the importance of which cannot be exaggerated when the attempt is being
made to grasp what is essential in his psychology and his ways of
conceiving of life and of human nature. For him truth does not exist
primarily, as for the formalist, in the formulas or the theorems of
text-books, but in the minds and the hearts of living men. In these
minds and hearts truth grows and spreads in countless subtle ways. Its
appeal is through numberless other channels than those of the mind. Man
is for Newman primarily an agent,--an acting creature,--not an intellect
with merely accidental relations to an outer world. First and foremost
he is a doer, a bringer about of results, a realizer of hopes and
ambitions and ideals. He is a mass of instincts and impulses, of
prejudices and passions; and it is in response to these mighty and
ceaselessly operating springs of action that he makes his way through
the world and subdues it to himself. Truth, then, to commend itself to
such a being, must come not merely by way of the brain, but also by that
of the heart; it must not be a collection of abstract formulas, but must
be concrete and vital. If it be religious truth, it must not take the
form of logical demonstrations, but must be beautifully enshrined in the
symbols of an elaborate ritual, illustrated in the lives of saints and
doctors, authoritative and venerable in the creeds and liturgies of a
hierarchical organization, irresistibly cogent as inculcated by the
divinely appointed representatives of the Source of all Truth. In these
forms religious truth may be able to impose itself upon individuals, to
take complete possession of them, to master their minds and hearts, and
to rule their lives.
But what shall be the test of such truth? How shall the individual be
sure of its claims? How shall he choose between rival systems? Here,
again, Newman refuses to be content with the formal and the abstract,
and goes straight to life itself. In the search for a criterion of truth
he rejects purely intellectual tests, and has recourse to tests which
call into activity the whole of a man’s nature. It is the Illative
Sense that detects and distinguishes truth, and the Illative Sense is
simply the entire mind of the individual vigorously grasping concrete
facts with all their implications for the heart and for the imagination
and for conduct, and extracting their peculiar significance. This
process, by which the individual searches for and attains truth in
concrete matters, is admirably described in the passage quoted in the
second chapter of the present Study, where the truth-seeker’s progress
is likened to that of a mountain-climber scaling a crag. The whole
nature of a man must be put into play, if truth is to be won. The formal
logic of the schools falls short of life; its symbols are general terms,
colourless abstractions, from which all the palpitating warmth and
persuasiveness of real life have been carefully drained. Propositions
fashioned out of these colourless general terms cannot by any process of
syllogistic jugglery be made to comprehend the whole truth of a
religious system. They leave out inevitably what is most vital, and what
is therefore most intimate in its appeal to the individual,--to his
heart and practical instincts, and his imagination. “We proceed as far
indeed as we can, by the logic of language, but we are obliged to
supplement it by the more subtle and elastic logic of thought; for forms
by themselves prove nothing.”[28] “It is to the living mind that we
must look for the means of using correctly principles of whatever
kind.”[29] “In all of these separate actions of the intellect, the
individual is supreme and responsible to himself, nay, under
circumstances, may be justified in opposing himself to the judgment of
the whole world; though he uses rules to his great advantage, as far as
they go, and is in consequence bound to use them.”[30] Absolute “proof
can never be furnished to us by the logic of words, for as certitude is
of the mind, so is the act of inference which leads to it. Every one who
reasons is his own centre.”[31] The progress of the individual “is a
living growth, not a mechanism; and its instruments are mental acts, not
the formulas and contrivances of language.”[32]
The foregoing analysis has tended to illustrate the facts that Newman
aimed to make religion an intensely concrete, personal experience, and
to fill out the spiritual life with widely varying and richly beautiful
feeling; and that he also set himself everywhere, consciously and
directly, against the eighteenth century ideal, according to which
reason was the sole discoverer and arbiter of truth and regulator of
conduct. In these respects, Newman’s work was in perfect harmony with
that of the Romanticists. Like them he was pleading for the spontaneous,
for the emotions and the imagination, for what is most vital in life, in
opposition to the formalists, the systematizers, and the devotees of
logic.
In the following points, then, Newman’s kinship with the Romanticists is
recognizable: in his imaginative sympathy with the past, in the range
and perspective of his historical consciousness, and in his devotion to
an ideal framed largely in accordance with a loving reverence for
mediæval life. His vein of mysticism, his imaginative sympathy with
Nature, his interpretation of Nature as symbolic of spiritual truth, his
rejection of reason as the guide of life, and his recognition of the
inadequacy of generalizations and formulas to the wealth of actual life
and to the intensity and variety of personal experience, are also
characteristics that mark his relation to the men of his period.
Finally, his very style in the narrowest meaning of the term also
classes Newman among Romantic writers. His debt to De Quincey has
already been noted. Though he is rarely, if ever, so ornate as De
Quincey, and though he perhaps never weaves his prose into such a
lustrous, shining surface through the continual use of sensations and
images as does De Quincey in his impassioned prose, yet the glowing
beauty, the picture-making power, the occasional imaginative splendour,
the elaborate swelling music of Newman’s writings, place him as a master
of prose in the same group with De Quincey, and Ruskin, and Carlyle, and
part him from Landor, or Macaulay, or Matthew Arnold. No prose can more
surely send quivering over the nerves a sense of the shadowing mystery
of life, than certain of Newman’s sermons, and passages here and there
in his _Apologia_ and in his _Essays_. Through the play, then, of his
imagination, its rhythms and beat of the wing, because of the ease with
which in a moment his prose can carry the reader into regions of
impassioned and mystical feeling, even because of the vital, intimate
warmth and colour of his phrasing,--qualities so different from the
hard, external glitter of Macaulay’s specific, but rhetorical
style,--Newman reveals his kinship with the great group of poets and
prose-writers who deepened and enriched the imaginative life of the
early part of our century. Ecclesiasticism and Academicism are
proverbially conservative powers. It may be for this reason that the new
spiritual forces of Romanticism did not renovate the Church through the
Oxford movement until a full generation after they had made almost
wholly their own the purely imaginative literature and life of the
English nation.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
I
Admirers of Arnold’s prose find it well to admit frankly that his style
has an unfortunate knack of exciting prejudice. Emerson has somewhere
spoken of the unkind trick fate plays a man when it gives him a strut in
his gait. Here and there in Arnold’s prose, there is just a
trace--sometimes more than a trace--of such a strut. He condescends to
his readers with a gracious elaborateness; he is at great pains to make
them feel that they are his equals; he undervalues himself playfully; he
assures us that “he is an unlearned bellettristic trifler”; he insists
over and over again that “he is an unpretending writer, without a
philosophy based on interdependent, subordinate, and coherent
principles.” All this he does smilingly; but the smile seems to many on
whom its favours fall, supercilious; and the playful under-valuation of
self looks shrewdly like an affectation. He is very debonair,--this
apologetic writer, very self-assured, at times even jaunty.
Stanch admirers of Arnold have always relished this strain in his style;
they have enjoyed its delicate challenge, the nice duplicity of its
innuendoes; they have found its insinuations and its covert, satirical
humour infinitely entertaining and stimulating. Moreover, however
seriously disposed they may be, however exacting of all the virtues from
the author of their choice, they have been able to reconcile their
enjoyment of Arnold with their serious inclinations, for they have been
confident that these tricks of manner implied no essential or radical
defect in Arnold’s humanity, no lack either of sincerity or of
earnestness or of broad sympathy.
Such admirers and interpreters of Arnold have been amply justified
of their confidence since the publication in 1895 of Arnold’s
_Letters_. The Arnold of these letters is a man the essential
integrity--_wholeness_--of whose nature is incontestable. His sincerity,
kindliness, wide-ranging sympathy with all classes of men are
unmistakably expressed on every page of his correspondence. We see him
having to do with people widely diverse in their relations to him: with
those close of kin, with chance friends, with many men of business or
officials, with a wide circle of literary acquaintances, with
workingmen, and with foreign _savants_. In all his intercourse the same
sweet-tempered frankness and the same readiness of sympathy are
manifest. There is never a trace of the duplicity or the treacherous
irony that are to be found in much of his prose.
Moreover, the record that these _Letters_ contain of close application
to uncongenial tasks must have been a revelation to many readers who
have had to rely upon books for their knowledge of literary men. Popular
caricatures of Arnold had represented him as “a high priest of the
kid-glove persuasion,” as an incorrigible dilettante, a literary fop
idling his time away over poetry and recommending the parmaceti of
culture as the sovereignest thing in nature for the inward bruises of
the spirit. This conception of Arnold, if it has at all maintained
itself, certainly cannot survive the revelations of the _Letters_. The
truth is beyond cavil that he was among the most self-sacrificingly
laborious men of his time.
For a long period of years Arnold held the post of inspector of schools.
Day after day, and week after week, he gave up one of the finest of
minds, one of the most sensitive of temperaments, one of the most
delicate of literary organizations, to the drudgery of examining in its
minutest details the work of the schools in such elementary subjects as
mathematics and grammar. On January 7, 1863, he writes to his mother, “I
am now at the work I dislike most in the world--looking over and marking
examination papers. I was stopped last week by my eyes, and the last
year or two these sixty papers a day of close handwriting to read have,
I am sorry to say, much tried my eyes for the time.” Two years later he
laments again: “I am being driven furious by seven hundred closely
written grammar papers, which I have to look over.” During these years
he was holding the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, and he had long since
established his reputation as one of the foremost of the younger poets.
Yet for a livelihood he was forced still to endure--and he endured them
till within a few years of his death in 1888--the exactions of this
wearing and exasperating drudgery. Moreover, despite occasional
outbursts of impatience, he gave himself to the work freely, heartily,
and effectively. He was sent on several occasions to the Continent to
examine and report on foreign school systems; his reports on German and
French education show immense diligence of investigation, a thorough
grasp of detail, and patience and persistence in the acquisition of
facts that in and for themselves must have been unattractive and
unrewarding.
The record of this severe labour is to be found in Arnold’s _Letters_,
and it must dispose once for all of any charge that he was a mere
dilettante and coiner of phrases. Through a long period of years he was
working diligently, wearisomely, in minutely practical ways, to better
the educational system of England; he was persistently striving both to
spread sounder ideals of elementary education and to make more effective
the system actually in vogue. And thus, unpretentiously and laboriously,
he was serving the cause of sweetness and light as well as through his
somewhat debonair contributions to literature.
In another way his _Letters_ have done much to reveal the innermost core
of Arnold’s nature, and so, ultimately, to explain the genesis of his
prose. They place it beyond doubt that in all he wrote Arnold had an
underlying purpose, clearly apprehended and faithfully pursued. In 1867,
in a letter to his mother, he says: “I more and more become conscious of
having something to do and of a resolution to do it.... Whether one
lives long or not, to be less and less _personal_ in one’s desires and
workings is the great matter.” In a letter of 1863 he had already
written in much the same strain: “However, one cannot change English
ideas as much as, if I live, I hope to change them, without saying
imperturbably what one thinks, and making a good many people
uncomfortable.” And in a letter of the same year he exclaims: “It is
very animating to think that one at last has a chance of _getting at_
the English public. Such a public as it is, and such a work as one wants
to do with it.” A work to do! The phrase recalls Cardinal Newman and the
well-known anecdote of his Sicilian illness, when through all the days
of greatest danger he insisted that he should get well because he had a
work to do in England. Despite Arnold’s difference in temperament from
Newman and the widely dissimilar task he proposed to himself, he was no
less in earnest than Newman, and no less convinced of the importance of
his task.
The occasional supercilious jauntiness of Arnold’s style, then, need not
trouble even the most conscientious of his admirers. To many of his
readers it is in itself, as has been already suggested, delightfully
stimulating. Others, the more conscientious folk and perhaps also the
severer judges of literary quality, are bound to find it artistically a
blemish; but they need not at any rate regard it as implying any radical
defect in Arnold’s humanity or as the result of cheap cynicism or of
inadequate sympathy. In point of fact, the true account of the matter
seems rather to lie in the paradox that the apparent superciliousness of
Arnold’s style comes from the very intensity of his moral earnestness,
and that the imperfections of his manner are often the result of an
over-conscientious desire to conciliate.
II
What, then, was Arnold’s controlling purpose in his prose-writing? What
was the “work” that he “wanted to do with the English public”? In trying
to find answers to these questions recourse will first be had to stray
phrases in Arnold’s prose; these phrases will give incidental glimpses,
from different points of view, of his central ideal; later, their
fragmentary suggestions will be brought together into something like a
comprehensive formula.
In the lectures on _Celtic Literature_ Arnold points out, in closing,
that it has been his aim to lead Englishmen to “reunite themselves with
their better mind and with the world through science”; that he has
sought to help them “conquer the hard unintelligence, which was just
then their bane; to supple and reduce it by culture, by a growth in the
variety, fulness, and sweetness of their spiritual life.” In the Preface
to his first volume of _Essays_ he explains that he is trying “to pull
out a few more stops in that powerful, but at present somewhat
narrow-toned organ, the modern Englishman.” In _Culture and Anarchy_ he
assures us that his object is to convince men of the value of “culture”;
to incite them to the pursuit of “perfection”; to help “make reason and
the will of God prevail.” And, again, in the same work he declares that
he is striving to intensify throughout England “the impulse to the
development of the whole man, to connecting and harmonizing all parts of
him, perfecting all, leaving none to take their chance.”
These phrases give, often with capricious picturesqueness, hints of the
prevailing intention with which Arnold writes. They may well be
supplemented by a series of phrases in which, in similarly picturesque
fashion, he finds fault with life as it actually exists in England, with
the individual Englishman as he encounters him from day to day; these
phrases, through their critical implications, also reveal the purpose
that is always present in Arnold’s mind, when he addresses his
countrymen. “Provinciality,” Arnold points out as a widely prevalent and
injurious characteristic of English literature; it argues a lack of
centrality, carelessness of ideal excellence, undue devotion to
relatively unimportant matters. Again, “arbitrariness” and
“eccentricity” are noticeable traits both of English literature and
scholarship; Arnold finds them everywhere deforming Professor Newman’s
interpretations of Homer, and he further comments on them as in varying
degrees “the great defect of English intellect--the great blemish of
English literature.” In religion he takes special exception to the “loss
of totality” that results from sectarianism; this is the penalty, Arnold
contends, that the Nonconformist pays for his hostility to the
established church; in his pursuit of his own special enthusiasm the
Nonconformist becomes, like Ephraim, “a wild ass alone by himself.”
From all these brief quotations this much at least is plain, that what
Arnold is continually recommending is the complete development of the
human type, and that what he is condemning is departure from some finely
conceived ideal of human excellence--from some scheme of human nature in
which all its powers have full and harmonious play. The various phrases
that have been quoted, alike the positive and the negative ones, imply,
as Arnold’s continual purpose in his prose-writings, the recommendation
of this ideal of human excellence and the illustration of the evils that
result from its neglect. Evidently, his imagination is haunted by some
symmetrical scheme of character--by some exquisitely conceived pattern
of perfection--wherein manners and knowledge, and passion and religion,
all have their due value, and work together for righteousness. With this
scheme in mind, he goes through the length and breadth of England,
scanning each class of men he meets, and questioning how far its members
conform to his type. And his continual purpose is to stir in the minds
of his fellow-countrymen as keen a sense as may be of the value of this
perfect type and of the dangers of disregarding it. The significance and
the scope of this purpose will become clearer if we consider some of the
imperfect ideals that Arnold finds operative in place of his absolute
ideal, and note their misleading and depraving effects.
One such partial ideal is the worship of the excessively practical and
the relentlessly utilitarian as the only things in life worth while.
England is a prevailingly practical nation, and our age is a
prevailingly practical age; the unregenerate product of this nation and
age is the Philistine, and against the Philistine Arnold never wearies
of inveighing. The Philistine is the swaggering enemy of the children
of light, of the chosen people, of those who love art and ideas
disinterestedly. The Philistine cares solely for business, for
developing the material resources of the country, for starting
companies, building bridges, making railways, and establishing plants.
The machinery of life--its material organization--monopolizes all his
attention. He judges of life by the outside, and is careless of the
things of the spirit. The Philistine may, of course, be religious; but
his religion is as materialistic as his every-day existence; his heaven
is a triumph of engineering skill, and his ideal of future bliss is, in
Sydney Smith’s phrase, to eat “_pâtés de foie gras_ to the sound of
trumpets.” Against men of this class Arnold cannot show himself too
cynically severe. They are pitiful distortions; the practical instincts
have usurped, and have destroyed the symmetry and integrity of the human
type. The senses and the will to live are monopolizing and determine all
the man’s energy toward utilitarian ends. The power of beauty, the power
of intellect and knowledge, the power of social manners, are atrophied.
Society is in serious danger unless men of this class can be touched
with a sense of their shortcomings; made aware of the larger values of
life; made pervious to ideas; brought to recognize the importance of the
things of the mind and the spirit.
Another partial ideal, the prevalence of which Arnold laments, is the
narrowly and unintelligently religious ideal. The middle-class
Englishman is, according to Arnold, a natural “Hebraist”; his whole
energy is spent, when he is at his best, in the struggle to obey certain
traditional rules of morality. In the origin of these rules, or in the
question as to whether or no they be founded in right reason, he has
little or no interest. In general, he is careless or contemptuous of
speculation and of whatever savours of philosophy. He is intent upon the
fulfilment of a conventional code of duty. _Conduct_, narrowly
conceived, is his only concern in life. Beauty has no charm for him;
art, no meaning. The free play of mind in the disinterested pursuit of
truth seems waste of energy or even vicious self-assertion. All the
bright irresponsibility, the sparkling delight in life and in thought
for their own sakes, that are characteristic of what Arnold calls the
“Hellenistic” temper--its burning eagerness to _know_, its strenuous
will to be _sure_ that its truth is really truth--all these qualities
and instincts seem to the Hebraist abnormal, pagan, altogether evil. The
Puritanism of the seventeenth century was the almost unrestricted
expression of the Hebraistic temper, and from the conceptions of life
that were then wrought out the middle classes in England have never
wholly escaped. The Puritans looked out upon life with a narrow vision,
recognized only a few of its varied interests, and provided for the
needs of only a part of man’s nature. Yet their theories and
conceptions of life--theories and conceptions that were limited in the
first place by the age in which they originated, and in the second place
by a Hebraistic lack of sensitiveness to the manifold charm of beauty
and knowledge--these limited theories and conceptions have imposed
themselves constrainingly on many generations of Englishmen. To-day they
remain, in all their narrowness and with an ever-increasing
disproportion to existing conditions, the most influential guiding
principles of large masses of men. Such men spend their lives in a round
of petty religious meetings and employments. They think all truth is
summed up in their little cut-and-dried Biblical interpretations. New
truth is uninteresting or dangerous. Art distracts from religion, and is
a siren against whose seductive chanting the discreet religious Ulysses
seals his ears. To Arnold this whole view of life seems sadly mistaken,
and the men who hold it seem fantastic distortions of the authentic
human type. The absurdities and the dangers of the unrestricted
Hebraistic ideal he satirizes or laments in _Culture and Anarchy_, in
_Literature and Dogma_, in _God and the Bible_, and in _St. Paul and
Protestantism_.