Part 8

Mediævalism, as we have seen, was a distinctive note of the Romantic spirit, and, certainly, Newman was intensely alive to the beauty and the poetic charm of the life of the Middle Ages. One is sometimes tempted to describe him as a great mediæval ecclesiastic astray in the nineteenth century and heroically striving to remodel modern life in harmony with his temperamental needs. His imagination was possessed with the Romantic vision of the greatness of the mediæval Church,--of its splendour and pomp and dignity, and of its power over the hearts and lives of its members; and the Oxford movement was in its essence an attempt to reconstruct the English Church in harmony with this Romantic ideal, to rouse the Church to a vital realization of its own great traditions, and to restore to it the prestige and the dominating position it had had in the past. 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, and found in them the symbols of the spirit of mystery and awe which was for him the essentially religious spirit, and of the mystical truths of which revealed religion was made up. The Church, as Newman found it, was Erastian and worldly; it was apt to regard itself as merely an ally of the State for the maintenance of order and spread of morality; it was coldly rational in belief and theology, and prosaic in its conception of religious truth and of its own position and functions. 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 organization, the direct representative of God in the world’s affairs. Such was the mediæval ideal to which he devoted himself. 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 recreating the whole English Church in harmony with mediæval conceptions.

Before Newman, Keble had already conceived of the English Church in this imaginative spirit. In one of his _Essays_, Newman describes how Keble had made the Church “poetical,” had “kindled hearts towards it,” and by “his happy magic” had thrown upon its ritual, offices, and servants a glamour and beauty of which they had for many generations been devoid. It was to the continuance and the furtherance of this process of regeneration and transfiguration that Newman devoted the Tractarian movement.

But the essentially Romantic character of the new movement comes out in other ways than in its idealization of the Church. The relation of Newman and of his friends to Nature was closely akin to that of the Romanticists. Newman, like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, found Nature mysteriously beautiful and instinct with strange significance, a divinely elaborated language whereby God speaks through symbols to the human soul. Keble’s _Christian Year_ is full of this interpretation of natural sights and sounds as images of spiritual truth, and with this mystical conception of Nature Newman was in sympathy. Nature was for him as rich in its spiritual suggestiveness, as for Wordsworth or Shelley, and was as truly for him as for Carlyle or Goethe the visible garment of God. But in interpreting the emotional value of Nature Newman had recourse to a symbolism drawn ready-made from Christianity. The mystical beauty of Nature, instead of calling up in his imagination a Platonic ideal world, as with Shelley, or adumbrating the world of eternal verity of German transcendentalism, as with Wordsworth and Coleridge, suggested the presence and power of seraphs and angels. Of the angels he says, “Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beautiful prospect, is, as it were, the skirts of their garments, the waving of the robes of those whose faces see God.” Again, he asks, “What would be the thoughts of a man who, when examining a flower, or an herb, or a pebble, or a ray of light, which he treats as something so beneath him in the scale of existence, suddenly discovered that he was in the presence of some powerful being who was hidden behind the visible things he was inspecting,--who, though concealing his wise hand, was giving them their beauty, grace, and perfection, as being God’s instrument for the purpose,--nay, whose robe and ornaments those objects were, which he was so eager to analyze?”[27]

Despite the somewhat conventional symbolism that pervades these passages, the mystical mood in the contemplation of Nature that underlies and suggests them is substantially the same that expresses itself through other imagery in the Romantic poets. In his intense sensitiveness, then, to the emotional value of the visible universe, and in his interpretation of the beauty of hill and valley and mountain and stream in terms of subjective emotion, Newman may justly be said to have shared in the Romantic Return to Nature.

But in a still more important way, Newman’s work was expressive of the Return to Nature. Under this term is to be included not merely the fresh delight that the Romanticists felt in the splendour of the firmament and the tender beauty or the sublimity of sea and land, but also their eager recognition of the value of the instinctive, the spontaneous, the _natural_ in life, as opposed to the artificial, the self-conscious, the systematic, and the conventional. This recognition pervades all the literature of the first quarter of our century, and, in fact, in one form or another, is the characteristic note of what is most novel in the thought and the life of the time. In this Return to Nature Newman shared. For him, as for all the Romanticists, life itself is more than what we think about life, experience is infinitely more significant than our formulas for summing it up, and transcends them incalculably. General terms are but the makeshifts of logic and can never cope with the multiplicity and the intensity of sensation and feeling. Newman’s elaborate justification of this indictment of logic is wrought out in the _Grammar of Assent_ and in his Sermon on _Implicit and Explicit Reason_.

Throughout these discourses he pleads for those vital processes of thought and feeling and intuition which every man goes through for himself in his acquisition of concrete truth, and which he can perhaps describe in but a stammering and inconsequent fashion in the terms of the schoolman’s logic. It is by these direct, spontaneous processes, Newman urges, that men reach truth in whatever concrete matter they apply themselves to, and the truth that they reach need be none the less true because they have not the knack of setting forth syllogistically their reasons for accepting it. In his rejection, then, of formal demonstration as the sole method for attaining truth, in his recognition of the limitations of logic, and in his deep conviction of the surpassing importance of the spontaneous and instinctive in life Newman was at one with the Romanticists, and in all these particulars he shared in their Return to Nature.

This insistence of Newman’s on the vital character of truth is a point, the importance of which cannot be exaggerated when the attempt is being made to grasp what is essential in his psychology and his ways of conceiving of life and of human nature. For him truth does not exist primarily, as for the formalist, in the formulas or the theorems of text-books, but in the minds and the hearts of living men. In these minds and hearts truth grows and spreads in countless subtle ways. Its appeal is through numberless other channels than those of the mind. Man is for Newman primarily an agent,--an acting creature,--not an intellect with merely accidental relations to an outer world. First and foremost he is a doer, a bringer about of results, a realizer of hopes and ambitions and ideals. He is a mass of instincts and impulses, of prejudices and passions; and it is in response to these mighty and ceaselessly operating springs of action that he makes his way through the world and subdues it to himself. Truth, then, to commend itself to such a being, must come not merely by way of the brain, but also by that of the heart; it must not be a collection of abstract formulas, but must be concrete and vital. If it be religious truth, it must not take the form of logical demonstrations, but must be beautifully enshrined in the symbols of an elaborate ritual, illustrated in the lives of saints and doctors, authoritative and venerable in the creeds and liturgies of a hierarchical organization, irresistibly cogent as inculcated by the divinely appointed representatives of the Source of all Truth. In these forms religious truth may be able to impose itself upon individuals, to take complete possession of them, to master their minds and hearts, and to rule their lives.

But what shall be the test of such truth? How shall the individual be sure of its claims? How shall he choose between rival systems? Here, again, Newman refuses to be content with the formal and the abstract, and goes straight to life itself. In the search for a criterion of truth he rejects purely intellectual tests, and has recourse to tests which call into activity the whole of a man’s nature. It is the Illative Sense that detects and distinguishes truth, and the Illative Sense is simply the entire mind of the individual vigorously grasping concrete facts with all their implications for the heart and for the imagination and for conduct, and extracting their peculiar significance. This process, by which the individual searches for and attains truth in concrete matters, is admirably described in the passage quoted in the second chapter of the present Study, where the truth-seeker’s progress is likened to that of a mountain-climber scaling a crag. The whole nature of a man must be put into play, if truth is to be won. The formal logic of the schools falls short of life; its symbols are general terms, colourless abstractions, from which all the palpitating warmth and persuasiveness of real life have been carefully drained. Propositions fashioned out of these colourless general terms cannot by any process of syllogistic jugglery be made to comprehend the whole truth of a religious system. They leave out inevitably what is most vital, and what is therefore most intimate in its appeal to the individual,--to his heart and practical instincts, and his imagination. “We proceed as far indeed as we can, by the logic of language, but we are obliged to supplement it by the more subtle and elastic logic of thought; for forms by themselves prove nothing.”[28] “It is to the living mind that we must look for the means of using correctly principles of whatever kind.”[29] “In all of these separate actions of the intellect, the individual is supreme and responsible to himself, nay, under circumstances, may be justified in opposing himself to the judgment of the whole world; though he uses rules to his great advantage, as far as they go, and is in consequence bound to use them.”[30] Absolute “proof can never be furnished to us by the logic of words, for as certitude is of the mind, so is the act of inference which leads to it. Every one who reasons is his own centre.”[31] The progress of the individual “is a living growth, not a mechanism; and its instruments are mental acts, not the formulas and contrivances of language.”[32]

The foregoing analysis has tended to illustrate the facts that Newman aimed to make religion an intensely concrete, personal experience, and to fill out the spiritual life with widely varying and richly beautiful feeling; and that he also set himself everywhere, consciously and directly, against the eighteenth century ideal, according to which reason was the sole discoverer and arbiter of truth and regulator of conduct. In these respects, Newman’s work was in perfect harmony with that of the Romanticists. Like them he was pleading for the spontaneous, for the emotions and the imagination, for what is most vital in life, in opposition to the formalists, the systematizers, and the devotees of logic.

In the following points, then, Newman’s kinship with the Romanticists is recognizable: in his imaginative sympathy with the past, in the range and perspective of his historical consciousness, and in his devotion to an ideal framed largely in accordance with a loving reverence for mediæval life. His vein of mysticism, his imaginative sympathy with Nature, his interpretation of Nature as symbolic of spiritual truth, his rejection of reason as the guide of life, and his recognition of the inadequacy of generalizations and formulas to the wealth of actual life and to the intensity and variety of personal experience, are also characteristics that mark his relation to the men of his period.

Finally, his very style in the narrowest meaning of the term also classes Newman among Romantic writers. His debt to De Quincey has already been noted. Though he is rarely, if ever, so ornate as De Quincey, and though he perhaps never weaves his prose into such a lustrous, shining surface through the continual use of sensations and images as does De Quincey in his impassioned prose, yet the glowing beauty, the picture-making power, the occasional imaginative splendour, the elaborate swelling music of Newman’s writings, place him as a master of prose in the same group with De Quincey, and Ruskin, and Carlyle, and part him from Landor, or Macaulay, or Matthew Arnold. No prose can more surely send quivering over the nerves a sense of the shadowing mystery of life, than certain of Newman’s sermons, and passages here and there in his _Apologia_ and in his _Essays_. Through the play, then, of his imagination, its rhythms and beat of the wing, because of the ease with which in a moment his prose can carry the reader into regions of impassioned and mystical feeling, even because of the vital, intimate warmth and colour of his phrasing,--qualities so different from the hard, external glitter of Macaulay’s specific, but rhetorical style,--Newman reveals his kinship with the great group of poets and prose-writers who deepened and enriched the imaginative life of the early part of our century. Ecclesiasticism and Academicism are proverbially conservative powers. It may be for this reason that the new spiritual forces of Romanticism did not renovate the Church through the Oxford movement until a full generation after they had made almost wholly their own the purely imaginative literature and life of the English nation.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

I

Admirers of Arnold’s prose find it well to admit frankly that his style has an unfortunate knack of exciting prejudice. Emerson has somewhere spoken of the unkind trick fate plays a man when it gives him a strut in his gait. Here and there in Arnold’s prose, there is just a trace--sometimes more than a trace--of such a strut. He condescends to his readers with a gracious elaborateness; he is at great pains to make them feel that they are his equals; he undervalues himself playfully; he assures us that “he is an unlearned bellettristic trifler”; he insists over and over again that “he is an unpretending writer, without a philosophy based on interdependent, subordinate, and coherent principles.” All this he does smilingly; but the smile seems to many on whom its favours fall, supercilious; and the playful under-valuation of self looks shrewdly like an affectation. He is very debonair,--this apologetic writer, very self-assured, at times even jaunty.

Stanch admirers of Arnold have always relished this strain in his style; they have enjoyed its delicate challenge, the nice duplicity of its innuendoes; they have found its insinuations and its covert, satirical humour infinitely entertaining and stimulating. Moreover, however seriously disposed they may be, however exacting of all the virtues from the author of their choice, they have been able to reconcile their enjoyment of Arnold with their serious inclinations, for they have been confident that these tricks of manner implied no essential or radical defect in Arnold’s humanity, no lack either of sincerity or of earnestness or of broad sympathy.

Such admirers and interpreters of Arnold have been amply justified of their confidence since the publication in 1895 of Arnold’s _Letters_. The Arnold of these letters is a man the essential integrity--_wholeness_--of whose nature is incontestable. His sincerity, kindliness, wide-ranging sympathy with all classes of men are unmistakably expressed on every page of his correspondence. We see him having to do with people widely diverse in their relations to him: with those close of kin, with chance friends, with many men of business or officials, with a wide circle of literary acquaintances, with workingmen, and with foreign _savants_. In all his intercourse the same sweet-tempered frankness and the same readiness of sympathy are manifest. There is never a trace of the duplicity or the treacherous irony that are to be found in much of his prose.

Moreover, the record that these _Letters_ contain of close application to uncongenial tasks must have been a revelation to many readers who have had to rely upon books for their knowledge of literary men. Popular caricatures of Arnold had represented him as “a high priest of the kid-glove persuasion,” as an incorrigible dilettante, a literary fop idling his time away over poetry and recommending the parmaceti of culture as the sovereignest thing in nature for the inward bruises of the spirit. This conception of Arnold, if it has at all maintained itself, certainly cannot survive the revelations of the _Letters_. The truth is beyond cavil that he was among the most self-sacrificingly laborious men of his time.

For a long period of years Arnold held the post of inspector of schools. Day after day, and week after week, he gave up one of the finest of minds, one of the most sensitive of temperaments, one of the most delicate of literary organizations, to the drudgery of examining in its minutest details the work of the schools in such elementary subjects as mathematics and grammar. On January 7, 1863, he writes to his mother, “I am now at the work I dislike most in the world--looking over and marking examination papers. I was stopped last week by my eyes, and the last year or two these sixty papers a day of close handwriting to read have, I am sorry to say, much tried my eyes for the time.” Two years later he laments again: “I am being driven furious by seven hundred closely written grammar papers, which I have to look over.” During these years he was holding the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, and he had long since established his reputation as one of the foremost of the younger poets. Yet for a livelihood he was forced still to endure--and he endured them till within a few years of his death in 1888--the exactions of this wearing and exasperating drudgery. Moreover, despite occasional outbursts of impatience, he gave himself to the work freely, heartily, and effectively. He was sent on several occasions to the Continent to examine and report on foreign school systems; his reports on German and French education show immense diligence of investigation, a thorough grasp of detail, and patience and persistence in the acquisition of facts that in and for themselves must have been unattractive and unrewarding.

The record of this severe labour is to be found in Arnold’s _Letters_, and it must dispose once for all of any charge that he was a mere dilettante and coiner of phrases. Through a long period of years he was working diligently, wearisomely, in minutely practical ways, to better the educational system of England; he was persistently striving both to spread sounder ideals of elementary education and to make more effective the system actually in vogue. And thus, unpretentiously and laboriously, he was serving the cause of sweetness and light as well as through his somewhat debonair contributions to literature.

In another way his _Letters_ have done much to reveal the innermost core of Arnold’s nature, and so, ultimately, to explain the genesis of his prose. They place it beyond doubt that in all he wrote Arnold had an underlying purpose, clearly apprehended and faithfully pursued. In 1867, in a letter to his mother, he says: “I more and more become conscious of having something to do and of a resolution to do it.... Whether one lives long or not, to be less and less _personal_ in one’s desires and workings is the great matter.” In a letter of 1863 he had already written in much the same strain: “However, one cannot change English ideas as much as, if I live, I hope to change them, without saying imperturbably what one thinks, and making a good many people uncomfortable.” And in a letter of the same year he exclaims: “It is very animating to think that one at last has a chance of _getting at_ the English public. Such a public as it is, and such a work as one wants to do with it.” A work to do! The phrase recalls Cardinal Newman and the well-known anecdote of his Sicilian illness, when through all the days of greatest danger he insisted that he should get well because he had a work to do in England. Despite Arnold’s difference in temperament from Newman and the widely dissimilar task he proposed to himself, he was no less in earnest than Newman, and no less convinced of the importance of his task.

The occasional supercilious jauntiness of Arnold’s style, then, need not trouble even the most conscientious of his admirers. To many of his readers it is in itself, as has been already suggested, delightfully stimulating. Others, the more conscientious folk and perhaps also the severer judges of literary quality, are bound to find it artistically a blemish; but they need not at any rate regard it as implying any radical defect in Arnold’s humanity or as the result of cheap cynicism or of inadequate sympathy. In point of fact, the true account of the matter seems rather to lie in the paradox that the apparent superciliousness of Arnold’s style comes from the very intensity of his moral earnestness, and that the imperfections of his manner are often the result of an over-conscientious desire to conciliate.

II

What, then, was Arnold’s controlling purpose in his prose-writing? What was the “work” that he “wanted to do with the English public”? In trying to find answers to these questions recourse will first be had to stray phrases in Arnold’s prose; these phrases will give incidental glimpses, from different points of view, of his central ideal; later, their fragmentary suggestions will be brought together into something like a comprehensive formula.