Part 7

One characteristic of the purely suggestive style is certainly to be 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.