for us the spirit of Athens and Rome and Paris as centers of learning, each eager for the things of the mind, each feeling the stir of intellectual curiosity as the Renaissance was one day to feel it again, each bearing the mark of a nationalism that lent it color and distinction and at the same time did not hinder it from being transfigured until it became as universal as civilization and as abiding as time.

[XI ]

In treating of Newman as historian I have considered his biographical studies as well, and in both aspects of his work as man of letters he suggests comparisons with two of his greatest contemporaries. One cannot help thinking of the brilliant biographical sketches of Macaulay, of how real he makes his men. They are as actual as a Premier or a President whose picture greets us in every shop window and whose exits and entrances occupy a prominent place in the daily newspapers. Macaulay's gallery is enormous and vivid but sooner or later we want to know just why these people acted as they did and what their intellectual and moral inheritance might be.

It is then that we receive a shock of disappointment; for these fine figures endowed with life have minds devoid of subtlety and respond to motives which "every schoolboy" can comprehend and which are evident at a glance to the young lady on whose dressing table Macaulay was to supplant "the novel from the circulating library."

Carlyle in the French Revolution gives us a gallery of portraits even more vivid than Macaulay's. In the veins of Carlyle's men flows the red blood of action and beside them Macaulay's seem like stuffed figures. Macaulay's men are "speaking likenesses"; Carlyle's the thinking,

doing humans from whom the likenesses are made. Macaulay's men lack inherent springs of action; those are supplied by the omniscient and cocksure Macaulay himself. Carlyle's men live and have their being truly apart from Carlyle himself and their springs of action derive from those complex and subtle moral forces which reside in every son of Eve. Macaulay's people assume typical and dramatic poses in splendid settings, and on the settings is lavished the same pictorial care as on the actors themselves. Carlyle's settings are sketched with a few broad strokes and his people, surcharged with energy, do not pose (they have no time for that), but they act. Macaulay's people are static, Carlyle's dynamic. Macaulay gives us magnificent tableaux; Carlyle, vivid dramas full of life and movement.

With Newman it is entirely different. The outer show of things, even an adequate background, means nothing to him. His whole intent is made clear as early as 1838 when he says of Hurrell Froude's Remains: "I trust this book will present, as far as it goes, the picture of a mind." With Newman that is always the question, the mind and the heart. Macaulay aimed to make history fascinating and easily understood, and he achieved his aim. So too Newman achieved his aim and perhaps we should not quarrel with him any more than with Macaulay. So far as Macaulay succeeded he was admirable; so far as Newman succeeded he was even more admirable because he sought to do an infinitely more difficult thing. He is as far above Macaulay as the spirit is above the flesh.

Carlyle sought to show that history is the life of its great men, and that belief necessarily implies men who satisfy the imagination, not merely minds like Newman's men nor fine lay figures like Macaulay's, but beings of flesh and blood endowed with energy and three dimensions who do things under our eyes. Of the three,

Macaulay's aim was the lowest, Newman's the loftiest, Carlyle's the most satisfying.

No man can remain long in the region of the mind. without weariness. The eye craves a resting place; and it must be satisfied imaginatively if we are to realize men and women as beings like ourselves-and it is only in so far as we may thus conjure them up that we realize them at all or feel an interest in them. How infinitely more lovable could Newman have made Chrysostom (more lovable because more real) if only he had let us see him in the flesh and with the things-of-three-dimensions near him, his house, his servant, his books, his neighbors. It is true that Newman tells us that Chrysostom was febrile and his body wizened, but he tells us in a kind of hurried aside as if it is a concession he is glad to have done with and whose purpose is merely to explain the difficulties of the saint's journey into exile. These things are not concomitant but only ephemeral; they belong to Chrysostom as for the moment like his cloak or his vestments.

With Carlyle physical facts are concomitant with moral ones. You can always see Robespierre with his sea-green complexion and Danton with his twisted lip and pock-marked face; and they think and toil and achieve in an environment of men and things such as we can realize imaginatively. By way of contrast Gregory might be another Newman and Basil another Manning for all the importance Newman attaches to time or place or associations. The fourth or the nineteenth century, Cæsarea or London, Constantinople Birmingham-what difference does it make? Newman seeks to present "the picture of a mind." But with Carlyle you would never mistake Frederick's court for Cromwell's, or the Paris of Danton for the London of Sterling or, for that matter, the London of Sterling for the London of Boswell.

or

In trying to make this point clear I am not forgetting that Newman was not concerned with these things nor would I retract the statement that Newman's aim was more noble than Macaulay's and Carlyle's. I am trying to make it clear that Carlyle's method was more satisfying in its results than the methods of the others.

Macaulay saw men as a "star" reporter sees them at a great spectacle; Carlyle as a keen student of human nature views them in action at high crises; Newman as the angels see them, as he saw Gerontius the good and Demas the bad man, when the prison house of the body no longer held them confined.

The typical Macaulay you have in his picture of the trial of Warren Hastings; the typical Carlyle, in the death of Mirabeau; the typical Newman, in his portrayal of the mind of Theodoret.

But to return to Newman as historian. Strictly speaking it may be queried whether we should properly call him an historian at all and the same question may be raised in the case of both Macaulay and Carlyle. The limitations of all three were striking. Macaulay never got much deeper than the pomp and circumstance of history, and Carlyle ignored such vital matters as the growth of institutions, the workings of constitutional government, the necessity of compromise, and the power of tradition; and if he deigned them a word it was merely to dismiss them scornfully as "Effete Formulas." Macaulay's common sense did not prevent him from being childishly partisan on many an occasion, nor did Carlyle's genius for portraiture and his occasional clairvoyance save him from being too often a narrow and purblind peasant. Macaulay could never see below the surface into the real causes and effects of history nor would Carlyle's provincial prejudices (and his frequently provincial admirations) permit him to see to what absurdities his "one man" theory impelled him. In the

last analysis he was a hero-worshipper whom prejudice made astigmatic and whom sympathy endowed with amazing vision. What he saw aright no man of his century could see better, and few as well; what he did not see aright he saw with a vision so distorted that it was actually grotesque.

Newman possessed the philosophic spirit (of which Carlyle had some and Macaulay little); psychological insight (a gift of Carlyle's, not of Macaulay's); a delicate sense of ethical values (not conspicuous in Macaulay, present but often startlingly wrong-headed in Carlyle); an unshakable mental poise (often sadly missing in Carlyle and not always secure in Macaulay); an almost ineradicable disinterest in the pageantry of history as appealing to the visualizing imagination (the first six lectures on the Turks are a notable exception) -in which both Macaulay and Carlyle were brilliantly and strikingly unlike him.

And now for Newman's great defect from which Macaulay and Carlyle were free: he was deficient in historical sense. Saintsbury tells of Newman's once complaining that it was unfair to find fault with him for "attributing to the middle of the third century what is certainly to be found in the fourth." That complaint is significant for it tells everything. And if we want examples of Newman's defect we have only to turn to the fourth chapter of the Rise and Progress of Universities. Newman is speaking of various brilliant men who came to study at Athens and he mentions Cleanthes who sat at the feet of Zeno the stoic; and Zeno died in 264 B. C. On the heels of Cleanthes we have Marcus Aurelius, a leap of four centuries; in the next paragraph we have Cicero, who died over a century and a half before Aurelius was born. The next student named is Gregory, who was born over 300 years after Cicero had passed away; and then Horace comes, and Newman non