Part 5

Newman’s loving regard for these traits of St. Philip’s genius is a revelation of some of the deepest instincts of his nature,--instincts which must at once be brought into view in any attempt to appreciate his style as a writer of prose. A peculiar personal charm is impressed on all the most characteristic of Newman’s prose-writings,--on whatever he wrote after he had, as an artist, found himself and realized his essential genius. Abstract as his subject may be, he gives it some colour of life and some of the beauty and grace of friendly discourse. Every one knows what charm there is in the talk of a man of the world who puts before his listeners, in picturesque phrases, the variable incidents of actual life as he himself has encountered them. The whim, the personal idiom, the glancing humour, the concrete image, the vivacious disorderliness, the skilful dealing at first hand with glowing human experience, give to talk of this sort a peculiarly winning quality. And the style that in literature mimics afar the colloquial rhythms and the idiom of such familiar talk has also, its peculiar charm. The writer seems to escape from the blank region of authorship, to realize himself before the reader as a friendly face and form, and to communicate himself through the hundred and one subtle signs of eye and voice and gesture and smile that give to actual human intercourse its delight and stimulating power. The extreme form of this colloquial style, where an author is merely amiably garrulous, is not to be found in Newman’s writings; Newman’s temper was, after all, too academic for this, and his subjects were too abstract and difficult. Rarely, however, have topics as speculative as are many of Newman’s been treated with so much of the wayward charm and pliant grace of friendly discourse as Newman reaches. His style, at its best, has the urbanity, the affability, the winning adroitness, even the half-careless desultoriness of the familiar talk of a man of the world with his fellows.

Yet it is not this colloquial grace by itself that gives to Newman’s discussions of abstract topics their peculiar distinction; it is rather his reconciliation of the charm of colloquial freedom with the demands of logical method and thoroughness of treatment. Garrulity to no purpose is usually easy enough. But the peculiarity of Newman’s style and method is that, with all their apparent casualness, they lead the reader to a complete and essentially logical command of the topic under discussion. When he chose, Newman was absolute master of the severe beauty of rational discourse,--of the beauty of that kind of discourse that disdains to follow any associations save those of logic,--discusses with fine economic precision just the aspects of truth that right reason detects as essential to the question in hand, and is everywhere formally correct, systematic, and dignified. His earliest work is often austerely wrought in accordance with this ideal. Ultimately, however, the essential charm that made him so winning in personal intercourse passed over into his prose, and conveyed into it the warmth, and elasticity, and colour of life. Yet this change involved no real sacrifice of structure or loss of firmness in the texture of his thought. And for the trained student of literary method much of the surpassing charm of Newman’s work is due to the possibility of finding in it, on analysis, a continual victorious union of logical strenuousness with the grace and ease and charm of a colloquial manner and idiom. This victory is so easily won as to seem something by the way; but the student and analyst knows that it is the result of rare tact, finely disciplined instinct, exquisite rhetorical insight and foresight, and extraordinary luminousness and largeness of thought.

The very perfection of Newman’s rhetorical manner has exposed him to some unpleasant charges of insincerity. It is not strange that in the midst of a people like the English, who are perhaps somewhat affectedly straightforward and pretentiously downright, Newman should, now and then, have suffered for his adroitness and grace. The bluff, impetuous man is proverbially ready to interpret subtlety as duplicity, and to rebuke reticence and indirectness as deceit and hypocrisy. Prejudice of this sort was probably the real cause of Canon Kingsley’s famous attack upon Newman. He had an instinctive dislike of Newman’s sinuousness and suppleness, and, without pausing to analyze very carefully, he spoke out fiercely against Newman’s whole work as containing a special variety of ecclesiastical hypocrisy. The charge was the more plausible inasmuch as there is unquestionably a certain debased ecclesiastical manner whose cheaply insinuating suavity might, by hasty observers, be confused with Newman’s bearing and style. Yet the injustice of this confusion and the unfairness of Kingsley’s charges become plain after a moment’s analysis.

In spite of Newman’s ease and affability, a fair-minded reader feels, throughout his writings, when he stops to consider, an underlying suggestion of uncompromising strength and unwavering conviction. He is sure that the author is really revealing himself frankly and unreservedly, notwithstanding his apparent self-effacement, and that he is imposing his own conclusions, persuasively and constrainingly. Moreover, the reader is sure that, however adroitly Newman may be developing his thesis, with an eye to the skilful manipulation of his readers’ prejudices, he would at any moment give a point-blank answer to a point-blank question. There is never any real doubt of Newman’s courage and manly English temper, or of his readiness to meet an opponent fairly on the grounds of debate. In the last analysis, it is this fundamental sincerity of tone and this all-pervasive, but unobtrusive self-assertion that preserve Newman’s style from the undue flexibility and the insincerity of the debased ecclesiastical style, just as his unfailing good taste preserves him from its cheap suavity or unctuousness.

But Newman’s adroitness and rhetorical skill have exposed him to charges of still another kind, charges that concern the very substance of his thought and intellectual life, and charges that have been urged with much greater dialectical skill than Canon Kingsley could attain to. In a general examination of Newman’s theories, Mr. E. A. Abbott[16] has accused him of systematically doctoring truth, and of having elaborated, though perhaps unconsciously, various ingenious methods for inveigling unsuspecting readers into the acceptance of doubtful propositions, methods for which Mr. Abbott has devised satirical names, the Art of Lubrication, the Art of Oscillation, the Art of Assimilation. He does not assert that Newman consciously palters with truth, or tries to make the worse appear the better reason. But he urges that Newman was constitutionally fonder of other things than of truth, that he desired, with an over-mastering strength, to establish certain conclusions, and that he persuaded himself of their correctness by a series of manœuvres which really involved insincere logic.

Here, again, the charges that are made against Newman seem the result of prejudice and temperamental hostility on the part of his critic. Mr. Abbott is a bit of a formalist, a Caledonian intellect, a thorough-going positivist, a thinker for whom the only truth that exists is truth that can be scientifically verified. He is quite unable to comprehend, or, at any rate, to tolerate, Newman’s mental constitution and his resulting methods of conceiving of life and relating himself to its facts. Truth is to Newman a much subtler matter, a much more elusive substance, than it is to the positivist, to the mere intellectual dealer in facts and in figures; it cannot be packed into syllogisms as pills are packed into a box; it cannot be conveyed into the human system with the simple directness which the Laputa wiseacre aimed at who was for teaching his pupils geometry by feeding them on paper duly inscribed with geometrical figures. Moreover, language is an infinitely treacherous medium; words are so “false,” so capable of endless change, that one is “loath to prove reason with them.” Readers, too, are widely diverse, and are open to countless other appeals than that of sheer logic. Because of such considerations as these, Newman is continually studious of effect in his writings; he is intensely conscious of his audience; and he is always striving to win a way for his convictions, and aiming to insinuate them into the minds and hearts of his hearers by gently persuasive means.

But all this by no means implies any real carelessness of truth on Newman’s part, or any sacrifice of truth to expediency. Truth is difficult of attainment, and hard to transmit; all the more strenuously does Newman set himself to trace it out in its obscurity and remoteness, and to reveal it in all its intricacies. Moreover, subtle and elusive as it may be, it is nevertheless something tangible and describable and defensible; something, furthermore, of the acquisition of which Newman can give a very definite account; something as far as possible from mere misty sentiment, and something, furthermore, to be strenuously asserted and defended.

Sympathetic and patient readers of Newman, then, can hardly doubt his essential mental integrity or his courage and readiness to be frank, even in those passages or in those works where the search for the subtlest shades of truth, or the desire to avoid clashing needlessly on prejudice, or the wish to win a favourable hearing, takes the author most indirectly and tortuously towards his end. It is his underlying manliness of mind and frank readiness to give an account of himself that prevent Newman’s prevailing subtlety, adroitness, and suavity from leaving on the mind of an unprejudiced reader any impression of timorousness or disingenuousness.

II

In what has been said of Newman’s realization of the elusive nature of truth and of the great difficulty of securing a welcome for it in the minds and hearts of the mass of men lies the key to what is most distinctive in his methods. He was a great rhetorician, and whatever he produced shows evidence, on analysis, of having been constructed with the utmost niceness of instinct and deftness of hand. He himself frankly admitted his rhetorical bent. Writing to Hurrell Froude in 1836, about the management of the Tractarian agitation, he says, “You and Keble are the philosophers, and I the rhetorician.”[17] And in a somewhat earlier letter he speaks of his aptitude for rhetoric in even stronger terms: “I have a vivid perception of the consequences of certain admitted principles, have a considerable intellectual capacity of drawing them out, have the refinement to admire them, and a rhetorical or histrionic power to represent them.”[18]

This rhetorical skill was partly natural and instinctive, and partly the result of training. From his earliest years as a student, Newman had been conspicuous for the subtlety and flexibility of his intelligence, for his readiness in assuming for speculative purposes the most diverse points of view, and for his insight into temperaments and his comprehension of their modifying action on the white light of truth. With this admirable equipment for effective rhetorical work, he came directly under the influence, in Oriel College, of two exceptionally great rhetoricians, Dr. Copleston, for many years Provost of Oriel, and Whately, one of its most influential Fellows. Copleston was a famous controversialist and dialectician, who had long been regarded as the chief champion of the University against the attacks of outsiders. His _Advice to a Young Reviewer with a Specimen of the Art_ (1807), had turned into ridicule the airs and pretensions of the young Edinburgh reviewers and had led them into severe strictures on University methods, against which attacks, however, Dr. Copleston had vigorously defended Oxford in various publications, to the satisfaction of all University men. He was the Provost of Oriel during the first year of Newman’s residence there, and suggestions of the influence of his ideas and methods are to be found throughout the early pages of the _Apologia_ and the _Autobiographical Memoir_. Still more decisive, however, was the influence of a yet more famous rhetorician, Dr. Whately, whose lectures on logic and on rhetoric remained almost down to the present day standard text-books in those subjects. Whately was also renowned as a controversialist, and his _Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Buonaparte_ was perhaps the cleverest and most famous piece of ironical argumentation produced in England during the first quarter of the century. Newman, for several of his most impressionable years, was intimately associated with Whately. “He emphatically opened my mind,” Newman says in the _Apologia_, “and taught me to think and to use my reason.” Under the influence of these two masters of rhetoric and redoubtable controversialists Newman’s natural aptitude for rhetorical methods was encouraged and fostered, so that he became a perfect adept in all the arts of exposition and argumentation and persuasion.

Whatever work of Newman’s, then, we take up, we may be sure that its construction will repay careful analysis. In trying to present any set of truths, Newman was consciously confronting a delicate psychological problem; he was aware of the elements that entered into the problem; he knew what special difficulties he had to face because of the special nature of the truth he was dealing with,--its abstractness, or complexity, or novelty. He had measured, also, the precise degree of resistance he must expect because of the peculiar prejudices or preoccupations of his readers. And the shape which his discussion finally took--the particular methods that he followed--were the result of a deliberate adaptation of means to ends; they were the methods that his trained rhetorical instinct and his insight into the truth he was handling and into the temperaments and intelligences he was to address himself to dictated as most likely to persuade.

Although ordinarily Newman does not explain the method he follows or comment on the difficulties of his problem, he has, in his _Apologia_, departed from this rule, and taken his readers into his confidence. In the first thirty pages of this self-justificatory piece of writing, he sets forth minutely the prejudices against which he must make his way, considers various possible modes of overcoming these prejudices, notes the precise reasons that finally lead him to the actual plan he chooses, and is entirely explicit as to the elaborate design that underlies and controls the seeming desultoriness of his whole discussion.

The problem which in this case confronted Newman was briefly as follows. He had been charged by Kingsley with teaching “lying on system.” He had protested against the charge and had obtained a half-hearted apology. Later, however, the charge had been reiterated more formally, and with the added taunt that as Newman recommended systematic dissimulation no one could be expected to accept his self-exculpating word. These charges fell in, as Newman recognized, first, with the general trend of British prejudice against Roman Catholics, and, secondly, with the particular prejudice against Newman himself that sprang from his early attempts to make the Anglican Church more Catholic, and his subsequent secession to Rome. How, then, was Newman to persuade the public of Kingsley’s injustice and his own innocence? He saw at once that to deal with each separate charge would be mere waste of time; to prove that in a special case he had not lied or recommended lying would carry him no whit towards his end, as long as contemptuous distrust remained the dominant mood of the British mind towards himself and his party. First of all, he must conquer this mood; he must overthrow the presumption against him, and win for his cause at least such an unbiassed hearing as is accorded to the ordinary man upon trial whose record has been hitherto clean; then he might hope to secure for his particular denials a universal scope. The method that he chose in order to win his readers was admirably conceived. He would put himself vitally and almost dramatically before them; he would bring them within the actual sound of his voice and the glance of his eye; he would let them follow him through the long course of his years as student, tutor, preacher, and leader, and come to know him as intimately as those few friends had known him with whom he had lived most freely. Then, he would ask his readers, when he had put his personality before them in its many shifting, but continuous aspects, and with all the intense persuasiveness of a dramatic portrayal, whether they were ready to believe of the man they had thus watched through the round of his duties that he was a liar. Of the peculiar power which Newman could count on exerting in thus appealing to his personal charm he was, of course, unable to speak in his Preface. In truth, however, he was having recourse to an influence which had always been potent whenever it had had a chance to make itself felt. Throughout his life at Oxford it was true of his relations to others that “friends unasked, unhoped” had “come,”--all men who met him falling almost inevitably under the sway of his winning and commanding personality. Newman was, therefore, well advised when he resolved to reveal himself to the world and to trust to the conciliating effect of this self-revelation to prepare for his specific denial of Kingsley’s charges.

In accordance with this purpose and plan, the _Apologia pro Vita Sua_, or History of his Religious Opinions, was written; and for these reasons his answer to certain definite charges of equivocation and systematic and elaborate misrepresentation was so shaped as to include in its scope the story of his whole life. Of the 384 pages of the original edition of the _Apologia_, only the last 93 pages are devoted to the actual refutation of Kingsley’s charges; the 238 pages that precede are merely persuasive, and simply prepare the way for the final defence. Probably in no other piece of writing is the actual demonstration so curiously small in proportion to the means that are taken to make the logic effective. Of course, it may be urged in reply to this view of the construction of the _Apologia_, that to look at the book as purely a reply to Kingsley, is to judge it from an arbitrary and artificial point of view, and hence to distort it inevitably and throw its parts out of proportion; that the real aim of the book was simply and sincerely autobiographic, and that, regarding the book as frank autobiography, the critic need find nothing strange in the proportioning of its parts. In answer to this objection, it should be noted that the last pages of the book deal directly and argumentatively with “Mr. Kingsley’s accusations”; that the transition in Part VII. from the history of Newman’s opinions to the discussion of the theory of truth-telling is almost imperceptible; and, finally, that Newman himself has declared in the early pages of the book that the sole reason for his self-revelations is his wish to clear away misconceptions, to win once again the confidence of that English public that had long been distrustful of him, and to make widely effective his refutation of Kingsley’s charges. The book, then, is fairly to be described as an enormously elaborate and ingenious piece of special pleading to prepare the way for a few syllogisms that have now become grotesquely insignificant.

It has been worth while to lay great stress on this disproportion between persuasion and demonstration in the _Apologia_, because this disproportion illustrates, with almost the over-emphasis of caricature, certain of Newman’s fundamental beliefs and resulting tricks of method. First and foremost, it illustrates the slight esteem in which he held the formal logic of the schools and syllogistic demonstrations. Not that he failed to recognize the value of analysis and logical demonstration as verifying processes; but he unhesitatingly subordinated these processes to those by which truth is originally won, and to those also by which truth is persuasively inculcated.

In a sermon on _Implicit and Explicit Reason_, he distinguishes with great elaborateness between the method by which the mind makes its way almost intuitively to the possession of a new truth, or set of truths, and the subsequent analysis by which it takes account of this half-instinctive original process and renders the moments of the process self-conscious and articulate. His description of the intellect delicately and swiftly feeling its way towards truth may well be quoted entire: “The mind ranges to and fro, and spreads out and advances forward with a quickness which has become a proverb, and a subtlety and versatility which baffle investigation. It passes on from point to point, gaining one by some indication; another on a probability; then availing itself of an association; then falling back on some received law; next seizing on testimony; then committing itself to some popular impression, or some inward instinct, or some obscure memory; and thus it makes progress not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff, who, by quick eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends, how, he knows not himself, by personal endowments and by practice, rather than by rule, leaving no track behind him, and unable to teach another. It is not too much to say that the stepping by which great geniuses scale the mountain of truth is as unsafe and precarious to men in general as the ascent of a skilful mountaineer up a literal crag. It is a way which they alone can take; and its justification lies alone in their success. And such mainly is the way in which all men, gifted or not gifted, commonly reason--not by rule, but by an inward faculty. Reasoning, then, or the exercise of reason, is a living, spontaneous energy within us, not an art.”[19]

But not only is syllogistic reasoning not the original process by which truth is attained; it is in no way essential to the validity or completeness of the process. “Clearness in argument certainly is not indispensable to reasoning well. Accuracy in stating doctrines or principles is not essential to feeling and acting upon them. The exercise of analysis is not necessary to the integrity of the process analyzed. The process of reasoning is complete in itself, and independent.”[20]

Finally, logical demonstration has relatively little value as a means of winning a hearing for new truth, of securing its entrance into the popular consciousness, and of giving it a place among the determining powers of life. “Logic makes but a sorry rhetoric with the multitude; first shoot round corners, and you may not despair of converting by a syllogism.” Men must be inveigled into the acceptance of truth; they cannot be driven to accept it at the point of the syllogism. “The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. People influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us.”