PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
It is the constant difficulty of the literary historian, especially if
he is working on no very great scale, that he is confronted with what
may be called "applied" literature, in which not only is the matter of
superior importance to the form, but the importance of the matter itself
disappears to a greater or less extent with time. In these cases it is
only possible for him to take notice of those writers who, whatever the
subject they handled, would have written literature, and perhaps of
those who from the unusual eminence and permanence of their position in
their own subjects have attained as it were an honorary position in
literature itself.
The literary importance and claim, however, of these applied branches
varies considerably; and there have been times when the two divisions
whose names stand at the head of this chapter even surpassed--there have
been not a few in which they equalled--any section of the purest _belles
lettres_ in strictly literary attractions. With rare exceptions this has
not been the case during the present century; poetry, fiction, history,
and essay-writing having drawn off the best hands on the one side, while
science has attracted them on the other. But the great Oxford Movement
in the second quarter created no small amount of theological or
ecclesiastical writing of unusual interest, while there had been
earlier, and continued to be till almost the time when the occupation of
the field by living writers warns us off, philosophers proper of great
excellence. Latterly (indeed till quite recently, when a certain
renaissance of philosophical writing not in jargon has taken place with
a corresponding depression of the better kind of literary theology) the
philosophers of Britain have not held a prominent place in her
literature. Whether this was because they have mostly been content to
Germanise, or because they have not been provided with sufficient
individual talent, it is fortunately unnecessary for us to attempt to
determine in this place and at this time.
Among the dead writers of the century who are known wholly or mainly for
the cultivation of philosophical studies, Bentham, Mackintosh, John
Stuart Mill (to whom some would add his father James), Sir William
Hamilton, Dean Mansel, are likely to hold a place in history, while at
present many might be disposed to add the name of Mr. T. H. Green, a
tutor of Balliol College, who between 1870 and his death propagated in
Oxford a sort of neo-Hegelianism much tinctured with political and
social Liberalism, and obtained a remarkable personal position. It is
however as yet too early to assign a distinct historical place to one
whose philosophy was in no sense original, though it was somewhat
originally combined and applied, and who exhibited very small literary
skill in setting forth. The others are already set "in the firm
perspective of the past," and, with yet others who, still living, escape
our grasp, have their names clearly marked for a place in an adequate
history.
Jeremy Bentham, a curious person who reminds one of a Hobbes without the
literary genius, was born in London, near Houndsditch, as far back as
5th February 1748. He was the son of a solicitor who was very well off,
and wished his son to take to the superior branch of the law. Jeremy was
sent to Westminster, and thence to Queen's College, Oxford, in his
thirteenth year. He was a Master of Arts at eighteen, and was called to
the Bar six years later; but he never practised. He must have been very
early drawn to the study of the French _philosophes_; much indeed of the
doctrine which afterwards made him famous was either taken from, or
incidentally anticipated by, Turgot and others of them, and it was a
common remark, half in earnest half in gibe, that Bentham's views had
made the tour of Europe in the French versions of Dumont before they
attained to any attention in England. In 1776 he wrote a _Fragment on
Government_, a kind of critique of Blackstone, which is distinguished by
acute one-sided deduction from Whig principles; and he became a sort of
prophet of the Whigs, who sometimes plagiarised and popularised,
sometimes neglected, his opinions. He never married, though he would
have liked to do so; and lived on his means till 1832, when he died in
the eighty-fifth year of his age. His chief books after the _Fragment_
had been his _Theory of Punishments and Rewards_; 1787, _Letters on
Usury_; 1789, _Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation_; 1813, _Treatise on Evidence_; and 1824, _Fallacies_.
The central pillar and hinge of all Bentham's doctrines in politics,
morals, and law is the famous principle of Utility, or to use the cant
phrase which he borrowed from Priestley, "the greatest happiness of the
greatest number." What the greatest number is--for instance whether in a
convict settlement of forty thieves and ten honest men, the thieves are
to be consulted--and what happiness means, what is utility, what things
have brought existing arrangements about, and what the loss of altering
them might be, as well as a vast number of other points, Bentham never
deigned to consider. Starting from a few crude phrases such as this, he
raised a system remarkable for a sort of apparent consistency and
thoroughness, and having the luck or the merit to hit off in parts not a
few of the popular desires and fads of the age of the French Revolution
and its sequel. But he was a political theorist rather than a political
philosopher, his neglect of all the nobler elements of thought and
feeling was complete, and latterly at least he wrote atrocious English,
clumsy in composition and crammed with technical jargon. The brilliant
fashion in which Sydney Smith has compressed and spirited his
_Fallacies_ into the famous "Noodle's Oration" is an example of the kind
of treatment which Bentham requires in order to be made tolerable in
form; and even then he remains one-sided in fact.
Sir James Mackintosh has been mentioned before, and is less of a
philosopher pure and simple than any person included in this
list--indeed his philosophical reputation rests almost wholly upon his
brilliant, though rather slight, _Dissertation on Ethics_ for the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_. The greater part by far of his by no means
short life (1765-1832) was occupied in practising medicine and law, in
defending the French Revolution against Burke (_Vindiciae Gallicae_,
1791); in defending the French Royalists in the person of Peltier
against Bonaparte, 1803; in acting as Recorder and Judge in India,
1804-1811; and in political and literary work at home for the last
twenty years, his literature being chiefly history, and contributions to
the _Edinburgh Review_. But there has been a certain tendency, both in
his own time and since, to regard Mackintosh as a sort of philosopher
thrown away. If he was so, he would probably have made his mark rather
in the history of philosophy than in philosophy itself, for there are no
signs in him of much original depth. But he wrote very well, and was a
sound and on the whole a fair critic.
Of the two Mills, the elder, James, was like Mackintosh only an
_interim_ philosopher: his son John belongs wholly to our present
subject. James was the son of a farmer, was born near Montrose in 1773,
and intended to enter the ministry, but became a journalist instead. In
the ten years or so after 1806, he composed a _History of British
India_, which was long regarded as authoritative, but on which the
gravest suspicions have recently been cast. Mill, in fact, was a violent
politician of the Radical type, and his opinions of ethics were so
peculiar that it is uncertain how far he might have carried them in
dealing with historical characters. His book, however, gained him a high
post in the East India Company, the Directors of which just at that time
were animated by a wish to secure distinguished men of letters as
servants. He nevertheless continued to write a good deal both in
periodicals and in book form, the chief examples of the latter being his
_Political Economy_, his _Analysis of the Human Mind_, and his _Fragment
on Mackintosh_. James Mill, of whom most people have conceived a rather
unfavourable idea since the appearance of his son's _Autobiography_, was
an early disciple of Bentham, and to a certain extent resembled him in
hard clearness and superficial consistency.
His son John Stuart was born in London on 20th May 1806, and educated by
his father in the unnatural fashion which he has himself recorded.
Intellectually, however, he was not neglected, and after some years,
spent mainly in France, he was, through his father's influence,
appointed at seventeen to a clerkship in the India House, which gave him
a competence for the rest of his life and a main occupation for
thirty-four years of it. He was early brought into contact (by his
father's friendship with Grote and others) with the Philosophical
Radicals, as well as with many men of letters, especially Carlyle, of
the destruction of the first version of whose _French Revolution_ Mill
(having lent it to his friend Mrs. Taylor) was the innocent cause. To
this Mrs. Taylor, whom he afterwards married, Mill was fanatically
attached, the attachment being the cause of some curious flights in his
later work. His character was very amiable, and the immense influence
which, especially in the later years of his life, he exercised, was
partly helped by his personal friendships. But it was unfortunate for
him that in 1865 he was returned to Parliament. His political views,
though it was the eve of the triumph of what might be called his party,
were _doctrinaire_ and out of date, and his life had given him no
practical hold of affairs, so that he more than fulfilled the usual
prophecy of failure in the case of men of thought who are brought late
in life into action. Fortunately for him he was defeated in 1868, and
passed the rest of his life mostly in France, dying at Avignon on 8th
May 1873.
Brought up in an atmosphere of discussion and of books, Mill soon took
to periodical writing, and in early middle life was for some years
editor of the _London and Westminster Review_; but his literary
ambition, which directed itself not to pure literature but to
philosophical and political discussion, was not content with periodical
writing as an exercise, and his circumstances enabled him to do without
it as a business. In 1843 he published what is undoubtedly his chief
work, _A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive_, five years later
a companion treatise on _Political Economy_ which may perhaps rank
second. In 1859 his essay on _Liberty_, a short but very attractive
exposition of his political principles, appeared; next year a collection
of essays entitled _Dissertations and Discussions_. After lesser works
on _Utilitarianism_ and on Comte, of whom he had been a supporter in
more senses than one, but whose later eccentricities revolted him, he
issued in 1865 his _Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy_,
which ranks as the third of his chief works, and completes his system,
as far as a system so negative can be said to be completed, on the side
of theology and metaphysics. Among his smaller works may be mentioned
_Representative Government_, and (very late) the fanatical and curious
_Subjection of Women_. His _Autobiography_, an interesting but
melancholy book, appeared shortly after his death.
Mill must be accounted on the whole by good judges, even if they are
utterly opposed to his whole system of philosophy, the chief
philosophical _writer_ of England in this century; and the enormous
though not permanent influence which he attained about its middle was
deserved, partly by qualities purely literary, but partly also by some
purely philosophical. He had inherited from his father not merely the
theoretical exaltation of liberty (except in the philosophical sense)
which characterised eighteenth century philosophers, but also that
arrogant and pragmatical impatience of the supernatural which was to a
still greater extent that century's characteristic. The arrogance and
the pragmaticality changed in John Stuart Mill's milder nature to a sort
of nervous dread of admitting even the possibility of things not
numerable, ponderable, and measurable; and it may be observed with
amusement that for the usual division of logic into Deductive and
Inductive he substituted _Ratiocinative_ for the first member, so as not
even by implication to admit the possibility of deduction from any
principles not inductively given. So, too, later, in his _Examination
of Sir William Hamilton_, between the opposing spectres of Realism and
Idealism, he was driven to take refuge in what he called "permanent
possibilities" of Sensation, though logicians vainly asked how he
assured himself of the permanence, and jesters rudely observed that to
call a bottle of gin a "permanent possibility of drunkenness" was an
unnecessary complication of language for a very small end or meaning.
His great philosophical weapon (borrowed from though of course not
invented by his father) was the Association of Ideas, just as his clue
in political economy was in the main though not exclusively
_laissez-faire_, in ethics a modified utilitarianism, and in politics an
absolute deference to, tempered by a resigned distrust of, the majority.
The defect in a higher and more architectonic theory of the world with
which he has been charged is not quite justly chargeable, for from his
point of view no such theory was possible.
Even those, however, who, as the present writer acknowledges in his own
case, are totally opposed to the whole Millian conception of logic and
politics, of metaphysics and morality, must, unless prejudiced, admit
his great merits of method and treatment. He not only very seldom
smuggles in sophistry into the middle of his arguments, but even
paralogisms are not common with him; it is with his premises, not with
his conclusions, that you must deal if you wish to upset him. Unlike
most contemners of formal logic, he is not in much danger, as far as his
merely dialectic processes go, from formal logic itself; and it is in
the arbitrary and partial character of his preliminary admissions,
assumptions, and exclusions that the weak points of his system are to be
found.
His style has also very considerable merits. It is not brilliant or
charming; it has neither great strength nor great stateliness. But it is
perfectly clear, it is impossible to mistake its meaning, and its
simplicity is unattended by any of the down-at-heel neglect of neatness
and elegance which is to be found, for instance, in Locke. Little
scholastic as he was in most ways, Mill had far outgrown the ignorant
eighteenth century contempt of the Schoolmen, and had learnt from them
an exact precision of statement and argument, while he had managed to
keep (without its concomitant looseness and vulgarity) much of the
eighteenth century's wholesome aversion to jargon and to excess of
terminology. In presenting complicated statements of detail, as in the
_Political Economy_, the _Representative Government_, and elsewhere, he
has as much lucidity as Macaulay, with an almost total freedom from
Macaulay's misleading and delusive suppression of material details. And
besides his usual kind of calm and measured argument, he can
occasionally, as in divers passages of the _Sir William Hamilton_ and
the political books, rise or sink from the logical and rhetorical points
of view respectively to an impassioned advocacy, which, though it may be
rarely proof against criticism, is very agreeable so far as it goes.
That Mill wholly escaped the defects of the popular philosopher, I do
not suppose that even those who sympathise with his views would contend;
though they might not admit, as others would, that these defects were
inseparable from his philosophy in itself. But it may be doubtful
whether, all things considered, a better _literary_ type of the popular
philosopher exists in modern English; and it certainly is not surprising
that, falling in as he did with the current mode of thought, and
providing it with a defence specious in reasoning and attractive in
language, he should have attained an influence perhaps greater than that
of which any English philosophical writer has been able during his
lifetime to boast.
The convenience of noticing the Mills together, and of putting Sir
William Hamilton next to his most famous disciples, seems to justify a
certain departure from strict chronological order. Hamilton was indeed
considerably the senior of his critic, having been born on 8th March
1788. His father and grandfather, both professors at the University of
Glasgow, had been plain "Dr. Hamilton." But they inherited, and Sir
William made good, the claim to a baronetcy which had been in abeyance
since the days of Robert Hamilton, the Covenanting leader. He himself
proceeded from Glasgow, with a Snell Exhibition, to Balliol in 1809. He
was called to the Scottish Bar, but never practised, though some
business came to him as Crown solicitor in the Court of Teinds (tithes).
He competed in 1820 for the Chair of Moral Philosophy, which Wilson,
with far inferior claims, obtained; but it is fair to say that at the
time the one candidate had given no more public proofs of fitness than
the other. Soon, however, he began to make his mark as a contributor of
philosophical articles to the _Edinburgh Review_, and in 1836 he
obtained a professorship in the University for which he was even better
fitted--that of Logic and Metaphysics. His lectures became celebrated,
but he never published them; indeed his only publication of any
importance during his lifetime was a collection of his articles under
the title of _Dissertations_, with the exception of his monumental
edition of Reid, on which he spent, and on which it has sometimes been
held that he wasted, most of his time. He died in 1856, and his lectures
were published after his death by his successor, Professor Veitch
(himself an enthusiastic devotee of literature, especially Border
literature, as well as of philosophy), and his greatest disciple,
Mansel, between 1859 and 1861. And this was how Mill's _Examination_
came to be posthumous. The "Philosophy of the Conditioned," as
Hamilton's is for shortness called, could not be described in any brief,
and perhaps not with propriety in any, space of the present volume. It
is enough to say that it was an attempt to reinforce the so-called
"Scotch Philosophy" of Reid against Hume by the help of Kant, as well as
at once to continue and evade the latter without resorting either to
Transcendentalism or to the experience-philosophy popular in England. In
logic, Hamilton was a great and justly honoured defender of the formal
view of the science which had been in persistent disrepute during the
eighteenth century; but some of the warmest lovers of logic doubt
whether his technical inventions or discoveries, such as the famous
Quantification of the Predicate, are more than "pretty" in the sense of
mathematicians and wine-merchants. This part of his doctrine, by the
way, attracted special attention, and was carefully elaborated by
another disciple, Professor Thomas Spencer Baynes (1823-1887), who,
after chequering philosophy with journalism, became editor of the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and a careful Shakespearian student. Yet
another disciple, and the most distinguished save one, was James
Frederick Ferrier, nephew of Susan Ferrier, to whom we owe three most
brilliant novels, who was born in 1808 and died in 1864 at St. Andrews,
where he had for nearly twenty years been Professor of Moral Philosophy,
after previously holding for a short time a History Professorship at
Edinburgh. Of this latter University Ferrier had been an alumnus, as
well as of Oxford. He edited his father-in-law Wilson's works, and was a
contributor to _Blackwood's Magazine_, but his chief book was his
_Institutes of Metaphysic_, published in 1854. Too strong a Hamiltonian
influence (not in style but in some other ways), and an attempt at an
almost Spinosian rigidity of method, have sometimes been held to have
marred Ferrier's philosophical performance; but it is certain that he
had the makings of a great metaphysician, and that he was actually no
small one.
The great merit of Hamilton was that he, in a somewhat irregular and
informal way (for, as has been said, he was ostensibly more a
commentator and critic than an independent theorist), introduced German
speculation into England after a fashion far more thorough than the
earlier but dilettante and haphazard attempts of De Quincey and
Coleridge, and contributed vastly to the lifting of the whole tone and
strain of English philosophic disputation from the slovenly commonsense
into which it had fallen. In fact, he restored metaphysics proper as a
part of English current thought; and helped (though here he was not
alone) to restore logic. His defects were, in the first place, that he
was at once too systematic and two piecemeal in theory, and worse still,
that his philosophical style was one of the very worst existing, or that
could exist. That this may have been in some degree a designed reaction
from ostentatious popularity is probable; and that it was in great part
caught from his studious frequentation of that Hercynian forest, which
takes the place of the groves of Academe in German philosophical
writing, is certain. But the hideousness of his dialect is a melancholy
fact; and it may be said to have contributed at least as much to the
decadence of his philosophical vogue as any defects in the philosophy
itself. He was, in fact, at the antipodes from Mill in attractiveness of
form as well as in character of doctrine.
There are some who think that Henry Longueville Mansel was actually in
more than one respect, and might, with some slight changes of accidental
circumstance, have been indisputably, the greatest philosopher of
Britain in the nineteenth century. Of the opinion entertained by
contemporaries of great intellectual gifts, that of Mark Pattison, a
bitter political and academical opponent, and the most acrimonious
critic of his time, that Mansel was, though according to Pattison's
view, an "arch-jobber," an "acute thinker, and a metaphysician" seems
pretty conclusive. But Mansel died in middle age, he was much occupied
in various kinds of University business, and he is said by those who
knew him to have been personally rather indolent. He was born in
Northamptonshire on 6th October 1820, and after school-days at Merchant
Taylors' passed in the then natural course to St. John's College,
Oxford, of which he became fellow. He was an active opponent of the
first University Commission, in reference to which he wrote the most
brilliant satire of the kind proper to University wits which this
century has produced--the Aristophanic parody entitled _Phrontisterion_.
But the Commission returned him good for evil, insomuch as he became the
first Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, a post
created in consequence of it. In 1859 he was Bampton Lecturer, and his
sermons in this office again attained the first excellence in style,
though they were made the subject of severe criticism not merely by the
disciples of Liberal philosophy, but by some timid defenders of
orthodoxy, for their bold application of the philosophy of the
conditioned, on scholastic lines, to the problems of theodicy. Mansel
was not a more frequent lecturer than the somewhat indulgent conditions
of the English Universities, especially Oxford, even after the
Commission, required; but his deliverances were of exceptional
importance, both in conception and expression. At the death of Milman,
his political friends being in power, he was made Dean of St. Paul's,
but enjoyed the dignity only a short time, and died in 1870. Besides
_Phrontisterion_ and his _Bampton Lectures_, which bring him under both
the divisions of this chapter, he had published in his lifetime an
excellent edition of Aldrich's "Logic," _Prolegomena Logica_ (the
principal work of the Hamiltonian school, though quite independent in
main points), and an enlarged edition of an Encyclopaedia dissertation on
_Metaphysics_. His essays, chiefly from the _Quarterly Review_, were
published after his death, with _Phrontisterion_ and other things.
It will appear from this brief summary that Mansel was a many-sided man;
and it may be added that he possessed an exceptionally keen wit, by no
means confined to professional subjects, and was altogether far more of
a man of the world than is usual in a philosopher. But though this
man-of-the-worldliness may have affected the extent and quantity of his
philosophical work, it did not touch the quality of it. It may be
contended that Mansel was on the whole rather intended for a critic or
historian of philosophy than for an independent philosophical teacher;
and in this he would but have exhibited a tendency of his century. Yet
he was very far from mere slavish following even of Hamilton, while the
copying, with a little travesty and adjustment of German originals, on
which so much philosophical repute has been founded in England, was
entirely foreign to his nature and thought. In Mill's _Examination of
Hamilton_, the _Bampton Lectures_, above referred to, came in for the
most vehement protest, for Mill, less blind than the orthodox objectors,
perceived that their drift was to steer clear of some of the commonest
and most dangerous reefs and shoals on which the orthodoxy of
intelligent but not far-sighted minds has for some generations past been
wrecked. But Mansel's rejoinder, written at a time when he was more than
ever distracted by avocations, and hampered certainly by the necessity
of speaking for his master as well as for himself, and probably by
considerations of expediency in respect to the duller of the faithful,
was not his happiest work. In fact he was too clear and profound a
thinker to be first-rate in controversy--a function which requires
either unusual dishonesty or one-sidedness in an unusual degree. He may
sometimes have been a very little of a sophist--it is perhaps impossible
to be a great philosopher without some such touch. But of paralogism--of
that sincere advancing of false argument which from the time of Plato
has been justly regarded as the most fatal of philosophic
drawbacks--there is no trace in Mansel. His natural genius, moreover,
assisted by his practice in miscellaneous writing, which though much
less in amount of result than Mill's was even more various in kind,
equipped him with a most admirable philosophical style, hitting the
exact mean between the over-popular and the over-technical, endowing
even the _Prolegomena Logica_ with a perfect readableness, and in the
_Metaphysics_ and large parts of the editorial matter of the _Aldrich_
showing capacities which make it deeply to be regretted that he never
undertook a regular history of philosophy.
The place which might have been thus filled, was accepted but partially
and with no capital success by divers writers. Frederick Denison
Maurice, who will be mentioned again in this chapter, wrote on _Moral
and Metaphysical Philosophy_, but the book, though like all his work
attractively written, does not show very wide or very profound knowledge
of the subject. The _Lectures on the History of Ancient Philosophy_, by
William Archer Butler, a Dublin professor, who died prematurely, would
probably, had the author lived, have formed the best history of the
subject in English, and even in their fragmentary condition make an
admirable book, free from jargon, not unduly popular, but at once sound
and literary. The most ambitious attempt at the whole subject was that
of George Henry Lewes, the companion of George Eliot, a versatile man of
letters of great ability, who brought out on a small scale in 1845, and
afterwards on a much larger one, a _Biographical History of
Philosophy_. This, though occasionally superficial, and too much tinged
with a sort of second-hand Positivism, had, as the qualities of these
defects, an excellent though sometimes a rather treacherous clearness,
and a unity of vision which is perhaps more valuable for fairly
intelligent readers than desultory profundity. But it can hardly take
rank as a book of philosophical scholarship, though it is almost a
brilliant specimen of popular philosophical literature.
Philosophy, science, and perhaps theology may dispute between them two
remarkable figures, nearly contemporary, the one an Oxford and the other
a Cambridge man--Whately and Whewell. Besides the differences which
their respective universities impress upon nearly all strong characters,
there were others between them, Whately being the better bred, the more
accomplished writer, and the more original, Whewell the more widely
informed, and perhaps the more thoroughgoing. But both were curiously
English in a sort of knock-me-down Johnsonian dogmatism; and both were
in consequence extremely intolerant. For Whately's so-called
impartiality consisted in being equally biassed against Evangelicals and
Tractarians; and both were accused by their unfriends of being a little
addicted to the encouragement of flatterers and toadies. Richard
Whately, the elder, was born in London in 1787, his father being a
clergyman in the enjoyment of several pluralities. He went to Oriel,
gained a fellowship there in 1811, and was with intervals a resident in
Oxford for some twenty years, being latterly Principal of St. Alban Hall
(where he made Newman his Vice-Principal), and in 1829 Professor of
Political Economy. In 1831 the Whigs made him Archbishop of Dublin,
which difficult post he held for more than thirty years till his death
in 1863. His work is not very extensive, but it is remarkable. His
_Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte_ was an exceedingly
clever "skit" on the Rationalist position in regard to miracles and
biblical criticism generally; though Whately's orthodoxy was none of the
strictest. His Bampton Lectures on _Party Feeling in Religion_ preceded
rather curiously the greatest outburst of the said party feeling which
had been seen in England since the seventeenth century. But the books by
which he is or was most widely known are his _Logic_ and _Rhetoric_,
expansions of Encyclopaedia articles (1826 and 1828) intentionally
popular and perhaps almost unnecessarily exoteric, but extremely
stimulating and clear. Whately, who had some points in common with
Sydney Smith, was, like him, in part the victim of the extreme want of
accuracy and range in the Oxford education of his youth; but his mental
and literary powers were great.
William Whewell, the son of a carpenter, showed talent for mathematics
early, and obtaining an exhibition at Trinity, Cambridge, became fellow,
tutor, and Master of his College. He had the advantage, which his
special studies gave, of more thorough training, and extended his
attention from pure and applied mathematics to science and a kind of
philosophy. His chief works were _The History_ (1837) and _The
Philosophy_ (1840) _of the Inductive Sciences_, his Bridgewater Treatise
on _Astronomy and Physic in Reference to Natural Philosophy_ (1833) and
his _Plurality of Worlds_ (1853) being also famous in their day; but he
wrote voluminously in various kinds. He was rather a bully, and his work
has no extraordinary merit of style, but it is interesting as being
among the latest in which science permitted her votaries not to
specialise very much, and rather to apply the ancient education to the
new subjects than to be wholly theirs.
If the difficulty of deciding on rejection or admission be great in the
case of philosophers proper, much greater is it in the numerous
subdivisions which are themselves applied philosophy as philosophy is
applied literature. The two chief of these perhaps are Jurisprudence and
Political Economy. Under the head of the first, three remarkable writers
at least absolutely demand notice--Austin, Maine, and Stephen. The first
of these was in respect of influence, if not also of actual
accomplishment, one of the most noteworthy Englishmen of the century.
Born in 1790, he died in 1859, having begun life in the Army which he
exchanged for the Bar not long after Waterloo. He was made Professor of
Jurisprudence in the new University College of London in 1827. He held
this post for five years only; but it resulted in his famous _Province
of Jurisprudence Determined_, a book standing more or less alone in
English. He did not publish much else, though he did some official work;
and his _Lectures on Jurisprudence_ were posthumously edited by his
wife, a Miss Taylor of Norwich, who has been referred to as translator
of the _Story without an End_, and who did much other good work. Austin
(whose younger brother Charles (1799-1874) left little if anything in
print but accumulated a great fortune at the Parliamentary Bar, and left
a greater, though vague, conversational reputation) had bad health
almost throughout his life, and his work is not large in bulk. At first
pooh-poohed and neglected, almost extravagantly prized later, and later
still, according to the usual round, a little cavilled at, it presents
Utilitarian theory at its best in the intellectual way; and its
disciplinary value, if it is not taken for gospel, can hardly be
overrated. But its extreme clearness, closeness, and logical precision
carry with them the almost inevitable defects of hardness, narrowness,
and want of "play," as well as of that most fatal of intellectual
attitudes which takes for granted that everything is explicable. Still,
these were the defects of Austin's school and time; his merits were
individual, and indeed very nearly unique.
Sir Henry James Summer Maine was born in 1822, and educated first as a
Blue Coat boy and then at Pembroke College, Cambridge. After a quite
exceptional career as an undergraduate, he became fellow of Trinity
Hall, of which he died Master in 1888. But he had only held this latter
post for eleven years, and the midmost of his career was occupied with
quite different work. He had been made Professor of Civil Law in his
University in 1847, at a very early age, when he had not even been
called to the Bar; but he supplied this omission three years later, and
a little later still exchanged his Cambridge Professorship for a
Readership at Lincoln's Inn. In 1862 he obtained the appointment, famous
from its connection with letters, of Legal Member of the Viceroy's
Council in India. On quitting it after seven years he was transferred to
the Council at Home, and became Professor of Comparative Jurisprudence
at Oxford. Besides his work as a reviewer, which was considerable, Maine
wrote--in an admirable style, and with a scholarship and sense which, in
the recrudescence of more barbaric thought, have brought down socialist
and other curses on his head--many works on the philosophy of law,
politics, and history, the chief of which were his famous _Ancient Law_
(1861), _Village Communities_ (1871), _Early Law and Custom_ (1883),
with a severe criticism on Democracy called _Popular Government_ (1885).
Few writers of our time could claim the phrase _mitis sapentia_ as Maine
could, though it is possible that he was a little too much given to
theorise. But his influence in checking that of Austin was admirable.
A colleague of Maine's on the _Saturday Review_, his successor in his
Indian post, like him a _malleus demagogorum_, but in some ways no small
contrast, was Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-94), the most
distinguished member of a family unusually distinguished during the past
century in the public service and in literature. His father, Sir James
Stephen, was himself well known as a reviewer, as a civil servant, as
Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, and as author of _Essays in
Ecclesiastical History_ and _Lectures on the History of France_ (1849
and 1851). The second Sir James was born at Kensington in 1829, went to
Eton, thence to King's College, London, and thence to Trinity,
Cambridge, and was called to the Bar in 1854. His legal career was
brilliant and varied, and led him to the Bench, which he resigned
shortly before his death. Sir James Stephen published some works of
capital importance on his own subject, the chief relating the Criminal
Law, collected both earlier and later a good deal of his _Saturday_
work, discussed a famous passage of Indian History in the _Story of
Nuncomar_ (1885), and wrote not a little criticism--political,
theological, and other--of a somewhat negative but admirably
clear-headed kind--the chief expression of which is _Liberty, Equality,
and Fraternity_ (1873).
Even less room can be given to the Political Economists than to the
"Jurisprudents," partly because the best writers of them, such as J. S.
Mill, have figured or will figure elsewhere; partly because, from
Ricardo to Jevons and Cliffe Leslie, though they have often displayed no
mean literary power, the necessities or supposed necessities of their
subject have usually kept their books further away from _belles lettres_
than the documents of any other department of what is widely called
philosophy. But a paragraph must at least be given to one of the
earliest and one of the most famous of them.
If a prize were offered to the best-abused person in English literature,
few competitors would have much chance with Thomas Robert Malthus,
author of the _Essay on the Principles of Population_ (1798), and of
divers works on Political Economy, of which he was Professor in the East
India College at Haileybury. To judge from the references which for many
years used to be, and to some extent still are, made to Malthus, still
more from the way in which the term "Malthusian" is still often used, he
might be supposed to have been a reprobate anarchist and revolutionary,
who had before his eyes neither the fear of God, nor the love of man,
nor the respect of morality and public opinion. As a matter of fact
Malthus was a most respectable and amiable clergyman, orthodox I believe
in religion, Tory I believe in politics, who incurred odium chiefly by
his inculcation of the most disagreeable lessons of the new and
cheerless science which he professed. Born on 24th February 1766 near
Dorking, of a very respectable family, he went to Cambridge, took
honours, a fellowship at his college (Jesus), and orders, obtained a
benefice, and spent most of the last thirty years of his life in the
Professorship above referred to, dying in 1854. His _Essay_ was one of
the numerous counter-blasts to Godwin's anarchic perfectibilism, and its
general drift was simply to show that the increase of population, unless
counter-acted by individual and moral self-restraint, must reduce
humanity to misery. The special formula that "population increases in a
geometrical, food in a arithmetical ratio," is overstrained and a
little absurd; the general principle is sound beyond all question, and
not only consistent with, but absolutely deducible from, the purest
Christian doctrines. Malthus wrote well, he knew thoroughly what he was
writing about, and he suffers only from the inevitable drawback to all
writers on such subjects who have not positive genius of form, that a
time comes when their contentions appear self-evident to all who are not
ignorant or prejudiced.
The greatest _theological_ interest of the century belongs to what is
diversely called the Oxford and the Tractarian Movement; while, even if
this statement be challenged on non-literary grounds, it will scarcely
be so by any one on grounds literary. For the present purpose, of
course, nothing like a full account of the Movement can be attempted. It
is enough to say that it arose partly in reaction from the Evangelical
tendency which had dominated the more active section of the Church of
England for many years, partly in protest against the Liberalising and
Latitudinarian tendency in matters both temporal and spiritual. In
contradistinction to its predecessor (for the Evangelicals had been the
reverse of literary), it was from the first--_i.e._ about 1830, or
earlier if we take _The Christian Year_ as a harbinger of it--a very
literary movement both in verse and prose. Of its three leaders,
Pusey--whose name, given to it in derision and sometimes contested by
sympathisers as unappropriate, unquestionably ranks of right as that of
its greatest theologian, its most steadfast character, and the most of a
born leader engaged in it--was something less of a pure man of letters
than either Keble or Newman. But he was a man of letters; and perhaps a
greater one than is usually thought.
Edward Bouverie Pusey, who belonged to the family of Lord Folkestone by
blood, his father having become by bequest the representative of the
very old Berkshire house of Pusey, was born at the seat of this family
in 1800. He went to Eton and to Christ Church, and became a fellow of
Oriel, studied theology and oriental languages in Germany, and was made
Professor of Hebrew at the early age of twenty-seven. He was a thorough
scholar, and even in the times of his greatest unpopularity no charge of
want of competence for his post was brought against him by any one who
knew. It is, however, somewhat comic that charges of Rationalism were
brought against his first book, a study of contemporary German theology.
In or soon after 1833 he joined Newman and Keble in the famous _Tracts
for the Times_, at the same time urging the return to a more primitive
and catholic theology in his sermons, and by means of the great
enterprise in translation called the _Oxford Library of the Fathers_, of
which he executed part and sedulously edited others. Pusey first came
before general public notice outside Oxford in 1843, in consequence of a
very high-handed exertion of power by the authorities of the University,
who, without allowing him a hearing, suspended him for a sermon on the
Eucharist from preaching for three years. His mouth was thus closed at
the very moment when Newman "went over"; and when some of the enemies of
the movement declared that Pusey would go too. Others were equally
certain that if he stayed it was either from base motives of
self-interest, or, still more basely, in order to do underhand damage to
the Church. But all who unite knowledge and fairness now admit, not only
his perfect loyalty, but the almost unexampled heroism and steadfastness
with which for some ten or fifteen years after Newman's secession,
against popular obloquy, against something very like persecution from
the authorities of the Church and the University, and against the
constant and repeated discouragement given by the desertion of friends
and colleagues, he upheld his cause and made the despised and reproached
"Puseyites" of his middle life what he lived to see them--the greatest
and almost the dominant party in the Anglican Church. He was less
fortunate in his opposition to the secularising of the Universities, and
in his attempts (which ill-willers did not fail to liken to the attempts
made to stifle his own teaching) to check by legal means the spread of
Rationalism. But he was nearly as full of honours as of years when he
died on 16th September 1882.
Many of the constituents of this remarkable and perhaps unexampled
success--Pusey's personal saintliness, his unselfish use of his
considerable income, his unwearied benevolence in other than pecuniary
ways--do not concern us here. But his works, which are numerous, and the
most literary of which are his _Sermons_ and his _Eirenicon_,
contributed not a little to it. Pusey's style was accused by some of
bareness and by others of obscurity; but these accusations may be safely
dismissed as due merely to the prevalent fancy for florid expression,
and to the impatience of somewhat scholastically arranged argument which
has also distinguished our times.
The second of this remarkable trio, John Keble, was the eldest, having
been born on 24th April 1792, at Fairford, in Gloucestershire, with
which county his family had for some centuries been connected. Keble's
father was a clergyman, and there was a clerical feeling and tradition
in the whole family. John went to no public school, but was very
carefully educated at home, obtained an open scholarship at Corpus
Christi College, Oxford, when he was only fourteen, and went into
residence next year--for just at this time extremely early entrance at
the University was much commoner than a little earlier or later. He had
only just entered his nineteenth year when he took a double first, and
had not concluded it when he was elected, at the same time with Whately,
to an Oriel fellowship. He followed this up by winning both the
Chancellor's Essays, English and Latin, and established his reputation
as the most brilliant man of his day. He was ordained as soon as he
could be, and served the usual offices of tutor in his College and
examiner in the University. But even such semi-public life as this was
distasteful to him, and he soon gave up his Oriel tutorship for a
country curacy and private pupils. Indeed the note, some would say the
fault, of Keble's whole life was an almost morbid retiringness, which
made him in 1827 refuse even to compete with Hawkins for the Provostship
of Oriel. It is possible that he would not have been elected, for oddly
enough his two future colleagues in the triumvirate, both Fellows, were
both in favour of his rival; but his shunning the contest has been
deeply deplored, and by some even blamed as a _gran rifiuto_. The
publication of _The Christian Year_, however, which immediately
followed, probably did more for the Movement and for the spiritual life
of England than any office-holding could have done; and in 1831, Keble,
being elected Professor of Poetry, distinguished himself almost as much
in criticism as he had already done in poetry. He obtained, and was
contented with, the living of Hursley, in Hampshire, where he resided
till his death on 29th March 1866.
Keble's very generally granted character as one of the holiest persons
of modern times, and even his influence on the Oxford Movement, concern
us less here than his literary work, which was of almost the first
importance merely as literature. The reaction from an enormous
popularity of nearly seventy years' date, and the growth of
anti-dogmatic opinions, have brought about a sort of tendency in some
quarters to belittle, if not positively to sneer at, _The Christian
Year_, which, with the _Lyra Innocentium_ and a collection of
_Miscellaneous Poems_, contains Keble's poetical work. There never was
anything more uncritical. The famous reference which Thackeray--the
least ecclesiastically inclined, if by no means the least religious, of
English men of letters of genius in this century--makes to its
appearance in _Pendennis_, shows what the thoughts of unbiassed
contemporaries were. And no very different judgment can be formed by
unbiassed posterity. With Herbert and Miss Rossetti, Keble ranks as the
greatest of English writers in sacred verse, the irregular and unequal
efforts of Vaughan and Crashaw sometimes transcending, oftener sinking
below the three. If Keble has not the exquisite poetical mysticism of
Christina Rossetti he is more copious and more strictly scholarly, while
he escapes the quaint triviality, or the triviality sometimes not even
quaint, which mars Herbert. The influence of Wordsworth is strongly
shown, but it is rendered and redirected in an entirely original manner.
The lack of taste which mars so much religious poetry never shows
itself even for a moment in Keble; yet the correctness of his diction,
like the orthodoxy of his thought, is never frigid or tame. There are
few poets who so well deserve the nickname of a Christian Horace, though
the phrase may seem to have something of the paradox of "prose
Shakespeare." The careful melody of the versification and the exact
felicity of the diction exclude, it may be, those highest flights which
create most enthusiasm, at any rate in this century. But for measure,
proportion, successful attainment of the proposed end, Keble has few
superiors.
It would indeed be surprising if he had many, for, with his gift of
verse, he was also one of the most accomplished of critics. His
_Praelectiones Academicae_, written, as the rule then was, in Latin, is
unfortunately a sealed book to too many persons whom modern practice
calls and strives to consider "educated"; but he did not confine himself
even in these to classical subjects, and he wrote not a few reviews in
English dealing with modern poetry. His aesthetics are of course deeply
tinged with ethic; but he does not in the least allow moral
prepossessions to twist his poetic theory, which may be generally
described as the Aristotelian teaching on the subject, supplied and
assisted by the aid of a wide study of the literatures not open to
Aristotle. There can be no doubt that if Keble's mind had not been more
and more absorbed by religious subjects he would have been one of the
very greatest of English critics of literature; and he is not far from
being a great one as it is. He did not publish many sermons, though one
of his, the Assize Sermon at Oxford in 1833, is considered to have
started the Movement; and opinions as to his pulpit powers have varied.
But it is certainly not too much to say that it was impossible for Keble
not to make everything that he wrote, whether in verse or prose,
literature of the most perfect academic kind, informed by the spirit of
scholarship and strengthened by individual talent.
John Henry Newman was the eldest son of a man of business of some means
(who came of a family of Cambridgeshire yeomen) and of a lady of
Huguenot descent. He was born in London on 21st February 1801, was
educated privately at Ealing, imbibed strong evangelical principles, and
went up to Oxford (Trinity College) so early that he went in for
"Greats" (in which he only obtained a third class) before he was
nineteen. He continued, however, to reside at Trinity, where he held a
scholarship, and more than made up for his mishap in the schools by
winning an Oriel fellowship in 1823. In three successive years he took
orders and a curacy in the first, the Vice-Principalship of St. Alban's
Hall under Whately in the second, and an Oriel tutorship in the third;
while in 1827 he succeeded Hawkins, who became Provost, in the Vicarage
of St. Mary's, the most important post of the kind--to a man who chose
to make it important--in Oxford.
Newman did so choose, and his sermons--not those to the University,
though these also are notable, but those nominally "Parochial," really
addressed to the undergraduates who soon flocked to hear him--were the
foundation and mainstay of his influence, constitute the largest single
division of his printed work, and perhaps present that work in the best
and fairest light. His history for the next sixteen years cannot be
attempted here; it is the history of the famous thing called the Oxford
Movement, which changed the intellectual as well as the ecclesiastical
face of England, on which libraries have been written, and which, even
yet, has not been satisfactorily or finally judged. His travels with
Hurrell Froude in the Mediterranean during 1832-33 seem to have been the
special turning-point of his career. After ten years, perhaps of
"development," certainly of hard fighting, he resigned St. Mary's in
1843, and after two years more of halting between two opinions he was
received into the Church of Rome in October 1845. He left Oxford, never
to return to it as a residence, and not to visit it for thirty-two
years, in the following February.
His first public appearance after this was in the once famous Achilli
trial for libel, in which the plaintiff, an anti-Roman lecturer,
recovered damages from Newman for an utterly damning description of
Achilli's career in the Roman Church itself. Impartial judges generally
thought and think that the verdict was against the weight of evidence.
At any rate it produced a decided revulsion in Newman's favour, of which
he was both too convinced of his own position and too astute not to take
advantage. He had hitherto since his secession resided (he had been
re-ordained in Rome) at Birmingham, London, and Dublin, but he now took
up his abode, practically for the rest of his life, at Birmingham or
rather Edgbaston. In 1864 the great opportunity, presented by Kingsley's
unguarded words (_vide supra_), occurred, and he availed himself of it
at once. Most of those who read the _Apologia pro Vita Sua_ were not
familiar with Newman's masterly English, and his competent, if not
supreme, dialectic and sophistic. They were not, as a former generation
had been, prejudiced against him; the untiring work of those of his
former friends who remained faithful to the Church of England had of
itself secured him a fair hearing. During the remaining twenty-five
years of his life he had never again to complain of ostracism or unfair
prejudice. The controversy as to the Vatican Council brought him once
more forward, and into collision with Mr. Gladstone, but into no odium
of any kind. Indeed he was considerably less popular at Rome than at
home, the more supple and less English character of Manning finding
greater favour with Pius IX. The late seventies, however, were a time of
triumph for Newman. In 1877 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of his own
College, Trinity, and next year paid what may be called a visit of
restoration to Oxford, while in 1879 the new Pope Leo XIII., a man of
great abilities and wide piety, raised Newman to the cardinalate. He
visited Rome on the occasion, but returned to Birmingham, where the
Edgbaston Oratory was still his home for the remaining years of his
life. This did not end till 11th August 1890, when almost all men spoke
almost all good things over his grave, though some did not spare to
interpose a sober criticism. The books composed during this long and
eventful career, especially in the first half of it, were very
numerous, Cardinal Newman's works at the time of his death, and before
the addition of Letters, etc., extending to nearly forty volumes. Much
of the matter of these is still _cinis dolosissimus_, not to be trodden
on save in the most gingerly manner in such a book as this. Yet there
are probably few qualified and impartial judges who would refuse Newman,
all things considered, the title of the greatest theological writer in
English during this century; and there are some who uphold him for one
of the very greatest of English prose writers. It is therefore
impossible not to give him a place, and no mean place, here.
Although his chief work, indeed all but a very small part of it, was in
prose, he was a good verse writer. The beautiful poem or hymn usually
called from its first words "Lead, kindly Light," but entitled by its
author "The Pillar of Cloud," is not merely as widely known as any piece
of sacred verse written during the century, but may challenge anything
of that class (out of the work of Miss Christina Rossetti) for really
poetical decoction and concoction of religious ideas. It was written,
with much else, during a voyage in a sailing ship from Sicily to
Marseilles at the close (June 1833) of that continental tour which was
of such moment in Newman's life; and the whole batch ferments with
spiritual excitement. Earlier, and indeed later, Newman, besides plenty
of serious verse, contributed to the _Lyra Apostolica_ or written
independently, was a graceful writer of verse trifles; but his largest
and best poetical work, _The Dream of Gerontius_, was not produced till
he was approaching old age, and had long passed the crisis of his
career. Possibly the new ferment of soul into which the composition of
the _Apologia_ had thrown him, may have been responsible for this, which
is dated a year later. It is the recital in lyrical-dramatic form of an
anticipatory vision, just before death, of the Last Things, and unites
dignity and melody in a remarkable manner. The only other parts of his
work to which Newman himself attached the title "literature" were the
prose romances of _Callista_ and _Loss and Gain_. They display his power
over language, but are exposed on one side to the charges usually
incurred by novels with a purpose, and on the other to a suspicion of
bad taste, incurred in the effort to be popular.
By far the larger bulk of the works, however, belongs to theology. This
includes twelve volumes of Sermons, all but a small part delivered
before Newman's change of creed, and eight of them the _Parochial and
Plain Sermons_, preached in the pulpit of St. Mary's but not to the
University; four of treatises, including the most famous and
characteristic of Newman's works except the _Apologia_, _The Grammar of
Assent_, and _The Development of Christian Doctrine_; four of Essays;
three of Historical Sketches; four theological, chiefly on Arianism, and
translations of St. Athanasius; and six Polemical, which culminate in
the _Apologia_. With respect to the substance of this work it is soon
easy, putting controversial matters as much as possible apart, to
discover where Newman's strength and weakness respectively lay. He was
distinctly deficient in the historic sense; and in the _Apologia_ itself
he threw curious light on this deficiency, and startled even friends and
fellow-converts, by speaking contemptuously of "antiquarian arguments."
The same defect is quaintly illustrated by a naif and evidently sincere
complaint that he should have been complained of for (in his own words)
"attributing to the middle of the third century what is certainly to be
found in the fourth." And it is understood that he was not regarded
either by Anglican or by Roman Catholic experts as a very deep
theologian in either of his stages. The special characteristic--the
_ethos_ as his own contemporaries and immediate successors at Oxford
would have said--of Newman seems to have been strangely combined. He was
perhaps the last of the very great preachers in English--of those who
combined a thoroughly classical training, a scholarly form, with the
incommunicable and almost inexplicable power to move audiences and
readers. And he was one of the first of that class of journalists who in
the new age have succeeded the preachers, whether for good or ill, as
the prophets of the illiterate. It may seem strange to speak of Newman
as a journalist; but if any one will read his essays, his _Apologia_,
above all the curious set of articles called _The Tamworth
Reading-Room_, he will see what a journalist was lost, or only partly
developed, in this cardinal. He had the conviction, which is far more
necessary to a journalist than is generally thought; and yet his
convictions were not of that extremely systematic and far-reaching kind
which no doubt often stands in the journalist's way. He had the faculty
of mixing bad and good argument, which is far more effective with mixed
audiences than unbated logic. And, little as he is thought of as
sympathising with the common people, he was entirely free from that
contempt of them which always prevents a man from gaining their ear
unless he is a consummately clever scoundrel.
It may however be retorted that if Newman was a born journalist, sermons
and theology must be a much better school of style in journalism than
articles and politics. And it is quite true that his writing at its best
is of extraordinary charm, while that charm is not, as in the case of
some of his contemporaries and successors, derived from dubiously
legitimate ornament and flourish, but observes the purest classical
limitations of proportion and form. It has perhaps sometimes been a
little over-valued, either by those who in this way or that--out of love
for what he joined or hate to what he left--were in uncritical sympathy
with Newman, or by others it may be from pure ignorance of the fact that
much of this charm is the common property of the more scholarly writers
of the time, and is only eminently, not specially, present in him. But
of the fact of it there is no doubt. In such a sermon for instance as
that on "The Individuality of the Soul," a thought or series of
thoughts, in itself poetically grandiose enough for Taylor or even for
Donne, is presented in the simplest but in the most marvellously
impressive language. The sentences are neither volleying in their
shortness, nor do they roll thundrously; the cadences though perfect are
not engineered with elaborate musical art; there are in proportion very
few adjectives; the writer exercises the most extreme continence in
metaphor, simile, illustration, all the tricks and frounces of literary
art. Yet Taylor, though he might have attained more sweetness or more
grandeur, could hardly have been more beautiful; and though Donne might
have been so, it would have been at the expense of clearness. Newman is
so clear that he has often been accused of being, and sometimes is, a
little hard; but this is not always or often the case: it is especially
not so when he is dealing with things which, as in the sermon just
referred to and that other on "The Intermediate State," admit the
diffusion of religious awe. The presence of that awe, and of a constant
sense and dread of Sin, have been said, and probably with truth, to be
keynotes of Newman's religious ideas, and of his religious history; but
they did not harden, as in thinkers of another temper has often been the
case, his style or his thought. On the contrary, they softened both; and
it is when he is least under the influence of them that unction chiefly
deserts him. Yet he by no means often sought to excite his hearers. He
held, as he himself somewhere says, that "impassioned thoughts and
sublime imaginings have no strength in them." And this conviction of his
can hardly be strange to the fact that few writers indulge so little as
Newman in what is called fine writing. He has "organ passages," but they
are such as the wind blowing as it lists draws from him, not such as are
produced by deliberate playing on himself.
In a wider space it would be interesting to comment on numerous other
exponents of the Movement. Archdeacon afterwards Cardinal Manning
(1807-93), the successful rival of Newman among those Anglican clergymen
who joined the Church of Rome, was less a man of letters than a very
astute man of business; but his sermons before he left the Church had
merit, and he afterwards wrote a good deal. Richard Hurrell Froude
(1803-36), elder brother of the historian, had a very great and not
perhaps a very beneficent influence on Newman, and through Newman on
others; but he died too soon to leave much work. His chief
distinguishing note was a vigorous and daring humour allied to a strong
reactionary sentiment. Isaac Williams, the second poet of the Movement
(1802-65), was in most respects, as well as in poetry, a minor Keble.
W. G. Ward, commonly called "Ideal" Ward from his famous, very
ill-written, very ill-digested, but important _Ideal of a Christian
Church_, which was the alarm-bell for the flight to Rome, was a
curiously constituted person of whom something has been said in
reference to Clough. He had little connection with pure letters, and
after his secession to Rome and his succession to a large fortune he
finally devoted himself to metaphysics of a kind. His acuteness was
great, and he had a scholastic subtlety and logical deftness which made
him very formidable to the loose thinkers and reasoners of
Utilitarianism and anti-Supernaturalism. One of the latest important
survivors was Dean Church (1815-91), who, as Proctor, had arrested the
persecution of the Tractarians, with which it was sought to complete the
condemnation of Ward's _Ideal_, and who afterwards, both in a country
cure and as Dean of St. Paul's, acquired very high literary rank by work
on Dante, Anselm, Spenser, and other subjects, leaving also the best
though unfortunately an incomplete history of the Movement itself; while
the two Mozleys, the one a considerable theologian, the other an active
journalist, brothers-in-law of Newman, also deserve mention. Last of all
perhaps we must notice Henry Parry Liddon (1829-90), of a younger
generation, but the right-hand man of Pusey in his later day, and his
biographer afterwards--a popular and pleasing, though rather rhetorical
than argumentative or original, preacher, and a man very much affected
by his friends. Even this list is nothing like complete, but it is
impossible to enlarge it.
Midway between the Movement and its enemies, a partial sympathiser in
early days, almost an enemy when the popular tide turned against it,
almost a leader when public favour once more set in in its favour, was
Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and Winchester (1805-73). The third
son of the celebrated emancipationist and evangelical, he had brothers
who were more attracted than himself by the centripetal force of Roman
doctrine, and succumbed to it. Worldly perhaps as much as spiritual
motives kept him steadier. He did invaluable work as a bishop; and at
all times of his life he was in literature a distinct supporter of the
High Church cause, though with declensions and defections of Erastian
and evangelical backsliding. He was a very admirable preacher, though
his sermons do not read as well as they "heard"; some of his devotional
manuals are of great excellence; and in the heyday of High Church
allegory (an interesting by-walk of literature which can only be glanced
at here, but which was trodden by some estimable and even some eminent
writers) he produced the well hit-off tale of _Agathos_ (1839). But it
may be that he will, as a writer, chiefly survive in the remarkable
letters and diaries in his _Life_, which are not only most valuable for
the political and ecclesiastical history of the time, but precious
always as human documents and sometimes as literary compositions.
Three remarkable persons must be mentioned among the opponents of (and
in one case harsh judgment might say the deserters of) the Movement.
These were Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Mark Pattison, and Benjamin Jowett.
Stanley, born in 1815, was the son of the (afterwards) Bishop of Norwich
and a nephew of the first Lord Stanley of Alderley, and was brought up
very much under the influence of Arnold, whose biographer he became. But
he went further than Arnold in Broad Church ways. His career at Rugby
and at Oxford was distinguished, and after being fellow and tutor of
University College for some ten years, he became successively Canon of
Canterbury, Canon of Christ Church, and Professor of Ecclesiastical
History at Oxford, and Dean of Westminster, in which last post he had
almost greater opportunities than any bishop, and used them to the full.
He also wrote busily, devoting himself especially to the geography of
Palestine and the history of the Eastern Church, which he handled in a
florid and popular style, though not with much accuracy or scholarship.
Personally, Stanley was much liked, though his conception of his duties
as a sworn servant of the Church has seemed strange to some. He died in
July 1881.
Mark Pattison (1813-84), Fellow and Rector of Lincoln College, had a
less amiable character than Stanley's, but a greater intellect and far
nicer, profounder, and wider scholarship, though he actually did very
little. He fell under the influence of Newman early, and was one of that
leader's closest associates in his monastic retreat at Littlemore. But
when Newman "went over," the wave swept Pattison neither to Rome nor
safely on to higher English ground, but into a religious scepticism, the
exact extent of which was nowhere definitely announced, but which was
regarded by some as nearly total. He did not nominally leave the Church,
but he acted always with the extreme Liberal party in the University,
and he was one of the famous Seven who contributed to _Essays and
Reviews_[11]. The shock of his religious revolution was completed by a
secular disappointment--his defeat for the office of Rector, which he
actually attained much later; and a temper always morbid, appears, to
judge from his painful but extraordinarily interesting and
characteristic _Memoirs_, to have been permanently soured. Even active
study became difficult to him, and though he was understood to have a
more extensive acquaintance with the humanists of the late Renaissance
than any man of his day, his knowledge took little written form except a
volume on Isaac Casaubon. He also wrote an admirable little book on
_Milton_ for the _English Men of Letters_, edited parts of Milton and
Pope, and contributed a not inconsiderable number of essays and articles
to the _Quarterly_ and _Saturday Reviews_, and other papers. The
autobiography mentioned was published after his death.
Despite Pattison's peculiar temper he had warm and devoted friends, and
it was impossible for any one, whether personally liking him or not, to
deny him the possession of most unusual gifts. Whether his small
performance was due to the shocks just referred to, to genuine
fastidiousness and resolve to do nothing but the best, or to these
things mixed with a strong dash of downright indolence and want of
energy, is hard to say. But it would be entirely unjust to regard him as
merely a man who was "going to do something." His actual work though not
large is admirable, and his style is the perfection of academic
correctness, not destitute of either vigour or grace.
There were some resemblances between Pattison and Jowett (1817-94); but
the latter, unlike Pattison, had never had any sympathies with the
religious renaissance of his time. Like Pattison he passed his entire
life (after he obtained a Balliol fellowship) in his College, and like
him became head of it; while he was a much more prominent member of the
Liberal party in Oxford. His position as Regius Professor of Greek gave
him considerable influence even beyond Balliol. He, too, was an
_Essayist and Reviewer_, and he exercised a quiet but pervading
influence in University matters. He even acquired no mean name in
literature, though his work, after an early _Commentary_ on some
Epistles of St. Paul, was almost entirely confined to translations,
especially of Plato, and though in these translations he was much
assisted by pupils. He wrote well, but with much less distinction and
elegance than Pattison, nor had he by any means the same taste for
literature and erudition in it. But, as an influence on the class of
persons from whom men of letters are drawn, no one has exceeded him in
his day.
The dramatic catastrophe of the Disruption of the Scotch Kirk, which, by
a strange coincidence, was nearly contemporary with the crisis of the
Oxford Movement, set the final seal upon the reputation of Thomas
Chalmers, who headed the seceders. But this reputation had been made
long before, and indeed Chalmers died 30th May 1847, only four years
after he "went out." He was a much older man than the Oxford leaders,
having been born in 1780, and after having for some years, though a
minister, devoted himself chiefly to secular studies, he became famous
as a preacher at the Tron Church, Glasgow. In 1823 he was appointed
Professor of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews, and (shortly afterwards)
of Theology in Edinburgh. He was one of the Bridgewater treatise
writers--a group of distinguished persons endowed to produce tractates
on Natural Theology--and his work, _The Adaptation of External Nature to
the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man_, was one of the most
famous of that set, procuring for him a correspondence-membership from
the French Institute and a D.C.L. from Oxford. Chalmers' works are
extremely voluminous; the testimony as to the effect of his preaching is
tolerably uniform; he was a man of very wide range of thought, and of
remarkable faculty of popularisation; and there is no doubt that he was
a born leader of men. But as literature his works have hardly maintained
the reputation which they once had, and even those who revere him,
unless they let reverence stifle criticism, are apt to acknowledge that
there is more rhetoric than logic in him, and that the rhetoric itself
is not of the finest.
Edward Irving, at one time an assistant to Chalmers, and an early friend
of Carlyle, was twelve years the junior of Chalmers himself, and died
thirteen years before him. But at nearly the time when Chalmers was at
the height of his reputation as a preacher in Glasgow, Irving was
drawing crowds to the unfashionable quarter of Hatton Garden, London, by
sermons of extraordinary brilliancy. Later he developed eccentricities
of doctrine which do not concern us, and his preaching has not worn much
better than that of his old superior. Irving, however, had more strictly
literary affinities than Chalmers; he came under the influence of
Coleridge (which probably had not a little to do both with his eloquence
and with his vagaries); and he may be regarded as having been much more
of a man of letters who had lost his way and strayed into theology than
as a theologian proper.
To what extent this great and famous influence of Coleridge actually
worked upon Frederick Denison Maurice has been debated. It is however
generally stated that he, like his friend Sterling, was induced to take
orders in the Church of England by this influence. He was not a very
young man when in 1834, the year of Irving's death, he did this, for he
had been born in 1805, and had been educated at Cambridge, though being
then a Unitarian he did not take a degree. He afterwards went to Oxford
and took an M.A. degree there, and he was regarded for a time as a sort
of outlying sympathiser with the Tractarian Movement. But his opinions
took a very different line of development not merely from those of
Newman, but from those of Keble and Pusey. He indeed never left the
Church, in which he held divers preferments; and though his views on
eternal punishment lost him a professorship in King's College, London,
he met with no formal ecclesiastical censure. But he came to be regarded
as a champion of the Broad Church school, and upheld eloquently and
vehemently, if not always with a sufficiency either of logic or of
learning, a curious conglomerate of "advanced" views, ranging from
Christian Socialism to something like the views of the Atonement
attributed to Origen, and from deprecation of dogma to deprecation of
the then fashionable political economy. He was made Professor of Moral
Philosophy at Cambridge in 1866, and died in 1872. Maurice's sermons
were effective, and his other works numerous. A very generous and
amiable person with a deficient sense of history, Maurice in his writing
is a sort of elder, less gifted, and more exclusively theological
Charles Kingsley, on whom he exercised great and rather unfortunate
influence. But his looseness of thought, wayward eclecticism of system,
and want of accurate learning, were not remedied by Kingsley's splendid
pictorial faculty, his creative imagination, or his brilliant style.
Somewhat akin to Maurice, but of a more feminine and less robust
temperament, was Frederick Robertson, generally called "Robertson of
Brighton," from the place of his last cure. Robertson, who was the son
of a soldier, was born in London on 3rd February 1816. After a rather
eccentric education and some vacillations about a profession, he went,
rather late, to Oxford, and was ordained in 1840. He had very bad
health, but did duty, chiefly at Cheltenham and at Brighton, pretty
valiantly, and died on August 1853. He published next to nothing in his
lifetime, but after his death there appeared several volumes of sermons
which gained great popularity, and were followed by other posthumous
works. Robertson's preaching is not very easy to judge, because the
published sermons are admittedly not what was actually delivered, but
after-reminiscences or summaries, and the judgment is not rendered
easier by the injudicious and gushing laudation of which he has been
made the subject. He certainly possessed a happy gift of phrase now and
then, and remarkable earnestness.
NOTE.--In no chapter, perhaps, has there been greater
difficulty as to inclusion and exclusion than in the
present. The names of Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, of Dean
Alford, of Bishop Lightfoot for England, of Bishop Charles
Wordsworth, of Dean Ramsay, of Drs. Candlish, Guthrie, and
Macleod for Scotland, may seem to clamour among orthodox
theologians, those of W. R. Greg, of James Hinton, of W. K.
Clifford among not always orthodox lay dealers with the
problems of philosophy, or of theology, or both. With less
tyrannous limits of space Principal Tulloch, who was
noteworthy in both these and in pure literature as well (he
was the last editor of _Fraser_), must have received at
least brief notice in this chapter, as must his brother
Principal, J. C. Shairp (an amiable poet, an agreeable
critic, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford), in others.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] This famous book, published in 1860, was a collection of papers by
six clergymen and a layman, some of which undoubtedly were, and the rest
of which were by association thought to be, unorthodox. It was condemned
by Convocation, and actual legal proceedings were taken against two of
the writers, but without final effect.