Labours Of The Controversy
At the end of the year the total number printed of the tract was 145,000, and of these 120,000 were in a people's edition. “My pamphlet,” he tells Lacaita, “has brought upon me such a mass of work as I can hardly cope with, and I am compelled to do all things as succinctly as possible, though my work is with little intermission from morning till night. I agree with you that the pamphlet in the main tells its own story; and I am glad there is no need to select in a hurry some one to write on the difference between papism and Catholicism.... There is no doubt that the discussion opens, i.e. makes a breach in the walls of the papal theology, and it ought to be turned to account. But I shall have enough to do with all my hands, if I am to work properly through the task I have undertaken. Not, I trust, for long, for I think another pamphlet should suffice to end it on my side. But I am vexed that Manning (as if he had been pulled up at Rome), after having announced his formal reply six weeks ago, hangs fire and now talks of delaying it.” The result, he assures Lord Granville (Nov. 25), “must be injurious to the pestilent opinions that have so grievously obtained the upper hand in that church, and to the party which means to have a war in Europe for the restoration of the temporal power. To place impediments in their way has been my principal purpose.”
He told Acton (Dec. 18), “When you were putting in caveats and warnings, you did not say to me, ‘Now mind, this affair will absorb some, perhaps many, months of your life.’ It has been so up to the present moment, and it evidently will be so for some time.” With Acton he carried on elaborate correspondence [pg 520] upon some of the questions raised by the Syllabus, notably on the effect of the pope's disciplinary judgment on anglican marriages, converting them into relations that were not marriage at all. He fears that he has conceded too much to the papal party in not treating the Syllabus as ex cathedra; in allowing that the popes had been apt to claim dogmatic infallibility for wellnigh a thousand years; as to the ecumenicity of the Vatican council. Among other matters he was reading “the curious volumes of Discorsi di Pio IX., published at Rome, and he might find it his duty to write collaterally upon them.” This duty he performed with much fidelity in the Quarterly Review for January 1875. He is active in interest about translations; keen to enlist auxiliaries in every camp and all countries; delighted with all utterances from Italy or elsewhere that make in his direction, even noting with satisfaction that the agnostic Huxley was warm in approval. “I pass my days and nights,” he tells the Duke of Argyll (Dec. 19), “in the Vatican. Already the pope has given me two months of incessant correspondence and other hard work, and it may very well last two more. Nor is this work pleasant; but I am as far as possible from repenting of it, as no one else to whom the public would listen saved me the trouble. It is full of intense interest. Every post brings a mass of general reading, writing, or both. Forty covers of one kind or another to-day, and all my time is absorbed. But the subject is well worth the pains.” The Italians, Lord Granville told him, “generally approved, but were puzzled why you should have thought it necessary.” Retorts and replies arose in swarms, including one from Manning and another from Newman. He was accused by some of introducing a Bismarckian Kulturkampf into England, of seeking to recover his lost popularity by pandering to no-popery, of disregarding the best interests of the country for the sake of his own restoration to power.[323]
I have now finished reading—he said at the beginning of February—the 20th reply to my pamphlet, They cover 1000 pages. And I am hard at work preparing mine with a good [pg 521] conscience and I think a good argument. Manning has been, I think, as civil as he could. Feb. 5.—All this morning I have had to spend in hunting up one important statement of Manning's which I am almost convinced is a gross mis-statement.... Feb. 6.—Manning in his 200 pages has not, I venture to say, made a single point against me. But I shall have to show up his quotations very seriously. We have exchanged one or two friendly notes. 8.—Worked on Vaticanism nearly all day and (an exception to my rule) late at night. 14.—Eight hours' work on my proof sheets. 15.—Went through Acton's corrections and notes on my proofs. 19.—Worked much in evening on finishing up my tract, Dr. Döllinger's final criticisms having arrived. He thinks highly of the work, which he observes will cut deeper than the former one, and be more difficult to deal with. By midnight I had the revises ready with the corrections. 20.—Inserted one or two references and wrote “Press” on the 2nd revises. May the power and blessing of God go with the work.
The second tract was more pungent than the first, and it gave pleasure to an important minister abroad who had now entangled himself by Falk laws and otherwise in a quarrel with the papacy. “I have had a letter of thanks,” Mr. Gladstone writes to Hawarden (March 6), “from Bismarck. This pamphlet is stouter, sharper, and cheaper than the last, but is only in its eleventh thousand, I believe.” Among others who replied to Vaticanism was Dr. Newman; he appended a new postscript of four-and-twenty pages to his former answer to the first of Mr. Gladstone's pamphlets. Its tone is courteous and argumentative—far too much so to please the ultras who had the pope's ear—and without the wild hitting that Mr. Gladstone found in Manning.
Newman wrote to thank him (Jan. 17, 1875) for a letter that he described as “forbearing and generous.” “It has been a great grief to me,” said Newman, “to have had to write against one whose career I have followed from first to last with so much (I may say) loyal interest and admiration. I had known about you from others, and had looked at you with kindly curiosity, before you came up to Christ Church, and from the time that you were launched into public life, [pg 522] you have retained a hold on my thoughts and on my gratitude by the various marks of attention which every now and then you have shown me, when you had an opportunity, and I could not fancy my ever standing towards you in any other relation than that which had lasted so long. What a fate it is, that now when so memorable a career has reached its formal termination [retirement from leadership], I should be the man, on the very day on which it closed, to present to you amid the many expressions of public sympathy which it elicits, a controversial pamphlet as my offering.” But he could not help writing it, he was called upon from such various quarters; and his conscience told him that he who had been in great measure the cause of so many becoming catholics, had no right to leave them in the lurch, when charges were made against them as serious as unexpected. “I do not think,” he concluded, “I ever can be sorry for what I have done, but I never can cease to be sorry for the necessity of doing it.”
VII
Change Of Abode
This fierce controversial episode was enough to show that the habit and temperament of action still followed him in the midst of all his purposes of retreat. Withdrawal from parliamentary leadership was accompanied by other steps, apparently all making in the same direction. He sold the house in Carlton House Terrace, where he had passed eight-and-twenty years of work and power and varied sociability. “I had grown to the house,” he says (April 15), “having lived more time in it than in any other since I was born, and mainly by reason of all that was done in it.” To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (Feb. 28):—
I do not wonder that you feel parting from the house will be a blow and a pang. It is nothing less than this to me, but it must be faced and you will face it gallantly. So much has occurred there; and thus it is leaving not the house only but the neighbourhood, where I have been with you for more than thirty-five years, and altogether nearly forty. The truth is that innocently and from special causes we have on the whole been housed better than according to our circumstances. All along Carlton House [pg 523] Terrace I think you would not find any one with less than £20,000 a year, and most of them with, much more.