Newman's best essays display a delicate and flexible treatment of
language, without emphasis, without oddity, which hardly arrests the
attention at first,--the reader being absorbed in the argument or
statement,--but which, in course of time, fascinates, as a thing
miraculous in its limpid grace and suavity.
--_Edmund Gosse's History of Modern English Literature._
The work of Newman reveals him as one of the great masters of graceful,
scholarly, finished prose. It is individual, it has charm, and this is
the secret of its power to interest. No writer of our time has reflected
his mind and heart in his pages as has Newman. He has light for the
intellect and warmth for the heart.
--_A. J. George's Types of Literary Art._
Newman towers, with only three or four compeers, above his generation;
and now that the benignity of his great nature has passed from our
sight, its majesty is more evident year by year.
--_Scudder's Modern English Poets._
The finish and urbanity of Newman's prose have been universally
commended even by those who are most strenuously opposed to his
opinions.
--_H. J. Nicoll._
All the resources of a master of English style are at Newman's command:
pure diction, clear arrangement, delicate irony, gracious dignity, a
copious command of words combined with a chaste reserve in using them.
All these qualities go to make up the charm of Newman's style--the
finest flower that the earliest system of a purely classical education
has produced.
--_J. Jacobs's Literary Studies._
Newman combines a thoroughly classical training, a scholarly form, with
the incommunicable and almost inexplicable power to move audiences and
readers.
--_George Saintsbury._
The pure style of Newman may be compared in its distinguishing quality
to the atmosphere. It is at once simple and subtle, vigorous and
elastic; it penetrates into every recess of its subject; it is
transparent, allowing each object it touches to display its own proper
color.
--_H. E. Beeching's English Prose._
There are touching passages characteristic of Newman's writings which
give them a peculiar charm. They are those which yield momentary
glimpses of a very tender heart that has a burden of its own, unrevealed
to man.... It is, as I have heard it described, as though he suddenly
opened a book and gave you a glimpse for a moment of wonderful secrets,
and then as quickly closed it.... In Newman's Sermons, how the old truth
became new; how it came home, as he spoke, with a meaning never felt
before! He laid his finger how gently, yet how powerfully, on some inner
place in the hearer's heart, and told him things about himself he had
never known till then. Subtlest truths, which it would have taken
philosophers pages of circumlocution and big words to state, were
dropped out by the way in a sentence or two of the most transparent
Saxon. What delicacy of style, yet what strength! how simple, yet how
suggestive! how penetrating, yet how refined! how homely, yet how
tender-hearted! You might come away still not believing the tenets
peculiar to the High Church System, but you would be harder than most
men if you did not feel more than ever ashamed of coarseness,
selfishness, worldliness, if you did not feel the things of faith
brought closer to the soul.... Newman's innate and intense idealism is,
perhaps, his most striking characteristic.... It is a thought of his,
always deeply felt and many times repeated, that this visible world is
but the outward shell of an invisible kingdom, a screen which hides from
our view things far greater and more wonderful than any which we see,
and that the unseen world is close to us and ever ready to break through
the shell and manifest itself.
--_Shairp._
Newman's great reputation for prose and the supreme interest attaching
to his life seem to have obscured the fame he might have won as a poet.
He was in poetry, as in theology, a more masculine Keble, but with all
the real purity of Keble, with also the indispensable flavor of
earth.
--_H. Walker._
The _Dream of Gerontius_ resembles Dante more than any other poetry
written since the great Tuscan's time.
--_Sir Henry Taylor._
The _Dream_ is a rare poetic rendering into English verse of that high
ritual which from the death-bed to the Mass of Supplication encompasses
the faithful soul.... Newman has no marked affinities with English
writers of his day. He is strikingly different from Macaulay, whose
eloquence betrays the fury, as it is annealed in the fire, of the
Western Celt. To Ruskin, who deliberately built up a monument, stately
as the palace of Kubla Khan, he is a contrast, for the very reason that
he does not handle words as if they were settings in architecture or
colors in a palette; rather, he would look upon them as transparencies
which let his meaning through. He is more like De Quincey, but again no
player upon the organ for the sake of its music; and that which is
common to both is the literary tradition of the eighteenth century
enhanced by a power to which abstract and concrete yielded in almost
equal degree.... With so prompt and intense an intellect at his call,
there was no subject, outside purely technical criticism, which Newman
could not have mastered.
--_Barry's Literary Lives._
It is when Newman exerts his flexible and vivid imagination in depicting
the deepest religious passion that we are most carried away by him and
feel his great genius most truly.... Whether tried by the test of
nobility, intensity, and steadfastness of his work, or by the test of
the greatness of the powers which have been consecrated to that work,
Cardinal Newman has been one of the greatest of our modern great men.
--_R. H. Hutton's Life of Newman._
Newman's mind was world-wide. He was interested in everything that was
going on in science, in the highest form of politics, in literature....
Nothing was too large for him, nothing too trivial, if it threw light
upon the central question,--what man really is and what is his destiny.
--_J. A. Froude._
In Newman's sketch of the influence of Abelard on his disciples is seen
his belief in the immense power for good or ill of a dominating
personality. And he himself supplied an object-lesson in his theory.
Shairp, Froude, Church, Wilberforce, Gladstone, are only a few of those
who have borne testimony to the personal magnetism which left its mark
on the whole of thinking Oxford. "Cor ad cor loquitur," the motto chosen
by Newman on his receiving the Cardinal's hat, expressed to him the
whole reality of intercourse between man and man, and man and God.
--_Wilfrid Ward's Problems and Persons._
Newman's mind swung through a wide arc, and thoughts apparently
antagonistic often were to him supplemental each to each.... A man of
dauntless courage and profound thoughtfulness, while his intellect was
preëminently a logical one, both the heart and the moral sense possessed
with him their sacred tribunals in matters of reasoning as well as of
sentiment.... The extreme subtlety of his intelligence opposed no
hindrance to his power of exciting vehement emotion.
--_A. De Vere's Literary Reminiscences._