Born, in London, 21 Feb. 1801. At School at Ealing, 1808–16. Matric., Trin. Coll., Oxford, 14 Dec. 1816; Scholar, 1819–22; B.A., 1820. Student of Lincoln’s Inn, 1819. Fellow of Oriel Coll., Oxford, April 1822 to 1845; Tutor, 1826–31. Friendship with Pusey begun, 1823. Ordained, 13 June 1824; Curate of St. Clement’s, Oxford. Contrib. to “Encycl. Met.,” 1824–29. Vice-Principal of Alban Hall, March 1825 to 1826. Preacher at Whitehall, 1827. Vicar of St. Mary’s, Oxford, 1828 to Sept. 1843. Select Preacher, 1831–32. Travelled on Continent, winter 1832–33. Contrib. to “Brit. Mag.,” 1833–36; to “British Critic,” 1837–42. One of the promoters of the “Oxford Movement,” 1833. Editor of “British Critic,” 1838–41. Retired from Oxford, 1842; lived life of seclusion at Littlemore till 1845. Received into Roman Catholic Church, at Littlemore, 9 Oct. 1845. To Rome, Oct. 1846; ordained Priest there, and received degree of D.D. Returned to England, Dec. 1847. Founded Oratory at Birmingham, 1848; founded Oratory in London, 1850. Lost libel action brought against him by Dr. Achilli, 1853. Rector of Catholic Univ., Dublin, 1854–58. Returned to Birmingham, 1858; contrib. to “Atlantis,” 1858–70; to “Rambler,” 1859–60; to “The Month,” 1864–66. Founded Catholic school at Edgbaston, 1859. Hon. Fellow, Trin. Coll., Oxford, 1877. Created Cardinal, 12 May 1879. Returned to Edgbaston, July 1879. Resided there till his death, 11 Aug. 1890. Buried at Rednall. Works: “St. Bartholomew’s Eve” (anon.; with J. W. Bowden), 1821; “Suggestions on behalf of the Church Missionary Society,” 1830; “The Arians of the Fourth Century,” 1833; “Five Letters on Church Reform” (from “The Record”), 1833; Tracts nos. 1–3, 6–8, 10, 11, 15, 19–21, 31, 33, 34, 38, 41, 45, 47, 71, 73–75, 79, 82, 83, 85, 88, 90 in “Tracts for the Times,” 1834–41; “Parochial Sermons” (6 vols.), 1834–42; “The Restoration of Suffragan Bishops,” 1835; “Letter to Parishioners,” 1835; “Elucidations of Dr. Hampden’s Theological Statements” (anon.), 1836; “Lyra Apostolica” (anon.), 1836; “Letter to the Margaret Professor of Divinity,” 1836; “Make Ventures for Christ’s Sake,” 1836; “Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church,” 1837; “Letter to the Rev. G. Faussett,” 1838; “Lectures on Justification,” 1838; “Plain Sermons” (with others), 1839; etc.; “The Church of the Fathers” (anon.), 1840; “The Tamworth Reading Room” (under pseud.: “Catholicus,” from “The Times”), 1841; “Letter … to the Rev. K. W. Jelf” (with initials: J. H. N.), 1841; “Letter to Richard, Bishop of Oxford,” 1841; “Sermons bearing on Subjects of the Day,” 1843; “Sermons … preached before the University of Oxford,” 1843; “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,” 1845; “The proposed Decree on the subject of No. XC.” (anon.), 1845; “Dissertatiunculæ quædam critico-theologicæ,” 1847; “Loss and Gain” (anon.), 1848; “Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations,” 1849; “Lectures on certain difficulties felt by Anglicans in submitting to the Catholic Church,” 1850; “Christ upon the Waters” [1850]; “Lectures on the present position of Catholics in England,” 1851; “Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education,” 1852; “The Second Spring,” 1852; “Verses on Religious Subjects” (under initials—J. H. N.), 1853; “Hymns,” 1854; “Lectures on the History of the Turks” (anon.), 1854; “Who’s to Blame?” (from “Catholic Standard”), 1855; “Remarks on the Oratorian Vocation” (priv. ptd.), 1856; “Callista” (anon.), [1856]; “The Office and Work of the Universities,” 1856; “Sermons Preached on Various Occasions,” 1857; “Lectures and Essays on University Subjects,” 1858; “Hymn Tunes of the Oratory” (anon.; priv. ptd.), 1860; “The Tree beside the Waters” [1860]; “Verses for Penitents” (anon.; priv. ptd.), 1860; “Mr. Kingsley and Dr. Newman: a correspondence,” 1864; “Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ,” 1864; “Letter to the Rev. E. B. Pusey,” 1866 (2d edn. same year); “The Pope and the Revolution,” 1866; “The Dream of Gerontius” (under initials: J. H. N.), 1866; “Verses on Various Occasions,” 1868; “Works” (36 vols.), 1868–81; “Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent,” 1870; “Essays, critical and historical” (2 vols.), 1872; “The Trials of Theodoret,” 1873; “Causes of the Rise and Success of Arianism,” 1872; “The Heresy of Apollinaris,” 1874; “Tracts, theological and ecclesiastical,” 1874; “Letter … to … the Duke of Norfolk,” 1875; “The Via Media of the English Church,” 1877; “Two Sermons” (priv. ptd.), 1880; “Prologue to the Andria of Terence” (priv. ptd.), 1882; “What is of obligation for a Catholic to believe concerning the Inspiration of the Canonical Scriptures” [1884]; “Meditations and Evolutions,” 1893. Posthumous: “Letters and Correspondence” (2 vols.), ed. by Miss Mozley, 1891 [1890]. He translated Fleury’s “Ecclesiastical History,” 1842; “Select Treatises of St. Athanasius,” 1842–44; and edited: R. H. Froude’s “Remains” (with Keble), 1838; Sutton’s “Godly Meditations,” 1838; “Hymni Ecclesiæ,” 1838; “Bibliotheca Patrum” (with Pusey and others), 1838, etc.; Bishop Sparrow’s “Rationale upon the Book of Common Prayer,” 1839; Dr. Wells’ “The Rich Man’s Duty,” 1840; “Catena Aurea,” 1841; “The Cistercian Saints,” pts. i., ii., 1844; “Maxims of the Kingdom of Heaven,” 1860; Terence’s “Phormio,” 1864, and “Eunuchus,” 1866; W. Palmer’s “Notes of a Visit to the Russian Church,” 1882; Plautus’ “Aulularia,” 1883; Terence’s “Andria,” 1883. [He also contributed prefaces to a number of theological publications, 1838–82.] Life: by Wilfred Meynell, 1890.

Personal

  I was in London for a couple of days last week at Rogers’ and met Newman, who was staying there. He had come for Manning’s consecration. It was the first time I had seen him for twenty years nearly. He was very little changed in look or general manner or way of talking, except that he seemed almost stronger in body. He was in good spirits, very hearty, and talked very freely about all sorts of things; reminding us every now and then that he was across the border, but without embarrassment, and without any attempt to flaunt anything in our faces. It was a much more easy meeting than I could have supposed possible. We seemed to fall into the old ways of talking.

  In all the arts that make an orator or a great preacher he is strikingly deficient. His manner is constrained, awkward, and even ungainly; his voice is thin and weak. His bearing is not impressive. His gaunt, emaciated figure, his sharp, eagle face, his cold, meditative eyes, rather repel than attract those who see him for the first time. The matter of his discourse, whether sermon, speech, or lecture, is always admirable, and the language is concise, scholarly, expressive—perhaps a little overweighted with thought; but there is nothing there of the orator.

  This gentleman bears in his bodily appearance a considerable degree of resemblance to Dr. Pusey [1845]. Mr. Newman is a shade taller than the Doctor; but he presents the same general outline of what men of the world call monkish austerity. There is a peacefulness and gentleness of demeanour about Newman, an unobtrusive and humble deportment; a deep sense of religious obligation; a desire to withdraw from everything rude and boisterous, gay and fashionable; and outward visible sign of a constant habit of inward reflection; and a total absence of even the most distant approach to anything like literary arrogance and conceit. He likes to hear everything, but he parts with his own thoughts sparingly. In an ordinary routine of literary intercourse he would be considered but a very dull and uninteresting person; but among his own friends, and with a fireside companion, his conversation is instructive and delightful. His peculiar pursuits, his course of reading, his power of inward reflection and discrimination, place him far beyond the reach of the general run of literary men; and on this account there are but very few qualified to enter into his views, and form a right conception of his character and acquirements. Hence it is that you hear among nearly all his University friends, those who have for years been in perpetual intercourse with him, a desire to exalt his moral and religious deportment and sentiments, at the expense of his intellectual attainments. The fact is, that he shoots over the heads of his academical companions. He displays a power of thought, an acuteness of perception, and a strength of judgment to which they are strangers; and hence it is that he finds so little intellectual sympathy within the walls of the University of Oxford.

  Mark him as he walks toward the pulpit along the narrow lane between the serried rows of “doctors of divinity,” and “doctors of canon law,” and “doctors of civil law,” and “deans,” and “tutors,” and “professors,” and “masters of art,” while every eye of the rising generation in the galleries is fixed upon him. A slender, square figure, whose academical robes are either so made—or, from the indefinable influence that a man’s nature has on the appearance of his garments, so hang in close clinging folds—as to produce, one knows not how, the impression of asceticism, he advances with swift, silent steps and eyes fixed on the ground. In the pulpit the time occupied by the preacher in silent prayer is rather long. Then, rising, his face is for the first time seen by the congregation—a face not readily to be forgotten, with slender, finely-cut features, and an appearance of emaciation, from which the attention of his hearers is drawn off by the eye beaming with intellectual power and the noble and lofty but not broad forehead above it.

  When I entered at Oxford, John Henry Newman was beginning to be famous. The responsible authorities were watching him with anxiety; clever men were looking with interest and curiosity on the apparition among them of one of those persons of indisputable genius who was likely to make a mark upon his time. His appearance was striking. He was above the middle height, slight and spare. His head was large, his face remarkably like that of Julius Cæsar. The forehead, the shape of the ears and nose were almost the same. The lines of the mouth were very peculiar, and I should say exactly the same. I have often thought of the resemblance, and believed that it extended to the temperament. In both there was an original force of character which refused to be moulded by circumstances, which was to make its own way, and become a power in the world; a clearness of intellectual perception, a disdain for conventionalities, a temper imperious and wilful, but along with it a most attaching gentleness, sweetness, singleness of heart and purpose. Both were formed by nature to command others; both had the faculty of attracting to themselves the passionate devotion of their friends and followers; and in both cases, too, perhaps the devotion was rather due to the personal ascendency of the leader than to the cause which he represented. It was Cæsar, not the principle of the empire, which overthrew Pompey and the constitution. Credo in Newmannum was a common phrase at Oxford, and is still unconsciously the faith of nine-tenths of the converts of Rome.

  The foremost man in the English Church was content to send for the humble Italian monk, Father Dominic, the Passionist, and, falling at his feet, to ask reception into the Roman Church. At the call of conscience he had already resigned preferment and leadership; he now abandoned home and nearly all his friends; for ease he accepted comparative poverty; for rule over others he took on him obedience; “et exiit nesciens quo iret.”

  The most interesting part of my visit to Birmingham was a call I made by appointment on Cardinal Newman. He was benignly courteous, and we excellencied and eminenced each other by turns. A more gracious senescence I never saw. There was no “monumental pomp,” but a serene decay, like that of some ruined abbey in a woodland dell, consolingly forlorn. I was surprised to find his head and features smaller than I expected—modelled on lines of great vigor, but reduced and softened by a certain weakness, as if a powerfully masculine face had been painted in miniature by Malbone. He was very kindly and sympathetic—his benignity as well as his lineaments reminding me of the old age of Emerson.

  With a keenly inquisitive mind disposed to search to the root of religious problems, he was too logical, too dogmatic, to be satisfied with Whately’s position; and the latter soon discovered that Newman’s was a spirit beyond his leading. He may have been wrong in saying that Newman was looking “to be the head of a party” himself; and yet there is a side of his character that suggests this view. He had a great love of personal influence. From the first he attracted by his personality rather than by his intelligence—by the authority rather than the rationality of his opinions. He never seems to have understood any other kind of influence. In this kind he was supreme. He did not require to go in search of friends or followers. They gathered spontaneously around him, and there almost necessarily sprang out of this feature of his character a high ambition.

  That great man’s extraordinary genius drew all those within his sphere, like a magnet, to attach themselves to him and his doctrines. Nay, before he became a Romanist, what we may call his mesmeric influence acted not only on his Tractarian adherents, but even in some degree on outsiders like myself. Whenever I was at Oxford, I used to go regularly on Sunday afternoons to listen to his sermon at St. Mary’s, and I have never heard such preaching since. I do not know whether it is a mere fancy of mine, or whether those who know him better will accept and endorse my belief, that one element of his wonderful power showed itself after this fashion. He always began as if he had determined to set forth his idea of the truth in the plainest and simplest language, language as men say “intelligible to the meanest understanding.” But his ardent zeal and fine poetical imagination were not thus to be controlled. As I hung upon his words, it seemed to me as if I could trace behind his will, and pressing, so to speak, against it, a rush of thoughts and feelings which he kept struggling to hold back, but in the end they were generally too strong for him and poured themselves out in a torrent of eloquence all the more impetuous from having been so long repressed. The effect of these outbursts was irresistible, and carried his hearers beyond themselves at once. Even when his efforts of self-restraint were more successful, those very efforts gave a life and colour to his style which riveted the attention of all within the reach of his voice.

	O weary Champion of the Cross, lie still:
	Sleep thou at length the all-embracing sleep:
	Long was thy sowing day, rest now and reap:
	Thy fast was long, feast now thy spirit’s fill.
	Yea, take thy fill of love, because thy will
	Chose love not in the shallows but the deep:
	Thy tides were springtides, set against the neap
	Of calmer souls: thy flood rebuked their rill.

  Cardinal Newman had always something to say when he spoke; something most worthy of being said; something which he could say as no one else could. And the light of his whole conversation was his supreme loyalty to truth…. In order fully to appreciate Dr. Newman, it was necessary to be with him in his own home, among the devoted fathers and brethren with whom his life was passed. His mornings were usually sacred to his work. But in the afternoon, at the period of which I am speaking, he would take a long walk—he was still a great pedestrian—in which his visitor had the privilege of accompanying him. At six o’clock the community dinner took place; and on the days when his turn came round, “the Father” would pin on the apron of service and wait upon his brethren and his visitor—who, to say the truth, was somewhat uncomfortable in being ministered to—not himself sitting down until they had received their portions…. It may be said of him, as Vittoria Colonna said of Michael Angelo, that they who know only his works, know the least part of him.

  If man ever succeeded in anything, Cardinal Newman has succeeded in convincing all those who study his career with an approach to candour and discrimination, that the depth and luminousness of his conviction, that the true key to the enigma of life is God’s revelation of Himself in Christ and in His Church, are infinitely deeper in him, and more of the intimate essence of his mind and heart, than his appreciation, keen as it is, of the obstacles which stand in the way of those convictions and appear to bar the access to them…. Whether tried then by the test of nobility, intensity, and steadfastness of his work, or by the test of the greatness of the powers which have been consecrated to that work Cardinal Newman has been one of the greatest of our modern great men.

	Peace to the virgin heart, the crystal brain!
	Peace for one hour through all the camps of thought!
	Our subtlest mind has rent the veil of pain,
	Has found the truth he sought.
	Who knows what page those new-born eyes have read?
	If this set creed, or that, or none be best?—
	Let no strife jar above this sacred head;
	Peace for a saint at rest!

  To those who equally honour a great and beautiful character and love their country, nothing surely can have been more striking than the manner in which the whole English nation has been moved during the last fortnight by the death of Cardinal Newman; and this feeling has been absolutely free from any distinctions of creed…. It is to Newman even more than to his great fellow-workers that we owe it—to the power and beauty of his life and writings, and even to the manner in which he pointed out our defects. In all these points it is not too much to call him “the founder of the Church of England as we see it.” The great institutions which have sprung up, and are still springing up almost of their own accord—the sisterhoods, and now we may hope the brotherhoods, the higher standard of clerical life, the different conception of public worship, the increased freedom of adopting practices of devotion which so many find to be essential to their religious life; the spirit of all this new life we owe primarily to the great man whom the whole nation now mourns.

  No one living knows my brother’s life from boyhood to the age of forty as I do. The splendour of his funeral makes certain that his early life will be written; it must be expected that the more mythical the narrative the better it will sell. The honour naturally and rightfully paid to him by Catholics makes him a public man of the century. I should have vastly preferred entire oblivion of him and his writings of the first forty years, but that is impossible. In the cause of Protestants and Protestantism I feel bound to write, however painful to myself, as simply as if my topic were an old Greek or Latin…. I could not possibly have written freely of the late Cardinal to grieve him while he lived, but I see a new side of my duty opened to me, now that my words cannot pain him…. Now I see that, unless something be explained by me, no one will guess at his very eccentric character, and false ideas are likely to gain currency.

  Newman’s strong point was not philanthropy either in word or deed…. Newman’s genius precluded him from getting on with common people, and made him perhaps feel ill at ease except when he was in an atmosphere of refinement.

  There was such a pathetic tone in his utterance of that which the French describe as “tears in the voice,” such a tender appeal of plaintive sweetness, that I remember to this day the first words of the first sermon I heard from his lips—“Sheep are defenceless creatures, wolves are strong and fierce.” But I fail to comprehend, regarding the matter in the light of consistency and common-sense, why it was proposed that a statue of Cardinal Newman should occupy the best site in Oxford; why the representation of a deserter should be set up in a barrack-yard of the Church Militant, as a model for the young recruits!

  To the falsification of history, illusion will take the place of reality, fiction of truth. And what would be gained by such an effeminate paltering with facts? To wink in silence is only owl-like wisdom. Not sentimental suppressions, but the simple truth is the only tribute worthy of such a man as Manning. What then is the truth? Not more than three or four years before the illusive and fancy picture of 1890, Cardinal Manning, not to speak of contemporary letters extending over a long period of years, avowed and put on record his condemnation of Newman in terms so clear and incisive as to leave no room or foothold for an after fiction of friendship. I will only recite one sentence from an autobiographical note dated 1887. “If I was opposed to Newman, it was only because I had either to oppose Newman or to oppose the Holy See. I could not oppose the Pope.”

  His [Cardinal Manning] greatest mistake was his treatment of Newman. For the misunderstandings of the two Cardinals he is most to blame, and the severest thing yet to be said of him will be contained in a candid and capable life of Newman. Manning was the leader in the cabinet and the field, and it was his business to have found a place for that beautiful soul lost in the lonely desert of Brompton: instead of shutting him off from every avenue of usefulness and distinction whose gates he was able to close. He has been punished already for his hostility or indifference, or whatever it may be called. His influence fades, while Newman’s increases.

  Early in the evening a singularly graceful figure in cap and gown glided into the room. The slight form and gracious address might have belonged either to a youthful ascetic of the middle ages or a graceful and high-bred lady of our own days. He was pale and thin almost to emaciation, swift of pace, but, when not walking, intensely still, with a voice sweet and pathetic both, but so distinct that you could count each vowel and consonant in every word. When touching upon subjects which interested him much, he used gestures rapid and decisive, though not vehement; and while in the expression of thoughts on important subjects there was often a restrained ardour about him; yet if individuals were in question he spoke severely of none, however widely their opinions might differ from his…. Nothing more characterised Newman than his unconscious refinement. It would have been impossible for him to tolerate coarse society, or coarse books, or manners seriously deficient in self-respect and respect for others. There was also in him a tenderness marked by a smile of magical sweetness, but a sweetness that had in it nothing of softness. On the contrary, there was a decided severity in his face, that severity which enables a man alike to exact from others, and himself to render, whatever painful service or sacrifice justice may claim.

  Certainly the whole Catholic Church, Anglican as well as Roman, owes a vast debt to the powerful defence that he made of all the great fundamentals of the Catholic faith. No injury done to the English Church by his secession can ever make Anglicans forgetful of all that they, with all true believers, owe to him for doing battle in a latitudinarian age in behalf of the great verities contained in Holy Scripture and the Creeds. To him in no little degree it is due that at the present day there is a more intelligent grasp and a more courageous expression in the Church of England of the mysteries of the faith—the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, as well as a devout acceptance and reverent use of the Grace of God given in the Sacraments. And therefore his elevation to so high a position in that Church for which he deserted her Communion, was received not only without jealousy, but with no little gratification at the honour done to one who had been the greatest Anglican of his own, if not of any age. Newman was also honoured by his own two colleges at Oxford, Trinity and Oriel, who rejoiced to welcome him back into their societies as an honorary member.

  In 1860, he had a slight bend, and seemed to me to look older than he really was…. He was, however, very rapid in his movements, still a great pedestrian, and he talked incessantly while walking. I remember what impressed me in his personal appearance was the massive and powerful head of which Froude speaks, and, perhaps, still more the large and luminous eyes, which seemed to pierce through the veil of this world into the illimitable beyond…. From the first moment I saw Cardinal Newman, I experienced the inexplicable fascination which all men, high and low, rich and poor, intellectual or otherwise, felt in his presence. It is hard to define the secret of his spell. It consisted partly in the bright, original, startling way in which he touched into life old truths, moral, religious or political. Then there was the extraordinary attraction of voice and manner.

Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ, 1846

  Few books have been published of late years which combine more distinct elements of interest than the “Apologia” of Dr. Newman. As an autobiography, in the highest sense of that word, as the portraiture, that is, and record of what the man was, irrespective of those common accidents of humanity which too often load the biographer’s pages, it is eminently dramatic. To produce such a portrait was the end which the writer proposed to himself, and which he has achieved with rare fidelity and completeness…. The “Apologia” will have a special interest for most of our readers. Almost every page of it will throw some light upon the great controversy which has been maintained for these three hundred years, and which now spreads itself throughout the world, between the Anglican Church and her oldest and greatest antagonist, the Papal See. As to the immediate contest between Professor Kingsley and Dr. Newman, we scarcely deem it necessary to speak. The only abiding significance, we may venture to affirm, of that disagreement will be its having given cause for the production of Dr. Newman’s volume. The controversial portion, indeed, of these publications can give no pleasure to the friends of either disputant. Professor Kingsley has added nothing here to his literary reputation. Indeed his pamphlet can only hope to live as the embedded fly in the clear amber of his antagonist’s Apology.

  The book is well worth reading, if only as a curious illustration of the utter inadequacy of human intellect and human logic to secure a soul from the strangest wandering, the saddest possible illusion. You cannot read a page of it without admiration for the intellect of the author, and without pity for the poverty even of the richest intellectual gifts where guidance is sought in a faith and in things which transcend the limits of human logic.

  It would be impossible to exaggerate the effect of the “Apologia” upon the public mind. It came out in parts, and each new part was looked forward to with eager interest. With the third part the work became purely autobiographical. The writer unveiled his life, his opinions, the influences which had operated upon him, the changes he had undergone, with a candour that carried conviction in every quarter…. As a psychological study,—as a remarkable example of searching and faithful introspection the “Apologia” will take its place among the English classics.

  That admirable piece of soul-dissection, so outspoken, with honesty written on every page; that revealing of a soul to which tens of thousands are bound up by ties of gratitude, love, and admiration—the “Apologia” of Cardinal Newman, a book which will henceforth rank with the “Confessions” of St. Augustine.

  As a controversialist Newman’s success has perhaps been exaggerated. The success of the “Apologia,” for instance, was very little due to its merits as a contribution to the question immediately at issue in the Kingsley dispute; those who were interested in that question knew that there were stronger invectives to be found against the unscrupulousness of Roman methods in Newman’s own writings than in the offending words of Kingsley; nor again was its success in any degree theological—probably no single person of average intellect was ever converted by reading it; it was a purely literary success, due in the first place to its engaging frankness, when the public mind was anticipating vulgar subterfuge; and secondly to the lucidity with which it set forth the writer’s two positions as a member, first of the English, and afterwards of the Roman communion.

  It is the “Apologia” that conquered for Newman the reverence of the younger generation, and left them no choice but to believe in his sincerity and do honour to his motives. It is doubtful if there is anything in literature to compare with it. Here is a man who has practically determined the judgment of an age concerning himself, who has so interpreted himself as he was to himself as to compel his own day and his own people to accept the interpretation. Yet the man was a poet, and the poet’s autobiography can never have Wahrheit without Dichtung, were it only because what has passed through the imagination is transfigured in the passage. The unconscious or the undesigned is ever the truest autobiography; and even more than in any “Apologia” the true Newman may be discovered in the books that come, as it were, unbidden out of his spirit, and seem still to throb as if they had within them the very breath of life.

  Concerning the “Apologia” two things may be said by way of epigraph or conclusion. It fixed the author’s place not only in the hearts of his countrymen, but in the national literature. It became the one book by which he was known to strangers who had seen nothing else from his pen, and to a growing number at home, ignorant of theology, not much troubled about dogma, yet willing to admire the living spirit at whose touch even a buried and forgotten antiquity put on the hues of resurrection. No autobiography in the English language has been more read; to the nineteenth century it bears a relation not less characteristic than Boswell’s “Johnson” to the eighteenth.

Grammar of Assent, 1870

  His book is composed with elaborate art, which is the more striking the more frequently we peruse it. Every line, every word tells, from the opening sentence to the last. His object, from the beginning to the end, is to combat and overthrow the position of Locke, that reasonable assent is proportioned to evidence, and in its nature, therefore, admits of degrees…. The argument is extremely subtle, and often difficult to follow, but the difficulty is in the subject rather than in the treatment. Dr. Newman has watched and analysed the processes of the mind with as much care and minuteness as Ehrenberg the organisation of animalculæ. The knotted and tangled skein is disengaged and combed out till every fibre of it can be taken up separately and examined at leisure; while all along, hints are let fall from time to time, expressions, seemingly casual, illustrations, or notices of emotional peculiarities, every one of which has its purpose, and to the careful reader, is a sign-post of the road on which he is travelling.

  I find it very instructive, directly and indirectly; as a hint to students of logic generally, as a special key to the character of Dr. Newman’s work…. He does not mean to go a step beyond assents; he scarcely thinks it possible to go a step beyond them. If he can explain them to us—what assent is, how we are able to assent, what constitutes our obligations to assent—he will deem his work as a teacher accomplished. Whatever wealth of illustration may be at his command, however he may seem to touch upon outlying-provinces of thought, this one word really determines his object; he never loses sight of it. The weakness as well as the strength of the book lies, it seems to me, in the persistency with which he pursues this end, and adheres to this name. Assents, he tells us again and again, and I should suppose no one will dispute the assertion, belong strictly and exclusively to propositions.

  The illustrious author of the “Grammar of Assent” has poured into this, his latest work, the treasures of thought and observation which a whole life-time has gathered together. Here he has summed up, explained, and corrected the lessons of his former writings. Here he has given the last touches to the “Apologia” by supplying the philosophy of its history.

  The work could not have fallen into better hands; and when we say that the learned author has embarked all his genius, culture, and metaphysical acumen in the enterprise, it is superfluous to add that his book is well worth reading. Dr. Newman is master of a simple, clear, untechnical English style; his pages teem with felicitous illustrations drawn from all quarters; and the essay abounds in passages revealing such depths and delicacy of psychological observation, that the reader whose tastes are at all philosophical will be charmed by the book even if he does not accept its teachings. Here our commendation must end.

  As before, we shall find, even in what we are compelled to regard as his errors, more instruction than there would be in the true conclusions of many less able and less consistent thinkers. Instead of Newman’s term “Assent,” I shall invariably use “Belief,” which—at least as used in modern psychology—expresses exactly what he intended by “assent.”

Sermons

  For ourselves, we must say, one of Mr. Newman’s sermons is to us a marvellous production. It has perfect power, and perfect nature; but the latter it is which makes it so great. A sermon of Mr. Newman’s enters into all our feeling, ideas, modes of viewing things. He wonderfully realises a state of mind, enters into a difficulty, a temptation, a disappointment, a grief; he goes into the different turns and incidental, unconscious symptoms of a case, with notions that come into the head and go out again, and are forgotten, till some chance recalls them…. He enters into the ordinary common states of mind just in the same way. He is most consoling, most sympathetic. He sets before persons their own feelings with such truth of detail, such natural expressive touches, that they seem not to be ordinary states of mind which everybody has, but very peculiar ones; for he and the reader seem to be the only two persons in the world that have them in common. Here is the point. Persons look into Mr. Newman’s sermons and see their own thoughts in them. This is, after all, what as much as anything gives a book hold upon minds…. Wonderful pathetic power, that can so intimately, so subtilely and kindly, deal with the soul!—and wonderful soul that can be so dealt with.

  Those who never heard him might fancy that his sermons would generally be about apostolical succession, or rights of the Church, or against Dissenters. Nothing of the kind. You might hear him preach for weeks without an allusion to these things. What there was of High Church was implied rather than enforced. The local, the temporary, and the modern were ennobled by the presence of the Catholic truth belonging to all ages that pervaded the whole. His power showed itself chiefly in the new and unlooked-for way in which he touched into life old truths, moral or spiritual, which all Christians acknowledge, but most have ceased to feel when he spoke of “unreal words,” of the “individuality of the soul,” of the “invisible world,” of a “particular Providence,” or again of the “ventures of faith,” “warfare the condition of victory,” “the Cross of Christ the measure of the world,” “the Church a Home for the Lonely.” As he spoke, how the old truth became new; 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 it would have taken philosophers pages of circumlocution and big words to state, were dropt out by the way in a sentence or two of the most transparent Saxon. What delicacy of style, yet what strength! how simple, yet how suggestive! how homely, yet how refined! how penetrating, yet how tender-hearted! If now and then there was a forlorn undertone which at the time seemed inexplicable, you might be perplexed at the drift of what he said, but you felt all the more drawn to the speaker. After hearing these sermons you might come away still not believing the tenets peculiar to the High Church System; but you would be harder than most men, if you did not feel more than ever ashamed of coarseness, selfishness, worldliness, if you did not feel the things of faith brought closer to the soul.

  People who read the sermons now for the first time, can scarcely appreciate the effect produced by their simplicity and naturalness of diction when they were first delivered or read. Like Arnold in this, if in few other points, Newman spoke on sacred things, usually in the language of common life—plain, even familiar often, but always transparent, always such as to convey the speaker’s meaning to the hearer’s mind, often such as to enlist imagination and feeling in the service of the speaker…. Regarded simply as compositions, we think that they may disappoint those who read them now for the first time, with tastes and expectations formed by the sermons of more recent preachers. In truth, Newman and Arnold formed the preachers who have in their turn taught the present generation what to expect in a sermon meant to live.

  When we read the sermons of Dr. Newman, we admire the subtlety of their insight, the loftiness of their spirituality, the curiosa felicitas of a style which, while it often seems to aim at an almost bald simplicity, keeps us spellbound with an unaccountable fascination. Yet so completely have the religious thoughts and even the phraseology, of “Mr. Newman of Oriel,” passed into our current homiletic literature, so familiar has even his peculiar pronunciation and method of delivery become, that we can hardly account for the fact that his sermons were once regarded with intense suspicion, and were believed by large sections of the Church to teem with the subtlest insinuation of dangerous heresy.

  There was not very much change in the inflection of the voice; action there was none. His sermons were read, and his eyes were always bent on his book, and all that, you will say, is against efficiency in preaching. Yes, but you must take the man as a whole, and there was a stamp and a seal upon him; there was a solemn sweetness and music in the tone, there was a completeness in the figure, taken together with the tone and the manner, which made even his delivery, such as I have described it, and though exclusively from written sermons, singularly attractive.

  As tutor at Oriel, Mr. Newman had made what effort he could, sometimes disturbing to the authorities, to raise the standard of conduct and feeling among his pupils. When he became a parish priest, his preaching took a singularly practical and plain-spoken character. The first sermon of the series, a typical sermon, “Holiness necessary for future Blessedness,” a sermon which has made many readers grave when they laid it down, was written in 1826, before he came to St. Mary’s; and as he began he continued. No sermons, except those which his great opposite, Dr. Arnold, was preaching at Rugby, had appealed to conscience with such directness and force. A passionate and sustained earnestness after a high moral rule, seriously realised in conduct is the dominant character of these sermons. They showed the strong reaction against slackness of fibre in the religious life; against the poverty, softness, restlessness, worldliness, the blunted and impaired sense of truth, which reigned with little check in the recognised fashions of professing Christianity; the want of depth both of thought and feeling; the strange blindness to the real sternness, nay the austerity, of the New Testament. Out of this ground the movement grew. Even more than a theological reform, it was a protest against the loose unreality of ordinary religious morality. In the first stage of the movement, moral earnestness and enthusiasm gave its impulse to theological interest and zeal.

  I am one of those who remember well the early days of the “Tracts for the Times;” I possess the Tracts in the original edition; I read them when they came fresh upon the minds of Englishmen; I had taken my degree before the appearance of No. XC. Nay more; I am one of those—not so many of them now—who have heard Newman preach in his own pulpit of St. Mary’s, Oxford, and who can bear testimony to the marvellous effect of his preaching and the marvellous manner in which it was produced. Those who never heard him can scarcely believe—so at least I have found—that pulpit eloquence could be supported upon such a foundation; the unvarying note, the absolute immobility of face and limb, the close of a long sentence to be followed by another apparently separated from the preceding one by a sharp fracture; all this does not look much like a true basis for pulpit eloquence—and in a certain sense it was not eloquence; nevertheless in a very real and deep sense it was so; it was like a message from another world, or like an utterance of a primitive saint or martyr permitted to revisit the world of living men.

  If we ask by what means this power was gained at Oxford, the answer must certainly be that it was entirely by his sermons and lectures, expressing as they did his whole character; and these have been so vividly described, and by men of every variety of opinion, that it is difficult, and may seem superfluous, to attempt the task once more. Sir Francis Doyle, Principal Shairp, Professor Mozley, Dean Church and Dean Stanley, Mr. Hutton, Mr. Matthew Arnold, and Mr. Froude have each struck a different note of admiration, and it is indeed difficult to describe their character without exaggeration, and without feeling that no one could entirely appreciate them who did not hear them. There was first the style, always simple, refined and unpretending and without a touch of anything which could be called rhetoric, but always marked by a depth of feeling which evidently sprang from the heart and experience of the speaker and penetrated by a suppressed vein of the poetry which was so strong a feature in Newman’s mind, and which appealed at once to the hearts and the highest feelings of his hearers. His language had the perfect grace which comes from uttering deep and affecting truths in the most natural and appropriate words. Then, as he entered into his subject more fully, the preacher seemed to enter into the very minds of his hearers, and, as it were, to reveal to themselves, and to tell them their very innermost thoughts. There was rarely or never anything which could be called a burst of feeling; but both of thought and of suppressed feeling there was every variety, and you were always conscious that you were in the hands of a man who was a perfect master of your heart, and was equally powerful to comfort and to warn you. Is it too much to say of such addresses that they were unlike anything that we had ever heard before, and that we have never heard or read anything similar to them in our after-life?

  The finer and more fastidious your mind is, the more you will enjoy Newman’s sermons. But the more burdened and broken your heart is, and especially with your secret sinfulness, the less will you find in them that which, above all things in heaven or earth, your heart needs. Had the substance and the spirit of Newman’s sermons been but half as good as their style, what a treasure the St. Mary’s sermons would have been to all time! As it is, they are a splendid literature in many respects; but one thing they are not, they are not what God intends the Gospel of His Son to be to all sinful and miserable men.

Poems

  It is grave and subdued as to tone, somewhat bare of ornament, but everywhere weighty with thought [“Gerontius”]. It is written also with Dr. Newman’s usual mastery over the English language, and moves along from the beginning to the end with a solemn harmony of its own. I am here referring to the blank verse; the speeches rather. The lyrical portions (with the exception of two, on which I shall touch by-and-by) are, in my judgment, less successful. The strains as they flow forth from the various ranks of angels are not, if I may use a somewhat pedantic word, differentiated by any intelligible gradations of feeling and of style, and, indeed, do not move me much more than those average hymns which people, who certainly are not angels yet, sing weekly in church. The interlocutory blasphemies of the demons are still worse. I cannot help pronouncing them to be mean and repulsive.

  He has published volumes of verse which I think belong to the very highest order of verse-making that is not genuine poetry. They are full of thought, feeling, pathos, tenderness, beauty of illustration; they are all that verse can be made by one who just fails to be a poet.

  “Lead kindly Light” is the most popular hymn in the language. All of us, Catholic, Protestant, or such as can see their way to no positive creed at all, can here meet on common ground and join in common prayer.

  His poetry, however, is to be found chiefly in the beautiful thoughts scattered through his prose rather than in the form of verses. These have been the lighter flowers of his literature, and, graceful as they are, are not those by which he is to be judged.

  Dr. Newman’s poetry cannot be passed over without a word—though I am ill-fitted to do justice to it. “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.

  He will be remembered chiefly by his “Lead kindly Light,” which is as far from poetry as I hope most hymns are from the ear to which they were addressed. Else would it be shut to all our petitions.

  Some, and among them the present writer, may dissent from the almost universal admiration of this poem as a congregational hymn, on the ground that it is better fitted for an anxious inquirer in the closet than for an assemblage of Christian believers singing prayers or praises of Him whom they worship as the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. To some it may even seem that both the words and the spirit of the words reveal a different stage of religion, if not a different religion altogether, from that which is expressed in such a hymn, as “O God our help in ages past.” But, whether indiscriminately admired or hypercritically censured, the hymn cannot legitimately suggest that the “kindly light” was, at the time, thought likely by the poet to lead him from the Church of England. Much rather it was the natural and justifiable prayer of one who was entering upon a dangerous, but (as he trusted) heaven-dictated enterprise, in doubt as to the best means for succeeding…. Yet this humble abnegation of foresight—praiseworthy enough perhaps in some penitent and beclouded wanderer groping his way back to the Truth from which he had strayed—would not be praiseworthy, would not be even tolerable, in one who was undertaking to be a leader of souls. We could not praise a teacher who is content not to see “the distant scene,” and who finds “one step enough” for him to be in advance of his pupils. But Newman was a poet, and liable to poetic moods. He did not probably, at the time, feel like a guide, and he consequently did not write like a guide.

  Cardinal Newman towers with only three or four compeers above his generation; and now that the benignity of his great nature has passed from our sight, its majesty is more evident year by year. But Newman is no child of his own age, though he was one of its leaders. He belongs to the Middle Ages, not by his imagination, but by his very personality. If Scott is all chivalry, Newman is all asceticism. Pure mystic speaks in him, the mystic who has not even seen the warrior. His longest poem, the “Dream of Gerontius,” is a study of the experience of the Catholic soul after death. No one who has felt the keen touch of that poem upon the hidden spirit could venture to call it archaic. But it is modern only because eternal, as the Confessions of Augustine are modern. Only by accident does the nineteenth rather than the thirteenth century give it birth. Cardinal Newman is in one sense apart even from the mediæval revival: he is simply a true son of the past.

  “The Dream of Gerontius,” as Newman informed me, owed its preservation to an accident. He had written it on a sudden impulse, put it aside, and forgotten it. The editor of a magazine wrote to him asking for a contribution. He looked into all his “pigeon-holes,” and found nothing theological; but, in answering his correspondent, he added that he had come upon some verses which, if, as editor, he cared to have, were at his command. The wise editor did care, and they were published at once. I well remember the delight with which many of them were read aloud by the Bishop of Gibraltar, Dr. Charles Harris, who was then on a visit with us, and the ardour with which we all shared his enjoyment.

  Newman’s great reputation for prose, and the supreme interest attaching to his life, seem to have obscured the fame he might have won, and deserved, as a poet. His poetry is religious without the weakness, or at any rate the limitedness, which mars so much religious verse. He was, in poetry as well as in theology, a greater and more masculine Keble, one with all the real purity of Keble, but with also the indispensable flavour of earth. “I was in a humour, certainly,” he says of the Anglican divines, “to bite off their ears;” and one loves him for it. It is worth remembering also that he taught the need of hatred as well as love; and though he explained and limited the teaching, there is meaning in the very form of expression. There was iron in Newman’s frame and gall in his blood.

  No doubt it is somewhat hard for the staunch Protestant to wax enthusiastic over the invocation of a “Kindly Light” which led its author straight into the arms of the Scarlet Woman of the Seven Hills. Against this may be put the fact that when the Parliament of Religions met at Chicago, the representatives of every creed known to man found two things on which they were agreed. They could all join in the Lord’s Prayer, and they could all sing, “Lead kindly Light.” This hymn, Mrs. Drew tells me, and “Rock of Ages,” are two of Mr. Gladstone’s “most favourite hymns.”

  “The Dream of Gerontius” describes the vision of a dying Christian, and is the most powerful and imaginative of his poems, though, curiously enough, it was not composed until late in life.

  There is nothing romantic in either temper or style about Newman’s poems, all of which are devotional in subject, and one of which—“The Pillar of the Cloud” (“Lead kindly Light”)—is a favourite hymn in most Protestant communions. The most ambitious of these is “The Dream of Gerontius,” a sort of mystery play which Sir Henry Taylor used to compare with the “Divine Comedy.” Indeed none but Dante has more poignantly expressed the purgatorial passion, the desire for pain, which makes the spirits in the flames of purification unwilling to intermit their torments even for a moment.

  This “Dream” is a true and vivid example of what Berkeley intended, when he represented the whole world as shown to the spirit, though not existing outside it, and on that account the more real. It has no local habitation; we do not once think, in reading it, of the Dantean cosmography. It takes place where the soul is, and the Angels, where we love and suffer. But the solid frame of things, as it lately appeared, is no more. Alone the spirit utters its beliefs, while it seems falling into the abyss; alone, amid litanies and absolutions, it passes away, the priest reciting most musically his anthem, “Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul!”

General

  His writings, at least all I have seen of them, leave an unsatisfactory impression on my mind. He appears always to view a subject at some acute angle or another; he never looks at it in a direct or straightforward manner. He never embraces it as a totality. His acuteness loses itself in minuteness, like some meandering rivulet which sinks out of sight in the sand. He throws a peculiar haziness over everything he touches; not exactly that kind of haziness which arises from the employment of quaint and obscure language or phrases; but that which results from a species of intellectual side-glancing at objects instead of steadily looking them full in the face. He is always fishing for pearls in deep water, and always striving to express the most common and familiar thoughts in the formal drapery of philosophical diction. A healthy and rational mode of thinking is out of his beat; partly, I conceive, from constitutional tendencies, and partly from a bad habit of thinking and reasoning. The casual and accidental relations of things are more important to him, as a thinker, than the necessary and essential.

  Two points are quite certain of Father Newman, and they are the only two which are at present material. He was undeniably a consummate master of the difficulties of the creeds of other men. With a profoundly religious organization which was hard to satisfy, with an imagination which could not help setting before itself simply and exactly what different creeds would come to and mean in life, with an analyzing and most subtle intellect which was sure to detect the weak point in an argument if a weak point there was, with a manner at once grave and fascinating,—he was a nearly perfect religious disputant, whatever may be his deficiencies as a religious teacher.

  Those who are old enough to remember 1840 will remember that “mystical,” not “popish,” was the public epithet of dislike for Dr. Newman’s mode of treating Christian truth at that period. Its doctrine of “reserve in communicating religious truth” was that which first embroiled nascent Tractarianism with the religious world. Just so in the recent ferment on occasion of “Essays and Reviews.” It was not the crudities, blunders, and hasty opinions that volume contains which has stirred all the indignation, but the transcendental treatment of religion from within. Newman’s constant effort was to “realize” the doctrines of the Church; it was his favourite word at onetime. Jowett is ever idealizing the language of Scripture. To the common understanding both alike are felt to be not only passing beyond its ken, but to be taking truth away with them into some region into which it cannot follow.

  His mind was essentially sceptical and sophistical, endowed with various talents in an eminent degree, but not with the power of taking firm hold on either speculative or historical truth. Yet his craving for truth was strong in proportion to the purity of his life and conscience. He felt that he was entirely unable to satisfy this craving by any mental operations of his own, and that if he was to depend on his own ability to arrive at any settled conclusion he should be for ever floating in a sea of doubt; therefore he was irresistibly impelled to take refuge under the wings of an infallible authority…. He bowed to an image which he had first himself set up. There was at once his strength and his weakness. He could deceive himself, and could not help letting himself be deceived.

  I cannot help recording my conviction that whenever posterity sits in judgment on the character of Dr. Newman, as it will some day, dutifulness to Bishops will not be reckoned among his strong points, or commended as a principle of action in general, from the success with which it was practiced in his case.

  To turn from Dr. Newman’s Apologia to Mill’s autobiography is, in the slang of modern science, to plunge the organism in a totally different environment. With Dr. Newman we are kneedeep in the dust of the ancient fathers, poring over the histories of Eutychians, Monophysites, or Arians, comparing the teaching of Luther and Melanchthon with that of Augustine; and from such dry bones extracting—not the materials of antiquarian discussion or philosophical histories—but living and effective light for our guidance. The terminal limit of our inquiries is fixed by Butler’s Analogy. Dr. Newman ends where Mill began.

  It is not, however, our part here to estimate the need or the value of the work he has done. But it is easy to see how well his rare and peculiar genius fitted him for doing it. If, on the one side, he had the imaginative devotion which clung to a past ideal, he had, on the other side, that penetrating insight into human nature, which made him well understand his own age, and its tendencies. He was intimately acquainted with his own heart, and he so read the hearts of his fellowmen, that he seemed to know their inmost secrets. In his own words he could tell them what they knew about themselves, and what they did not know, till they were startled by the truth of his revelations. His knowledge of human nature, underived from books and philosophy, was intuitive, first-hand, practical. In this region he belonged to the pre-scientific era. He took what he found within him, as the first of all knowledge, as the thing he was most absolutely certain of. The feelings, desires, aspirations, needs, which he felt in his own heart, the intimations of conscience, sense of sin, longing for deliverance, these were his closest knowledge, to accept, not to explain away, or to analyse into nothing. They were his original outfit, they fixed his standard of judgment; they furnished the key by which he was to read the riddle of life, and to interpret the world; they were the “something within him, which was to harmonise and adjust” all that was obscure and discordant without him.

  It is hardly an overstrained inference to believe that, with that half-conscious aspiration which arises in the minds of most men, when they contemplate a life in which they recognise the embodiment of their own ideal the John Henry Newman of those days sought to be the Ken of the nineteenth century, striving to lead the Church of England, and, through her, other Christian communities, to the doctrine and the worship of that undivided Church of the East and West, after which Ken yearned even to his dying hour.

  Of all that he has done, poetry is that which Cardinal Newman has done least well. There are qualities in his mind and circumstances in his career which have been unfavorable to any remarkable development of his genius in this direction. The outward phenomena of nature have ever been subordinated by him to abstract truths, and this has of necessity diverted his observation from the details of physical life, which are in so great a degree the sources of poetic inspiration and the object of poetic description. His life has been intensely interior, and its ascetic character has imparted to his verse a certain severity which is not compensated by finely-chiselled outline of Hellenic form. The influence of women on his thoughts, feelings, and modes of expression in verse is hardly to be traced, and he writes as might a solitary penitent in his cell, or a prophet in his cleft of the rock. The softness and sweetness and melody of versification proper to the poet are with him only occasional, and if we want to read his best poetry we must betake ourselves to his prose. In his sermons and sometimes in his essays the depth and fervor of his religious emotions supply every requisite and overflow every disadvantage, and far from our feeling him severe, rude, or rugged, we are deluged by his ineffable tenderness. Once, indeed,—in his “Lead, Kindly Light,”—he has surpassed himself as a poet, and written what touches every heart and satisfies every ear, and will last as long as the language in which it is composed. It is purely and simply a poetic inspiration—a gem without a flaw.

  The published works of Newman fill thirty-five volumes, and abundantly testify to the thoroughness and extent of his knowledge and the versatility of his mind. His “History of the Arians,” his “Primitive Church” and his annotations of St. Athanasius, his “Historical Sketches,” reveal his intimate acquaintance with the history of the early church. No work of fiction has ever given its readers a clearer view of the outward forms and inward spirit of the Christianity of the third century, especially in Africa, than his “Callista.” Its attractiveness for empty hearts and troubled minds, the vigor of its life even in its apparent death, its power to recall the careless and indifferent and to reanimate fainting souls, has never been more happily portrayed. The writer of such a book must have had, in his mind and heart, a picture of the church of that far distant time and clime as vivid and real as that of the church at whose altars he served…. His two ablest works,—works which give him a high place among the thinkers on the profoundest subjects that can occupy the human mind, almost as important as the study of the crayfish,—are the “Development of Christian Doctrine,” and the “Grammar of Assent.” Both works are valuable and interesting, not only because of the power of thought and extent of information and richness of suggestion that are to be found in them, but because they are the operations of a great and earnest spirit upon problems that had for a long time occupied and exercised it as practical matters.

  It is not to be supposed, however, that with all Newman’s energy and genius the Tracts were at once successful. For some time they were only “as seed cast on the waters.” As we read them now, or try to read them, it seems strange that they should have ever moved any number of minds. If some were found to be “heavy reading” at the time, they are now mainly interesting to the theological antiquarian. But this only shows the more how inflamable the clerical and lay-clerical mind was at the time.

  One of the most winning writers of English that ever existed.

  Dr. Newman’s style is pellucid, it is animated, it is varied; at times icy cold, it oftener glows with a fervent heat; it employs as its obedient and well-trained servant a vast vocabulary, and it does so always with the ease of the educated gentleman, who by a sure instinct ever avoids alike the ugly pedantry of the bookworm, the forbidding accents of the lawyer, and the stiff conceit of the man of scientific theory. Dr. Newman’s sentences sometimes fall upon the ear like well-considered and final judgments, each word being weighed and counted out with dignity and precision; but af other times the demeanor and language of the Judge are hastily abandoned, and substituted for them we encounter the impetuous torrent—the captivating rhetoric, the brilliant imagery, the frequent examples, the repetition of the same idea in different words, of the eager and accomplished advocate addressing men of like passions with himself.

  His sermons were read, are still read. They are, or many of them are, admirable discourses; but they are sermons, and sermons they must remain. His “Lead Kindly Light” is an immortal hymn. That and the “Apologia” excepted, it were rash indeed to predict immortality of the rest. I am almost tempted to call him a great journalist, so fragmentary was his writing; so strictly did it answer the appeal, “Give us day by day our daily bread;” so accurately adapted was it to the necessities of the particular occasion on which he wrote. Whether he expressed himself in a column or a volume is accidental, not essential. His books did the work, in a measure and within limits which they were meant to do when written. They affected the thought and to some extent modified the lives of his readers. None the less were they occasional, and none the less are they likely to be ephemeral. That is why it is so difficult to look upon Newman’s place in English literature as a very great one for all time to come.

  The history of our land will hereafter record the name of John Henry Newman among the greatest of our people, as a confessor for the faith, a great teacher of men, a preacher of justice, of piety, and of compassion.

  What literary powers were those that thus seem to have been squandered away on temporary objects! Bizarre as his reasoning seemed to most of us, how subtly he weaved the weft of it. Dealing for the most part with subjects remote from human interests, he would so order his argument that it would have the attraction of a plot for us. Topics that seemed forbidding both for their theological technicalities and their repulse of reason were presented by him with such skill that they appeared as inevitable as Euclid and as attractive as Plato. All the resources of a master of English style—except, perhaps, one, description—were at his command; pure diction, clear arrangement, irony, dignity, a copious command of words combined with a reserve in the use of them—all these qualities went to make up the charm of Newman’s style, the finest flower that the earliest system of a purely classical education has produced.

  In the workings of Cardinal Newman’s thought as such, apart from the psychological or literary interest attached to them, not many people of the present day, within at any rate the arena of free discussion, can be said to feel themselves very deeply concerned. The ground, so to speak, on which that thought worked has been undermined on all sides. Many of the questions Newman discussed have assumed totally new aspects; still more, the questions he did not discuss at all have become all-important.

  I protest that in honesty any edition of my brother’s writing while he was a nominal Anglican ought to state in the title page, or some equally conspicuous place, that he was already a hater of the Reformation, and eager to convert us to Romanism. My brother hated Protestantism, and accepted as a divine mission to supplant it (I do not say by Popery, but) by full Romanism. As warning to incautious parents, I have felt it my duty to exhibit the facts. Scholars like my very able friend Dr. James Martineau may read with profit my brother’s works; so perhaps may Mr. Richard Hutton. But parents who would be sorely grieved by their children becoming converts to Romanism will not be wise in exposing the young and inexperienced to the speciousness of his pleadings.

  Newman knew well, and taught his followers, that no man can be said to know anything of religious importance till he has done something in consequence of it. So far as he imbued his party with this very practical truth he helped them to success. Whatever is done regularly, in the definite name of religion, drives a nail through the character, and fixes a man in his adherence to what he professes…. Newman has left us something to imitate, much more to avoid. Our debt to him is negative rather than positive. Not to despise God’s facts, and not to be afraid of God’s justice, are the two great lessons to be learned by all Englishmen, and especially by English theologians, from Newman’s Anglican career.

  We speak of him with regard, respect, affection, almost without reference to schools of thought; we print “Lead, Kindly Light” in all our hymn-books, whether “Ancient and Modern,” “Hymnal Companion,” Society for the Promoting Christian Knowledge, or what not. When the Cardinal departed this life there was something like a national sorrow, and yet how many Englishmen have practically followed his leading? How many have felt the English Church unsound and unsafe in virtue of these arguments which led him to desert her? What are they who followed him, as compared with the multitude who have recognised all that was beautiful in his character and remarkable in his intellectual powers, and who have sorrowed over him as one who left a grand post of spiritual influence from which it seemed possible that he might have moved the world, in order to adopt a position against which in his best days no one had protested more strongly than himself?

  Yet who can doubt that, when Protestantism is no more, and when the Church stands, as the sole champion of her Master’s divinity, face to face with materialism and infidelity, the record of Newman’s mind will live, not merely on account of the matchless English with which it is clothed, but because within its pages, according to its author’s pregnant motto: Cor ad cor loquitur?

  Newman’s paragraphs are the result of the most careful analysis on the part of their writer. In them unity, usually philosophical, often complex, is severely observed. The style is highly redintegrating, in spite of the aggregating sentence and bookish vocabulary. But it can never be called impartially redintegrating, as one is sometimes tempted to call De Quincey’s. The most careful selection of thought is made, and whatever subsidiary matter may have been generated in the act of composition is sternly repressed in the writing. In this matter we may compare Newman and De Quincey—both artistic minds. Both men are interested in the various phases of the material they use for any given purpose, though of course Newman less than De Quincey in the sensuous qualities. But De Quincey cannot express one phase of his interest at a time; Newman can. We find Newman not indeed depending upon connectives for coherence, but using them freely for increased accuracy.

  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…. 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 organisation, the direct representative of God in the world’s affairs…. 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 re-creating the whole English Church in harmony with the mediæval conceptions.

  Newman’s prose style may be compared in its distinguishing quality to the atmosphere. It is at once simple and subtle; it has vigour and elasticity; it penetrates into every recess of its subject; and it is transparent, allowing each object it touches to display its own proper colour. The comparison holds also in two further points, the apparent effortlessness of its successes, and the fact that, in consequence, its virtue attracts little notice.

  The books composed during this long and eventful career, especially in the first half of it, were very numerous, Cardinal Newman’s works at the time of his death, and before the addition of Letters, etc., extending to nearly forty volumes. Much of the matter of these is still cinis dolosissimus, not to be trodden on save in the most gingerly manner in such a book as this. Yet there are probably few qualified and impartial judges who would refuse Newman, all things considered, the title of the greatest theological writer in English during this century; and there are some who uphold him for one of the very greatest of English prose writers. It is therefore impossible not to give him a place, and no mean place, here…. He was perhaps the last of the very great preachers in England—of those who combined a thoroughly classical training, a scholarly form, with the incommunicable and almost inexplicable power to move audiences and readers. And he was one of the first of that class of journalists who in the new age have succeeded the preachers, whether for good or ill, as the prophets of the illiterate.

  He is the greatest subjective writer of our age; his power over it is but the fascination exercised by his revelation of himself. In his more scholastic treatises in his dogmatic works, in his attempts at historical writing—his strained subtleties, his violent prejudices, his wilfulness, and his often startling pettiness, make him one of the authors a dispassionate student finds it hardest to read. But the moment his own experience is distilled into a sermon, or tract, or book, his peculiar and often almost irresistible fascination appears.

  Plutarch has written “Parallel Lives;” and history, no less than drama, delights in contrast and coincidents. But seldom, perhaps, did it execute in this line a stroke so remarkable as when, in the month of October, 1845, and almost on the same day of the month, it led John Henry Newman to the door of the Catholic Church while Ernest Renan was issuing thence, and bidding his early faith an everlasting farewell…. For these two men, although never meeting in the body, nor acquainted with each other’s writings, were in fact rivals and antagonists—parallel and opposed; each had fought the battle of belief and unbelief in his own bosom; together they summed up the tendencies of an age. And in variety of gifts, in personal romance, in the influence which went forth from them and subdued more than one generation, who shall say that they were greatly unequal? The most striking resemblance between them is their mastery of style. Newman has long been recognised as one of the crowned and sceptred kings of English prose literature, without a competitor save Ruskin; but as a spiritual teacher, a light in the world of religious development, he is by far the greatest that has risen up during our century. On the other hand, which among illustrious French writers has excelled Renan?

  Whose best sermons and controversial essays displayed a delicate and flexible treatment of language, without emphasis, without oddity, which hardly arrests any attention at first—the reader being absorbed in the argument or statement—but which in course of time fascinates, and at last somewhat overbalances the judgment, as a thing miraculous in its limpid grace and suavity. The style which Newman employs is the more admired because of its rarity in English; it would attract less wonder if the writer were a Frenchman. If we banish the curious intimidation which the harmony of Newman exercises, at one time or another, over almost every reader, and examine his methods closely, we see that the faults to which his writing became in measure a victim in later years—the redundancy, the excess of colour, the langour and inelasticity of the periods—were not incompatible with what we admire so much in the “Sermons at St. Mary’s Church” and in the pamphlets of the Oxford Movement.

  In spite of having taken a most unpopular step in leaving the national church, Newman always retained the popularity which he had so well earned as a member of that Church. I have myself been one of his true admirers, partly from having known many of his intimate friends at Oxford, partly from having studied his earlier works when I first came to England. I read them more for their style than for their contents. If Newman had left behind him no more than his exquisite University sermons and his sweet hymns he would always have stood high among the glories of England.

  Newman’s work reveals him as one of the great masters of graceful, scholarly, finished prose. It is individual; it has charm, and this is the secret of its power to interest. No writer of our time has reflected his mind and heart in his work as has he. He has light for the intellect, and warmth for the heart.

  He has attached himself to the everlasting world of literature by his gift of imagination and speech. Nothing in English can be compared to his simplicity and self-restraint. An acute critic has placed him for music of language alongside of Cicero; yet this gift is a mere incident, for of more worth is the sincerity of the mind behind the faculty—the truth consistent with and almost one with the expression. The personal element in all he has written is very akin to Dante’s characteristic; yet the personalities of each are vastly dissimilar…. There are passages of his which act like a sedative on the mind and the heart. We must thank England for giving us this spiritual genius. Amid the strife of many voices his note of solemn unction sounds clear and brings silence, as the music of a bird when all the woods are hushed.

  If Arnold’s constitutional deficiency was unguardedness and exaggeration, Newman’s was impatience and despair. We see his limitations clearly now; of temper, knowledge, mental discipline, even piety. We see haste to be despondent in the hero of his valedictory novel, more nakedly in his letters to his sister, until criticism is disarmed by their agony as the crisis becomes inevitable. That his secular knowledge was limited all his reviews and essays show; ignorant of German as we know him to have been, the historic development of religious reason with its underlying unity of thought lay outside the narrow philosophical basis on which were reared his Anglican conclusions; while Arnold was just the man, invicem præbens crura sagittis, to elucidate, correct, counterbalance, these flaws in his temperament and system. And if will governed and narrowed his intellect, so did impatience dominate his piety and self-discipline.

  Apart from their subject matter, Newman’s prose writings will assuredly have a permanent place in the front rank of English literature. His poems can scarcely claim so high a rank, though those contained in the “Lyra Apostolica” and his “Occasional Verses” will not readily be forgotten. The fascinating poem, entitled “The Dream of Gerontius,” dedicated to his friend, John Joseph Gordon of the Oratory, is perhaps the most remarkable attempt ever made to realize the passage of a soul from this world through death into the unseen. The well-known chant of “The Fifth Choir of Angelicans,” “Praise to the Holiest in the height, and in the depth be praise,” has found its way into numerous hymnals, and has been sung at the graveside of many an English Christian, including Mr. Gladstone and Dean Church. If the doctrine of purgatory had always been dealt with in the delicate, reverent manner of this wonderful effort to realize the state of the disembodied spirit, Christendom might have been saved not only the horrors of the mediæval conception of purgatorial fires, but all the disastrous reaction and revolt that has followed them.

  Newman’s “Christian Doctrine” is an investigation into the philosophical justification of all belief in dogmatic Christianity. Christianity as a living creed, exhibiting its life in history, in practical action and in dogmatic expression, proving its objective reality by its vitality, is the subject of the book, which is at once historical and philosophical in the sense in which the two coalesce under the influence of the theory of evolution. There is undoubtedly a plane of theological writing to which the phrase “provincial dogma” is applicable. But Newman’s Essay is no more on that plane than are the “Pensées” of Pascal. Both writers accept a dogmatic church. But both have that perception from different points of view of the questions they discuss, that sense of the impossibility of complete intellectual solutions of the deepest problems, and that true estimate of the relation of their own partial solution to the speculations of other thinkers, which mark their work as due to the vision of genius, freely exercised, and wide in range, seeing things as they are, with its own eyes, and not vicariously. Personally I believe that the “Essay on Development” will ultimately be judged to contain materials for a greater work than Newman ever completed anywhere, or outlined elsewhere. And even now I cannot doubt that, by those who really know it, it will be allowed to belong not to “provincial” dogma, but to the literature of the world.

  While Newman was completing this book he was thinking himself into the Roman Catholic Church. It is quite in the modern spirit in its way of approaching the problem; it views the history in the light of the idea of Development.

  Newman was a writer almost by accident. He was essentially a leader of men, an ecclesiastical prince, who used literature as an instrument of his rule. But he was also a mystic and a poet, gifted with literary power of the most winning and magnetic kind. His influence upon pure literature has therefore been great. His mediæval cast of mind, his passionate perception of the beauty of the symbolism embodied in the mediæval church, united with Ruskin’s devotion to mediæval art to influence a remarkable group of young painters and poets, known as the “Preraphaelites.”