English Literature: Its History and Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World, William J. Long [suggested reading .txt] 📗

spirit of inquiry and comparison, illumined here and there by the play of humor, and especially by his broad sympathy and intellectual culture, he seems destined to occupy a very high place among the masters of literary criticism.

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN (1801-1890)

Any record of the prose literature of the Victorian era, which includes the historical essays of Macaulay and the art criticism of Ruskin, should contain also some notice of its spiritual leaders. For there was never a time when the religious ideals that inspire the race were kept more constantly before men's minds through the medium of literature.

Among the religious writers of the age the first place belongs unquestionably to Cardinal Newman. Whether we consider him as a man, with his powerful yet gracious personality, or as a religious reformer, who did much to break down old religious prejudices by showing the underlying beauty and consistency of the Roman church, or as a prose writer whose style is as near perfection as we have ever reached, Newman is one of the most interesting figures of the whole nineteenth century.

Life. Three things stand out clearly in Newman's life: first, his unshaken faith in the divine companionship and guidance; second, his desire to find and to teach the truth of revealed religion; third, his quest of an authoritative standard of faith, which should remain steadfast through the changing centuries and amid all sorts and conditions of men. The first led to that rare and beautiful spiritual quality which shines in all his work; the second to his frequent doctrinal and controversial essays; the third to his conversion to the Catholic church, which he served as priest and teacher for the last forty-five years of his life. Perhaps we should add one more characteristic,--the practical bent of his religion; for he was never so busy with study or controversy that he neglected to give a large part of his time to gentle ministration among the poor and needy.

He was born in London, in 1801. His father was an English banker; his mother, a member of a French Huguenot family, was a thoughtful, devout woman, who brought up her son in a way which suggests the mother of Ruskin. Of his early training, his reading of doctrinal and argumentative works, and of his isolation from material things in the thought that there were "two and only two absolute and luminously self-evident beings in the world," himself and his Creator, it is better to read his own record in the Apologia, which is a kind of spiritual biography.

At the age of fifteen Newman had begun his profound study of theological subjects. For science, literature, art, nature,--all the broad interests which attracted other literary men of his age,--he cared little, his mind being wholly occupied with the history and doctrines of the Christian church, to which he had already devoted his life. He was educated first at the school in Ealing, then at Oxford, taking his degree in the latter place in 1820. Though his college career was not more brilliant than that of many unknown men, his unusual ability was recognized and he was made a fellow of Oriel College, retaining the fellowship, and leading a scholarly life for over twenty years. In 1824 he was ordained in the Anglican church, and four years later was chosen vicar of St. Mary's, at Oxford, where his sermons made a deep impression on the cultivated audiences that gathered from far and near to hear him.

Illustration: QUADRANGLE OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD
QUADRANGLE OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD

A change is noticeable in Newman's life after his trip to the Mediterranean in 1832. He had begun his life as a Calvinist, but while in Oxford, then the center of religious unrest, he described himself as "drifting in the direction of Liberalism." Then study and bereavement and an innate mysticism led him to a profound sympathy with the mediæval Church. He had from the beginning opposed Catholicism; but during his visit to Italy, where he saw the Roman church at the center of Its power and splendor, many of his prejudices were overcome. In this enlargement of his spiritual horizon Newman was greatly influenced by his friend Hurrell Froude, with whom he made the first part of the journey. His poems of this period (afterwards collected in the Lyra Apostolica), among which is the famous "Lead, Kindly Light," are noticeable for their radiant spirituality; but one who reads them carefully sees the beginning of that mental struggle which ended in his leaving the church in which he was born. Thus he writes of the Catholic church, whose services he had attended as "one who in a foreign land receives the gifts of a good Samaritan":

O that thy creed were sound!
    For thou dost soothe the heart, thou church of Rome,
By thy unwearied watch and varied round
    Of service, in thy Saviour's holy home.
I cannot walk the city's sultry streets,
But the wide porch invites to still retreats,
    Where passion's thirst is calmed, and care's unthankful gloom.

On his return to England, in 1833, he entered into the religious struggle known as the Oxford or Tractarian Movement,[245] and speedily became its acknowledged leader. Those who wish to follow this attempt at religious reform, which profoundly affected the life of the whole English church, will find it recorded in the Tracts for the Times, twenty-nine of which were written by Newman, and in his Parochial and Plain Sermons (1837-1843). After nine years of spiritual conflict Newman retired to Littlemore, where, with a few followers, he led a life of almost monastic seclusion, still striving to reconcile his changing belief with the doctrines of his own church. Two years later he resigned his charge at St. Mary's and left the Anglican communion,--not bitterly, but with a deep and tender regret. His last sermon at Littlemore on "The Parting of Friends" still moves us profoundly, like the cry of a prophet torn by personal anguish in the face of duty. In 1845 he was received into the Catholic church, and the following year, at Rome, he joined the community of St. Philip Neri, "the saint of gentleness and kindness," as Newman describes him, and was ordained to the Roman priesthood.

By his preaching and writing Newman had exercised a strong influence over his cultivated English hearers, and the effect of his conversion was tremendous. Into the theological controversy of the next twenty years we have no mind to enter. Through it all Newman retained his serenity, and, though a master of irony and satire, kept his literary power always subordinate to his chief aim, which was to establish the truth as he saw it. Whether or not we agree with his conclusions, we must all admire the spirit of the man, which is above praise or criticism. His most widely read work, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), was written in answer to an unfortunate attack by Charles Kingsley, which would long since have been forgotten had it not led to this remarkable book. In 1854 Newman was appointed rector of the Catholic University in Dublin, but after four years returned to England and founded a Catholic school at Edgbaston. In 1879 he was made cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. The grace and dignity of his life, quite as much as the sincerity of his Apologia, had long since disarmed criticism, and at his death, in 1890, the thought of all England might well be expressed by his own lines in "The Dream of Gerontius":

I had a dream. Yes, some one softly said,
    "He's gone," and then a sigh went round the room;
And then I surely heard a priestly voice
        Cry Subvenite; and they knelt in prayer.

Apologia Pro Vita SuaWorks of Newman. Readers approach Newman from so many different motives, some for doctrine, some for argument, some for a pure prose style, that it is difficult to recommend the best works for the beginner's use. As an expression of Newman's spiritual struggle the Apologia Pro Vita Sua is perhaps the most significant. This book is not light reading and one who opens it should understand clearly the reasons for which it was written. Newman had been accused of insincerity, not only by Kingsley but by many other men, in the public press. His retirement to solitude and meditation at Littlemore had been outrageously misunderstood, and it was openly charged that his conversion was a cunningly devised plot to win a large number of his followers to the Catholic church. This charge involved others, and it was to defend them, as well as to vindicate himself, that Newman wrote the Apologia. The perfect sincerity with which he traced his religious history, showing that his conversion was only the final step in a course he had been following since boyhood, silenced his critics and revolutionized public opinion concerning himself and the church which he had joined. As the revelation of a soul's history, and as a model of pure, simple, unaffected English, this book, entirely apart from its doctrinal teaching, deserves a high place in our prose literature.

CallistaIn Newman's doctrinal works, the Via Media, the Grammar of Assent, and in numerous controversial essays the student of literature will have little interest. Much more significant are his sermons, the unconscious reflection of a rare spiritual nature, of which Professor Shairp said: "His power shows itself clearly in the new and unlooked-for way in which he touched into life old truths, moral or spiritual.... And as he spoke, how the old truth became new! and how it came home 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 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." Of greater interest to the general reader are The Idea of a University, discourses delivered at Dublin, and his two works of fiction, Loss and Gain, treating of a man's conversion to Catholicism, and Callista, which is, in his own words, "an attempt to express the feelings and mutual relations of Christians and heathens in the middle of the third century." The latter is, in our judgment, the most readable and interesting of Newman's works. The character of Callista, a beautiful Greek sculptor of idols, is powerfully delineated; the style is clear and transparent as air, and the story of the heroine's conversion and death makes one of the most fascinating chapters in fiction, though it is not the story so much as the author's unconscious revelation of himself that charms us. It would be well to read this novel in connection with Kingsley's Hypatia, which attempts to reconstruct the life and ideals of the same period.

PoemsNewman's poems are not so well known as his prose, but the reader who examines the Lyra Apostolica and Verses on Various Occasions will find many short poems that stir a religious nature profoundly by their pure and lofty imagination; and future generations may pronounce one of these poems, "The Dream of Gerontius," to be Newman's most enduring work. This poem aims to reproduce the thoughts and feelings of a man whose soul is just quitting the body, and who is just beginning a new and greater life. Both in style and in thought "The Dream" is a powerful and original poem and is worthy of attention not only for itself but, as a modern critic suggests, "as a revelation of that high spiritual purpose which animated Newman's life from beginning to end."

Newman's styleOf Newman's style it is as difficult to write as it would be to describe the dress of a gentleman we had met, who was so perfectly dressed that we paid no attention to his clothes. His style is called transparent, because at first we are not conscious of his manner; and unobtrusive, because we