He is at liberty to wring his hands as much as he pleases over the
personalities which sullied the controversy with Salmasius; but these
are a small part of the matter, particularly when they are viewed in
connection with the habits of a time which was at once much rougher in
phrase, though perhaps not more malicious, than ours, and given to
servile imitation of Greek and Latin oratory. To point his moral more
keenly, Mr. Pattison denies that Milton was ever effective as a
political writer. Yet the Council of State, who can have looked to
nothing but effectiveness, and were pretty good judges of it, specially
invited Milton to answer "Eikon Basilike" and to plead the cause of the
Regicide Republic against Salmasius in the court of European opinion.
Mr. Pattison himself (p. 135) allows that on the Continent Milton was
renowned as the answerer of Salmasius and the vindicator of liberty; and
he proceeds to quote the statement of Milton's nephew that learned
foreigners could not leave London without seeing his uncle. But the
biographer has evidently laid down beforehand in his own mind general
laws which are fatal to all pamphlets as pamphlets, without
consideration of their particular merits. "There are," he says,
"examples of thought having been influenced by books. But such books
have been scientific, not rhetorical." If it were not rude to
contradict, we should have said that the influence exercised in politics
by scientific treatises had been as nothing in the aggregate compared
with that exercised by pamphlets, speeches, and, in later times, by the
newspaper press. What does Mr. Pattison say to Burke's "Reflections on
the French Revolution," to Paine's "Common Sense," to the tracts written
by Halifax and Defoe at the time of the Revolution? Neither thought nor
action is his epigrammatic condemnation of Milton's political writings,
but an appeal which stirs men to action is surely both. Again of
"Eikonoklastes" we are told that "it is like _all answers_,
worthless as a book." Bentley's "Phalaris" is an answer, Demosthenes'
"De Corona" is an answer. As a rule no doubt the form is a bad one, but
an answer may embody principles and knowledge as well as show literary
skill, reasoning power, and courteous self-control, which after all are
not worthless though they are worth far less than some other things.
These discussions so odious and contemptible in Mr. Pattison's eyes,
what are they but the processes of thought through which a nation or
humanity works its way to political truth? Even books scientific in form
such as Hobbes's "Leviathan" or Harrington's "Oceana" are but registered
results of a long discussion. "Eikon Basilike" was doing infinite
mischief to the cause of the Commonwealth, and how could it have been
met except by a critical reply? "Eikonoklastes" was thought, though it
was not exact science, and so far as it told it was action, though it
was not a pike or a musket.
This portion of Mr. Pattison's work is thickly sown with aphorisms to
which no one who does not share his special mood can without
qualification assent. No good man can with impunity addict himself to
party, and the best men will suffer most because their conviction of the
goodness of their cause is deeper. But when one with the sensibility of
a poet throws himself into the excitements of a struggle he is certain
to lose his balance. The endowment of feeling and imagination which
qualifies him to be the ideal interpreter of life unfits him for
participation in that real life through the manoeuvres and compromises
of which reason is the only guide and where imagination is as much
misplaced as it would be in a game of chess. In this there is an element
of truth but there is also something to which we are inclined to demur.
If by party is meant mere faction, plainly no man can addict himself to
it with impunity. But when the English nation was struggling in the
grasp of a court and a prelacy which sought to reduce it to the level of
Spain, no Englishman as it seems to us could with impunity perch himself
aloft in a palace of art while peasants were shedding their blood to
make him free. Especially do we question the soundness of the sentiment
expressed in the last clause. Why is real life to be abandoned by every
man of feeling and imagination and given over to the men of manoeuvre and
compromise? Is not this the sentiment of the monkish ascetic coming back
to us in another form and enjoining us to make ourselves eunuchs for the
Kingdom of Art's sake? Cromwell, Vane, Hampden, and Pym were not men of
manoeuvre and compromise, they had plenty of feeling and imagination,
though in them these qualities gave birth not to poetry, but to high
political or religious aspirations and grand social ideals. The theory
of Milton's biographer is that an active interest in public affairs is
fatal to excellence in literature or in art; and this theory seems to be
confuted as signally as possible by the facts of Milton's life.
It is curious to see how completely at variance Milton's own sentiment
is with that of his biographer and how little he foresaw what Mr.
Pattison would say about him. In the _Defensio Secunda_ he defends
himself against the charge not of over activity but of inaction. "I can
easily repel," he says, "any imputation of want of courage or of want of
zeal. For though I did not share the toils or perils of the war I was
engaged in a service not less hazardous to myself and more beneficial to
my fellow citizens; nor in the adverse turns of our affairs, did I ever
betray any symptoms of pusillanimity and dejection; or show myself more
afraid than became me of malice or of death: For since from my youth I
was devoted to the pursuits of literature, and my mind has always been
stronger than my body, I did not court the labours of a camp, in which
any common person would have been of more service than myself, but
resorted to that employment in which my exertions were likely to be of
most avail. Thus, with the better part of my frame I contributed as much
as possible to the good of my country, and to the success of the
glorious cause in which we were engaged; and I thought that if God
willed the success of such glorious achievements, it was equally
agreeable to his will that there should be others by whom those
achievements should be recorded with dignity and elegance; and that the
truth, which had been defended by arms, should also be defended by
reason; which is the best and only legitimate means of defending it.
Hence, while I applaud those who were victorious in the field, I will
not complain of the province which was assigned me; but rather
congratulate myself upon it, and thank the author of all good for having
placed me in a station, which may be an object of envy to others rather
than of regret to myself." Here is a culprit who entirely mistakes the
nature of his offence and instead of apologizing for what he has done
apologizes for not having done more. Nor so far as we are aware is there
in Milton's writings the slightest trace of sorrow for the misemployment
of his best years or consciousness of the ruin which it had wrought in
his genius as a poet.
In the same spirit Mr. Pattison continually represents the end of
Milton's public life as "the irretrievable discomfiture of all his
hopes, aims, and aspirations," his labour as "being swept away without a
trace of it being left," and the latter part of his life as utter
"wretchedness." The failure of selfish schemes often makes men wretched.
The failure of unselfish aspirations may make a man sad, but can never
make him wretched, and Milton was not wretched when he was writing
"Paradise Lost." He would not have been wretched even if the
discomfiture of his hopes for the Commonwealth had been as final and as
irretrievable as his biographer supposes. But Milton knew that though
disastrous it was not final or irretrievable. He had implicit confidence
in the indestructibility of moral force, and he "bated no jot of heart
or hope." He could see the limits of the reaction and he knew that,
though great and calamitous in proportion to the errors of the
Republican party, it had not changed in a day the character and
fundamental tendencies of the nation. He would note that the Star
Chamber, the Court of High Commission, the Council of the North, the
legislative functions once usurped by the Privy Council, were not
restored, and that no attempt was made to govern without a parliament.
He found himself the defender of regicide, not free from peril, indeed,
yet protected by public opinion, while, in general, narrow bounds were
set to the bloodthirsty vengeance of the Cavaliers. He lived to witness
the actual turn of the tide. Six years before his death the Triple
Alliance was formed, and in the year of his death the Cabal Ministry
fell. At worst, his case would have been that of a soldier killed in an
unfortunate crisis of a battle which in the end was won, but he fell, if
not with the shout of victory in his ears, with the inspiring signs of a
general advance around him. If we take remoter ages into our view, the
triumph of Milton is still more manifest. The cause to which he gave his
life and his genius is forever exalted and dignified by his name. The
notion that the Cavaliers were the men of culture and that the Puritans
were the uncultivated has been a hundred times confuted, though it
reappears in the discourses of Mr. Matthew Arnold, and, what is much
more astonishing, in this work of Mr. Pattison. But in a party of action
great defect of culture would be amply redeemed by the possession of a
Milton.
COLERIDGE'S LIFE OF KEBLE.
[Footnote: A Memoir of the Rev. J. Keble, M.A., late Vicar of Hursley,
by the Right Hon. Sir J.T. Coleridge, D.C.L., Oxford and London: James
Parker & Co., 1869.]
SIR JOHN COLERIDGE, the writer of this "Life of Keble," was for many
years one of the Judges of the Court of Queen's Bench, is now a Privy
Councillor, and may be regarded almost as the lay head of the High
Church party in England. Sharing Keble's opinions, and entering into all
his feelings, he is at the same time himself always a man of the world
and a man of sense. Add to these qualifications his intimate and
lifelong friendship with the subject of his work, and we have reason to
expect a biography at once appreciative and judicial. Such a biography,
in fact, we have; one full of sympathy, yet free from exaggeration, and
a good lesson to biographers in general. The intimacy of the friendship
between the writer and his subject might have interfered with his
impartiality and repelled our confidence if the case had been more
complex and had made greater demands on the inflexibility of the judge.
But in the case of a character and a life so perfectly simple, pure, and
transparent as the character and the life of Keble, there was but one
thing to be said.
The author of "The Christian Year" was the son of a country clergyman of
the Church of England, and was educated at home by his father, so that
he missed, or, as he would probably have said himself, escaped, the
knowledge of minds differently trained from his own which a boy cannot
help picking up at an English public school. At a very early age he
became a scholar of Corpus Christi, a very small and secluded college of
the High Church and High Tory University of Oxford. As the scholarships
led to fellowships--the holders of which were required to be in holy
orders--and to church preferment, almost all the scholars were destined
for the clerical profession. Of Keble's student friendships one only
seems to have been formed outside the walls of his own college, and this
was with Miller, a student of Worcester College, who afterwards became a
High Church clergyman. Among the students destined for the Anglican
priesthood in the Junior Common Room of Corpus Christi College, there
was indeed one whose presence strikes us like the apparition of Turnus
in the camp of AEneas--Thomas Arnold. Arnold was already Arnold, and he
succeeded in drawing the young champions of the divine right of kings
and priests into a struggle against the divine right of tutors which
'secured the liberty of the subject' at Corpus--the question at issue
between the subject and the ruler being by which of two clocks, one of
which was always five minutes before the other, the recitations should
begin. The friendship between Arnold and Keble, however, was merely
personal, Arnold evidently never exercised the slightest influence over
Keble's mind, and even in this 'great rebellion'--the only rebellion,
great or small, of his life--Keble was induced to take part, as he has
expressly recorded, at the instigation of Coleridge, a middle term
between Arnold and himself. The college teachers were all clergymen and
the university curriculum in their days was regulated and limited by
clerical ascendancy, and consisted of the Aristotelian and Butlerian
philosophy, classics, and pure mathematics, without modern history or
physical science. The remarkable precocity of Keble's intellect enabled
him to graduate with the highest honours both in classics and
mathematics at an age almost miraculously early even when allowance is
made for the comparative youthfulness of students in general in those
days. He was at once elected a Fellow of Oriel, and translated to the
Senior Common Room of the College--another clerical society consisting
of men for the most part considerably his seniors, among whom, in spite
of the presence of Whately, High Church principles probably predominated
already, and were destined soon to predominate in the most extreme
sense, for the college presently became the focus of the Ritualistic and
Romanizing movement. Thus, up to twenty-three, Keble's life had been
that of a sort of acolyte, and though not ascetic (for his nature
appears to have been always genial and mirthful), entirely clerical in
its environments and its aspirations. At twenty-three he took orders,
and put round his neck, with the white tie of Anglican priesthood, the
Thirty-nine Articles, the whole contents of the Anglican Prayer Book and
all the contradictions between those two standards of belief. For some
time he held a tutorship in his college then he went down to a country
living in the neighbourhood of a cathedral city, where he spent the rest
of his days. His character was so sweet and gentle that he could not
fail to be naturally disposed to toleration. He even goes the length of
saying that some profane libellers whom his friend Coleridge was going
to prosecute, were not half so dangerous enemies to religion as some
wicked worldly-minded Christians. But it is no wonder, and implies no
derogation from his charity, that he should have regarded the progress
of opinions different from his own as a mediaeval monk would have
regarded the progress of an army of Saracens or a horde of Avars. His
poetic sympathies could not hinder him from disliking the rebel and
Puritan Milton.
Thus it was impossible that he should be in a very broad sense a poet of
humanity. His fundamental conception of the world was essentially
mediaeval, his ideal was that of cloistered innocence or, still better,
the innocence of untempted and untried infancy. For such perfection his
Lyra Innocentium was strung. When his friend is thinking of the
profession of the law, he conjures him to forego the brilliant visions
which tempted him in that direction for "visions far more brilliant and
more certain too, more brilliant in their results, inasmuch as the
salvation of one soul is worth more than the framing the Magna Charta of
a thousand worlds, more certain to take place since temptations are
fewer and opportunities everywhere to be found. These words remind us of
a passage in one of Massillon's sermons, preached on the delivery of
colours to a regiment, in which the bishop after dwelling on the
hardships and sufferings which soldiers are called upon to endure,
intimates that a small part of those hardships and sufferings, undergone
in performance of a monastic vow, would merit the kingdom of heaven. If
souls are to be saved by real moral influences, Sir John Coleridge has
probably saved a good many more souls as a religious judge and man of
the world than he would have saved as the rector of a country parish,
and if character is formed by moral effort, he has probably formed a
much higher character by facing temptation than he would have done by
flying from it. Keble himself, in his Morning Hymn, has a passage in a
different strain, but the sentiment which really prevailed with him was
probably that embodied in his advice to his friend.
Whatever of grace, worth, or beneficence there could be in the half
cloistered life of an Oxford fellow of those days or in the rural and
sacerdotal life of a High Church rector, there was in the life of Keble
at Oriel, and afterwards at Hursley. The best spirit of such a life
together with the image of a character rivalling in spiritual beauty,
after its kind that of Ken or Leighton, is found in Keble's poetry, and
for this we may be, as hundreds of thousands have been, thankful.
The biographer declines to enter into a critical examination of the
"Christian Year," but he confidently predicts its indefinite reign,
founding his prediction on the causes of its original success. He justly
describes it, in effect as rather a poetical manual of devotion than a
book of poetry for continuous reading It is in truth, so completely out
of the category of ordinary poetry that to estimate its poetic merits
would be a very difficult task. Sir John Coleridge indicates this, when
he cites as an appropriate tribute to the excellence of the book the
practice of the clergyman who used, every Sunday afternoon instead of a
sermon to read and interpret to his congregation the poem of the
Christian Year for the day. The object of the present publication says
the Preface will be attained if any person find assistance from it in
bringing his own thoughts and feelings into more entire unison with
those recommended and exemplified in the Prayer Book. This connection
with the Prayer Book and with the Anglican Calendar, while it has given
the book an immense circulation necessarily limits its range and
interest. Yet those who care least for being brought into unison with
the Prayer Book fully admit that the "Christian Year" gives proof of
real poetic power. Keble himself, as his biographer attests, had a very
humble opinion of his own work, seldom read it hated to hear it praised
consented with great difficulty to its glorification by sumptuous
editions. It was his saintly humility suggests the biographer which made
him feel that the book which flowed from his own heart would inevitably
be taken for a faithful likeness of himself, that he would thus be
exhibiting himself in favourable colours and be in danger of incurring
the woe pronounced on those who win the good opinion of the world. If
this account be true it is another proof of the mediaeval and half
monastic mould in which Keble's religious character was cast.
The comparative failure of the "Lyra Innocentium" is probably to be
attributed not only to its inferiority in intrinsic merit but to the
fact that whereas the "Christian Year" has as little of a party
character as any work of devotion written by an Anglican and High Church
clergyman could have, the "Lyra Innocentium" was the work of a leading
party man. The interval between the two publications had been filled by
a great reactionary movement among the clergy, one of the back-streams
to that current of Liberalism, which setting in after the termination of
the great French war, not only swept away the Rotten boroughs and the
other political bulwarks of Tory dominion but threatened to sweep away
the privileges of the Established Church, and compelled Churchmen to
look out for a basis independent of State support. Keble was the
associate of Hurrell Froude, Newman Pusey and the other great
Tractarians. A sermon which he preached before the University of Oxford
was regarded by Newman as the beginning of the movement. He contributed
to the Tracts for the Times, though as a controversialist he was never
powerful, sweetness not strength being the characteristic of his mind.
He gradually embraced, as it seems to us, all the principles which sent
his fellow Tractarians over to Rome. The posthumous alteration made in
the Christian Year by his direction shows that he held a doctrine
respecting the Eucharist not practically distinguishable from the Roman
doctrine of Transubstantiation. A poem intended to appear in the "Lyra
Apostolica" but suppressed at the time in deference to the wishes of
cautious friends and now published by his biographer proves that he was,
as a Protestant putting it plainly would say, an advanced Mariolater. He
was a thoroughgoing sacerdotalist and believer in the authority of the
Church in matters of opinion. He mourned over the abandonment of
auricular confession. He regarded the cessation of prayers for the souls
of dead founders and benefactors as a lamentable concession to
Protestant prejudice. Like his associates he repudiated the very name of
Protestant. He deemed the state of the Church of England with regard to
orthodoxy most deplorable--two prelates having distinctly denied an
article of the Apostles Creed and matters going on altogether so that it
was very difficult for a Catholic Christian to remain in that communion.
Why then did he not with Newman and the rest accept the logical
conclusions of his premises and go to the place to which his principles
belonged? His was not a character to be influenced by any worldly
motives or even by that sense of ecclesiastical position which perhaps
has sometimes had its influence in making Romanizing leaders of the
Anglican clergy unwilling to merge their party and their leadership in
the Church of Rome. There was nothing in his nature which would have
recoiled from any self abnegation or submission. The real answer is we
believe that Keble was a married man. We can hardly imagine him making
love. His marriage was no doubt one not of passion but of affection, as
small a departure from the sacerdotal ideal as it was possible for a
marriage to be. Still, he was married and tenderly attached to his good
wife. Thus it was probably not any subtle distinction between Real
Presence and Transubstantiation, not misgivings as to the exact degree
of worship to be paid to the Virgin, not doubts as to the limits of the
personal infallibility of the Pope or objections to practical abuses in
the Church of Rome--which kept Keble and has kept many a Romanizing
clergyman of the Anglican Church from becoming a Roman Catholic. Nor is
the reason when analysed one of which Anglican philosophy need be
ashamed for to the pretentions of sacerdotal asceticism the best answer
is domestic love.
Keble stopped his ears with wax against the siren appeal of his seceding
chief John Henry Newman and refused at first to read the Essay on
Development. When at last he was drawn into the controversy he
constructed for his own satisfaction and that of other waverers who
looked up to him for support and guidance an argument founded on the
Butlerian principle of probability as the guide of life. But Butler,
with all deference to his great name be it said, imports into questions
of conscience and into the spiritual domain a principle really
applicable only to worldly concerns. A man will invest his money or take
any other step in relation to his worldly affairs as he thinks the
chances are in his favour, but he cannot be satisfied with a mere
preponderance of chances that he possesses vital truth and that he will
escape everlasting condemnation. The analogy drawn by Keble between the
late recognition of the Prayer Book instead of the too Protestant
Articles as the real canon of the Anglican faith and the lateness of the
Christian Revelation in the world's history was an application of the
analogical method of reasoning which showed to what strange uses that
method might be put.