some unpleasant charges of insincerity. It is not strange that in the
midst of a people like the English, who are perhaps somewhat affectedly
straightforward and pretentiously downright, Newman should, now and
then, have suffered for his adroitness and grace. The bluff, impetuous
man is proverbially ready to interpret subtlety as duplicity, and to
rebuke reticence and indirectness as deceit and hypocrisy. Prejudice of
this sort was probably the real cause of Canon Kingsley’s famous attack
upon Newman. He had an instinctive dislike of Newman’s sinuousness and
suppleness, and, without pausing to analyze very carefully, he spoke out
fiercely against Newman’s whole work as containing a special variety of
ecclesiastical hypocrisy. The charge was the more plausible inasmuch as
there is unquestionably a certain debased ecclesiastical manner whose
cheaply insinuating suavity might, by hasty observers, be confused with
Newman’s bearing and style. Yet the injustice of this confusion and the
unfairness of Kingsley’s charges become plain after a moment’s analysis.
In spite of Newman’s ease and affability, a fair-minded reader feels,
throughout his writings, when he stops to consider, an underlying
suggestion of uncompromising strength and unwavering conviction. He is
sure that the author is really revealing himself frankly and
unreservedly, notwithstanding his apparent self-effacement, and that he
is imposing his own conclusions, persuasively and constrainingly.
Moreover, the reader is sure that, however adroitly Newman may be
developing his thesis, with an eye to the skilful manipulation of his
readers’ prejudices, he would at any moment give a point-blank answer to
a point-blank question. There is never any real doubt of Newman’s
courage and manly English temper, or of his readiness to meet an
opponent fairly on the grounds of debate. In the last analysis, it is
this fundamental sincerity of tone and this all-pervasive, but
unobtrusive self-assertion that preserve Newman’s style from the undue
flexibility and the insincerity of the debased ecclesiastical style,
just as his unfailing good taste preserves him from its cheap suavity or
unctuousness.
But Newman’s adroitness and rhetorical skill have exposed him to charges
of still another kind, charges that concern the very substance of his
thought and intellectual life, and charges that have been urged with
much greater dialectical skill than Canon Kingsley could attain to. In a
general examination of Newman’s theories, Mr. E. A. Abbott[16] has
accused him of systematically doctoring truth, and of having elaborated,
though perhaps unconsciously, various ingenious methods for inveigling
unsuspecting readers into the acceptance of doubtful propositions,
methods for which Mr. Abbott has devised satirical names, the Art of
Lubrication, the Art of Oscillation, the Art of Assimilation. He does
not assert that Newman consciously palters with truth, or tries to make
the worse appear the better reason. But he urges that Newman was
constitutionally fonder of other things than of truth, that he desired,
with an over-mastering strength, to establish certain conclusions, and
that he persuaded himself of their correctness by a series of manœuvres
which really involved insincere logic.
Here, again, the charges that are made against Newman seem the result of
prejudice and temperamental hostility on the part of his critic. Mr.
Abbott is a bit of a formalist, a Caledonian intellect, a thorough-going
positivist, a thinker for whom the only truth that exists is truth that
can be scientifically verified. He is quite unable to comprehend, or, at
any rate, to tolerate, Newman’s mental constitution and his resulting
methods of conceiving of life and relating himself to its facts. Truth
is to Newman a much subtler matter, a much more elusive substance, than
it is to the positivist, to the mere intellectual dealer in facts and in
figures; it cannot be packed into syllogisms as pills are packed into a
box; it cannot be conveyed into the human system with the simple
directness which the Laputa wiseacre aimed at who was for teaching his
pupils geometry by feeding them on paper duly inscribed with geometrical
figures. Moreover, language is an infinitely treacherous medium; words
are so “false,” so capable of endless change, that one is “loath to
prove reason with them.” Readers, too, are widely diverse, and are open
to countless other appeals than that of sheer logic. Because of such
considerations as these, Newman is continually studious of effect in his
writings; he is intensely conscious of his audience; and he is always
striving to win a way for his convictions, and aiming to insinuate them
into the minds and hearts of his hearers by gently persuasive means.
But all this by no means implies any real carelessness of truth on
Newman’s part, or any sacrifice of truth to expediency. Truth is
difficult of attainment, and hard to transmit; all the more strenuously
does Newman set himself to trace it out in its obscurity and remoteness,
and to reveal it in all its intricacies. Moreover, subtle and elusive as
it may be, it is nevertheless something tangible and describable and
defensible; something, furthermore, of the acquisition of which Newman
can give a very definite account; something as far as possible from mere
misty sentiment, and something, furthermore, to be strenuously asserted
and defended.
Sympathetic and patient readers of Newman, then, can hardly doubt his
essential mental integrity or his courage and readiness to be frank,
even in those passages or in those works where the search for the
subtlest shades of truth, or the desire to avoid clashing needlessly on
prejudice, or the wish to win a favourable hearing, takes the author
most indirectly and tortuously towards his end. It is his underlying
manliness of mind and frank readiness to give an account of himself that
prevent Newman’s prevailing subtlety, adroitness, and suavity from
leaving on the mind of an unprejudiced reader any impression of
timorousness or disingenuousness.
II
In what has been said of Newman’s realization of the elusive nature of
truth and of the great difficulty of securing a welcome for it in the
minds and hearts of the mass of men lies the key to what is most
distinctive in his methods. He was a great rhetorician, and whatever he
produced shows evidence, on analysis, of having been constructed with
the utmost niceness of instinct and deftness of hand. He himself frankly
admitted his rhetorical bent. Writing to Hurrell Froude in 1836, about
the management of the Tractarian agitation, he says, “You and Keble are
the philosophers, and I the rhetorician.”[17] And in a somewhat earlier
letter he speaks of his aptitude for rhetoric in even stronger terms: “I
have a vivid perception of the consequences of certain admitted
principles, have a considerable intellectual capacity of drawing them
out, have the refinement to admire them, and a rhetorical or histrionic
power to represent them.”[18]
This rhetorical skill was partly natural and instinctive, and partly the
result of training. From his earliest years as a student, Newman had
been conspicuous for the subtlety and flexibility of his intelligence,
for his readiness in assuming for speculative purposes the most diverse
points of view, and for his insight into temperaments and his
comprehension of their modifying action on the white light of truth.
With this admirable equipment for effective rhetorical work, he came
directly under the influence, in Oriel College, of two exceptionally
great rhetoricians, Dr. Copleston, for many years Provost of Oriel, and
Whately, one of its most influential Fellows. Copleston was a famous
controversialist and dialectician, who had long been regarded as the
chief champion of the University against the attacks of outsiders. His
_Advice to a Young Reviewer with a Specimen of the Art_ (1807), had
turned into ridicule the airs and pretensions of the young Edinburgh
reviewers and had led them into severe strictures on University methods,
against which attacks, however, Dr. Copleston had vigorously defended
Oxford in various publications, to the satisfaction of all University
men. He was the Provost of Oriel during the first year of Newman’s
residence there, and suggestions of the influence of his ideas and
methods are to be found throughout the early pages of the _Apologia_ and
the _Autobiographical Memoir_. Still more decisive, however, was the
influence of a yet more famous rhetorician, Dr. Whately, whose lectures
on logic and on rhetoric remained almost down to the present day
standard text-books in those subjects. Whately was also renowned as a
controversialist, and his _Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon
Buonaparte_ was perhaps the cleverest and most famous piece of ironical
argumentation produced in England during the first quarter of the
century. Newman, for several of his most impressionable years, was
intimately associated with Whately. “He emphatically opened my mind,”
Newman says in the _Apologia_, “and taught me to think and to use my
reason.” Under the influence of these two masters of rhetoric and
redoubtable controversialists Newman’s natural aptitude for rhetorical
methods was encouraged and fostered, so that he became a perfect adept
in all the arts of exposition and argumentation and persuasion.
Whatever work of Newman’s, then, we take up, we may be sure that its
construction will repay careful analysis. In trying to present any set
of truths, Newman was consciously confronting a delicate psychological
problem; he was aware of the elements that entered into the problem; he
knew what special difficulties he had to face because of the special
nature of the truth he was dealing with,--its abstractness, or
complexity, or novelty. He had measured, also, the precise degree of
resistance he must expect because of the peculiar prejudices or
preoccupations of his readers. And the shape which his discussion
finally took--the particular methods that he followed--were the result
of a deliberate adaptation of means to ends; they were the methods that
his trained rhetorical instinct and his insight into the truth he was
handling and into the temperaments and intelligences he was to address
himself to dictated as most likely to persuade.
Although ordinarily Newman does not explain the method he follows or
comment on the difficulties of his problem, he has, in his _Apologia_,
departed from this rule, and taken his readers into his confidence. In
the first thirty pages of this self-justificatory piece of writing, he
sets forth minutely the prejudices against which he must make his way,
considers various possible modes of overcoming these prejudices, notes
the precise reasons that finally lead him to the actual plan he chooses,
and is entirely explicit as to the elaborate design that underlies and
controls the seeming desultoriness of his whole discussion.
The problem which in this case confronted Newman was briefly as follows.
He had been charged by Kingsley with teaching “lying on system.” He had
protested against the charge and had obtained a half-hearted apology.
Later, however, the charge had been reiterated more formally, and with
the added taunt that as Newman recommended systematic dissimulation no
one could be expected to accept his self-exculpating word. These charges
fell in, as Newman recognized, first, with the general trend of British
prejudice against Roman Catholics, and, secondly, with the particular
prejudice against Newman himself that sprang from his early attempts to
make the Anglican Church more Catholic, and his subsequent secession to
Rome. How, then, was Newman to persuade the public of Kingsley’s
injustice and his own innocence? He saw at once that to deal with each
separate charge would be mere waste of time; to prove that in a special
case he had not lied or recommended lying would carry him no whit
towards his end, as long as contemptuous distrust remained the dominant
mood of the British mind towards himself and his party. First of all, he
must conquer this mood; he must overthrow the presumption against him,
and win for his cause at least such an unbiassed hearing as is accorded
to the ordinary man upon trial whose record has been hitherto clean;
then he might hope to secure for his particular denials a universal
scope. The method that he chose in order to win his readers was
admirably conceived. He would put himself vitally and almost
dramatically before them; he would bring them within the actual sound of
his voice and the glance of his eye; he would let them follow him
through the long course of his years as student, tutor, preacher, and
leader, and come to know him as intimately as those few friends had
known him with whom he had lived most freely. Then, he would ask his
readers, when he had put his personality before them in its many
shifting, but continuous aspects, and with all the intense
persuasiveness of a dramatic portrayal, whether they were ready to
believe of the man they had thus watched through the round of his duties
that he was a liar. Of the peculiar power which Newman could count on
exerting in thus appealing to his personal charm he was, of course,
unable to speak in his Preface. In truth, however, he was having
recourse to an influence which had always been potent whenever it had
had a chance to make itself felt. Throughout his life at Oxford it was
true of his relations to others that “friends unasked, unhoped” had
“come,”--all men who met him falling almost inevitably under the sway of
his winning and commanding personality. Newman was, therefore, well
advised when he resolved to reveal himself to the world and to trust to
the conciliating effect of this self-revelation to prepare for his
specific denial of Kingsley’s charges.
In accordance with this purpose and plan, the _Apologia pro Vita Sua_,
or History of his Religious Opinions, was written; and for these reasons
his answer to certain definite charges of equivocation and systematic
and elaborate misrepresentation was so shaped as to include in its scope
the story of his whole life. Of the 384 pages of the original edition of
the _Apologia_, only the last 93 pages are devoted to the actual
refutation of Kingsley’s charges; the 238 pages that precede are merely
persuasive, and simply prepare the way for the final defence. Probably
in no other piece of writing is the actual demonstration so curiously
small in proportion to the means that are taken to make the logic
effective. Of course, it may be urged in reply to this view of the
construction of the _Apologia_, that to look at the book as purely a
reply to Kingsley, is to judge it from an arbitrary and artificial point
of view, and hence to distort it inevitably and throw its parts out of
proportion; that the real aim of the book was simply and sincerely
autobiographic, and that, regarding the book as frank autobiography, the
critic need find nothing strange in the proportioning of its parts. In
answer to this objection, it should be noted that the last pages of the
book deal directly and argumentatively with “Mr. Kingsley’s
accusations”; that the transition in Part VII. from the history of
Newman’s opinions to the discussion of the theory of truth-telling is
almost imperceptible; and, finally, that Newman himself has declared in
the early pages of the book that the sole reason for his
self-revelations is his wish to clear away misconceptions, to win once
again the confidence of that English public that had long been
distrustful of him, and to make widely effective his refutation of
Kingsley’s charges. The book, then, is fairly to be described as an
enormously elaborate and ingenious piece of special pleading to prepare
the way for a few syllogisms that have now become grotesquely
insignificant.
It has been worth while to lay great stress on this disproportion
between persuasion and demonstration in the _Apologia_, because this
disproportion illustrates, with almost the over-emphasis of caricature,
certain of Newman’s fundamental beliefs and resulting tricks of method.
First and foremost, it illustrates the slight esteem in which he held
the formal logic of the schools and syllogistic demonstrations. Not that
he failed to recognize the value of analysis and logical demonstration
as verifying processes; but he unhesitatingly subordinated these
processes to those by which truth is originally won, and to those also
by which truth is persuasively inculcated.
In a sermon on _Implicit and Explicit Reason_, he distinguishes with
great elaborateness between the method by which the mind makes its way
almost intuitively to the possession of a new truth, or set of truths,
and the subsequent analysis by which it takes account of this
half-instinctive original process and renders the moments of the process
self-conscious and articulate. His description of the intellect
delicately and swiftly feeling its way towards truth may well be quoted
entire: “The mind ranges to and fro, and spreads out and advances
forward with a quickness which has become a proverb, and a subtlety and
versatility which baffle investigation. It passes on from point to
point, gaining one by some indication; another on a probability; then
availing itself of an association; then falling back on some received
law; next seizing on testimony; then committing itself to some popular
impression, or some inward instinct, or some obscure memory; and thus it
makes progress not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff, who, by quick
eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends, how, he knows not himself, by
personal endowments and by practice, rather than by rule, leaving no
track behind him, and unable to teach another. It is not too much to say
that the stepping by which great geniuses scale the mountain of truth is
as unsafe and precarious to men in general as the ascent of a skilful
mountaineer up a literal crag. It is a way which they alone can take;
and its justification lies alone in their success. And such mainly is
the way in which all men, gifted or not gifted, commonly reason--not by
rule, but by an inward faculty. Reasoning, then, or the exercise of
reason, is a living, spontaneous energy within us, not an art.”[19]
But not only is syllogistic reasoning not the original process by which
truth is attained; it is in no way essential to the validity or
completeness of the process. “Clearness in argument certainly is not
indispensable to reasoning well. Accuracy in stating doctrines or
principles is not essential to feeling and acting upon them. The
exercise of analysis is not necessary to the integrity of the process
analyzed. The process of reasoning is complete in itself, and
independent.”[20]
Finally, logical demonstration has relatively little value as a means of
winning a hearing for new truth, of securing its entrance into the
popular consciousness, and of giving it a place among the determining
powers of life. “Logic makes but a sorry rhetoric with the multitude;
first shoot round corners, and you may not despair of converting by a
syllogism.” Men must be inveigled into the acceptance of truth; they
cannot be driven to accept it at the point of the syllogism. “The heart
is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the
imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts
and events, by history, by description. People influence us, voices melt
us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us.”
The application of all this,--particularly of what Newman says touching
the persuasiveness of a personal appeal,--to the whole method of the
_Apologia_ hardly needs pointing out. The work is, from first to last,
intensely personal in its tone and matter, persuasive because of its
concreteness, its dramatic vividness, the modulations of the speaker’s
voice, the sincerity and dignity of his look and bearing. Logic, of
course, gives coherence to the discussions. The processes of thought by
which Newman moved from point to point in his theological development
are consistently set forth; but the convincing quality of the book comes
from its embodiment of a life, not from its systematization of a theory.
In accordance with this general character of the book is its tone
throughout; its style is the perfection of informality and easy
colloquialism. Now and then, in describing his ideas on specially
complicated questions, Newman makes use of numbered propositions, and
proceeds, for the time being, with the precaution and precision of the
dialectician. But, for the most part, he is as unconstrained and
apparently fortuitous in his presentation of ideas as if he were merely
emulating Montaigne in confidential self-revelation, and were guided by
no controversial purpose. Perhaps no writer has surpassed, or even
equalled, Newman in combining apparent desultoriness of treatment with
real definiteness of purpose and clairvoyance of method.
III
Another admirable example of Newman’s least formal, and most
characteristic, method may be found in his series of papers on the _Rise
and Progress of Universities_. Here, again, there is apparent
desultoriness, or, at most, a careless following of historical sequence.
One after another, with what seems like a haphazard choice, Newman
describes a half-dozen of the most famous universities of the past,
explains popularly their organization, methods, and aims, entertaining
the reader meanwhile with such superlative pieces of rhetoric as the
description of Attica and Athens, and with such dramatic episodes as
that of Abelard. Yet underneath this apparent caprice runs the
controlling purpose of putting the reader in possession, through
concrete illustrations, of the complete idea of a typically effective
university. Each special school that Newman describes illustrates some
essential attribute of the ideal school; and incidentally the reader,
who is all the time beguiled, from chapter to chapter, by Newman’s
picturesque detail, takes into his mind the various features, and
ultimately the complete image, of the perfect type.
In the series of _Discourses on the Idea of a University_, Newman’s
method is more formal and his tone more controversial. Newman was this
time addressing a distinctly scholarly audience, and was treating of a
series of abstract topics, on which he was called to pronounce in his
character of probable vice-chancellor of the proposed university.
Accordingly, throughout these _Discourses_ he is consistently academic
in tone and manner, and formal and elaborate in method. He lays out his
work with somewhat mechanical precision; he sketches his plan strictly
beforehand; he defines terms and refines upon possible meanings, and
guards at each step against misinterpretations; he pauses often to come
to an understanding with his hearers about the progress already made,
and to consider what line of advance severe logical method next
dictates. In all these ways, he is deliberate, explicit, and
demonstrative. Yet despite this strenuous regard for system and method,
not even here does Newman become crabbedly scholastic or pedantically
over-formal; the result of his strenuousness is, rather, a finely
conscientious circumspection of demeanour and an academic dignity of
bearing. There is something irresistibly impressive in the perfect poise
with which he moves through the intricacies of the many abstractions
that his subject involves. He exhibits each aspect of his subject in
just the right perspective and with just the requisite minuteness of
detail; he leads us unerringly from each point of view to that which
most naturally follows; he keeps us always aware of the relation of each
aspect to the total sum of truth he is trying to help us to grasp; and
so, little by little, he secures for us that perfect command of an
intellectual region, in its concrete facts and in its abstract
relations, which exposition aims to make possible. These _Discourses_
are as fine an example as exists in English of the union of strict
method with charm of style in the treatment of an abstract topic.
In the _Development of Christian Doctrine_ and the _Grammar of Assent_
the severity of Newman’s method is somewhat greater, as is but natural
in strictly scientific treatises. Yet even in these abstract discussions
his style retains an inalienable charm, due to the luminousness of the
atmosphere, the wide-ranging command of illustrations, the unobtrusively
tropical phrasing, and the steady harmonious sweep of the periods. Few
books on equally abstract topics are as easy reading.