Many of the constituents of this remarkable and perhaps unexampled success—Pusey's personal saintliness, his unselfish use of his considerable income, his unwearied benevolence in other than pecuniary ways—do not concern us here. But his works, which are numerous, and the most literary of which are his Sermons and his Eirenicon, contributed not a little to it. Pusey's style was accused by some of bareness and by others of obscurity; but these accusations may be safely dismissed as due merely to the prevalent fancy for florid expression, and to the impatience of somewhat scholastically arranged argument which has also distinguished our times.
The second of this remarkable trio, John Keble, was the eldest, having been born on 24th April 1792, at Fairford, in Gloucestershire, with which county his family had for some centuries been connected. Keble's father was a clergyman, and there was a clerical feeling and tradition in the whole family. John went to no public school, but was very carefully educated at home, obtained an open scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, when he was only fourteen, and went into residence next year—for just at this time extremely early entrance at the University was much commoner than a little earlier or later. He had only just entered his nineteenth year when he took a double first, and had not concluded it when he was elected, at the same time with Whately, to an Oriel fellowship. He followed this up by winning both the Chancellor's Essays, English and Latin, and established his reputation as the most brilliant man of his day. He was ordained as soon as he could be, and served the usual offices of tutor in his College and examiner in the University. But even such semi-public life as this was distasteful to him, and he soon gave up his Oriel tutorship for a country curacy and private pupils. Indeed the note, some would say the fault, of Keble's whole life was an almost morbid retiringness, which made him in 1827 refuse even to compete with Hawkins for the Provostship of Oriel. It is possible that he would not have been elected, for oddly enough his two future colleagues in the triumvirate, both Fellows, were both in favour of his rival; but his shunning the contest has been deeply deplored, and by some even blamed as a gran rifiuto. The publication of The Christian Year, however, which immediately followed, probably did more for the Movement and for the spiritual life of England than any office-holding could have done; and in 1831, Keble, being elected Professor of Poetry, distinguished himself almost as much in criticism as he had already done in poetry. He obtained, and was contented with, the living of Hursley, in Hampshire, where he resided till his death on 29th March 1866.
Keble's very generally granted character as one of the holiest persons of modern times, and even his influence on the Oxford Movement, concern us less here than his literary work, which was of almost the first importance merely as literature. The reaction from an enormous popularity of nearly seventy years' date, and the growth of anti-dogmatic opinions, have brought about a sort of tendency in some quarters to belittle, if not positively to sneer at, The Christian Year, which, with the Lyra Innocentium and a collection of Miscellaneous Poems, contains Keble's poetical work. There never was anything more uncritical. The famous reference which Thackeray—the least ecclesiastically inclined, if by no means the least religious, of English men of letters of genius in this century—makes to its appearance in Pendennis, shows what the thoughts of unbiassed contemporaries were. And no very different judgment can be formed by unbiassed posterity. With Herbert and Miss Rossetti, Keble ranks as the greatest of English writers in sacred verse, the irregular and unequal efforts of Vaughan and Crashaw sometimes transcending, oftener sinking below the three. If Keble has not the exquisite poetical mysticism of Christina Rossetti he is more copious and more strictly scholarly, while he escapes the quaint triviality, or the triviality sometimes not even quaint, which mars Herbert. The influence of Wordsworth is strongly shown, but it is rendered and redirected in an entirely original manner. The lack of taste which mars so much religious poetry never shows itself even for a moment in Keble; yet the correctness of his diction, like the orthodoxy of his thought, is never frigid or tame. There are few poets who so well deserve the nickname of a Christian Horace, though the phrase may seem to have something of the paradox of "prose Shakespeare." The careful melody of the versification and the exact felicity of the diction exclude, it may be, those highest flights which create most enthusiasm, at any rate in this century. But for measure, proportion, successful attainment of the proposed end, Keble has few superiors.
It would indeed be surprising if he had many, for, with his gift of verse, he was also one of the most accomplished of critics. His Prælectiones Academicæ, written, as the rule then was, in Latin, is unfortunately a sealed book to too many persons whom modern practice calls and strives to consider "educated"; but he did not confine himself even in these to classical subjects, and he wrote not a few reviews in English dealing with modern poetry. His æsthetics are of course deeply tinged with ethic; but he does not in the least allow moral prepossessions to twist his poetic theory, which may be generally described as the Aristotelian teaching on the subject, supplied and assisted by the aid of a wide study of the literatures not open to Aristotle. There can be no doubt that if Keble's mind had not been more and more absorbed by religious subjects he would have been one of the very greatest of English critics of literature; and he is not far from being a great one as it is. He did not publish many sermons, though one of his, the Assize Sermon at Oxford in 1833, is considered to have started the Movement; and opinions as to his pulpit powers have varied. But it is certainly not too much to say that it was impossible for Keble not to make everything that he wrote, whether in verse or prose, literature of the most perfect academic kind, informed by the spirit of scholarship and strengthened by individual talent.
John Henry Newman was the eldest son of a man of business of some means (who came of a family of Cambridgeshire yeomen) and of a lady of Huguenot descent. He was born in London on 21st February 1801, was educated privately at Ealing, imbibed strong evangelical principles, and went up to Oxford (Trinity College) so early that he went in for "Greats" (in which he only obtained a third class) before he was nineteen. He continued, however, to reside at Trinity, where he held a scholarship, and more than made up for his mishap in the schools by winning an Oriel fellowship in 1823. In three successive years he took orders and a curacy in the first, the Vice-Principalship of St. Alban's Hall under Whately in the second, and an Oriel tutorship in the third; while in 1827 he succeeded Hawkins, who became Provost, in the Vicarage of St. Mary's, the most important post of the kind—to a man who chose to make it important—in Oxford.
Newman did so choose, and his sermons—not those to the University, though these also are notable, but those nominally "Parochial," really addressed to the undergraduates who soon flocked to hear him—were the foundation and mainstay of his influence, constitute the largest single division of his printed work, and perhaps present that work in the best and fairest light. His history for the next sixteen years cannot be attempted here; it is the history of the famous thing called the Oxford Movement, which changed the intellectual as well as the ecclesiastical face of England, on which libraries have been written, and which, even yet, has not been satisfactorily or finally judged. His travels with Hurrell Froude in the Mediterranean during 1832-33 seem to have been the special turning-point of his career. After ten years, perhaps of "development," certainly of hard fighting, he resigned St. Mary's in 1843, and after two years more of halting between two opinions he was received into the Church of Rome in October 1845. He left Oxford, never to return to it as a residence, and not to visit it for thirty-two years, in the following February.
His first public appearance after this was in the once famous Achilli trial for libel, in which the plaintiff, an anti-Roman lecturer, recovered damages from Newman for an utterly damning description of Achilli's career in the Roman Church itself. Impartial judges generally thought and think that the verdict was against the weight of evidence. At any rate it produced a decided revulsion in Newman's favour, of which he was both too convinced of his own position and too astute not to take advantage. He had hitherto since his secession resided (he had been re-ordained in Rome) at Birmingham, London, and Dublin, but he now took up his abode, practically for the rest of his life, at Birmingham or rather Edgbaston. In 1864 the great opportunity, presented by Kingsley's unguarded words (vide supra), occurred, and he availed himself of it at once. Most of those who read the Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ were not familiar with Newman's masterly English, and his competent, if not supreme, dialectic and sophistic. They were not, as a former generation had been, prejudiced against him; the untiring work of those of his former friends who remained faithful to the Church of England had of itself secured him a fair hearing. During the remaining twenty-five years of his life he had never again to complain of ostracism or unfair prejudice. The controversy as to the Vatican Council brought him once more forward, and into collision with Mr. Gladstone, but into no odium of any kind. Indeed he was considerably less popular at Rome than at home, the more supple and less English character of Manning finding greater favour with Pius IX. The late seventies, however, were a time of triumph for Newman. In 1877 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of his own College, Trinity, and next year paid what may be called a visit of restoration to Oxford, while in 1879 the new Pope Leo XIII., a man of great abilities and wide piety, raised Newman to the cardinalate. He visited Rome on the occasion, but returned to Birmingham, where the Edgbaston Oratory was still his home for the remaining years of his life. This did not end till 11th August 1890, when almost all men spoke almost all good things over his grave, though some did not spare to interpose a sober criticism. The books composed during this long and eventful career, especially in the first half of it, were very numerous, Cardinal Newman's works at the time of his death, and before the addition of Letters, etc., extending to nearly forty volumes. Much of the matter of these is still cinis dolosissimus, not to be trodden on save in the most gingerly manner in such a book as this. Yet there are probably few qualified and impartial judges who would refuse Newman, all things considered, the title of the greatest theological writer in English during this century; and there are some who uphold him for one of the very greatest of English prose writers. It is therefore impossible not to give him a place, and no mean place, here.
Although his chief work, indeed all but a very small part of it, was in prose, he was a good verse writer. The beautiful poem or hymn usually called from its first words "Lead, kindly Light," but entitled by its author "The Pillar of Cloud," is not merely as widely known as any piece of sacred verse written during the century, but may challenge anything of that class (out of the work of Miss Christina Rossetti) for really poetical decoction and concoction of religious ideas. It was written, with much else, during a voyage in a sailing ship from Sicily to Marseilles at the close (June 1833) of that continental tour which was of such moment in Newman's life; and the whole batch ferments with spiritual excitement. Earlier, and indeed later, Newman, besides plenty of serious verse, contributed to the Lyra Apostolica or written independently, was a graceful writer of verse trifles; but his largest and best poetical work, The Dream of Gerontius, was not produced till he was approaching old age, and had long passed the crisis of his career. Possibly the new ferment of soul into which the composition of the Apologia had thrown him, may have been responsible for this, which is dated a year later. It is the recital in lyrical-dramatic form of an anticipatory vision, just before death, of the Last Things, and unites dignity and melody in a remarkable manner. The only other parts of his work to which Newman himself attached the title "literature" were the prose romances of Callista and Loss and Gain. They display his power over language, but are exposed on one side to the charges usually incurred by novels with a purpose, and on the other to a suspicion of bad taste, incurred in the effort to be popular.
By far the larger bulk of the works, however, belongs to theology. This includes twelve volumes of Sermons, all but a small part delivered before Newman's change of creed, and eight of them the Parochial and Plain Sermons, preached in the pulpit of St. Mary's but not to the University; four of treatises, including the most famous and characteristic of Newman's works except the Apologia, The Grammar of Assent, and The Development of Christian Doctrine; four of Essays; three of Historical Sketches; four theological, chiefly on Arianism, and translations of St. Athanasius; and six Polemical, which culminate in the Apologia. With respect to the substance of this work it is soon easy, putting controversial matters as much as possible apart, to discover where Newman's strength and weakness respectively lay. He was distinctly deficient in the historic sense; and in the Apologia itself he threw curious light on this deficiency, and startled even friends and fellow-converts, by speaking contemptuously of "antiquarian arguments." The same defect is quaintly illustrated by a naïf and evidently sincere complaint that he should have been complained of for (in his own words) "attributing to the middle of the third century what is certainly to be found in the fourth." And it is understood that he was not regarded either by Anglican or by Roman Catholic experts as a very deep theologian in either of his stages. The special characteristic—the ethos as his own contemporaries and immediate successors at Oxford would have said—of Newman seems to have been strangely combined. He was perhaps the last of the very great preachers in English—of those who combined a thoroughly classical training, a scholarly form, with the incommunicable and almost inexplicable power to move audiences and readers. And he was one of the first of that class of journalists who in the new age have succeeded the preachers, whether for good or ill, as the prophets of the illiterate. It may seem strange to speak of Newman as a journalist; but if any one will read his essays, his Apologia, above all the curious set of articles called The Tamworth Reading-Room, he will see what a journalist was lost, or only partly developed, in this cardinal. He had the conviction, which is far more necessary to a journalist than is generally thought; and yet his convictions were not of that extremely systematic and far-reaching kind which no doubt often stands in the journalist's way. He had the faculty of mixing bad and good argument, which is far more effective with mixed audiences than unbated logic. And, little as he is thought of as sympathising with the common people, he was entirely free from that contempt of them which always prevents a man from gaining their ear unless he is a consummately clever scoundrel.
It may however be retorted that if Newman was a born journalist, sermons and theology must be a much better school of style in journalism than articles and politics. And it is quite true that his writing at its best is of extraordinary charm, while that charm is not, as in the case of some of his contemporaries and successors, derived from dubiously legitimate ornament and flourish, but observes the purest classical limitations of proportion and form. It has perhaps sometimes been a little over-valued, either by those who in this way or that—out of love for what he joined or hate to what he left—were in uncritical sympathy with Newman, or by others it may be from pure ignorance of the fact that much of this charm is the common property of the more scholarly writers of the time, and is only eminently, not specially, present in him. But of the fact of it there is no doubt. In such a sermon for instance as that on "The Individuality of the Soul," a thought or series of thoughts, in itself poetically grandiose enough for Taylor or even for Donne, is presented in the simplest but in the most marvellously impressive language. The sentences are neither volleying in their shortness, nor do they roll thundrously; the cadences though perfect are not engineered with elaborate musical art; there are in proportion very few adjectives; the writer exercises the most extreme continence in metaphor, simile, illustration, all the tricks and frounces of literary art. Yet Taylor, though he might have attained more sweetness or more grandeur, could hardly have been more beautiful; and though Donne might have been so, it would have been at the expense of clearness. Newman is so clear that he has often been accused of being, and sometimes is, a little hard; but this is not always or often the case: it is especially not so when he is dealing with things which, as in the sermon just referred to and that other on "The Intermediate State," admit the diffusion of religious awe. The presence of that awe, and of a constant sense and dread of Sin, have been said, and probably with truth, to be keynotes of Newman's religious ideas, and of his religious history; but they did not harden, as in thinkers of another temper has often been the case, his style or his thought. On the contrary, they softened both; and it is when he is least under the influence of them that unction chiefly deserts him. Yet he by no means often sought to excite his hearers. He held, as he himself somewhere says, that "impassioned thoughts and sublime imaginings have no strength in them." And this conviction of his can hardly be strange to the fact that few writers indulge so little as Newman in what is called fine writing. He has "organ passages," but they are such as the wind blowing as it lists draws from him, not such as are produced by deliberate playing on himself.