the cause of the Roman Catholic Church. Rome welcomed him with that
cordial welcome she always gives to a new-comer, and she utilized him
and set work for him to do. Macaulay has shown very effectively in one
of his essays how the Roman Church seldom loses any one it has gained,
because it is so skilful in finding for everybody his proper place, and
assigning him in her service the task he is best qualified to do, so
that her ambition becomes his ambition, her interest his interest, her
conquests his conquests. Newman appears to have been made a sort of
missionary from Rome to the intellect and culture of the English people.
Within the Church to which he had gone over he became an immense
influence and almost unequalled power. The Catholics delighted to have a
leader whose intellect no one could pretend to despise, whose gifts and
culture had been panegyrized in the most glowing terms, over and over
again, by the foremost statesmen and divines of the Protestant Church.
Newman was appointed head of the oratory of St. Philip Neri at
Birmingham, and was for some years rector of the Roman Catholic
University of Dublin. He rarely came before the public. In all the arts
that make an orator or a great preacher he is strikingly deficient. His
manner is constrained, awkward, and even ungainly; his voice is thin and
weak. His bearing is not impressive. His gaunt, emaciated figure, his
sharp, eagle face, his cold, meditative eye, rather repel than attract
those who see him for the first time. The matter of his discourse,
whether sermon, speech, or lecture, is always admirable, and the
language is concise, scholarly, expressive--perhaps a little
overweighted with thought; but there is nothing there of the orator. It
is as a writer, and as an "influence"--I don't know how better to
express it--that Newman has become famous. I doubt if we have many
better prose writers. He is full of keen, pungent, satirical humor; and
there is, on the other hand, a subtle vein of poetry and of pathos
suffusing nearly all he writes. One of the finest and one of the most
frequently quoted passages in modern English literature is Newman's
touching and noble apostrophe to England's "Saxon Bible." He has
published volumes of verse which I think belong to the very highest
order of verse-making that is not genuine poetry. They are full of
thought, feeling, pathos, tenderness, beauty of illustration; they are
all that verse can be made by one who just fails to be a poet. An
English critical review not long since classed the poetical works of Dr.
Newman and George Eliot together, as the nearest approach which
intellect and culture have made in our days toward the production of
genuine poetry. When Newman made his famous attack on Dr. Achilli, an
Italian priest who had renounced the Roman Church, and whom Newman
publicly accused of many crimes, the judge who had to sentence the
accuser to the payment of a fine for libel pronounced a panegyric on his
intellect and his character such as is rarely heard from an English
judgment seat. Not long after, when the subject came up somehow in the
House of Commons, Mr. Gladstone broke into an encomium of John Henry
Newman which might have seemed poetical by hyperbole to those who did
not know the merits of the one man and the conscientious truthfulness of
the other. We have heard the testimony borne by Mr. Disraeli to the
importance of Newman's intellect as a support of the English Church, and
the shock which was caused by his withdrawal. Seldom, indeed, has a man
seceded from one church and become the aggressive, unsparing, intolerant
champion of its enemy, and yet retained the esteem and the affection of
those whom he abandoned, as this good, great, mistaken Englishman has
done.
The two brothers then are hopelessly divided. One consorts with the Pope
and Cardinal Wiseman and Archbishop Manning, and is the idol and saint
of the Ultramontanes, and devotes his noble intellect to the task of
making the Irish Catholic a more bigoted Catholic than ever. The other
falls in with the little band, that once seemed a forlorn hope, of what
we may call the philosophical radicals of England. He becomes a
professor of the rationalistic University of London, and a contributor
to the free-thinking "Westminster Review." Judging each brother's
success merely by what each sought to do, I suppose the career of the
Catholic has been the more successful. Not that I think he has made much
way toward the conversion of England to Catholicism. With all its
Puseyism and ritualism, England seems to have little real inclination
toward the doctrines of Rome. There is indeed a distinguished "convert"
every now and then--the Marquis of Bute some two years ago, Lord Robert
Montagu last year; but the great mass of the English people remain
obstinately anti-papal. The tendency is far more toward Rationalism than
toward Romanism; with the Newman who withdrew from all churches rather
than with the Newman who renounced one church to enter another.
Therefore, when I say that the career of John Newman appears to me to
have been more successful than that of Francis, I mean only that he has
been a greater influence, a more powerful instrument of his cause than
his brother ever has been. The boast was made unjustly for Voltaire that
he almost arrested the progress of Christianity in Europe. I think the
admirers of John Newman might claim for him that he actually did for a
time at least arrest the progress of Protestantism in England. He had
indeed the great advantage of passing from one organization to another.
Like Coriolanus, when he seceded he became the leader of the enemy's
army. It was quite otherwise with his brother, who leaving the English
Church was thenceforward only an individual, and for the most part an
isolated worker. But indeed, with all his intellect, his high culture,
and his indomitable courage, Francis Newman has never been an
influential man in English politics. It may be that his keen logic is
too uncompromising; and there can be no practical statesmanship without
compromise. It may be that there is something eccentric, egotistic (in
the less offensive sense), and crotchety in that sharp, independent, and
self-sufficing intelligence. Whatever the reason, nine out of ten men in
London set down Francis Newman as hopelessly given over to crotchets,
while the tenth man, admiring however much his character and his
capacity, is sometimes grieved and sometimes provoked that both together
do not make him a greater power in the nation. I never remember Francis
Newman to have been in accord with what I may call the average public
opinion of English political life, except in one instance; and in that
case I believe him to have been wrong. He was in favor of the Crimean
war; and for this once therefore he found himself on the side of the
majority. As if to mark the contrast of views which it has been the fate
of these two brothers to present during their lives, it so happened
that, so far as John Henry's opinions on the subject could be learned by
the public, they were against the war. At least they were decidedly
against the Turks. I remember hearing him deliver at that time a course
of lectures in an educational institution, having for their subject the
origin and the results of the Ottoman settlement in Europe. I well
remember how effectively and vividly he argued, with his thin voice and
his constrained, ungraceful action, that the Turk had no greater moral
right to the territory he occupies, but does not cultivate and improve,
than the pirate has to the sea over which he sails. But Francis Newman
was then for once mixed up with the majority; and I doubt whether he
could have much liked the unwonted position. He certainly took care to
explain more than once that his reasons for taking that side were not
those of the average Englishman. He thus might have given some of his
casual associates occasion to say of him, as Charles Mathews says of
woman in general, that even when he is right he is right in a wrong
sort of way. For myself I am inclined to reverse the saying, and declare
of Francis Newman that even when he is wrong he is wrong in a right sort
of way. He was right, and in a very right sort of way, when he came out
from his habitual seclusion during the American civil war, and stood up
on many a platform for the cause of the Union. Like his brother, he is a
poor public speaker. At his very best he is the professor talking to his
class, not the orator addressing a crowd. His manner is singularly
constrained, ineffective, and even awkward; his voice is thin and weak.
There is a certain very small and rare class of bad speakers, which has
yet a virtue and charm of its own almost equal to eloquence. I am now
thinking of men utterly wanting in all the arts and graces, in all the
power and effect of rhetorical delivery, but who yet with whatever
defect of manner can say such striking things, can put such noble
thoughts into expressive words, can be so entirely original and so
completely masters of their subject, that they seem to be orators in all
but voice and manner. Horace Greeley always is, to me at least, such a
speaker; so is Stuart Mill. These are bad speakers as Jane Eyre or
Consuelo may have been an unlovely woman; all the rules declare against
them, all the intelligences and sympathies are in their favor. But
Francis Newman is not a speaker of this kind. He is feeble, ineffective,
and often even commonplace. Nature has denied to him the faculty of
adequately expressing himself in spoken words. He is almost as much out
of his element when addressing a public meeting as he would be if he
were singing in an opera. Few Englishmen living can claim to be the
intellectual superiors of Francis Newman; but you would never know
Francis Newman by hearing him speak on a platform. The last time I heard
him address a public meeting was on an occasion to which I have already
alluded. He was presiding over an assemblage called together to protest
against compulsory vaccination. The Government and Parliament have
lately made very stringent the enactment for compulsory vaccination, in
consequence of the terrible increase of small-pox. There is in London,
as in all other great capitals, a certain knot of persons who would
refuse to wash their faces or kiss their wives if Government ordered or
even recommended either performance. Therefore there was a small
agitation got up against vaccination, and Francis Newman consented to
become the president of one of its meetings. This meeting was held in
Exeter Hall--not indeed in the vast hall where the oratorios are
performed, and where once upon a time Henry Ward Beecher pleaded the
cause of the Union; but in the "lower hall," as it is called, a little
subterranean den. Some eminent classic person, I really forget who,
being reproached with the small size of his apartments, declared that he
should be only too glad if he could fill his rooms, small as they were,
with men his friends. The organizers of this meeting might have been
content if they could have filled the hall, small as it was, with men
and women their friends. The attendance was not nearly up to the size of
the room. There on the platform sat the good, the gifted, and the
fearless Francis Newman; and immediately around him were some dozen
embodied and living crotchets and crazes. There was this learned
physician who has communication with the spirit-world regularly. There
was this other eminent person who has long been trying in vain to teach
an apathetic Government how to cure crime on phrenological principles.
There was Smith, who is opposed to all wars; Brown, who firmly believes
that every disease comes from the use of salt; Jones, who has at his own
expense put into circulation thousands of copies of his work against the
employment of medical men in puerperal cases; Robinson, who is ready to
spend his last coin for the purpose of proving that vaccination and
original sin are one and the same thing. How often, oh, how often have I
not heard those theories expounded! How often have I marvelled at the
extraordinary perversion of ingenuity by which figures, facts,
philosophy, and Scripture are jumbled up together to convince you that
the moon is made of green cheese! We just wanted on this memorable
occasion the awful persons who prove to you that the earth is flat, and
the indefatigable ladies who expound their claims to the British crown
feloniously usurped by Queen Victoria. There sat Francis Newman
presiding over this preposterous little conclave, and having of course
what seemed to him satisfactory and just reasons for the position he
occupied. He spoke rather better than usual, and there was a bewildering
bravery of paradox writhing through his speech which must have delighted
his listeners. The meeting came to nothing. The papers took hardly any
notice of it (London papers were never in my time so entirely
conventional, respectable, and Philistinish as they are just now); and
Newman's effort went wholly in vain. I have mentioned it only because it
was illustrative or typical of so much in the man's whole career. So
much of lovely independence; such a disdain of public opinion and public
ridicule; such an absence of all perception of the ridiculous! Thus it
was that he endeavored to rouse up the English public, who except for
the extreme democracy always have had a strong hankering for the
Austrian Government, to a sense of the crimes of the House of Hapsburg
against its subjects. Thus he was for reform in Parliament when
Parliamentary reform was a theme supposed to be dead and buried; when
Palmerston had trampled on its ashes, and Disraeli had made merry over
its coffin. Thus he came out for the American Union when John Bright
stood almost alone in the House of Commons, and Mill and Goldwin Smith
and two or three others were trying to organize public opinion outside
the House. The same qualities after all which made Newman nearly sublime
in these latter instances, were just those which made him well nigh
ridiculous in the anti-vaccination business. But in all the instances
alike the same thing can be said of Francis Newman. There is a turn or
twist of some kind in his nature and intellect which always seems to mar
his best efforts at practical accomplishment. Even his purely literary
and scholastic productions are marked by the same fatal characteristic.
All the outfit, all the materials are there in surprising profusion.
There is the culture, there is the intellect, the patience, the
sincerity. But the result is not in proportion to the value of the
materials. The blending is not complete, is not effectual. Something has
always intervened or been wanting. Francis Newman has never done and
probably never will do anything equal to his strength and his capacity.
I am not inviting a comparison between these two brothers, so alike in
their sincerity, their devotion, their courage, and their gifts--so
singularly unlike, so utterly divided, in their creeds and their
careers. My own sympathies, of course, naturally go with Francis Newman,
who has in a vast majority of instances been a teacher of some opinion,
a champion of some political cause of which I am proud to be a disciple
and a follower. But I suppose the greater intellect and the richer gifts
were those which were given up so meekly and wholly to the service of
the dogmatism of the Roman Catholic Church. The career of John Henry
Newman may probably be regarded as having practically closed. His latest
work of note, "The Grammar of Assent," does not indeed seem to show any
falling away of his intellectual powers; but I have heard that his
physical strength has suffered severely with years, and he never was a
strong man. He is now in his seventieth year, and it is therefore only
reasonable to regard him as one who has done his work and whose life is
fully open to the judgment of his time. May I be allowed to say that I
think he has done some good even to that English Church to which his
secession struck so heavy a blow? Newman was really the mainspring of
that movement which proposed to rescue the Church from apathy, from dull
easy-going quiescence, from the perfunctory discharge of formal duties,
and to quicken her once again with the spirit of a priesthood, to arouse
her to the living work, physical and spiritual, of an ecclesiastical
sovereignty. The impulse indeed overshot itself in his case, and was
misdirected in the case of Dr. Pusey, plunging blindly into Romanism
with the one, degenerating into a somewhat barren symbolism with the
other. But throughout the English Church in general there has been
surely a higher spirit at work since that famous Oxford movement which
was inspired by John Henry Newman. I think its influence has been more
active, more beneficent, more human, and yet at the same time more
spiritual, since that sudden and startling impulse was given. For the
man himself little more needs to be said. Every one acknowledges his
gifts and his virtues. No one doubts that in his marvellous change he
sought only the pure truth. His theology, I presume, is not that of the
readers of "The Galaxy" in general, any more than it is mine; but I
trust there is none of us so narrowed to his own form of Christianity as
to refuse his respect and admiration to one so highly lifted above the
average of men in goodness and intellect, even though his career may
have been sacrificed at the shrine of a faith that is not ours. For me,
I am sometimes lost in wonder at the sacrifice, but I can only think
with respect and even veneration of the man.
The younger brother needs no apology or vindication, in the United
States especially. He is, be it understood, a thoroughly religious man.
He has never sunk into materialism or frittered away his earnestness in
mere skepticism. He is not orthodox--he has gone his own way as regards
church dogma and discipline; but except in the vulgarest and narrowest
application of the word, he is no "infidel." The United States owe him
some good feeling, for he was one of the few eminent men in England who
never were faithless to the cause of the Union, and never doubted of its
ultimate triumph. I have now before me one of the most powerful
arguments addressed to an English audience for the Union and against
secession that reason, justice, and eloquence could frame. It is a
pamphlet published in 1863 by "F. W. Newman, late Professor at
University College, London," in the form of a "Letter to a Friend who
had joined the Southern Independence Association." How wonderful it
seems now that such arguments ever should have been needed; how few
there were then in England who regarded them; how completely time has
justified and sealed them as true, right, and prophetic. I read the
pages over, and all the old struggle comes back with its rancors and its
dangers, and I honor anew the brave man who was not afraid to stand as
one of a little group, isolated, denounced, and laughed at, confiding
always in justice and time.
The story of these two brothers is on the whole as strange a chapter as
any I know in the biography of human intellect and creed. I think it may
at least teach us a lesson of toleration, if nothing better. The very
pride of intellect itself can hardly pretend to look down with mere
scorn upon beliefs or errors which have carried off in contrary
directions these two Newmans. The sternest bigot can scarcely refuse to
admit that truthfulness and goodness may abide without the limits of his
own creed, when he remembers the high and noble example of pure, true,
and disinterested lives which these intellectually-sundered brothers
alike have given to their fellow-men.
ARCHBISHOP MANNING.
St. James's Hall, London, is primarily a place for concerts and singers,
as Exeter Hall is. But, like its venerable predecessor, St. James's Hall
has come to be identified with political meetings of a certain class.
Exeter Hall, a huge, gaunt, unadorned, and dreary room in the Strand, is
resorted to for the most part as the arena and platform of
ultra-Protestantism. St. James's Hall, a beautiful and almost lavishly
ornate structure in Piccadilly, is commonly used by the leading Roman
Catholics of London when they desire to make a demonstration. There are
political classes which will use either place indifferently; but Exeter
Hall has usually a tinge of Protestant exclusiveness about its political
expression, while the ceiling of the other building has rung alike to
the thrilling music of John Bright's voice, to the strident vehemence of
Mr. Bradlaugh, the humdrum humming of Mr. Odger, and the clear,
delicate, tremulous intonations of Stuart Mill. But I never heard of a
Roman Catholic meeting of great importance being held anywhere in London
lately, except in St. James's Hall.
Let us attend such a meeting there. The hall is a huge oblong, with
galleries around three of the sides, and a platform bearing a splendid
organ on the fourth. The room is brilliantly lighted, and the mode of
lighting is peculiar and picturesque. The platform, the galleries, the
body of the hall alike are crowded. This is a meeting held to make a
demonstration in favor of some Roman Catholic demand--say for separate
education. On the platform are the great Catholic peers, most of them
men of lineage stretching back to years when Catholicism was yet
unsuspicious of any possible rivalry in England. There are the Norfolks,
the Denbighs, the Dormers, the Petres, the Staffords; there are such
later accessions to Catholicism as the Marquis of Bute, whose change
created such a sensation, and Lord Robert Montagu, who "went over" only
last year. There are some recent accessions of the peerage also--Lord
Acton, for instance, head of a distinguished and ancient family, but
only lately called to the Upper House, and who, when Sir John Acton, won
honorable fame as a writer and scholar. Lord Acton not many years ago
started the "Home and Foreign Review," a quarterly periodical which
endeavored to reconcile Catholicism with liberalism and science. The
universal opinion of England and of Europe declared the "Home and
Foreign Review" to be unsurpassed for ability, scholarship, and
political information by any publication in the world. It leaped at one
bound to a level with the "Edinburgh," the "Quarterly," and the "Revue
des Deux Mondes." But the Pope thought the Review too liberal, and
intimated that it ought to be suppressed; and Lord Acton meekly bowed
his head and suppressed it in all the bloom of its growing fame. Some
Irish members of Parliament are on the platform--men of station and
wealth like Munsell, men of energy and brains like John Francis Maguire;
perhaps, too, the handsome, brilliant-minded O'Donoghue, with his
picturesque pedigree and his broken fortunes. But in general there is
not a very cordial _rapprochement_ between the English Catholic peers
and the Irish Catholic members. Of all slow, cold, stately Conservatives
in the world, the slowest, coldest, and stateliest is the English
Catholic peer. Only the common bond of religion brings these two sets of
men together now and then. They meet, but do not blend. In the body of
the hall are the middle-class Catholics of London, the shopkeepers and
clerks, mostly Irish or of Irish parentage. In the galleries are
swarming the genuine Irishmen of London, the Paddies who are always
threatening to interrupt Garibaldian gatherings in the parks, and who
throw up their hats at the prospect of any "row" on behalf of the Pope.
The chair is taken by some duke or earl, who is listened to
respectfully, but without any special fervor of admiration. The English
Catholics are undemonstrative in any case, and Irish Paddy does not care
much about a chilly English peer. But a speaker is presently introduced
who has only to make his appearance in front of the platform in order to
awaken one universal burst of applause. Paddy and the Duke of Norfolk
vie with each other; the steady English shopkeeper from Islington is as
demonstrative as any O'Donoghue or Maguire. The meeting is wide awake
and informed by one spirit and soul at last.