Part 6

Newman’s methods as a controversialist may advantageously be studied in his _Present Position of Catholics in England_,--a work that contains some of his most ingenious and caustic irony. In plan and construction, these discourses illustrate once more Newman’s consummate skill in adapting his method to the matter in hand. His purpose in this case is to right the Roman Catholic Church with the English nation, to exhibit the Roman Catholics as he knows them to be, a conscientious, honourable, patriotic body of men, and to put an end once for all, if possible, to the long tradition of calumny that has persecuted them. Such is his problem. He sets about its solution characteristically. He does not undertake to demonstrate the truth of Roman Catholic doctrines, or, by direct evidence and argument, to refute the wild charges of hypocrisy and corruption which Protestants are habitually making against Roman Catholics. His methods are much subtler than these and also much more comprehensive and final. He sets himself to analyze Protestant prejudice, and to destroy it by resolving it into its elements. He takes it up historically, and exhibits its origin in an atmosphere of intense partisan conflict, and its development in the midst of peculiarly favourable intellectual and moral conditions; he shows that it is political in its origin and has been inwrought into the very fibre of English national life: “English Protestantism is the religion of the throne; it is represented, realized, taught, transmitted in the succession of monarchs and an hereditary aristocracy. It is religion grafted upon loyalty; and its strength is not in argument, not in fact, not in the unanswerable controversialist, not in an apostolic succession, not in sanction of Scripture--but in a royal road to faith, in backing up a King whom men see, against a Pope whom they do not see. The devolution of its crown is the tradition of its creed; and to doubt its truth is to be disloyal towards its Sovereign. Kings are an Englishman’s saints and doctors; he likes somebody or something at which he can cry, ‘huzzah,’ and throw up his hat.”

To hate a “Romanist,” then, is as natural for John Bull as to hate a Frenchman, and to libel him is a matter of patriotism. The Englishman’s romantic imagination has for generations been spinning myths of Catholic misdoing to satisfy these deep instinctive animosities. Moreover, many other typical English qualities, in addition to loyalty and patriotism, have contributed to foster and develop this Protestant prejudice. Such are the controlling practical interests of the middle-class English, their content with compromise-working schemes, and their contempt for abstractions and subtleties; their shuddering dislike of innovation; their well-meaning obstinacy in ignorance, and their heroic adherence to familiar, though undeniable error; their insularity; their hatred of foreigners in general, and their frenzied fear of the Pope in particular. With unfailing adroitness of suggestion, Newman makes clear how these national traits, and many others closely related to them, have coöperated to originate and develop Protestant hatred of Roman Catholicism. His mastery of the details of social life and of motives of action is in this discussion of English history and contemporary life specially conspicuous. Every phase of peculiarly English thought and feeling is present to him; every intricacy of the curiously subterranean British national temperament is traced out. And the result is that prejudice is explained out of existence. The intense hostility that seems so primitive an instinct as to justify itself like the belief in God or in an outer world, is resolved into the expression of a vast mass of petty, and often discreditable instincts, and so loses all its validity in losing its apparent primitiveness and mystery.

Such is the general plan and scope of Newman’s attack on Protestant prejudice; in carrying out the plan and making his attack brilliantly effective, he shows inexhaustible ingenuity and unwearied invention. He uses fables, allegories, and elaborate pieces of irony; he develops an unending series of picturesque illustrations of Protestant prejudice, drawn from all sources, past and present; he sets curious traps for this prejudice, catches it at unawares, and shows it up to his readers in guises they can hardly defend; he plays skilfully upon the instincts that lie at its root, and by clever manipulation makes them declare themselves in a twinkling in favour of some aspect of Roman Catholicism. In short, he uses all the rhetorical devices of which he is master to win a hearing from the half-hostile, to beguile the unwilling, to amuse the captious, and, finally, to insinuate into the minds of his readers an all-permeating mood of contempt for Protestant narrowness and bigotry, and of open-minded appreciation of the merits of Roman Catholics.

IV

For still another reason the lectures on the _Present Position of Catholics_ are specially interesting to a student of Newman’s methods; they illustrate exceptionally well his skill in the use of irony. To the genuine rhetorician there is something specially attractive in the duplicity of irony, because of the opportunity it offers of playing with points of view, of juggling with phrases, of showing virtuosity in the manipulation of both thoughts and words. Newman was too much of a rhetorician not to feel this fascination. Moreover, he had learned from his study of Copleston and Whately the possibilities of irony as a controversial weapon. Copleston’s _Advice to a Young Reviewer_, and Whately’s _Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Buonaparte_ were typical specimens of academic irony, where, with impressive dignity and suavity and the most plausible simplicity and candour, the writers, while seemingly advocating a certain policy, or theory, or set of conclusions, were really sneering throughout at a somewhat similar policy or theory--that of their opponents--and laying it open to helpless ridicule.

One of the most noteworthy characteristics of Newman’s irony--and in this point his irony resembled that of his masters--was its positive argumentative value. Often an elaborate piece of irony is chiefly destructive; it turns cleverly into ridicule the general attitude of mind of the writer’s opponents, but makes no attempt to supply a substitute for the faith it destroys. Swift’s irony is usually of this character. It is intensely ill-natured, even savage, and is so extravagant that it sometimes defeats its own end as argument. Its hauteur and bitterness produce a reaction in the mind of the reader, and force him to distrust the judgment and sanity of a man who can be so inveterately and fiercely insolent. Its indictment is so sweeping and its mood so cynical, that the reader, though he is bullied out of any regard for the ideas that Swift attacks, is repelled from Swift himself, and made to hate his notions as much as he despises those of Swift’s opponents. Moreover, full of duplicity and innuendo as it is, its innuendoes are often merely disguised sneers, and not suggestions of genuinely valid reasons why the opinions or prejudices which the writer is assailing should be abandoned. In the _Modest Proposal_ and the _Argument against Abolishing Christianity_, for example, the irony reduces to one long sneer at the prejudice, the selfishness, and the cruelty of Yahoo human nature; there is very little positive argument in behalf of the oppressed Irish on the one hand, or in favour of Christianity on the other.

Newman’s irony, on the contrary, is subtle, intellectual, and suggestive. It is positive in its insinuation of actual reasons for abandoning prejudice against Roman Catholics; it is tirelessly adroit, and adjusts itself delicately to every part of the opposing argument; it is suggestive of new ideas, and not only makes the reader see the absurdity of some time-worn prejudice, but hints at its explanation and is ready with a new opinion to take its place. In tone, too, it is very different from Swift’s irony; it is not enraged and blindly savage, but more like the best French irony--self-possessed, suave, and oblique. Newman addresses himself with unfailing skill to the prejudices of those whom he is trying to move, and carries his readers with him in a way that Swift was too contemptuous to aim at. Newman’s irony wins the wavering, while it routs the hostile. This is the double task it proposes to itself.

An example of his irony at its best may be found in the amusing piece of declamation against the British Constitution and John Bullism which Newman puts into the mouth of a Russian count. The passage occurs in a lecture on the _Present Position of Catholics_, which was delivered just before the war with Russia, when English jealousy of Russia and contempt for Russian prejudice and ignorance were most intense. It was, of course, on these feelings of jealousy and contempt that Newman skilfully played when he represented the Russian count as grotesquely misinterpreting the British Constitution and _Blackstone’s Commentaries_, and as charging them with irreligion and blasphemy. His satirical portrayal of the Russian and the clever manipulation by which he forces the count to exhibit his stores of ungentle dulness and his stock of malignant prejudice delighted every ordinary British reader, and threw him into a pleasant glow of self-satisfaction, and of sympathy with the author; now this was the very mood, as Newman was well aware, in which, if ever, the anti-Catholic reader might be led to question with himself whether, after all, he was perfectly informed about Roman Catholicism, or whether he did not, like the Russian count, take most of his knowledge at second-hand and inherit most of his prejudice. Throughout this passage the ingenuity is conspicuous with which Newman makes use of English dislike of Russia and loyalty to Queen and Constitution; the passage everywhere exemplifies the adroitness, the flexibility, the persuasiveness, and the far-reaching calculation of Newman’s irony.

Indeed, this elaborateness and self-consciousness, and deliberateness of aim, are perhaps, at times, limitations on the success of his irony; it is somewhat too cleverly planned and a trifle over-elaborate. In these respects it contrasts disadvantageously with French irony, which, at its best, is so delightfully by the way, so airily unexpected, so accidental, and yet so dextrously fatal. It would be an instructive study in literary method to compare Newman’s ironical defence of Roman Catholicism in the passage already referred to with Montesquieu’s ironical attack upon the same system in the _Lettres Persanes_.

V

When we turn from Newman’s methods to his style in the narrower meaning of the term, we still find careful elaboration and ingenious calculation of effect, although here, again, the conscientious workmanship becomes evident only on reflection, and the general impression is that of easy and instinctive mastery. Nevertheless, Newman wrought out all that he wrote, with much patient recasting and revising. “It is simply the fact,” he tells a friend in one of his letters, “that I have been obliged to take great pains with everything I have written, and I often write chapters over and over again, besides innumerable corrections and interlinear additions.... I think I have never written for writing’s sake; but my one and single desire and aim has been to do what is so difficult: viz., to express clearly and exactly my meaning; this has been the motive principle of all my corrections and rewritings.”[21]

It is perhaps this sincerity of aim and this sacrifice of the decorative impulse in the strenuous search for adequacy of expression that keep out of Newman’s writing every trace of artificiality. Sophisticated as is his style, it is never mannered. There is no pretence, no flourish, no exhibition of rhetorical resources for their own sake. The most impressive and the most richly imaginative passages in his prose come in because he is betrayed into them in his conscientious pursuit of all the aspects of the truth he is illustrating. Moreover, they are curiously congruous in tone with the most colloquial parts of his writing. There is no sudden jar perceptible when, in the midst of his ordinary discourse, one chances upon these passages of essential beauty; perfect continuity of texture is characteristic of his work. This perfect continuity of texture illustrates both the all-pervasive fineness and nobleness of Newman’s temper, which constantly holds the elements of moral and spiritual beauty in solution, and which imprints a certain distinction upon even the commonplace, and also the flexibility and elasticity of his style, which enables him with such perfect gradation of effect to change imperceptibly from the lofty to the common. An admirable example of this exquisite gradation of values and continuity of texture may be found in the third chapter of Newman’s _Rise and Progress of Universities_, where he describes Athens and the region round about as the ideal site for a university. Alike in the earlier paragraphs that are merely expository, and in the later ones that portray the beauty of Attica, his style is simple and easily colloquial; and when from the splendid imaginative picture that his descriptive sentences call up, he turns again suddenly to exposition, the transition causes no perceptible jar. The same flexibility and smoothness of style is exemplified in a passage in the third of the discourses on _University Teaching_, where he defines his conception of the Science of Theology. In this passage, the change from a scientific explanation of the duties of the theologian to the almost impassioned eloquence of the ascription of goodness and might to the Deity is effected with no shock or sense of discontinuity.

In its freedom from artificiality and in its perfect sincerity, Newman’s style contrasts noticeably with the style of a great rhetorician from whom he nevertheless took many hints--De Quincey. Of his careful study of De Quincey’s style there can be no question. In the passage on the Deity, to which reference has just been made, there are unmistakable reminiscences of De Quincey in the iteration of emphasis on an important word, in the frequent use of inversions, in the rise and fall of the periods, and, indeed, in the subtle rhythmic effects throughout. The piece of writing, however, where the likeness to De Quincey and the imitation of his manner and music are most evident is the sermon on the _Fitness of the Glories of Mary_,--that piece of Newman’s prose, it should be noted, which is least defensible against the charge of artificiality and undue ornateness. A passage near the close of the sermon best illustrates the points in question: “And therefore she died in private. It became Him, who died for the world, to die in the world’s sight; it became the Great Sacrifice to be lifted up on high, as a light that could not be hid. But she, the Lily of Eden, who had always dwelt out of the sight of man, fittingly did she die in the garden’s shade, and amid the sweet flowers in which she had lived. Her departure made no noise in the world. The Church went about her common duties, preaching, converting, suffering. There were persecutions, there was fleeing from place to place, there were martyrs, there were triumphs. At length the rumour spread abroad that the Mother of God was no longer upon earth. Pilgrims went to and fro; they sought for her relics, but they found them not; did she die at Ephesus? or did she die at Jerusalem? reports varied; but her tomb could not be pointed out, or if it was found, it was open; and instead of her pure and fragrant body, there was a growth of lilies from the earth which she had touched. So inquirers went home marvelling, and waiting for further light.”[22]

Though the cadences of Newman’s prose are rarely as marked as here, a subtle musical beauty runs elusively through it all. Not that there is any of the sing-song of pseudo-poetic prose. The cadences are always wide-ranging and delicately shifting, with none of the halting iteration and feeble sameness of half-metrical work. Moreover, the rhythms, subtly pervasive as they are, and even symbolic of the mood of the passage as they often prove to be, never compel direct recognition, but act merely as a mass of undistinguished under-and over-tones like those which give to a human voice depth and tenderness and suggestiveness.

Newman understood perfectly the symbolic value of rhythm and the possibility of imposing upon a series of simple words, by delicately sensitive adjustment, a power over the feelings and the imagination like that of an incantation. Several of the passages already quoted or referred to illustrate his instinctive adaptation of cadence to meaning and tone; another passage, in which this same adaptation is exemplified, occurs towards the close of the _Apologia_, where Newman describes the apparent moral chaos in human history. For subtlety of modulation, however, and symbolic suggestiveness, perhaps the tender leave-taking with which the _Apologia_ concludes is the most beautiful piece of prose that Newman has written: “I have closed this history of myself with St. Philip’s name upon St. Philip’s feast-day; and having done so, to whom can I more suitably offer it, as a memorial of affection and gratitude, than to St. Philip’s sons, my dearest brothers of this House, the Priests of the Birmingham Oratory, Ambrose St. John, Henry Austin Mills, Henry Bittleston, Edward Caswall, William Paine Neville, and Henry Ignatius Dudley Rider, who have been so faithful to me; who have been so sensitive of my needs; who have been so indulgent to my failings; who have carried me through so many trials; who have grudged no sacrifice, if I have asked for it; who have been so cheerful under discouragements of my causing; who have done so many good works, and let me have the credit of them;--with whom I have lived so long, with whom I hope to die.

“And to you especially, dear Ambrose St. John, whom God gave me, when He took every one else away; who are the link between my old life and my new; who have now for twenty-one years been so devoted to me, so patient, so zealous, so tender; who have let me lean so hard upon you; who have watched me so narrowly; who have never thought of yourself, if I was in question.

“And in you I gather up and bear in memory those familiar, affectionate companions and counsellors, who, in Oxford, were given to me, one after another, to be my daily solace and relief; and all those others, of great name and high example, who were my thorough friends, and showed me true attachment in times long past; and also those many younger men, whether I knew them or not, who have never been disloyal to me by word or deed; and of all these, thus various in their relations to me, those more especially who have since joined the Catholic Church.

“And I earnestly pray for this whole company, with a hope against hope, that all of us, who once were so united, and so happy in our union, may even now be brought at length, by the Power of the Divine Will, into One Fold and under One Shepherd.”

VI

The careful gradation of values in Newman’s style and the far-reaching sweep of his periods connect themselves closely with another of his noteworthy characteristics--his breadth of handling. He manipulates with perfect ease and precision vast masses of facts, and makes them all contribute with unerring coöperation to the production of a single effect. However minute his detail,--and his liking for concreteness which will be presently illustrated often incites him to great minuteness,--he is careful not to confuse his composition, destroy the perspective, or lose sight of total effect. The largeness of his manner and the certainty of his handling place him at once among really great constructive artists.

Against this assertion it may be urged that in his fiction it is just this breadth of effect and constructive skill that are most noticeably lacking; that each of his novels, whatever its merits in places, is unsuccessful as a whole, and leaves a blurred impression. This must at once be granted. But, after all, it is in his theoretical, or moral, or historical work that the real Newman is to be found; in such work he is much more himself, much more thoroughly alive and efficient than in his stories, which, though cleverly turned out, were, after all, things by the way, were amateurish in execution, and never completely called forth his strength. Moreover, even in his novels, we find occasionally the integrating power of his imagination remarkably illustrated. The description in _Callista_ of the invading and ravaging locusts is admirably sure in its treatment of detail and even and impressive in tone; the episode of Gurta’s madness is powerfully conceived, is swift and sure in its action, and is developed with admirable subordination and colouring of detail and regard to climax.

On the whole, however, it must be granted that in his fiction Newman’s sense of total effect and his constructive skill are least conspicuous. In his abstract discussions they never fail him. First and foremost, they show themselves in the plan of each work as a whole. The treatment is invariably symmetrical and exhaustive; part answers to part with the precision and the delicacy of adjustment of a work of art. Each part is conscious of the whole and has a vitally loyal relation to it, so that the needs and purposes of the whole organism seem present as controlling and centralizing instincts in every chapter, paragraph, and sentence.

In his use of elaborate illustrations for the sake of securing concreteness and sensuous beauty, Newman shows this same integrating power of imagination. In the long illustrations, which often take almost the proportions of episodes in the epical progress of his argument or exposition, the reader has no sense of bewilderment or uncertainty of aim; the strength of Newman’s mind and purpose subdues his endlessly diverse material, and compels it into artistic coherence and vital unity; all details are coloured in harmony with the dominant tone of the piece, and reënforce a predetermined mood. When a reader commits himself to one of Newman’s discussions, he must resign himself to him body and soul, and be prepared to live and move and have his being in the medium of Newman’s thought, and, moreover, in the special range of thought, and the special mood, that this particular discussion provokes. Perhaps this omnipresence of Newman in the minutest details of each discussion becomes ultimately to the careful student of his writing the most convincing proof of the largeness of his mind, of the intensity of his conception, and of the vigour and vitality of his imagination.

It may be urged that the copiousness of Newman at times becomes wearisome; that he is over-liberal of both explanation and illustration; and that his style, though never exuberant in ornament, is sometimes annoyingly luminous, and blinds with excess of light. This is probably the point in which Newman’s style is most open to attack. It is a cloyingly explicit, rather than a stimulatingly suggestive, style; it does almost too much for the reader, and is almost inconsiderately generous. Yet these qualities of his style are so intimately connected with its peculiar personal charm that they can hardly be censured. And it may be noted that so strenuous an advocate of the austere style as Walter Pater has instanced Newman’s _Idea of a University_ as an example of “the perfect handling of a theory.”