In these “uncanonical times,” it may seem somewhat grotesque to go for information about an author’s style to his patron saint. Yet no surer way exists for gaining an insight into the peculiar charm of Cardinal Newman’s writings than through an appeal to St. Philip Neri, the founder of the Congregation of the Oratory, whom Newman chose for his “own special Father and Patron.” In at least two of his discourses, or essays, Newman has analyzed the character and peculiar influence of St. Philip Neri. “Whatever was exact and systematic,” Newman tells us, “pleased him not; he put from him monastic rule and authoritative speech, as David refused the armour of his king. No; he would be but an ordinary individual priest as others; and his weapons should be but unaffected humility and unpretending love. All he did was to be done by the light, and fervour, and convincing eloquence of his personal character and his easy conversation.” In another essay, Newman describes St. Philip’s distrust of “the severity of the Regular” as a means for the control of those whom he sought to subjugate. “Influence,” adroit intimacy, winning intercourse, these were the means by which St. Philip preferred to work on those about him.
Newman’s loving regard for these traits of St. Philip’s genius is a revelation of some of the deepest instincts of his nature,—instincts which must at once be brought into view in any attempt to appreciate his style as a writer of prose. A peculiar personal charm is impressed on all the most characteristic of Newman’s prose-writings,—on whatever he wrote after he had, as an artist, found himself and realized his essential genius. Abstract as his subject may be, he gives it some colour of life and some of the beauty and grace of friendly discourse. Every one knows what charm there is in the talk of a man of the world who puts before his listeners, in picturesque phrases, the variable incidents of actual life as he himself has encountered them. The whim, the personal idiom, the glancing humour, the concrete image, the vivacious disorderliness, the skilful dealing at first hand with glowing human experience, give to talk of this sort a peculiarly winning quality. And the style that in literature mimics afar the colloquial rhythms and the idiom of such familiar talk has also, its peculiar charm. The writer seems to escape from the blank region of authorship, to realize himself before the reader as a friendly face and form, and to communicate himself through the hundred and one subtle signs of eye and voice and gesture and smile that give to actual human intercourse its delight and stimulating power. The extreme form of this colloquial style, where an author is merely amiably garrulous, is not to be found in Newman’s writings; Newman’s temper was, after all, too academic for this, and his subjects were too abstract and difficult. Rarely, however, have topics as speculative as are many of Newman’s been treated with so much of the wayward charm and pliant grace of friendly discourse as Newman reaches. His style, at its best, has the urbanity, the affability, the winning adroitness, even the half-careless desultoriness of the familiar talk of a man of the world with his fellows.
Yet it is not this colloquial grace by itself that gives to Newman’s discussions of abstract topics their peculiar distinction; it is rather his reconciliation of the charm of colloquial freedom with the demands of logical method and thoroughness of treatment. Garrulity to no purpose is usually easy enough. But the peculiarity of Newman’s style and method is that, with all their apparent casualness, they lead the reader to a complete and essentially logical command of the topic under discussion. When he chose, Newman was absolute master of the severe beauty of rational discourse,—of the beauty of that kind of discourse that disdains to follow any associations save those of logic,—discusses with fine economic precision just the aspects of truth that right reason detects as essential to the question in hand, and is everywhere formally correct, systematic, and dignified. His earliest work is often austerely wrought in accordance with this ideal. Ultimately, however, the essential charm that made him so winning in personal intercourse passed over into his prose, and conveyed into it the warmth, and elasticity, and colour of life. Yet this change involved no real sacrifice of structure or loss of firmness in the texture of his thought. And for the trained student of literary method much of the surpassing charm of Newman’s work is due to the possibility of finding in it, on analysis, a continual victorious union of logical strenuousness with the grace and ease and charm of a colloquial manner and idiom. This victory is so easily won as to seem something by the way; but the student and analyst knows that it is the result of rare tact, finely disciplined instinct, exquisite rhetorical insight and foresight, and extraordinary luminousness and largeness of thought.
The very perfection of Newman’s rhetorical manner has exposed him to some unpleasant charges of insincerity. It is not strange that in the midst of a people like the English, who are perhaps somewhat affectedly straightforward and pretentiously downright, Newman should, now and then, have suffered for his adroitness and grace. The bluff, impetuous man is proverbially ready to interpret subtlety as duplicity, and to rebuke reticence and indirectness as deceit and hypocrisy. Prejudice of this sort was probably the real cause of Canon Kingsley’s famous attack upon Newman. He had an instinctive dislike of Newman’s sinuousness and suppleness, and, without pausing to analyze very carefully, he spoke out fiercely against Newman’s whole work as containing a special variety of ecclesiastical hypocrisy. The charge was the more plausible inasmuch as there is unquestionably a certain debased ecclesiastical manner whose cheaply insinuating suavity might, by hasty observers, be confused with Newman’s bearing and style. Yet the injustice of this confusion and the unfairness of Kingsley’s charges become plain after a moment’s analysis.
In spite of Newman’s ease and affability, a fair-minded reader feels, throughout his writings, when he stops to consider, an underlying suggestion of uncompromising strength and unwavering conviction. He is sure that the author is really revealing himself frankly and unreservedly, notwithstanding his apparent self-effacement, and that he is imposing his own conclusions, persuasively and constrainingly. Moreover, the reader is sure that, however adroitly Newman may be developing his thesis, with an eye to the skilful manipulation of his readers’ prejudices, he would at any moment give a point-blank answer to a point-blank question. There is never any real doubt of Newman’s courage and manly English temper, or of his readiness to meet an opponent fairly on the grounds of debate. In the last analysis, it is this fundamental sincerity of tone and this all-pervasive, but unobtrusive self-assertion that preserve Newman’s style from the undue flexibility and the insincerity of the debased ecclesiastical style, just as his unfailing good taste preserves him from its cheap suavity or unctuousness.
But Newman’s adroitness and rhetorical skill have exposed him to charges of still another kind, charges that concern the very substance of his thought and intellectual life, and charges that have been urged with much greater dialectical skill than Canon Kingsley could attain to. In a general examination of Newman’s theories, Mr. E. A. Abbott[16] has accused him of systematically doctoring truth, and of having elaborated, though perhaps unconsciously, various ingenious methods for inveigling unsuspecting readers into the acceptance of doubtful propositions, methods for which Mr. Abbott has devised satirical names, the Art of Lubrication, the Art of Oscillation, the Art of Assimilation. He does not assert that Newman consciously palters with truth, or tries to make the worse appear the better reason. But he urges that Newman was constitutionally fonder of other things than of truth, that he desired, with an over-mastering strength, to establish certain conclusions, and that he persuaded himself of their correctness by a series of manœuvres which really involved insincere logic.
Here, again, the charges that are made against Newman seem the result of prejudice and temperamental hostility on the part of his critic. Mr. Abbott is a bit of a formalist, a Caledonian intellect, a thorough-going positivist, a thinker for whom the only truth that exists is truth that can be scientifically verified. He is quite unable to comprehend, or, at any rate, to tolerate, Newman’s mental constitution and his resulting methods of conceiving of life and relating himself to its facts. Truth is to Newman a much subtler matter, a much more elusive substance, than it is to the positivist, to the mere intellectual dealer in facts and in figures; it cannot be packed into syllogisms as pills are packed into a box; it cannot be conveyed into the human system with the simple directness which the Laputa wiseacre aimed at who was for teaching his pupils geometry by feeding them on paper duly inscribed with geometrical figures. Moreover, language is an infinitely treacherous medium; words are so “false,” so capable of endless change, that one is “loath to prove reason with them.” Readers, too, are widely diverse, and are open to countless other appeals than that of sheer logic. Because of such considerations as these, Newman is continually studious of effect in his writings; he is intensely conscious of his audience; and he is always striving to win a way for his convictions, and aiming to insinuate them into the minds and hearts of his hearers by gently persuasive means.
But all this by no means implies any real carelessness of truth on Newman’s part, or any sacrifice of truth to expediency. Truth is difficult of attainment, and hard to transmit; all the more strenuously does Newman set himself to trace it out in its obscurity and remoteness, and to reveal it in all its intricacies. Moreover, subtle and elusive as it may be, it is nevertheless something tangible and describable and defensible; something, furthermore, of the acquisition of which Newman can give a very definite account; something as far as possible from mere misty sentiment, and something, furthermore, to be strenuously asserted and defended.
Sympathetic and patient readers of Newman, then, can hardly doubt his essential mental integrity or his courage and readiness to be frank, even in those passages or in those works where the search for the subtlest shades of truth, or the desire to avoid clashing needlessly on prejudice, or the wish to win a favourable hearing, takes the author most indirectly and tortuously towards his end. It is his underlying manliness of mind and frank readiness to give an account of himself that prevent Newman’s prevailing subtlety, adroitness, and suavity from leaving on the mind of an unprejudiced reader any impression of timorousness or disingenuousness.