Literature. Causerie of the Week: Dr. Barry's Live of Newman
The Speaker, September 24, 1904
It is very difficult, even for a man of Dr. Barry's acknowledged
capacity, to write the life of a great man who devoted himself to a
cause; of a great man, that is, who by his own greatness perceived that
his own greatness was dust and nothing compared with the greatness of
something else. The biographer of a man like Newman is, in the modern
world, in a dilemma; so is the biographer of a man like Cobden; so is
the biographer of a man like Tolstoy; but so especially is it in the
case of Newman. If the writer introduces the subject of theology, he
will certainly be called a bigot. If he leaves out the subject of
theology, he will certainly be a bigot. He will be a person of such
narrow and choking prejudices that he cannot see in an idea, not merely
the things that are to be said for it, but even the men who say them. He
is not only blind to the spiritual fact that there are Catholic ideals,
but even to the material fact that there are Catholic people. To leave
Catholicism out of Newman is to cut out his inside. To put it in is to
discuss heaven and earth. Dr. Barry has been in a bewildering
difficulty, and has come out of it very well. He has stated clearly the
religious views of Newman. He has then dealt with him as an English man
of letters.
Dr. Barry offers some singularly able and sound observations on Newman's
style; this one, for instance, is particularly true, and its truth
extends perhaps further than it fell into Dr. Barry's task to trace it:
"However fresh or recondite his (Newman's) thoughts, he, like Walter
Scott, attired them in the natural, yet not commonplace terms of the
current language. He never could be quaint, odd, or affected; he went up
to the heights as by steps that were visible to all. If on certain
subjects he remained obscure, even to himself, as he confesses in a
charming letter of his old age, the reason cannot be found in his choice
of words, but lies below them. Thus he is the opposite of Carlyle,
whose vocabulary we learn as though a foreign tongue."
This is indeed a truth, and a truth not confined to the question of
Newman. A fine style is not a narrow or fastidious or aristocratic
thing, as many think. On the contrary, style is the truly democratic
thing, since it touches all common things with the same fairy wand. A
man who loves all men enough to use them rightly is a democrat. A man
who loves all words enough to use them rightly is a stylist. Style comes
out, as the fraternal human sentiment comes out, pre-eminently and most
definitely in dealing with coarse or everyday things. An eloquent
outburst from Carlyle about the stars and the heroes is, in its own way,
fine style. But a page of Newman's Apologia which merely
describes how he left off living at some college and went to live in
some settlement is also fine style. The ideal lover of mankind would
linger over a postcard to his washerwoman, transposing words and
modifying adjectives until it was as perfect as a sonnet.
The one weakness of Newman's temper and attitude as a whole was, I
think, that he lacked the democratic warmth. This had nothing to do with
his religion; for in Manning, who was a far more rigid and central
Catholic than he, democracy roared like a bonfire. It had something to
do with his character and something to do with his training. But in this
matter of a fine style Newman was not doing anything precious or
exclusive; he was doing something entirely human and sociable. Good
style treats verbs and particles as good manners treats chairs and
tables, easily but in the proper way. There is no such thing as being a
gentleman at important moments; it is at unimportant moments that a man
is a gentleman. At important moments he ought to be something better. So
while we can consent to receive some poignant message or violent and
sudden sincerity in any language that the man chooses to use, we feel
that the finest instinct of geniality is to speak of common things with
some dignity and care. No man has ever done this so well as Newman. A
magic that is like a sort of musical accompaniment changes and heightens
the most prosaic fragments of personal biography or scholastic
explanation. And in this, as I say, he achieves for a time, Tory and
recluse as he is, that awful and beautiful thing which is the dream of
all democracy, the seeing of all things as wonderful, the thing for
which Whitman strove and which he did not perfectly attain. In this
respect Carlyle and Walt Whitman (that immeasurably greater man) are
even the aristocrats compared to this classical embroiderer. They spoke
in a tongue not understood of the people. They were bold and boisterous
and personal, as the better kind of aristocrats are always bold and
boisterous and personal.
There is another element in Newman's style which is worth noticing as a
guide for all controversialists. He had the same knack in discussion
which Gladstone had, the air of not being in any way in a hurry. Young
men who read Gladstone's speeches in printed books just after his career
had closed in unpopularity often could not see wherein lay the
overwhelming witchcraft which made vast audiences rise like one man and
vast combinations follow the orator to defeat. The oratorical style
seemed to them wordy and winding, full of endless parentheses and
needless distinctions. The truth is, I imagine, that it was precisely
the air of leisure and large-mindedness, this scrupulosity about
exceptions, this allowance for misunderstandings, that gave to the final
assertion its sudden fire. Both Newman and Gladstone often seemed, in
their mildness and restraint, a long time coming to the point, but the
point was deadly sharp. This is very much mirrored in their style. Both
men had one particularly rhetorical effect perfectly: the art of passing
smoothly and yet suddenly from philosophical to popular language. A
hundred examples or parallels might be given if I had all their works
before me: one parallel, which I happen to remember, may suffice.
Gladstone, in answering one of the early Unionist orators who had
appealed to the idea that all the intellectual people were Unionist,
very gently deprecated this mode of argument. He asked his hearers (I
have forgotten the words, but there were a great many of them and they
were very long ones) to confess, if necessary, that they were the
inferiors of their opponents in erudition, in opportunities, in culture.
"So that nothing remains for us," he said, "but to show that we have
better manners"— and the sudden stress on the word must have been
like a blow. Almost exactly the same kind of abrupt colloquialism marks
the wonderful termination of the introduction to the Apologia.
With careful and melancholy phrases Newman describes how delicate and
painful a matter it must necessarily be to give an account to the world
of all the secret transitions of the soul. "But I do not like to be
called a knave and liar to my face, and-." The dramatic effect is almost
exactly the same. It is, indeed, a rather singular fact that although
Newman's style is so harmonious and limpid, yet the peculiar force of
that style generally consists in its use for sharply different purposes.
Nobody, I imagine, who has read the Apologia will ever forget
that transition, which strikes the reader not only as thrilling but
almost as queer, in the passage dealing with his first relations with
Edgbaston. He describes, in quiet detail, how he went to this place and
that place; how he was, in consequence, asked this and that question;
how his opponents could not explain legitimately his reason for leaving
on such and such a day or going to such and such a destination; how they
plied him with questions and haunted him with suggestions. Then he
turns and calls them, with a cry like thunder, "Cowards." "It is not
you," he says, "that I fear; it is not you from whom I am hiding, Di me terrent et Jupiter hostis."
The truth was, as I fancy, that it was very fortunate for Newman,
considered merely as a temperament and a personality, that he was forced
into that insatiably fighting thing, the Catholic Church, and that he
was forced into it in a deeply Protestant country. His spirit might have
been too much protected by the politeness of our English temper and our
modern age, but it was flayed alive by the living spirit of "No
Popery." The frigid philosopher was called a liar and turned into a man.
Perhaps the chief defect of Dr. Barry's book (if a mere omission of one
interesting fact out of a million can be called a defect) is that he
has not dwelt upon that one outburst of wild and exuberant satire in
which Newman indulged: I mean his comparison (in the first lecture on
"The Position of English Catholics") of the English view of the Catholic
Church to the probable Russian view of the British Constitution. It is
one of the great pages of fierce English humour. Why he thus once
exploded into fantastic derision I do not know. But I suspect that it
was because Birmingham was full of "No Popery" rioters and his back was
to the wall. This man, when he was in the sweet but too refined
atmosphere of the Oxford High Churchmen, had shed many tears. But, like
all brave men when he first saw the face of battle he began to laugh.
[BTW, here is the first lecture on the "The Position of English Catholics" which Chesterton alludes to in the final paragraph]
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