The foregoing analysis has tended to illustrate the facts that Newman aimed to make religion an intensely concrete, personal experience, and to fill out the spiritual life with widely varying and richly beautiful feeling; and that he also set himself everywhere, consciously and directly, against the eighteenth century ideal, according to which reason was the sole discoverer and arbiter of truth and regulator of conduct. In these respects, Newman’s work was in perfect harmony with that of the Romanticists. Like them he was pleading for the spontaneous, for the emotions and the imagination, for what is most vital in life, in opposition to the formalists, the systematizers, and the devotees of logic.
In the following points, then, Newman’s kinship with the Romanticists is recognizable: in his imaginative sympathy with the past, in the range and perspective of his historical consciousness, and in his devotion to an ideal framed largely in accordance with a loving reverence for mediæval life. His vein of mysticism, his imaginative sympathy with Nature, his interpretation of Nature as symbolic of spiritual truth, his rejection of reason as the guide of life, and his recognition of the inadequacy of generalizations and formulas to the wealth of actual life and to the intensity and variety of personal experience, are also characteristics that mark his relation to the men of his period.
Finally, his very style in the narrowest meaning of the term also classes Newman among Romantic writers. His debt to De Quincey has already been noted. Though he is rarely, if ever, so ornate as De Quincey, and though he perhaps never weaves his prose into such a lustrous, shining surface through the continual use of sensations and images as does De Quincey in his impassioned prose, yet the glowing beauty, the picture-making power, the occasional imaginative splendour, the elaborate swelling music of Newman’s writings, place him as a master of prose in the same group with De Quincey, and Ruskin, and Carlyle, and part him from Landor, or Macaulay, or Matthew Arnold. No prose can more surely send quivering over the nerves a sense of the shadowing mystery of life, than certain of Newman’s sermons, and passages here and there in his Apologia and in his Essays. Through the play, then, of his imagination, its rhythms and beat of the wing, because of the ease with which in a moment his prose can carry the reader into regions of impassioned and mystical feeling, even because of the vital, intimate warmth and colour of his phrasing,—qualities so different from the hard, external glitter of Macaulay’s specific, but rhetorical style,—Newman reveals his kinship with the great group of poets and prose-writers who deepened and enriched the imaginative life of the early part of our century. Ecclesiasticism and Academicism are proverbially conservative powers. It may be for this reason that the new spiritual forces of Romanticism did not renovate the Church through the Oxford movement until a full generation after they had made almost wholly their own the purely imaginative literature and life of the English nation.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
[I]
Admirers of Arnold’s prose find it well to admit frankly that his style has an unfortunate knack of exciting prejudice. Emerson has somewhere spoken of the unkind trick fate plays a man when it gives him a strut in his gait. Here and there in Arnold’s prose, there is just a trace—sometimes more than a trace—of such a strut. He condescends to his readers with a gracious elaborateness; he is at great pains to make them feel that they are his equals; he undervalues himself playfully; he assures us that “he is an unlearned bellettristic trifler”; he insists over and over again that “he is an unpretending writer, without a philosophy based on interdependent, subordinate, and coherent principles.” All this he does smilingly; but the smile seems to many on whom its favours fall, supercilious; and the playful under-valuation of self looks shrewdly like an affectation. He is very debonair,—this apologetic writer, very self-assured, at times even jaunty.
Stanch admirers of Arnold have always relished this strain in his style; they have enjoyed its delicate challenge, the nice duplicity of its innuendoes; they have found its insinuations and its covert, satirical humour infinitely entertaining and stimulating. Moreover, however seriously disposed they may be, however exacting of all the virtues from the author of their choice, they have been able to reconcile their enjoyment of Arnold with their serious inclinations, for they have been confident that these tricks of manner implied no essential or radical defect in Arnold’s humanity, no lack either of sincerity or of earnestness or of broad sympathy.
Such admirers and interpreters of Arnold have been amply justified of their confidence since the publication in 1895 of Arnold’s Letters. The Arnold of these letters is a man the essential integrity—wholeness—of whose nature is incontestable. His sincerity, kindliness, wide-ranging sympathy with all classes of men are unmistakably expressed on every page of his correspondence. We see him having to do with people widely diverse in their relations to him: with those close of kin, with chance friends, with many men of business or officials, with a wide circle of literary acquaintances, with workingmen, and with foreign savants. In all his intercourse the same sweet-tempered frankness and the same readiness of sympathy are manifest. There is never a trace of the duplicity or the treacherous irony that are to be found in much of his prose.
Moreover, the record that these Letters contain of close application to uncongenial tasks must have been a revelation to many readers who have had to rely upon books for their knowledge of literary men. Popular caricatures of Arnold had represented him as “a high priest of the kid-glove persuasion,” as an incorrigible dilettante, a literary fop idling his time away over poetry and recommending the parmaceti of culture as the sovereignest thing in nature for the inward bruises of the spirit. This conception of Arnold, if it has at all maintained itself, certainly cannot survive the revelations of the Letters. The truth is beyond cavil that he was among the most self-sacrificingly laborious men of his time.
For a long period of years Arnold held the post of inspector of schools. Day after day, and week after week, he gave up one of the finest of minds, one of the most sensitive of temperaments, one of the most delicate of literary organizations, to the drudgery of examining in its minutest details the work of the schools in such elementary subjects as mathematics and grammar. On January 7, 1863, he writes to his mother, “I am now at the work I dislike most in the world—looking over and marking examination papers. I was stopped last week by my eyes, and the last year or two these sixty papers a day of close handwriting to read have, I am sorry to say, much tried my eyes for the time.” Two years later he laments again: “I am being driven furious by seven hundred closely written grammar papers, which I have to look over.” During these years he was holding the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, and he had long since established his reputation as one of the foremost of the younger poets. Yet for a livelihood he was forced still to endure—and he endured them till within a few years of his death in 1888—the exactions of this wearing and exasperating drudgery. Moreover, despite occasional outbursts of impatience, he gave himself to the work freely, heartily, and effectively. He was sent on several occasions to the Continent to examine and report on foreign school systems; his reports on German and French education show immense diligence of investigation, a thorough grasp of detail, and patience and persistence in the acquisition of facts that in and for themselves must have been unattractive and unrewarding.