John Henry Newman threw his whole soul, energy, genius, and fame into the cause of the Roman Catholic Church. Rome welcomed him with that cordial welcome she always gives to a new-comer, and she utilized him and set work for him to do. Macaulay has shown very effectively in one of his essays how the Roman Church seldom loses any one it has gained, because it is so skilful in finding for everybody his proper place, and assigning him in her service the task he is best qualified to do, so that her ambition becomes his ambition, her interest his interest, her conquests his conquests. Newman appears to have been made a sort of missionary from Rome to the intellect and culture of the English people. Within the Church to which he had gone over he became an immense influence and almost unequalled power. The Catholics delighted to have a leader whose intellect no one could pretend to despise, whose gifts and culture had been panegyrized in the most glowing terms, over and over again, by the foremost statesmen and divines of the Protestant Church. Newman was appointed head of the oratory of St. Philip Neri at Birmingham, and was for some years rector of the Roman Catholic University of Dublin. He rarely came before the public. In all the arts that make an orator or a great preacher he is strikingly deficient. His manner is constrained, awkward, and even ungainly; his voice is thin and weak. His bearing is not impressive. His gaunt, emaciated figure, his sharp, eagle face, his cold, meditative eye, rather repel than attract those who see him for the first time. The matter of his discourse, whether sermon, speech, or lecture, is always admirable, and the language is concise, scholarly, expressive—perhaps a little overweighted with thought; but there is nothing there of the orator. It is as a writer, and as an "influence"—I don't know how better to express it—that Newman has become famous. I doubt if we have many better prose writers. He is full of keen, pungent, satirical humor; and there is, on the other hand, a subtle vein of poetry and of pathos suffusing nearly all he writes. One of the finest and one of the most frequently quoted passages in modern English literature is Newman's touching and noble apostrophe to England's "Saxon Bible." He has published volumes of verse which I think belong to the very highest order of verse-making that is not genuine poetry. They are full of thought, feeling, pathos, tenderness, beauty of illustration; they are all that verse can be made by one who just fails to be a poet. An English critical review not long since classed the poetical works of Dr. Newman and George Eliot together, as the nearest approach which intellect and culture have made in our days toward the production of genuine poetry. When Newman made his famous attack on Dr. Achilli, an Italian priest who had renounced the Roman Church, and whom Newman publicly accused of many crimes, the judge who had to sentence the accuser to the payment of a fine for libel pronounced a panegyric on his intellect and his character such as is rarely heard from an English judgment seat. Not long after, when the subject came up somehow in the House of Commons, Mr. Gladstone broke into an encomium of John Henry Newman which might have seemed poetical by hyperbole to those who did not know the merits of the one man and the conscientious truthfulness of the other. We have heard the testimony borne by Mr. Disraeli to the importance of Newman's intellect as a support of the English Church, and the shock which was caused by his withdrawal. Seldom, indeed, has a man seceded from one church and become the aggressive, unsparing, intolerant champion of its enemy, and yet retained the esteem and the affection of those whom he abandoned, as this good, great, mistaken Englishman has done.
The two brothers then are hopelessly divided. One consorts with the Pope and Cardinal Wiseman and Archbishop Manning, and is the idol and saint of the Ultramontanes, and devotes his noble intellect to the task of making the Irish Catholic a more bigoted Catholic than ever. The other falls in with the little band, that once seemed a forlorn hope, of what we may call the philosophical radicals of England. He becomes a professor of the rationalistic University of London, and a contributor to the free-thinking "Westminster Review." Judging each brother's success merely by what each sought to do, I suppose the career of the Catholic has been the more successful. Not that I think he has made much way toward the conversion of England to Catholicism. With all its Puseyism and ritualism, England seems to have little real inclination toward the doctrines of Rome. There is indeed a distinguished "convert" every now and then—the Marquis of Bute some two years ago, Lord Robert Montagu last year; but the great mass of the English people remain obstinately anti-papal. The tendency is far more toward Rationalism than toward Romanism; with the Newman who withdrew from all churches rather than with the Newman who renounced one church to enter another. Therefore, when I say that the career of John Newman appears to me to have been more successful than that of Francis, I mean only that he has been a greater influence, a more powerful instrument of his cause than his brother ever has been. The boast was made unjustly for Voltaire that he almost arrested the progress of Christianity in Europe. I think the admirers of John Newman might claim for him that he actually did for a time at least arrest the progress of Protestantism in England. He had indeed the great advantage of passing from one organization to another. Like Coriolanus, when he seceded he became the leader of the enemy's army. It was quite otherwise with his brother, who leaving the English Church was thenceforward only an individual, and for the most part an isolated worker. But indeed, with all his intellect, his high culture, and his indomitable courage, Francis Newman has never been an influential man in English politics. It may be that his keen logic is too uncompromising; and there can be no practical statesmanship without compromise. It may be that there is something eccentric, egotistic (in the less offensive sense), and crotchety in that sharp, independent, and self-sufficing intelligence. Whatever the reason, nine out of ten men in London set down Francis Newman as hopelessly given over to crotchets, while the tenth man, admiring however much his character and his capacity, is sometimes grieved and sometimes provoked that both together do not make him a greater power in the nation. I never remember Francis Newman to have been in accord with what I may call the average public opinion of English political life, except in one instance; and in that case I believe him to have been wrong. He was in favor of the Crimean war; and for this once therefore he found himself on the side of the majority. As if to mark the contrast of views which it has been the fate of these two brothers to present during their lives, it so happened that, so far as John Henry's opinions on the subject could be learned by the public, they were against the war. At least they were decidedly against the Turks. I remember hearing him deliver at that time a course of lectures in an educational institution, having for their subject the origin and the results of the Ottoman settlement in Europe. I well remember how effectively and vividly he argued, with his thin voice and his constrained, ungraceful action, that the Turk had no greater moral right to the territory he occupies, but does not cultivate and improve, than the pirate has to the sea over which he sails. But Francis Newman was then for once mixed up with the majority; and I doubt whether he could have much liked the unwonted position. He certainly took care to explain more than once that his reasons for taking that side were not those of the average Englishman. He thus might have given some of his casual associates occasion to say of him, as Charles Mathews says of woman in general, that even when he is right he is right in a wrong sort of way. For myself I am inclined to reverse the saying, and declare of Francis Newman that even when he is wrong he is wrong in a right sort of way. He was right, and in a very right sort of way, when he came out from his habitual seclusion during the American civil war, and stood up on many a platform for the cause of the Union. Like his brother, he is a poor public speaker. At his very best he is the professor talking to his class, not the orator addressing a crowd. His manner is singularly constrained, ineffective, and even awkward; his voice is thin and weak. There is a certain very small and rare class of bad speakers, which has yet a virtue and charm of its own almost equal to eloquence. I am now thinking of men utterly wanting in all the arts and graces, in all the power and effect of rhetorical delivery, but who yet with whatever defect of manner can say such striking things, can put such noble thoughts into expressive words, can be so entirely original and so completely masters of their subject, that they seem to be orators in all but voice and manner. Horace Greeley always is, to me at least, such a speaker; so is Stuart Mill. These are bad speakers as Jane Eyre or Consuelo may have been an unlovely woman; all the rules declare against them, all the intelligences and sympathies are in their favor. But Francis Newman is not a speaker of this kind. He is feeble, ineffective, and often even commonplace. Nature has denied to him the faculty of adequately expressing himself in spoken words. He is almost as much out of his element when addressing a public meeting as he would be if he were singing in an opera. Few Englishmen living can claim to be the intellectual superiors of Francis Newman; but you would never know Francis Newman by hearing him speak on a platform. The last time I heard him address a public meeting was on an occasion to which I have already alluded. He was presiding over an assemblage called together to protest against compulsory vaccination. The Government and Parliament have lately made very stringent the enactment for compulsory vaccination, in consequence of the terrible increase of small-pox. There is in London, as in all other great capitals, a certain knot of persons who would refuse to wash their faces or kiss their wives if Government ordered or even recommended either performance. Therefore there was a small agitation got up against vaccination, and Francis Newman consented to become the president of one of its meetings. This meeting was held in Exeter Hall—not indeed in the vast hall where the oratorios are performed, and where once upon a time Henry Ward Beecher pleaded the cause of the Union; but in the "lower hall," as it is called, a little subterranean den. Some eminent classic person, I really forget who, being reproached with the small size of his apartments, declared that he should be only too glad if he could fill his rooms, small as they were, with men his friends. The organizers of this meeting might have been content if they could have filled the hall, small as it was, with men and women their friends. The attendance was not nearly up to the size of the room. There on the platform sat the good, the gifted, and the fearless Francis Newman; and immediately around him were some dozen embodied and living crotchets and crazes. There was this learned physician who has communication with the spirit-world regularly. There was this other eminent person who has long been trying in vain to teach an apathetic Government how to cure crime on phrenological principles. There was Smith, who is opposed to all wars; Brown, who firmly believes that every disease comes from the use of salt; Jones, who has at his own expense put into circulation thousands of copies of his work against the employment of medical men in puerperal cases; Robinson, who is ready to spend his last coin for the purpose of proving that vaccination and original sin are one and the same thing. How often, oh, how often have I not heard those theories expounded! How often have I marvelled at the extraordinary perversion of ingenuity by which figures, facts, philosophy, and Scripture are jumbled up together to convince you that the moon is made of green cheese! We just wanted on this memorable occasion the awful persons who prove to you that the earth is flat, and the indefatigable ladies who expound their claims to the British crown feloniously usurped by Queen Victoria. There sat Francis Newman presiding over this preposterous little conclave, and having of course what seemed to him satisfactory and just reasons for the position he occupied. He spoke rather better than usual, and there was a bewildering bravery of paradox writhing through his speech which must have delighted his listeners. The meeting came to nothing. The papers took hardly any notice of it (London papers were never in my time so entirely conventional, respectable, and Philistinish as they are just now); and Newman's effort went wholly in vain. I have mentioned it only because it was illustrative or typical of so much in the man's whole career. So much of lovely independence; such a disdain of public opinion and public ridicule; such an absence of all perception of the ridiculous! Thus it was that he endeavored to rouse up the English public, who except for the extreme democracy always have had a strong hankering for the Austrian Government, to a sense of the crimes of the House of Hapsburg against its subjects. Thus he was for reform in Parliament when Parliamentary reform was a theme supposed to be dead and buried; when Palmerston had trampled on its ashes, and Disraeli had made merry over its coffin. Thus he came out for the American Union when John Bright stood almost alone in the House of Commons, and Mill and Goldwin Smith and two or three others were trying to organize public opinion outside the House. The same qualities after all which made Newman nearly sublime in these latter instances, were just those which made him well nigh ridiculous in the anti-vaccination business. But in all the instances alike the same thing can be said of Francis Newman. There is a turn or twist of some kind in his nature and intellect which always seems to mar his best efforts at practical accomplishment. Even his purely literary and scholastic productions are marked by the same fatal characteristic. All the outfit, all the materials are there in surprising profusion. There is the culture, there is the intellect, the patience, the sincerity. But the result is not in proportion to the value of the materials. The blending is not complete, is not effectual. Something has always intervened or been wanting. Francis Newman has never done and probably never will do anything equal to his strength and his capacity.
I am not inviting a comparison between these two brothers, so alike in their sincerity, their devotion, their courage, and their gifts—so singularly unlike, so utterly divided, in their creeds and their careers. My own sympathies, of course, naturally go with Francis Newman, who has in a vast majority of instances been a teacher of some opinion, a champion of some political cause of which I am proud to be a disciple and a follower. But I suppose the greater intellect and the richer gifts were those which were given up so meekly and wholly to the service of the dogmatism of the Roman Catholic Church. The career of John Henry Newman may probably be regarded as having practically closed. His latest work of note, "The Grammar of Assent," does not indeed seem to show any falling away of his intellectual powers; but I have heard that his physical strength has suffered severely with years, and he never was a strong man. He is now in his seventieth year, and it is therefore only reasonable to regard him as one who has done his work and whose life is fully open to the judgment of his time. May I be allowed to say that I think he has done some good even to that English Church to which his secession struck so heavy a blow? Newman was really the mainspring of that movement which proposed to rescue the Church from apathy, from dull easy-going quiescence, from the perfunctory discharge of formal duties, and to quicken her once again with the spirit of a priesthood, to arouse her to the living work, physical and spiritual, of an ecclesiastical sovereignty. The impulse indeed overshot itself in his case, and was misdirected in the case of Dr. Pusey, plunging blindly into Romanism with the one, degenerating into a somewhat barren symbolism with the other. But throughout the English Church in general there has been surely a higher spirit at work since that famous Oxford movement which was inspired by John Henry Newman. I think its influence has been more active, more beneficent, more human, and yet at the same time more spiritual, since that sudden and startling impulse was given. For the man himself little more needs to be said. Every one acknowledges his gifts and his virtues. No one doubts that in his marvellous change he sought only the pure truth. His theology, I presume, is not that of the readers of "The Galaxy" in general, any more than it is mine; but I trust there is none of us so narrowed to his own form of Christianity as to refuse his respect and admiration to one so highly lifted above the average of men in goodness and intellect, even though his career may have been sacrificed at the shrine of a faith that is not ours. For me, I am sometimes lost in wonder at the sacrifice, but I can only think with respect and even veneration of the man.
The younger brother needs no apology or vindication, in the United States especially. He is, be it understood, a thoroughly religious man. He has never sunk into materialism or frittered away his earnestness in mere skepticism. He is not orthodox—he has gone his own way as regards church dogma and discipline; but except in the vulgarest and narrowest application of the word, he is no "infidel." The United States owe him some good feeling, for he was one of the few eminent men in England who never were faithless to the cause of the Union, and never doubted of its ultimate triumph. I have now before me one of the most powerful arguments addressed to an English audience for the Union and against secession that reason, justice, and eloquence could frame. It is a pamphlet published in 1863 by "F. W. Newman, late Professor at University College, London," in the form of a "Letter to a Friend who had joined the Southern Independence Association." How wonderful it seems now that such arguments ever should have been needed; how few there were then in England who regarded them; how completely time has justified and sealed them as true, right, and prophetic. I read the pages over, and all the old struggle comes back with its rancors and its dangers, and I honor anew the brave man who was not afraid to stand as one of a little group, isolated, denounced, and laughed at, confiding always in justice and time.
The story of these two brothers is on the whole as strange a chapter as any I know in the biography of human intellect and creed. I think it may at least teach us a lesson of toleration, if nothing better. The very pride of intellect itself can hardly pretend to look down with mere scorn upon beliefs or errors which have carried off in contrary directions these two Newmans. The sternest bigot can scarcely refuse to admit that truthfulness and goodness may abide without the limits of his own creed, when he remembers the high and noble example of pure, true, and disinterested lives which these intellectually-sundered brothers alike have given to their fellow-men.
ARCHBISHOP MANNING.
St. James's Hall, London, is primarily a place for concerts and singers, as Exeter Hall is. But, like its venerable predecessor, St. James's Hall has come to be identified with political meetings of a certain class. Exeter Hall, a huge, gaunt, unadorned, and dreary room in the Strand, is resorted to for the most part as the arena and platform of ultra-Protestantism. St. James's Hall, a beautiful and almost lavishly ornate structure in Piccadilly, is commonly used by the leading Roman Catholics of London when they desire to make a demonstration. There are political classes which will use either place indifferently; but Exeter Hall has usually a tinge of Protestant exclusiveness about its political expression, while the ceiling of the other building has rung alike to the thrilling music of John Bright's voice, to the strident vehemence of Mr. Bradlaugh, the humdrum humming of Mr. Odger, and the clear, delicate, tremulous intonations of Stuart Mill. But I never heard of a Roman Catholic meeting of great importance being held anywhere in London lately, except in St. James's Hall.