For still another reason the lectures on the Present Position of Catholics are specially interesting to a student of Newman’s methods; they illustrate exceptionally well his skill in the use of irony. To the genuine rhetorician there is something specially attractive in the duplicity of irony, because of the opportunity it offers of playing with points of view, of juggling with phrases, of showing virtuosity in the manipulation of both thoughts and words. Newman was too much of a rhetorician not to feel this fascination. Moreover, he had learned from his study of Copleston and Whately the possibilities of irony as a controversial weapon. Copleston’s Advice to a Young Reviewer, and Whately’s Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Buonaparte were typical specimens of academic irony, where, with impressive dignity and suavity and the most plausible simplicity and candour, the writers, while seemingly advocating a certain policy, or theory, or set of conclusions, were really sneering throughout at a somewhat similar policy or theory—that of their opponents—and laying it open to helpless ridicule.
One of the most noteworthy characteristics of Newman’s irony—and in this point his irony resembled that of his masters—was its positive argumentative value. Often an elaborate piece of irony is chiefly destructive; it turns cleverly into ridicule the general attitude of mind of the writer’s opponents, but makes no attempt to supply a substitute for the faith it destroys. Swift’s irony is usually of this character. It is intensely ill-natured, even savage, and is so extravagant that it sometimes defeats its own end as argument. Its hauteur and bitterness produce a reaction in the mind of the reader, and force him to distrust the judgment and sanity of a man who can be so inveterately and fiercely insolent. Its indictment is so sweeping and its mood so cynical, that the reader, though he is bullied out of any regard for the ideas that Swift attacks, is repelled from Swift himself, and made to hate his notions as much as he despises those of Swift’s opponents. Moreover, full of duplicity and innuendo as it is, its innuendoes are often merely disguised sneers, and not suggestions of genuinely valid reasons why the opinions or prejudices which the writer is assailing should be abandoned. In the Modest Proposal and the Argument against Abolishing Christianity, for example, the irony reduces to one long sneer at the prejudice, the selfishness, and the cruelty of Yahoo human nature; there is very little positive argument in behalf of the oppressed Irish on the one hand, or in favour of Christianity on the other.
Newman’s irony, on the contrary, is subtle, intellectual, and suggestive. It is positive in its insinuation of actual reasons for abandoning prejudice against Roman Catholics; it is tirelessly adroit, and adjusts itself delicately to every part of the opposing argument; it is suggestive of new ideas, and not only makes the reader see the absurdity of some time-worn prejudice, but hints at its explanation and is ready with a new opinion to take its place. In tone, too, it is very different from Swift’s irony; it is not enraged and blindly savage, but more like the best French irony—self-possessed, suave, and oblique. Newman addresses himself with unfailing skill to the prejudices of those whom he is trying to move, and carries his readers with him in a way that Swift was too contemptuous to aim at. Newman’s irony wins the wavering, while it routs the hostile. This is the double task it proposes to itself.
An example of his irony at its best may be found in the amusing piece of declamation against the British Constitution and John Bullism which Newman puts into the mouth of a Russian count. The passage occurs in a lecture on the Present Position of Catholics, which was delivered just before the war with Russia, when English jealousy of Russia and contempt for Russian prejudice and ignorance were most intense. It was, of course, on these feelings of jealousy and contempt that Newman skilfully played when he represented the Russian count as grotesquely misinterpreting the British Constitution and Blackstone’s Commentaries, and as charging them with irreligion and blasphemy. His satirical portrayal of the Russian and the clever manipulation by which he forces the count to exhibit his stores of ungentle dulness and his stock of malignant prejudice delighted every ordinary British reader, and threw him into a pleasant glow of self-satisfaction, and of sympathy with the author; now this was the very mood, as Newman was well aware, in which, if ever, the anti-Catholic reader might be led to question with himself whether, after all, he was perfectly informed about Roman Catholicism, or whether he did not, like the Russian count, take most of his knowledge at second-hand and inherit most of his prejudice. Throughout this passage the ingenuity is conspicuous with which Newman makes use of English dislike of Russia and loyalty to Queen and Constitution; the passage everywhere exemplifies the adroitness, the flexibility, the persuasiveness, and the far-reaching calculation of Newman’s irony.
Indeed, this elaborateness and self-consciousness, and deliberateness of aim, are perhaps, at times, limitations on the success of his irony; it is somewhat too cleverly planned and a trifle over-elaborate. In these respects it contrasts disadvantageously with French irony, which, at its best, is so delightfully by the way, so airily unexpected, so accidental, and yet so dextrously fatal. It would be an instructive study in literary method to compare Newman’s ironical defence of Roman Catholicism in the passage already referred to with Montesquieu’s ironical attack upon the same system in the Lettres Persanes.
[V]
When we turn from Newman’s methods to his style in the narrower meaning of the term, we still find careful elaboration and ingenious calculation of effect, although here, again, the conscientious workmanship becomes evident only on reflection, and the general impression is that of easy and instinctive mastery. Nevertheless, Newman wrought out all that he wrote, with much patient recasting and revising. “It is simply the fact,” he tells a friend in one of his letters, “that I have been obliged to take great pains with everything I have written, and I often write chapters over and over again, besides innumerable corrections and interlinear additions.... I think I have never written for writing’s sake; but my one and single desire and aim has been to do what is so difficult: viz., to express clearly and exactly my meaning; this has been the motive principle of all my corrections and rewritings.”[21]
It is perhaps this sincerity of aim and this sacrifice of the decorative impulse in the strenuous search for adequacy of expression that keep out of Newman’s writing every trace of artificiality. Sophisticated as is his style, it is never mannered. There is no pretence, no flourish, no exhibition of rhetorical resources for their own sake. The most impressive and the most richly imaginative passages in his prose come in because he is betrayed into them in his conscientious pursuit of all the aspects of the truth he is illustrating. Moreover, they are curiously congruous in tone with the most colloquial parts of his writing. There is no sudden jar perceptible when, in the midst of his ordinary discourse, one chances upon these passages of essential beauty; perfect continuity of texture is characteristic of his work. This perfect continuity of texture illustrates both the all-pervasive fineness and nobleness of Newman’s temper, which constantly holds the elements of moral and spiritual beauty in solution, and which imprints a certain distinction upon even the commonplace, and also the flexibility and elasticity of his style, which enables him with such perfect gradation of effect to change imperceptibly from the lofty to the common. An admirable example of this exquisite gradation of values and continuity of texture may be found in the third chapter of Newman’s Rise and Progress of Universities, where he describes Athens and the region round about as the ideal site for a university. Alike in the earlier paragraphs that are merely expository, and in the later ones that portray the beauty of Attica, his style is simple and easily colloquial; and when from the splendid imaginative picture that his descriptive sentences call up, he turns again suddenly to exposition, the transition causes no perceptible jar. The same flexibility and smoothness of style is exemplified in a passage in the third of the discourses on University Teaching, where he defines his conception of the Science of Theology. In this passage, the change from a scientific explanation of the duties of the theologian to the almost impassioned eloquence of the ascription of goodness and might to the Deity is effected with no shock or sense of discontinuity.
In its freedom from artificiality and in its perfect sincerity, Newman’s style contrasts noticeably with the style of a great rhetorician from whom he nevertheless took many hints—De Quincey. Of his careful study of De Quincey’s style there can be no question. In the passage on the Deity, to which reference has just been made, there are unmistakable reminiscences of De Quincey in the iteration of emphasis on an important word, in the frequent use of inversions, in the rise and fall of the periods, and, indeed, in the subtle rhythmic effects throughout. The piece of writing, however, where the likeness to De Quincey and the imitation of his manner and music are most evident is the sermon on the Fitness of the Glories of Mary,—that piece of Newman’s prose, it should be noted, which is least defensible against the charge of artificiality and undue ornateness. A passage near the close of the sermon best illustrates the points in question: “And therefore she died in private. It became Him, who died for the world, to die in the world’s sight; it became the Great Sacrifice to be lifted up on high, as a light that could not be hid. But she, the Lily of Eden, who had always dwelt out of the sight of man, fittingly did she die in the garden’s shade, and amid the sweet flowers in which she had lived. Her departure made no noise in the world. The Church went about her common duties, preaching, converting, suffering. There were persecutions, there was fleeing from place to place, there were martyrs, there were triumphs. At length the rumour spread abroad that the Mother of God was no longer upon earth. Pilgrims went to and fro; they sought for her relics, but they found them not; did she die at Ephesus? or did she die at Jerusalem? reports varied; but her tomb could not be pointed out, or if it was found, it was open; and instead of her pure and fragrant body, there was a growth of lilies from the earth which she had touched. So inquirers went home marvelling, and waiting for further light.”[22]
Though the cadences of Newman’s prose are rarely as marked as here, a subtle musical beauty runs elusively through it all. Not that there is any of the sing-song of pseudo-poetic prose. The cadences are always wide-ranging and delicately shifting, with none of the halting iteration and feeble sameness of half-metrical work. Moreover, the rhythms, subtly pervasive as they are, and even symbolic of the mood of the passage as they often prove to be, never compel direct recognition, but act merely as a mass of undistinguished under-and over-tones like those which give to a human voice depth and tenderness and suggestiveness.