Walter Farquhar Hook
(1798-1875).
Walter Farquhar Hook was a prominent clergyman, whose doctrine, that the English Roman Catholics were really seceders from the Church of England, caused a great stir when it was first promulgated. His vast design of the Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury (1860-1876) was ultimately executed in twelve big volumes. The plan was too large and the characters treated too multifarious for really good biography, but it is solid and valuable work.
Sir John William Kaye
(1814-1876).
Sir John William Kaye wrote two meritorious books of military history, The History of the War in Afghanistan (1851), and The History of the Sepoy War in India (1864-1876). The latter, which roused some controversy, was left unfinished at Kaye’s death, and was afterwards completed by Colonel Malleson.
Sir Francis Palgrave
(1788-1861).
Sir Francis Palgrave was in the early part of his life an active contributor to the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, and a diligent editor of state documents. His Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth (1832) threw much light on the early history of England. Palgrave was in his day one of the most earnest students of mediæval history.
Philip Henry, Earl Stanhope
(1805-1875).
Philip Henry, Earl Stanhope, wrote the History of the War of the Succession in Spain, the History of the Reign of Queen Anne, and the History of England from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles. He took great pains with his work, but he does not reach distinction either of thought or style.
Sir William Stirling-Maxwell
(1818-1878).
Sir William Stirling-Maxwell is less widely known than he deserves to be, but this is partly due to the expensiveness of his works. He wrote Annals of the Artists of Spain, The Cloister Life of Charles V., Velasquez and his Work, and a posthumous book, Don John of Austria. All his work is distinguished for learning and good taste.
Agnes Strickland
(1806-1874)
Agnes Strickland was a popular writer whose work is readable rather than profound or original. Her principal books are the Lives of the Queens of England, followed up by Lives of the Queens of Scotland.
Patrick Fraser Tytler
(1791-1849).
Patrick Fraser Tytler, another historian of Scotland, came of a family distinguished both in literature and in law. His History of Scotland has been superseded in general favour by Burton’s, which has the advantage of embodying more recent research. Tytler however was the abler man of the two, and he had a higher literary gift than Burton. Except where the narrative has to be re-written in the light of later discoveries, his judgment is always worth weighing.
CHAPTER VII
THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY
The early part of the nineteenth century was not very prolific in the department of speculative thought, but signs of movement may be detected in the third decade. Each of the English universities became the centre of a very active intellectual society. The Cambridge men showed a bent towards general literature and philosophy, or to theology of a type cognate to philosophy. In the works of Whately Oxford gave signs of a philosophical revival; but she devoted herself mainly to theology, and the practical isolation of Whately, a hard and arid though a vigorous man, calls the more attention to her speculative poverty. The celebrated ‘Oxford movement,’ whose roots are in the twenties, though its visible growth dates only from the thirties, is of incomparably greater importance than this feeble revival.
John Keble
(1792-1866).
Newman, the great artificer of the movement, rightly traces its inception to the influence of John Keble. But Keble’s true literary form is poetry, and his principal contribution to poetry belongs to the preceding period. His prose works are not in themselves of great importance. As Professor of Poetry at Oxford he delivered lectures (in Latin) on critical subjects. In his character of pastor he preached many sermons, and a selection from them was published in 1847. The most famous of his pulpit utterances was one preached in 1833 on ‘National Apostasy.’ ‘I have ever considered and kept the day,’ says Newman, with regard to the delivery of this sermon, ‘as the start of the religious movement of 1833.’ Finally, in 1863, appeared Keble’s latest work of importance, a Life of Bishop Wilson.
Keble’s influence was essentially personal, and was due to his saintly life more than to anything he wrote, even in poetry. The Tractarian movement took its rise in a longing for saintliness, of which Keble furnished a living example. He was not to any considerable extent an originator of theory. Certain germs of theory about the Church, about its relation to pre-Reformation times, about authority in religion, were in the air, and they became absorbed in Keble’s system. But his was not a creative mind, and his position at the head of the Anglo-Catholic movement was little more than an accident. He was like a child who by a thrust of his hand sends a finely-poised rock thundering down a hill. In his literary aspects he is disappointing. A brilliant boy and a most blameless man, he remains throughout too little of this world. The pale perfection of his life is reflected in his works. He would have been better had he been less good; he would have been much better had he been less feminine.
In the ranks of the movement so initiated were included an unusual number of men who must be classed among the ‘might-have-beens’ of literature; men of great reputation eclipsed by premature death, men who never wrote, or men whose writings disappointed expectation. Nearly all its members had literary tastes, a fact not surprising when we consider how large a part imagination played in its start and development. But Hurrell Froude, one of the most daring-minded men engaged in it, died early, leaving only inadequate remains as evidence of his great gifts. W. G. Ward lived, but only to prove by his Ideal of a Christian Church that the power of writing good English was not among his endowments; and if the poetry of Keble is only second or even third-rate, that of Isaac Williams, a versifier of the movement, is of lower grade still. Manning was more the man of action than the man of letters; while the work of Dean Church and Canon Liddon, both of whom had marked literary talents, falls principally outside the limits of this period. There remain two remarkable men, one the very soul of the movement, the other its greatest recruit, who have attained, the first a great, the second a respectable place in letters. These are Cardinal Newman and Pusey, of whom the latter may be considered the exception to the rule that the Tractarians were by nature and instinct men of letters. Pusey was not; he was rather the technical theologian with no direct interest in letters at all.
John Henry Newman
(1801-1890).
John Henry Newman has been described by J. A. Froude, in language hardly too strong, as ‘the indicating number’ of the movement, all the others being, in comparison with him, but as cyphers. The story of Newman’s inner life has been told with inimitable grace in the Apologia pro Vita Sua, and this is not only his greatest contribution to literature, but the best document for his life and doctrines. There are few studies more interesting than the contrast presented by this book on the one side, and the Phases of Faith by its author’s brother, F. W. Newman, on the other. The younger Newman too has a mind prone to religion, but he decides to rest in reason, while his brother leans upon authority. Not unnaturally they drift very far apart; not unnaturally too the author of the Phases of Faith is amazed that it took his brother ten years to discover whither he was going.
Newman’s education was private till he went to Oxford, where, in 1822, he won a fellowship at Oriel, then the great intellectual college of the university. He was at this time a Calvinist in his religious views, and held, among other things, that the Pope was Antichrist. At Oxford he came under the influence of Whately, who, he says, taught him to think. But the two men were essentially antipathetic and foredoomed to part, not the best of friends. Newman drew gradually closer to men of a very different stamp—R. J. Wilberforce, Hurrell Froude and Keble. His Arians of the Fourth Century was finished in 1832, and he took rest after the fatigue of writing it in a memorable journey with Hurrell Froude in the Mediterranean. During this journey he composed most of his verses printed in the Lyra Apostolica, and towards the end of it the exquisite hymn, ‘Lead, kindly light.’
After his return, in 1833, Newman began, ‘out of his own head,’ the Tracts for the Times. They culminated in the celebrated Tract XC (1841), which raised such a storm of opposition that the series had to be closed. Contemporaneously with the Tracts, Newman was busied with other works in defence of the Via Media. To this class belong The Prophetical Office of the Church (1837) and the Lectures on Justification (1838). He was moreover building up a great reputation as a preacher; and, as if all this was not enough, he was for several years editor of The British Critic. The storm raised by his opinions, and especially by Tract XC, drove him into retirement at Littlemore in 1841. He called it his Torres Vedras, in the conviction that he, like Wellington, was destined to ‘issue forth anew,’ and to conquer. But the actual course was different. In 1843 he retracted his former strictures on Rome, and resigned his charge of St. Mary’s. For two years more he lingered in the Church of England, foreseeing the inevitable end, but slow to take a step of such importance without absolute assurance. In 1845 he was received into the Roman communion. Here the history of his spiritual development may be said to close. ‘It was,’ he says, ‘like coming into port after a rough sea.’ He repudiates the idea that his mind was afterwards idle; but there was no change, no anxiety, no doubt. He seems to be unconscious that this individual peace may be dear bought for the human race, and that the absence of doubt is, to use his own favourite word, the ‘note’ of a low type.
Among the voluminous works of Newman, in addition to those of his Anglican period already mentioned, the most important are The Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), the Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), The Dream of Gerontius (1865), and the Grammar of Assent (1870).
Except the Apologia, no work of Newman’s is more valuable or more helpful to an understanding of him than The Dream of Gerontius, subtle, mystical, imaginative. Newman’s great reputation for prose, and the supreme interest attaching to his life, seem to have obscured the fame he might have won, and deserved, as a poet. His poetry is religious without the weakness, or at any rate the limitedness, which mars so much religious verse. He was, in poetry as well as in theology, a greater and more masculine Keble, one with all the real purity of Keble, but with also the indispensable flavour of earth. ‘I was in a humour, certainly,’ he says of the Anglican divines, ‘to bite off their ears;’ and one loves him for it. It is worth remembering also that he taught the need of hatred as well as love; and though he explained and limited the teaching, there is meaning in the very form of expression. There was iron in Newman’s frame and gall in his blood.
Newman’s mind was fundamentally imaginative, and in him imagination, though of an intellectual cast, was conjoined with an acutely sensitive organisation. Moreover, he had a tendency to solitude which powerfully influenced his development. Finally, along with his sensitiveness and power of imagination there went a subtle gift of logic, subordinate upon the whole to imagination, but clamorous until it had received what might at least plausibly pass for satisfaction. These characteristics together explain Newman’s work.
There can be no dispute about the imaginative cast of Newman’s mind. He had, besides the poet’s, the philosopher’s or speculative imagination. He pondered habitually over the secret of the universe. There is an often quoted sentence at the beginning of the Apologia which is vital to a comprehension of him. ‘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.’ It has been said that no one has any genuine gift for philosophy who has never doubted the reality of material things. Newman evidently had the necessary ‘note’ of philosophy, but he had it with a morbid addition which, without careful control, might lead to strange and even disastrous results. If Newman had only known German he would have found in the German philosophers an idealism far more profound and more rational than any he was ever able to frame for himself. But in England the dominant philosophy was Benthamism, the dominant theology was equally hard, and Newman turned from both in disgust, took to the theological road-making of the Via Media, and finally found refuge in Rome, driven by the conviction that ‘there are but two alternatives, the way to Rome and the way to atheism.’
Newman’s sensitiveness produced a shrinking from intercourse and strengthened a love of solitude probably constitutional and not altogether wholesome. He was believed to be, and to have the ambition to be, the head of a party. In truth, he shrank almost morbidly from the idea of leadership, and it was in spite of himself that he gathered followers. Even the few friends with whom he lived in familiar intercourse came ‘unasked, unhoped.’ It would have been better for him had he been able to speak out more freely and to harmonise himself with the world around him. Instead, he fell back upon himself and upon a study of the Fathers, hoping to find the full truth in the primitive days of Christianity. This is a fatal error which, in theory, vitiates most theology, but from the effects of which a great deal of it is saved by inconsistency. Newman himself was afterwards led in his course towards Rome to recognise development in doctrine. The Fathers are doubtless excellent reading, but they are safe reading to him only who can read them in the light of the present day. It is vain to think of stopping the wheels of change even in theology. A creed which meant one thing in the first century, even though its verbal expression remain the same, means something widely different in the nineteenth. Newman unfortunately could conceive of modern thought only as a detestable and soul-deadening ‘liberalism,’ a halfway house to atheism, as Anglicanism was, in his mature view, a halfway house to Rome. Had he been more a real participant in contemporary life, his conceptions would insensibly have taken their bent from the ‘liberalism’ he hated; and, little as he thought it, he had something to learn from that liberalism, just as it had something to learn from him.
Newman was moreover a logician, though he ultimately found refuge in a communion where the science of logic is little needed. The subtlety of his logic is unquestionable. The doubt which some feel is rather with regard to its honesty. This doubt however is only felt by those who fail to understand how behind and beneath and above his logic there spread and towered his imagination and his emotions. Newman was compelled by the law of his nature to find a foundation for his religion; he neither understood nor respected those who let it exist as a mere sentiment. ‘I determined,’ says he with reference to a time of crisis, ‘to be guided, not by my imagination, but by my reason.’ It was this resolve that kept him so long out of the Church of Rome. He is wholly, even transparently sincere. Nevertheless, in spite of himself, he is guided by imagination after all. The conclusion is at every point a foregone one; and his pause results, not in genuine reasons for the change, but in increased strength of feeling compelling it. This is what observers have noted in Newman’s logic, and what has led them to doubt his sincerity. His dice are always loaded, but they are loaded against his own will. The absolute need for him to rest on authority makes it certain from the start that authority will win.
There is no way of using reason except by consenting to be wholly guided by it. Newman never consented. He always knew the general character of the answer he must receive, though he did not know the precise terms of it, whether those of the Via Media or those of Rome. This is the secret of Newman’s power, in his argumentative works, over those who already fundamentally agree with him, and of his failure to move those who do not. For surely it is remarkable how little real effect followed from his secession, that blow under which, it has been said, the Church of England reeled. Newman, unlike both his friends and his enemies, was well aware that few would follow him to Rome; and he paused for years because he believed, on the other hand, that his secession would shatter the party for which he had so long toiled. The character of the Oxford movement was changed by Newman’s secession, because by that step many were awakened to the fact that his brilliant logic had no sound foundation in reason. Others had been awakened before. J. A. Froude in his Nemesis of Faith tells how his eyes were opened by a sentence in one of Newman’s sermons: ‘Scripture says the earth is stationary and the sun moves; science, that the sun is stationary and that the earth moves, and we shall never know which is true until we know what motion is.’ Froude adds the common sense criticism that if Scripture uses the word motion in a transcendental sense it may equally use other words so, and we can never know what it means.
When we add to this Newman’s impulsiveness we have a sufficient explanation of the aberrations of his reasoning. He tried to be and thought he was cautious; but he was mistaken. The pause he was accustomed to make before taking decisive action had only the appearance of caution; and the real impulsiveness of his nature is indicated by several things in his own narrative. For example, the phrase of St. Augustine, Securus judicat orbis terrarum, rings in his ears and recurs to his mind and produces more effect than volumes of argument. ‘By those great words of the ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history, the theory of the Via Media was absolutely pulverised.’ Was such a result ever before produced by such a cause? or was it that the Via Media was in truth built of loose rubbish over shifting sand?
The fact is that Newman’s talent for philosophy, though considerable, nay, almost great even in a strict use of the word great, was insufficient to construct a comprehensive system without better guidance than he could find. He was
‘Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born;’
and, unable himself to bring about the birth, he turned back upon the dead old world, a conspicuous, though personally blameless and most attractive, specimen of the class of those who sink ‘from the van and the freemen’ back ‘to the rear and the slaves.’
Great part of Newman’s power and attractiveness depended upon his exquisite literary gifts. His mind grew up at Oxford, and few have shown so much of the genius loci. He is academical in the best sense. There is a polished scholarliness in all his work, and very little English prose can be ranked as superior to his. Yet it is perfectly simple. With the true scholar’s instinct he strives for lucidity rather than magnificence. His writings frequently breathe passion, but there could be nothing less like what is commonly called ‘impassioned prose.’ Compare him with De Quincey or with Ruskin. They frequently betray a straining for effect, Newman rarely or never. His passages of eloquence come, like his friends, ‘unasked, unhoped,’ because the fervour of his own thought, or the pressure of circumstances, like the calumnies that provoked the Apologia, wrings them from him. Always clear, faultless in taste, capable of great elevation but never too high for the occasion, Newman’s prose is as likely to be permanently satisfying as any of this century.
Edward Bouverie Pusey
(1800-1882).
Edward Bouverie Pusey was, as regards his contributions to formal theology, superior to Newman; both as a man and as a writer he was indefinitely smaller. Pusey early won a great reputation for learning, and Newman considered his accession to the movement an event of the first importance. He had great tenacity, and his adhesion, once given, was sure. Notwithstanding suspicions at the time of Newman’s perversion, there never was the least chance that Pusey would go over to Rome; the Via Media, which had crumbled under Newman’s feet, was solid enough for him. He was not sufficiently imaginative to push his way into the bog which, like another Chat’s Moss, swallowed up all the material Newman could collect. On the contrary, for the forty years of his life after Newman’s secession, he went on diligently stopping the holes which Stanley and others were ‘boring in the bottom of the Church of England.’ And it is certainly a wonderful tribute to the strength of Pusey’s character that, never quailing beneath the blow of Newman’s perversion, never yielding to the opposition which looked so formidable when his party was small and feeble and despised, unretarded and unhurried, he should have steadily pursued his course and raised that party to a foremost place in the Church. One or two events of his life make it matter of thankfulness that its temporal power was not equal to its spiritual fervour. He did all he could to maintain the Anglican exclusiveness of the universities; and he would, if he could, have used the civil power to suppress opinions he deemed dangerous.
Pusey’s writings are purely technical theology, not literature like those of Newman. Of their value diverse opinions will long be entertained. They are oracles to the High Church party; but it is well to consider what opponents think, especially such as have some grounds of sympathy. Pius IX. compared Pusey to ‘a bell, which always sounds to invite the faithful to Church, and itself always remains outside.’ In a similar spirit another great Romish ecclesiastic, when questioned as to Pusey’s chance of salvation, is said to have playfully replied, ‘Oh, yes, he will be saved propter magnam implicationem.’ These are just the criticisms of those who have attacked the Puseyite position from the point of view of free thought. They are also the criticisms implied in Newman’s action. It is at least remarkable that critics from both extreme parties, together with the ablest of all the men who have ever maintained the views in question, should concur in the same judgment.
Samuel Wilberforce
(1805-1873).
Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, deserves a passing mention, though he was more remarkable as a man of affairs than as a man of letters. He was of the High Church, but was opposed to the extreme Tractarians. He was still more opposed to the advanced Liberals. He wrote an article in the Quarterly Review against Essays and Reviews, he framed the indictment against Colenso, and he was one of the chief opponents of evolution before it had been discovered that evolution is all contained in Genesis. His most formal literary work is the allegorical tale of Agathos; but his wit and power of expression find their best outlet in the letters which give to his Life a zest rare in ecclesiastical biography.
John Frederick Denison Maurice
(1805-1872).
There is no other theological sect as compact as the Oxford school, but there are two others of considerable importance and distinguished by fairly well-marked characteristics. Both are imbued with that German thought of which Newman was so unfortunately ignorant; and one of them especially had what he would have considered a deep taint of the hated ‘liberalism.’ John Frederick Denison Maurice was the chief of the first section, while Kingsley, who was more of a novelist than a theologian, and perhaps F. W. Robertson, may be regarded as affiliated to it. Maurice went to Cambridge, but was prevented by the Unitarian faith he then held from proceeding to his degree, and ultimately he graduated at Oxford. He became Professor of English Literature and History at King’s College, London, but fell into trouble because his views on eternal punishment were unsound. At a later date Cambridge honoured him and herself by appointing him Professor of Moral Philosophy.
Maurice’s theology was always a little indefinite, but it seems best described by the word broad. His friendship for the remarkable Scotch theologian, Thomas Erskine, of Linlathen, who, though not a Calvinist, thanked heaven for his Calvinistic training, is significant on one side; his position as a disciple of Coleridge on another. Coleridge made Maurice more orthodox than he had previously been, but also preserved him from narrowness. Thanks to Coleridge, reason fills a greater space in Maurice than it does in the Tractarians. From Coleridge also Maurice derived some of the mysticism, if not mistiness, which characterised his thought. The want of clear outline is one of his chief defects. Though always suggestive, he is often somewhat elusive; and perhaps it is for this reason that his influence seems to dissipate itself without producing anything like the effect anticipated from it. The practical outcome of the school of Maurice is poor in comparison with that of the school of Pusey. This however was not wholly Maurice’s fault. The Oxford school has drawn strength from what, nevertheless, may ultimately prove to be its weakness,—the appeal to authority, so tempting to many minds for the relief it promises. Maurice is not chargeable with this fault to the same degree. But neither is he entirely free from a kindred fault. He too, like Newman, argues to a foregone conclusion. In Mill’s opinion, more intellectual power was wasted in Maurice than in any other of his contemporaries, and it was wasted because all Maurice’s subtlety and power of generalisation served only ‘for proving to his own mind that the Church of England had known everything from the first.’
The principal theological works of Maurice are The Kingdom of Christ (1838), The Doctrine of Sacrifice (1854), and The Claims of the Bible and of Science (1863). He wrote also a not very valuable treatise on Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy (1848-1862). And finally he wrote a number of tracts on Christian Socialism, of which he was the originator.
The Christian Socialists made a well-meant but not very wise attempt to raise the condition of the working classes. The name is unfortunate. If the party had thought a little more carefully they must have seen that if their socialism was economically sound there was nothing specially Christian about it; while, if it was not sound, neither it nor Christianity was benefited by the addition of the adjective. The Christian Socialists had no more thought out their principles than they had considered the name they chose, and for want of solid ground-work they failed. Nevertheless, Christian Socialism has left a mark on literature, in the works of Maurice himself, in the novels of Charles Kingsley, and to some extent in the writings of John Sterling, who was for a time of the school of Maurice.
Frederick William Robertson
(1816-1853).
Frederick William Robertson owes his position entirely to the celebrated sermons which he preached at Brighton during the last six years of his life. They are not great in scholarship, nor even in eloquence, but they exhibit a character of many-sided attractiveness which was the real secret of Robertson’s power.
Mark Pattison
(1813-1884).
Benjamin Jowett
(1817-1893).
The other section of theologians made a much firmer stand for freedom of thought than Maurice. Their leader in the earlier days of opposition to Tractarianism was Dr. Arnold of Rugby. Some of them were his pupils, and all were influenced by his spirit. In many cases however they came to hold very different ground from his, and supposing him to have lived and to have remained stable in his opinions, he might have regarded his disciples with as much disquiet and fear as he regarded the Tractarians. One of his pupils was A. P. Stanley, who entered the Church and remained in it; another was Clough, the story of whose doubts and unrest is written in his poems; and the author of Literature and Dogma was a third. Outside the circle of Arnold’s pupils but in general sympathy with them were Mark Pattison, a quondam follower of Newman, and Benjamin Jowett, the celebrated Master of Balliol, whose most important literary work, the translation of Plato, comes after 1870, but whose struggle for freedom of opinion and whose persecution in its cause belong to the period under consideration. Jowett was Regius Professor of Greek, and the animosity of those who detested his opinions took the contemptible shape of withholding a reasonable salary. They mistook their man and their means. Jowett was no money-lover; his enemies could not starve him out; and the effect followed which experience proves to attend persecution when it cannot be made crushingly severe. He became the hero of the more liberal-minded, and he moulded almost as he pleased the best intellects of the most intellectual college of the university.
Both Jowett and Pattison were writers in the celebrated volume entitled Essays and Reviews (1860). This was a collection of seven papers on theological subjects, united only by a common liberalism of view. Few books, in the main so harmless, have caused such a commotion. The volume is valuable chiefly as a landmark. Some of the opinions would still be considered heterodox, but they would be received now, if not with satisfaction, at least with calmness. At that time however people were sensitive on the point of orthodoxy. Darwin had just been promulgating an obnoxious doctrine, and it seemed hard that the faith, in danger from without, should be assailed also from within; for six of the seven essayists were clergymen. Legal proceedings were taken against two of them, but they only let off harmlessly humours which, if suppressed, might have been dangerous. It was with respect to the Gorham controversy, ten years earlier, that a Frenchman ‘congratulated Stanley on the fact that the English revolution had taken the shape of “le père Gorham.”’ The truth underlying this remark applies to other things besides the Gorham case.