Part 8
This insistence of Newman’s on the vital character of truth is a point, 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_.