Res Judicatae Part 6

'In the present day mistiness is the mother of wisdom. A man who can set down half a dozen general propositions, which escape from destroying one another only by being diluted into truisms, who can hold the balance between opposites so skilfully as to do without fulcrum or beam, who never enunciates a truth without guarding himself from being supposed to exclude the contradictory, who holds that Scripture is the only authority--yet that the Church is to be deferred to, that faith only justifies, yet that it does not justify without works, that grace does not depend on the sacraments, yet is not given without them, that bishops are a divine ordinance--yet those who have them not are in the same religious condition as those who have--this is your safe man and the hope of the Church; this is what the Church is said to want, not party men, but sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons to guide it through the channel of No-meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and No. But, alas! reading sets men thinking. They will not keep standing in that very att.i.tude, which you please to call sound Church-of-Englandism or orthodox Protestantism. It tires them, it is so very awkward, and for the life of them--they cannot continue in it long together, where there is neither article nor canon to lean against--they cannot go on for ever standing on one leg, or sitting without a chair, or walking with their legs tied, or grazing like t.i.tyrus's stags on the air. Promises imply conclusions--germs lead to developments; principles have issues; doctrines lead to action.'

Of the personal note to which I have made reference--no examples need or should be given. Such things must not be transplanted from their own homes.

'The delicate sh.e.l.ls lay on the sh.o.r.e; The bubbles of the latest wave Fresh pearl to their enamel gave; And the bellowing of the savage sea Greeted their safe escape to me.

I wiped away the weeds and foam And brought my sea-born treasures home: But the poor, unsightly noisome things Had left their beauty on the sh.o.r.e, With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.'

If I may suppose this paper read by someone who is not yet acquainted with Newman's writings I would advise him, unless he is bent on theology, to begin not with the _Sermons_, not even with the _Apologia_, but with the _Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England_.

Then let him take up the _Lectures on the Idea of an University_, and on _University Subjects_. These may be followed by _Discussions and Arguments_, after which he will be well disposed to read the _Lectures on the Difficulties felt by Anglicans_. If after he has despatched these volumes he is not infected with what one of those charging Bishops called 'Newmania,' he is possessed of a devil of obtuseness no wit of man can expel.

Of the strength of Dr. Newman's philosophical position, which he has explained in his _Grammar of a.s.sent_, it would ill become me to speak.

He there strikes the s.h.i.+eld of John Locke. _Non nostrum est tantas componere lites._ But it is difficult for the most ignorant of us not to have shy notions and lurking suspicions even about such big subjects and great men. Locke maintained that a man's belief in a proposition really depended upon and bore a relation to the weight of evidence forthcoming in its favour. Dr. Newman a.s.serts that certainty is a quality of propositions, and he has discovered in man 'an illative sense' whereby conclusions are converted into dogmas and a measured concurrence into an unlimited and absolute a.s.surance. This illative sense is hardly a thing (if I may use an expression for ever a.s.sociated with Lord Macaulay) to be c.o.c.ksure about. Wedges, said the mediaeval mechanic to his pupils, split wood by virtue of a wood-splitting quality in wedges--but now we are indisposed to endow wedges with qualities, and if not wedges, why propositions? But the _Grammar of a.s.sent_ is a beautiful book, and with a quotation from it I will close my quotations: 'Thus it is that Christianity is the fulfilment of the promise made to Abraham and of the Mosaic revelations; this is how it has been able from the first to occupy the world, and gain a hold on every cla.s.s of human society to which its preachers reached; this is why the Roman power and the mult.i.tude of religions which it embraced could not stand against it; this is the secret of its sustained energy, and its never-flagging martyrdoms; this is how at present it is so mysteriously potent, in spite of the new and fearful adversaries which beset its path. It has with it that gift of stanching and healing the one deep wound of human nature, which avails more for its success than a full encyclopaedia of scientific knowledge and a whole library of controversy, and therefore it must last while human nature lasts.'

It is fitting that our last quotation should be one which leaves the Cardinal face to face with his faith.

Dr. Newman's poetry cannot be pa.s.sed over without a word, though I am ill-fitted to do it justice. _Lead, Kindly Light_ has forced its way into every hymn-book and heart. Those who go, and those who do not go to church, the fervent believer and the tired-out sceptic here meet on common ground. The language of the verses in their intense sincerity seems to reduce all human feelings, whether fed on dogmas and holy rites or on man's own sad heart, to a common denominator.

'The night is dark, and I am far from home, Lead Thou me on.'

The believer can often say no more. The unbeliever will never willingly say less.

Amongst Dr. Newman's _Verses on Various Occasions_--though in some cases the earlier versions to be met with in the _Lyra Apostolica_ are to be preferred to the later--poems will be found by those who seek, conveying sure and certain evidence of the possession by the poet of the true lyrical gift--though almost cruelly controlled by the course of the poet's thoughts and the nature of his subjects. One is sometimes constrained to cry, 'Oh, if he could only get out into the wild blowing airs, how his pinions would sweep the skies!' but such thoughts are unlicensed and unseemly. That we have two such religious poets as Cardinal Newman and Miss Christina Rossetti is or ought to be matter for sincere rejoicing.

II

To the inveterate truth-hunter there has been much of melancholy in the very numerous estimates, hasty estimates no doubt, but all manifestly sincere, which the death of Cardinal Newman has occasioned.

The n.o.bility of the pursuit after truth wherever the pursuit may lead has been abundantly recognised. n.o.body has been base enough or cynical enough to venture upon a sneer. It has been marvellous to notice what a hold an unpopular thinker, dwelling very far apart from the trodden paths of English life and thought, had obtained upon men's imaginations.

The 'man in the street' was to be heard declaring that the dead Cardinal was a fine fellow. The newspaper-makers were astonished at the interest displayed by their readers. How many of these honest mourners, asked the _Globe_, have read a page of Newman's writings? It is a vain inquiry.

Newman's books have long had a large and increasing sale. They stand on all sorts of shelves, and wherever they go a still, small voice accompanies them. They are speaking books; an air breathes from their pages.

'Again I saw and I confess'd Thy speech was rare and high, And yet it vex'd my burden'd breast, And scared I knew not why.'

It is a strange criticism that recently declared Newman's style to lack individuality. Oddity it lacked, and mannerisms, but not, so it seems to me, individuality.

But this wide recognition of Newman's charm both of character and style cannot conceal from the anxious truth-hunter that there has been an almost equally wide recognition of the futility of Newman's method and position.

Method and position? These were sacred words with the Cardinal. But a few days ago he seemed securely posed before the world. It cannot surely have been his unrivalled dialectics only that made men keep civil tongues in their heads or hesitate to try conclusions with him. It was rather, we presume, that there was no especial occasion to speak of him otherwise than with the respect and affection due to honoured age. But when he is dead--it is different. It is necessary then to gauge his method and to estimate his influence, not as a living man, but as a dead one.

And what has that estimate been? The saintly life, the mysterious presence, are admitted, and well-nigh nothing else. All sorts of reasons are named, some plausible, all cunningly contrived, to account for Newman's quarrel with the Church of his baptism. A writer in the _Guardian_ suggests one, a writer in the _Times_ another, a writer in the _Sat.u.r.day Review_ a third, and so on.

However much these reasons may differ one from another, they all agree in this, that of necessity they have ceased to operate. They were personal reasons, and perished with the man whose faith and actions they controlled. n.o.body else, it has been throughout a.s.sumed, will become a Romanist for the same reasons as John Henry Newman. If he had not been brought up an Evangelical, if he had learnt German, if he had married, if he had been made an archdeacon, all would have been different.

There is something positively terrible in this natural history of opinion. All the pa.s.sion and the pleading of a life, the thought, and the labour, the sustained argument, the library of books, reduced to what?--a series of accidents!

Newman himself well knew this aspect of affairs. No one's plummet since Pascal's had taken deeper soundings of the infirmity--the oceanic infirmity--of the intellect. What actuary, he asks contemptuously, can appraise the value of a man's opinions? In how many a superb pa.s.sage does he exhibit the absurd, the haphazard fas.h.i.+on in which men and women collect the odds and ends, the bits and sc.r.a.ps they are pleased to place in the museum of their minds, and label, in all good faith, their convictions! Newman almost revels in such subjects. The solemn pomposity which so frequently dignifies with the name of research or inquiry feeble scratchings amongst heaps of verbosity had no more determined foe than the Cardinal.

But now the same measure is being meted out to him, and we are told of a thinker's life--it is nought.

He thought he had constructed a way of escape from the City of Destruction for himself and his followers across the bridge of that illative sense which turns conclusions into a.s.sents, and opinions into faiths--but the bridge seems no longer standing.

The writer in the _Guardian_, who attributes Newman's restlessness in the English Church to the smug and comfortable life of many of its clergy rather than to any especial craving after authority, no doubt wrote with knowledge.

A married clergy seemed always to annoy Newman. Readers of _Loss and Gain_ are not likely to forget the famous 'pork chop' pa.s.sage, which describes a young parson and his bride bustling into a stationer's shop to buy hymnals and tracts. What was once only annoyance at some of the ways of John Bull on his knees, soon ripened into something not very unlike hatred. Never was any invention less _ben trovato_ than that which used to describe Newman as pining after the 'incomparable liturgy'

or the 'cultured society' of the Church of England. He hated _ex animo_ all those aspects of Anglicanism which best recommend it to Erastian minds. A church of which sanct.i.ty is _not_ a note is sure to have many friends.

The _Sat.u.r.day Review_ struck up a fine national tune:

'An intense but narrow conception of personal holiness, and personal satisfaction with dogma, ate him (Newman) up--the natural legacy of the Evangelical school in which he had been nursed, the great tradition of Tory churchmans.h.i.+p, _of pride in the Church of England, as such_, of determination to stand shoulder to shoulder in resisting the foreigner, whether he came from Rome or from Geneva, from Tubingen, or from Saint Sulpice, of the union of all social and intellectual culture with theological learning--the idea which, alone of all such ideas, has made education patriotic, and orthodoxy generous, made insufficient appeal to him, and for want of it he himself made s.h.i.+pwreck.'

Here is John Bullism, bold and erect. If the Ark of Peter won't hoist the Union Jack, John Bull must have an Ark of his own, with patriotic clergy of his own manufacture tugging at the oar, and with nothing foreign in the hold save some sound old port. 'It will always be remembered to Newman's credit,' says this same reviewer, 'that he knew good wine if he did not drink much.' Mark the 'If'; there is much virtue in it.

We are now provided with two causes of Newman's discomfort in the Church of England--its too comfortable clergy, and its too frequent introduction of the lion and the unicorn amongst the symbols of religion--both effective causes, as may be proved by many pa.s.sages; but to say that either or both availed to drive him out, and compelled him to seek shelter at the hands of one whom he had long regarded as a foe, is to go very far indeed.

It should not be overlooked that these minimisers of Newman's influence are all firmly attached for different reasons to the inst.i.tution Newman left. Their judgments therefore cannot be allowed to pa.s.s unchallenged.

What Disraeli meant when he said that Newman's secession had dealt the Church of England a blow under which it still reeled, was that by this act Newman expressed before the whole world his profound conviction that our so-called National Church was not a branch of the Church Catholic.

And this really is the point of weakness upon which Newman hurled himself. This is the damage he did to the Church of this island.

Throughout all his writings, in a hundred places, in jests and sarcasms as well as in papers and arguments, there crops up this settled conviction that England is not a Catholic country, and that John Bull is not a member of the Catholic Church.

This may not matter much to the British electorate; but to those who care about such things, who rely upon the validity of orders and the efficacy of sacraments, who need a pedigree for their faith, who do not agree with Emerson that if a man would be great he must be a Nonconformist--over these people it would be rash to a.s.sume that Newman's influence is spent. The general effect of his writings, the demands they awaken, the spirit they breathe, are all hostile to Anglicanism. They create a profound dissatisfaction with, a distaste for, the Church of England as by law established. Those who are affected by this spirit will no longer be able comfortably to enjoy the maimed rites and practices of their Church. They will feel their place is elsewhere, and sooner or later they will pack up and go. It is far too early in the day to leave Newman out of sight.

But to end where we began. There has been scant recognition in the Cardinal's case of the usefulness of devoting life to anxious inquiries after truth. It is very n.o.ble to do so, and when you come to die, the newspapers, from the _Times_ to the _Sporting Life_, will first point out, after their superior fas.h.i.+on, how much better was this pure-minded and unworldly thinker than the soiled politician, full of opportunism and inconsistency, trying hard to drown the echoes of his past with his loud vociferations, and then proceed in a few short sentences to establish how out of date is this Thinker's thought, how false his reasoning, how impossible his conclusions, and lastly, how dead his influence.

It is very puzzling and difficult, and drives some men to collect b.u.t.terflies and beetles. Thinkers are not, however, to be disposed of by scratches of the pen. A Cardinal of the Roman Church is not, to say the least of it, more obviously a s.h.i.+pwreck than a dean or even a bishop of the English establishment. Character, too, counts for something. Of Newman it may be said:

'Fate gave what chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.'

But the truth-hunter is still unsatisfied.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

I

The news of Mr. Arnold's sudden death at Liverpool struck a chill into many hearts, for although a somewhat constrained writer (despite his playfulness) and certainly the least boisterous of men, he was yet most distinctly on the side of human enjoyment. He conspired and contrived to make things pleasant. Pedantry he abhorred. He was a man of this life and this world. A severe critic of the world he indeed was, but finding himself in it and not precisely knowing what is beyond it, like a brave and true-hearted man he set himself to make the best of it. Its sight and sounds were dear to him. The 'uncrumpling fern,' the eternal moon-lit snow, 'Sweet William with its homely cottage-smell,' 'the red grouse springing at our sound,' the tinkling bells of the 'high-pasturing kine,' the vagaries of men, women, and dogs, their odd ways and tricks, whether of mind or manner, all delighted, amused, tickled him. Human loves, joys, sorrows, human relations.h.i.+ps, ordinary ties interested him:

'The help in strife, The thousand sweet still joys of such As hand in hand face earthly life.'

In a sense of the words which is n.o.ble and blessed, he was of the Earth Earthy.

In his earlier days Mr. Arnold was much misunderstood. That rowdy Philistine the _Daily Telegraph_ called him 'a prophet of the kid-glove persuasion,' and his own too frequent iteration of the somewhat dandiacal phrase 'sweetness and light' helped to promote the notion that he was a fanciful, finikin Oxonian,

'A fine puss gentleman that's all perfume,'

quite unfit for the most ordinary wear and tear of life. He was in reality nothing of the kind, though his literary style was a little in keeping with this false conception. His mind was based on the plainest possible things. What he hated most was the fantastic--the far-fetched, all elaborated fancies, and strained interpretations. He stuck to the beaten track of human experience, and the broader the better. He was a plain-sailing man. This is his true note. In his much criticised, but as I think admirable introduction to the selection he made from Wordsworth's poems, he admits that the famous _Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections in Early Childhood_ is not one of his prime favourites, and in that connection he quotes from Thucydides the following judgment on the early exploits of the Greek Race and applies it to these intimations of immortality in babies. 'It is impossible to speak with certainty of what is so remote, but from all that we can really investigate I should say that they were no very great things.'