probably represents as nothing else might its author's thoughts on a great subject. "Literature" is too well known to require analysis. It is enough to say that Newman takes pains to make clear the ways in which literature is distinct from science, and that he insists on the personality of the writer as the soul of literature.

Then he speaks of style. In our own day the discussion of style has gone merrily on, and, whatever has been said about it, style is generally supposed to be a matter of picking and choosing; of finding the archaic word, the unusual turn of expression; of implying by deviousness and indirection, with as many tricks to avoid plain statement as characterized the versifiers of Pope's generation. Style must be applied no longer to the straightforward, the simple, the unaffected, but must be reserved for such language as is tricked out with the gems-whether paste or real-that are filched from the works of others. How deliciously Newman ridicules all this! How rich is the passage in which he makes us laugh at the notion that thought and style are not wedded in an inseparable alliance: "We read in Persian travels of the way in which young gentlemen go to work in the East, when they would engage in correspondence with those who inspire them with hope or fear. They cannot write one sentence themselves; so they betake themselves to the professional letter-writer. They confide to him the object they have in view. They have a point to gain from a superior, a favour to ask, an evil to deprecate; they have to approach a man in power, or to make court to some beautiful lady. The professional man manufactures words for them, as they are wanted, as a stationer sells them paper, or a schoolmaster might cut their pens. Thought and word are, in their conception, two things, and thus there is a division of labour. The man of thought comes to the man of words; and the man of words, duly instructed in the thought, dips the pen of

desire into the ink of devotedness, and proceeds to spread it over the page of desolation. Then the nightingale of affection is heard to warble to the rose of loveliness, while the breeze of anxiety plays around the brow of expectation. This is what the Easterns are said to consider fine writing; and it seems pretty much the idea of the school of critics to whom I have been referring."

Newman the man possessed no characteristic which was not obvious in his writings. The qualities of his pervasive personality are everywhere in his printed pages. We can no more mistake a work of Newman than a Greek could mistake a work of Plato, a Latinist a work of Cicero, a German a work of Goethe. "Le style, c'est l'homme," said Buffon, and Newman subscribed to the truth of that epigram and pointed out its numerous implications as only he could. He had never written a volume except from a sense of duty; nor allowed the importance of the things to be said (however vital) to excuse a lack of precision, grace, or clearness. He had made his style, by tireless patience and care, the perfect image of his mind as well as of his subject; and for all these reasons literature and the art of letters were rightly invested in his eyes with an inalienable dignity.

"The art of Letters," he says, "is the method by which a speaker or writer brings out in words, worthy of his subject, and sufficient for his audience or readers, the thoughts which impress him. Literature, then, is of a personal character; it consists in the enunciations and teachings of those who have a right to speak as representatives of their kind, and in whose words their brethren find an interpretation of their own sentiments, a record of their own experience, and a suggestion for their own judgments. A great author is not one who merely has a copia verborum, whether in prose or verse, and can, as it were, turn on at his will any number of splendid phrases and swelling sentences; but he is one who has something

to say and knows how to say it. I do not claim for him, as such, any great depth of thought, or breadth of view, or philosophy, or sagacity, or knowledge of human nature, or experience of human life, though these additional gifts he may have, and the more he has of them the greater he is; but I ascribe to him, as his characteristic gift, in a large sense the faculty of Expression. He is master of the two-fold Logos, the thought and the word, distinct, but inseparable from each other. He may, if so be, elaborate his compositions, or he may pour out his improvisations, but in either case he has but one aim, which he keeps steadily before him, and is conscientious and single-minded in fulfilling. That aim is to give forth what he has within him; and from his very earnestness it comes to pass that, whatever be the splendour of his diction or the harmony of his periods, he has with him the charm of an incommunicable simplicity. Whatever be his subject, high or low, he treats it suitably and for its own sake. If he is a poet, 'nil molitur inepte.' If he is an orator, then too he speaks, not only 'distincte' and 'splendide,' but also 'apte.' His page is the lucid mirror of his mind and life.

"He writes passionately, because he feels keenly; forcibly, because he conceives vividly; he sees too clearly to be vague; he is too serious to be otiose; he can analyze his subject, and therefore he is rich; he embraces it as a whole and in its parts, and therefore he is consistent; he has a firm hold of it, and therefore he is luminous. When his imagination wells up, it overflows in ornament; when his heart is touched, it thrills along his verse. He always has the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much. If he is brief, it is because few words suffice; when he is lavish of them, still each word has its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march of his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but all cannot say; and his say

ings pass into proverbs among his people, and his phrases become household words and idioms of their daily speech, which is tessellated with the rich fragments of his language, as we see in foreign lands the marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of modern palaces.

"Such pre-eminently is Shakespeare among ourselves; such pre-eminently Virgil among the Latins; such in their degree are all those writers who in every nation go by the name of Classics. To particular nations they are necessarily attached from the circumstance of the variety of tongues, and the peculiarities of each; but so far they have a catholic and ecumenical character, that what they express is common to the whole race of man, and they alone are able to express it."

The Idea of a University touches literature and science, education and life illuminatingly on many sides. Walter Pater characterized it as "the perfect handling of a theory." He might have added with equal truth that it was the perfect expression of the convictions of a deep thinker and a great man of letters.

VIII

THE APOLOGIA

In a previous chapter I have touched on the origin of the Apologia and on its masterly character as a piece of controversy. No work ever written had a more immediate effect in revolutionizing public opinion; no vindication from damaging suspicions ever proved so striking and so complete.

[I]

The world has seen many great autobiographies. Cellini, self-conscious, fervid, egotistical, unfailingly in the right, swayed by violent passions and sudden gusts of emotion, always a great artist and always a great rogue, felt moved to tell the world how he had made his way up to the mountain top where dwell the supreme artists of all time, and how in the course of it he had encountered jealousy and hatred, unscrupulous opposition, knavery, and deceit, not only among his fellows but among those who sat in the seats of the mighty. He had been imprisoned in a loathsome dungeon but managed to escape. The daggers of more than one assassin just failed to find his heart. Driven by fear and allured by the promise of honors and gold he left one court after another, content to dwell among strangers if only Cellini the man might be given emoluments and Cellini the artist be granted a chance to execute in peace the artistic conceptions of his brilliant fancy. His autobiography throbs with life. Kings and princes, cardinals