Halleck's New English Literature · Chapter 84John Henry, Cardinal Newman, 1801-1890
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[Illustration: JOHN HENRY, CARDINAL NEWMAN. From the painting by Emmeline Deane.]
Life.—Newman, who was born in London the year after Macaulay, represents a different aspect of English thought. Macaulay was thrilled in contemplating the great material growth and energy of the nation. Newman's interest was centered in the development of the spiritual life.
This son of a practical London banker was writing verses at nine, a mock drama at twelve, and at fourteen, "he broke out into periodicals, The Spy and Anti-Spy, intended to answer one another." Of his tendency toward mysticism in youth, he wrote:—
"I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true; my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers and influences. I thought life might be a dream, or I an angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world."
In his youth he imitated the style of Addison, Johnson, and Gibbon. Few boys of his generation had as much practice in writing English prose. At the age of fifteen years and ten months he entered Trinity College, Oxford, from which he was graduated at nineteen. Two years later he won an Oxford fellowship, and in 1824 he became a clergyman of the Church of England.
The rest of his life belongs mainly to theological history. He became one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement (1833-1841) toward stricter High-Church principles, as opposed to liberalism, and in 1845 he joined the Catholic Church. He was rector of the new Catholic University at Dublin from 1854 to 1858. In 1879 he was made a cardinal. Most of his later life was spent at Edgbaston (near Birmingham) at the Oratory of St. Philip Neri.
Works and General Characteristics.—Newman was a voluminous writer. An edition of his works in thirty-six volumes was issued during his lifetime. Most of these properly belong to the history of theological thought. His Apologia pro Vita Sua, which he wrote in reply to an attack by Charles Kingsley, an Episcopal clergyman, is really, as its sub-title indicates, A History of His Religious Opinions. This intimate, sympathetic account of his religious experiences won him many friends. He wrote two novels: Loss and Gain (1848), which gives an excellent picture of Oxford society during the last days of the Oxford Movement, and Callista (1852), a vivid story of an early Christian martyr in Africa. His best-known hymn, Lead kindly Light, remains a favorite with all Christian denominations. The Dream of Gerontius (1865) is a poem that has been called "the happiest effort to represent the unseen world that has been made since the time of Dante."
Those who are not interested in Newman's Episcopal or Catholic sermons or in his great theological treatises will find some of his best prose in the work known as The Idea of a University. This volume, containing 521 pages, is composed of discussions, lectures, and essays, prepared while he was rector of the University at Dublin.
Newman's prose is worthy of close study for the following reasons:—
(1) His style is a clear, transparent medium for the presentation of thought. He molded his sentences with the care of an artist. He said:—
"I have been obliged to take great pains with everything I have ever written, and I often write chapters over and over again, besides innumerable corrections and interlinear additions."
His definition of style is "a thinking out into language," not an ornamental "addition from without." He employs his characteristic irony in ridiculing those who think that "one man could do the thought and another the style":—
"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… 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."[8]
It was a pleasure to him to "think out" expressions like the following:—
"Ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt."
"Calculation never made a hero."
"Here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often."
(2) Like Macaulay, Newman excelled in the use of the concrete. In his Historical Sketches, he imagines the agent of a London company sent to inspect Attica:—
"He would report that the climate was mild; the hills were limestone; there was plenty of good marble; more pasture land than at first survey might have been expected, sufficient certainly for sheep and goats; fisheries productive; silver mines once, but long since worked out; figs fair; oil first rate; olives in profusion… He would not tell how that same delicate and brilliant atmosphere freshened up the pale olive till the olive forgot its monotony, and its cheek glowed like the arbutus or the beech of the Umbrian hills."
A general statement about superseding "the operation of the laws of the universe in a multitude of ways" does not satisfy him. He specifies in those ways when he records his belief that saints have "raised the dead to life, crossed the sea without vessels, multiplied grain and bread, cured incurable diseases."
(3) He modestly called himself a rhetorician, but he possessed also the qualities of an acute thinker. He displayed unusual sagacity in detecting the value of different arguments in persuasion. He could arrange in proper proportion the most complex tangle of facts, so as to make one clear impression. Such power made him one of the great Victorian masters of argumentative prose.