NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER

I

In these “uncanonical times,” it may seem somewhat grotesque to go for information about an author’s style to his patron saint. Yet no surer way exists for gaining an insight into the peculiar charm of Cardinal Newman’s writings than through an appeal to St. Philip Neri, the founder of the Congregation of the Oratory, whom Newman chose for his “own special Father and Patron.” In at least two of his discourses, or essays, Newman has analyzed the character and peculiar influence of St. Philip Neri. “Whatever was exact and systematic,” Newman tells us, “pleased him not; he put from him monastic rule and authoritative speech, as David refused the armour of his king. No; he would be but an ordinary individual priest as others; and his weapons should be but unaffected humility and unpretending love. All he did was to be done by the light, and fervour, and convincing eloquence of his personal character and his easy conversation.” In another essay, Newman describes St. Philip’s distrust of “the severity of the Regular” as a means for the control of those whom he sought to subjugate. “Influence,” adroit intimacy, winning intercourse, these were the means by which St. Philip preferred to work on those about him.

Newman’s loving regard for these traits of St. Philip’s genius is a revelation of some of the deepest instincts of his nature,—instincts which must at once be brought into view in any attempt to appreciate his style as a writer of prose. A peculiar personal charm is impressed on all the most characteristic of Newman’s prose-writings,—on whatever he wrote after he had, as an artist, found himself and realized his essential genius. Abstract as his subject may be, he gives it some colour of life and some of the beauty and grace of friendly discourse. Every one knows what charm there is in the talk of a man of the world who puts before his listeners, in picturesque phrases, the variable incidents of actual life as he himself has encountered them. The whim, the personal idiom, the glancing humour, the concrete image, the vivacious disorderliness, the skilful dealing at first hand with glowing human experience, give to talk of this sort a peculiarly winning quality. And the style that in literature mimics afar the colloquial rhythms and the idiom of such familiar talk has also, its peculiar charm. The writer seems to escape from the blank region of authorship, to realize himself before the reader as a friendly face and form, and to communicate himself through the hundred and one subtle signs of eye and voice and gesture and smile that give to actual human intercourse its delight and stimulating power. The extreme form of this colloquial style, where an author is merely amiably garrulous, is not to be found in Newman’s writings; Newman’s temper was, after all, too academic for this, and his subjects were too abstract and difficult. Rarely, however, have topics as speculative as are many of Newman’s been treated with so much of the wayward charm and pliant grace of friendly discourse as Newman reaches. His style, at its best, has the urbanity, the affability, the winning adroitness, even the half-careless desultoriness of the familiar talk of a man of the world with his fellows.

Yet it is not this colloquial grace by itself that gives to Newman’s discussions of abstract topics their peculiar distinction; it is rather his reconciliation of the charm of colloquial freedom with the demands of logical method and thoroughness of treatment. Garrulity to no purpose is usually easy enough. But the peculiarity of Newman’s style and method is that, with all their apparent casualness, they lead the reader to a complete and essentially logical command of the topic under discussion. When he chose, Newman was absolute master of the severe beauty of rational discourse,—of the beauty of that kind of discourse that disdains to follow any associations save those of logic,—discusses with fine economic precision just the aspects of truth that right reason detects as essential to the question in hand, and is everywhere formally correct, systematic, and dignified. His earliest work is often austerely wrought in accordance with this ideal. Ultimately, however, the essential charm that made him so winning in personal intercourse passed over into his prose, and conveyed into it the warmth, and elasticity, and colour of life. Yet this change involved no real sacrifice of structure or loss of firmness in the texture of his thought. And for the trained student of literary method much of the surpassing charm of Newman’s work is due to the possibility of finding in it, on analysis, a continual victorious union of logical strenuousness with the grace and ease and charm of a colloquial manner and idiom. This victory is so easily won as to seem something by the way; but the student and analyst knows that it is the result of rare tact, finely disciplined instinct, exquisite rhetorical insight and foresight, and extraordinary luminousness and largeness of thought.

The very perfection of Newman’s rhetorical manner has exposed him to some unpleasant charges of insincerity. It is not strange that in the midst of a people like the English, who are perhaps somewhat affectedly straightforward and pretentiously downright, Newman should, now and then, have suffered for his adroitness and grace. The bluff, impetuous man is proverbially ready to interpret subtlety as duplicity, and to rebuke reticence and indirectness as deceit and hypocrisy. Prejudice of this sort was probably the real cause of Canon Kingsley’s famous attack upon Newman. He had an instinctive dislike of Newman’s sinuousness and suppleness, and, without pausing to analyze very carefully, he spoke out fiercely against Newman’s whole work as containing a special variety of ecclesiastical hypocrisy. The charge was the more plausible inasmuch as there is unquestionably a certain debased ecclesiastical manner whose cheaply insinuating suavity might, by hasty observers, be confused with Newman’s bearing and style. Yet the injustice of this confusion and the unfairness of Kingsley’s charges become plain after a moment’s analysis.

In spite of Newman’s ease and affability, a fair-minded reader feels, throughout his writings, when he stops to consider, an underlying suggestion of uncompromising strength and unwavering conviction. He is sure that the author is really revealing himself frankly and unreservedly, notwithstanding his apparent self-effacement, and that he is imposing his own conclusions, persuasively and constrainingly. Moreover, the reader is sure that, however adroitly Newman may be developing his thesis, with an eye to the skilful manipulation of his readers’ prejudices, he would at any moment give a point-blank answer to a point-blank question. There is never any real doubt of Newman’s courage and manly English temper, or of his readiness to meet an opponent fairly on the grounds of debate. In the last analysis, it is this fundamental sincerity of tone and this all-pervasive, but unobtrusive self-assertion that preserve Newman’s style from the undue flexibility and the insincerity of the debased ecclesiastical style, just as his unfailing good taste preserves him from its cheap suavity or unctuousness.

But Newman’s adroitness and rhetorical skill have exposed him to charges of still another kind, charges that concern the very substance of his thought and intellectual life, and charges that have been urged with much greater dialectical skill than Canon Kingsley could attain to. In a general examination of Newman’s theories, Mr. E. A. Abbott[16] has accused him of systematically doctoring truth, and of having elaborated, though perhaps unconsciously, various ingenious methods for inveigling unsuspecting readers into the acceptance of doubtful propositions, methods for which Mr. Abbott has devised satirical names, the Art of Lubrication, the Art of Oscillation, the Art of Assimilation. He does not assert that Newman consciously palters with truth, or tries to make the worse appear the better reason. But he urges that Newman was constitutionally fonder of other things than of truth, that he desired, with an over-mastering strength, to establish certain conclusions, and that he persuaded himself of their correctness by a series of manœuvres which really involved insincere logic.

Here, again, the charges that are made against Newman seem the result of prejudice and temperamental hostility on the part of his critic. Mr. Abbott is a bit of a formalist, a Caledonian intellect, a thorough-going positivist, a thinker for whom the only truth that exists is truth that can be scientifically verified. He is quite unable to comprehend, or, at any rate, to tolerate, Newman’s mental constitution and his resulting methods of conceiving of life and relating himself to its facts. Truth is to Newman a much subtler matter, a much more elusive substance, than it is to the positivist, to the mere intellectual dealer in facts and in figures; it cannot be packed into syllogisms as pills are packed into a box; it cannot be conveyed into the human system with the simple directness which the Laputa wiseacre aimed at who was for teaching his pupils geometry by feeding them on paper duly inscribed with geometrical figures. Moreover, language is an infinitely treacherous medium; words are so “false,” so capable of endless change, that one is “loath to prove reason with them.” Readers, too, are widely diverse, and are open to countless other appeals than that of sheer logic. Because of such considerations as these, Newman is continually studious of effect in his writings; he is intensely conscious of his audience; and he is always striving to win a way for his convictions, and aiming to insinuate them into the minds and hearts of his hearers by gently persuasive means.

But all this by no means implies any real carelessness of truth on Newman’s part, or any sacrifice of truth to expediency. Truth is difficult of attainment, and hard to transmit; all the more strenuously does Newman set himself to trace it out in its obscurity and remoteness, and to reveal it in all its intricacies. Moreover, subtle and elusive as it may be, it is nevertheless something tangible and describable and defensible; something, furthermore, of the acquisition of which Newman can give a very definite account; something as far as possible from mere misty sentiment, and something, furthermore, to be strenuously asserted and defended.

Sympathetic and patient readers of Newman, then, can hardly doubt his essential mental integrity or his courage and readiness to be frank, even in those passages or in those works where the search for the subtlest shades of truth, or the desire to avoid clashing needlessly on prejudice, or the wish to win a favourable hearing, takes the author most indirectly and tortuously towards his end. It is his underlying manliness of mind and frank readiness to give an account of himself that prevent Newman’s prevailing subtlety, adroitness, and suavity from leaving on the mind of an unprejudiced reader any impression of timorousness or disingenuousness.

II

In what has been said of Newman’s realization of the elusive nature of truth and of the great difficulty of securing a welcome for it in the minds and hearts of the mass of men lies the key to what is most distinctive in his methods. He was a great rhetorician, and whatever he produced shows evidence, on analysis, of having been constructed with the utmost niceness of instinct and deftness of hand. He himself frankly admitted his rhetorical bent. Writing to Hurrell Froude in 1836, about the management of the Tractarian agitation, he says, “You and Keble are the philosophers, and I the rhetorician.”[17] And in a somewhat earlier letter he speaks of his aptitude for rhetoric in even stronger terms: “I have a vivid perception of the consequences of certain admitted principles, have a considerable intellectual capacity of drawing them out, have the refinement to admire them, and a rhetorical or histrionic power to represent them.”[18]

This rhetorical skill was partly natural and instinctive, and partly the result of training. From his earliest years as a student, Newman had been conspicuous for the subtlety and flexibility of his intelligence, for his readiness in assuming for speculative purposes the most diverse points of view, and for his insight into temperaments and his comprehension of their modifying action on the white light of truth. With this admirable equipment for effective rhetorical work, he came directly under the influence, in Oriel College, of two exceptionally great rhetoricians, Dr. Copleston, for many years Provost of Oriel, and Whately, one of its most influential Fellows. Copleston was a famous controversialist and dialectician, who had long been regarded as the chief champion of the University against the attacks of outsiders. His Advice to a Young Reviewer with a Specimen of the Art (1807), had turned into ridicule the airs and pretensions of the young Edinburgh reviewers and had led them into severe strictures on University methods, against which attacks, however, Dr. Copleston had vigorously defended Oxford in various publications, to the satisfaction of all University men. He was the Provost of Oriel during the first year of Newman’s residence there, and suggestions of the influence of his ideas and methods are to be found throughout the early pages of the Apologia and the Autobiographical Memoir. Still more decisive, however, was the influence of a yet more famous rhetorician, Dr. Whately, whose lectures on logic and on rhetoric remained almost down to the present day standard text-books in those subjects. Whately was also renowned as a controversialist, and his Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Buonaparte was perhaps the cleverest and most famous piece of ironical argumentation produced in England during the first quarter of the century. Newman, for several of his most impressionable years, was intimately associated with Whately. “He emphatically opened my mind,” Newman says in the Apologia, “and taught me to think and to use my reason.” Under the influence of these two masters of rhetoric and redoubtable controversialists Newman’s natural aptitude for rhetorical methods was encouraged and fostered, so that he became a perfect adept in all the arts of exposition and argumentation and persuasion.

Whatever work of Newman’s, then, we take up, we may be sure that its construction will repay careful analysis. In trying to present any set of truths, Newman was consciously confronting a delicate psychological problem; he was aware of the elements that entered into the problem; he knew what special difficulties he had to face because of the special nature of the truth he was dealing with,—its abstractness, or complexity, or novelty. He had measured, also, the precise degree of resistance he must expect because of the peculiar prejudices or preoccupations of his readers. And the shape which his discussion finally took—the particular methods that he followed—were the result of a deliberate adaptation of means to ends; they were the methods that his trained rhetorical instinct and his insight into the truth he was handling and into the temperaments and intelligences he was to address himself to dictated as most likely to persuade.

Although ordinarily Newman does not explain the method he follows or comment on the difficulties of his problem, he has, in his Apologia, departed from this rule, and taken his readers into his confidence. In the first thirty pages of this self-justificatory piece of writing, he sets forth minutely the prejudices against which he must make his way, considers various possible modes of overcoming these prejudices, notes the precise reasons that finally lead him to the actual plan he chooses, and is entirely explicit as to the elaborate design that underlies and controls the seeming desultoriness of his whole discussion.

The problem which in this case confronted Newman was briefly as follows. He had been charged by Kingsley with teaching “lying on system.” He had protested against the charge and had obtained a half-hearted apology. Later, however, the charge had been reiterated more formally, and with the added taunt that as Newman recommended systematic dissimulation no one could be expected to accept his self-exculpating word. These charges fell in, as Newman recognized, first, with the general trend of British prejudice against Roman Catholics, and, secondly, with the particular prejudice against Newman himself that sprang from his early attempts to make the Anglican Church more Catholic, and his subsequent secession to Rome. How, then, was Newman to persuade the public of Kingsley’s injustice and his own innocence? He saw at once that to deal with each separate charge would be mere waste of time; to prove that in a special case he had not lied or recommended lying would carry him no whit towards his end, as long as contemptuous distrust remained the dominant mood of the British mind towards himself and his party. First of all, he must conquer this mood; he must overthrow the presumption against him, and win for his cause at least such an unbiassed hearing as is accorded to the ordinary man upon trial whose record has been hitherto clean; then he might hope to secure for his particular denials a universal scope. The method that he chose in order to win his readers was admirably conceived. He would put himself vitally and almost dramatically before them; he would bring them within the actual sound of his voice and the glance of his eye; he would let them follow him through the long course of his years as student, tutor, preacher, and leader, and come to know him as intimately as those few friends had known him with whom he had lived most freely. Then, he would ask his readers, when he had put his personality before them in its many shifting, but continuous aspects, and with all the intense persuasiveness of a dramatic portrayal, whether they were ready to believe of the man they had thus watched through the round of his duties that he was a liar. Of the peculiar power which Newman could count on exerting in thus appealing to his personal charm he was, of course, unable to speak in his Preface. In truth, however, he was having recourse to an influence which had always been potent whenever it had had a chance to make itself felt. Throughout his life at Oxford it was true of his relations to others that “friends unasked, unhoped” had “come,”—all men who met him falling almost inevitably under the sway of his winning and commanding personality. Newman was, therefore, well advised when he resolved to reveal himself to the world and to trust to the conciliating effect of this self-revelation to prepare for his specific denial of Kingsley’s charges.

In accordance with this purpose and plan, the Apologia pro Vita Sua, or History of his Religious Opinions, was written; and for these reasons his answer to certain definite charges of equivocation and systematic and elaborate misrepresentation was so shaped as to include in its scope the story of his whole life. Of the 384 pages of the original edition of the Apologia, only the last 93 pages are devoted to the actual refutation of Kingsley’s charges; the 238 pages that precede are merely persuasive, and simply prepare the way for the final defence. Probably in no other piece of writing is the actual demonstration so curiously small in proportion to the means that are taken to make the logic effective. Of course, it may be urged in reply to this view of the construction of the Apologia, that to look at the book as purely a reply to Kingsley, is to judge it from an arbitrary and artificial point of view, and hence to distort it inevitably and throw its parts out of proportion; that the real aim of the book was simply and sincerely autobiographic, and that, regarding the book as frank autobiography, the critic need find nothing strange in the proportioning of its parts. In answer to this objection, it should be noted that the last pages of the book deal directly and argumentatively with “Mr. Kingsley’s accusations”; that the transition in Part VII. from the history of Newman’s opinions to the discussion of the theory of truth-telling is almost imperceptible; and, finally, that Newman himself has declared in the early pages of the book that the sole reason for his self-revelations is his wish to clear away misconceptions, to win once again the confidence of that English public that had long been distrustful of him, and to make widely effective his refutation of Kingsley’s charges. The book, then, is fairly to be described as an enormously elaborate and ingenious piece of special pleading to prepare the way for a few syllogisms that have now become grotesquely insignificant.

It has been worth while to lay great stress on this disproportion between persuasion and demonstration in the Apologia, because this disproportion illustrates, with almost the over-emphasis of caricature, certain of Newman’s fundamental beliefs and resulting tricks of method. First and foremost, it illustrates the slight esteem in which he held the formal logic of the schools and syllogistic demonstrations. Not that he failed to recognize the value of analysis and logical demonstration as verifying processes; but he unhesitatingly subordinated these processes to those by which truth is originally won, and to those also by which truth is persuasively inculcated.

In a sermon on Implicit and Explicit Reason, he distinguishes with great elaborateness between the method by which the mind makes its way almost intuitively to the possession of a new truth, or set of truths, and the subsequent analysis by which it takes account of this half-instinctive original process and renders the moments of the process self-conscious and articulate. His description of the intellect delicately and swiftly feeling its way towards truth may well be quoted entire: “The mind ranges to and fro, and spreads out and advances forward with a quickness which has become a proverb, and a subtlety and versatility which baffle investigation. It passes on from point to point, gaining one by some indication; another on a probability; then availing itself of an association; then falling back on some received law; next seizing on testimony; then committing itself to some popular impression, or some inward instinct, or some obscure memory; and thus it makes progress not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff, who, by quick eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends, how, he knows not himself, by personal endowments and by practice, rather than by rule, leaving no track behind him, and unable to teach another. It is not too much to say that the stepping by which great geniuses scale the mountain of truth is as unsafe and precarious to men in general as the ascent of a skilful mountaineer up a literal crag. It is a way which they alone can take; and its justification lies alone in their success. And such mainly is the way in which all men, gifted or not gifted, commonly reason—not by rule, but by an inward faculty. Reasoning, then, or the exercise of reason, is a living, spontaneous energy within us, not an art.”[19]

But not only is syllogistic reasoning not the original process by which truth is attained; it is in no way essential to the validity or completeness of the process. “Clearness in argument certainly is not indispensable to reasoning well. Accuracy in stating doctrines or principles is not essential to feeling and acting upon them. The exercise of analysis is not necessary to the integrity of the process analyzed. The process of reasoning is complete in itself, and independent.”[20]

Finally, logical demonstration has relatively little value as a means of winning a hearing for new truth, of securing its entrance into the popular consciousness, and of giving it a place among the determining powers of life. “Logic makes but a sorry rhetoric with the multitude; first shoot round corners, and you may not despair of converting by a syllogism.” Men must be inveigled into the acceptance of truth; they cannot be driven to accept it at the point of the syllogism. “The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. People influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us.”

The application of all this,—particularly of what Newman says touching the persuasiveness of a personal appeal,—to the whole method of the Apologia hardly needs pointing out. The work is, from first to last, intensely personal in its tone and matter, persuasive because of its concreteness, its dramatic vividness, the modulations of the speaker’s voice, the sincerity and dignity of his look and bearing. Logic, of course, gives coherence to the discussions. The processes of thought by which Newman moved from point to point in his theological development are consistently set forth; but the convincing quality of the book comes from its embodiment of a life, not from its systematization of a theory.

In accordance with this general character of the book is its tone throughout; its style is the perfection of informality and easy colloquialism. Now and then, in describing his ideas on specially complicated questions, Newman makes use of numbered propositions, and proceeds, for the time being, with the precaution and precision of the dialectician. But, for the most part, he is as unconstrained and apparently fortuitous in his presentation of ideas as if he were merely emulating Montaigne in confidential self-revelation, and were guided by no controversial purpose. Perhaps no writer has surpassed, or even equalled, Newman in combining apparent desultoriness of treatment with real definiteness of purpose and clairvoyance of method.

III

Another admirable example of Newman’s least formal, and most characteristic, method may be found in his series of papers on the Rise and Progress of Universities. Here, again, there is apparent desultoriness, or, at most, a careless following of historical sequence. One after another, with what seems like a haphazard choice, Newman describes a half-dozen of the most famous universities of the past, explains popularly their organization, methods, and aims, entertaining the reader meanwhile with such superlative pieces of rhetoric as the description of Attica and Athens, and with such dramatic episodes as that of Abelard. Yet underneath this apparent caprice runs the controlling purpose of putting the reader in possession, through concrete illustrations, of the complete idea of a typically effective university. Each special school that Newman describes illustrates some essential attribute of the ideal school; and incidentally the reader, who is all the time beguiled, from chapter to chapter, by Newman’s picturesque detail, takes into his mind the various features, and ultimately the complete image, of the perfect type.

In the series of Discourses on the Idea of a University, Newman’s method is more formal and his tone more controversial. Newman was this time addressing a distinctly scholarly audience, and was treating of a series of abstract topics, on which he was called to pronounce in his character of probable vice-chancellor of the proposed university. Accordingly, throughout these Discourses he is consistently academic in tone and manner, and formal and elaborate in method. He lays out his work with somewhat mechanical precision; he sketches his plan strictly beforehand; he defines terms and refines upon possible meanings, and guards at each step against misinterpretations; he pauses often to come to an understanding with his hearers about the progress already made, and to consider what line of advance severe logical method next dictates. In all these ways, he is deliberate, explicit, and demonstrative. Yet despite this strenuous regard for system and method, not even here does Newman become crabbedly scholastic or pedantically over-formal; the result of his strenuousness is, rather, a finely conscientious circumspection of demeanour and an academic dignity of bearing. There is something irresistibly impressive in the perfect poise with which he moves through the intricacies of the many abstractions that his subject involves. He exhibits each aspect of his subject in just the right perspective and with just the requisite minuteness of detail; he leads us unerringly from each point of view to that which most naturally follows; he keeps us always aware of the relation of each aspect to the total sum of truth he is trying to help us to grasp; and so, little by little, he secures for us that perfect command of an intellectual region, in its concrete facts and in its abstract relations, which exposition aims to make possible. These Discourses are as fine an example as exists in English of the union of strict method with charm of style in the treatment of an abstract topic.

In the Development of Christian Doctrine and the Grammar of Assent the severity of Newman’s method is somewhat greater, as is but natural in strictly scientific treatises. Yet even in these abstract discussions his style retains an inalienable charm, due to the luminousness of the atmosphere, the wide-ranging command of illustrations, the unobtrusively tropical phrasing, and the steady harmonious sweep of the periods. Few books on equally abstract topics are as easy reading.

Newman’s methods as a controversialist may advantageously be studied in his Present Position of Catholics in England,—a work that contains some of his most ingenious and caustic irony. In plan and construction, these discourses illustrate once more Newman’s consummate skill in adapting his method to the matter in hand. His purpose in this case is to right the Roman Catholic Church with the English nation, to exhibit the Roman Catholics as he knows them to be, a conscientious, honourable, patriotic body of men, and to put an end once for all, if possible, to the long tradition of calumny that has persecuted them. Such is his problem. He sets about its solution characteristically. He does not undertake to demonstrate the truth of Roman Catholic doctrines, or, by direct evidence and argument, to refute the wild charges of hypocrisy and corruption which Protestants are habitually making against Roman Catholics. His methods are much subtler than these and also much more comprehensive and final. He sets himself to analyze Protestant prejudice, and to destroy it by resolving it into its elements. He takes it up historically, and exhibits its origin in an atmosphere of intense partisan conflict, and its development in the midst of peculiarly favourable intellectual and moral conditions; he shows that it is political in its origin and has been inwrought into the very fibre of English national life: “English Protestantism is the religion of the throne; it is represented, realized, taught, transmitted in the succession of monarchs and an hereditary aristocracy. It is religion grafted upon loyalty; and its strength is not in argument, not in fact, not in the unanswerable controversialist, not in an apostolic succession, not in sanction of Scripture—but in a royal road to faith, in backing up a King whom men see, against a Pope whom they do not see. The devolution of its crown is the tradition of its creed; and to doubt its truth is to be disloyal towards its Sovereign. Kings are an Englishman’s saints and doctors; he likes somebody or something at which he can cry, ‘huzzah,’ and throw up his hat.”

To hate a “Romanist,” then, is as natural for John Bull as to hate a Frenchman, and to libel him is a matter of patriotism. The Englishman’s romantic imagination has for generations been spinning myths of Catholic misdoing to satisfy these deep instinctive animosities. Moreover, many other typical English qualities, in addition to loyalty and patriotism, have contributed to foster and develop this Protestant prejudice. Such are the controlling practical interests of the middle-class English, their content with compromise-working schemes, and their contempt for abstractions and subtleties; their shuddering dislike of innovation; their well-meaning obstinacy in ignorance, and their heroic adherence to familiar, though undeniable error; their insularity; their hatred of foreigners in general, and their frenzied fear of the Pope in particular. With unfailing adroitness of suggestion, Newman makes clear how these national traits, and many others closely related to them, have coöperated to originate and develop Protestant hatred of Roman Catholicism. His mastery of the details of social life and of motives of action is in this discussion of English history and contemporary life specially conspicuous. Every phase of peculiarly English thought and feeling is present to him; every intricacy of the curiously subterranean British national temperament is traced out. And the result is that prejudice is explained out of existence. The intense hostility that seems so primitive an instinct as to justify itself like the belief in God or in an outer world, is resolved into the expression of a vast mass of petty, and often discreditable instincts, and so loses all its validity in losing its apparent primitiveness and mystery.

Such is the general plan and scope of Newman’s attack on Protestant prejudice; in carrying out the plan and making his attack brilliantly effective, he shows inexhaustible ingenuity and unwearied invention. He uses fables, allegories, and elaborate pieces of irony; he develops an unending series of picturesque illustrations of Protestant prejudice, drawn from all sources, past and present; he sets curious traps for this prejudice, catches it at unawares, and shows it up to his readers in guises they can hardly defend; he plays skilfully upon the instincts that lie at its root, and by clever manipulation makes them declare themselves in a twinkling in favour of some aspect of Roman Catholicism. In short, he uses all the rhetorical devices of which he is master to win a hearing from the half-hostile, to beguile the unwilling, to amuse the captious, and, finally, to insinuate into the minds of his readers an all-permeating mood of contempt for Protestant narrowness and bigotry, and of open-minded appreciation of the merits of Roman Catholics.

IV

For still another reason the lectures on the Present Position of Catholics are specially interesting to a student of Newman’s methods; they illustrate exceptionally well his skill in the use of irony. To the genuine rhetorician there is something specially attractive in the duplicity of irony, because of the opportunity it offers of playing with points of view, of juggling with phrases, of showing virtuosity in the manipulation of both thoughts and words. Newman was too much of a rhetorician not to feel this fascination. Moreover, he had learned from his study of Copleston and Whately the possibilities of irony as a controversial weapon. Copleston’s Advice to a Young Reviewer, and Whately’s Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Buonaparte were typical specimens of academic irony, where, with impressive dignity and suavity and the most plausible simplicity and candour, the writers, while seemingly advocating a certain policy, or theory, or set of conclusions, were really sneering throughout at a somewhat similar policy or theory—that of their opponents—and laying it open to helpless ridicule.

One of the most noteworthy characteristics of Newman’s irony—and in this point his irony resembled that of his masters—was its positive argumentative value. Often an elaborate piece of irony is chiefly destructive; it turns cleverly into ridicule the general attitude of mind of the writer’s opponents, but makes no attempt to supply a substitute for the faith it destroys. Swift’s irony is usually of this character. It is intensely ill-natured, even savage, and is so extravagant that it sometimes defeats its own end as argument. Its hauteur and bitterness produce a reaction in the mind of the reader, and force him to distrust the judgment and sanity of a man who can be so inveterately and fiercely insolent. Its indictment is so sweeping and its mood so cynical, that the reader, though he is bullied out of any regard for the ideas that Swift attacks, is repelled from Swift himself, and made to hate his notions as much as he despises those of Swift’s opponents. Moreover, full of duplicity and innuendo as it is, its innuendoes are often merely disguised sneers, and not suggestions of genuinely valid reasons why the opinions or prejudices which the writer is assailing should be abandoned. In the Modest Proposal and the Argument against Abolishing Christianity, for example, the irony reduces to one long sneer at the prejudice, the selfishness, and the cruelty of Yahoo human nature; there is very little positive argument in behalf of the oppressed Irish on the one hand, or in favour of Christianity on the other.

Newman’s irony, on the contrary, is subtle, intellectual, and suggestive. It is positive in its insinuation of actual reasons for abandoning prejudice against Roman Catholics; it is tirelessly adroit, and adjusts itself delicately to every part of the opposing argument; it is suggestive of new ideas, and not only makes the reader see the absurdity of some time-worn prejudice, but hints at its explanation and is ready with a new opinion to take its place. In tone, too, it is very different from Swift’s irony; it is not enraged and blindly savage, but more like the best French irony—self-possessed, suave, and oblique. Newman addresses himself with unfailing skill to the prejudices of those whom he is trying to move, and carries his readers with him in a way that Swift was too contemptuous to aim at. Newman’s irony wins the wavering, while it routs the hostile. This is the double task it proposes to itself.

An example of his irony at its best may be found in the amusing piece of declamation against the British Constitution and John Bullism which Newman puts into the mouth of a Russian count. The passage occurs in a lecture on the Present Position of Catholics, which was delivered just before the war with Russia, when English jealousy of Russia and contempt for Russian prejudice and ignorance were most intense. It was, of course, on these feelings of jealousy and contempt that Newman skilfully played when he represented the Russian count as grotesquely misinterpreting the British Constitution and Blackstone’s Commentaries, and as charging them with irreligion and blasphemy. His satirical portrayal of the Russian and the clever manipulation by which he forces the count to exhibit his stores of ungentle dulness and his stock of malignant prejudice delighted every ordinary British reader, and threw him into a pleasant glow of self-satisfaction, and of sympathy with the author; now this was the very mood, as Newman was well aware, in which, if ever, the anti-Catholic reader might be led to question with himself whether, after all, he was perfectly informed about Roman Catholicism, or whether he did not, like the Russian count, take most of his knowledge at second-hand and inherit most of his prejudice. Throughout this passage the ingenuity is conspicuous with which Newman makes use of English dislike of Russia and loyalty to Queen and Constitution; the passage everywhere exemplifies the adroitness, the flexibility, the persuasiveness, and the far-reaching calculation of Newman’s irony.

Indeed, this elaborateness and self-consciousness, and deliberateness of aim, are perhaps, at times, limitations on the success of his irony; it is somewhat too cleverly planned and a trifle over-elaborate. In these respects it contrasts disadvantageously with French irony, which, at its best, is so delightfully by the way, so airily unexpected, so accidental, and yet so dextrously fatal. It would be an instructive study in literary method to compare Newman’s ironical defence of Roman Catholicism in the passage already referred to with Montesquieu’s ironical attack upon the same system in the Lettres Persanes.

V

When we turn from Newman’s methods to his style in the narrower meaning of the term, we still find careful elaboration and ingenious calculation of effect, although here, again, the conscientious workmanship becomes evident only on reflection, and the general impression is that of easy and instinctive mastery. Nevertheless, Newman wrought out all that he wrote, with much patient recasting and revising. “It is simply the fact,” he tells a friend in one of his letters, “that I have been obliged to take great pains with everything I have written, and I often write chapters over and over again, besides innumerable corrections and interlinear additions.... I think I have never written for writing’s sake; but my one and single desire and aim has been to do what is so difficult: viz., to express clearly and exactly my meaning; this has been the motive principle of all my corrections and rewritings.”[21]

It is perhaps this sincerity of aim and this sacrifice of the decorative impulse in the strenuous search for adequacy of expression that keep out of Newman’s writing every trace of artificiality. Sophisticated as is his style, it is never mannered. There is no pretence, no flourish, no exhibition of rhetorical resources for their own sake. The most impressive and the most richly imaginative passages in his prose come in because he is betrayed into them in his conscientious pursuit of all the aspects of the truth he is illustrating. Moreover, they are curiously congruous in tone with the most colloquial parts of his writing. There is no sudden jar perceptible when, in the midst of his ordinary discourse, one chances upon these passages of essential beauty; perfect continuity of texture is characteristic of his work. This perfect continuity of texture illustrates both the all-pervasive fineness and nobleness of Newman’s temper, which constantly holds the elements of moral and spiritual beauty in solution, and which imprints a certain distinction upon even the commonplace, and also the flexibility and elasticity of his style, which enables him with such perfect gradation of effect to change imperceptibly from the lofty to the common. An admirable example of this exquisite gradation of values and continuity of texture may be found in the third chapter of Newman’s Rise and Progress of Universities, where he describes Athens and the region round about as the ideal site for a university. Alike in the earlier paragraphs that are merely expository, and in the later ones that portray the beauty of Attica, his style is simple and easily colloquial; and when from the splendid imaginative picture that his descriptive sentences call up, he turns again suddenly to exposition, the transition causes no perceptible jar. The same flexibility and smoothness of style is exemplified in a passage in the third of the discourses on University Teaching, where he defines his conception of the Science of Theology. In this passage, the change from a scientific explanation of the duties of the theologian to the almost impassioned eloquence of the ascription of goodness and might to the Deity is effected with no shock or sense of discontinuity.

In its freedom from artificiality and in its perfect sincerity, Newman’s style contrasts noticeably with the style of a great rhetorician from whom he nevertheless took many hints—De Quincey. Of his careful study of De Quincey’s style there can be no question. In the passage on the Deity, to which reference has just been made, there are unmistakable reminiscences of De Quincey in the iteration of emphasis on an important word, in the frequent use of inversions, in the rise and fall of the periods, and, indeed, in the subtle rhythmic effects throughout. The piece of writing, however, where the likeness to De Quincey and the imitation of his manner and music are most evident is the sermon on the Fitness of the Glories of Mary,—that piece of Newman’s prose, it should be noted, which is least defensible against the charge of artificiality and undue ornateness. A passage near the close of the sermon best illustrates the points in question: “And therefore she died in private. It became Him, who died for the world, to die in the world’s sight; it became the Great Sacrifice to be lifted up on high, as a light that could not be hid. But she, the Lily of Eden, who had always dwelt out of the sight of man, fittingly did she die in the garden’s shade, and amid the sweet flowers in which she had lived. Her departure made no noise in the world. The Church went about her common duties, preaching, converting, suffering. There were persecutions, there was fleeing from place to place, there were martyrs, there were triumphs. At length the rumour spread abroad that the Mother of God was no longer upon earth. Pilgrims went to and fro; they sought for her relics, but they found them not; did she die at Ephesus? or did she die at Jerusalem? reports varied; but her tomb could not be pointed out, or if it was found, it was open; and instead of her pure and fragrant body, there was a growth of lilies from the earth which she had touched. So inquirers went home marvelling, and waiting for further light.”[22]

Though the cadences of Newman’s prose are rarely as marked as here, a subtle musical beauty runs elusively through it all. Not that there is any of the sing-song of pseudo-poetic prose. The cadences are always wide-ranging and delicately shifting, with none of the halting iteration and feeble sameness of half-metrical work. Moreover, the rhythms, subtly pervasive as they are, and even symbolic of the mood of the passage as they often prove to be, never compel direct recognition, but act merely as a mass of undistinguished under-and over-tones like those which give to a human voice depth and tenderness and suggestiveness.

Newman understood perfectly the symbolic value of rhythm and the possibility of imposing upon a series of simple words, by delicately sensitive adjustment, a power over the feelings and the imagination like that of an incantation. Several of the passages already quoted or referred to illustrate his instinctive adaptation of cadence to meaning and tone; another passage, in which this same adaptation is exemplified, occurs towards the close of the Apologia, where Newman describes the apparent moral chaos in human history. For subtlety of modulation, however, and symbolic suggestiveness, perhaps the tender leave-taking with which the Apologia concludes is the most beautiful piece of prose that Newman has written: “I have closed this history of myself with St. Philip’s name upon St. Philip’s feast-day; and having done so, to whom can I more suitably offer it, as a memorial of affection and gratitude, than to St. Philip’s sons, my dearest brothers of this House, the Priests of the Birmingham Oratory, Ambrose St. John, Henry Austin Mills, Henry Bittleston, Edward Caswall, William Paine Neville, and Henry Ignatius Dudley Rider, who have been so faithful to me; who have been so sensitive of my needs; who have been so indulgent to my failings; who have carried me through so many trials; who have grudged no sacrifice, if I have asked for it; who have been so cheerful under discouragements of my causing; who have done so many good works, and let me have the credit of them;—with whom I have lived so long, with whom I hope to die.

“And to you especially, dear Ambrose St. John, whom God gave me, when He took every one else away; who are the link between my old life and my new; who have now for twenty-one years been so devoted to me, so patient, so zealous, so tender; who have let me lean so hard upon you; who have watched me so narrowly; who have never thought of yourself, if I was in question.

“And in you I gather up and bear in memory those familiar, affectionate companions and counsellors, who, in Oxford, were given to me, one after another, to be my daily solace and relief; and all those others, of great name and high example, who were my thorough friends, and showed me true attachment in times long past; and also those many younger men, whether I knew them or not, who have never been disloyal to me by word or deed; and of all these, thus various in their relations to me, those more especially who have since joined the Catholic Church.

“And I earnestly pray for this whole company, with a hope against hope, that all of us, who once were so united, and so happy in our union, may even now be brought at length, by the Power of the Divine Will, into One Fold and under One Shepherd.”

VI

The careful gradation of values in Newman’s style and the far-reaching sweep of his periods connect themselves closely with another of his noteworthy characteristics—his breadth of handling. He manipulates with perfect ease and precision vast masses of facts, and makes them all contribute with unerring coöperation to the production of a single effect. However minute his detail,—and his liking for concreteness which will be presently illustrated often incites him to great minuteness,—he is careful not to confuse his composition, destroy the perspective, or lose sight of total effect. The largeness of his manner and the certainty of his handling place him at once among really great constructive artists.

Against this assertion it may be urged that in his fiction it is just this breadth of effect and constructive skill that are most noticeably lacking; that each of his novels, whatever its merits in places, is unsuccessful as a whole, and leaves a blurred impression. This must at once be granted. But, after all, it is in his theoretical, or moral, or historical work that the real Newman is to be found; in such work he is much more himself, much more thoroughly alive and efficient than in his stories, which, though cleverly turned out, were, after all, things by the way, were amateurish in execution, and never completely called forth his strength. Moreover, even in his novels, we find occasionally the integrating power of his imagination remarkably illustrated. The description in Callista of the invading and ravaging locusts is admirably sure in its treatment of detail and even and impressive in tone; the episode of Gurta’s madness is powerfully conceived, is swift and sure in its action, and is developed with admirable subordination and colouring of detail and regard to climax.

On the whole, however, it must be granted that in his fiction Newman’s sense of total effect and his constructive skill are least conspicuous. In his abstract discussions they never fail him. First and foremost, they show themselves in the plan of each work as a whole. The treatment is invariably symmetrical and exhaustive; part answers to part with the precision and the delicacy of adjustment of a work of art. Each part is conscious of the whole and has a vitally loyal relation to it, so that the needs and purposes of the whole organism seem present as controlling and centralizing instincts in every chapter, paragraph, and sentence.

In his use of elaborate illustrations for the sake of securing concreteness and sensuous beauty, Newman shows this same integrating power of imagination. In the long illustrations, which often take almost the proportions of episodes in the epical progress of his argument or exposition, the reader has no sense of bewilderment or uncertainty of aim; the strength of Newman’s mind and purpose subdues his endlessly diverse material, and compels it into artistic coherence and vital unity; all details are coloured in harmony with the dominant tone of the piece, and reënforce a predetermined mood. When a reader commits himself to one of Newman’s discussions, he must resign himself to him body and soul, and be prepared to live and move and have his being in the medium of Newman’s thought, and, moreover, in the special range of thought, and the special mood, that this particular discussion provokes. Perhaps this omnipresence of Newman in the minutest details of each discussion becomes ultimately to the careful student of his writing the most convincing proof of the largeness of his mind, of the intensity of his conception, and of the vigour and vitality of his imagination.

It may be urged that the copiousness of Newman at times becomes wearisome; that he is over-liberal of both explanation and illustration; and that his style, though never exuberant in ornament, is sometimes annoyingly luminous, and blinds with excess of light. This is probably the point in which Newman’s style is most open to attack. It is a cloyingly explicit, rather than a stimulatingly suggestive, style; it does almost too much for the reader, and is almost inconsiderately generous. Yet these qualities of his style are so intimately connected with its peculiar personal charm that they can hardly be censured. And it may be noted that so strenuous an advocate of the austere style as Walter Pater has instanced Newman’s Idea of a University as an example of “the perfect handling of a theory.”

One characteristic of the purely suggestive style is certainly to be found in Newman’s writing,—great beauty and vigour of phrase. This fact is the more noteworthy because a writer who, like Newman, is impressive in the mass, and excels in securing breadth of effect, very often lacks the ability to strike out memorable epigrams. A few quotations, brought together at random, will show what point and terseness Newman could command when he chose. “Ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt.” “Great things are done by devotion to one idea.” “Calculation never made a hero.” “All aberrations are founded on, and have their life in, some truth or other.” “Great acts take time.” “A book after all cannot make a stand against the wild living intellect of man.” “To be converted in partnership.” “It is not at all easy (humanly speaking) to wind up an Englishman to a dogmatic level.” “Paper logic.” “One is not at all pleased when poetry, or eloquence, or devotion is considered as if chiefly intended to feed syllogisms.” “Here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” In terseness and sententiousness these utterances could hardly be surpassed by the most acrimonious searcher after epigram, though of course they have not the glitter of paradox to which modern coiners of phrases aspire.

Of wit there is very little to be found in Newman’s writings; it is not the natural expression of his temperament. Wit is too dryly intellectual, too external and formal, too little vital, to suit Newman’s mental habit. To the appeal of humour he was distinctly more open. It is from the humorous incongruities of imaginary situations that his irony secures its most persuasive effects. Moreover, whenever he is not necessarily preoccupied with the tragically serious aspects of life and of history, or forced by his subject-matter, and audience, into a formally restrained manner and method, he has, in treating any topic, that urbanity and half-playful kindliness that come from a large-minded and almost tolerant recognition of the essential imperfections of life and human nature. The mood of the man of the world, sweetened and ennobled, and enriched by profound knowledge and deep feeling and spiritual seriousness, gives to much of Newman’s work its most distinctive note. When he is able to be thoroughly colloquial, this mood and this tone can assert themselves most freely, and the result is a style through which a gracious kindliness, which is never quite humour, and which yet possesses all its elements, diffuses itself pervasively and persuasively. Throughout the Rise and Progress of Universities this tone is traceable, and, to take a specific example, it is largely to its influence that the description of Athens, in the third chapter, owes its peculiar charm. What can be more deliciously incongruous than the agent of a London “mercantile firm” and the Acropolis? or more curiously ill-mated than his standards of valuation and the qualities of the Grecian landscape? Yet how little malicious is Newman’s use of this incongruity or disproportion, and how unsuspiciously the “agent of a London Company” ministers to the quiet amusement of the reader, and also helps to heighten, by contrast, the effect of beauty and romance and mystery that Newman is aiming at.

Several allusions have already been made to Newman’s liking for concreteness, and in an earlier paragraph his distrust of the abstract was described and illustrated at length. These predilections of his have left their unmistakable mark on his style in ways more technical than those that have thus far been noted. His vocabulary is, for a scholar, exceptionally idiomatic and unliterary; the most ordinary and unparsable turns of every-day speech are inwrought into the texture of his style. In the Apologia he speaks of himself in one place as having had “a lounging, free-and-easy way of carrying things on,” and the phrase both defines and illustrates one characteristic of his style. Idioms that have the crude force of popular speech, the vitality without the vulgarity of slang, abound in his writings. Of his increasingly clear recognition, in 1839, of the weakness of the Anglican position, he says: “The Via Media was an impossible idea; it was what I had called ‘standing on one leg.’” In describing his loss of control over his party in 1840 he declares: “I never had a strong wrist, but at the very time when it was most needed, the reins had broken in my hands.” Of the ineradicableness of evil in human nature, he exclaims: “You do but play a sort of ‘hunt the slipper,’ with the fault of our nature, till you go to Christianity.” Illustrations of this idiomatic and homely phrasing might be endlessly multiplied. Moreover, to the concreteness of colloquial phrasing, Newman adds the concreteness of the specific word. Other things being equal, he prefers the name of the species to that of the genus, and the name of the class to that of the species; he is always urged forward towards the individual and the actual; his mind does not lag in the region of abstractions and formulas, but presses past the general term, or abstraction, or law, to the image or the example, and into the tangible, glowing, sensible world of fact. His imagery, though never obtrusive, is almost lavishly present, and though never purely decorative, is often very beautiful. It is so inevitable, however, springs so organically from the thought and the mood of the moment, that the reader accepts it unmindfully, and is conscious only of grasping, easily and securely, the writer’s meaning. He must first look back through the sentences and study the style in detail before he will come to realize its continual, but decisive, divergence from the literal and commonplace, and its essential freshness and distinction.

On occasion, of course, Newman uses elaborate figures; but commonly for purposes of exposition or persuasion. In such cases the reader may well note the thoroughness with which the figure adjusts itself to every turn and phase of the thought, and the surprising omnipresence and suggestiveness of the tropical phrasing. These qualities of Newman’s style are illustrated in the following passage from the Development of Christian Doctrine:—

“Whatever be the risk of corruption from intercourse with the world around, such a risk must be encountered if a great idea is duly to be understood, and much more if it is to be fully exhibited. It is elicited and expanded by trial, and battles into perfection and supremacy. Nor does it escape the collision of opinion even in its earlier years, nor does it remain truer to itself, and with a better claim to be considered one and the same, though externally protected from vicissitude and change. It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which, on the contrary, is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary, and is employed in efforts after freedom which become more vigorous and hopeful as its years increase. Its beginnings are no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope. At first no one knows what it is, or what it is worth. It remains perhaps for a time quiescent; it tries, as it were, its limbs, and proves the ground under it, and feels its way. From time to time, it makes essays which fail, and are in consequence abandoned. It seems in suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length strikes out in one definite direction. In time it enters upon strange territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and fall around it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles reappear under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”[23] The image of the river pervades this passage throughout, and yet is never obtrusive and never determines or even constrains the progress of the thought. The imagery simply seems to insinuate the ideas into the reader’s mind with a certain novelty of appeal and half-sensuous persuasiveness. Another passage of much this kind has already been quoted, where Newman describes the adventurous investigator scaling the crags of truth.[24]

Closely akin to this use of figures is Newman’s generous use of examples and illustrations. Whatever be the principle he is discussing, he is not content till he has realized it for the reader in tangible, visible form, until he has given it the cogency and intensity of appeal that only sensations or images possess. In all these ways, then, by his idiomatic and colloquial phrasing, by his specific vocabulary, by his delicately adroit use of metaphors, by his carefully elaborated imagery, and by his wealth of examples and illustrations, Newman keeps resolutely close to the concrete, and imparts everywhere to his style warmth, vividness, colour, convincing actuality.

VII

It remains to suggest briefly Newman’s relation to what was most characteristic in the thought and feeling of his times. Without any attempt at a technical analysis of his doctrine or at a special study of his theorizing in religion and philosophy, it will be possible to connect him, by virtue of certain temperamental characteristics, and certain prevailing modes of conceiving life, with what was most distinctive in the literature of the early part of the century. Interpreted most searchingly, his early Anglicanism and his later Catholicism were peculiar expressions of that Romantic spirit which realized itself with such splendour and power in the best and most vital literature of his day and generation.

Perhaps the most general formula for the work of English literature during the first quarter of the present century is the rediscovery and vindication of the concrete. The special task of the eighteenth century had been to order, and to systematize, and to name; its favourite methods had been analysis and generalization. It asked for no new experience; it sought only to master and reduce to formulas, and to find convenient labels for what experience it already possessed. It was perpetually in search of standards and canons; it was conventional through and through; and its men felt secure from the ills of time only when sheltered under some ingenious artificial construction of rule and precedent. Whatever lay beyond the scope of their analysis and defied their laws, they disliked and dreaded. The outlying regions of mystery which hem life in on every side, are inaccessible to the intellect and irreducible in terms of its laws, were strangely repellent to them, and from such shadowy vistas they resolutely turned their eyes and fastened them on the solid ground at their feet. The familiar bustle of the town, the thronging streets of the city, the gay life of the drawing-room, and coffee-house, and play-house; or the more exalted life of Parliament and Court, the intrigues of State-chambers, the manœuvres of the battle-field; the aspects of human activity, wherever collective man in his social capacity goes through the orderly and comprehensible changes of his ceaseless pursuit of worldly happiness and worldly success; these were the subjects that for the men of the eighteenth century had absorbing charm: in seeking to master this intricate play of forces, to fathom the motives below it, to tabulate its experiences, to set up standards to guide the individual successfully through the intricacies of this commonplace, every-day world, they spent their utmost energy, and to these tasks they instinctively limited themselves. In poetry, it was a generalized view of life that they aimed at, a semi-philosophical representation of man’s nature and actions. Pope, the typical poet of the century, “stooped to truth and moralized his song.” Dr. Johnson, the most authoritative critic of the century, taught that the poet should “remark general properties and large appearances ... and must neglect the minuter discriminations, which one may have remarked, and another have neglected, or those characteristics which are alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness.” In prose, the same moralizing and generalizing tendencies prevailed, and found their most adequate and thorough-going expression in the abstract and pretentiously latinized style of Dr. Johnson.

Everywhere thought gave the law; the senses and the imagination were kept jealously in subordination. The abstract, the typical, the general—these were everywhere exalted at the expense of the image, the specific experience, the vital fact. In religion, the same tendencies showed themselves. Orthodoxy and Deism alike were mechanical in their conception of Nature and of God. Both Free-thinkers and Apologists tried to systematize religious experience, and to rationalize theology. In the pursuit of historical evidences and of logical demonstrations of the truth or falsity of religion, genuine religious emotion was almost neglected, or was actually condemned. Enthusiasm was distrusted or abhorred; an enthusiast was a madman. Intense feeling of all kinds was regarded askance, and avoided as irrational, unsettling, prone to disarrange systems, and to overturn standards, and burst the bonds of formulas.

It was to this limited manner of living life and of conceiving of life that the great movement which, for lack of a better name, may be called the Romantic Movement, was to put an end. The Romanticists sought to enrich life with new emotions, to conquer new fields of experience, to come into imaginative touch with far distant times, to give its due to the encompassing world of darkness and mystery, and even to pierce through the darkness in the hope of finding, at the heart of the mystery, a transcendental world of infinite beauty and eternal truth. A keener sense of the value of life penetrated them and stirred them into imaginative sympathy with much that had left the men of the eighteenth century unmoved. They found in the naïve life of Nature and animals and children picturesqueness and grace that were wanting in the sophisticated life of the “town”; they delighted in the mysterious chiaroscuro of the Middle Ages, in its rich blazonry of passion, and its ever-changing spectacular magnificence; they looked forward with ardour into the future, and dreamed dreams of the progress of man; they opened their hearts to the influences of the spiritual world, and religion became to them something more than respectability and morality. In every way they endeavoured to give some new zest to life, to impart to it some fine novel flavour, to attain to some exquisite new experience. They sought this new experience imaginatively in the past, with Scott and Southey; they sought it with fierce insistence in foreign lands, following Byron, and in the wild exploitation of individual fancy and caprice; they sought it with Coleridge and Wordsworth through the revived sensitiveness of the spirit and its intuitions of a transcendental world of absolute reality; they sought it with Shelley in the regions of the vast inane.

Now it was in the midst of these restless conditions and under the influence of all this new striving and aspiration that Newman’s youth and most impressionable years of development were spent, and he took colour and tone from his epoch to a degree that has often been overlooked. His work, despite its reactionary character, indeed, partly because of it, is a genuine expression of the Romantic spirit, and can be understood only when thus interpreted and brought into relation with the great tendencies of thought and feeling of the early part of our century. Of his direct indebtedness to Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, he has himself made record in the Apologia[25]and in his Autobiographical Sketch.[26] But far more important than the influence of any single man was the penetrating and determining action upon him of the Romantic atmosphere, overcharged as it was with intense feeling and tingling with new thought. The results of this action may be traced throughout his temperament and in all his work.

Mediævalism, as we have seen, was a distinctive note of the Romantic spirit, and, certainly, Newman was intensely alive to the beauty and the poetic charm of the life of the Middle Ages. One is sometimes tempted to describe him as a great mediæval ecclesiastic astray in the nineteenth century and heroically striving to remodel modern life in harmony with his temperamental needs. His imagination was possessed with the Romantic vision of the greatness of the mediæval Church,—of its splendour and pomp and dignity, and of its power over the hearts and lives of its members; and the Oxford movement was in its essence an attempt to reconstruct the English Church in harmony with this Romantic ideal, to rouse the Church to a vital realization of its own great traditions, and to restore to it the prestige and the dominating position it had had in the past. As Scott’s imagination was fascinated with the picturesque paraphernalia of feudalism,—with its jousts, and courts of love, and its coats of mail and buff-jerkins,—so Newman’s imagination was captivated by the gorgeous ritual and ceremonial, the art and architecture of mediæval Christianity, and found in them the symbols of the spirit of mystery and awe which was for him the essentially religious spirit, and of the mystical truths of which revealed religion was made up. The Church, as Newman found it, was Erastian and worldly; it was apt to regard itself as merely an ally of the State for the maintenance of order and spread of morality; it was coldly rational in belief and theology, and prosaic in its conception of religious truth and of its own position and functions. Newman sought to revive in the Church a mediæval faith in its own divine mission and the intense spiritual consciousness of the Middle Ages; he aimed to restore to religion its mystical character, to exalt the sacramental system as the divinely appointed means for the salvation of souls, and to impose once more on men’s imaginations the mighty spell of a hierarchical organization, the direct representative of God in the world’s affairs. Such was the mediæval ideal to which he devoted himself. Both he and Scott substantially ruined themselves through their mediævalism. Scott’s luckless attempt was to place his private and family life upon a feudal basis and to give it mediæval colour and beauty; Newman undertook a much nobler and more heroic, but more intrinsically hopeless task,—that of recreating the whole English Church in harmony with mediæval conceptions.

Before Newman, Keble had already conceived of the English Church in this imaginative spirit. In one of his Essays, Newman describes how Keble had made the Church “poetical,” had “kindled hearts towards it,” and by “his happy magic” had thrown upon its ritual, offices, and servants a glamour and beauty of which they had for many generations been devoid. It was to the continuance and the furtherance of this process of regeneration and transfiguration that Newman devoted the Tractarian movement.

But the essentially Romantic character of the new movement comes out in other ways than in its idealization of the Church. The relation of Newman and of his friends to Nature was closely akin to that of the Romanticists. Newman, like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, found Nature mysteriously beautiful and instinct with strange significance, a divinely elaborated language whereby God speaks through symbols to the human soul. Keble’s Christian Year is full of this interpretation of natural sights and sounds as images of spiritual truth, and with this mystical conception of Nature Newman was in sympathy. Nature was for him as rich in its spiritual suggestiveness, as for Wordsworth or Shelley, and was as truly for him as for Carlyle or Goethe the visible garment of God. But in interpreting the emotional value of Nature Newman had recourse to a symbolism drawn ready-made from Christianity. The mystical beauty of Nature, instead of calling up in his imagination a Platonic ideal world, as with Shelley, or adumbrating the world of eternal verity of German transcendentalism, as with Wordsworth and Coleridge, suggested the presence and power of seraphs and angels. Of the angels he says, “Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beautiful prospect, is, as it were, the skirts of their garments, the waving of the robes of those whose faces see God.” Again, he asks, “What would be the thoughts of a man who, when examining a flower, or an herb, or a pebble, or a ray of light, which he treats as something so beneath him in the scale of existence, suddenly discovered that he was in the presence of some powerful being who was hidden behind the visible things he was inspecting,—who, though concealing his wise hand, was giving them their beauty, grace, and perfection, as being God’s instrument for the purpose,—nay, whose robe and ornaments those objects were, which he was so eager to analyze?”[27]

Despite the somewhat conventional symbolism that pervades these passages, the mystical mood in the contemplation of Nature that underlies and suggests them is substantially the same that expresses itself through other imagery in the Romantic poets. In his intense sensitiveness, then, to the emotional value of the visible universe, and in his interpretation of the beauty of hill and valley and mountain and stream in terms of subjective emotion, Newman may justly be said to have shared in the Romantic Return to Nature.

But in a still more important way, Newman’s work was expressive of the Return to Nature. Under this term is to be included not merely the fresh delight that the Romanticists felt in the splendour of the firmament and the tender beauty or the sublimity of sea and land, but also their eager recognition of the value of the instinctive, the spontaneous, the natural in life, as opposed to the artificial, the self-conscious, the systematic, and the conventional. This recognition pervades all the literature of the first quarter of our century, and, in fact, in one form or another, is the characteristic note of what is most novel in the thought and the life of the time. In this Return to Nature Newman shared. For him, as for all the Romanticists, life itself is more than what we think about life, experience is infinitely more significant than our formulas for summing it up, and transcends them incalculably. General terms are but the makeshifts of logic and can never cope with the multiplicity and the intensity of sensation and feeling. Newman’s elaborate justification of this indictment of logic is wrought out in the Grammar of Assent and in his Sermon on Implicit and Explicit Reason.

Throughout these discourses he pleads for those vital processes of thought and feeling and intuition which every man goes through for himself in his acquisition of concrete truth, and which he can perhaps describe in but a stammering and inconsequent fashion in the terms of the schoolman’s logic. It is by these direct, spontaneous processes, Newman urges, that men reach truth in whatever concrete matter they apply themselves to, and the truth that they reach need be none the less true because they have not the knack of setting forth syllogistically their reasons for accepting it. In his rejection, then, of formal demonstration as the sole method for attaining truth, in his recognition of the limitations of logic, and in his deep conviction of the surpassing importance of the spontaneous and instinctive in life Newman was at one with the Romanticists, and in all these particulars he shared in their Return to Nature.

This insistence of Newman’s on the vital character of truth is a point, the importance of which cannot be exaggerated when the attempt is being made to grasp what is essential in his psychology and his ways of conceiving of life and of human nature. For him truth does not exist primarily, as for the formalist, in the formulas or the theorems of text-books, but in the minds and the hearts of living men. In these minds and hearts truth grows and spreads in countless subtle ways. Its appeal is through numberless other channels than those of the mind. Man is for Newman primarily an agent,—an acting creature,—not an intellect with merely accidental relations to an outer world. First and foremost he is a doer, a bringer about of results, a realizer of hopes and ambitions and ideals. He is a mass of instincts and impulses, of prejudices and passions; and it is in response to these mighty and ceaselessly operating springs of action that he makes his way through the world and subdues it to himself. Truth, then, to commend itself to such a being, must come not merely by way of the brain, but also by that of the heart; it must not be a collection of abstract formulas, but must be concrete and vital. If it be religious truth, it must not take the form of logical demonstrations, but must be beautifully enshrined in the symbols of an elaborate ritual, illustrated in the lives of saints and doctors, authoritative and venerable in the creeds and liturgies of a hierarchical organization, irresistibly cogent as inculcated by the divinely appointed representatives of the Source of all Truth. In these forms religious truth may be able to impose itself upon individuals, to take complete possession of them, to master their minds and hearts, and to rule their lives.

But what shall be the test of such truth? How shall the individual be sure of its claims? How shall he choose between rival systems? Here, again, Newman refuses to be content with the formal and the abstract, and goes straight to life itself. In the search for a criterion of truth he rejects purely intellectual tests, and has recourse to tests which call into activity the whole of a man’s nature. It is the Illative Sense that detects and distinguishes truth, and the Illative Sense is simply the entire mind of the individual vigorously grasping concrete facts with all their implications for the heart and for the imagination and for conduct, and extracting their peculiar significance. This process, by which the individual searches for and attains truth in concrete matters, is admirably described in the passage quoted in the second chapter of the present Study, where the truth-seeker’s progress is likened to that of a mountain-climber scaling a crag. The whole nature of a man must be put into play, if truth is to be won. The formal logic of the schools falls short of life; its symbols are general terms, colourless abstractions, from which all the palpitating warmth and persuasiveness of real life have been carefully drained. Propositions fashioned out of these colourless general terms cannot by any process of syllogistic jugglery be made to comprehend the whole truth of a religious system. They leave out inevitably what is most vital, and what is therefore most intimate in its appeal to the individual,—to his heart and practical instincts, and his imagination. “We proceed as far indeed as we can, by the logic of language, but we are obliged to supplement it by the more subtle and elastic logic of thought; for forms by themselves prove nothing.”[28] “It is to the living mind that we must look for the means of using correctly principles of whatever kind.”[29] “In all of these separate actions of the intellect, the individual is supreme and responsible to himself, nay, under circumstances, may be justified in opposing himself to the judgment of the whole world; though he uses rules to his great advantage, as far as they go, and is in consequence bound to use them.”[30] Absolute “proof can never be furnished to us by the logic of words, for as certitude is of the mind, so is the act of inference which leads to it. Every one who reasons is his own centre.”[31] The progress of the individual “is a living growth, not a mechanism; and its instruments are mental acts, not the formulas and contrivances of language.”[32]

The foregoing analysis has tended to illustrate the facts that Newman aimed to make religion an intensely concrete, personal experience, and to fill out the spiritual life with widely varying and richly beautiful feeling; and that he also set himself everywhere, consciously and directly, against the eighteenth century ideal, according to which reason was the sole discoverer and arbiter of truth and regulator of conduct. In these respects, Newman’s work was in perfect harmony with that of the Romanticists. Like them he was pleading for the spontaneous, for the emotions and the imagination, for what is most vital in life, in opposition to the formalists, the systematizers, and the devotees of logic.

In the following points, then, Newman’s kinship with the Romanticists is recognizable: in his imaginative sympathy with the past, in the range and perspective of his historical consciousness, and in his devotion to an ideal framed largely in accordance with a loving reverence for mediæval life. His vein of mysticism, his imaginative sympathy with Nature, his interpretation of Nature as symbolic of spiritual truth, his rejection of reason as the guide of life, and his recognition of the inadequacy of generalizations and formulas to the wealth of actual life and to the intensity and variety of personal experience, are also characteristics that mark his relation to the men of his period.

Finally, his very style in the narrowest meaning of the term also classes Newman among Romantic writers. His debt to De Quincey has already been noted. Though he is rarely, if ever, so ornate as De Quincey, and though he perhaps never weaves his prose into such a lustrous, shining surface through the continual use of sensations and images as does De Quincey in his impassioned prose, yet the glowing beauty, the picture-making power, the occasional imaginative splendour, the elaborate swelling music of Newman’s writings, place him as a master of prose in the same group with De Quincey, and Ruskin, and Carlyle, and part him from Landor, or Macaulay, or Matthew Arnold. No prose can more surely send quivering over the nerves a sense of the shadowing mystery of life, than certain of Newman’s sermons, and passages here and there in his Apologia and in his Essays. Through the play, then, of his imagination, its rhythms and beat of the wing, because of the ease with which in a moment his prose can carry the reader into regions of impassioned and mystical feeling, even because of the vital, intimate warmth and colour of his phrasing,—qualities so different from the hard, external glitter of Macaulay’s specific, but rhetorical style,—Newman reveals his kinship with the great group of poets and prose-writers who deepened and enriched the imaginative life of the early part of our century. Ecclesiasticism and Academicism are proverbially conservative powers. It may be for this reason that the new spiritual forces of Romanticism did not renovate the Church through the Oxford movement until a full generation after they had made almost wholly their own the purely imaginative literature and life of the English nation.