found in Newman’s writing,--great beauty and vigour of phrase. This fact
is the more noteworthy because a writer who, like Newman, is impressive
in the mass, and excels in securing breadth of effect, very often lacks
the ability to strike out memorable epigrams. A few quotations, brought
together at random, will show what point and terseness Newman could
command when he chose. “Ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt.”
“Great things are done by devotion to one idea.” “Calculation never made
a hero.” “All aberrations are founded on, and have their life in, some
truth or other.” “Great acts take time.” “A book after all cannot make a
stand against the wild living intellect of man.” “To be converted in
partnership.” “It is not at all easy (humanly speaking) to wind up an
Englishman to a dogmatic level.” “Paper logic.” “One is not at all
pleased when poetry, or eloquence, or devotion is considered as if
chiefly intended to feed syllogisms.” “Here below to live is to change,
and to be perfect is to have changed often.” In terseness and
sententiousness these utterances could hardly be surpassed by the most
acrimonious searcher after epigram, though of course they have not the
glitter of paradox to which modern coiners of phrases aspire.
Of wit there is very little to be found in Newman’s writings; it is not
the natural expression of his temperament. Wit is too dryly
intellectual, too external and formal, too little vital, to suit
Newman’s mental habit. To the appeal of humour he was distinctly more
open. It is from the humorous incongruities of imaginary situations that
his irony secures its most persuasive effects. Moreover, whenever he is
not necessarily preoccupied with the tragically serious aspects of life
and of history, or forced by his subject-matter, and audience, into a
formally restrained manner and method, he has, in treating any topic,
that urbanity and half-playful kindliness that come from a large-minded
and almost tolerant recognition of the essential imperfections of life
and human nature. The mood of the man of the world, sweetened and
ennobled, and enriched by profound knowledge and deep feeling and
spiritual seriousness, gives to much of Newman’s work its most
distinctive note. When he is able to be thoroughly colloquial, this mood
and this tone can assert themselves most freely, and the result is a
style through which a gracious kindliness, which is never quite humour,
and which yet possesses all its elements, diffuses itself pervasively
and persuasively. Throughout the _Rise and Progress of Universities_
this tone is traceable, and, to take a specific example, it is largely
to its influence that the description of Athens, in the third chapter,
owes its peculiar charm. What can be more deliciously incongruous than
the agent of a London “mercantile firm” and the Acropolis? or more
curiously ill-mated than his standards of valuation and the qualities of
the Grecian landscape? Yet how little malicious is Newman’s use of this
incongruity or disproportion, and how unsuspiciously the “agent of a
London Company” ministers to the quiet amusement of the reader, and also
helps to heighten, by contrast, the effect of beauty and romance and
mystery that Newman is aiming at.
Several allusions have already been made to Newman’s liking for
concreteness, and in an earlier paragraph his distrust of the abstract
was described and illustrated at length. These predilections of his have
left their unmistakable mark on his style in ways more technical than
those that have thus far been noted. His vocabulary is, for a scholar,
exceptionally idiomatic and unliterary; the most ordinary and unparsable
turns of every-day speech are inwrought into the texture of his style.
In the _Apologia_ he speaks of himself in one place as having had “a
lounging, free-and-easy way of carrying things on,” and the phrase both
defines and illustrates one characteristic of his style. Idioms that
have the crude force of popular speech, the vitality without the
vulgarity of slang, abound in his writings. Of his increasingly clear
recognition, in 1839, of the weakness of the Anglican position, he says:
“The Via Media was an impossible idea; it was what I had called
‘standing on one leg.’” In describing his loss of control over his party
in 1840 he declares: “I never had a strong wrist, but at the very time
when it was most needed, the reins had broken in my hands.” Of the
ineradicableness of evil in human nature, he exclaims: “You do but play
a sort of ‘hunt the slipper,’ with the fault of our nature, till you go
to Christianity.” Illustrations of this idiomatic and homely phrasing
might be endlessly multiplied. Moreover, to the concreteness of
colloquial phrasing, Newman adds the concreteness of the specific word.
Other things being equal, he prefers the name of the species to that of
the genus, and the name of the class to that of the species; he is
always urged forward towards the individual and the actual; his mind
does not lag in the region of abstractions and formulas, but presses
past the general term, or abstraction, or law, to the image or the
example, and into the tangible, glowing, sensible world of fact. His
imagery, though never obtrusive, is almost lavishly present, and though
never purely decorative, is often very beautiful. It is so inevitable,
however, springs so organically from the thought and the mood of the
moment, that the reader accepts it unmindfully, and is conscious only of
grasping, easily and securely, the writer’s meaning. He must first look
back through the sentences and study the style in detail before he will
come to realize its continual, but decisive, divergence from the literal
and commonplace, and its essential freshness and distinction.
On occasion, of course, Newman uses elaborate figures; but commonly for
purposes of exposition or persuasion. In such cases the reader may well
note the thoroughness with which the figure adjusts itself to every turn
and phase of the thought, and the surprising omnipresence and
suggestiveness of the tropical phrasing. These qualities of Newman’s
style are illustrated in the following passage from the _Development of
Christian Doctrine_:--
“Whatever be the risk of corruption from intercourse with the world
around, such a risk must be encountered if a great idea is duly to be
understood, and much more if it is to be fully exhibited. It is elicited
and expanded by trial, and battles into perfection and supremacy. Nor
does it escape the collision of opinion even in its earlier years, nor
does it remain truer to itself, and with a better claim to be considered
one and the same, though externally protected from vicissitude and
change. It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the
spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply
to the history of a philosophy or belief, which, on the contrary, is
more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and
broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of
things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its vital element needs
disengaging from what is foreign and temporary, and is employed in
efforts after freedom which become more vigorous and hopeful as its
years increase. Its beginnings are no measure of its capabilities, nor
of its scope. At first no one knows what it is, or what it is worth. It
remains perhaps for a time quiescent; it tries, as it were, its limbs,
and proves the ground under it, and feels its way. From time to time, it
makes essays which fail, and are in consequence abandoned. It seems in
suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length strikes out in one
definite direction. In time it enters upon strange territory; points of
controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and fall around it;
dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles reappear
under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same. In a
higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and
to be perfect is to have changed often.”[23] The image of the river
pervades this passage throughout, and yet is never obtrusive and never
determines or even constrains the progress of the thought. The imagery
simply seems to insinuate the ideas into the reader’s mind with a
certain novelty of appeal and half-sensuous persuasiveness. Another
passage of much this kind has already been quoted, where Newman
describes the adventurous investigator scaling the crags of truth.[24]
Closely akin to this use of figures is Newman’s generous use of examples
and illustrations. Whatever be the principle he is discussing, he is not
content till he has realized it for the reader in tangible, visible
form, until he has given it the cogency and intensity of appeal that
only sensations or images possess. In all these ways, then, by his
idiomatic and colloquial phrasing, by his specific vocabulary, by his
delicately adroit use of metaphors, by his carefully elaborated imagery,
and by his wealth of examples and illustrations, Newman keeps
resolutely close to the concrete, and imparts everywhere to his style
warmth, vividness, colour, convincing actuality.
VII
It remains to suggest briefly Newman’s relation to what was most
characteristic in the thought and feeling of his times. Without any
attempt at a technical analysis of his doctrine or at a special study of
his theorizing in religion and philosophy, it will be possible to
connect him, by virtue of certain temperamental characteristics, and
certain prevailing modes of conceiving life, with what was most
distinctive in the literature of the early part of the century.
Interpreted most searchingly, his early Anglicanism and his later
Catholicism were peculiar expressions of that Romantic spirit which
realized itself with such splendour and power in the best and most vital
literature of his day and generation.
Perhaps the most general formula for the work of English literature
during the first quarter of the present century is the rediscovery and
vindication of the concrete. The special task of the eighteenth century
had been to order, and to systematize, and to name; its favourite
methods had been analysis and generalization. It asked for no new
experience; it sought only to master and reduce to formulas, and to find
convenient labels for what experience it already possessed. It was
perpetually in search of standards and canons; it was conventional
through and through; and its men felt secure from the ills of time only
when sheltered under some ingenious artificial construction of rule and
precedent. Whatever lay beyond the scope of their analysis and defied
their laws, they disliked and dreaded. The outlying regions of mystery
which hem life in on every side, are inaccessible to the intellect and
irreducible in terms of its laws, were strangely repellent to them, and
from such shadowy vistas they resolutely turned their eyes and fastened
them on the solid ground at their feet. The familiar bustle of the town,
the thronging streets of the city, the gay life of the drawing-room, and
coffee-house, and play-house; or the more exalted life of Parliament and
Court, the intrigues of State-chambers, the manœuvres of the
battle-field; the aspects of human activity, wherever collective man in
his social capacity goes through the orderly and comprehensible changes
of his ceaseless pursuit of worldly happiness and worldly success; these
were the subjects that for the men of the eighteenth century had
absorbing charm: in seeking to master this intricate play of forces, to
fathom the motives below it, to tabulate its experiences, to set up
standards to guide the individual successfully through the intricacies
of this commonplace, every-day world, they spent their utmost energy,
and to these tasks they instinctively limited themselves. In poetry, it
was a generalized view of life that they aimed at, a semi-philosophical
representation of man’s nature and actions. Pope, the typical poet of
the century, “stooped to truth and moralized his song.” Dr. Johnson, the
most authoritative critic of the century, taught that the poet should
“remark general properties and large appearances ... and must neglect
the minuter discriminations, which one may have remarked, and another
have neglected, or those characteristics which are alike obvious to
vigilance and carelessness.” In prose, the same moralizing and
generalizing tendencies prevailed, and found their most adequate and
thorough-going expression in the abstract and pretentiously latinized
style of Dr. Johnson.
Everywhere thought gave the law; the senses and the imagination were
kept jealously in subordination. The abstract, the typical, the
general--these were everywhere exalted at the expense of the image, the
specific experience, the vital fact. In religion, the same tendencies
showed themselves. Orthodoxy and Deism alike were mechanical in their
conception of Nature and of God. Both Free-thinkers and Apologists tried
to systematize religious experience, and to rationalize theology. In the
pursuit of historical evidences and of logical demonstrations of the
truth or falsity of religion, genuine religious emotion was almost
neglected, or was actually condemned. Enthusiasm was distrusted or
abhorred; an enthusiast was a madman. Intense feeling of all kinds was
regarded askance, and avoided as irrational, unsettling, prone to
disarrange systems, and to overturn standards, and burst the bonds of
formulas.
It was to this limited manner of living life and of conceiving of life
that the great movement which, for lack of a better name, may be called
the Romantic Movement, was to put an end. The Romanticists sought to
enrich life with new emotions, to conquer new fields of experience, to
come into imaginative touch with far distant times, to give its due to
the encompassing world of darkness and mystery, and even to pierce
through the darkness in the hope of finding, at the heart of the
mystery, a transcendental world of infinite beauty and eternal truth. A
keener sense of the value of life penetrated them and stirred them into
imaginative sympathy with much that had left the men of the eighteenth
century unmoved. They found in the naïve life of Nature and animals and
children picturesqueness and grace that were wanting in the
sophisticated life of the “town”; they delighted in the mysterious
chiaroscuro of the Middle Ages, in its rich blazonry of passion, and its
ever-changing spectacular magnificence; they looked forward with ardour
into the future, and dreamed dreams of the progress of man; they opened
their hearts to the influences of the spiritual world, and religion
became to them something more than respectability and morality. In
every way they endeavoured to give some new zest to life, to impart to
it some fine novel flavour, to attain to some exquisite new experience.
They sought this new experience imaginatively in the past, with Scott
and Southey; they sought it with fierce insistence in foreign lands,
following Byron, and in the wild exploitation of individual fancy and
caprice; they sought it with Coleridge and Wordsworth through the
revived sensitiveness of the spirit and its intuitions of a
transcendental world of absolute reality; they sought it with Shelley in
the regions of the vast inane.
Now it was in the midst of these restless conditions and under the
influence of all this new striving and aspiration that Newman’s youth
and most impressionable years of development were spent, and he took
colour and tone from his epoch to a degree that has often been
overlooked. His work, despite its reactionary character, indeed, partly
because of it, is a genuine expression of the Romantic spirit, and can
be understood only when thus interpreted and brought into relation with
the great tendencies of thought and feeling of the early part of our
century. Of his direct indebtedness to Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge,
he has himself made record in the _Apologia_[25]and in his
_Autobiographical Sketch_.[26] But far more important than the
influence of any single man was the penetrating and determining action
upon him of the Romantic atmosphere, overcharged as it was with intense
feeling and tingling with new thought. The results of this action may be
traced throughout his temperament and in all his work.
Mediævalism, as we have seen, was a distinctive note of the Romantic
spirit, and, certainly, Newman was intensely alive to the beauty and the
poetic charm of the life of the Middle Ages. One is sometimes tempted to
describe him as a great mediæval ecclesiastic astray in the nineteenth
century and heroically striving to remodel modern life in harmony with
his temperamental needs. His imagination was possessed with the Romantic
vision of the greatness of the mediæval Church,--of its splendour and
pomp and dignity, and of its power over the hearts and lives of its
members; and the Oxford movement was in its essence an attempt to
reconstruct the English Church in harmony with this Romantic ideal, to
rouse the Church to a vital realization of its own great traditions, and
to restore to it the prestige and the dominating position it had had in
the past. As Scott’s imagination was fascinated with the picturesque
paraphernalia of feudalism,--with its jousts, and courts of love, and
its coats of mail and buff-jerkins,--so Newman’s imagination was
captivated by the gorgeous ritual and ceremonial, the art and
architecture of mediæval Christianity, and found in them the symbols of
the spirit of mystery and awe which was for him the essentially
religious spirit, and of the mystical truths of which revealed religion
was made up. The Church, as Newman found it, was Erastian and worldly;
it was apt to regard itself as merely an ally of the State for the
maintenance of order and spread of morality; it was coldly rational in
belief and theology, and prosaic in its conception of religious truth
and of its own position and functions. Newman sought to revive in the
Church a mediæval faith in its own divine mission and the intense
spiritual consciousness of the Middle Ages; he aimed to restore to
religion its mystical character, to exalt the sacramental system as the
divinely appointed means for the salvation of souls, and to impose once
more on men’s imaginations the mighty spell of a hierarchical
organization, the direct representative of God in the world’s affairs.
Such was the mediæval ideal to which he devoted himself. Both he and
Scott substantially ruined themselves through their mediævalism. Scott’s
luckless attempt was to place his private and family life upon a feudal
basis and to give it mediæval colour and beauty; Newman undertook a much
nobler and more heroic, but more intrinsically hopeless task,--that of
recreating the whole English Church in harmony with mediæval
conceptions.
Before Newman, Keble had already conceived of the English Church in this
imaginative spirit. In one of his _Essays_, Newman describes how Keble
had made the Church “poetical,” had “kindled hearts towards it,” and by
“his happy magic” had thrown upon its ritual, offices, and servants a
glamour and beauty of which they had for many generations been devoid.
It was to the continuance and the furtherance of this process of
regeneration and transfiguration that Newman devoted the Tractarian
movement.
But the essentially Romantic character of the new movement comes out in
other ways than in its idealization of the Church. The relation of
Newman and of his friends to Nature was closely akin to that of the
Romanticists. Newman, like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, found
Nature mysteriously beautiful and instinct with strange significance, a
divinely elaborated language whereby God speaks through symbols to the
human soul. Keble’s _Christian Year_ is full of this interpretation of
natural sights and sounds as images of spiritual truth, and with this
mystical conception of Nature Newman was in sympathy. Nature was for him
as rich in its spiritual suggestiveness, as for Wordsworth or Shelley,
and was as truly for him as for Carlyle or Goethe the visible garment of
God. But in interpreting the emotional value of Nature Newman had
recourse to a symbolism drawn ready-made from Christianity. The mystical
beauty of Nature, instead of calling up in his imagination a Platonic
ideal world, as with Shelley, or adumbrating the world of eternal
verity of German transcendentalism, as with Wordsworth and Coleridge,
suggested the presence and power of seraphs and angels. Of the angels he
says, “Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beautiful
prospect, is, as it were, the skirts of their garments, the waving of
the robes of those whose faces see God.” Again, he asks, “What would be
the thoughts of a man who, when examining a flower, or an herb, or a
pebble, or a ray of light, which he treats as something so beneath him
in the scale of existence, suddenly discovered that he was in the
presence of some powerful being who was hidden behind the visible things
he was inspecting,--who, though concealing his wise hand, was giving
them their beauty, grace, and perfection, as being God’s instrument for
the purpose,--nay, whose robe and ornaments those objects were, which he
was so eager to analyze?”[27]
Despite the somewhat conventional symbolism that pervades these
passages, the mystical mood in the contemplation of Nature that
underlies and suggests them is substantially the same that expresses
itself through other imagery in the Romantic poets. In his intense
sensitiveness, then, to the emotional value of the visible universe, and
in his interpretation of the beauty of hill and valley and mountain and
stream in terms of subjective emotion, Newman may justly be said to
have shared in the Romantic Return to Nature.
But in a still more important way, Newman’s work was expressive of the
Return to Nature. Under this term is to be included not merely the fresh
delight that the Romanticists felt in the splendour of the firmament and
the tender beauty or the sublimity of sea and land, but also their eager
recognition of the value of the instinctive, the spontaneous, the
_natural_ in life, as opposed to the artificial, the self-conscious, the
systematic, and the conventional. This recognition pervades all the
literature of the first quarter of our century, and, in fact, in one
form or another, is the characteristic note of what is most novel in the
thought and the life of the time. In this Return to Nature Newman
shared. For him, as for all the Romanticists, life itself is more than
what we think about life, experience is infinitely more significant than
our formulas for summing it up, and transcends them incalculably.
General terms are but the makeshifts of logic and can never cope with
the multiplicity and the intensity of sensation and feeling. Newman’s
elaborate justification of this indictment of logic is wrought out in
the _Grammar of Assent_ and in his Sermon on _Implicit and Explicit
Reason_.
Throughout these discourses he pleads for those vital processes of
thought and feeling and intuition which every man goes through for
himself in his acquisition of concrete truth, and which he can perhaps
describe in but a stammering and inconsequent fashion in the terms of
the schoolman’s logic. It is by these direct, spontaneous processes,
Newman urges, that men reach truth in whatever concrete matter they
apply themselves to, and the truth that they reach need be none the less
true because they have not the knack of setting forth syllogistically
their reasons for accepting it. In his rejection, then, of formal
demonstration as the sole method for attaining truth, in his recognition
of the limitations of logic, and in his deep conviction of the
surpassing importance of the spontaneous and instinctive in life Newman
was at one with the Romanticists, and in all these particulars he shared
in their Return to Nature.