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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NEWMAN

[I]

THE critics of today, however they may fail to agree on secondary matters, are for the most part at one in assigning to Carlyle, Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold their places in nineteenth century literature. In the case of Newman, however, things are different. He is treated by minor critics as one of the lesser lights, usually under the general head of theologian, and his virtues are considered as stylistic only. The chief interest of even the major critics is not centered upon his qualities as a man of letters but upon a recital of his influence in the Oxford Movement, his secession to Rome, and the significance of his Apologia, culminating in a more or less unamiable expression of regret that Newman, despite his early promise, "did so little."

The general tone of the criticism of forty years ago may be discovered in Shairp's essay on Newman in Aspects of Poetry. He was looked upon as a great man who had, in an eminently personal way, been in the public eye of England for almost three-quarters of a century and about whom there had gathered a kind of aura which had distinguished him in the heyday of his influence at Oxford and which, though dim for a time, endured through all his years. Criticism looked upon him with eyes of reverence and admiration. His life, his writings, his place in the forefront of the spiritual life of England-all conspired to make him a man apart.

The critics treated him with open deference, glorying in his rhythmic skill, in his many-sided powers of mind, in the gifts of style which placed him almost alone among Victorian masters for precision, clearness, elegance, and unfailing grace. They pointed out the spiritual significance of his poetry, the imaginative appeal of his prose, and they took care to add that his was the voice of otherworldliness which called men to believe in a "better world than this they see and a higher life than this they know."

In the course of a generation things changed. The men who had seen Newman, who had known him, who had felt the magic of his voice, to whom his personality made an appeal they could not resist, were gone, and the younger generation who professed to see things with the superior wisdom that is the child of a more "scientific" age have sought to appraise Newman, his work, and his influence with measuring rods of a strange fashioning. Those who have studied nineteenth century Romanticism profess to see in the Oxford Movement merely one phase of it. They point out that the influence of Shelley and Keats and Byron was in the air, and while they have seen no evidences of any special interest on Newman's part in these poets they have found proof aplenty of his love of Walter Scott. Ignoring, just as Taine did, factors difficult to perceive and too subtle to analyze, they have discounted personal elements of vital importance and sought to "explain" Newman in their own fashion. He was aroused, they say, to an interest in the middle ages by the fascinating portrayals of Scott and from that conceived a love of mediaevalism especially on its ecclesiastical side. In consequence there came a coloring of his thought that made him a kind of modern-day anchorite who found the great world no place for him and who turned away in fear to seek a refuge, "where beyond these voices

there is peace." All this may be comfortable as a theory; I trust this study has not failed to indicate that it has many shortcomings as a fact.

For the most part present-day critics have clung to the judgment of Newman as a great stylist, and finding nothing novel or fresh or illuminating to say about his work as literature, they have taken him as a striking example of a reactionary and have professed to see in him the leader of a lost cause. His type of mind eludes them completely and they naturally fail to feel sympathy for what they cannot understand. The result is a kind of resentment as if he had been guilty of unfairness in abandoning what he considered uncertainty for what he deemed certitude. They fail to understand that Newman would pronounce their attitude towards life and its meaning a "merely literary philosophy" and that he could find no footing with them in what were to him the shifting sands of spiritual dilettantism. It is unfortunate that, lacking so fatally, they should venture to write of him at all. It is idle to set up a straw Newman and then come prancing, plumed and panoplied, into the lists, like so many Don Quixotes of "modern truth and scientific method," to demolish him. Their immense valor is thrown away; they but tilt with shadows. The spirit of the real Newman still abides, a vital force beyond their reckoning.

[II]

When due allowance is made for difference of epoch, types of mind, and dissimilarities of temperament and viewpoint, the tasks attempted by Ruskin, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold were ultimately ethical and strangely alike. Carlyle's opinions, often contradictory and more often both confused and confusing, are not always easy to get at. Behind his odd fancies about Deity, his per

ilously absurd notions of "great men," his contempt of the "common herd," his bullying and denouncing, there lie the noble aims of a man who had moments of divine vision clouded over again too often by what was "fuliginous" and dyspeptic. But undeniably Carlyle belonged to the prophets of the nineteenth century. He was not a prophet of joy or optimism or always of hope, but a prophet he was, none the less. The question, "What's wrong with the world?" knocked incessantly at brain and heart for an answer, and would not be denied. He could not dwell in peace with himself nor turn his mind to serenity nor sleep at ease until he gave utterance to the thoughts that burned within him. He found his star risen upon a strange epoch, an age of complacency, in which machinery had facilitated production just as the wider suffrage was facilitating the carrying out of the will of the masses. Mechanical production was deemed a blessing and so, too, was democracy (to Carlyle, "the rule of the worst"); the age was one of "enlightenment" and "advancement"; the world was getting on famously, and of course was bound to continue, for had it not railroads and ballot boxes, and did not every political leader proclaim that this was the best of all possible worlds, and that England was the happiest spot upon it?

As Carlyle beheld all this, he was filled with moral indignation; for he saw beneath the surface of this boasted prosperity the squalor and misery and vice of the masses; the weakness and pretended omniscience of political leaders; the enormous selfishness of captains of industry; the prevalence of sham and cant; the universal blindness to the meaning of life and its mysteries. He would not be silent; he could not, even though he would. He called on men to cast aside their folly and selfishness, to look upon life with seeing eyes, to hold honesty and sincerity and justice and truth in deepest reverence,

to find the work fitted to their hands, and to do it manfully and with all their might, to seek out those leaders who had virtue and intelligence and yield them obedience. This was a great gospel to preach and Carlyle preached it mightily as became a prophet who hated hypocrisy, laziness, and selfishness; and, whether he denounced or exhorted, his voice had in it those ringing notes that are not easily forgotten. As you read his pages you can hear more than once far-off echoes, like thunder among the distant mountains, of those mighty voices which of old spoke of the wrath of Jehovah to a people that were turning away from Him. "It is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry a future ghost within us but are in very deed ghosts. These limbs, whence had we them? This stormy force, this life blood with its burning passion? They are dust and shadow. . . . Still men tread the earth, as if it were a firm substance. Fools! the earth is but a film; it cracks in twain." No wonder men harkened to such clarion tones, and though in the strife of tongues his voice was not always clear they knew that a great seer was risen among them, that he was summoning them out of their unmanly lethargy and bidding them to bestir themselves and perform in honor and truth the tasks of the day before the night should come when no man might work.

Ruskin, who boasted himself a disciple of Carlyle, hated a commercialized society as deeply as his master. His voice was less thunderous and for the most part his tones less bitter; exhortation rather than denunciation was his weapon even though he could call London "that great foul city, rattling, growling, smoking, stinking, a ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore." He proclaimed that society however commercialized could not put aside its moral obligations. Those relations between capital and labor were not valid which left the Ten Commandments out of the

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