as one that finds great spoils. Many
Catholics died well, but in forcible characters
the Reformers had it. There are none to set
against Luther, Latimer, Knox.
This was not all. Henry VIII. is considered
— not, it seems, altogether rightly — the founder
of the British Navy, and under Drake and
Hawkins that navy became a force in Europe.
Froude was a Devonian, too romantic and too
1 Preface of 1870 to the " History of England."

i68 J. A. FROUDE [1818.
sad not to be as much the slave of the sea as
Michelet, and proud as any West-countryman
of the exploits of the English seamen of the
sixteenth century. Then, again, he found among
the Tudor statesmen all the glow and colour,
which were a necessity of his nature. The
Reformation was in fact f the supreme emotion^
of the western world. All the high features
of human character, which Machiavelli, a little
before, had supposed to be non-existent, had
risen at once to the surface, together with such
a mass of intrigue, cruelty, and double-dealing as
should feed historical novels to the end of the
world. Romance meets us at every turn, and
Froude, like all the Oriel School, was keenly
romantic. The sixteenth century besides offered
the circumstances most favourable to illustrate
the theory of great men, in which Carlyle had
led him to believe. The assumption underlying
that theory is that great men understand the
people's real needs, as the people never do them
selves. Carlyle had thought this true of Oliver.
He had found the Long Parliament ineffective
and impotent ; the Lieutenant - General full of
insight. If the Reformation was good it is certain
that Henry was actively expressing, as the people
could never have been disinterested enough to
express it, that transcendental conception of
' the general will ' as distinct from ' the will of
all,' which Rousseau taught1 and which Green
1 " Contrat Social," ii. ch. 3.

«894] FROUDE AND THE REFORMERS 169
supposed to be 'the permanently valuable thing
in his teaching.' x Henry and his daughter carried
the thing through " backed by the strongest,
bravest, and best of their subjects. To the last,
to the defeat of the Armada, manhood suffrage
in England would have brought back the Pope." 2
Lastly, perhaps from the singular but fortunate
irony which makes us most admire just those
virtues in which we least excel, Froude had a
vehement admiration for practical sagacity and, if
there be an English statesman who has possessed
a double measure of that quality, it is Burleigh.
These were the affections which linked him to
the sixteenth century, and enabled him to tell its
story with all the fervour of passionate interest.
Impartiality in the sense in which we attribute it
to Lecky and Gardiner, it is unreasonable to look
for. One man can give us "limpid rationalism,"
a dispassionate review of the folly of the past
in the light of the wisdom of the present ; an
other man can kindle into flame the embers of
bygone controversies, and make us declare for
Caesar or the Reformation or Elizabeth, so that,
as we read, time drops away, and the past be
comes as the present, and we realise our
partnership in the ages that are gone. The
man who could accomplish both would be the
perfect historian ; only he might chance to turn
out a god in disguise.
1 T. H. Green, " Lectures on Political Obligation," p. 90.
2JJnjjuWisJ«dJfraginenL,

170 J. A. FROUDE [1818.
We may carry farther the contrast between
the two modes of work. Lecky behaves like
a judge who trusts his jury. He gives them the
material for forming a judgment either way, then
recommends one view to their notice, and leaves
them to themselves. Froude always means to
manage his jury. He has looked into the case,
drawn his conclusions, and in his summing-up
commonly fails to give any adequate presenta
tion of the facts that tell against his own view,
if indeed he fully states them. The jury is
not required to make any effort, but merely to
convert the opinion of the judge into a verdict.
As good a defence might, perhaps, be made
out for writing history this way as the other,
because impartiality is the mortal foe of vigour
and proceeds, besides, on the gratuitous assump
tion of an advance in the quality of human
judgment. We think war bad and intolerance
and kingly government, and mete out justice
accordingly. But the men of the sixteenth
century did not think so. War, they argued,
made for manliness, and religious conformity for
national unity, and the government of kings for
wise counsels ; and there is nothing proven to
show they were wrong. Froude commonly took
the standpoint of the men he judged the best
of their time, and saw with their eyes.
He was accused, not only of partiality, but of
inaccuracy. What he had to say about this may

1894] HIS ALLEGED INACCURACY 171
be seen in the restrained but sufficient defence
of his work, which he published in the Nineteenth
Century, "A Few Words to Mr Freeman."1
" I acknowledge to five real mistakes in the
whole book," he wrote to Skelton, "and that is
all that the utmost malignity has discovered."2
In a brilliant piece of satirical and only half-
serious allegory — "A Siding at a Railway
Station " 3 — he supposes a number of persons
representative of the society of the nineteenth
century to be brought up for final judgment, not
in the presence of the hosts of heaven (in whose
existence indeed they few of them probably
believed) but at the custom-house of a railway
terminus, where baggage is opened instead of
books. After a time his own turn comes round,
and this is how he describes it : —
"In the way of work there was nothing to be
shown but certain books and other writings, and
these were spread out to be tested. A fluid
was poured on the pages, the effect of which was
to obliterate entirely every untrue proposition,
and make every partially true proposition grow
faint in proportion to the false element which
entered into it. Alas! Chapter after chapter
vanished away, leaving the paper clean, as if
no compositor had ever laboured in setting type
for it. Pale and illegible became the fine-sound
ing paragraphs in which I had secretly prided
myself. A few passages, however, survived here
and there at long intervals. They were those
1 April, 1879.
2 Skelton, "Table-Talk of Shirley," pp. 142-143.
s "Short Studies."

i;a J. A. FROUDE [i8,8-
on which I had laboured least and (which I) had
almost forgotten, or those, as I observed in one or
two instances, which had been selected for special
reprobation in the weekly journals. Something
stood to my credit, and the worst charge of
wilfully and intentionally setting down what I
did not believe to be true was not alleged against
me. Ignorance, prejudice, carelessness ; sins of
infirmity, culpable indeed, but not culpable in the
last degree ; the water in the ink, the common
places, the ineffectual sentiments ; these, to
my unspeakable comfort, I perceived were my
heaviest crimes."
Men, as Gibbon said, are the best judges of
their own work. Froude has laid what blame
there is where, one may suspect, it will finally
lie. It was the general expressions of opinion,
not the particular statements of fact, which made
him so many foes, and it is likely it will be for
those and not for these that sentence will finally
go against him, if it goes that way at all. His
quiet, vigilant, rather merciless sarcasm cost him
dear. Mistakes, doubtless, he made — mistakes of
omission, interpretation, inference ; but whether
many or few, both in themselves and relatively
to the work of others has yet to be determined.
Ignorant, anyhow, he was not ; prejudiced, not
one half so much as most people ; careless, it
seems, very much more in reading his proofs
than in working up his material. Those who
speak of him as a liar would do well to remember
that every slander, and indeed every condemna-

1894] THE "ERASMUS" 173
tion, is a snowball and gathers size as it goes.
Freeman was the first father of many attacks,
but cuts an uncommonly poor figure now in
the light of some recent revelations.1 And
Macaulay, whose historical work Freeman set
so high, would have passed a discreditable
examination in some of those very qualities, for
the alleged absence of which Froude was so
violently attacked.
A word may be said here about the " Erasmus,"
which is commonly regarded as one of the least
accurate, as it is certainly one of the most delight
ful, of his writings. It has faults, a few serious,
many trifling, none prejudicial to the point and
purpose of the book. But it must be remembered
that it was written in the last hurried years at
Oxford, when health was fast failing and work
more pressing than ever ; that Renaissance Latin
is no child's play, and the experts themselves
sometimes in doubt how to translate ; that the
proofs were corrected on his death-bed. They
are singularly ungracious that cast stones at the
historian, who drew " Erasmus " out of his Latin
winding-sheet, and clothed him in English of
imperishable excellence.
Of the History of England there is another
vindication. He had to decipher in crabbed
manuscript what we can now read in clear print.
Few men, it is safe to say, could have turned
1 See Paul, " Life of Froude," the chapter on " Froude and
Freeman."

174 J- A- FROUDE [1818.
what was virtually virgin soil at Froude's speed,
and with greater certainty ; no one except Gibbon
could have maintained throughout so high a level
of expression. He got into touch with his period,
as few historians have been able to do at any time,
saturating himself with it until he became in his
likes and dislikes something of an Elizabethan.
Hatfield, so overpoweringly full of the spirit of
the past, where he worked through much of his
material and formed one of the great friendships
of his life, cast over him, one cannot doubt, its
wonderful spell. The old palace of the bishops
of Ely, the Vineyard, the stretch of field and
woodland past Pope's Farm to Essendon, the
ground across which fell the shadows of the
immemorial Oak, must all have been peopled
for him with something more than the ghosts
of the past. His men and women, whatever
else we may say of them, are human, passionate,
impressionable, real. We pass behind institu
tions, policies, diplomacies, economic and ecclesi
astical crises, to know the actors themselves. All
things are seen subjectively. Character becomes,
as indeed it is, the one thing needful. He does
not sketch the movement of a society, but paints
the society itself. And in the ardour of his work
he entirely forgets his own religious determinism
and colours every moral blot, by which men and
women have defiled the freedom of their will,Jin
the angriest hues.

'894] FROUDE'S PORTRAITS 175
Of the great gallery of portraits that adorn his
pages, five stand out in high relief — the master
ful King, the high-hearted Archbishop striving
with self and circumstance, the wayward Queen
and her guileful cousin, and the sagacious Burleigh.
It might almost be said that the history falls
into three acts, each depending on some personal
interest. There is first ' the King's matter ' ;
then there is the trial and vindication of the
opinions of Cranmer ; then, last of all in one
long, lurid, fitful blaze of plot and counter-plot is
waged the battle of the two Queens, whilst
Burleigh plays the r6le that Edward Waverley
and Henry Morton do for Scott, and embodies
Froude's reason, though never his enthusiasm.
The character that he has drawn of Henry, has,
of course, excited the sharpest denial. Up to
Froude's time, Henry, in the popular estimate,
had enjoyed much the same distinction as Oliver
Cromwell. He was wicked, tyrannical, cruel,
capricious, contemptuous of law, human or divine.
Hume could only explain his popularity by sup
posing that the English of that age had grown
like ' Eastern slaves.' 1 Nor had the Tractarian
movement helped the cause of Protestant or
Puritan. Carlyle upset the legend about Oliver,
and the destroyer of many Parliaments now stands
outside Westminster Hall. Froude tried to do as
much for Henry ; yet Westminster Cathedral has
1 Hume, " History of England," ch. xxxiii.

176 J. A. FROUDE [,8,8-
risen without any monument to the Defender of
the Faith. Religious sentiment runs deeper than
political, so we may see the ecclesiastical despot
get his reward at last as well as the civil one.
Meanwhile, the historians are not encouraging,
and Froude is generally discountenanced. But
this is, to some extent, because about Froude
himself there has grown to be a legend. It is
said that he has made Henry something between
a hero and a demi-god. This was not Henry's
character as Froude conceived it. In the matter
of what we are pleased to call the divorce —
though divorce it never was nor could be1 — he
does not dispute the King's personal and selfish
interest. What he does say is, that it happened
to coincide with that which was of grave national
concern — the birth of an heir to the throne. It
has been too little observed that he is not un
willing to let us apply the term 'self-deceit' to
Henry's conduct.2 Mr Pollard, the greatest living
authority, says no worse of Henry when he points
out that so far as dates go it is perfectly possible
to hold that he was meditating the separation from
Katherine before ever he was in love with Anne,
and that in 1528, when in serious fear of the
plague and daily receiving the sacrament, he
1 It was a decree of nullity of marriage : the very point of the
suit being that Henry was not able to contract a marriage with
Katherine ; and, if there was no marriage, there could be no
divorce. a " History of England," i. p. 123.

1894] HENRY AND MORE 177
continued to write love - letters to the latter,
without any apparent qualms of conscience, whilst
with the other hand he was reproving his sister,
Margaret, for her amours.1
Our view of the transactions of which Anne
was the pivot will determine our view of Henry.
Froude saw this, and devoted a chapter to the
trial of that Queen. Mr Fisher2 selects it as
an example of all that is worst in his work.
Froude's argument, however, remains untouched.
We have no adequate knowledge of the evidence
on which Anne was condemned. If we disbelieve
its sufficiency, we inculpate the greatest names
in England in a foul conspiracy. Choose between
Anne and Henry, as you please, but remember
that with Henry falls the flower of the English
nobility. So, again, in the matter of More, Froude's
defence that the crisis admitted of no half-
measures is virtually endorsed by Mr Pollard,
when he points out that More and Fisher would
have condemned heretics for pleading the rights
of conscience, just as certainly as they were them
selves condemned for exercising them.3 Mores
death, we say, is a hideous crime. Hideous it is
because More was More, but crime it was not, and
More knew that as well as any one. It is, any
way, an event over which Anglican apologists are
1 Pollard, " Henry VI 1 1.," p. 149.
' H. Fisher, "Political History of England, 1487-1547."
' Pollard, "Henry VIII.," p. 225. M

178 J. A. FROUDE [1818.
apt to skate too lightly. The Act of Supremacy
in its own view, and in fact, substituted the King
for the Pope as the interpreter of Scripture.1 The
secular clergy complied and took the oath. More,
if high character and wisdom are thrown together
into the balance, was easily the greatest man in
Europe — a rare combination of saint and lawyer.
He had been Lord Chancellor ; and in the
matter of the succession he was ready to swear
to obey the law of the land. But the royal
supremacy he would not acknowledge, and because
he would not acknowledge it he perished.
Froude regards the event as the parting of the
ways. From that day a great battle was joined,
with passive resistance for arms and armour, and
nationality or catholicity for a cause.2 When
More was asked by Audley if he wished to be
considered wiser and of better conscience than
all the bishops and nobles of the realm, he
replied : —
" My lord, for one bishop of your opinion, I
have a hundred saints of mine ; and for one
parliament of yours, and God knows of what
kind, I have all the General Councils for a
thousand years ; and for one kingdom I have
France and all the kingdoms of Christendom."8
More saw further it may be than many men
see to-day. Anyway, the severance with Rome
1 Froude, " History of England," ii. p. 346. See note.
8 Froude, " History of England," ii. p. 362.
• Quoted by Fisher, "Political History of England, 1487-1547,"
P. 354-

1894] THE MONASTERIES 179
was complete, and the curtain descended over
the old world of saints and relics with its back
ground of abbey and cloister, in which More and
Fisher had played their part. It was the hour
of Cranmer and Cromwell.
On 9th June 1536 Latimer preached his
famous sermon before convocation, assembled
in Old St Paul's. Latimer was the man after
Froude's own heart ; one who walked warily,
taking religion for a lantern and holding his eyes
fixed, not on the source of light, but upon the
rays that shone across the narrow roadway. He
was beyond all question the greatest moral force
in England in his time,1 ready to speak his mind
and pay for it with his blood. Mighty evils, he
told his audience, had been swept away, yet they
had had no hand in the work. God would visit
them also in an hour when they thought not.
The mighty evils were the lesser monasteries,
lately suppressed at the recommendation of
Cromwell's inquisitors. Froude accepts the
reports of Legh and Layton and exhibits the
religious orders as wallowing in the foulest vice.
Here, as so often when great issues are at
stake, History seems to wear a double face.
There is the Protestant view, naturally impatient
of ascetism and resting on the word of men like
Colet and Latimer, resting, too, on Acts of
Parliament, to which, in that epoch, Froude was
1 And this in spite of his inexcusable conduct at the death of
Friar Forest.

180 J. A. FROUDE [1818-
accustomed to defer as to the voice of the best
public opinion ; and, if we accept it, the Augean
stables appear a paradise of cleanliness beside
the monasteries. There is the Catholic view,
affirming, with St Paul,1 the exceptional grace of
perfect purity ; affirming with De Maistre the
practical wisdom of the Church in withdrawing
a large body of men from the married state ; 2
denouncing the reckless speed and insufficient
enquiry of Legh and Layton, their want of high
character, greed of preferment, prejudice as
seculars 3 against the religious orders ; pleading
the inconsistency between their reports and the
preamble of the Act of Dissolution in which
religion in divers of the greater houses was
declared to be right well kept; pleading, too,
the inevitable advent of offences whether among
primitive disciples or cloistered monks or those jolly
parsons of the eighteenth century, whom Froude
preferred to the Oxford revivalists. History was
never more ironical. A shake of the box, a
shuffle of the documents that remain to us, and
the dice, we feel, might fall out the other way.
Close upon the Act of Dissolution and
Latimer's sermon followed the English Bible.
Froude thought it a work of incomparable genius,
1 1 Cor. vii. 1, 7, 28, 32, 34.
2 De Maistre, " De Pape," iii. section 3.
' Legh was, almost certainly, not in orders, and can only be
called a secular in the sense of a laymen. Layton was technically
a secular.

««94] HENRY AND CROMWELL iSr
and laid characteristic, but not improper, stress
upon the frontispiece.1 First, Henry, kneeling,
receives the Bible from God ; then Henry,
enthroned, gives with each hand a copy of the
precious book to Cranmer and Cromwell — the
one for the spirituality, the other for the laity of
the realm. The national character of the move
ment that was by then well on its way had been
perfectly understood by Coverdale. Yet the
course of the Reformation did not run smoothly
either for the Vicar-General or his apologist.
Cromwell fell between the King and the
Lutherans ; and Froude was like to fall between
the King and Cromwell. He had greatly
admired both ; had thought them both hard but,
so far as the times would allow, good. He would
not throw over either ; Cromwell, he said, had
faithfully served the King, and one higher than
the King, yet Henry had no alternative but to
surrender him to his foes.2 Such a defence may
avail to palliate the guilt of Charles I. in giving
up Strafford, when the Whitehall mob was
threatening the Queen's life. It can have no
force at all, urged on behalf of Henry in the
fulness of his power.
Swift steel carried off Cromwell ; slow disease
did for Henry ; Cranmer was left to steer the
ship of the state in that Via Media Anglicana,
for which the three men had been inconsequently
1 " History of England," iii. p. 82. 3 Ibid. p. 528.

i8a J. A. FROUDE [181S-
striving. The English Liturgy, the work of the
Archbishop's own hands, appeared — "the one
admirable thing which the unhappy reign (of
Edward VI.) produced."1 Cranmer, like Henry,
had understood the temper of his countrymen
better than they understood it themselves, and,
as Froude says, "services which have outlived
so many storms speak for their own excellence,
and speak for the merit of the workmen."2
Alongside of the Liturgy came the Articles, and
of them also Froude has a word to say : —
" Articles of belief they have been called ;
articles of teaching ; articles of peace. Pro
testants who have restored the right of private
judgment, who condemn so emphatically the
articles added by the Council of Trent to the
Christian creed, not for themselves only, but
because human beings are not permitted to bind
propositions of their own upon the consciences
of believers, will scarcely pretend that they are
the first. If it be unlawful for a Catholic Council
to enlarge the dogmatic system of Christianity,
no more can it be permitted to a local church
to impose upon the judgment a series of intricate
assertions on theological subtleties, which the
most polemical divines will not call vital, or on
questions of public and private morality where
the conscience should be the only guide."8
This is, as we are beginning to know, the
logical outcome of the Protestant creed. But
Cranmer did not know it, nor those who worked
1 " History of England," iii. p. 528. * Ibid., v. p. 394.
s Ibid., p. 395.

ism] CRANMER; ELIZABETH; CECIL 183
with him, Zwingli being an honourable exception.1
They used the sword to teach truth as well as
justice, and in their own condemnation they had
no ground of complaint. All unconscious, they
fought the battle of religious liberty, not really
against the Pope but against the King; for by what
Froude calls 'a cowardly sophism,'2 but which is
surely no sophism at all, all heretics, after being
adjudged so, were handed over to the civil power
for such punishment as the civil power decreed.
Anyway, Froude told the story of Cranmer's
death, with a pathos and a sympathy that will
never be equalled. He can hardly be wrong in
his conclusion that the Archbishop's martyrdom,
more than any other event, won the battle of
the English Reformation.
" The worth of a man," he said, with singular
felicity, and yet, as it must seem from a Roman
standpoint, with singular inconsequence, " must
be measured by his life, not by his failure under
a single and peculiar trial. The Apostle, though
forewarned, denied his Master on the first alarm
of danger ; yet that Master, who knew his nature
in its strength and its infirmity, chose him for
the rock on which He would build His Church."8
Cranmer died, but his opinions lived. It was
on his foundation that Elizabeth and Cecil reared
that strange shell of a church, which was after
wards to have so rich and splendid a decoration.
1 Zwingli and Socinus were opposed to persecution. See Lecky,
" Rise of the Spirit of Rationalism," ii. p. 44.
2 " History of England," vi. p. 382. * Ibid., p. 430.

i&*4 J. A. FROUDE [iSiS-
The conduct of the Marian bishops left little
room to doubt the finality of the cleavage. Only
the disreputable Kitchen kept his place ; the
others with one accord went to the Tower rather
than swear to the Supremacy. With difficulty
Parker was consecrated by the remnant of
Edward's episcopate — Scory, Coverdale, Barlow
and Hodgkins. It was such a settlement as
suited Elizabeth perfectly. She liked the old
forms, but the substance of episcopal power she
had no mind to restore. She left to her spiritual
officers a show of spiritual dignity, but Dean and
Chapter were, in effect, bound to choose the royal
nominees. Mary had waited to burn Cranmer
before she appointed Pole. Elizabeth filled her
sees while the Marian bishops were still alive.
"The fear of a King is as the roaring of a lion,"
said the wisest of the children of men, "whoso
provoketh him to anger sinneth against his own
soul." J So Henry taught and Elizabeth believed.
An Anglo Catholic history of the English
Reformation would terminate, as Dean Church
suggested, at the reign of Charles II. A
Protestant history ends, and ends properly, with
the death of Mary Stuart and the destruction
of the Armada. Sixteenth-century Catholicism,
as Froude conceived it, was incarnate in the
Queen of Scots. She is the villain of the piece,
luring men to loss of soul and body, by her
1 Proverbs xx. 2,

'894] MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS 185
winning wiles and her features falsely fair, as
surely as that fanciful contemporary portrait of
her — the false Duessa in the Faerie Queene. And
just as Spenser gloats with an indecent malignity
over Duessa's fall, when stripped of all her
artifices, old, foul and deformed, she is driven
from Orgoglio's castle,1 Froude, making history
into parable, dwells all too faithfully on the last
scene at Fotheringhay, where Mary, still a grace
ful and majestic figure robed in black satin, with a
golden crucifix about her neck and one of ivory
in her hand, is converted, even as she repeats
the Latin prayers of her church, into a wizened
old woman, clad by her own care in a scarlet
gown. And if the hoJlowjiess of the Catholic
persuasion was depicted in the downfall of the
Queen of Scots, all the vigour and vitality of the
Reformation were made apparent in the life of
the Elizabethan circle — in seamen like Drake
and Hawkins and Frobisher, in statesmen like
Burghley and Walsingham, in courtiers like
Sidney and Spenser. Its superstitions, he
thought, were not craven, its austerities not
oppressive. It was the education of men who
beat the greatest King of their age, began to
build a maritime Empire, the like of which has
never been seen, and reared a race as adventurous
as the world can show. If, as Froude believed,
right in modern societies tends to be might,2
1 Faerie Queene, bk. i., canto, viii. 46-50.
8 ' The English in Ireland," i. p. 2.

186 J. A. FROUDE H818-
then it may be that the principles of the English
Reformation are as near the truth as in this
illusive world we may hope to come.
The drama, played out to its fifth act, ends
magnificently. From the Bay of Ferrol, with
the sun gilding the summit of the Galician
mountains and the wind scarcely stirring the
summer sea, the huge Armada, its sails marked
with the blood - red emblem of the Crusades,
floats to its undreamed-of doom — Catholic Spain
advancing to the conquest of Protestant England.
Against it come forth Drake, and Hawkins, and
Howard, and a thousand more of ' England's
forgotten worthies' in ship, and sloop, and
pinnace, ill-armed and ill-fed, but worrying, tear
ing, and rending like the sea-dogs that they are.
The galleons are inert as knights in heavy armour.
The skies change, and hearts change with them,
and in the end all is confusion and fear, flight
and destruction.
U]- It is a magnificent tragedy magnificently told.
We should have to go to Syracuse or Con
stantinople for an equal. Then the curtain drops,
and the author speaks the epilogue. England
had established her right to be free to choose
her own religion. In the awful crisis of her
fortunes Catholic and Protestant had fought
shoulder to shoulder. The rents, which thought
had made, action had healed. The nation settled
for a time into the uneasy compromise toward

'894] CARLYLE'S RELIGION 187
which the statesmanship of Henry and Elizabeth
had been drawing them on. Anglicanism came
to self-consciousness in the writings of Hooker.
England, it was apparent, was entering upon a
new phase, and the centre of rebellion shifted
from the Catholics to the Protestants.
Froude had written an epic on the birth of
Modern England. The moral of the book was
that men, to be men, must be religious, and that
religion, to be religion, must be manly. If, in
this strange sea of life in which we find our
selves, we are to keep our heads above water,
our thought and our faith must be in harmony,
else we shall sink, not swim.
" Religion," he said in some of the concluding
words of his history, " is the attitude of reverence
in which noble-minded people instinctively place
themselves towards the unknown Power which
made man and his dwelling-place. It is the
natural accompaniment of their lives, the sancti-
fication of their actions and their acquirements.
It is what gives to man, in the midst of the rest
of creation, his special elevation and dignity."1
There was one living man who had, as he well
knew, taught all this yet more earnestly than
himself. Carlyle had all the faith of the Hebrew
prophets without their hope. Froude thought
that Cheyne Row contained by far the greatest
man of the age — a man religious as Newman, yet
not reactionary. In an unpublished letter to
1 " History of England," xii. p. 535. _..

188 J. A. FROUDE ['8i8-
Lord Derby written about a year after Carlyle's
death, he gave what is perhaps his finest estimate
of his master's worth and teaching : —
" Isaiah had no new morality to teach. Jesus
Christ's doctrines were not original. In ordinary
times men acknowledge the moral part of these
doctrines to be true, but do not act as if they
were true, and therefore do not really believe
them to be true. Men rise from time to time,
whose function it is to insist upon their truth, to
show in vivid detail the consequence of neglect
ing them, to show that the first business of men
in this world is really and truly to be men, and
not machines for making money or tinkering
constitutions, or enjoying what they call pleasure.
I conceive this to have been Carlyle's mission,
and that all his writings have this for their common
focus. He did not believe, like Rousseau, that
civilisation was degeneracy, (that) the savage state
was the best, but he thought that all nations
had their times of growth and decay, and that
England once produced far finer individual men
than she produces now. He regarded us (as)
going down hill, as the Romans went down after
the first Caesars ; and he expected a similar end
for us. Something better would eventually rise
out of the wreck." *
Of this man Froude was called upon to
write the life. Great preachers are expected
to practice what they preach. Had Carlyle
been tried by his own standard he would have
emerged, if not scatheless, at least with honour.
He had been in private, as in public, courageous,
truthful, forcible. The public tried him by the

1894] CARLYLE'S GOSPEL 189
code of Christ, and condemned for irritability,
inconsiderateness, and want of calm. Against
Froude there ought to be no word of blame. He
told the story of his master's life in sunshine
and shadow, faithfully, and beautifully as Carlyle
would have wished it told. Those who have
tried to blacken his character have merely
darkened their own.
Carlyle's gospel had been the gospel of strength.
In the establishment and maintenance of order
among human beings he found the root of great
ness, and in the sense of order a guarantee of
conscience. No man, he thought, to whom his
fellows had looked up could be greatly wicked.
A king that was king indeed seemed to him
invested with a spiritual as well as a temporal
majesty ; to be like Melchizedek, priest as well
as king.1 In Cromwell he thought he saw the
perfect embodiment of kingly greatness.
It is easy and probably right to be cynical.
Most great men, as Lord Acton thought,2 have
been bad men, and human admiration is not,
perhaps, the least corrupt of human instincts.
Froude, however, was differently affected. In
the monkish legends of the saints he had recog
nised the presence of a common type, which in
its time had quickened and guided the whole
of western society.3 Chivalry had been the
1 Carlyle, "Heroes and Hero-worship" the chapter on "The
Hero as King."
3 "Lord Acton's Letters to Mary Gladstone," p. 122.
» "Short Studies," pp. 562-564.

ioo J. A. FROUDE ['8i8-
effect of an effort on the part of the mediaeval
Church to bring the thoughts of Christ and His
mother into the rough and often bloody work
of every day. Before ' the silent figures sleep
ing on the tombs ' — figures such as lie in the
round church of the Temple, where he was often
a worshipper — Froude reverenced the grace of
knightly purity as one of the most precious gifts
that had dropped from Heaven to ennoble poor
Humanity. These splendid warriors, sleeping
cross-legged till the day of resurrection, were as
much the creation of the cloistered saints with
their intense, if narrow vision, as those Gothic
cathedrals, "perhaps, on the whole, the most
magnificent creation which the mind of man has
as yet thrown out of itself."1
Times had changed. The monks had glided
after their tales down the stream of time. But
no new ideal had come to replace the old one,
and men wandered as sheep having no shepherd.
A responsibility seemed to rest with men of
letters, to evoke a common type of nobility which
should stir the hearts of the young men of the
nineteenth century as the Iliad, or the Sagas, or
the monkish legends had stirred Greeks and
Norsemen, and Catholics hundreds of years ago.2
Carlyle had set up Cromwell as a model of high
English character. With that model Froude
agreed, and in his turn drew men's eyes back
1 "Short Studies," i. p. 565. 2 Ibid., p. 582.

'894] CHRIST AND CAESAR 191
towards Caesar — Caesar scoured and polished by
Mommsen's brush and chisel — as a fit object for
the meditation of young imperialists. His book
on "Caesar" seemed to him the best he had
written,1 and it is beyond all doubt a brilliant
sketch brilliantly executed. Sellar, who could
speak with great authority, said that wherever
the narrative dealt with Caesar, that is through
three-fourths of it, he read with sympathy and
assent, as unqualified as his pleasure and admira
tion.2 Yet, for all that, as a moral essay — and
all Froude's books were moral essays — it is
strangely ineffective. " The heart of the nation,"
he says boldly in his unpublished Fragment, " is
in its armies." Yet an antagonism, never finally
resolved, ran through his "Caesar" as through
his own nature. Carlyle told him he got no
good out of the book,8 and we can easily see the
reason. Between the king of this world, whom
his master revered, and the King not of this
world, whom Newman had long ago at Oxford
taught him to think greater than the sons of
men, Froude had never clearly made his choice.
In a sentence, the last of the book, afterwards
rightly cut out, he instituted a curious parallel
between the lives, and aims, and deaths of Christ
and Caesar. People thought the comparison
profane, and it was certainly false. Between
1 Paul, " Life of Froude," p. 338.
2 Eraser's Magazine, September 1879, P- 332-
3 Paul, " Life of Froude," p. 343.

192 J. A. FROUDE [1818.
those who take short, sharp cuts to reform and
Him, who sowed moral revolutions in grains of
mustard seed, there is no kinship or acquaintance.
Their life and work is simply incommensurable.
The best, and perhaps more than the best, that
can be said of Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon — if we
look to the true interest of mankind — is 'stern
necessity.' When men have grown so vile, or
nations so depraved, or institutions so decrepit
that to root them out is to do God service, we
might fairly ask that those who do the work
should cover their faces with a mask, and that the
pages of their history be sealed up. They are no
models for patriots ; for moderate men do not fail
because they are moderate, but because they are
few. It had been Cranmer, not Henry, as Froude
himself had taught, who had won the battle of
the Reformation.
The influence of Caesar and Cromwell was
very strong upon him. Right, he argued with
dangerous subtlety, tended in civilised societies
to create might,1 and he enforced the doctrine
in a book on English rule in Ireland, which Lecky
condemned — and Lecky 's moral judgments were
always weighty — as a bad one.2 The purpose of
it was to show that the Irish were, as Cromwell
and Clare (in whom Froude found the prototype
of the late Lord Salisbury3) thought they were,
' The English in Ireland," i. p. 2.
Lecky, "History of England," ii. pp. 95, 101, 169.

1 «¦

* Paul, " Life of Froude," p. 244.

'894] FROUDE AND SOUTH AFRICA 193
an inferior race needing to be governed with
a heavy hand. Imperialism seemed to him to
be doubly blessed ; powerful at the same time
to civilise the savage, and to elicit and preserve
the highest qualities of the English. Yet, like
Carlyle, he saw in us a likeness to the society
of Clodius and Milo, and was fearful lest it should
extend to an identity. Democracy and Science,
held in check for eighteen centuries, by Caesar
and the Church — strange allies strangely matched
— were returning upon us hand in hand.1 Could
we found at last such a commonwealth as Har
rington had fancied for us, at once free and
terrible ?
A few years before " Oceana " was written
circumstance had given Froude a chance of play
ing a not inconsiderable part in imperial politics.
In 1874 Disraeli came into power, and Lord
Carnarvon went to the Colonial Office. In South
Africa both the native and the Anglo - Dutch
questions were giving trouble. Cape Colony had
been compelled to lend assistance to Natal to
suppress Langalibalele, a native chief, whose
offences were rather anticipated than accom
plished. Further west a dispute had arisen
about Griqualand, where lay the Diamond Fields,
lately discovered. Carnarvon wanted special
knowledge, and Froude went out to get it.
He was not long in making up his mind. The
1 " Oceana," p. 25. N

i94 J- A- FROUDE [1818-
natives would be best kept under control if the
whites made common cause ; and that meant a
South African confederation. In the matter of
the Diamond Fields he saw that a great wrong
had been done. By treaty and pledge1 we had
been bound to let alone the tribes beyond the
Vaal and Orange Rivers. Nevertheless, Lord
Kimberley, acting on behalf of Gladstone's
government, had contrived to reclaim Griqua
land West for a Basuto chief, and take the
most valuable part of it for the British people.
He intended to annex the new province to Cape
Colony, but when the time came the Cape Dutch
would not receive the stolen property of their
kinsmen beyond the Orange River. There was
small blame to them for not keeping their word,
since the transaction had been one of those which
help the impartial observer to understand why
we are thought on the continent to be no better
than a race of hypocrites.
It is the especial glory of men of letters — a
glory outweighing many weaknesses — that they
have had the claims of justice more constantly
at heart than any other class of men whatsoever.
Froude saw with a clear and steady eye. In
the Boers he perceived some of the qualities
he most revered — courage, dogged endurance,
Puritan faith. In the conduct of the British
1 Sand and Orange River Conventions. Answer of Sir G.
Cathcart to Nicholas Waterboer in 1853.

'8941 SOUTH AFRICA 195
Government he perceived an absence of fidelity
sufficient to alienate a well - tried friend. He
urged Carnarvon to redress the wrong. Car
narvon sent him back in the following year (1875)
as the accredited envoy of the Mother Country.
He was to represent England at a conference
of the South African States designed to settle
the miserable affair by amicable agreement. He
found Cape Colony in a ferment. Carnarvon's
despatch, suggesting the conference, had been
held up by the Molteno ministry as an example
of English interference with responsible govern
ment. Molteno himself did not think the times
were ripe for federation, and was no friend to
a proposal which might, he thought, revive the
animosity between the eastern and western
districts of the Colony,1 the one the home of
English capital, the other of Dutch agriculture.
He may or may not have been wise ; in reading
the history of South Africa, as in reading the
history of Ireland, one is apt to feel that any
and every policy would have been blessed, if
only it had been consistently pursued from start
to finish. But he certainly forgot, that so long as
South Africa remained unfederated, the control
of intra-colonial relations was left to the judgment
ofthe Secretary of State acting through the High
Commissioner. Carnarvon, right or wrong, had
a right to his support in bringing together the
1 Each was to be separately represented at the Conference.

196 J. A. FROUDE [1818.
leading South African statesmen. Anyway, it
was plainly necessary for Froude to get the real
tenor of Carnarvon's despatch explained and
justified. But Barkly, the Governor of the Cape,
gave him no help, and in the end he spoke out
plainly, keeping as clear as he could of local
politics. No doubt he was sometimes rash, for
even Prime Ministers sometimes appear to lose
their heads on the platform, and Froude, a man
wholly untrained, was faced by a situation of
rare difficulty. Like all idealists, he saw better/
what ought to be done than what could be done.
The response that he evoked was not strong
enough to overpower the resistance of Molteno.
Had it been seen so, it is not improbable that
certain Zulu wars and Boer wars, which afford
no pleasant recollections, would never have
been. With Carnarvon's later policy, and Frere's
virtual dictatorship he did not agree. Confedera
tion, if it came, must, he felt, come with the force
of public opinion behind it.1 That public opinion
he had tried to arouse, and of the way in
which he had done so Carnarvon fully approved.2
One thing his visit did effect. Wrong was made
right in Griqualand West. Cape Colony agreed
to annex it, and the President of the Free State
came to England and received an indemnity of
,£90,000, in satisfaction of his country's claim.
1 " Oceana," p. 44.
» I. P. — C— 1399, p. 89 (quoted in Molteno's "Life of Molteno,"
ii. P- 57)-

i8943 TARIFF REFORM 197
Literary men seldom get a warm welcome in
the world of affairs. After the South African
episode, Froude was left to promote the imperial
spirit by word, and no longer by deed. " Oceana "
and "The Bow of Ulysses" are the patriotic
reflections of a traveller very proud of his country,
Und very fearful of her decay.*) His foresight
was very remarkable. He saw, as clearly as any
present-day imperialist, the great weight which
numbers must have in any world-struggle.1 In
the colonies numbers could grow, and grow in
health. To link her children to the Mother
Country would give us, not perhaps wealth, but
power. But he was, at first, distrustful of federa
tive schemes, colonial peerages, tariffs,2 and the
like. Every attempt to tighten the chain must,
he felt, as well he might after the South African
affair, come from the colonies themselves. Yet
from the unpublished fragment of his West Indian
diary, it appears that he came, in the end, to look
on an imperial tariff with a friendly eye : —
" I feel more and more clear . . . that we
must be connected through a Zollverein, or not
at all. Probably our own people will come round
to reciprocity before long. But they should begin
with the Colonies. Protection even against foreign
corn would not really injure the British citizen.
It would scarcely raise the price of corn 2s. a
quarter, if Indian and Australian came in duty
free, while he would gain everything else. But
nothing good will be got out of the present
1 " The Bow of Ulysses," pp. 206, 207.
2 "Oceana," pp. 193, 222-223.

198 J. A. FROUDE ['8i8-
generation of statesmen who have Free Trade
on the brain."
The main purpose of "The Bow of Ulysses"
was to get protection for the West Indian sugar-
planters. And, like other prophets, Froude was
to foresee more than he realised. Much as
he disliked Liberal politicians, and Gladstone in
particular, he made an exception in favour of
one. " I like Chamberlain," he wrote in 1882.
"He knows his mind. There is no dust in his
eyes, and he throws no dust in the eyes of
others."1 For domestic politics, however, and
party conflicts he cared very little. " A wise man,"
he said, "keeps both his eyes open, belongs to
no party, and can see things as they are."2
This is, of course, a proper, though not always
a possible, attitude for a historian. But Froude
was far too great a man to be deluded into
supposing that history is therefore a colourless
compilation of chronicles and criticisms. He
chose Tacitus as his model ; a man in whom,
alone, he found 'serene calmness of insight'
combined with 'intensity of feeling.'3 Further
than this no human being might hope to go.
"Faithful and literal history," he said in a
passage of profound truth, " is possible only to
an impassive spirit. Man will never write it until
perfect knowledge and faith in God shall enable
1 Paul, « Life of Froude," p. 345.
3 Oceana," p. 175. » "Short Studies," i. p. 555.

'894] HIS VIEW OF HISTORY 199
him to see and endure every fact in its reality ;
until perfect love shall kindle in him under its
touch the one just emotion which is in harmony
with the eternal order of all things." 1
We must recognise and accept our limitations.
If we do so, with these thoughts in our mind,
the course of history will be best represented as
a drama played on a gigantic scale, where the
great world-forces of right and wrong execute
their just unvarying laws. More than this, we
cannot make it, or else it will mock us, offer
ing ' in its passive irony ' 2 a selection of facts
from which we may fashion any and every
theory we please — Zeitgeists, fatalisms, miraculous
interpositions of Providence. (And he quotes
Napoleon : "What is history but a fiction agreed
upon ? ") Less than this we dare not make it,
or it will smile grimly at us across the mists of
Time and marvel at the shortness of our vision.
" One lesson, and only one, history may be said
to repeat with distinctness ; that the world is built
somehow on moral foundations ; that in the long
run it is well with the good ; in the long run it
is ill with the wicked. But this is no science ;
it is no more than the old doctrine taught long
ago by the Hebrew prophets."3
One great value of history, he adds cynically,
is its constant assertion of the futility of fore
bodings. Read it for its moral quality and its
1 " Short Studies," i. p. 554. 2 Ibid, p. 20.
3 Ibid, p. 21.

zoo J. A. FROUDE [1818.
dramatic intensity, and you have read its soul.
Shakespeare had no philosophy to satisfy. He
looked at life, saw the real things in it, and
painted what he saw.1 Every historian, who
knows his art, will do the same.
Froude never forgot these early conclusions.
In the history of the Reformation he set himself
on the side of the moral element ; as for the rest
it was a play with real men and women in it.
A curious critic will notice that the other great
imaginative historians had each lived with a
poet. Tacitus had steeped himself in Virgil ;
Carlyle in Goethe.
Two of the lesser gems of English literature
are the monographs Froude wrote on Caesar and
Beaconsfield. Of the position of the first in his
moral scheme enough has already been said.
As a dramatic effort its value is much greater.
Every one knows, at least, by reputation the dry
excellence of Caesar's Commentaries ; how, per
haps, the greatest feat of generalship is told
without vanity and without self - suppression.
Froude's biography is a kind of complement to
the Commentaries. Here all that colour, en
thusiasm, romance, can do for Caesar's exploits,
is achieved. The description of the battle of
Alesia is an astonishing piece of word-painting,
if we compare it with the sober narrative of the
original ; yet the writer has dealt carefully with
1 " Short Studies," i. p. 29.

l894] HIS PERSONALITY 201
his materials. " Lord Beaconsfield " is conceived
in another vein. Once more romance, colour,
charm, lend their aid. Once more the central
figure seems to gather around it all the varied
movement of the age. But in Caesar the main
interest is political, whilst the other gives us
Disraeli as he really was and wished to be — the
mysterious visitant at a masked ball, whom every
one suspects and no one quite manages to discover.
Of Froude's style there is little need to speak.
Mr Paul has said the last word about that. It
is 'the perfection of grace.'1 Severe classical
perfection, like Newman's or Landor's, it has
not. Its secret lies in the delightful abandon of
the manner, the broad-sweeping generalisations
which weld together the narrative, the rich tones
and harmonies of the language.
Froude was much more than a historian. He
was one of the personalities of his time, famous
for his talk, his charm, his culture, his friend
ships. Skelton has left a singularly attractive
description of him as he appeared to his friends :
the coal - black hair, the massive deeply - lined
features, the luminous dark eyes, the rapid play
of expression, impassive as Disraeli's when he
wished it, the distinguished presence, the hand
steady with rod or gun.2 To one, who chanced
to see something of him in middle life, his look
1 " The perfection of easy, graceful narrative." — Paul, " Life of
Froude," p. 124.
2 Skelton, "Table-talk of Shirley," pp. 120, 121.

202 J. A. FROUDE ['Sis-
gave the impression of mingled sarcasm and
kindliness. Oxford men, who were lucky enough
to be up during the two years of his professor
ship, were struck with the singular beauty of
his voice. But his personality is inscribed for
all time on the pages of the " Short Studies,"
those 'observations and experiences of a single
voyager floating down a river, and unable to
conjecture whither he is bound.' There, with
perfect taste and judgment, fit to be compared
to that of the "Apologia," he has made the
revelation of himself, grouping his thoughts on
religion, and politics, and life quite naturally
round books, and fables, and events. The
influence of these four volumes is incalculable.
Every thinking Oxford undergraduate has had
one or other of them in his hands, and no one
can have turned over their pages without be
coming, in no jesting sense, a sadder and a wiser
man. The most humorous of them — humorous
in the fullest sense, all laughter and tears — is
"The Cat's Pilgrimage."
The Cat is one of those unlucky people of
moderate opportunities, who are born with a
desire to be of some use, to live unselfishly, to
leave a mark upon the world. She cannot submit
to sleep, to be fed, to take things as they come.
She consults her companion the Dog, but he
can see no sort of advantage in exchanging
epicureanism for knight - errantry. He is of

1894] "THE CAT'S PILGRIMAGE" 203
excellent good sense, tells her not to cultivate a
conscience, to accept life as she finds it, and to
ask no questions. This, however, brings her
no peace. She leaves the Dog on the hearth
rug, and passes out into the world, to learn
what she is here for. " Do your duty and get
your dinner," says the Ox, in answer to her
question. " I have no duty," she complains to
the Bee, who remarks that, if this be so, the
other is a worthless drone, and hurries on
her way. The Owl recommends meditation.
" Meditation on what ? " she innocently enquires.
" Upon which came first, the Owl or the Egg,"
is the reply.
In despair and feeling hungry, she begins
to seek her dinner, but, after hemming in her
quarry in the person of a Rabbit, is too un
accustomed and too pitiful to slay it. Lastly, she
visits the Fox, who laughs at her humanitarian
scruples, and points out that in this evil world
the weakest goes of right to the wall. This
brings the pilgrimage to an end. She gives
the Dog her conclusions next day. "All the
creatures I met were happy because they had
their several businesses to attend. As I have
been bred to do nothing, I must try to do that."
The piece was written in 1850, just after Froude
had resigned his fellowship, but it might have
been written in 1894. Neither from Carlyle nor
any one else did he ever learn any other philosophy

204 J- A. FROUDE ['8i8-
than that of blind yet faithful duty. The only
tolerable explanation of this puzzling universe
he had deliberately rejected, and Christianity
without Christ never satisfies. For the conven
tional narcotics and stimulants with which lesser
men dull or dispel the problem, he had an
amused contempt. Happiness as the end of
life he valued at its proper absurdity in the
mouths of people who revere 'the Man of
Sorrows' as their God or Teacher.1 His own
theology never advanced beyond, though it never
fell behind, the famous sentiment in the book of
Job: — "Though He slay me, yet will I trust
in Him." To the first part of the "Analogy"
he remained unfalteringly loyal, after he had
abandoned the second as special pleading.2 The
world was always for him, a moral world in
which great, though hidden, purposes were
being worked out. And this confidence kept
his judgment eminently sane in respect of some
of those practical matters on which curious
thinkers are apt to run their barks aground. On
the question of shooting, for example — a very
touchstone for common sense — he counselled
and practised great moderation. He loved wild
sport ; he hated artificial battues.3 On the other
hand, in his historical judgments, his belief in
the justice of even vicarious retribution tended
1 " Short Studies," ii. p. 55. 2 Ibid, p. 1 16.
3 Paul, " Life of Froude," p. 315.

'894] LITERARY MEN 205
to make him appear rather pitiless towards all
the servants of the Pope, from More to Mary
and Babington.
In spite of all his brilliant literary and social
success, the ironies of life were always too
strong for him. Like the Cat, he found him
self excluded by Fate from a life of action, such
as other men led, and to think about the ultimate
questions is always a little like chasing the problem
of the Owl and the Egg. He had wished in early
life to be a physician,1 and always regretted that
he had not been one, since from that as from the
other liberal professions, he was for many years
shut off by the fact of his having received Holy
Orders. In all literature, perhaps, there is no such
pathetic confession as that in which he cites and
endorses his master's verdict on literary work.
"It often strikes me as a question," Carlyle
had said, "whether there ought to be any such
thing as a literary man at all. He is surely the
wretchedest of all sorts of men. I wish with
the heart occasionally I had never been one."
" Let young men," comments Froude, " who are
dreaming of literary eminence as the laurel wreath
of their existence, reflect on these words. Let
them win a place for themselves as high as
Carlyle won ; they will find that he was speaking
no more than the truth, and will wish, when it
is too late, that they had been wise in time.
Literature — were it even poetry — is but the
shadow of action ; the action the reality, the
¦!• y^p^bUshed^Fragment, v *

206 J. A. FROUDE [1818-
poetry an echo. The Odyssey is but the
ghost of Ulysses — immortal, but a ghost still ;
and Homer himself would have said in some
moods with his own Achilles : —
" /3ov\oifitjv k iirdpovpos ewv 8irreve/j.ev a\\(p,
avSpi 7rap' cucKijpu), w /mr] /31otos woXbf e'iij,
Sy -koxtiv veKvearcri KaTa<j>Qiix€voi<Tiv avacraetv." l
Gibbon, it is to be feared, would have given
them both a short shrift : —
" I am disgusted with the affectation of men
of letters who complain that they have renounced
a substance for a shadow ; and that their fame
(which sometimes is no insupportable weight)
affords a poor compensation for envy, censure,
and persecution."2
Carlyle and Froude, at least, were guiltless of
affectation, and their fame is not likely to be
soon forgotten. The clouds that darkened their
sky lay on a far horizon, to which Gibbon's
eyes had never pierced. It might have been
said of them, as it has been said of Lucian, that
" men of genius as they were, they were looking
at human life from far above, with no limitations
of time, and passing a judgment which may
be repeated in the thirtieth century."3 It was
1 Carlyle's "Life in London," i. p. 130. "Rather would I live
upon the earth as the hireling of another, with a landless man who
had no great livelihood, than bear sway among all the dead that
be departed." — Butcher and Lang on Odyssey, xi. 489.
2 Gibbon, " Memoirs," p. 236.
3 Dill, "Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius."

'894] THE END 207
so with many of their contemporaries — with
Tennyson, Ruskin, Arnold, with almost all the
finest spirits of the age except Browning. And
it would be idle to deny that the wonderful beauty
and power of their prose and verse owes much
to the profound melancholy that breathes in
every line. Froude certainly was no exception.
Though he was passionately fond of Homer, it
was the brooding spirit of Virgil flavoured with
a dash of the mockery of Lucian to which his
own was akin. Or, if one cared to look for
a fanciful resemblance in a different sphere of
art, one might liken him to Botticelli — -Botticelli
who had sat under Savonarola, Botticelli as he
might have been if he had ever come under
the mind of Michelangelo. The voices of
Newman and Carlyle were always sounding
about his ears. Men who have listened to the
prophets can never be again as if they had not.
Those who gaze often into the starry heights
will find the earth a poor spectacle, and men a
little breed.
The last of many vicissitudes came in 1894,
when he had lived long enough to fulfil a two
years' Professorship of History at Oxford, where
his labours met with a splendid, though too
tardy, recognition. As he lay on his death-bed
by the Devon coast, in some of the last moments
of consciousness, he repeated those wonderful

308 J. A. FROUDE [18,8.1894
words, which, as a recent critic1 has pointed
out, are so often and so wrongly regarded as
Shakespeare's final verdict upon life : —
" To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle,
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more."
Like his well-loved Elizabethan seamen, "he
did what he did from the great unrest in him
which made him do it."2
1 A. C. Bradley, " Shakesperean Tragedy," p. 359.
2 " Short Studies," i. p. 457.

AUTHORITIES 209

AUTHORITIES
The references in this article are to the fourth edition of
the "History of England" (Longmans, 1867); the 1885
edition of the "Short Studies"; the 1894 edition of
"Oceana"; the fourth edition (1885) of "Carlyle's Life in
London"; the Silver Library edition of "The English in
Ireland." The principal authorities for Froude's life are Herbert Paul,
"Life of Froude" and Skelton, "Table-talk of Shirley."
Through the kindness of Miss Froude, the author has also had
the privilege of reading Froude's unpublished fragment of
Autobiography ; and, through the kindness of Lady Margaret
Cecil, Froude's letters to Mary, Lady Derby.
Froude has been the object of many attacks, some of
them extremely embittered by prejudice. The person chiefly
responsible was Freeman, who inaugurated them anonymously
in the columns of the Saturday Review, and closed them
without disguise in the Contemporary Review for 1877 and
1878. Froude replied to his critic in the Nineteenth Century
for April 1879, and Freeman rebutted in the Contemporary
Review for May. Mr Paul, in the chapter on " Froude and
Freeman," in his " Life of Froude," has told the painful story of
the controversy. Lecky's chapters on Ireland in his " History
of England in the Eighteenth Century" are a criticism of
Froude's view of Irish history contained in " The English in
Ireland." Mr P. A. Molteno, " Life and Times of Sir John Molteno,"
has written a long criticism of Carnarvon's South African
policy, accompanied by a running fire of criticism on Froude,
Frere, and all opponents of his father.
It does not seem necessary to specify the attacks made on
Froude's integrity in the matter of Carlyle's life. They ought
never to have been made nor published. O

210 AUTHORITIES
All charges against Froude, although made by high
authorities, must, however, be received with caution. MM.
Langlois and Seignobos, the eminent French historians,
think proper to remark in their "Introduction aux Etudes
Historiques," that "J. A. Froude etait un e"crivain tres bien
doue, mais sujet a ne rien affirmer qui ne fut entache" d'erreur ;
on a dit de lui qu'il dtait constitutionally inaccurate"1 The
only evidence brought forward in support of this tremendous
indictment is a reference to an article by Mr H. A. L. Fisher,
in the Fortnightly Review, December 1894.
Froude had written : — - '
"We rose slightly from the sea, and at the end of the seven
miles we saw below us, in a basin with the river winding
through it, a city of 150,000 inhabitants, not one of whom
has ever known or will know, a moment's anxiety as to the
recurring regularity of his three meals a day."2
"Adelaide," says Mr Fisher, "is on high ground, not in a
valley ; there is no river running through it ; its population
was not more than 75,000, and, at the very moment when
Mr Froude visited it, a large portion of that population was
on the verge of starvation." 3
In point of fact, Adelaide, though it stands on high ground,
is shut in at some distance by a semi-circle of heights, and the
River Torrens, which flows down from these hills, winds, as
Froude said, through the basin and into Adelaide, where it is
damned up so as to form an artificial lake, from which some
of its waters find their way into St Vincent's Gulf. Froude's
description of Adelaide, though it appears to be incorrect as a
description of the view seen, as he suggests, on approaching it
from the sea, is not incorrect as a description of it from another
point of view * (which Froude had probably in his mind when
1 Langlois and Seignobos, " Introduction aux Etudes His-
toriques," p. 101.
2 " Oceana," p. 75.
3 Fortnightly Review, December 1894, p. 815.
4 See the articles in the " Encyclo. Brit.," " La Grande Encyclo
pedic," and (more closely contemporary with Froude's visit) in
the " Handbook for South Australia," 1886 (Br. Mus. Press-mark
7959d. 28).

AUTHORITIES 211
he wrote), and Mr Fisher's flat denials are calculated to give a
wholly false idea of Froude's powers of observation.1
In respect of Froude's statement about the population,
matters stand thus. At the census of 1881, the population
of Adelaide, including the suburbs, was 67,954.2 Froude
visited it in 1885. In the "Handbook for South Australia,"
published on the occasion of the Colonial Exhibition in London
in 1886, the population is estimated at 100,000 to 110,000
souls, inclusive of the suburbs. Froude seems therefore to
have made a bad shot, or been misinformed ; but his mistake
was not so gross as Mr Fisher supposes, and accurate informa
tion as to the amount of the growing and shifting population
of a new country is never easy to get.
Froude's other statement that no inhabitant of Adelaide has
ever known, or will know any anxiety about his three meals a
day is, of course and obviously, hyperbolic. No one accuses
the spies of inaccuracy, because they said the land of Canaan
was flowing with milk and honey ; and Froude may surely be
permitted to give the impression of a wealthy land by a loose
figure. But I can find no reason to think with Mr Fisher
that in the early part of 1885 a large portion of the population
of Adelaide was "on the verge of starvation." There was,
indeed, some distress and some anxiety, owing principally to
several disastrous fires, but from 1 883-1 889 very considerable
advances in prosperity were made throughout the colony,3 and
the death-rate in 1885 was only 12-92 per 1,000 inhabitants,
as against 15*78 in 1884 and i3'95 in 1886. 4
But, if a meticulous accuracy is to be exacted, what can
be said for eminent historians, who, writing under the high
responsibility of correcting a fellow-student, and after informing
1 Mr Fisher very kindly asks me to say that he is satisfied, that,
although Froude's description of Adelaide, taken in its context,
is not wholly unexceptionable, his own charges are not made in
such a manner as to be fair to Froude, and that the second of them
is indefensible. He asks me to add that his information was
derived from an article by E. Wakefield in the Nineteenth Century
for August 1886.
3 "Year-book of Australia," 1885.
3 Hodder, " History of South Australia," ch. xvi.
4 Woods, " Handbook of South Australia," p. 220.

2i2 AUTHORITIES
us that "the historian ought to distrust ct priori every state
ment of an author, for he cannot be sure that it is not
mendacious or mistaken," 1 not only proceed to damn Froude's
reputation without any critical examination of Mr Fisher's
allegations, but put their condemnation in such a form as to
make it palpably untrue, for to say that Froude never made
any statement not disfigured by error is ridiculous ? Besides
'constitutional inaccuracy' there is surely unconstitutional
inaccuracy — inaccuracy not permitted by the conventions of
criticism. In conclusion I cannot refrain from asking the reader, who
is inclined to judge Froude hardly, to read the following
estimate of the historian, whose pre-eminence in the modern
world will scarcely be attacked — Gibbon. He will find it very
instructive. These are the words with which Guizot prefaces
his translation of the " Decline and Fall " : —
"Apres une premiere lecture rapide, qui ne m'avait laisse
sentir que l'interet d'une narration, toujours animee malgre son
etendue, toujours claire malgre la variete' des objets qu'elle
fait passer sous nos yeux, je suis entre dans un examen minu-
tieux des details dont elle se compose, et l'opinion que je m'en
suis formee alors a ete, je l'avoue, singulierement severe. J'ai
rencontre^ dans certains chapitres des erreurs qui m'ont paru
assez importantes et assez multipliers pour me faire croire qu'ils
avaient ete ecrits avec une extreme negligence ; dans d'autres,
j'ai ete frappe d'une teinte generate de partialite et de preven
tion, qui donnait a l'expose des faits ce defaut de verite' et de
justice, que les anglais designent par le mot heureux de misre
presentation; quelques citations tronquees, quelques passages,
omis involontairement ou a dessein, m'ont rendu suspecte la
bonne foi de l'auteur ; et cette violation de la premiere loi de
l'histoire, grossie a. mes yeux par l'attention prolongee avec
laquelle je m'occupais de chaque phrase, de chaque note, de
chaque reflexion, m'a fait porter sur tout l'ouvrage un jugement
beaucoup trop rigoureux. Apres avoir termine mon travail,
j'ai laisse s'ecouler quelque temps avant d'en revoir l'ensemble.
Une nouvelle lecture attentive et suivie de l'ouvrage entier,
des notes de l'auteur et de celles que j'avais cru devoir y
joindre, m'a montrg combien je m'etais exage"re l'importance
des reproches que meritait Gibbon ; j'ai ete frapp£ des memes
1 Langlois and Seignobos, " Introduction to the Study of History "
(English translation), p. 157.

AUTHORITIES 213
erreurs, de la meme partialite sur certains sujets; mais j'etais
loin de rendre assez de justice a Pimmensite de ses recherches,
a la variete de ses connaissances, a. l'etendue de ses lumieres,
et surtout a. cette justesse vraiment philosophique de son
esprit, qui juge le passd comme il jugerait le present, sans
se laisser offusquer par ces nuages que le temps amasse
autour des morts, et qui souvent nous empechent de voir que
sous la toge comme sous l'habit moderne ... les hommes
etaient ce qu'il sont encore. . . . Alors j'ai senti que Gibbon,
malgre ses faiblesses, etait vraiment un habile historien ; que
son livre, malgre ses deTauts, serait toujours un bel ouvrage,
et qu'on pouvait relever ses erreurs et combattre ses preven
tions ; sans cesser de dire que peu d'hommes ont reuni sinon
a. un aussi haut degre, du moins d'une maniere aussi complete
et aussi bien ordonnee, les qualites necessaires a. celui qui
veut ecrire l'histoire."1
1 Guizot's Introduction to his French translation of Gibbon's
" Decline and Fall," pp. 7, 8.

WALTER PATER
1839-1894
Ritualism old and new — Catholicity in Art — Pater's childhood —
The collision with Ruskin — Ruskin's theory of Art — Pater's
divergence — "Diaphaneite" — The gospel of Culture — Pater's
theory of Art — The essay on "./Esthetic Poetry" — "Renaiss
ance Studies" : Leonardo ; Botticelli ; Pico — " Greek Studies "|:
The " Bacchae " ; " Demeter and Kore " — Pater's special talent
— "Marius the Epicurean" — Marius and John Inglesant —
" Imaginary Portraits " — "A Prince of Court Painters " ;
" Sebastian van Storck " — London life — The last phase —
Oxford again — The end — His work and style — His religion
sometimes followed to-day.
" Dr Anodyne. In an age like ours, in which music and pictures
are the predominant tastes,1 I do not wonder that the forms of the
old Catholic worship are received with increasing favour. There
is a sort of adhesion to the old religion, which results less from
faith than from a feeling of poetry ; it finds its disciples ; but it is
of modern growth ; and has very essential differences from what
it resembles." — Peacock, Gryll Grange, ch. xi.
Ritualism, the conscious observance of certain
well-tried forms of worship, calculated to give
a stimulus to, or even to supply the absence of,
the energy of faith, has been too commonly the
herald of the decline of those very beliefs which
it desires to figure forth and preserve, to be
anything more than an object of pathetic interest
to the eye of the student of history. It is as
distinct from that joyous spirit of ritual, which
has the power to imagine and create all these
214

,839-1894] RITUALISM 21 s
beautiful symbols, as the winding-sheet is distinct
from the marriage garment. Each, indeed, may
be fashioned of the finest linen, but only a dull
eye will confound the sad memorial of decay
with the pledge of affection. A cultivated sense
of the holiness which is latent in all beautiful
things is as sharply separate from that sense of
the beauty of holiness required by the Psalmist of
himself, in order to fit him for the performance
of the highest act of which a human creature is
capable, as the pale lustre of the northern skies
from the kindly glow of the summer sun. And
as the eye will sometimes cheat the body, making
it warm with light alone, so the perception of
beauty will sometimes simulate the apprehension
of it, and a man find at last that he has been
loving all the while only the appearance of the
thing and never known the thing itself.
In the wake of the Oxford Movement, in the
track of the Catholic Revival, there followed a
group of men, of whom Walter Pater is the
most notable, as he is also by far the noblest
representative. These men sought to be catholic
in the natural sense of the word — in that daring
and difficult sense in which Shakespeare and
Goethe, not, perhaps, entirely without loss, are
catholic — by treating every variety of character,
however divergent from or hostile to the ideal
type, as in itself valuable, as food for that full
existence of ever - varying sensation, which is

216 WALTER PATER C'839-
becoming more and more plainly the native
element of the man of culture ; by making
Richard II. — or, to put an extreme instance,
Bardolph — not contemptible or foul (as in any
strictly moral view of humanity they must
certainly appear), but merely the objects of an
amused or kindly sympathy, as grateful to the
fools and knaves of society, as well as to the
heroes, and conscious that without them — the
foils of high character and true enthusiasm — the
artistic brilliancy of this earthly spectacle would be
greatly impaired. Such a view of life, pressed
to a conclusion, makes every experience worth
a risk, and every chequered career a possession.
From this ugly consequence, indeed, of an over
scrupulous logic, the great masters have carefully
refrained ; but it was precisely the snare into
which the Oxford aesthetes of the nineteenth
century fell. It was their mitier to pluck the
apple, not from any idea of wilful disobedience,
still less from any wish to corrupt others, but
exactly because it was pleasant to the, eye and
a tree to be desired to make one wise. And
as they turned instinctively towards all things
that appeared pleasant and lovely, so they in
stinctively rejected all things that were painful
or hideous, and not least that sordid inglorious
life of the poor, — the poor in spirit as well as
those literally in want, — where dulness is the
only pathos, but where, and, with especial hope,

'894] CHILDHOOD 21;
Christ had fixed His gaze. Pater's literary
career reads like a latter-day rendering of the;
words of the Preacher, king in Jerusalem. His
mind built for him every kind of intellectual
palace, led him through all the halls of fancy,
decked with rare and costly ornament, showed
him every choice and exquisite work that was
done under the sun ; and, after this sore travail
that God had given to the sons of men to be
exercised therewith, brought him back at last,
chastened and purified, to that same point from
which, as a little child, he had started. Yet on
those strange and silent seas of thought, where
men fetch and carry so many argosies, he had
been one of the most adventurous of voyagers
and most skilful of merchantmen.
Pater was born in 1839, the son of a doctor, con
spicuous for unselfish work among the poor. His
boyhood is one of those rare ones which repay
research and bring to the mind the saying of a
spiritual director — that God makes it easy for
us to believe as children, but, as we go on, gives
us, in belief as in other things, the work of
men to do. The child, indeed, had an almost
unhealthy bent towards religion, carried it into
his play, and preached sermons to his playmates.
A chance encounter with Keblg left ineffaceable
memories. A little later the grey stones and
Gothic lines of Canterbury entered into his soul ;
so that even when as a grown man he had

218 WALTER PATER [1839-
experienced the full impact of classical culture,
he could only see in the Greek spirit ' the
sangrail of an endless destiny.' x Close observers
may find, or fancy that they find, other stigmata
upon his pages : — of Hooker, whose parish of
Bishopsbourne lay at no great distance from
Canterbury ; of Lamb and Keats, who had
actually lived at Enfield ; of the Throckmortons,
the old Roman Catholic lords of Weston Under
wood, under whose shadow the Paters of the
eighteenth century had dwelt ; and, chiefly and
most confidently, of those Dutch ancestors of
his, of whom one may really have been that
Pater, who is remembered among the pupils
of Watteau. "The Child in the House" and
"Emerald Uthwart" — dainty, idealised, portraits
of InV boyhood etched in at the distance of many
years — show how deeply the force of tradition
had affected the grave, imaginative child.
At Oxford the gracious influences of the past
swelled suddenly into fruit, then dropped rotting
to the earth. He read Ruskin as an under
graduate at Queen's before he was twenty.2 In
" Modern Painters " he had in his hand the
artistic complement of the Oxford Movement.
The book was an appeal from shibboleths to
reality, from convention to nature. Newman
had heard God speaking, not from tomes of
theology, but in the human conscience. Ruskin
1 " Appreciations," p. 104. 2 Gosse, " Critical Kit-kats."

'894] RUSKIN'S THEORY OF ART 219
saw Him walking among the trees of the Garden.
"Modern Painters" put forward Theoria — an,
attitude of reverent contemplation, widely \
different from ^Esthesis, mere pleasant sensa
tion — as the one indispensable condition of all
knowledge, or right judgment, or excellence, or
true inspiration in art. The word came from
Aristotle, and had found its interpreter in Dante.
Ruskin required every one to put himself to
school with Beatrice, with Heavenly Wisdom
gazing into God's face.1 Like Newman, he
looked upon a liberal education, upon taste, as a
likely barrier in the road to perfection.2 The only
matter was to do all to the glory of God. Those
who had laboured in this spirit had succeeded ;
the others, weighed in the scales against pure
gold, were found wanting.3
It was plain that with such canons as these i
Angelico alone had fulfilled the law ; and
indeed, as a spiritual painter Ruskin found no
equal to him. But he was deficient in knowledge
of the world, and he could hardly communicate
with those who were mostly busy with other
matters than the celestial hierarchy. Tintoret
and Turner had satisfied the test of spiritual
endeavour, yet had been under no temptation
to lose sight of the facts of life. Turner
especially, who had lit the world with the purest
1 Ruskin, " Modern Painters," iv. ch. 14, section 37.
2 Ibid., iv. ch. 5, section 6. * Ibid., iv. ch. 14, section 40.

220

WALTER PATER [1839-

sunlight, had never feared to see the greyness
of the sky. Both painters had been true alike
to earth and heaven. At every bend of the road
Ruskin set up sign - posts to warn his readers
against the fatal error of aestheticism, against
' art,' as we say, ' for art's sake,' which had
been the undoing of Raphael. In the central
and most significant passage of the book he
says that great art is busy with the past and
the future, restoring and evoking the images of
ideas, not with the present — with what we may
best see in actual existence.1 Yet in all this
imaginative work he requires that the closest
regard be paid to nature ; that men should paint
not effects but facts,2 remembering that "a man
of deadened moral sensation is always dull in
his perception of truth." 3
"Modern Painters" was in fact an exhaustive
treatise on beauty from the Christian standpoint.
It set effort leagues above performance, and
judged men rather by their faith than their
works. In the noblest sense of the word it was
an ascetic book. The true artist was enjoined,
as really as the Christian neophyte, to forsake
the world, the flesh, and the devil.
But artists were not to be coerced into joining
the third order of St Francis, much less into
wearing the cowl of the monk. Art, it seemed,
1 " Modern Painters," iv. ch. 10, section 13.
2 Ibid., iv. ch. 7, section 97. ' Ibid., ii. ch. 2, section 4.

'894] ART FOR ART'S SAKE 221
must be free to roam where it pleased, to eat
freely of the tree of knowledge, to reproduce all
things, not with the chastened calm of the
mediaevalists, but with the careless freedom of
the Greeks. Ruskin had appealed to Nature ;
to Nature would they go — to faun" and satyr and
naiad, or their modern antitypes. They would
paint what they saw and paint it as they saw it.
There should be for art nothing that was not
convenient. It was hardly found necessary to
discard the old terms. The personal God, to
whom Ruskin had required all art, as it valued
its existence, to be dedicated, became, with how
slight a stroke of the brush, a world-spirit coming
to fuller self- consciousness in each new human
sensation. Pater, of course, was too subtle to
state these doctrines in their naked form, nor
would it be just to say that he ever fully sub
scribed to them. But they are too - generous
critics who think it a kind of accident that he
became the idol and the philosopher of a school
of thought, or rather of sensation, which healthy
English instinct is agreed to refuse. When the
author of "Dorian Gray"1 said2 that Pater's
" Renaissance Studies " had for good or evil
been the turning-point in his life, he bore the
most convincing testimony to the presence in
the book of a certain unwholesome fascination,
which few of us are so right-minded as not in
1 " The Portrait of Dorian Gray." 2 In " De Profundis."

222 WALTER PATER [1839-
some degree to feel. And in that delicate study
of childhood, which Pater published nel mezzo
del cammin there is a pathetic sentence, decked
out, one may fancy, with sackcloth and ashes,
which speaks of "the rapid growth" in the child
"of a certain capacity of fascination by bright
colour and choice form . . . marking early the
activity in him of a more than customary sensuous-
ness, 'the lust of the eye,' as the Preacher says,
which might lead him, one day, how far ? Could
he have foreseen the weariness of the way ? " 1
Anyway, Pater, not fully conscious, it may
have been, of what he was doing and yet
certainly not unconscious, chose the delectable
path, which broke away from the path of Ruskin
— chose, like Faust, to know all ; chose to let all
the winds of the most tolerant liberalism blow
across House Beautiful ; chose art for art's sake.
It was a momentous decision for himself as well
as for others ; and the effect of it was immediately
apparent in his own life. The simple loyalty of
childhood to its ancestral faith and accustomed
ritual, so touchingly described long afterwards in
"Emerald U thwart," made way for Stanley and
Maurice, who in their turn were displaced — as
logic ran its course — by Plato and Hegel.2
Christianity was aggressively criticised3 and
Goethe rose into the midst ofthe heavens.* This
1 "Miscellaneous Studies," p. 181.
* Wright, "Life of Walter Pater," i. p. 170.
3 Ibid., i. p. 169. * Ibid., i. p. 199.

»894] « DIAPHANEITE " 223
is that part of Pater's life, over which a biographer
would gladly hurry his speed. Yet it is precisely
that in which he was most completely a ritualist
— a ritualist and nothing more. He was con
tent to enjoy Catholic emotion without one;
struggle after Catholic faith. He affected high
Anglican services ; 1 let himself be soothed with
out conviction by the language of the pulpit ; 2
and finally offered himself to the Bishop of
London as a candidate for Holy Orders.3 But
the consummation of this last disgrace was pre
vented by friends, acting on Liddon's advice.
Within two years Pater's knowledge of German
metaphysics had won him a fellowship at
Brasenose, and by the time he was twenty-five"
he had sketched the character, which it became
his steady purpose to achieve. The sketch is
called " Diaphaneite" — Transparency.
The world, he remarked, sick with a great
sickness, had been curiously tolerant of certain
persons, separated by choice from the main-
current of affairs and engaged in the con
templative life as saints, or artists, or thinkers.
But there was another yet more finely grained
type of character, akin to these, yet distinct from
them, for which the world had at present no
room or recognition. Persons, forged by circum
stance to this scintillating keenness of edge, had
for their aim in life to give to all things their
1 Wright, " Life of Walter Pater," i. p. 201.
2 Ibid., i. p. 202. 3 Ibid, i. p. 207.

224 WALTER PATER [1839-
eternal values ; and the peculiar characteristic of
them was a certain wistfulness, anxious but with
out hope for real knowledge. Thus they sought
rather to preserve a receptive attitude of mind
than to put forward any definite propositions in
the form of creeds or principles. They were
precisely diaphanous — a medium through which
the eye might see all things but not an object
upon which the eye could find repose. Alien
to the strong Titanic forces of the world, in
the great crises of society they were effective,
not as Luther and Danton were effective, but
contrariwise by their calm and majestic impotence
— vicarious sacrifices to the outraged furies that
had been let loose. And Pater found in Charlotte
Corday the example of such a character, though
Falkland's was, almost certainly, the name he
wanted. Tenderly considerate for the old lights
of the past, yet wistfully eager for the new lights
of the future, these people, who knew well how to
tone all glaring colours by sympathy, were, he
thought, best fitted to be the basal type of human
character. A majority of men formed out of this
clay would be ' the regeneration of the world.'
Mere culture, always a little comfortless on
English soil, had at last found a perfect exponent.
Free from the incubus of moral sentiment, Pater
picked his way through the enchanted garden
with an ease to which Arnold could not pretend.
Coleridge, who had been busy with religious

1894] THE RELIGION OF BEAUTY 225
philosophy after the German fashion and might
have arrested his progress, he passed by, having
just sipped the honey, not quite heather-sweet,
of the poems, and toyed for a few pleasant
minutes with the unstrained wine of the
metaphysic. A year later he had found in
Winkelmann a more congenial philosopher.1
Goethe was never far off, and Pater stayed in
their company. Winkelmann, reared in poverty,
self-taught in face of the most adverse circum
stances, had at last surrendered honour itself to
buy a visit to Italy, and see such copies of the
Greek masterpieces as were there preserved ;
thus displaying a fidelity to art which by its very
concentration absorbed, as Pater thought, and in
a sense justified that breach of the law of truth
of which he had been guilty. Goethe, who
regarded Winkelmann as his master, had said that
life ought to be lived like a poem, and out of the
very breadth of his understanding had made
culture a practical ideal. Pater fell behind the
one in enthusiasm, as he fell behind the other in
knowledge. But he learnt from them to keep
his eyes moving between the Greece of Pericles
and the Italy of the Renaissance as between two
beacon-lights in a world whose lustrous sun had
for ever gone down.
It is proper at this point to make some attempt
to indicate Pater's position in the philosophy
1 Cp. " Renaissance Studies," p 182. P

226 WALTER PATER . [1S39-
of art. Ruskin, in ignorance of the peculiar
properties of the word he was using, had
thought to end controversy by telling men to
paint according to Nature. In the event the
expression proved as slippery for the artists as it
had done for the philosophers. Impressionists,
who seemed to Ruskin of all men the most
degraded, boldly averred that they were the
first to paint with eyes wide open, to see Nature
as she really is. Between them and Turner the
pre-Raphaelites stood midway, and it was with
these that Pater really cast in his lot, even
though, as Mr Benson thinks,1 he never pene
trated into their holy of holies. Nor is this to
confound his standpoint with that of Ruskin.
To the eye of each pre-Raphaelitism represented
a gain for art. But the one was looking at it
from the shelter and seclusion of a pleasant
valley, the other as he climbed towards the snow
and the sunshine. To the latter — to Ruskin —
what seemed admirable in it was its faithful
transcript of Nature,2 and what seemed best in
it realised in Hunt's picture of The Light of
the World} Pater, on the other hand, drew
his breath more freely, for that warm air of
overwrought, if beautiful sentiment, that blew off
the earthly paradise. In an essay, written
about this time of his life, suppressed for over
1 Benson, " Pater," p. 86.
2 "Modern Painters," iv. ch. 10, section 21.
' Ibid., ch. 4, section 20 ; ch. 6, section 8.

'894] THE WORLD OF THE ESTHETE 227
twenty years, and then published, only to be
again suppressed, he indicates very plainly the
charm and the defect of his own way of looking
at things : —
' ' Greek poetry, mediaeval or modern poetry,
projects above the realities of its time, a world
in which the forms of things are transfigured.
Of that transfigured world this new (aesthetic)
poetry takes possession, and sublimates beyond
it another still fainter and more spectral, which
is literally an artificial or 'earthly paradise.' It
is a finer ideal extracted from what in relation
to any actual world is already an ideal."1
On that earthly paradise — not surely very far-
distant from the island of Shalott — he preferred
to fix his eyes. Only he never sickened of the
shadows. The essay on "^Esthetic Poetry," from which
the above quotation is taken, is indeed the most
intimate thing he ever wrote ; too intimate, we
may fancy, to be anything but a source of anxiety
to himself. It contains three criticisms suggested
by William Morris's poems which show how closely
his own work followed upon that of the pre-
Raphaelites. "The monastic religion of the middle age,"
he wrote, "was in fact in many of its bearings
like a beautiful disease or disorder of the senses ;
and a religion, which is a disorder of the senses,
must always be subject to illusions." 2
1 "Appreciations" (1889 edition), p. 213.
2 Ibid., p. 2,7.

228 WALTER PATER ['839-
" The choice life of the human spirit is always
under mixed lights, and in mixed situations when
it is not too sure of itself, is still expectant, girt
up to leap forward to the promise."1
" One characteristic of the pagan spirit the
aesthetic poetry has, which is on its surface —
the continual suggestion, passive or passionate,
of the shortness of life. This is contrasted with
the bloom of the world, and gives new seduction
to it — the sense of death and the desire of beauty ;
the desire of beauty quickened by the sense of
death."2 Are not these the first thoughts that should
enter a mind, at once sympathetic and severe,
after reading " Marius the Epicurean " ?
Here, too, in this penetrating essay the author
has defined his place among students of history
— a place gratefully and delicately accorded by
the most meditative of our living historians : s —
" We cannot truly conceive the age : we can
conceive the element it has contributed to our
culture ; we can treat the subjects of that age
bringing that into relief. Such an attitude
towards Greece, aspiring to but never actually
reaching its way of conceiving life, is what is
possible for art." 4
This is perhaps as sound an estimate of the
possibilities and limitations of philosophic history
as one can ask for. And beside it one may
1 "Appreciations" (1889), p. 224.
2 Ibid., p. 227.
» Dill, "Roman Society from Nero," pp. 536-537.
4 "Appreciations" (1889), p. 224.

i»94] HISTORICAL CRITICISM 229
place a casual remark of his recorded by Mr
Benson : —
" I am quite tired of hearing people for ever
talking of the causes which led to the French
Revolution ; I don't want to know. I am all
for details. I want to know how people lived,
what they wore, what they looked like."1
As good a principle certainly in laying the
foundations of a work of artistic history, as the
other is good for its superstructure! And for
once the critic did not neglect his own maxims.
His criticism only fell short, as Ruskin's had
done, in knowledge of the technical character
istics of painters. Here he accepted the received
opinions, and wove his theories round them.
But no student would now, with Pater, attribute
the Medusa of the Uffizi to Leonardo, any more
than, with Ruskin, the Marriage of Joachim and
Anna at the Golden Gate to Giotto. And the
Concerto, on which his estimate of Giorgione is
based, is after all an early Titian.2
The volume of " Renaissance Studies," whichN
were first collected for publication in 1873, is
the typical work of this central period of his
life as " Plato and Platonism " is of the later.
Three things he had learnt from Ruskin : the
charm of imaginative prose ; how to study and
elucidate the meaning of a picture ; and the
recognition of Leonardo as the truest lover of
1 Benson, "Walter Pater," p. 187.
2 Berenson, "Venetian Painters ofthe Renaissance," p. 123.

230 WALTER PATER [1839-
beauty in the history of art.1 In very much
else he differed : in liking beautiful things just
because they were beautiful ; in claiming for each
art a separate sphere — that, for example, some
ideas were fit for pictorial, and others for lapidary
expression ; 2 in an affection for homely, trivial
scenes, for genre, so that while Ruskin will
display Tintoret's Crucifixion as the glory of
the Venetian School, Pater will lead you quietly
to admire the more hidden beauties of the
Concerto ; in a humanism, lavishly appreciative
of every fine and curious point of view, and
apt to regard religion and morality chiefly as
a graceful ornament, supplied to soften the
harder lines and harmonise the cruder colours
of imaginative work. It was from no uncertain
or errant fancy that he fixed upon La Gioconda,
as the object of the wealthiest and most delicate
piece of interpretative criticism that exists in this,
or probably in any, language. That strange
woman, sitting in her chair beside the waters,
bore in her face, as he said, the lineaments alike
of the mother of Helen and the mother of Mary ;
had culled in every garden — in the garden of
the soul as in the garden of the earth — every
choice and exquisite flower, so that upon her
'all the ends of the world were come.' In her,
' the revealing instance of Leonardo's mode
1 See " Modern Painters," iv. ch. 3, section 25.
2 Cp. "Renaissance Studies," pp. 130, 13,, with "Modern
Painters," iv. ch. 1, section ,5.

'894] "RENAISSANCE STUDIES" 231
of thought and work,' the modern spirit was
incarnate — that modern spirit which would draw ]
from every age and climate its most exquisite !
products, so that the life of art might be fed, like
the feast of some Roman epicure, with an endless
succession of the rarest dainties.
"A counted number of pulses only," he said
in the famous envoi of the book, "is given to
us of a variegated dramatic life. How may we
see in them all that is to be seen in them by
the finest senses? How shall we pass most
swiftly from point to point, and be present always
at the focus where the greatest number of vital
forces unite in their purest energy ? To burn
always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain
this ecstasy, is success in life." 1
He believed — and his belief is the great defence
of his work — that the human spirit, set free to
wander amongst all the treasures of the Palace
of Art, would prefer those things that were really
best, would practise a certain ascesis in judging
all the various expressions of each new time-
spirit.2 Only to bid men burn with this hard
gem-like flame was precisely to bid them play
with fire.
Illustration of this was not absent from the
book itself. The essays on Botticelli and Pico
della Mirandola are written with penetrating
sympathy, but with the sympathy of a man who
has a natural genius for performing the last
1 " Renaissance Studies," p. 236. 2 Ibid., p. xiii.

232 WALTER PATER ['839-
offices of friendship. Pater's essay has made
Botticelli the interpreter of a certain phase in
the lives of most men for whom art is in any
degree an interpretation of life ; of that kind of
luxurious melancholy which overtakes highly-
strung natures at their first entrance on man
hood, as they perceive that they are themselves
in Pater's borrowed phrase 'under sentence of
death with a sort of indefinite reprieve.' If
the warrant for execution were coming on the
morrow the situation would be painful ; as it is,
melancholy draws after it a spurious kind of
pleasure, which Shakespeare had long ago made
fun of in As You Like It, but which, as the
world grows older, becomes less of a joke and
more of a sombre reality.
Botticelli and Pico were men after Pater's own
heart. Wistfulness — the quality so highly rated
in " Diaphaneite " — is the characteristic written
large by the Florentine painter upon the faces
of men and women.1 A great reader of Dante,
Botticelli had become preoccupied — at least so
we may fancy — with that band of souls outside
the Inferno, whom for their infirmity of purpose
Heaven cast forth and Hell would not receive.5
To his eye they seemed closely to resemble the
men and women of his own time, as being
unambitious of great decisions, and well content
to float with the current rather than to outstrip
1 "Renaissance Studies," p. 55. 2 Inferno III.

'894] BOTTICELLI: PICO 233
or baffle it. The face of his Madonnas is always
a troubled one ; they are oppressed by ' the
intolerable honour ' that has come to them ; they
would gladly have made ' the great refusal ' if
any choice had been left them. It is the same
with Venus Rising Out of the Sea. The blithe
Greek spirit has allured him, as the face of Tito
allured Romola, but, as he transfers it to his
canvas, it changes, so that, when we look on it
at last in the completed picture, the beauty of
it is like that of Tito lying at last among the
reeds — the beauty of a corpse.
Botticelli in the end came under the spell of
the famous Prior of San Marco. Like Michel
angelo — like Pascal two centuries later — there
came for him a time when
" Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest,
My Soul that turns to His great love on high,
Whose arms to clasp me on the cross were stretched."1
Pico, a beautiful youth of a great house, had
gone the same way some years earlier ; had run
through many philosophies by the time he was
twenty ; had effected in his own view a sort of
reconciliation between the technical parts of faith
and philosophy, and had in the end fallen under
that censure of the Church, which not uncom
monly overtakes those who endeavour to make
a microcosm of their own minds. Yet it was
these very conceits in him that attracted Pater.
1 Symonds' translation of Michelangelo's Poems ("Renais. in
Italy— The Fine Arts," p. 387).

234 WALTER PATER ['839-
And in his quaint efforts to adapt Plato's account
of creation to the Mosaic cosmogony, his critic
' finds the troubled workings of a true humanism,
a belief that there was in all knowledge, however
seemingly chaotic, a kind of ritual or orderliness,
which, if men could but apprehend it, would
do much to soften and reconcile many crude
antagonisms of an imperfect understanding.
Pico had ended by obtaining a papal absolu
tion for his heresies. There was another artist
who many centuries before had fallen under the
ban of religious paganism, and in the end, as
Pater interpreted his work,1 had wished to make
amends for his ill-placed mockeries. Euripides,
like his critic, had at one time got some amuse
ment out of the supposed credulities of religious
people. In his old age he was sorry for what
he had done, and began to suspect that sceptics
themselves might be guilty of a kind of absurdity.
In such a frame of mind, as Pater supposed, he
wrote the " Bacchae." Pentheus, King of Thebes,
young, ardent, and healthily contemptuous of re
ligious enthusiasm, is provoked to fury by the
ritualistic excesses of his mother and his grand
father. He takes an oath to suppress the
devotions, fair and foul, that are performed in
honour of Dionysus. He seizes upon the leader
1 There are, of course, other interpretations, as Froude's in
" Sea Studies " (" Short Studies on Great Subjects ") and Gilbert
Murray's in "The Athenian Drama — Euripides."

'894] THE "BACCHiE" OF EURIPIDES 23$
of the Bacchic worship, condemns him in an
interview, which has been thought to be like a
faint forecast of the most tremendous scene in
all history, and throws him into prison. But it
is no mortal man that he has to deal with.
Dionysus himself has come to Thebes to avenge
the dishonour done to the memory of his mother
Semele. The house burns from contact with
the passive god. Pentheus is seized with a mad
folly, dresses himself in the fawn-skin of a
Dionysiac votary, and is guided by Dionysus to
the hills, where he thinks to spy out the haunts
of the frenzied women ; and is, of course, in the
event, captured and torn to pieces by these furies —
Agave\ his mother, at their head. Dionysus with
draws, having vindicated his mother's honour ;
and to the distracted Agav6, who had questioned
it, her reason is restored. The Chorus speaks
the famous lines of the epilogue : —
" Many are the shapes of deity and many
things beyond expectation the gods accomplish.
That which is looked for is not performed, and
the god takes unlikely paths as he walks with
men. So has it been here."
In an evidently unreal world, where the
shadows seem to fall deeper than the lights and
to submit so much more easily to artistic treat
ment, it was well to be at peace with the gods ;
to deal kindly with the old religions, even when,
as Pater thought it was with Christianity, they

236 WALTER PATER [1839-
seemed to be growing paler and paler, like
Leonardo's Last Supper in the Refectory of
St Mary of the Graces ; 1 to carry away what we
may each of us be capable of from the mysteries
celebrated before us in the spirit of old Greek
nvarai ; to recognise (with the "AyyeXo? as he
looked on the "Bacchae" at sunrise2) a certain
wild beauty and inspiration in even the most
extravagant and reckless religious enthusiasm.
That was the burden of the advice of Euripides,
weighing ' the sum of probabilities ' in the
serenity of old age, and it was also, perhaps, as
fair an estimate of the aesthetic attitude towards
religion as we can ask for.
" There are two," says Teiresias to Pentheus,3
"that minister to the wants of mortal men — the
son of Semele, who introduced among them the
gladdening juice of the grape, and Demeter, who
is also called the Earth that gave them bread."
These deities, who did not scorn to make them
selves known through the medium of what we
now reckon the basest of our senses were very
much the object of Pater's scrutiny as bringing him
into touch with that ' earlier estate of religion,
when, as Pausanias fancied, it had been nearer
the gods as it was certainly nearer the earth.'4
1 " Renaissance Studies," p. 120.
2 Siar' 6i irAprjaSa, riv 0ebv t6v vw ij/iyets,
e&X&wv &v /tmJXfies elatS&v T&de.
(" Bacchae," 11. 712, 713).
5 "Bacchfe," 1. 274. * "Greek Studies," p. 156.

,894] "MARIUS THE EPICUREAN" 237
Tracing back the myth of Demeter and Kor6
with courteous gravity to the early intuitions of
the Greek husbandmen (as if with Wordsworth
he really believed in a quickened perception of
spiritual things among the children of Nature)
he follows it through the treatment of the poets
until it expands into ' the ethical phase,' into 'that
worship of sorrow,' of which the statue of the
Demeter of Cnidos in the British Museum is at
once the witness and the expression. And as he
finds in that famous statue the forerunner of the
Mater Dolorosa, so in the spirit of the humanist
he draws some curious parallels between the
ritual of the Eleusinian mysteries and the ritual
of the Christian Church,1 seeking always, as the
test and mirror of truth, as the conclusion of the
whole matter, for a feeling in the recesses of
the human mind, by wh'ch, according to the law
of artistic perfection, the form and matter of any
spiritual effort, as most evidently in the art of
music,2 may be transcended and reconciled.
Pater was nearly forty when he wrote the essay
on the " Bacchae," the latest of those we have
been considering. It was time for him to write
his book — that criticism of life, which every one,
who has thought at all, owes to the world. He
devoted the next five years to the task. So far
he had been a curious explorer, wandering pretty
much where he would, living and teaching others
1 "Greek Studies," p. ,23.
2 Cp. " Renaissance Studies," p. ,49.

238 WALTER PATER ['839-
to live on the goodly heritage of ideas and
impressions of which every educated man may
make free. This is the mdtier of the essayist,
and Pater brought his craft to perfection by the
insertion of those vivid personal touches.^!^
fruit of constant self-observation and self-analysis
— the absence of which no wealth of. erudition
can ever atone for. Only Newman, as Lionel
Johnson said, had so well known how to speak
to the human heart of ^oujth^jjf death, of. little-
homely things.1 This was Pater's peculiar talent,
and he could not afford to cramp it. Yet, to
make his philosophy — his Neo-Cyrenaicism —
intelligible, he must present it, not by glimpse
and allusion, but concentrated, focussed, embodied.
The task was not an easy one, and he scored
a magnificent success. " Marius the Epicurean "
is unlike anything else in the English language.
It escapes every classification. It is neither
novel, nor biography, nor romance, and his own
name (selected for some later efforts of the same
kind) 'an imaginary portrait' is the best that
can be found for it. He placed his hero 'under
mixed lights and in mixed situations ' at the
collision or conjunction of the Roman Empire
and the Christian Church. Marius was one of
the lesser nobility in the reign of Marcus
Aurelius. Of singular sweetness and purity of
heart, he was under the necessity of gaining
1 Fortnightly Review, September 1894, p. 355.

'8941 "MARIUS THE EPICUREAN" 239
the same clarity for his mental vision. His
century was just such as Pater loved to write
about. The lights above the firmament of
established belief had grown dim, and the
lamps and candles of philosophy had been set
in their place. In the gloom men were catching
at shadows. Among the ghosts of the past was
one, Aristippus, a disciple of Socrates and
the author of a philosophy just the reverse of
cynicism. Admitting pleasure and pain to be
the criterion of human good plainly indicated
by Nature, he urged the importance of extract
ing from the passing moment its whole stock of
pleasant stimulus, mental as well as bodily.
Beyond such intimations of the world without
as were thus derived, we had, he supposed, no
solid or indisputable knowledge upon which to
rely. Creatures of a day, we need have no shame
in being creatures of circumstance.
Open to obvious abuse in the case of a
glutton or a profligate, this doctrine became in
the terriperate mind of Marius an injunction to
seek always the noblest enjoyments afforded by
the fleeting.hours ; became, in fact, a religion of
culture as austere and exacting as the self-
renunciation of the cynic, although infinitely
more elastic and comprehensive. And in default
of definite convictions it is hard to conceive a
better philosophy of life.
There was one thing in the world of which the

240 WALTER PATER ['839
' refined sensation ' of the Cyrenaic philosopher
had not made the most, had hardly, in fact, made
any account at all — that mass of old beliefs,
traditions, and moralities, which, under the name
of religion served to force men out of an egoistic
isolation into a fellowship with one another. In
the first flush of youthful excitement, mere feel
ing, jealously guarded as a sacred trust, had
seemed to Marius a sufficient discharge of the
purpose of life. In the society and discourse of
Cornelius Fronto, the intimate and counsellor of
Marcus Aurelius, he began to feel a craving for
some partnership in that spiritual state, wider
and nobler than great Rome itself, which Fronto
seemed to foretell, and where the inhabitants
should be just men made perfect. In obvious
correspondence, his mind, which until then had
found a centre for the shows of the world in his
own intellect, began to seek for them another and
a higher one. "'Tis in thy power to think as
thou wilt," Aurelius had told him ; and so, using
'the will as vision,' he came to suppose that
the whole material universe might at any moment
vanish from his gaze, if it were not constantly
supported by an eternal and sympathetic com
panion, personally interested in his welfare.
In this frame of mind he was one day taken
by a friend to the house of a Christian lady.
Much that he saw there was new to him, most
of all the confident hope of the epitaphs in the

1894] "MARIUS THE EPICUREAN" 241
place of burial hard by. The calm sweetness of
that afternoon remained with him — an oasis for
the eye of the mind in a barren wilderness of
thought. He went to Caecilia's house again,
this time at early dawn. It was the hour of
the Eucharistic celebration at Christmas. The
liturgy, full, perfect, and sufficient, felt its way
to the inmost recesses of his mind. It had, as
he thought, gathered to itself all the beauty and
wisdom of pagan ritual, with much besides that
was altogether unearthly and mysterious : —
" Tantum ergo sacramentum
Veneremur cernui :
Et antiquum documentum
Novo cedat ritui."
His intellect,1 keen and fastidious beyond the
common, had at last been satisfied, and the law
of prayer became for him the law of faith. Then,
with the finished touch of a great artist, his
biographer makes him die before he is actually
admitted into the communion of the Church.
He had seen the vision of beauty, which he
had so earnestly desired, and passed away in
sight of, but not within, the promised land. His
faith, awoken through his senses, through eye
and ear, possessed no power, and the act of
quiet heroism, which brought on his death, would
have been just as certainly performed if he had
never seen the King in his beauty, nor beheld
1 " Marius the Epicurean," ii. p. 128. Q

242 WALTER PATER [1839-
the land that was still for him very far off. For to
the end he was one of ' the wisest of the children
of this world,' approaching all things critically, and
never losing himself in that abandon of unselfish
love which is the peculiar glory, as it. is surely
the peculiar test, of the faithful follower of Christ.
Five years before " Marius the Epicurean "
appeared another Platonic book issued from
that suburb of Birmingham — Edgbaston — which
had been already illuminated by the residence
of Newman. Between "John Inglesant" and
"Marius," however, the comparison is obvious,
but the contrast real. Both were, of course,
attempts to meet the need of an age which, as
Liddon thought, ' longed to be religious,' x and
both followed at a greater or less distance in
the path of the catholic revival, with a full
sense of the mystical beauty of the road. But
" Marius " neither had nor deserved to have the
success of the other. Though it showed wider
study, deeper thought, subtler sensibility, far
greater originality of style, it was deficient in
the one thing needful. It was not true. It
depicted not life, but a pale reflection of it.
John Inglesant had really widened the horizon,
had really opened to men a larger view of
what life might be. The problems he had
to face were real ones, really necessary to be
1 Liddon, "Some Elements of Religion," p. 1. But he went on
to say that this was perhaps too unguarded an assertion.

1894] "MARIUS THE EPICUREAN" 243
resolved. And his was a real character, not
impossible of imitation by any one who could at
all admire and understand it. We can see the
evidence of this in the wide range of the book
itself. It appealed to Acton 1 and Huxley,2 men
of as powerfully positive and negative temper as
were then alive. It appealed to men of affairs,
like Gladstone and Selborne.
But Marius does not seem to have moved
one single mind of first-rate eminence. His was
'the light that never was on land or sea,' and
his character just an imaginary portrait of what
human nature might be, if it had no degrading
sins to fight, or ugly suffering to endure — if it
were not itself. It was rather, after all, a
criticism of Utopia than a criticism of life. Mr
Wright has, indeed, discovered the original of
Marius in Mr Richard Jackson, at that time
a clergyman of advanced views attached to the
mission at St Austin's Priory, Walworth, and a
connoisseur and collector of rare books. But
in the dream-hero every trace of slum life has
been removed, and one is uncomfortably aware
that Marius would have felt the same horror of
mean streets as Pater himself3 — would have been
as little likely to look for the tragedies of life
amongst the rich and the cultured.
" Marius " was followed by four other imaginary
1 " Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone," p. 135.
2 "Life and Letters of J. H. Shorthouse," i. p. 115.
s Symons, Monthly Review, September 1906, p. ,8,

244 WALTER PATER ,[1839-
portraits, which are certainly the most natural
products of Pater's genius. Two of them
illustrate, carry, one may think, to a logical finish,
those two strains in his nature indicated1 by
his acute and friendly critic — the ' strong attrac
tion towards precise and definite forms of beauty,'
and the 'strong impulse towards transcendental
philosophy,' the 'desire to discern, as far as
possible, the absolute principles of life and being.'
The sketch of Watteau is slight enough, but
the very bareness of it throws the motif of
the piece into a stronger relief — a character,
never too strong but intensely susceptible to
graceful and delicate things, drawn on by the
seductive charm of a brilliant court, by a very
'lust of the eye,' to be the decorator of a hollow
society, and at last to reflect it in the fretful,
unsatisfied glitter of his own rapid, half-con
temptuous work.
" Sebastian van Storck," suggested no doubt
by Amiel's Journal, is an exchange of ' the colour
or curve of a rose-leaf for . . . that colourless,
formless, intangible being Plato put so high.'2
The beautiful Dutch boy is haunted by a yearn
ing after those cold, clear peaks of thought,
where reason sits wrapped in an abstraction so
intense that the world, with all its shows, has
no interest for her any more ; for that spot, to
which Parmenides pointed long ago, where all
1 Benson, " Pater," pp. 1 1 and 12. " " Appreciations," p. 68.

i894] "SEBASTIAN VAN STORCK" 245
things are brought to a unity, and the life of
active service sinks or deepens into an im
personal contemplation.1 There is the Nemesis
of intellect ; for those who come there lose all
interest in, all capacity for, this world, and die
of a kind of mental inanition from the very
completeness of their victory over passion.
Pater has given his diagnosis with the appalling
realism of one who has himself had something
of an escape. The brilliant colours of the
staging only throw into greater contrast the
mortal coldness of the protagonist. For Sebastian
— like Amiel, like Merimee — is the finished
victim of his own fastidious taste. All human
delights — the home life just at that time coming
to self-consciousness in Dutch painting, the fresh
bloom of early womanhood, the prospect of a
brilliant career, the material comfort of a luxurious
fortune, seem to him trivial, almost vulgar. Even
the life of a sea-dog among compatriots grown
great on the water, or the life of self-abandon
ment in the solitude of a cloister (both of them
at one moment very fascinating to that curious
mind) evaporate at last before the overmaster
ing desire to find the one absolute stable essence
of Being, by virtue of which he himself is to
gether with all persons and things of which he
is sensible. An idealist by instinct, a pantheist"
by conviction, he petrifies in the midst of all the
1 Cp. " Plato and Platonism," pp. 40, 41.

246 WALTER PATER 1*839-
love and wealth that surround him. Reality —
in the sense of reunion with God (considered
as an intellectual abstraction) — being altogether
desirable, and yet here altogether unattainable,
Death becomes the perfect good, and is thought
of only as the quickest road to truth. So he
perishes gladly, and, as it chances beautifully,
in saving the life of a child.
Whilst the " Imaginary Portraits " were appear
ing, Pater had begun to occupy one of that row
of houses in Earl's Terrace facing Holland Park,
which are now under sentence of death. He
appears to have found Oxford cramping,1 and
his keen sensibility had not missed the strange
charm of London ' in the heavy glow of
summer.'2 Nor is it fanciful to connect this
change of outlook with a change in the inner
point of view, visible in some of the reviews,
which about this time he began to contribute
to the Guardian. Slowly, and with lapses, but
very certainly, he began to advocate the recall
of art to the service of the Church, and at the
same time to busy himself with the disciplinary
value of faith, and more than ever with the
thoughts of death. We may date this last phase
of his life perhaps from the essay on "Sir
Thomas Browne," written in 1886, and trace
it through the essay on "Style" until it reaches
1 Wright, " Life of Pater," ii. p. 41.
2 " Marius the Epicurean," ii. p. 17.

,894] "PLATO'S ESTHETICS" 247
its final, scarcely expected, fulfilment in " Plato's
./Esthetics."1 And it is a consciousness of this
great change in himself which explains that other
wise cryptic remark that ' if there was anything
of his that had a chance of surviving, it was his
Plato ' 2 ; Plato being exactly one of those who
had passed from a too sensuous love of visible
things to *a certain penitential colour of fancy
and expression.'3 This temperate habit of mind
— this true ascisis — is advanced in the "Plato"
as a condition of membership in the perfect state,
as a discipline to which art must conform to
be made perfect, and appears in the essay on
" Style," as an injunction to do all to the glory
of God. And that pathetic half - line about
imagination being a malady, which closed the
unfinished essay on Pascal, and came to the
world as a word from the grave, was, for all'
we can tell, the last confession of one to whom
imagination had once meant very much indeed. !
Pater had not severed his connection with
Brasenose when he abandoned historical work,
and there, was no doubt, whatever temporary
disgusts he might experience, that his proper
sphere was in an academy. In 1893 ne gave up
his London house and took another in St Giles',
Oxford, in addition to his college rooms. The
President of Magdalen has described his appear-
1 In " Plato and Platonism."
2 Benson, " Pater," p. 162.
J " Plato and Platonism," the chapter on the " Genius of Plato."

248 WALTER PATER ['839-
ance about this time — his 'pale face, strong jaw,
heavy, chopped, German moustache, tall hat,
apple-green tie ' and laboured walk, giving an im
pression of pain. * The sands, indeed, though he
did not know it,2 were running out. At Brasenose
they noticed as a curious trait how stern an
advocate of compulsory chapel for undergraduates
he had become.8 His own Sunday attendance
there had long been invariable,4 and he began
to confine his general reading within the limits
of the Bible, the Prayer-Book, and Bute's transla
tion of the Breviary.8 He was, it is likely, grow
ing to be acutely sensible of that ' homelessness '
of the human soul in the world, of which he
speaks in the essay on "Sir Thomas Browne,"6
and took full advantage of the passionate, if
subdued, ritual of the Church in order to allay
his suffering. Still deep in his nature there lay
'a certain untamed scepticism,'7 as Mr Benson
calls it, which is very apparent in his thoughts
about Pascal. It was, after all, upon the patterns
of the heavenly things that he had looked, not
upon the heavenly things themselves. He died
suddenly and painlessly on 30th July 1894.
"Whatsoever things are true, and honest, and
1 Benson, "Pater," pp. ,74, 175.
* Wright, " Life of Pater," ii. p. 215.
' Buchan, " Brasenose College," p. 139.
* Benson, " Pater," p. 84.
6 Wright, " Life of Pater," p. 201.
8 " Appreciations," p. 137.
7 Benson, " Pater," p. 26.

I894] HIS STYLE 249
pure," they wrote on his tablet in Brasenose.
They might have added and with greater truth,
" oo-a irpoo-QiXtj," "whatsoever things are lovely."
As in religion he had always followed the form
and colour rather than the reality of things, so
of his work it is rather the qualities than the
thoughts that will remain. It is not by any
means that there is no substance in his writing.
Those who have travelled over the same ground,
have borne witness to the accuracy of his observa
tion, to the historic value of many a sentence
that seems as if tuned only for the ear of the
musician. But facts with him are so little solid
accretions possessed of the primary qualities,
are so completely absorbed into the ideas of the
writer, that at the end of each passage a man
feels as he does at the end of a piece of music,
unable to give an account of what has delighted
him. And thus Pater's writing does in a great
measure realise his conception of high art — the
condition of music. And it is because he is thus
determinedly metaphysical, because his reason is
resolutely enthroned above the stream of con
sciousness, that his sympathy is so immobile and
his style possesses that endless languor, which,
as he might have said himself, is like the slow
movement of a summer stream when the skies
are dark and louring overhead, and the air heavy
with a thousand scents. All things are tuned
to a solemn suspense, and appear lazily expectant ;

250 WALTER PATER [i839-«894
only the water-flies skip playfully and make little
ripples on the surface of the water. But the
thunder never breaks, and the delicious drowsy
afternoon never dies.
And it is this unique style, unlike anything
that has been in English literature, or may
probably ever be again, which makes him
difficult to write about, because it is hardly
possible to give any true representation of his
ideas without adopting his manner, so entirely
consistent were the expression and the substance
of his thoughts. It was, in fact, a point of view
from which to look at life rather than a pathway
across it at which he aimed, and this in itself
would have separated him from the mass of his
fellow-creatures. Like Landor, and with even
better reason, he might have said : " I shall dine
late, but the dining-room will be well lighted, the
guests few and select."1 For amongst men
of culture his religious position is sometimes
adopted ; a communion of ritual that shall over
rule the distinctions of faith confidently antici
pated ; and the Christian religion more generally
exchanged for the beauties of Christianity than
we care to recognise.
1 Colvin, " Landor," p. 3.

AUTHORITIES 251

AUTHORITIES
In preparing this article, I have used the 1904 edition of
Pater's works.
There are biographies of Pater by Mr A. C. Benson in the
Englishmen of Letter Series and by Mr Wright. The former
is written from the academic standpoint, and with the aid of
information supplied by Pater's University friends ; the latter
contains some curious and some unimportant detail about
Pater's other friends. As Pater never mixed his friendships,
Mr Wright's book is an important, if not very pleasant, source
of information. There is also a short biography of Pater by
Ferris Greenslet.
Of the numerous articles that have been written about him,
Mr Gosse's in "Critical Kit-Kats" is the most important.
The others include Lionel Johnson's in the Fortnightly Review,
September 1894; Professor Dowden's in the Atlantic, No.
90, p. 112; Mr Arthur Symons' in the Monthly Review,
September 1906, and Mr Edward Hutton's in the same
magazine for September 1903.

LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN
1838 
Lord Morley — Politics and religion — Newman's definition of
Liberalism — Liberalism as it appears to-day — Liberal and
Catholic ideals contrasted — Mill— The enthusiasm of liberty
— The Encyclopaedists — The benefits of Liberalism — Its
superficiality — In the society of the French Liberals,
Diderot, Helvetius Holbach, Rousseau, Turgot, Condorcet,
Voltaire ; Lord Morley's debt to them. Points of resem
blance — Utilitarianism the basis of Liberalism — Conscience
up to date — Some Nemeses of Utilitarianism — "On Com
promise" — The unseen foundations of society undermined
by Liberalism — The meaning of aristocracy — Gladstone and
Ruskin — Lecky on Democracy — The ' scientific ' politician of
the future — The Toryism of the past — Lord Morley's
" Burke " — Lord Morley's views on religion — The religion
of science — Doubt and conviction — Lord Morley in public
life — The Irish Secretariate— Lord Morley's later books on
men of affairs : Machiavelli ; Cromwell ; Gladstone —
Lord Morley as a historian — Scientific history fatalist in
tendency — The moralities, insisted upon by Lord Morley,
inconsistent with it — Effect of strong moral emotion on Lord
Morley's style — His resemblance to Lucretius in temper of
mind — His satire — Newman once more.
" Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint and heard great argument
About it and about ; but evermore
Came out by the same door as in I went."
— Omar Khayyam.
When the false gods, according to Mrs Browning's
fancy,1 fell moaning off their golden seats, there
1 E. B. Browning, " The Dead Pan."
252

 1 NEMESIS 253
was assuredly one who refused to render up her
deity. Nemesis is a goddess whom the advances
of civilisation have not availed to disturb. She
sits meting out her judgments from age to age,
and, like death itself, with impartial if sometimes
tardy tread, crosses the threshold of the rich
man's castle and the poor man's hut. With all
men she has her word, but chiefly with those of
strong opinions and determined assertion of
them, whether they be theologians or poets,
financiers or journalists. It is in the fortunes
of statesmen, however, that her writs run most
legibly, and in the England of to-day there is no
instance of this more striking than the career of
Lord Morley. Behind him lies a life so con
sistent that any man might be proud of it.
He has very seldom recanted an opinion or
abandoned a principle. Yet the fact remains
that he, the philosophic Liberal, the Little
Englander, the ardent advocate of Home Rule,
the persistent foe of war and coercion, the con
vinced champion of free discussion, is closing his
fine record of public service, with a coronet on
his head, as the ruler of India, of the child of
Clive and Hastings, of the creature of strife and
fraud ; as, one might say, a benevolent despot in
an absolute constitution, imposed and administered
by an alien race. The political and parliamentary
history of this century and the last will certainly
not be the poorer for the singular presence of

254 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN ['838.
Lord Morley in the world of affairs, and romance,
ill able to breathe in an atmosphere of science
and democracy and for over fifty years wearing
out its existence in a long decay, will clutch at
a figure whose personality did very much in
its time to relieve the Commons of their
commonness. All politics run back into religion. "The
usurpations of reason," as Newman thought,
"may be dated from the Reformation."1
Independence of the Pope brought men at last
to be independent of the King. Thomas
Cromwell was the proper ancestor of Oliver ;
Holbach and Rousseau begat Chaumette and
Robespierre. The Protestants of the sixteenth
century were as surely the parents of nineteenth
century freethinkers, as it is sure that handsome
parents may have children whose looks belie their
parentage. Liberalism, as Newman defined it,
is "false liberty of thought or the exercise of
thought upon matters, in which, from the con
stitution of the human mind, thought cannot be
brought to any successful issue, and therefore is
out of place."2 Among such matters, he said,
were first principles of any kind ; and he felt
Lacordaire, Montalembert, and the school of
Catholic Liberals to be deeply illogical.3
We have glanced at Liberalism with the eyes
1 " Oxford University Sermons," p. 69.
» "Apologia," p. 288. » Ibid, p. 286.

— J LIBERALISM 255
ofthe author of the "Apologia." We are now
to try to take our stand on the other side of the
hill, and see it with the eyes of one who has been
the biographer of Cromwell, Voltaire, Diderot,
Cobden, Gladstone, and as many more. The
present moment is, indeed, one of peculiar
interest. Liberalism in any intelligible sense
cannot last another generation. Lord Morley
embodies more than any living man the principles
of a school of thought that is fast dying out. In
a score of years the strange adventure upon
which the nations of Europe embarked in 1789
will be concluded, and we shall revert, doubtless
with many and formidable changes, to an earlier
type. The principles of unchecked individual
liberty and unrestricted competition have, to use
the ancient phrase, been tried in the balance and
found wanting. The golden dreams, which so
lately cheated the anxious eyes of men, have
tarnished with time. Their splendour has proved
illusive, and they have gone the way of other
philosophies down a road upon which there is
no returning. Gradgrind and Bounderby have
after all been found to be no better members of
society than noble lords with long lineages and
loose lives ; not so generous, not so easy-going.
King Log, as we know, was in the end pre
ferred to King Stork. Gods and men alike are
incurably fond of jesting, and we have to be
careful. Crassus lived for gold, but he got more

256 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN ['838
of it by dying, for the Parthians stuffed his
mouth with it. The old aristocrats have been
swept away, and some malicious spirit has given
us new ones, bathed a la Kilmansegg in the most
material sort of golden splendour. And Misery,
Vice, and Discontent stalk among the drudges of
society, much as they did before.
This is Liberalism as it appears to most of us,
Tories or Socialists, to-day. But we are to put
the clock back and look at it as it appeared in
the 'fifties, just when, as Lord Morley says, the
' star of Newman ' had set, and ' the sun of Mill '
was high in the heavens.1 To Newman the earth
seemed to show the spectacle of a world for
all time at hopeless variance with its " Maker ; 2
to Mill also it was barren land, but land where,
if only unrestricted competition — la carriere
ouverte aux talents — was introduced, the fir and
the myrtle would replace the thorn and the briar.
The distinction is profound, searching, dividing
the very joints and marrow, for it makes all the
difference in the world whether we say " Ora et
labora" or " Labor a" simply. Works, we argue,
seeking to bridge over the gulf, are the best
prayers. Possibly ! only it is not a little remark
able that we are the first generation that has
thought so.
Newman discussed the question with customary
courage and perspicuity in his " Difficulties of
1 " On Compromise," p. 115. 2 "Apologia," p. 241.

— ] THE CANCER OF SOCIETY 257
Anglicans considered."1 Catholicism was com
monly condemned on account of the unpro-
gressive state of Catholic countries. There
ecclesiastics were at a premium ; telegraphs, rail
roads, commerce at a discount. The result was,
or was alleged to be, poverty, insecurity, and a
vast army of mendicants, lay as well as spiritual.
The reply he gave was one which had at least the
merit of a lofty ancestry. The Catholic Church
was possessed, he said, by one idea — "that sin is
the enemy of the soul." The eternal welfare or
loss of one single human being, sunk in crime
or degradation, was of greater consequence to her
than a hundred lines of railroad, or the sanita
tion of whole cities, except so far as these pro
moted some spiritual good beyond them. Many
publicans and harlots, he suggested, many
criminals purged by one last act of contrition,
would enter the kingdom of heaven before states
men of excellent parts, worthy virtues, and
brilliant records.2 The cancer of society, eating
at its vitals, was chiefly and in every age moral
evil, a wrong attitude of the soul towards its
Creator. The true philanthropist was he who
devoted himself to keep it under — more than that
he could never do — by the means of grace,
Prayer and the Sacraments.
Mill set his face in another direction. The
1 " Difficulties of Anglicans," i. p. 240.
2 " Apologia," p. 249.

258 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN H838-
cancer of society, he said in effect, was physical
evil. Physical evil would respond to human
remedies. Men and women appeared to him
just starved in mind and body. The road of
prosperity was increased production of wealth.
The road to knowledge was free discussion. In
the wake of knowledge would follow wisdom.
Let the authority of governments, spiritual or
temporal, be rated henceforth at the lowest ;
let every soul be as little subject to the higher
powers as possible ; let every man make his life
in his own way, restrained by the community
only where his conduct was directly injurious to
another ; let opportunities be equalised ; let the
cleverest men get to the top — and the world
would be regenerate.
The great difficulty nowadays in reading Mill
is to appreciate the enthusiasm which lay behind
that ice - cold gospel. But Lord Morley was
extremely sensible of it, and his own nervous,
emotional English is the measure of its force.
And we may not do amiss to place ourselves for
a few minutes among that earlier band of Liberals
who were accustomed to meet round Hoi bach's
table at Grandval, and in whose society, it may
well be, as Lord Morley suggests, we might best
choose to pass a day, if, as by some magic
wishing-carpet, we could be carried back into
the middle period of the eighteenth century.1
1 " Diderot," i. p. 260.

— ] LIBERALISM 259
In the freshness of their conversation, in their
boundless faith in the future of the race, in their
keen delight in intellectual toil, their hatred
of ecclesiastical tyranny, their belief in thought
and individuality as the great regenerators, their
courage in face of opposition, we can hear, as
nowhere else, the heart-beat of Liberalism, quick
and strong as that of a young man in his
prime. If it be asked, now that mists and
visions have cleared away, what solid gain these
men brought to humanity, three things would
have especially to be named. In the first place,
and one may add in the second place and in the
third place, a conviction that religious persecution
is of all kind of tyranny the most wicked and
religious conformity of all kind of equivocation
the most degrading — both of them entirely value
less in promoting religion and morally disastrous
to all who promote them. And there is no one,
we may safely assume, among those who care for
the future of the Christian religion to-day that
would not echo the sentiment of Pastor Allamand,
when he declared that he would give sixteen
quarto volumes of his sermons to have written
one single line of Voltaire's "Traite sur la
Tolerance"—" Si vous voulez ressembler a Jesus
Christ, soyez martirs, et non pas bourreaux." 1
In the next place Liberalism brought with it
an effective desire to enter into the wisdom of
1 Voltaire, "Traite" sur la Tolerance," p. 155.

262 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN ['838-
demonstration. On enquiry we learn that we
are face to face with Diderot, the very focus of
the rationalistic thought of the day, the father of
that religion of science in which our guide so
passionately believes. Hard by are stationed
Helvdtius and Holbach, the one so indiscreet —
so Madame du Deffand declared — as to have let
out everybody's secret, and the other so much the
reverse as to have kept secret the authorship of
the best abused book in literature. "De l'Esprit"
suggested to Bentham, the principle of utility as
the standard of action, and went on to declare
' everybody's secret ' — that selfishness always and
in every case is the motive of action. " Le
Systeme de Nature," was the boldest possible
assertion that we, with all that we see and feel,
are just transient modes of matter.
Our sponsor, faithful to his golden rule that we
should have preferences but no exclusions,1 will
place us next before a solitary, mournful figure
whom he addresses with some reserve and con
straint. This, he tells us, is Rousseau — a senti
mental dreamer, a writer whose spring of action
is not the head but the heart, unpractical, much
given to egotism and self-observation, yet the
master of a style which makes him the very
prophet of human suffering and sorrow. We
may have met, he adds, with the same sort of
person in England. Carlyle is the English
1 " Studies in Literature," p. 72.

CONDORCET 263
Rousseau.1 They are dangerous people, these
poets who take prose for the vehicle of their
ideas, lull reason to sleep, and play on the emotions
and prejudices of mankind. They make "thought
an aspiration, justice a sentiment, and society a
retrogression." 2 We need to beware of them.
But there are better men than Rousseau out
side the charmed circle at Grandval. Turgot
and Condorcet are not merely thinkers, but men
of affairs — always a recommendation with Lord
Morley. From the one our guide learnt to
observe a temper of mind in dealing with revolu
tionary material, which, one may venture to
suspect, has not been without value at the India
Office. With the other he has more instinctive
sympathy. Condorcet's boundless belief in the
unchained spirit of man ; his affection for natural
history because of the buffets it incidently deals
at Moses ; 3 his uncommunicative reserve, which
made Diderot speak of him as 'a volcano
covered with snow,' are, or at least were, not un
congenial characteristics. Lord Morley's writing
has about it, too, that aristocratic fashion, which
makes ill company for the bonnets - rouges and
sans - culottes of every age, and shows how
difficult it is for educated Liberals to make in
practice any heartfelt acceptance of democracy.
A world thoroughly democratic would, indeed,
have little soil nor space where such high growths
1 " Miscellanies," i. p. 147- 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid, ii. p. 176.

264 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN ['838-
of culture as his own works could come to
maturity. This is no piece of theory. Let any
one look at the literature or art of the France
or America of to-day and then judge.
He resembles Condorcet in another point — a
deep veneration for Voltaire, or at least for his
principles, and what Condorcet said of Voltaire
might, with the proper emendations, be said of
himself: —
" L'exemple de l'Angleterre lui montrait que la
veYitd n'est pas faite pour rester un secret entre
les mains de quelques philosophes et d'un petit
nombre de gens du monde instruits, ou plutdt
endoctrines pas les philosophes; riant avec eux
des erreurs dont le peuple est la victime, mais
sen rendant eux-m£mes les d^fenseurs, lorsque
leur dtat ou leurs places leur y fait trouver un
int6r£t chimerique ou r£el, et pr£ts a laisser
proscrire ou m£me a pers^cuter leurs preeepteurs
s'ils osent dire ce qu'eux-memes pensent en
secret. Des ce moment Voltaire se sentit appele
a ddtruire les prejug^s de toute espece dont son
pays £tait l'esclave." 1
More than this, Voltaire is admirable because
"he is, perhaps, the one great Frenchman who
has known how to abide in patient contentment
with an all but purely critical reserve, leaving
reconstruction, its forms, its modes, its epoch, for
the fulness of time and maturity of effort to
disclose." 8
Lord Morley thinks him great because he was
1 Condorcet, " Vie de Voltaire," p. 20. 2 " Voltaire," p. 38.

VOLTAIRE : MILL 265
content to try to destroy and did not try to build.
We may wonder, perhaps, if any Liberal has ever
been great any other way. Then he finds in
Voltaire the true model for all time of the man of
letters, whose special art it is to show ' the ideas
of all subjects in the double light of the practical
and the spiritual reason.' x Again, Voltaire was
the master-spirit of the only reformation which was
wholly non-ascetic, which was moved always by
appealing to reason, never to passion,2 which cared
nothing for the dark chastity 3 of the Middle Ages.
Nor can it be quite by chance that the study of
Voltaire was written when the author was just
verging on thirty-three, ' that earlier climacteric,
when the men with vision first feel conscious of a
past, and reflectively mark its shadow.' 4
We are done with the Encyclopaedists, and may
return for a moment to Mill. There were two
effects of his scheme of social salvation, which
were insufficiently foreseen. One, which has
given Lord Morley no little trouble, was that,
if an increased accumulation of material wealth
be set before society as the road to improve
ment,6 those will be reckoned the wisest citizens
who are readiest at making money. Happiness
in terms of very material comfort will, as Carlyle
saw, come more and more to be substituted for
the 'blessedness,' which despite all their vice
1 "Voltaire," p. 117. a Ibid., p. 33.
s Ibid., p. 152, "The mediaeval superstition about chastity."
4 Ibid., p. 44. 5 " On Compromise," p. 34.

264 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN C183S-
of culture as his own works could come to
maturity. This is no piece of theory. Let any
one look at the literature or art of the France
or America of to-day and then judge.
He resembles Condorcet in another point — a
deep veneration for Voltaire, or at least for his
principles, and what Condorcet said of Voltaire
might, with the proper emendations, be said of
himself: —
" L'exemple de l'Angleterre lui montrait que la
v6rit6 n'est pas faite pour rester un secret entre
les mains de quelques philosophes et d'un petit
nombre de gens du monde instruits, ou plutdt
endoctrin^s pas les philosophes; riant avec eux
des erreurs dont le peuple est la victime, mais
sen rendant eux-mdmes les d^fenseurs, lorsque
leur 6tat ou leurs places leur y fait trouver un
inte>£t chimerique ou rdel, et pr£ts a laisser
proscrire ou m£me a pers^cuter leurs preeepteurs
s'ils osent dire ce qu'eux-memes pensent en
secret. Des ce moment Voltaire se sentit appel6
a detruire les prejug^s de toute espece dont son
pays e"tait l'esclave." 1
More than this, Voltaire is admirable because
"he is, perhaps, the one great Frenchman who
has known how to abide in patient contentment
with an all but purely critical reserve, leaving
reconstruction, its forms, its modes, its epoch, for
the fulness of time and maturity of effort to
disclose." 2
Lord Morley thinks him great because he was
1 Condorcet, " Vie de Voltaire," p. 20. 2 " Voltaire," p. 38.

— ] VOLTAIRE : MILL 265
content to try to destroy and did not try to build.
We may wonder, perhaps, if any Liberal has ever
been great any other way. Then he finds in
Voltaire the true model for all time of the man of
letters, whose special art it is to show ' the ideas
of all subjects in the double light of the practical
and the spiritual reason.' J Again, Voltaire was
the master-spirit of the only reformation which was
wholly non-ascetic, which was moved always by
appealing to reason, never to passion,2 which cared
nothing for the dark chastity3 ofthe Middle Ages.
Nor can it be quite by chance that the study of
Voltaire was written when the author was just
verging on thirty-three, ' that earlier climacteric,
when the men with vision first feel conscious of a
past, and reflectively mark its shadow.' 4
We are done with the Encyclopaedists, and may
return for a moment to Mill. There were two
effects of his scheme of social salvation, which
were insufficiently foreseen. One, which has
given Lord Morley no little trouble, was that,
if an increased accumulation of material wealth
be set before society as the road to improve
ment,6 those will be reckoned the wisest citizens
who are readiest at making money. Happiness
in terms of very material comfort will, as Carlyle
saw, come more and more to be substituted for
the 'blessedness,' which despite all their vice
1 "Voltaire," p. 117. a Ibid., p. 33.
s Ibid., p. 152, "The mediaeval superstition about chastity."
* Ibid., p. 44. 5 " On Compromise," p. 34.

266 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN [1838-
and brutality did represent the goal of all the
ardent spirits of the Middle Age. The other
effect was an almost complete loss of corporate
feeling, whether spiritual or temporal. Men
were converted by their habit of mind into so
many atoms or units, consciously busy with
enlightened selfishness, and unconsciously busy
with selfish enlightenment. Matters got so bad
at last that Leslie Stephen set to work to mend
the utilitarian creed. Sympathy was present,
he said, in the instinctive unavoidable effort of
mankind to realise each other's feelings.1 A
wholly unsympathetic man was an idiot, and, as
we narrowed our sympathies, we became pro
gressively ' idiotic' 2
This new utilitarianism, if a strict inquisition
were held, might cost the country something con
siderable in asylums. Abuse, besides, one has
always to remember, well deserved as it may
be, is not argument. Napoleon was supremely
selfish, supremely unsympathetic. Was he in
any intelligible sense an idiot?
We are not primarily concerned, however,
with Mill or Stephen, close allies as they were
of Lord Morley. Yet one cannot be at too
much pains to contrast the utilitarian morality,
never long dissociated from the Liberal creed,
with the phrase of thought which preceded it.
Conscience with Newman had been a golden
1 "Science of Ethics," p. 221. 2 Ibid., p. 244.

SANCTIONS AND STANDARDS 267
chain led down from Heaven by God. Mill
' the saint of rationalism ' 1 took it for ' a sub
jective feeling in the mind ' (though how feeling
in the mind could be other than subjective it is
hard to see 2) and, thus transformed, made it the
sanction of the new morality. A good deal
evidently depended on the standard. Newman's
standard has been the life of Christ. Mill said
you could hardly have a better one,3 but Christ's
Person, like the phenomenon of conscience, had
lost for him its divine origin. Therefore it
appeared safer to reconstitute society with the
aid of Bentham's formula about 'the greatest
happiness of the greatest number.' Whether
Lord Morley has found the new sanction and
the new standard less nebulous than the old ones
one may venture to doubt. To the present
writer his pages seem constantly to show a heart
higher than his confession of faith. Thus, for
example, if you really believe in ' the greatest
happiness ' principle, and also (as Lord Morley
does) in democracy (which is as much as to say
that men are the best judges of their own
interests) it is hard to see, in the event of your
being outvoted, on what principle you continue
to exhort mankind to choose the more excellent
way. How much more reasonable to accept the
1 Morley, " Miscellanies," iv. p. 146.
This is a criticism of Leslie Stephen's in "The English
Utilitarians." ! "Essays on Religion," p. 255.

268 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN ['838-
popular verdict and exalt it into a divine decree,
like the flotsam adventurer of politics who knows
well enough on which side his bread is buttered
but hardly at all which side his coat is turned !
Or take the circumstances of the downfall of
the Second Empire which Lord Morley, in the
temper if not the language of a Hebrew prophet,
bids us regard as a proof that morality is " the
nature of things.'1 In all fairness and reason
then one might argue, if the French to be beaten
had a monopoly of crime, the Germans, to have
won so fine a success, must have had more than
the average of virtue. And yet Lord Morley is
not going to tell us that the Silesian wars and
the Ems telegram, on which more than any other
things the supremacy of Prussia has been founded,
were anything but the vilest instruments of
ambition, bound with iron and stained with blood.
Or, whilst we are about it, take the whole
principle of international morality by which Lord
Morley sets so much store, and consider the
unification of Italy in the light of the means by
which it was obtained — the greatest happiness
of the greatest number of Italians effected by
Cavour at the cost of a little Sardinian blood in
the Crimean War, and the cession to France of his
countrymen in Savoy and Nice. The utilitarian
calculus works out the same answer as the
doctrines of Machiavelli and the alleged doctrines
1 " On Compromise," p. 25.

— ] "ON COMPROMISE" 269
of the Jesuits. ' Reason of state,' ' the end justi
fying the means ' — these were after all the
principles by which the great ' progressive '
developments of the nineteenth century have
been obtained. Yet Lord Morley decries ' reason
of state ' with a severity, which would not
ill become one who held Newman's doctrine
of sin.
His counsels have, indeed, been greater than
his creed from start to finish. In an early treatise
"On Compromise," of which the motto is "It
makes all the difference in the world whether
we put Truth in the first place or in the second
place," his moral fervour glows and scorches
with deep-set passion. The writer sets out to
find the boundary between ' wise suspense in
forming opinions ' and ' disingenuousness and
self-illusion,' between ' wise reserve in expressing
opinions' and 'voluntary dissimulation,' between
' wise tardiness in trying to realise them ' and
' indolence and pusillanimity ' in neglecting the
attempt. Compromise, as we are all aware, is
dear to the English mind. It has made of the
English constitution a model of excellence. It
has made of the English people a governing race.
It has smoothed away innumerable difficulties,
and added vastly to the sum of human comfort,
and therefore presumably to the sum of human
happiness. To stick to your father's opinions and
have no dealings with logic is not uncommonly

270 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN ['838-
an effect of English public-school education. But
Lord Morley has a way of pressing inconvenient
questions, hardly less urgent than Newman's.
Equally intolerant of convention, he was equally
exasperated by Hume, who, after all, had only
expressed with unusual cynicism the opinions
which are commonly held by educated people.
The philosopher, in giving advice to a young
man who wanted a benefice, and felt some
difficulty in signing the Thirty-nine Articles, had
reproached himself for not having practised
hypocrisy in this particular.
"The common duties of society usually require
it, and the ecclesiastical profession only adds a
little more to an innocent dissimulation, or rather
simulation, without which it is impossible to pass
through the world." 1
With this sort of thing Lord Morley will have
no truce. His book is throughout an untiring
rebuke to those who adopt the conventional path
of easy compromise ; the tone of it stimulating,
trenchant, thorough, very foreign to an age
which is more ready to ask a question than to
stay for the answer. No one, who reads it
intelligently and who can be quit of political
or religious bias, will lay it down without finding
that he has been undergoing a very severe cross-
examination. The moral conclusion arrived at is
as characteristic of the writer as it is strikingly
1 Quoted in " On Compromise," p. 88.

— ] THE END OF GOVERNMENT 271
enforced. Whatever restraint a consideration
for the convictions, prejudices, or traditions of
other men may impose upon any attempt to
realise opinion in practical form, whatever reserve
courtesy may here or there place upon the free
expression of our thoughts, the formation of
opinion on all topics as much of future as of
present interest ought to go on unchecked, un
hindered, unembarrassed. On the free produc
tion and commerce of new ideas in short all
the moral prospects of society depend.1
If the author had not so firm a faith that
'morality is the nature of things,' he might
have hesitated to advocate so tremendous a
gamble. What, if a people imperfectly educated
in judgment (as a people for mere lack of leisure
must always be) should first throw over the
restraints of religion, and then the restraints
of government, should think itself into bombs,
outrage and sedition, even when it is controlled
by rulers eminently wise, disinterested and
beneficent. Has not a plenitude of free dis
cussion, like a plentitude of authority, a Nemesis
prepared for it? To warn us, as Mill did, not
to suppress anybody of apparently anarchical or
dangerous opinion, because in so doing we may
inadvertently or blindly fight, like the Pharisees,
against the powers of light, is to invite men to
a cowardly evasion of those very responsibilities
1 " On Compromise," pp. 96, 97.

272 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN ['838-
which the keepers of the public conscience ought
to be required to face. Bolingbroke, with his
ideas of a patriot king and a national party had
surely a truer eye for the genius of government
than those who look for it in an interminable
chaos of opinion. A society which would make
progress something more than a word ' to
mystify the millions' would be one in which
argument, and especially political argument, was
ever narrowing to a point ; in which first principles,
and second principles, too, in religion, in politics,
in art, as well as in science, were established
beyond dispute, and all minds were tending in
the same direction. It was because this ideal
had been largely attained in the Middle Ages,
that they produced, as Lord Morley sees, a higher
type of character than is at present within our
reach ; 1 that amid all their ignorance and brutality
they contrived to raise monuments, which are as
much our despair as our admiration. It would
not, indeed, be hard with a little dexterous
juggling of the utilitarian standard to vindicate
those who refused facilities to religious doubt
and denial. For Liberalism has failed in the
sphere of religion, as it has failed in the sphere
of government, and will leave behind no positive
faith, unless it be the faith of the children of Israel
when every man had his own priest and his own
Levite. If we refuse to acclaim that state of the
1 " On Compromise," p. 36.

— J LIBERALISM 273
Roman world, which Gibbon applauded,1 when
all modes of worship were considered by the
people as equally true, by the philosopher as
equally false, and by the magistrate as equally
useful, we cannot safely do so on Liberal or
utilitarian principles (of the consequence of which,
indeed, it is an excellent illustration), but because
common conviction is the vital spark of every
nation and every society. To keep that sacred
fire alive is the eternal problem of the statesman.
The Middle Ages rested upon a theory of govern
ance ecclesiastical and civil, which they believed
to be of divine appointment. To question it
was heresy or treason. As religion had an
absolute sanction, so it was absolutely enforced.
Protestantism wrecked the theory, and Liberalism
the practice. In destructive power Liberalism
had no rival, but it had the defects of its qualities
and built up nothing at all. Advanced thought
in civil matters turned to Socialism, for which
Rousseau had already laid a mythical foundation
in the common brotherhood of man. As faith in
a heaven where wrongs would be righted, and
the lion lie beside the lamb, faded from the
common stock of beliefs, the Sermon on the
Mount was dragged from its spiritual setting,
and crudely interpreted as communism. The
sane socialism of the Middle Ages, which had
meant so much to Carlyle and Froude, grew
1 " Decline and Fall," ch. ii. (vol. i. p. 28.) S

274 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN U838-
into a fanciful reconstruction of society on a
basis of equality, and the dignity of labour came
to mean the indignity of intellect. Post hoc
sed non propter hoc. These things followed
Liberalism in fact, but not in thought. Diderot
and Voltaire, Cobden and Mill and Gladstone
were accustomed to contemplate with more or less
complacency the existence of a set of privileged
persons, and Lord Morley followed in their wake.
The difficulty lay, has always lain, in the forma
tion of this class. We read of an interview
between Gladstone and Ruskin, when the latter
attacked his host as ' a leveller,' whereupon
Gladstone replied, "Oh, dear no; I am nothing
of the sort. I am a firm believer in the aristo
cratic principle — the rule of the best. I am an
out-and-out inequalitarian."
" The true question," comments Lord Morley,
" against Ruskin's and Carlyle's school of thought
was how you are to get the rule of the best.
Mr Gladstone thought freedom was the answer.
What path the others would have us tread,
neither Ruskin nor his stormy teacher ever
intelligibly told us." 1
This is hardly fair. In the civilised world
there have been suggested, one may say, four
methods of forming a governing class. The
first, which met with Carlyle's approval, was
that of education. A man was brought up to
command, was given such a tincture of learn-
1 " Life of Gladstone," ii. p. 582.

— ] THE RULING CLASS 275
ing as the times allowed, was required to be
courageous, self- controlled, indifferent to money,
to have a regard for the tradition of his class
and family, and a chivalrous respect for women
and sufferers. There were other things, but
these were the chief. In some cases the educa
tion succeeded, in some it failed. But the notion
of it was that a man with fine feelings was the
best man of all.
The second method, which is Lord Morley's,
is that of instruction. A man full of knowledge
is supposed to be the wisest of men. Com
petitive examinations in subjects, more or less
useful, perform the services and receive the
honour accorded in early societies to the casting
of lots, and the Chinese become, as Voltaire
supposed them, some of the most favoured of
mortals. The English civil servants in India,
indeed, are often reckoned the glory of this
system ; but owing to difference of birth and
education between them and the people they
govern, they would be much more properly
regarded as hereditary aristocrats.
The third method, which tends in western
societies to override this one, is the plutocratic.
Rich men govern the country by virtue of a more
or less honourable use of their riches. They
have hard heads, and not infrequently hard
hearts, and owe their position in this country more
to Mill and Cobden than any other two persons.

276 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN ['838-
The latest method of obtaining a governing
class is from the ranks of the sufferers. The
people, who have neither education, instruction,
or wealth, have, at least, as Aristotle pointed
out, the great advantage of knowing where the
shoe pinches. A labour-party, if it often recom
mends a quack medicine, is likely to have pretty
quick fingers for a diagnosis of the complaint.
The phantom economic man of Mill's fancy, who
needed only to be left alone to make the best
of himself, has dissolved into the sturdy artisan
clamouring for state regulation, sometimes for
state control. History, revolving on its axis, is
showing us the same side of the wheel once
again, and in our efforts to solve the social
problem we are going to revert to the solution
of the Middle Ages; this time with democracy
to hurry our steps and a swelling population to
confuse them. Anyway, and that is all with which
we are here concerned, Liberalism, Gladstonian,
or Cobdenite has disappointed the public hopes,
and the fairy city of the Economists, paved with
gold and freedom, has come tumbling about our
heads. This is not to deny that it has worked an
obvious measure of public good. Any one,
indeed, to criticise it effectively, must have
deeply pondered the case of the man whose last
state is described as being worse than his first.
There is a moment in all political development

— I DEMOCRACY 277
when change looks like improvement, when the
abode once haunted by a devil is swept and
garnished. But, as Lord Morley somewhere
says himself, politics is one long second best.
Benevolent despotisms and benevolent demo
cracies are both of them better in theory than
any system of weights and balances. Plato pre
ferred the one, and Rousseau the other, and, if
men could be trusted, we might adopt either with
indifferent ease. But, if there is one lesson writ
large on the page of history, it is that power cannot
be safely entrusted to men absolutely, neither to
the one nor to the many. English democracy
may, as Lord Morley seems to anticipate, alter
the rule, but present signs are not encouraging.
Meanwhile, anti- Liberal opinion is unable to
crystallise. Lecky's attack on democracy was,
as Lord Morley pointed out with much acerbity,1
singularly feeble. Lecky, a weak-kneed Liberal
himself, failed to draw the all - important dis
tinction which governs the whole question
between democracy as a form of civilisation,
which is Liberalism and may run in the veins
of Joseph II. or Napoleon III., and democracy
as a form of government, which means the
acceptance of Chartist petitions and Newcastle
programmes. Even now, an anti - democratic
but not altogether anti Liberal philosophy is
forming itself, which will rest on biological and
1 "Miscellanies," iv. p. 171.

278 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN ['838-
economic and social observation — observation,
for instance, of the inheritance of political, or for
the matter of that, of other ability ; J of the
importance to progress of natural selection and
of variety (this last even at the cost of con
siderable waste) ; of the vastly preponderant
value of production to distribution as an agent
of social reform ; of the propriety of a national
supervision, as against a national supersession, of
philanthropic enterprise ; and, last but not least,
of the unreasonableness of professional disagree
ment among thinking men on mundane matters.
And, if civilisation is not to become a hot-bed
of anarchy, these ideas must some day pitch
both sentimental and flaming democracy into
the sea.
It may be worth while for a moment and by
way of contrast, to look back on the creed with
which democracy fought so victorious a conflict.
Not the least of Lord Morley's accomplishments is
that he is at the pains to appreciate his opponents'
point of view and at the farthest possible remove
from those who scoff without understanding. His
study of Burke is as fair and friendly a criticism
of the Conservative philosopher as we have a
right to ask. Lord Morley puts us through some
of the positions occupied by the ' Bossuet of
politics.' We shall lose nothing by following
him so far, and a little further.
See on this Flinders Petrie, " Janus in Modern Life," p. 4.

 1 CONSERVATISM 279
'Political Mysticism' lay at the root of the
Conservative system. The constitution was *a
nice equipoise with steep precipices and deep
waters upon all sides of it ; ' 1 thus ordered by
God and given in trust to men.2 The Church
Establishment was a recognition of our debt
and our duty towards our Heavenly Patron.
It was with a just pride that Englishmen made
their clergy the opulent equals or superiors of
the nobility and gentry of the kingdom, looking
to them to preserve in the spirit the injunctions
of primitive and evangelic poverty.3 The senti
ment of loyalty towards the Church was re
flected in that of loyalty towards the Sovereign ;
and these emotions were the true glory and
dignity of a civilised society.
In a hereditary aristocracy Burke perceived
the great oaks that give shade and stability
to the constitution.4 Men, like Richmond and
Rockingham, who did their duty, passed down
to their children and all connected with them
a precious tradition of conduct and example,
which was in itself a sufficient justification of
their place and power. In the House of
Commons he looked to find men of upright
and independent character, not charged with any
mandate nor delegated for any purpose, but
devoting to their constituents their power of
1 Burke, "Thoughts on the Present Discontents."
2 Ibid., "Reflections on the French Revolution," pp. 354, 361.
3 Ibid., p. 369. 4 Letter to the Duke of Richmond,

280 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN ['838-
judgment as well as their power of work.1
Above all he deprecated change. Spartam
nactus es ; hanc exorna. "A disposition to
preserve and an ability to improve " 2 was his
standard of a statesman. A man was not to
be too critical of his inheritance. But extremes
of government — despotisms and democracies —
were perilous in the last degree.
" A perfect democracy," he says, in words
which Lord Morley has forborne to quote, " is
the most shameless thing in the world, because
the people's approbation of their own acts has
to them the appearance of a public judgment in
their favour. As it is the most shameless, it
is also the most fearless. No man apprehends
in his person that he can be made subject to
punishment."8 Whatever we may think of a state of society
that for better or worse has definitely passed
away, we may recognise that it possessed a
stability to which our present modes of
thought and government cannot pretend.
Many particular benefits have come from
Liberalism but social solidarity, which is the
greatest benefit a constitution can bestow,
has not come. "Whenever," says Burke — and
Lord Morley endorses the statement as ' the
weightiest and most important of all political
1 Burke at Bristol (Morley " Burke," p. 107).
9 " Reflections on the French Revolution," p. 440.
« Ibid., p. 355,

— ] LIBERALISM IN RELIGION 281
truths'1 — "a separation is made between liberty
and justice, neither is, in my opinion, safe."
We may hope, but few of us expect, that in
the years that are coming those two great
currents will flow on side by side.
As in politics, so in religion, Liberalism has
shown no constructive power. The Encyclopaedia
of Diderot and his colleagues, the coarse jokes
of Voltaire, applied in Lord Morley's view the
appropriate solvent to such Christianity as France
could boast of in the eighteenth century. In
England he thinks Newman restored galvanic
action to dead matter for another fifty years.
That may or may not be the last word. Any
way Liberalism took no lasting hold of the
public imagination in spiritual matters any more
than in secular ones. Men were crying for
bread, and their intellectual fathers gave them
a stone. Mill offered his essay on Theism ;
Lord Morley offered Doubt. Religion, he said,
had been a great force, and would be so again.2
For the moment we must be content with that
'kind of doubt which is not without search.'3
Then he goes to Newman for his language : —
"Are there pleasures of Doubt, as well as
of Inference and Assent? In one sense there
are. Not, indeed, if doubt means ignorance,
uncertainty, or hopeless suspense, but there is
a certain grave" acquiescence in ignorance, a
1 "Burke," p. 213. 2 " On Compromise," p. 36. 3 Ibid., p. 132.

282 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN [1*38-
recognition of our impotence to solve momentous
and urgent questions, which has a satisfaction
of its own. After high aspiration, after renewed
endeavours, after bootless toil, after long wander
ings, after hope, effort, weariness, failure, pain
fully alternating and recurring, it is an immense
relief to the exhausted mind to be able to say,
' At length I know that I can know nothing
about anything. . . . Ignorance remains the
evil which it ever was, but something of the
peace of certitude is gained in knowing the
worst, and in having reconciled the mind to
the endurance of it.' " 1
"Precisely," adds Lord Morley, "and what
one would say of our own age is that it will not
deliberately face this knowledge of the worst. So
it misses the peace of certitude, and not only its
peace but the strength and coherency that follow
strict acceptance of the worst, when the worst is
after all the best within reach."2
There are in his view three honourable
positions open to all men — to affirm, to deny, to
disclaim any grounds of opinion — faith, atheism,
agnosticism. Most people shift their feet from
one to the other. " They speak as if they affirmed,
and they act as if they denied, and in their hearts
they cherish a slovenly sort of suspicion that we
can neither deny or affirm."* For himself he
makes no pretence to knowledge of these high
things. Comte and the system of Comte are
premature. One cannot as yet be positive ; the
1 "On Compromise," p. 132. (Quoted from Newman's
" Grammar of Assent.")
2 Ibid, p. 133. 3 Ibid., p. 135.

— ] THE NEW FAITH AND THE OLD 283
right of denial is hardly established. A great
wilderness has to be traversed, where the charities
of life will not enable those who are for God,
and those who have no knowledge of Him to
march side by side.1 The new faith like the old
will come with the sword. For our generation,
and those nearest us, are like Balaam. They
see it, but not nigh. Darkness lies between.
And as the human race passes into the valley
of decision, the best is that we should all be
honest, fearless in assertion of opinion, sure of
each other as friend or foe, knowing that the new
faith will be of the same worth as the men who
shape it. " We fight that others may enjoy, and
many generations struggle and debate that one
generation may hold something for proven."2
There is the pathos of it. Voltaire, he commends,
as we have seen, because he was
"perhaps the one great Frenchman who has
known how to abide in patient contentment
with an all but purely critical reserve, leaving
reconstruction, its form, its modes, its epoch, for
the fulness of time to disclose."
Yet Diderot seems to him a greater man
inasmuch as he foresaw the scientific lines on
which such a reconstruction must take place, and
was, in the true sense of the word, a philosopher.3
1 "On Compromise," p. 157.
2 "Voltaire," p. 26.
3 " Diderot," i. p. 9-

284 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN ['838-
Beyond this scientific foundation all he can
predicate of the religion of the future is that it
will have no priests, pledged by vows and com
pelled for subsistence, to stunt the free growth
of their intellects ; 1 that the instinct of holiness
will be satisfied by a ministry in the brotherhood
of men, the addition of a stone to the temple of
freedom, a page to the book of knowledge, or
a touch to the portrait of human perfection.2
And in some beautiful, though not unsullied,
words he reminds us how Condorcet, as he
awaited the knock of the executioner, withdrew
himself into the realm of pure reason, and
offered his own poor efforts for light and liberty
on the altar of human progress.3
These things were written before 1880, and
already we may do something to sift the truth
and error of them. Only incurable optimists
can fancy that science is going to prescribe all
the faiths and repeat all the injunctions of
Christianity ; that, for example, it is going to
recommend the use of prayer and fasting, or the
inviolable sanctity of the marriage vow.4 Science
is very busy, as Lord Morley expected, in con
structing a morality of its own. It can tell us
much about the human body, of laws of health
1 "On Compromise," p. 112.
2 " Rousseau," ii. p. 277. ' Ibid., p. 279.
4 Sir E. Ray Lankester is credited with the saying that Religion
has nothing to hope and nothing to fear from Science. This is,
I suppose, a rough statement of the true position.

— ] SCIENCE AND RELIGION 285
and the penalty of disobeying them, which things
once had much the appearance of arbitrary
judgments. It can tell us more about the
human mind than was ever guessed at ; it can
tell us of averages, of the behaviour of great
multitudes drifting along in known conditions.
But all this is morality, albeit morality touched
with pathos, a philosophic substitute for religion ;
not religion itself. Of the human spirit, its
heights and depths, its sense of personal duty,
and its sense of sin, its justice, its loyalty, its
love, science tells us nothing, or nothing at least
that is not utterly laughable. And the few men,
who do not let themselves drift, will still find in
the Psalms and the Bible the best account and
the best explanation of that world of 'passion
and mystery,' from which we may in nowise
escape. Meanwhile, Lord Morley falls back on a
philosophy not essentially different from Stoicism.
With the gospel of uncertainty in his hand he
requires of all men a rigid, strenuous life. Behind
stern, set faces, we are to conceal our doubting
hearts. When, for all we can tell, Humanity
may already have crossed the summit of human
perfectibility and be entering upon its decline, he
would have our belief in the future remain
undimmed.1 The most credulous adherent of
threadbare superstition never pledged himself so
1 " Burke," p. 299.

286 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN ['838-
unreservedly to the truth of his crumbling dogmas
as Lord Morley to this faith in Progress (and
by Progress he always means progress in high
character) ; though the most perfectly rational
estimate of the world would possibly show that
the efforts of all the philanthropists merely suffice
to turn the stream of human vice from one
channel into another.1 And truth itself, nicely
limited by the not too extended range of our
understanding, he will have us pursue with
increasing endeavour, with the courage and con
fidence of those who seek or find the absolute.
And, as if we had not contradiction enough, this
proud, defiant creed, matured surely in the school
of Prometheus and which could never be the
property of more than the cultured few, is
found in the mouth of an avowed democrat and
suggested as the present and, for all one can
see, the future philosophy for mankind.
Doubt is painful ; conviction is pleasant.
Therefore with those who have no surer guides
than the utilitarians, Rousseau has won all
along the line. In politics Socialism, in religion
the "Savoyard Vicar," 'that rag of metaphysic,'
as Lord Morley calls it, ' floating in the sunshine
of sentimentalism,'2 — these have many more
1 A pamphlet by Professor Taylor on "The Diminishing Birth
rate," which had a wide circulation some few years ago, contains
an unforgettable warning as to the impotence of improved conditions
— of civilisation and the facilities it affords — to make men better.
2 " Rousseau," ii. p. 279.

— ] REFORM OR DEVELOPMENT 287
adherents, even in what is spoken of as the
Liberal camp, than his own sombre faith. And
in place of the tedious theologies and supplica
tions, the vita contemplativa, the long pilgrimage
of the Middle Age, a broad safe way, paved with
petty philanthropies, hedged in with endless com
mittee-meetings, and shaded by whole libraries
of sensational novels, has been cut to Heaven
(or Nirvana or whatever we may fancy our
ultimate destination to be), though once the way
there had been supposed on excellent grounds to
be narrow, rough, and precipitous. There was
evil enough in the old society to justify every
one of Lord Morley's passionate indictments of
it ; and yet we may see that these men had hold
of a view of life which is as much nobler and
deeper than our own as Pascal's sad, severe
thoughts are wiser than the false emotion of the
" Contrat Social." Lord Morley, and those with
whom he has thrown in his lot, have bidden us
build a new road to eternity instead of mending
the old one, and, where there should have been
development, we have had reform. But these
are reflections upon which it is more than time
to turn our backs.
Thought was exchanged for action in 1883;
the editorship of the Pall Mall Gazette for the
representation of Newcastle. " On Compromise "
was already a little forgotten, for the Oaths Act
was not passed until 1888, and a seat in

288 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN [1S38-
Parliament entailed a theistic declaration. The
party was heavily indebted to him for his
philosophic journalism, and the debt was dis
charged in 1886 and 1892 by his appointment
to the Irish Office. With the Irish Question at
its height the post was in each case the roughest
in the Cabinet, next to that of the Prime
Minister. The English people had to be re
conciled with the Irish members, and the Home-
Rule Bills with the interest of both. Liberal
sentiment required that Irishmen should vote
Imperial taxation in the British Parliament.
English sentiment, where it favoured the Bills
at all, was eager to pack off the whole unruly
troop, to whom chance had given such a pre
dominant influence on British affairs, bag and
baggage, to their own country, never to return.
But this Gordian knot was never cut, nor, one
may suspect, ever will be.
The Encyclopaedists had been thinkers who
questioned all things in heaven and earth, and let
reason run riot as she would. In his new phase
Lord Morley found men of affairs more con
genial. Their problems were now his problems,
just as had once been the case with those of the
French Liberals. Much of the old interest,
however, was still present in the characters he
picked out. In the minds of Machiavelli and
Cromwell the moralities — ' those noble moralities '
which, as he somewhere tells us, are 'the life-

— ] MACHIAVELLI 289
blood of style' — were predominant by action or
reaction. Both men had thought a great deal
about good and evil, and had met the alternatives
in the practical work of the State. Machiavelli
decided, as we know, that international morality
was a dream ; that, as his disciple put it, ' force
and fraud were the cardinal virtues.' Darwin,
against his will, taught the same thing. No
demonstration of the unselfish instincts of mother
hood seemed to wash clean the struggle of
species with species, genus with genus, nation
with nation.1 The strong were more efficient,
more useful than the weak, and the battle was
to the strong. But Lord Morley will have none
of it. He bids us look at the long issue of
things, and condemn the whole line of Machia
vellians — from Caesar Borgia past Henri Quatre,
William the Silent, Elizabeth, Frederick, down to
Napoleon. "The world," he says, "in spite of
a thousand mischances, and at tortoise-pace, has
steadily moved away from them." 2
Politics blind us all, and there are some who
think that our vaunted progress is no better than
retrogression. "The distinction of property and
the stability of possession," says Hume, "are of
all circumstances the most necessary for the
establishment of human society." A Tory with
these notions in his head might think that a
1 See Romanes, " Darwin and after Darwin," i. p. 268.
2 " Machiavelli," p. 45- T

290 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN [as
certain philanthropic party in modern politics
was not so bad a representation of Machiavelli's
"Prince." It exists to equalise wealth by force
of law ; to make the rich poorer, the poor richer.
A Prince, reputed liberal, says Machiavelli, if
he does not plunder foreign nations, must raise
the money either from his own or his subjects'
purses. "In the first case he is to be frugal ;
in the second he may be as profuse as he pleases,
and baulk no point of liberality." 1 Our modern
philanthropists are not so far out either in their
weapons. Sentiment is invoked — the misery of
the poor, the opulence of the rich ! The Bible
is invoked and the liquor traffic encircled with
flames of hell ; because men and women, adjudged
fit to decide the policy of an empire at the polls,
are thought unfit to decide the expediency of a
glass of liquor, more or less, at the public house.
Christ is invoked — Christ who preached without
tiring the unimportance of worldly wealth, Who
said He was no Judge or Divider, Who kept
free of Caesar and the things of Caesar, Who
spoke always of the inner life, is transformed into
a communistic legislator.
" It is honourable," says Machiavelli, "to seem
mild and merciful and courteous and religious
and sincere, and indeed to be so, provided your
mind be so rectified and prepared that you can
act quite contrary on occasion." 2
1 " The Prince," ch. xvi. 2 Ibid., ch. xviii.

— ] CROMWELL 291
Anyway, whether or not its conclusions be
true, whether or not the Liberal vine has borne
the bitter grapes of Socialism, the Romanes'
lecture on Machiavelli stands in the same cate
gory as its famous predecessor — Huxley's
" Evolution and Ethics." Each is the protest of
a singularly austere moralist against the logical
effect of his own conclusions. Each is the con
fession of an idealist who fears that his followers,
not unreasonably, may mistake him for something
less. Natural selection in politics is as repugnant
to the one as natural selection in science to the
other. In each case it is the argument with
Thrasymachus all over again — that justice is
not after all the interest of the stronger. But,
if the conclusion is so plainly true, the world,
one must admit, has been strangely slow to
discover it.
There was another moralist who lived in the
thick of diplomacy, national and international, and
reached very different conclusions to Machiavelli.
Cromwell died, as he had lived, in the odour of
sanctity. Fiercely hated and fiercely denounced,
accused of unscrupulous ambition, selfishness,
hypocrisy, of all the vices that Machiavelli had
recommended, he died in the assurance that he
was one of the elect, the chosen servant of God.
For two centuries his name lay buried in discredit.
Then Carlyle taught us, more or less justly, that
he was a great Englishman. Lord Morley

292 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN ['838-
follows timidly behind. But, whilst the mazes of
moral casuistry are unravelled, the outstanding
difficulties — Drogheda and Wexford and the sup
pression of that very form of government which
he had fought to obtain — are left unresolved-
The real defence and the only defence for him
is that he was, as he supposed himself, in a
nobler sense than Attila, 'the scourge of God.'
He did his duty, asking no man's praise. He
was ' blest.' But on utilitarian grounds he is
hopelessly condemned. Bismarck and Garibaldi
waded through blood to give their countrymen
stable and effective government. Whose happi
ness, in any but a transcendental sense, did
Cromwell ever promote ?
Gladstone's mind was built after the design of
the Cromwellian maze. He is the other great
theological statesman of English history, and
believed also in something like direct spiritual
inspiration, and became involved too in the bogs
of the Irish morass. As Cromwell had consulted
the Old Testament, so Gladstone consulted the
New. The Sermon on the Mount was to furnish
the principles of government.
" People will perhaps some day wonder," says
Lord Morley in what is perhaps his most search
ing criticism of Gladstone's career, "that many
of those who derided the experiment and
reproached its author, failed to see that they were
making manifest in this a wholesale scepticism

— ] GLADSTONE 293
as to truths that they professed to prize, far
deeper and more destructive than the doubts and
disbeliefs of the Gentiles of the outer court." 1
Whether or not Christianity has been imperilled
by the opposition of the Conservative party to
Gladstonian politics, it is evident that Gladstone
did bring a certain, and as some may think a
reckless, interpretation of the Gospel into a
sphere, where the Gospel had hardly ever before
been preached at all and for which it was
probably never intended. This must always be
the defence of his policy at Majuba and in
Ireland, and it is on this line that Lord Morley's
book (which is what all biographies ought to
be — a brief for the defence) advances to a
vindication of politics that once looked cowardly
and time-serving. Again, and on every page,
the moral interest is dominant.
Historians, says Lord Morley, fall into three
companies. There are annalists, statesmen,
philosophers.2 If this be so, he is himself in the
second rank, with an eye to a place in the third.
The coveted position, however, will hardly be
conceded. Like the other historians in this
collection he was qualified by passion, sentiment,
conviction, to write the history of a particular
phase of life and thought, which he apprehended
mainly through its bearing on his own time.
1 " Life of Gladstone," i. p. 4.
2 " Voltaire," p. 299.

294 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN 1838-
He saw that Liberalism had everywhere cleaned
things up, but he did not recall the parable of the
man, whose abode being swept and garnished,
became the prey of seven evil spirits instead of
one. It is the bane of the man of affairs who
turns to history that he unconsciously supposes,
or works as if he supposed, finality in the political
and economic ideals of his own time. Lecky 's
patient, cautious, and, as Lord Morley would say,
' limpid ' review of the French Liberals in his
" History of England " is more likely to be
received by posterity as the true measure of the
Voltairean circle. But this is only to say that
Lord Morley has the defects of his qualities.
Common opinion would have been less inclined
to believe Voltaire something more than a
blasphemous sceptic, to see in him the rough
model of a great reformer, if his critic had been
more dispassionate. Uncommon opinion would
have missed that strong emotion and elevation of
tone, whicn give to all Lord Morley writes or
says the rare flavour of a bygone vintage.
In another sense, beside the political and the
religious, he is the heir of Voltaire. It was not
the least of the effects of the Liberal movement
that it revolutionised the conception of history.
The " Essai sur les Mceurs " was as great an
epoch in the modern world as the History of
the Peloponnesian War had been in the ancient.
Up till then history meant, for the most part, a

— ] HIS CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 295
tale of great men, diplomacy, and scandal. The
Christian and the courtier had their separate
reasons for liking to have it so. The subjective
treatment of events, of which the perfect example
is contained in the Gospel of St John, was the
bread of the one, as gossip was the bread of the
other. Besides, as Bunyan says, Religion in
those days mostly walked about in satin shoes.
Liberalism threw aside the supremacy of character
along with a mass of foolish, often prurient, detail.
The observation of courts and camps was ex
changed for a study of the moral, economic, and
intellectual movement of society. Men became
important exactly in so far, and only in so far,
as they had perceived the possibilities of their
age, had assisted at the obsequies of the past
and the accouchement of the future. True great
ness, and therefore true morality, was to under
stand your age.
Our vision is so mercifully shaded by the
atmosphere of our prejudices and presuppositions
that we are seldom dazzled by the logic of our
thoughts. The scientific or evolutionary con
ception of society, fully and fairly applied, means
that every man is what circumstances make him ;
every country as advanced as conditions admit
of; every people blessed with the government
it deserves. There is no room for regrets or
reproaches. If we are discontented with present
society, it is simply because we have outstripped

296 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN t'838
or fallen behind the current of our time. When
the drifting multitude are abreast of us again,
or we of them, the scene will change once more,
and the mountains be made low and the valleys
straight. Lord Morley, whatever he may say,
has no right to call history a ' huge pis-aller! 1
Such a view may make for effort, but it makes
also for the belief that mankind lie under some
primaeval curse. The heart and the conscience
may hardly be invoked to fetch the rationalistic
historian out of his troubles. To understand,
to explain, to trace down the long chain of causa
tion the development of a society or of an
individual as the product of a society, is surely
the full extent of his duty.
However this may be, the reader has no reason
to regret Lord Morley's passionate pre-occupation
with the rights and wrongs of every question, old
or new, that he touches. His style gains just
where his consistency loses. Moral judgments,
the parry and thrust of political principles, nourish
and warm the style, make it earnest, forcible,
eloquent. Of him it is exceptionally true that
le style cest I'homme, and in his own literary
advice he says no more, though he gives a fine
echo to the saying : —
"Style after all, one has always to remember,
can never be anything but the reflex of ideas and
1 " On Compromise," pp. 80, 81.

— ] HIS STYLE 297
habits of mind, and when respect for one's own
personal dignity as a ruling and unique element
in character gave way to sentimental love of the
human race often real and often a pretence, old
self-respecting modes of expression went out of
fashion."1 It is a saying of his that style works miracles.
With his weather-eye always on Catholicism —
that incalculable element in human affairs — he
fancies that Newman was able by sheer force of
style to lure the world back on to a quicksand,
which else it had long forsaken.2 The miracles
of Revelation being abandoned, the miracles of
literature begin. So much truth at least the
theory possesses as this — that the tone, temper,
and habit of mind of a whole generation may be
moulded by style, and a man's sentiment formed,
nowadays, as much by the literary manner of
what he reads as by any other mundane influence
whatever. Lord Morley's own writing might
serve for an example. No one can lay down any
book of his without feeling braced, stimulated,
deepened, without becoming more conscious of
the nobility of life. Too greatly suffused with
moral emotion to possess the hard and brilliant
clarity of the French school, with whom he has
lived, his style has a terse argumentative vigour,
which makes it an excellent model for educated
orators, together with a certain stateliness of
motion reminiscent of the grand manner. The
1 "Voltaire," p. 124. 2 "Miscellanies," iv. p. ,6,.

298 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN ['838-
calm which is required of the highest literature,
as of the highest art, is not there. He is too
anxious to have us agree with him, too constant
in pressing his views ; so that what Dryden wrote
of Lucretius, with whom he so deeply sympathises,
has become true of himself : —
"If I am not mistaken, the distinguishing
character of Lucretius, I mean of his soul and
genius, is a certain kind of noble pride and
positive assertion of his own opinions. . . . He
seems to disdain all manner of replies, and is so
confident of his cause that he is beforehand with
his antagonists ; urging for them whatever he
imagined they could say, and leaving them, as he
supposes, without an objection in the future."1
His satire is very keen and bitter. What
could be better for example than this on ' the
man of the world ' ?
" Who does not know this temper of the man
of the world, the worst enemy of the world. His
inexhaustible patience of abuses that only torment
others, his apologetic word for beliefs that may
perhaps not be so precisely true as one might
wish, and institutions that are not altogether so
useful as some might think possible ; his cordiality
towards progress and improvement in a general
way, and his coldness or antipathy to each pro
gressive proposal in particular ; his pygmy hope
that life will one day become somewhat better,
punily shivering by the side of his gigantic con
viction that it might well be infinitely worse."
1 Quoted in Watson's Introduction to his translation of Lucretius,
p. xi.

— ] HIS STRENGTH 299
But he can strike other chords at will, for there
is nothing in this world to equal the strong man
who is not grown hard ; who, if he but knows
his instrument, can touch all notes from fine
rage to unsubdued suffering. The lecture on
" Machiavelli " is probably the best of his pieces.
Many voices, their sound stored in the experience
of a life - time, which has been passed, like
Machiavelli's own, partly in the council chamber
of statesmen, partly in the "ancient courts of
the men of old," blend to adorn and illustrate
the motif. Moliere, Goethe, Tennyson, Butler
and Thucydides, Dante and Michelangelo — all
are there, summoned at will to aid. It is, to
change the metaphor, as if a man were to spread
over the sober warp of his own life a woof of
many tints and colours. For the warp is what
it always was, a love of truth, keen, passionate,
seldom faltering. This is that characteristic
which he has most striven to impress upon his
countrymen. And it is this rare quality which
draws him nearest of all to that school of thought,
to which he owed perhaps more than he knew,
and whose conviction it was that the philo
sophic temper was first enjoined by Christianity.
Newman — for to Newman we must be always
returning — had an idea that Christianity had
brought into the world that earnestness of purpose
and seriousness of mind that are the first requisite

300 LORD MORLEY OF BLACKBURN [»83s
of scientific investigation.! He added a caution
against rashness of assertion, and hastiness of
conclusion, and confident reliance on our powers
of reasoning. Some of us may like to fancy that,
but for a neglect on one side to observe that
caution, two of the loftier minds of the nineteenth
century would have moved in closer accord.
" Burke," says Lord Morley in a vivid sentence,
"has the sacred gift of inspiring men to use a
grave diligence in caring for high things and
in making their lives at once rich and austere."
No less may be said of himself.
1 " Oxf. Univ. Serm." p. 8.

AUTHORITIES 301

AUTHORITIES
The edition of Lord Morley's works used in preparing this
essay is the Eversley, except in the case of the Fourth
Series of "Miscellanies," lately published,
The Romanes lecture on " Machiavelli " is quoted from the
1898 reprint of the first edition: the "Life of Gladstone"
from the 1904 reprint of the first edition.
There is no existing biography of Lord Morley, nor any
article on him of any particular value, so far as the present
writer is aware.

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