An accusation that truth
for its own sake had never been a virtue with the Roman catholic
clergy was supplemented by a gratuitous mention of Newman,
and, for this, the only substantiation offered was a reference to a
sermon delivered when the preacher was still ministering in the
English church.
for its own sake had never been a virtue with the Roman catholic
clergy was supplemented by a gratuitous mention of Newman,
and, for this, the only substantiation offered was a reference to a
sermon delivered when the preacher was still ministering in the
English church.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v12
L.
XII.
CH. XII.
17
## p. 258 (#282) ############################################
258
The Oxford Movement [CH.
The first of the tracts was Newman's own, Thoughts on the
Ministerial Commission, respectfully addressed to the Clergy ;
and all the early tracts sounded the same notes of stress and
danger and appeal. Other writers joined, some of them men of
great power, and worthy to be leaders in a great cause; but
perhaps in Newman and Froude alone was there the indubitable
touch of real genius. Of Froude, those who knew him best said,
when he had passed away, before the movement had reached more
than its initial stages, that 'men with all their health and strength
about them might gaze on his attenuated form, struck with a
certain awe of wonderment at the brightness of his wit, the
intenseness of his mental vision, and the iron strength of his
argument. ' His Remains (1838 and 1839) show the daring of
his spirit, the directness, if narrowness, of his vision and the
sympathy with which he appreciated the history of the church's
past. His analysis and summary of the letters of Becket is
remarkable for the time at which it was written and has not a
few points of enduring value. In 1834, the tract writers were
joined by Edward Bouverie Pusey, regius professor of Hebrew
since 1828, a scholar of eminence who was already of great
weight in the university and the church. Newman said of his
accession to the movement that ‘he was able to give a name,
a fame, and a personality to what was without him a sort of
mob. ' Tract no. 18, Thoughts on the Benefits of the System of
Fasting enjoined by our Church was issued with his initials.
Isaac Williams, who was with him and Newman when it was
agreed that he should contribute, says that the initials were added
to show that he was in no way responsible for the other tracts;
but the Record newspaper took them as showing his sanction, and
the nickname 'Puseyite' was soon affixed to all the writers and
their friends, and it stuck.
The tracts were now well launched, and those who wrote them
were a coherent body, with common aims and something of a
common style in English writing: intensely serious, unaffected,
without the slightest ornament or rhetoric, but dignified and, in
later issues, reflecting in the language the weight and elaboration
of the argument. John William Bowden, William Palmer, Arthur
Philip Perceval, Isaac Williams were others who added each a
distinctive character to the general impression; and the last of
these was a genuine poet and the master of a singularly limpid
and attractive prose style.
In a few words, the history of the movement of which the tracts
## p. 259 (#283) ############################################
X1] Newman at St Mary's 259
were the chief literary output may be told. A great impetus was
given by the preaching of Newman at St Mary's, of which an
immortal description exists by John Campbell Shairp, who became
principal of the United college at St Andrews and professor of
poetry at Oxford. The English church had produced many great
preachers since the reformation. Men had hung on the words
of Donne, had crowded to hear Stillingfleet and Tillotson; but
no man had ever moved others so deeply by such simple means
as Newman. All was quiet, restrained, subdued; the voice soft,
almost monotonous, the eyes hardly ever lifted from the paper;
but old truths were touched into life, when he spoke of 'Unreal
Words,' of the ‘Individuality of the Soul,' of the 'Invisible World,
and again of 'warfare the condition of victory,' the Cross of Christ
the measure of the world,' or 'the Christian Church a home for
the lonely. The sermons gave to every cause which Newman
supported a following of enthusiastic supporters. In 1836, the
strength of the party was shown in the attack on Hampden
when he was made regius professor of divinity. Efforts of Roman
catholics in England under a new leader (Wiseman) were also met
by Newman in lectures on Romanism and popular protestantism;
in tract 71, he condemned the Roman form of various Christian
doctrines; and the witness of the ancient church was collected in a
series, begun in 1836 and lasting some forty years, of translations en-
titled Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, anterior to the Division
of East and West. Yet, other influences were already at work.
An important addition to the company of friends proved eventually
to be an impulse towards Rome. With Frederick Oakeley and
Frederick Faber, came a man of much greater power, William
George Ward, fellow of Balliol, a dialectician of extraordinary
skill, an ebullient humourist and, as a friend, full of devotion and
charm. But the book which had attracted him was the first
severe blow the movement received. It was the first two volumes
of Literary Remains of Richard Hurrell Froude (1838), and its
unsparing condemnation of the reformers and the reformation
alienated many supporters, alarmed those ignorant of history
and turned the mass of the public into bitter opponents. Already,
the school of liberalism in theology had attacked the tracts,
Arnold using as violent language against the Oxford malignants'
as was ever used against Wesley, and declaring that their work
was to change sense into silliness and holiness into formality and
hypocrisy. Still, recruits crowded to the banner of the tractarians.
Newman succeeded to the editorship of the famous British Critic,
2
17--2
## p. 260 (#284) ############################################
260
[CH.
The Oxford Movement
6
a literary magazine whose importance dated from the days of the
younger Pitt. It seemed as if the friends stood firmly in con-
servative ways. Behind them was the figure of that wonderful
old scholar, theologian and tory, Martin Joseph Routh (1755—
1854), president of Magdalen, reserved, as Newman wrote in 1838,
'to report to a forgetful generation what was the theology of their
fathers. ' But, already the new accessions had cut into the original
movement at an angle, fallen across its line of thought and then
set about turning that line in its own direction. Tract 87, by
Isaac Williams, On reserve in communicating religious knowledge,
more by its title, probably—for all who did not read it, and some
who did, entirely misunderstood it—than by its contents, alarmed
many, and the author was easily defeated when he stood for the
Oxford professorship of poetry. It was war now, and war within
the field of English letters. Newman, in tract 90, repeated the
argument of Sta. Clara in Charles I's time that the XXXIX
Articles could not historically be directed against the council of
Trent and were at least patient of an interpretation accordant
with the theology of the catholic church. Such an argument
.
was familiar enough and could only alarm the ignorant. But
this it effectually did. The heads of houses awoke from torpor,
and, except the patriarch president of Magdalen, and the rector
of Exeter, under the influence of four college tutors (one of whom,
Archibald Campbell Tait, of Balliol, lived to become archbishop of
Canterbury), condemned the tract in March 1841. Bishops 'charged'
against the author, and, at the same time, the English church seemed
committed to an agreement with Prussian protestantism in the
creation of a bishopric for Jerusalem. And then Newman himself
received a serious blow to his own intellectual stability. The con-
fidence of his studies in the history of the early church was abruptly
broken by an article in The Dublin Review, September 1839,
on the Donatists, written by Wiseman, the leader of the new
and dominant party among the English Roman catholics. Other
points in the story of ancient heresies seemed to him to look
the same way. The 'palmary words' of St Augustine, securus
judicat orbis terrarum, struck him in a new light. The bishops'
condemnation weighed heavily on him, and he began to feel that
he could not remain in a church which did not allow his sense
of the Articles. Early in 1842, he left Oxford and went to live
three miles away, but still in his parish, at Littlemore. He
resigned his living in September 1843 and withdrew into lay
communion. His last sermon, a lament of singular beauty for the
## p. 261 (#285) ############################################
XII] The Secession of Newman
261
church of England, was preached at Littlemore, on 25 September
1843. Already, a sermon by Pusey, which a little knowledge of
seventeenth century theology would have shown never to have
travelled beyond the limits of the Caroline divines, had been
condemned by the heads of houses, without a hearing or any
statement of reasons. And, to add to the disasters which beset
the tractarians, the irrepressible W. G. Ward published a heavy
and exasperating book, The Ideal of a Christian Church. He
gloried in the 'most joyful, most wonderful, most unexpected,
sight! we find the whole cycle of Roman doctrine gradually
possessing numbers of English churchmen. ' On 13 February
1845, the movement reached its crisis at Oxford. Convocation,
attended by more than a thousand members of the university, the
most famous as well as the most obscure, condemned the book
and deprived the author of his degrees. A proposal to censure
tract 90 was defeated by the veto of the proctors. The scene, of
passion and humour and snowballs, has often been described; and
Edward Freeman, in later years the historian of the Norman con-
quest, set it to verse after the style of Macaulay's Virginia. It was,
as R. W. Church, then junior proctor, wrote in after years, ‘not only
the final defeat and conclusion of the first stage of the movement.
It was the birthday of the modern Liberalism of Oxford. ' On
9 October, Newman was received into the church of Rome.
From that moment, the story ceases to be picturesque or
passionate. Those in whom the original principles of the Oxford
leaders had been firmly rooted, Keble and Pusey, Isaac Williams
and Charles Marriott, Richard Church and James Mozley, remained
to teach to the next generation the doctrines for which they had
suffered. The movement took its place in the history of the
English church.
It passed away from Oxford. Part of its influence went Rome-
wards with Newman. Part remained, with the two stalwarts
among its first leaders, to leaven the life of the whole church of
England. Keble died in 1866, having written nothing which
achieved the popularity of The Christian Year; but, till the last
there remained much of the grace and sober sweetness of his early
manner in all that he wrote. Pusey lived till 16 September 1882,
when he had survived all his first associates, except Newman, and
most of their first disciples. Year by year, he produced books of
massive learning and unbending orthodoxy. Lord chancellor
Selborne said of him that he was a power in the Church of
England greater than Archbishop or Bishop for more than half
## p. 262 (#286) ############################################
262
[CH.
The Oxford Movement
a century. Theological literature which issued from the press
under his name as author or editor or with his imprimatur found
a ready market. So long as he lived there was still something of
a theological public, as there had been in the days of the Caroline
divines. And, in the Roman obedience, and created a cardinal in
1879, Newman lingered on till 1890, having almost ceased to
write. When he died, the literary influence he had represented
was at its last gasp.
It is difficult, while the controversies in which the Oxford
writers were protagonists are still scarce cold, to estimate the
position which the movement will occupy in English literature. In
manner, expression, tone, the twentieth century presents a piquant
contrast to the severity of sixty years ago. If theologians still
think seriously, they are wont to write flippantly. To the trac-
tarians, the manner reflected the solemnity of the matter with which
they were concerned. Pusey, whose learning and stability far sur-
passed that of any of his contemporaries in the arena, cared nothing
for grace of expression, achieved lucidity not without an effort,
but was the heir of the dignity of the ancient divines. He was
a master of serried argument, repeating his blows as with a
hammer, cogent, cumulative, compelling, if not convincing, to
assent, rarely epigrammatic, never concise. He was mainly a
preacher, a commentator, a minister to individual souls, surpass-
ingly sincere, profoundly erudite, piercingly appellant. Nor was
the range of his survey limited. He could pass easily from Semitic
scholarship to constitutional history, from French pietism to social
reforms: on each subject, he was an expert. His style, like his
mind, was eminently traditional and conservative. He denounced
the doctrine that the original of government was with the people,
and 'the so-called social compact,' with as much determination as
he defended the symbol of Chalcedon or the rights and claims of
the poor. And the language in which he expressed all this was
the language of an Elizabethan without its elasticity or a Caroline
without its quaintness. He was no pedant for pure English, still
less for the vocabulary of a pedagogue reared upon the classical
tongues. There seems no art in his sentences, and yet it is not
true that there is none. But, what art there is is only that of
taking pains-not, like Newman, to say a thing in the best as well
as the clearest way in which it can be said, but only to say it so
that it is certain to be understood. So, he is found sometimes
writing sentences as short and trenchant as Macaulay's; yet, far
more often, you will come across one in which, without hesitation,
## p. 263 (#287) ############################################
X11]
263
Pusey as a a
Writer
6
he has extended his meaning to nearly four hundred words.
His style, eminently, was one that had its best effect when read
aloud. Often a phrase is pungent and arresting: rarely does
a sentence linger in the memory. But the power and weight that
belong to his greatest efforts is indubitable. For sheer solemnity,
pathos and grandeur, there was nothing in the century in which
he lived that surpassed the two sermons preached, the one in 1843,
before, and the cause of, his suspension, and the other in 1846, on
the resumption of this my office among you,' of which he had been
deprived. The sentences at the beginning of the second are
characteristic:
It will be in the memory of some that when, nearly three years past, Almighty
God (for 'secret faults' which He knoweth, and from which, I trust, He
willed thereby the rather to 'cleanse' me), allowed me to be deprived for
a time of this my office among yon, I was endeavouring to mitigate the stern
doctrine of the heavy character of a Christian's sins, by pointing out the
mercies of God which might reassure the penitent, the means of his
restoration, the earnests of his pardon. And in so doing, it seemed best, first
to dwell upon the unfathomable mercies of God in Christ, the exhaustless
abyss of mercy in the Infinite Fountain of Mercy;-when it is not finally shut
out, Infinite as Himself, as being poured out from His Infinity; and then,
more directly, on all those untold and ineffable mercies contained in the
intercession of our Lord, at the Right Hand of God, for us. For so, I hoped,
would the hearts of penitents be the more fixed upon Him, the Source of all
mercies, and their faith be strengthened, and they the more hope that no
depth of past sin could utterly sever them from the love of Christ; nay, could
sever them from no degree of fulness of His unspeakable lovel.
Primarily, what he wrote bears the impress of his deep devotion.
Whether he wrote about religion or not, what he wrote was
religious. But, secondarily, all his writings bore the mark of his
indomitable and tenacious spirit. And all that he wrote was
balanced, proportionate, sensitive to distinctions, receptive of
truths new and old. The very character of all the tractarians was
sincerity, and most conspicuously of all did this belong to Pusey.
When others left their old moorings he remained firmly anchored to
the past of the church. He foresaw the dark future, but he stayed
himself on the things of old. When others looked only on England,
his view extended beyond, to the country whence he espied a
coming danger. He foresaw that what he had seen in Germany
would come to his own land. “This will all come upon us in
England, and how utterly unprepared we are ! But then, as he
said, he was in the English church by the providence of God; and
there he found all that he needed, though not all, perhaps, that he
could desire. And thus, to him, the Oxford movement was only
Entire Absolution of the Penitent: A Sermon, 1846, pp. 1, 2.
6
## p. 264 (#288) ############################################
264
[ch.
The Oxford Movement
a call upon the succours of the past. As he wrote more than forty
years after the first tract-
When we were awakened, the Revival was wholly from within. We did not
open a Roman book. We did not think of them. Rome was quiet at that
time in itself. It was only, for political ends, assimilating itself as much as
it could to us. “We must own,' Cardinal Wiseman said, 'that we have been
a little ashamed of our special doctrines. However, we had all which we
wanted within our Church. We had the whole range of Christian doctrine,
and did not look beyond, except to the Fathers, to whom our Church sent us.
One, of whom I thought far more than myself, said, 'We have range enough
in those before us, to whatever the pigmies may growl!
It was Keble, no doubt, whom Pusey thus quoted. And Keble,
like Pusey, and far more than Newman, had his roots in the past.
If Pusey's name was given to the followers of the movement, it
was, unquestionably, Keble who gave it its first popularity. His
sermon inaugurated it, and its principles were those of The
Christian Year. That book, said Newman once, laughingly, was
the fons et origo mali. And in it we see the nature of the influ-
ence which the movement exercised, not only upon theology, but
upon literature. Here, again, is the note of sincerity, first and
foremost: sincerity which means purity, also, and
The princely heart of innocence.
But sincerity, with Keble, does not mean narrowness. Dean Stanley
said of The Christian Year that it had a real openness of mind
for the whole large view of the Church and the world. ' It could
hardly be otherwise with the work of a writer who was steeped
in the ancient classic literatures and had a deep sympathy with
nature as well as human life. And the result is a poetic vision of
the sacredness of life, in town and country, in art and labour, in
literature as well as prayer. Nature, to the poet, is a sacrament of
God. And its appeal has no need to be heightened beyond what
the poet feels himself: the mark of his art is its veracity. He
writes exactly as he thinks. But he thinks in the manner of the
early nineteenth century, and the manner sometimes prevents the
thought from reaching in clear directness the generations of later
time. A simple thought is not always expressed in simple style.
Keble's poetry is eminently literary and reminiscent: it is the work
of a well-read-almost a too well-read-man. And the memory now
and again goes near to quench the inspiration. The Christian Year
is, eminently, a book of its own period, as that period was seen by
one who, most of all, was a scholar and a saint. And Keble was,
· Pusey's Spiritual Letters, p. 239.
## p. 265 (#289) ############################################
XII]
265
Isaac Williams
a
besides, a preacher and a critic. If his sermons cannot be placed in
that rank which Newman alone of the nineteenth century preachers
can claim to have reached, they have, at least, one conspicuous
merit-at least in his later volumes—their absolute directness and
simplicity. He spoke, first and foremost, so as to be understood
by everyone, and yet from such a height of personal experience that,
as one said who heard him, you seemed to be amidst the rustling
of angels' wings. The preaching of the tractarians, like that of the
Caroline divines, was eminently doctrinal, yet it did not abandon
the direct morality of the eighteenth century; it rather raised it, by
the conjunction, to a higher power. As a critic, Keble has sympathy
and depth, dictated by the central thoughts which ruled his life.
Poetry, in its essence, was, to him, simply religion; and the best
poets in every age and every country had been those who have
had the highest thoughts about God. It may be that the lectures
he delivered, written, as they were, in the choice Latin of which he
was a master, will never be read again; but there were thoughts in
them which have passed into the common stock of criticism; and
dean Church declared that they were the most original and
memorable course ever delivered from the Chair of Poetry in
Oxford. '
The influence which Keble exercised upon others is illustrated
most conspicuously in the life of Isaac Williams, who came to
Trinity as a bright Welsh lad interested in his books and his play,
but hardly at all in religion. Latin verse brought him to the
notice of the poetry professor, and he became his pupil in the
lovely village between Thames and Cotswold, where the most
distinguished academic of his day' ministered to a few country
folk with as much zeal as others would bestow on labours the
most anxious and exciting. He came into a new world of intense
reality and, no less, of engrossing charm. He saw-again to quote
the historian of the movement-
à
this man, who had made what the world would call so great a sacrifice,
apparently unconscious that he had made any sacrifice at all, gay, un-
ceremonious, bright, full of play as a boy, ready with his pupils for any
exertion, mental or muscular-for a hard ride, or a crabbed bit of Aeschylus,
or a logic fence with disputatious and paradoxical undergraduates, giving
and taking on even ground1.
And Keble made a man of him. Isaac Williams was a true poet,
who, it may be, has not yet come into his own. The fire of the
Celt burst forth in many a lament for the past, and prayer for the
1 Church, R. W. , The Oxford Movement, p. 60.
## p. 266 (#290) ############################################
266 The Oxford Movement [CH.
6
future, of the church, which it became his passion, in utter self-
effacement, to serve. The Cathedral (1838) contains verse, inspired,
no doubt, in form by Scott and, sometimes, by Wordsworth, which
has not a little of the romance and enthusiasm of the Wizard of the
North. The ancient church of Wales, the church which he came to
serve in England, the church which was that of Basil and Ambrose,
Gregory and Clement, Cyprian and Chrysostom, was, to him, the
centre of life: and he was content to abide with it in unostentatious
work, doing each day's duty without recognition or reward. That
is the note of his poetry and his prose: it lights the fire of the
one, it dictates the grey sedateness of the other. When he compared
English uses with the richer dress her southern sisters own,' he
was content with what might seem 'the homelier truth. ' He
turned back from the breviary to the prayer book :
The chorister
That sings the summer nights, so soft and strong,
To music modulating his sweet throat,
Labours with richness of his varied note,
Yet lifts not unto Heaven a holier song,
Than our home bird that, on some leafless thorn,
Hymns his plain chaunt each wintry eve and morn? .
His poetry knows little of the technical mastery which belonged to
that of Keble, but, in genuine feeling, it was surpassed by none of
his contemporaries. And it is this which makes his Autobiography,
next to Newman's Apologia, the most fascinating record of the time
which any of the leaders bequeathed to posterity. In it, every phase
of the movement as it appealed to one of the chief disciples is
recorded without a touch of exaggeration, with no arrière-pensée,
no attempt to justify, still less to conceal, any of his thoughts, or
aims, or experiences. It explains the attractiveness of Newman,
the devotion of his followers, the sincerity of their principles, the
tragedy of their separation. If it has not the art or the pathos of
Newman's Apologia, it is a picture even more truthful, though but a
picture in little, of the days of storm and stress in which the move-
ment was shaped which transformed the English church into a new
and living influence on men. When Williams became Newman's
curate at St Mary's, he was struck by the contrast to the school in
which the Kebles had trained him. He found Newman 'in the
habit of looking for effect, and for what was sensibly effective. ' This,
which is true, without any hint of censure, of Newman's work as a
religious teacher, left its impress on all that he wrote. With all
the genius of the poet and the preacher, with all the severity and
1 The Cathedral, 1841 edn, p. 21.
>
>
## p. 267 (#291) ############################################
X11]
267
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
simplicity of the Oxford school which he led, Newman was yet, to
the fingertips, and to the end of his life, an artist, and an incom-
parable master of his art. Hardly yet can his literary be severed
from his personal and religious influence; but already two, at least, of
his works have come to be ranked among the classics. His Apologia
pro vita sua was written in 1864 in answer to an offensive and un-
provoked slander from Charles Kingsley.
An accusation that truth
for its own sake had never been a virtue with the Roman catholic
clergy was supplemented by a gratuitous mention of Newman,
and, for this, the only substantiation offered was a reference to a
sermon delivered when the preacher was still ministering in the
English church. Newman showed that the sermon contained no
words that could possibly express such a meaning. Kingsley, the
most honest and fearless of men, yet would not make an honest
withdrawal, and Newman, with just relentlessness, exposed him
to the derision of the world. The exposure was completed by
an intimate account of the mental history of the man who had
been maligned. Between April and June, Newman put out an
Apologia, in seven parts, which should vindicate himself and
show his countrymen what manner of man he was. False ideas
may be refuted by argument, but by true ideas alone are they
expelled. I will vanquish,' he said, 'not my accuser, but my
judges. ' And this he did in a wonderful way. He sat down and
wrote day and night—his fingers, as he said, walking nearly
twenty miles a day—just as he felt, thought and remembered,
often weeping as he wrote, but triumphantly achieving such a
record as few men have ever made, so sincere, so thorough, or
80 convincing. From the day when his Apologia was published,
Newman won a place in the heart of his countrymen of whatever
religion or whatever politics, which he never lost till he passed
away nearly fifty years later in an honoured old age. The supreme
merit of his Apologia, no doubt, is its directness. Every page
seems as if it were rather spoken than written. It has the merits
of a letter rather than of a book. It seems to represent without
omission or concealment the whole mind of the writer. And yet
it is a piece of finished art, not conscious but inevitable, because
the writer had become, half-perhaps altogether-unwittingly, a
supreme artist. He could not write in any other way than as an
artist: his art had become to him a second nature. Thus, then,
when the English of his Apologia is recommended as a model,
and as characteristic of its age and the tractarian movement, it
must be remembered that its simplicity is largely the result of a
that
## p. 268 (#292) ############################################
268
The Oxford Movement [CH.
long and strenuous mental discipline acting upon a singularly
brilliant and sensitive spirit. Newman writes as nature looks;
but it is not given to others, in untaught simplicity, to write as
he wrote. The training ground of his Apologia was the long
series of sermons, delivered week by week, saint's day by saint's
day, at St Mary's, Oxford. Their simplicity seems even more
certain than that of the personal vindication which followed them
after twenty years. Their English is simple, clear and refreshing
as pure water; answering to every changing thought of the
speaker's mind. The thought is as limpid as the language. There
had been nothing like them in the English pulpit: the nearest
approach was bishop Wilson, yet in him still lingered the savour
of the old divines who, undoubtedly, said what they meant, yet
relished it as it was said. Newman never seems to taste what
he is saying, nor to write with any look backward at himself :
he only speaks straight home. Yet all this would have been
impossible, his unique and wonderful style would not have been
created, if he had not been both a student and a musician and
had not, almost all his life long written thrice over everything
that he intended to preserve. The ancient classics, the fathers
in their solemn searching severity, the unearthly music of the
violin—these taught him the mastery of language and to know
when he had mastered it to express every vibration of his thought.
Of his teachers in English literature, only two were prominent,
Southey, whom he 'worshipped,' and Crabbe, from whom he un--
consciously learnt more than any other master, in power to register,
remember and reproduce a single impression in single-minded
words. And, ever at the background, a spirit which dominates
but finds no complete expression which frail humanity can grasp,
is the majestic infinity which sounds in the symphonies of Beet-
hoven. In his later sermons, especially in Sermons for Mixed
Congregations (1850), his style was much more ornate, his
eloquence less restrained, with an extraordinary vividness of
description and appeal. He became more rhetorical, more
obviously aiming at effect, with less of English reticence and
with a vehemence more Italian or French.
Next to Newman's Sermons and his Apologia, no doubt
The Dream of Gerontius, the vision, half dream, half inspiration,
of the beginnings of a world beyond this life, is his most direct
appeal. Swinburne recognised 'the force, the fervour, the terse
energy' in its verse : and it has that mark of genius, like the
finest parts of Shakespeare, that poor and rich, learned and
## p. 269 (#293) ############################################
XII]
269
Newman's Later Works
ignorant, are alike carried away by its attraction. There are im-
mortal lines in it, and it is no temerity to predict that ‘Praise to
the Holiest,' like 'Lead kindly Light,' will never be forgotten, the
one a profound theology in words like classic marble, the other
a passionate cry of individual struggle and self-conquest.
In the rest of Newman's work there is an obvious division
drawn by his submission to the see of Rome. Yet there is little
apparent difference in his manner of writing. He never sur-
passed, in the way of pure exposition, the clarity and distinction
of his style in Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church
(1838). But, later books were, at least at the time of their publica-
tion, more generally influential, notably The Scope and Nature of
University Education (1859), The Grammar of Assent (1870) and
perhaps, also, the earlier Essay on the Development of Christian
Doctrine (1845). This last, begun while he was still in the English
church, became a justification of his secession. It explained how
modern Rome, widely different from the church of the Fathers,
could yet claim to represent the original Christianity, not as identical
but as consistent with it, as being in fact the full fruit of which
the seed only was seen at first. In his theory, Newman was not so
far away from the Darwinism which was to exert a far greater
influence on English thought, and he certainly expressed the heart
of the science of comparative religion. Something of the same
kind may be said of lectures on University Education. They
represent, if they do not indeed anticipate, some of the most
powerful ideas of the later nineteenth century in regard to the
true functions of a university and the motive force of university
reform. Knowledge for its own sake, as enlargement of the mind,
is the object of a university education; but such knowledge is
impossible apart from a theology. All knowledge is, ultimately, a
defence of the Christian faith. A university is, must be, impartial;
but it can only be impartial if it includes theology in the sciences
which it studies. The Grammar of Assent carried the argument of
probability, the corner-stone of his master Butler, on to new ground.
The argument was, to him, 'an accumulation of probabilities,' and
he reached these by a study of the mental processes which lead to
apprehension and assent. 'In any enquiry about things in the
concrete,' he wrote, 'men differ from each other not so much in the
soundness of their reasoning as in the principles which govern its
exercise,' and those principles were not general but personal. “The
validity of proof is determined not by any scientific test but by the
illative sense. ' It is easy to relate such thoughts as these to much
>
## p. 270 (#294) ############################################
270 The Oxford Movement [CH.
later philosophy, both English and German. And, in fact, what is
characteristic of all Newman's writing is that form of genius which
seizes upon the floating tendencies of nascent thought and points
the way towards unforeseen conclusions.
It is only within very narrow limits that Newman's thought
here or elsewhere can ever be called reactionary. No doubt he,
as one of the latest and clearest of his critics and admirers has
said, had, indeed, an 'abhorrence of doctrinal liberalism. ' In 1835,
he vigorously protested against 'the introduction of rationalistic
principles into revealed religion' in a tract which described
rationalism as 'a certain abuse of reason; that is, a use of it
for purposes for which it never was intended and is unfitted,' and
‘a rationalistic spirit' as 'the antagonist of Faith; for Faith is, in
its very nature, the acceptance of what our reason cannot reach,
simply and absolutely upon testimony. But it has of recent
years again and again been asserted that he was the intellectual
parent of a modernism which he would have abhorred. A partial
study of his writings might give some ground for such a view:
a complete one refutes it. It could, indeed, hardly be held by any
who did not, perhaps unconsciously, identify the wider catholicism
of orthodox Christianity with the narrower presentment of it in
modern Roman theology which Newman never set himself very
seriously to defend. His intellectual standpoint, however much
during his long life it may seem to have varied, never really
departed from the three bases on which it had been founded.
He was an Aristotelian. He distrusted much of modern metaphysic.
He regarded the actual facts of human life as the ultimate basis of
reason. He was, like many of the most earnest English thinkers
of his time, a convinced disciple of Butler. His reading of The
Analogy of Religion was, as he said, an era in his religious opinions.
Starting from probability as the guide of life, he never fancied
that the limitless area of things human and divine could be fully
mapped or the ultimate mystery more than 'imperfectly com-
prehended. ' But he found reality in the religious facts of the
world, as the philosophers of his time found them in the moral
facts, and the men of science in the physical ; and, herein, he may
be said to have anticipated modern psychology. Yet also, and with
at least as much strength, he was a historian: very often, not
an accurate historian in detail, but a historian of illumination
and genius. If much that he wrote as history has long been cast
aside, the interpretation that he gave of early-not the earliest-
Christian centuries remained as an inspiration to the students who
## p. 271 (#295) ############################################
XII]
271
Dean Church
TOT
LE
re
TI
made Oxford history famous, to Stubbs and Freeman, Creighton
and Bryce, and remains still. When he wrote his different studies
he was loyal to his principles, whether, at the time, he was an
English or a Roman churchman, but he never surrendered the
scholar's independence. No doubt, he loved narration more than
interpretation, character more than institutional life; but, what
he wanted to find, and believed he could find, in history was
truth: and in that he never deserted the fundamental principle of
the tractarian company. As a historian, his affinities were with
the French school which was coming into existence in his middle
age, never with the purely German, where vast collections of facts
were often used to support an unverifiable theory. But, if his
passion throughout was catholicism, his preconception was truth.
Newman must ever remain the central figure in the literature
of the movement of which he was the most conspicuous figure.
But Pusey, it would be true to say, represented far more entirely its
most prominent characteristics: its basis in history and tradition,
its via media, its determination stare super antiquas vias. And
it may well be that, if Newman appealed to the wider circle, Pusey
and Keble influenced more directly the general literature of
English religion. The Oxford movement certainly belongs to the
history of English religion more definitely than to the history
of English literature; but it had great influence, outside its own
definite members, on the literary taste of its age. It spoke from
the first for a certain purity, directness and severity of style:
later, the historical influences which attached themselves to it,
through the study of ancient legends, and liturgies, and hymns,
produced a richer vein of prose, a more florid touch in poetry.
No one can think that Tennyson was wholly unmoved by its
manner; but Dolben and Pater were the undoubted issue of its
later life. If one were to look for men of letters who were as
clearly such, and would have been in any age, as they were men
of religion, one would light instantly on the names of Richard
William Church and Richard Chenevix Trench. The former, a
fellow of Oriel with Newman, one of the proctors who vetoed
the new test proposed when Ward was condemned, died as
dean of St Paul's. Church lived to be the historian of the
movement itself, and perhaps that was his finest work. But his
deep thought and profound wisdom, which had remarkable
weight with the eminent statesmen of his day, were seen at
their best in his interpretation of past history as well as in
lectures and sermons which are models of clear writing and
Test
TK
the
tat
## p. 272 (#296) ############################################
272 The Oxford Movement
[CH.
clear thought. Something of the severity and unworldliness of
Dante, of whom he was a devoted student, seemed to have
descended upon him, with, also, the great Florentine's knowledge
of the ways and thoughts of common men. But, most clearly,
he was, in literature, the disciple of Newman, in the simplicity,
directness and absence of ornament which made his style powerful
in its effect on the writing of his generation. Church was a
preacher, a moralist, a historian; but, especially, he was a student
of human nature, who judged men equally yet with sympathy,
who weighed motives in scales which were never deflected by
prejudice or passion, and knew to a nicety the springs of human
action. He was a master of sympathetic literary criticism, too,
as his volume on Spenser proves. His historical sketches, such as
that of the early middle age, and his criticisms in literature, such
as those of Cassiodorus and Pascal, show a characteristic simplicity
which cannot veil the abundance of knowledge. Occasionally,
something is revealed of the fire within him, which breaks out
now and again in his classic memorial of the Oxford movement
and the men who began and led it, a record, as he wrote to
Lord Acton,
that one who lived with them, and lived long beyond most of em, believed
in the reality of their goodness and height of character, and still looks back
with deepest reverence to those forgotten men as the companions to whose
teaching and example he owes an infinite debt, and not he only but religious
society in England of all kinds 1.
Preeminently, Church was a man of letters; and this was as
obviously true of Richard Chenevix Trench. Church noted 'the
peculiar combination in him of the poet, the theologian and the
champion of primitive and catholic doctrine. ' Some of his lyrics
belong to the highest flight of English poetry. His religious
writings had a peculiar distinction and charm. Just as Church
owed inspiration to Greece, modern as well as ancient, and its
struggle for liberty, so Trench had nourished himself on the great
literature of Spain and was in harmony with the aspirations of her
liberal revival. He passed, in 1863, from the deanery of West-
minster to the archbishopric of Dublin, where he was primate at
the disestablishment and fought hard for the ancient symbols of
the Irish church under its new constitution. Like the dean of
St Paul's, he was not a militant tractarian, but he spoke of Hugh
James Rose as ‘my master,' and wrote, on the death of Pusey,
that ‘a prince in our Israel has indeed passed away. ' The names
1 Quoted in the Advertisement' to The Oxford Movement, p. vi.
6
6
## p. 273 (#297) ############################################
XII]
273
Neale and the Mozleys
of Church and Trench, which, even apart from their theological
writings, and at any time in our history, would have been pro-
minent in English letters, are examples of the influence which the
serious ideas of the Oxford movement exercised upon literature.
In historical study, the influence was no less conspicuous.
William Stubbs, the greatest English historian of the nineteenth
century, was a convinced tractarian and spoke of Pusey, whom
he assisted in literary work, as 'the master. ' Henry Parry
Liddon, the greatest preacher of the period, whose sermons at
St Paul's were, for twenty years, a conspicuous factor in the
life of London, was the disciple, the friend and the biographer
of Pusey. His Bampton lectures on the Divinity of Christ were
worthy to rank with the great dogmatic treatises of the older
divines. And their successors remain to the present day.
Not far apart from them, yet still somewhat in isolation, was
the striking figure of John Mason Neale, not an Oxford but a
Cambridge man. He was antiquary, historian, poet, novelist,
priest; and in none of these activities can he be forgotten.
He was as facile as he was learned. He poured forth book
after book of amazing erudition on almost every conceivable
subject of theological and historical interest. As a translator
of Latin and Greek hymns no Englishman has surpassed him.
But, above all things, he loved 'a story' and he could tell it—as
such an historical novel as Theodora Phranza, which tells the
fall of Christian Constantinople, evidences—with the best of
them. While his knowledge was diffused, that of James Bowling
Mozley was intense and concentrated. Master of a stern and
somewhat arid style, which still could rise into eloquence and
passion, he exercised a profound influence on the generation
which succeeded him. He was the foe of shallow thinking and
shallow writing. Many of the idols of the market-place, past
or present, from Martin Luther to Thomas Carlyle, suffered his
gwashing blows. His brother Thomas had abilities of a more
popular cast: he was, for a while, editor of The British Critic:
for many years he was a leader writer for The Times, and he
represented that paper at Rome during the time of the council
1869–70, when liis letters, unsympathetic though Roman catholics
have complained that they are, presented a most vivid and re-
markable picture of a great historical episode. In his old age,
he wrote Reminiscences of the days of struggle, which are
entertaining, but not always accurate. 'If a story cannot stand
on two legs,' said Newman, whose sister he had married, 'Tom
18
9
E. L. XII.
CH. XII.
## p. 274 (#298) ############################################
274
[CH.
The Oxford Movement
supplies a third. From him comes a touching tribute to the
self-effacing labours of Charles Marriott, like himself a fellow
of Oriel, who was the helper of every one, great and small, who
belonged to the movement, and its great stay in scholarship, as
editing with Keble and Pusey The Oxford Library of the Fathers.
Outside Oxford, the same interests which had awakened the
ecclesiastical learning and catholic orthodoxy of the university
were represented in many writers who were affected, in greater
or less degree, by the principles of the tractarians.
Walter Farquhar Hook was one of the most masterful figures
of his time, first as vicar of Leeds for twenty-two years and then
as dean of Chichester. He accepted nearly all the principles of the
tractarians, but frequently stood apart from their expression and
was often a vehement critic. He was an industrious compiler
of dictionaries and biographies, without sufficient research or
originality to give them permanent vitality. His successor at
Chichester, John William Burgon, held a similar position of in-
dependent judgment. He was a keen and biting controversialist
and the most conservative of biblical critics ; but he had an
intense love of 'good men,' among whom he placed some of the
authors of the tracts. His biographies are essential to a knowledge
of the movement.
Two sons of the famous statesman and philanthropist, and
brothers of that bishop of Oxford who revolutionised the ideal of
English episcopacy, Robert Isaac and Henry William Wilberforce,
both at Oriel, passed into the Roman church. The elder had
been an archdeacon and yet had written theological books of
real value, notably one on The Doctrine of The Incarnation,
which was on strictly tractarian lines and won great fame. The
younger after his secession gave important help to the Roman
catholic cause in the press.
Some of those who had abandoned their orders and left the
English church seemed eager to disclaim any connection with it.
Some vehemently attacked what they had before as vehemently
defended, but no one of them save Newman made any great mark
in literature. Some were content with a change of clothes, sub-
stituting for their customary suits of solemn black the vagaries of
'blue ties and ginger-coloured trousers. '
More formidable was the Anglo-Roman hierarchy created in
1850, whose head announced its creation by a letter from out the
Flaminian Gate. '
Nicholas Wiseman, Roman catholic controversialist and
1
## p. 275 (#299) ############################################
X1)
275
Converts to Rome
cardinal, whose education had not been English, was a capable
craftsman in letters. He was an orientalist, and a cultured student
of many subjects, who became the first archbishop of Westminster
in 1850, after devoting himself to confuting ‘High Church Claims'
(1841), and embodying his theories of church history in a pretty
story called Fabiola, or the Church of the Catacombs (1854).
Henry Edward, cardinal Manning, who had been an English
archdeacon and became Wiseman's successor, wrote, while he
was a member of the English church, volumes of sermons which
reached at least a fifth edition, and, as a controversial papalist,
many vehement criticisms of the Anglican position; but, though
his personal influence was great, his work is negligible as literature.
John Hungerford Pollen, as an English priest wrote the most
touching and tragic of all the records of struggle in parish
work for tractarian principles (A Narrative of Five Years at
St Saviour's, Leeds, 1851), and then, as a Romanist layman,
devoted himself to art, wrote some valuable lectures, was the
friend of Morris and Rossetti, Swinburne and Patmore, and
became in artistic literature, what his friend Baron von Hügel
said he was in life, 'the perfect type of l'homme du monde. '
Another convert, Frederick William Faber, endowed with high
gifts of imagination, deplored, as a Roman catholic, the position
of the Magi, with, perhaps, an undercurrent of reference to the
protestants' unhappy lot,
No Pope, no blessèd Pope had they
To guide them with his hand,-
and was generally sentimental and sugary, very unlike the
tractarians; but he wrote some devotional poetry of sincerity
and pathos. John Dobree Dalgairns was capable and solid
as a Roman controversialist on behalf of Christian belief; but
he was far surpassed by another of the later disciples of the
tractarians who became a power in the church of his adoption.
William George Ward, the crisis of whose stormy career was
critical also in the movement itself, has won immortality in the
verse of Tennyson and the prose of dean Church. The latter
finds it his chief distinction that as 'a profound metaphysical
thinker he was the equal antagonist on their own ground of John
Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. ' His work hardly belongs to
pure literature: its manner and method are, for the most part,
cumbrous, only occasionally vivid or comprehensive. His own
generation read what he wrote because he was famous for what
he said: it was meat and drink to him to argue and to chop logic,
5
18-2
## p. 276 (#300) ############################################
276 The Oxford Movement [CH.
and his swordplay was a delight to the onlookers. But, if his
Ideal, his intuitionist philosophy and his controversial treatises
are forgotten, he will ever be remembered by the poet's farewell
to him as one
Whose Faith and Work were bells of full accord,
My friend, the most unworldly of mankind,
Most generous of all Ultramontanes, Ward.
Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, another English convert to the Roman
obedience, followed the Tracts for the Times with keenest in-
terest from the first. He had been ten years a Roman catholic
when they began to appear and he set himself before long to
correspond with their writers in the hope of 'producing a good
understanding between the Catholic and Anglican churches, with
a view to the ultimate restoration of that happy and blessed unity,
which formerly existed between them for more than a thousand
years, and which,' he added, “I am perfectly certain will one day be
restored. ' The letters which passed between him and Mont-
alembert illustrate how close at some points was the connection
between the ecclesiastical revival in England and in France.
The French man of letters had no hope
that Catholicity will make any real progress in England, as long as the
fanatical spirit of Archbishop Manning, Mr Ward, and others of the same
stamp is prevalent among English Catholics;
and, on the other side, Newman was equally hopeless about reunion
or 'the conversion of that corporate body which we call the
Anglican Church. ' De Lisle's own work, sympathetic in aim,
trivial in result, is an example of the rift between the two bodies,
in literature as well as in religion. Only in Newman himself was
the influence of the Oxford movement to be discerned among
Romanist writers.
But the glamour of tractarian theology extended far beyond
those who were its first teachers or their direct heirs. It created
a religious literature effective if ephemeral: it ‘tuned the pulpits'
for some half a century to a gravity which strove, often success-
fully, after the majesty of classical sculpture. And, in the poetry
of Digby Mackworth Dolben, only recently given to the world, and
of Christina Rossetti, it formed a new life exuberant and aflame.
Dolben pursued its teaching till it yielded to him a certain medieval
richness of ecclesiastical imagery that touched at many points a
religious passion which was older than Christianity, and almost
1 Purcell, E. , Life of Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, vol. II, p. 360.
## p. 277 (#301) ############################################
XII]
Tractarian Novels
277
hostile to it. To Christina Rossetti, the catholic theology of the
English church was the very breath of life, and she accepted its
sternness without dispute. Yet, while the accent of severity
clings to all she wrote, we are, in her company, on the road to a
reaction which yet has its roots in the past: the splendour of
Jeremy Taylor is not forgotten and the exotic richness of Walter
Pater is in sight.
In humbler literature, 'tractarianism' may be thought to
have created an epoch by inaugurating the dreary succession
of religious novels. But they were not dreary in their beginnings.
J. M. Neale was a great writer of romance. Newman himself put
some very good polemical work into Loss and Gain (with an
immortal description of an Oxford tutor's breakfast) and Callista.
Wiseman's Fabiola was an effort of the same kind. Francis
Edward Paget, student of Christ Church and then rector of
Elford, published a series of most interesting tales, containing
quite delicious descriptions of country life and character which
no novelist of his time surpassed. But most prominent of all
was the long line of stories, exquisite in domestic portraiture,
strong in moral power, keen in understanding of character and
touched with a gracious humour, which issued from the parish of
Hursley-where Keble was to the authoress a true guide, phi-
losopher and friend-and were the work of Charlotte M. Yonge.
The Heir of Redclyffe and The Little Duke have their place
in English literature. They have had many imitators and suc-
cessors but few rivals, unless John Inglesant may claim to be of
their company.
A movement which had so many means of making itself felt
throughout the country had, naturally, an influence in many phases
of literature. It was primarily religious, with a religion, said one
of its lay disciples, an eminent public official, 'which was fervent
and reforming in essentials with a due reverence for existing
authorities and habits and traditions'; but it was not narrow
or cloistered, it was 'a religion which did not reject, but aspired
to embody in itself, any form of art and literature, poetry,
philosophy, and even science which could be pressed into the
service of Christianity? '
But its permanent effects may be seen most clearly in the fields
of history and dogma. During the eighteenth century, the constant
study of the Fathers of the early church which had been the
basis of the theological writings of the reformers and the Caroline
1 Letters of Lord Blachford, p. 15.
## p. 278 (#302) ############################################
278 The Oxford Movement [CH. XII
divines had passed into desuetude. In the seventeenth century,
no one would have dared to write theology without quoting long
passages of crabbed Latin and obscure Greek. In the eighteenth
century, the habit had gone entirely out of fashion, and Wesley,
scholar though he was, was the last man in the world to wish
for its revival. But, while the tractarians were in their cradles,
Routh of Magdalen had recalled to the church of England the
thought of the rock whence it was digged, by the publication of
the first part of his Reliquiae Sacrae (1814), in which he collected
the fragments of early Christian writings up to the first Nicene
council and edited them with a remarkable combination of affec-
tion, erudition and sagacity. He set the tone for the Oxford
writers.
CH. XII.
17
## p. 258 (#282) ############################################
258
The Oxford Movement [CH.
The first of the tracts was Newman's own, Thoughts on the
Ministerial Commission, respectfully addressed to the Clergy ;
and all the early tracts sounded the same notes of stress and
danger and appeal. Other writers joined, some of them men of
great power, and worthy to be leaders in a great cause; but
perhaps in Newman and Froude alone was there the indubitable
touch of real genius. Of Froude, those who knew him best said,
when he had passed away, before the movement had reached more
than its initial stages, that 'men with all their health and strength
about them might gaze on his attenuated form, struck with a
certain awe of wonderment at the brightness of his wit, the
intenseness of his mental vision, and the iron strength of his
argument. ' His Remains (1838 and 1839) show the daring of
his spirit, the directness, if narrowness, of his vision and the
sympathy with which he appreciated the history of the church's
past. His analysis and summary of the letters of Becket is
remarkable for the time at which it was written and has not a
few points of enduring value. In 1834, the tract writers were
joined by Edward Bouverie Pusey, regius professor of Hebrew
since 1828, a scholar of eminence who was already of great
weight in the university and the church. Newman said of his
accession to the movement that ‘he was able to give a name,
a fame, and a personality to what was without him a sort of
mob. ' Tract no. 18, Thoughts on the Benefits of the System of
Fasting enjoined by our Church was issued with his initials.
Isaac Williams, who was with him and Newman when it was
agreed that he should contribute, says that the initials were added
to show that he was in no way responsible for the other tracts;
but the Record newspaper took them as showing his sanction, and
the nickname 'Puseyite' was soon affixed to all the writers and
their friends, and it stuck.
The tracts were now well launched, and those who wrote them
were a coherent body, with common aims and something of a
common style in English writing: intensely serious, unaffected,
without the slightest ornament or rhetoric, but dignified and, in
later issues, reflecting in the language the weight and elaboration
of the argument. John William Bowden, William Palmer, Arthur
Philip Perceval, Isaac Williams were others who added each a
distinctive character to the general impression; and the last of
these was a genuine poet and the master of a singularly limpid
and attractive prose style.
In a few words, the history of the movement of which the tracts
## p. 259 (#283) ############################################
X1] Newman at St Mary's 259
were the chief literary output may be told. A great impetus was
given by the preaching of Newman at St Mary's, of which an
immortal description exists by John Campbell Shairp, who became
principal of the United college at St Andrews and professor of
poetry at Oxford. The English church had produced many great
preachers since the reformation. Men had hung on the words
of Donne, had crowded to hear Stillingfleet and Tillotson; but
no man had ever moved others so deeply by such simple means
as Newman. All was quiet, restrained, subdued; the voice soft,
almost monotonous, the eyes hardly ever lifted from the paper;
but old truths were touched into life, when he spoke of 'Unreal
Words,' of the ‘Individuality of the Soul,' of the 'Invisible World,
and again of 'warfare the condition of victory,' the Cross of Christ
the measure of the world,' or 'the Christian Church a home for
the lonely. The sermons gave to every cause which Newman
supported a following of enthusiastic supporters. In 1836, the
strength of the party was shown in the attack on Hampden
when he was made regius professor of divinity. Efforts of Roman
catholics in England under a new leader (Wiseman) were also met
by Newman in lectures on Romanism and popular protestantism;
in tract 71, he condemned the Roman form of various Christian
doctrines; and the witness of the ancient church was collected in a
series, begun in 1836 and lasting some forty years, of translations en-
titled Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, anterior to the Division
of East and West. Yet, other influences were already at work.
An important addition to the company of friends proved eventually
to be an impulse towards Rome. With Frederick Oakeley and
Frederick Faber, came a man of much greater power, William
George Ward, fellow of Balliol, a dialectician of extraordinary
skill, an ebullient humourist and, as a friend, full of devotion and
charm. But the book which had attracted him was the first
severe blow the movement received. It was the first two volumes
of Literary Remains of Richard Hurrell Froude (1838), and its
unsparing condemnation of the reformers and the reformation
alienated many supporters, alarmed those ignorant of history
and turned the mass of the public into bitter opponents. Already,
the school of liberalism in theology had attacked the tracts,
Arnold using as violent language against the Oxford malignants'
as was ever used against Wesley, and declaring that their work
was to change sense into silliness and holiness into formality and
hypocrisy. Still, recruits crowded to the banner of the tractarians.
Newman succeeded to the editorship of the famous British Critic,
2
17--2
## p. 260 (#284) ############################################
260
[CH.
The Oxford Movement
6
a literary magazine whose importance dated from the days of the
younger Pitt. It seemed as if the friends stood firmly in con-
servative ways. Behind them was the figure of that wonderful
old scholar, theologian and tory, Martin Joseph Routh (1755—
1854), president of Magdalen, reserved, as Newman wrote in 1838,
'to report to a forgetful generation what was the theology of their
fathers. ' But, already the new accessions had cut into the original
movement at an angle, fallen across its line of thought and then
set about turning that line in its own direction. Tract 87, by
Isaac Williams, On reserve in communicating religious knowledge,
more by its title, probably—for all who did not read it, and some
who did, entirely misunderstood it—than by its contents, alarmed
many, and the author was easily defeated when he stood for the
Oxford professorship of poetry. It was war now, and war within
the field of English letters. Newman, in tract 90, repeated the
argument of Sta. Clara in Charles I's time that the XXXIX
Articles could not historically be directed against the council of
Trent and were at least patient of an interpretation accordant
with the theology of the catholic church. Such an argument
.
was familiar enough and could only alarm the ignorant. But
this it effectually did. The heads of houses awoke from torpor,
and, except the patriarch president of Magdalen, and the rector
of Exeter, under the influence of four college tutors (one of whom,
Archibald Campbell Tait, of Balliol, lived to become archbishop of
Canterbury), condemned the tract in March 1841. Bishops 'charged'
against the author, and, at the same time, the English church seemed
committed to an agreement with Prussian protestantism in the
creation of a bishopric for Jerusalem. And then Newman himself
received a serious blow to his own intellectual stability. The con-
fidence of his studies in the history of the early church was abruptly
broken by an article in The Dublin Review, September 1839,
on the Donatists, written by Wiseman, the leader of the new
and dominant party among the English Roman catholics. Other
points in the story of ancient heresies seemed to him to look
the same way. The 'palmary words' of St Augustine, securus
judicat orbis terrarum, struck him in a new light. The bishops'
condemnation weighed heavily on him, and he began to feel that
he could not remain in a church which did not allow his sense
of the Articles. Early in 1842, he left Oxford and went to live
three miles away, but still in his parish, at Littlemore. He
resigned his living in September 1843 and withdrew into lay
communion. His last sermon, a lament of singular beauty for the
## p. 261 (#285) ############################################
XII] The Secession of Newman
261
church of England, was preached at Littlemore, on 25 September
1843. Already, a sermon by Pusey, which a little knowledge of
seventeenth century theology would have shown never to have
travelled beyond the limits of the Caroline divines, had been
condemned by the heads of houses, without a hearing or any
statement of reasons. And, to add to the disasters which beset
the tractarians, the irrepressible W. G. Ward published a heavy
and exasperating book, The Ideal of a Christian Church. He
gloried in the 'most joyful, most wonderful, most unexpected,
sight! we find the whole cycle of Roman doctrine gradually
possessing numbers of English churchmen. ' On 13 February
1845, the movement reached its crisis at Oxford. Convocation,
attended by more than a thousand members of the university, the
most famous as well as the most obscure, condemned the book
and deprived the author of his degrees. A proposal to censure
tract 90 was defeated by the veto of the proctors. The scene, of
passion and humour and snowballs, has often been described; and
Edward Freeman, in later years the historian of the Norman con-
quest, set it to verse after the style of Macaulay's Virginia. It was,
as R. W. Church, then junior proctor, wrote in after years, ‘not only
the final defeat and conclusion of the first stage of the movement.
It was the birthday of the modern Liberalism of Oxford. ' On
9 October, Newman was received into the church of Rome.
From that moment, the story ceases to be picturesque or
passionate. Those in whom the original principles of the Oxford
leaders had been firmly rooted, Keble and Pusey, Isaac Williams
and Charles Marriott, Richard Church and James Mozley, remained
to teach to the next generation the doctrines for which they had
suffered. The movement took its place in the history of the
English church.
It passed away from Oxford. Part of its influence went Rome-
wards with Newman. Part remained, with the two stalwarts
among its first leaders, to leaven the life of the whole church of
England. Keble died in 1866, having written nothing which
achieved the popularity of The Christian Year; but, till the last
there remained much of the grace and sober sweetness of his early
manner in all that he wrote. Pusey lived till 16 September 1882,
when he had survived all his first associates, except Newman, and
most of their first disciples. Year by year, he produced books of
massive learning and unbending orthodoxy. Lord chancellor
Selborne said of him that he was a power in the Church of
England greater than Archbishop or Bishop for more than half
## p. 262 (#286) ############################################
262
[CH.
The Oxford Movement
a century. Theological literature which issued from the press
under his name as author or editor or with his imprimatur found
a ready market. So long as he lived there was still something of
a theological public, as there had been in the days of the Caroline
divines. And, in the Roman obedience, and created a cardinal in
1879, Newman lingered on till 1890, having almost ceased to
write. When he died, the literary influence he had represented
was at its last gasp.
It is difficult, while the controversies in which the Oxford
writers were protagonists are still scarce cold, to estimate the
position which the movement will occupy in English literature. In
manner, expression, tone, the twentieth century presents a piquant
contrast to the severity of sixty years ago. If theologians still
think seriously, they are wont to write flippantly. To the trac-
tarians, the manner reflected the solemnity of the matter with which
they were concerned. Pusey, whose learning and stability far sur-
passed that of any of his contemporaries in the arena, cared nothing
for grace of expression, achieved lucidity not without an effort,
but was the heir of the dignity of the ancient divines. He was
a master of serried argument, repeating his blows as with a
hammer, cogent, cumulative, compelling, if not convincing, to
assent, rarely epigrammatic, never concise. He was mainly a
preacher, a commentator, a minister to individual souls, surpass-
ingly sincere, profoundly erudite, piercingly appellant. Nor was
the range of his survey limited. He could pass easily from Semitic
scholarship to constitutional history, from French pietism to social
reforms: on each subject, he was an expert. His style, like his
mind, was eminently traditional and conservative. He denounced
the doctrine that the original of government was with the people,
and 'the so-called social compact,' with as much determination as
he defended the symbol of Chalcedon or the rights and claims of
the poor. And the language in which he expressed all this was
the language of an Elizabethan without its elasticity or a Caroline
without its quaintness. He was no pedant for pure English, still
less for the vocabulary of a pedagogue reared upon the classical
tongues. There seems no art in his sentences, and yet it is not
true that there is none. But, what art there is is only that of
taking pains-not, like Newman, to say a thing in the best as well
as the clearest way in which it can be said, but only to say it so
that it is certain to be understood. So, he is found sometimes
writing sentences as short and trenchant as Macaulay's; yet, far
more often, you will come across one in which, without hesitation,
## p. 263 (#287) ############################################
X11]
263
Pusey as a a
Writer
6
he has extended his meaning to nearly four hundred words.
His style, eminently, was one that had its best effect when read
aloud. Often a phrase is pungent and arresting: rarely does
a sentence linger in the memory. But the power and weight that
belong to his greatest efforts is indubitable. For sheer solemnity,
pathos and grandeur, there was nothing in the century in which
he lived that surpassed the two sermons preached, the one in 1843,
before, and the cause of, his suspension, and the other in 1846, on
the resumption of this my office among you,' of which he had been
deprived. The sentences at the beginning of the second are
characteristic:
It will be in the memory of some that when, nearly three years past, Almighty
God (for 'secret faults' which He knoweth, and from which, I trust, He
willed thereby the rather to 'cleanse' me), allowed me to be deprived for
a time of this my office among yon, I was endeavouring to mitigate the stern
doctrine of the heavy character of a Christian's sins, by pointing out the
mercies of God which might reassure the penitent, the means of his
restoration, the earnests of his pardon. And in so doing, it seemed best, first
to dwell upon the unfathomable mercies of God in Christ, the exhaustless
abyss of mercy in the Infinite Fountain of Mercy;-when it is not finally shut
out, Infinite as Himself, as being poured out from His Infinity; and then,
more directly, on all those untold and ineffable mercies contained in the
intercession of our Lord, at the Right Hand of God, for us. For so, I hoped,
would the hearts of penitents be the more fixed upon Him, the Source of all
mercies, and their faith be strengthened, and they the more hope that no
depth of past sin could utterly sever them from the love of Christ; nay, could
sever them from no degree of fulness of His unspeakable lovel.
Primarily, what he wrote bears the impress of his deep devotion.
Whether he wrote about religion or not, what he wrote was
religious. But, secondarily, all his writings bore the mark of his
indomitable and tenacious spirit. And all that he wrote was
balanced, proportionate, sensitive to distinctions, receptive of
truths new and old. The very character of all the tractarians was
sincerity, and most conspicuously of all did this belong to Pusey.
When others left their old moorings he remained firmly anchored to
the past of the church. He foresaw the dark future, but he stayed
himself on the things of old. When others looked only on England,
his view extended beyond, to the country whence he espied a
coming danger. He foresaw that what he had seen in Germany
would come to his own land. “This will all come upon us in
England, and how utterly unprepared we are ! But then, as he
said, he was in the English church by the providence of God; and
there he found all that he needed, though not all, perhaps, that he
could desire. And thus, to him, the Oxford movement was only
Entire Absolution of the Penitent: A Sermon, 1846, pp. 1, 2.
6
## p. 264 (#288) ############################################
264
[ch.
The Oxford Movement
a call upon the succours of the past. As he wrote more than forty
years after the first tract-
When we were awakened, the Revival was wholly from within. We did not
open a Roman book. We did not think of them. Rome was quiet at that
time in itself. It was only, for political ends, assimilating itself as much as
it could to us. “We must own,' Cardinal Wiseman said, 'that we have been
a little ashamed of our special doctrines. However, we had all which we
wanted within our Church. We had the whole range of Christian doctrine,
and did not look beyond, except to the Fathers, to whom our Church sent us.
One, of whom I thought far more than myself, said, 'We have range enough
in those before us, to whatever the pigmies may growl!
It was Keble, no doubt, whom Pusey thus quoted. And Keble,
like Pusey, and far more than Newman, had his roots in the past.
If Pusey's name was given to the followers of the movement, it
was, unquestionably, Keble who gave it its first popularity. His
sermon inaugurated it, and its principles were those of The
Christian Year. That book, said Newman once, laughingly, was
the fons et origo mali. And in it we see the nature of the influ-
ence which the movement exercised, not only upon theology, but
upon literature. Here, again, is the note of sincerity, first and
foremost: sincerity which means purity, also, and
The princely heart of innocence.
But sincerity, with Keble, does not mean narrowness. Dean Stanley
said of The Christian Year that it had a real openness of mind
for the whole large view of the Church and the world. ' It could
hardly be otherwise with the work of a writer who was steeped
in the ancient classic literatures and had a deep sympathy with
nature as well as human life. And the result is a poetic vision of
the sacredness of life, in town and country, in art and labour, in
literature as well as prayer. Nature, to the poet, is a sacrament of
God. And its appeal has no need to be heightened beyond what
the poet feels himself: the mark of his art is its veracity. He
writes exactly as he thinks. But he thinks in the manner of the
early nineteenth century, and the manner sometimes prevents the
thought from reaching in clear directness the generations of later
time. A simple thought is not always expressed in simple style.
Keble's poetry is eminently literary and reminiscent: it is the work
of a well-read-almost a too well-read-man. And the memory now
and again goes near to quench the inspiration. The Christian Year
is, eminently, a book of its own period, as that period was seen by
one who, most of all, was a scholar and a saint. And Keble was,
· Pusey's Spiritual Letters, p. 239.
## p. 265 (#289) ############################################
XII]
265
Isaac Williams
a
besides, a preacher and a critic. If his sermons cannot be placed in
that rank which Newman alone of the nineteenth century preachers
can claim to have reached, they have, at least, one conspicuous
merit-at least in his later volumes—their absolute directness and
simplicity. He spoke, first and foremost, so as to be understood
by everyone, and yet from such a height of personal experience that,
as one said who heard him, you seemed to be amidst the rustling
of angels' wings. The preaching of the tractarians, like that of the
Caroline divines, was eminently doctrinal, yet it did not abandon
the direct morality of the eighteenth century; it rather raised it, by
the conjunction, to a higher power. As a critic, Keble has sympathy
and depth, dictated by the central thoughts which ruled his life.
Poetry, in its essence, was, to him, simply religion; and the best
poets in every age and every country had been those who have
had the highest thoughts about God. It may be that the lectures
he delivered, written, as they were, in the choice Latin of which he
was a master, will never be read again; but there were thoughts in
them which have passed into the common stock of criticism; and
dean Church declared that they were the most original and
memorable course ever delivered from the Chair of Poetry in
Oxford. '
The influence which Keble exercised upon others is illustrated
most conspicuously in the life of Isaac Williams, who came to
Trinity as a bright Welsh lad interested in his books and his play,
but hardly at all in religion. Latin verse brought him to the
notice of the poetry professor, and he became his pupil in the
lovely village between Thames and Cotswold, where the most
distinguished academic of his day' ministered to a few country
folk with as much zeal as others would bestow on labours the
most anxious and exciting. He came into a new world of intense
reality and, no less, of engrossing charm. He saw-again to quote
the historian of the movement-
à
this man, who had made what the world would call so great a sacrifice,
apparently unconscious that he had made any sacrifice at all, gay, un-
ceremonious, bright, full of play as a boy, ready with his pupils for any
exertion, mental or muscular-for a hard ride, or a crabbed bit of Aeschylus,
or a logic fence with disputatious and paradoxical undergraduates, giving
and taking on even ground1.
And Keble made a man of him. Isaac Williams was a true poet,
who, it may be, has not yet come into his own. The fire of the
Celt burst forth in many a lament for the past, and prayer for the
1 Church, R. W. , The Oxford Movement, p. 60.
## p. 266 (#290) ############################################
266 The Oxford Movement [CH.
6
future, of the church, which it became his passion, in utter self-
effacement, to serve. The Cathedral (1838) contains verse, inspired,
no doubt, in form by Scott and, sometimes, by Wordsworth, which
has not a little of the romance and enthusiasm of the Wizard of the
North. The ancient church of Wales, the church which he came to
serve in England, the church which was that of Basil and Ambrose,
Gregory and Clement, Cyprian and Chrysostom, was, to him, the
centre of life: and he was content to abide with it in unostentatious
work, doing each day's duty without recognition or reward. That
is the note of his poetry and his prose: it lights the fire of the
one, it dictates the grey sedateness of the other. When he compared
English uses with the richer dress her southern sisters own,' he
was content with what might seem 'the homelier truth. ' He
turned back from the breviary to the prayer book :
The chorister
That sings the summer nights, so soft and strong,
To music modulating his sweet throat,
Labours with richness of his varied note,
Yet lifts not unto Heaven a holier song,
Than our home bird that, on some leafless thorn,
Hymns his plain chaunt each wintry eve and morn? .
His poetry knows little of the technical mastery which belonged to
that of Keble, but, in genuine feeling, it was surpassed by none of
his contemporaries. And it is this which makes his Autobiography,
next to Newman's Apologia, the most fascinating record of the time
which any of the leaders bequeathed to posterity. In it, every phase
of the movement as it appealed to one of the chief disciples is
recorded without a touch of exaggeration, with no arrière-pensée,
no attempt to justify, still less to conceal, any of his thoughts, or
aims, or experiences. It explains the attractiveness of Newman,
the devotion of his followers, the sincerity of their principles, the
tragedy of their separation. If it has not the art or the pathos of
Newman's Apologia, it is a picture even more truthful, though but a
picture in little, of the days of storm and stress in which the move-
ment was shaped which transformed the English church into a new
and living influence on men. When Williams became Newman's
curate at St Mary's, he was struck by the contrast to the school in
which the Kebles had trained him. He found Newman 'in the
habit of looking for effect, and for what was sensibly effective. ' This,
which is true, without any hint of censure, of Newman's work as a
religious teacher, left its impress on all that he wrote. With all
the genius of the poet and the preacher, with all the severity and
1 The Cathedral, 1841 edn, p. 21.
>
>
## p. 267 (#291) ############################################
X11]
267
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
simplicity of the Oxford school which he led, Newman was yet, to
the fingertips, and to the end of his life, an artist, and an incom-
parable master of his art. Hardly yet can his literary be severed
from his personal and religious influence; but already two, at least, of
his works have come to be ranked among the classics. His Apologia
pro vita sua was written in 1864 in answer to an offensive and un-
provoked slander from Charles Kingsley.
An accusation that truth
for its own sake had never been a virtue with the Roman catholic
clergy was supplemented by a gratuitous mention of Newman,
and, for this, the only substantiation offered was a reference to a
sermon delivered when the preacher was still ministering in the
English church. Newman showed that the sermon contained no
words that could possibly express such a meaning. Kingsley, the
most honest and fearless of men, yet would not make an honest
withdrawal, and Newman, with just relentlessness, exposed him
to the derision of the world. The exposure was completed by
an intimate account of the mental history of the man who had
been maligned. Between April and June, Newman put out an
Apologia, in seven parts, which should vindicate himself and
show his countrymen what manner of man he was. False ideas
may be refuted by argument, but by true ideas alone are they
expelled. I will vanquish,' he said, 'not my accuser, but my
judges. ' And this he did in a wonderful way. He sat down and
wrote day and night—his fingers, as he said, walking nearly
twenty miles a day—just as he felt, thought and remembered,
often weeping as he wrote, but triumphantly achieving such a
record as few men have ever made, so sincere, so thorough, or
80 convincing. From the day when his Apologia was published,
Newman won a place in the heart of his countrymen of whatever
religion or whatever politics, which he never lost till he passed
away nearly fifty years later in an honoured old age. The supreme
merit of his Apologia, no doubt, is its directness. Every page
seems as if it were rather spoken than written. It has the merits
of a letter rather than of a book. It seems to represent without
omission or concealment the whole mind of the writer. And yet
it is a piece of finished art, not conscious but inevitable, because
the writer had become, half-perhaps altogether-unwittingly, a
supreme artist. He could not write in any other way than as an
artist: his art had become to him a second nature. Thus, then,
when the English of his Apologia is recommended as a model,
and as characteristic of its age and the tractarian movement, it
must be remembered that its simplicity is largely the result of a
that
## p. 268 (#292) ############################################
268
The Oxford Movement [CH.
long and strenuous mental discipline acting upon a singularly
brilliant and sensitive spirit. Newman writes as nature looks;
but it is not given to others, in untaught simplicity, to write as
he wrote. The training ground of his Apologia was the long
series of sermons, delivered week by week, saint's day by saint's
day, at St Mary's, Oxford. Their simplicity seems even more
certain than that of the personal vindication which followed them
after twenty years. Their English is simple, clear and refreshing
as pure water; answering to every changing thought of the
speaker's mind. The thought is as limpid as the language. There
had been nothing like them in the English pulpit: the nearest
approach was bishop Wilson, yet in him still lingered the savour
of the old divines who, undoubtedly, said what they meant, yet
relished it as it was said. Newman never seems to taste what
he is saying, nor to write with any look backward at himself :
he only speaks straight home. Yet all this would have been
impossible, his unique and wonderful style would not have been
created, if he had not been both a student and a musician and
had not, almost all his life long written thrice over everything
that he intended to preserve. The ancient classics, the fathers
in their solemn searching severity, the unearthly music of the
violin—these taught him the mastery of language and to know
when he had mastered it to express every vibration of his thought.
Of his teachers in English literature, only two were prominent,
Southey, whom he 'worshipped,' and Crabbe, from whom he un--
consciously learnt more than any other master, in power to register,
remember and reproduce a single impression in single-minded
words. And, ever at the background, a spirit which dominates
but finds no complete expression which frail humanity can grasp,
is the majestic infinity which sounds in the symphonies of Beet-
hoven. In his later sermons, especially in Sermons for Mixed
Congregations (1850), his style was much more ornate, his
eloquence less restrained, with an extraordinary vividness of
description and appeal. He became more rhetorical, more
obviously aiming at effect, with less of English reticence and
with a vehemence more Italian or French.
Next to Newman's Sermons and his Apologia, no doubt
The Dream of Gerontius, the vision, half dream, half inspiration,
of the beginnings of a world beyond this life, is his most direct
appeal. Swinburne recognised 'the force, the fervour, the terse
energy' in its verse : and it has that mark of genius, like the
finest parts of Shakespeare, that poor and rich, learned and
## p. 269 (#293) ############################################
XII]
269
Newman's Later Works
ignorant, are alike carried away by its attraction. There are im-
mortal lines in it, and it is no temerity to predict that ‘Praise to
the Holiest,' like 'Lead kindly Light,' will never be forgotten, the
one a profound theology in words like classic marble, the other
a passionate cry of individual struggle and self-conquest.
In the rest of Newman's work there is an obvious division
drawn by his submission to the see of Rome. Yet there is little
apparent difference in his manner of writing. He never sur-
passed, in the way of pure exposition, the clarity and distinction
of his style in Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church
(1838). But, later books were, at least at the time of their publica-
tion, more generally influential, notably The Scope and Nature of
University Education (1859), The Grammar of Assent (1870) and
perhaps, also, the earlier Essay on the Development of Christian
Doctrine (1845). This last, begun while he was still in the English
church, became a justification of his secession. It explained how
modern Rome, widely different from the church of the Fathers,
could yet claim to represent the original Christianity, not as identical
but as consistent with it, as being in fact the full fruit of which
the seed only was seen at first. In his theory, Newman was not so
far away from the Darwinism which was to exert a far greater
influence on English thought, and he certainly expressed the heart
of the science of comparative religion. Something of the same
kind may be said of lectures on University Education. They
represent, if they do not indeed anticipate, some of the most
powerful ideas of the later nineteenth century in regard to the
true functions of a university and the motive force of university
reform. Knowledge for its own sake, as enlargement of the mind,
is the object of a university education; but such knowledge is
impossible apart from a theology. All knowledge is, ultimately, a
defence of the Christian faith. A university is, must be, impartial;
but it can only be impartial if it includes theology in the sciences
which it studies. The Grammar of Assent carried the argument of
probability, the corner-stone of his master Butler, on to new ground.
The argument was, to him, 'an accumulation of probabilities,' and
he reached these by a study of the mental processes which lead to
apprehension and assent. 'In any enquiry about things in the
concrete,' he wrote, 'men differ from each other not so much in the
soundness of their reasoning as in the principles which govern its
exercise,' and those principles were not general but personal. “The
validity of proof is determined not by any scientific test but by the
illative sense. ' It is easy to relate such thoughts as these to much
>
## p. 270 (#294) ############################################
270 The Oxford Movement [CH.
later philosophy, both English and German. And, in fact, what is
characteristic of all Newman's writing is that form of genius which
seizes upon the floating tendencies of nascent thought and points
the way towards unforeseen conclusions.
It is only within very narrow limits that Newman's thought
here or elsewhere can ever be called reactionary. No doubt he,
as one of the latest and clearest of his critics and admirers has
said, had, indeed, an 'abhorrence of doctrinal liberalism. ' In 1835,
he vigorously protested against 'the introduction of rationalistic
principles into revealed religion' in a tract which described
rationalism as 'a certain abuse of reason; that is, a use of it
for purposes for which it never was intended and is unfitted,' and
‘a rationalistic spirit' as 'the antagonist of Faith; for Faith is, in
its very nature, the acceptance of what our reason cannot reach,
simply and absolutely upon testimony. But it has of recent
years again and again been asserted that he was the intellectual
parent of a modernism which he would have abhorred. A partial
study of his writings might give some ground for such a view:
a complete one refutes it. It could, indeed, hardly be held by any
who did not, perhaps unconsciously, identify the wider catholicism
of orthodox Christianity with the narrower presentment of it in
modern Roman theology which Newman never set himself very
seriously to defend. His intellectual standpoint, however much
during his long life it may seem to have varied, never really
departed from the three bases on which it had been founded.
He was an Aristotelian. He distrusted much of modern metaphysic.
He regarded the actual facts of human life as the ultimate basis of
reason. He was, like many of the most earnest English thinkers
of his time, a convinced disciple of Butler. His reading of The
Analogy of Religion was, as he said, an era in his religious opinions.
Starting from probability as the guide of life, he never fancied
that the limitless area of things human and divine could be fully
mapped or the ultimate mystery more than 'imperfectly com-
prehended. ' But he found reality in the religious facts of the
world, as the philosophers of his time found them in the moral
facts, and the men of science in the physical ; and, herein, he may
be said to have anticipated modern psychology. Yet also, and with
at least as much strength, he was a historian: very often, not
an accurate historian in detail, but a historian of illumination
and genius. If much that he wrote as history has long been cast
aside, the interpretation that he gave of early-not the earliest-
Christian centuries remained as an inspiration to the students who
## p. 271 (#295) ############################################
XII]
271
Dean Church
TOT
LE
re
TI
made Oxford history famous, to Stubbs and Freeman, Creighton
and Bryce, and remains still. When he wrote his different studies
he was loyal to his principles, whether, at the time, he was an
English or a Roman churchman, but he never surrendered the
scholar's independence. No doubt, he loved narration more than
interpretation, character more than institutional life; but, what
he wanted to find, and believed he could find, in history was
truth: and in that he never deserted the fundamental principle of
the tractarian company. As a historian, his affinities were with
the French school which was coming into existence in his middle
age, never with the purely German, where vast collections of facts
were often used to support an unverifiable theory. But, if his
passion throughout was catholicism, his preconception was truth.
Newman must ever remain the central figure in the literature
of the movement of which he was the most conspicuous figure.
But Pusey, it would be true to say, represented far more entirely its
most prominent characteristics: its basis in history and tradition,
its via media, its determination stare super antiquas vias. And
it may well be that, if Newman appealed to the wider circle, Pusey
and Keble influenced more directly the general literature of
English religion. The Oxford movement certainly belongs to the
history of English religion more definitely than to the history
of English literature; but it had great influence, outside its own
definite members, on the literary taste of its age. It spoke from
the first for a certain purity, directness and severity of style:
later, the historical influences which attached themselves to it,
through the study of ancient legends, and liturgies, and hymns,
produced a richer vein of prose, a more florid touch in poetry.
No one can think that Tennyson was wholly unmoved by its
manner; but Dolben and Pater were the undoubted issue of its
later life. If one were to look for men of letters who were as
clearly such, and would have been in any age, as they were men
of religion, one would light instantly on the names of Richard
William Church and Richard Chenevix Trench. The former, a
fellow of Oriel with Newman, one of the proctors who vetoed
the new test proposed when Ward was condemned, died as
dean of St Paul's. Church lived to be the historian of the
movement itself, and perhaps that was his finest work. But his
deep thought and profound wisdom, which had remarkable
weight with the eminent statesmen of his day, were seen at
their best in his interpretation of past history as well as in
lectures and sermons which are models of clear writing and
Test
TK
the
tat
## p. 272 (#296) ############################################
272 The Oxford Movement
[CH.
clear thought. Something of the severity and unworldliness of
Dante, of whom he was a devoted student, seemed to have
descended upon him, with, also, the great Florentine's knowledge
of the ways and thoughts of common men. But, most clearly,
he was, in literature, the disciple of Newman, in the simplicity,
directness and absence of ornament which made his style powerful
in its effect on the writing of his generation. Church was a
preacher, a moralist, a historian; but, especially, he was a student
of human nature, who judged men equally yet with sympathy,
who weighed motives in scales which were never deflected by
prejudice or passion, and knew to a nicety the springs of human
action. He was a master of sympathetic literary criticism, too,
as his volume on Spenser proves. His historical sketches, such as
that of the early middle age, and his criticisms in literature, such
as those of Cassiodorus and Pascal, show a characteristic simplicity
which cannot veil the abundance of knowledge. Occasionally,
something is revealed of the fire within him, which breaks out
now and again in his classic memorial of the Oxford movement
and the men who began and led it, a record, as he wrote to
Lord Acton,
that one who lived with them, and lived long beyond most of em, believed
in the reality of their goodness and height of character, and still looks back
with deepest reverence to those forgotten men as the companions to whose
teaching and example he owes an infinite debt, and not he only but religious
society in England of all kinds 1.
Preeminently, Church was a man of letters; and this was as
obviously true of Richard Chenevix Trench. Church noted 'the
peculiar combination in him of the poet, the theologian and the
champion of primitive and catholic doctrine. ' Some of his lyrics
belong to the highest flight of English poetry. His religious
writings had a peculiar distinction and charm. Just as Church
owed inspiration to Greece, modern as well as ancient, and its
struggle for liberty, so Trench had nourished himself on the great
literature of Spain and was in harmony with the aspirations of her
liberal revival. He passed, in 1863, from the deanery of West-
minster to the archbishopric of Dublin, where he was primate at
the disestablishment and fought hard for the ancient symbols of
the Irish church under its new constitution. Like the dean of
St Paul's, he was not a militant tractarian, but he spoke of Hugh
James Rose as ‘my master,' and wrote, on the death of Pusey,
that ‘a prince in our Israel has indeed passed away. ' The names
1 Quoted in the Advertisement' to The Oxford Movement, p. vi.
6
6
## p. 273 (#297) ############################################
XII]
273
Neale and the Mozleys
of Church and Trench, which, even apart from their theological
writings, and at any time in our history, would have been pro-
minent in English letters, are examples of the influence which the
serious ideas of the Oxford movement exercised upon literature.
In historical study, the influence was no less conspicuous.
William Stubbs, the greatest English historian of the nineteenth
century, was a convinced tractarian and spoke of Pusey, whom
he assisted in literary work, as 'the master. ' Henry Parry
Liddon, the greatest preacher of the period, whose sermons at
St Paul's were, for twenty years, a conspicuous factor in the
life of London, was the disciple, the friend and the biographer
of Pusey. His Bampton lectures on the Divinity of Christ were
worthy to rank with the great dogmatic treatises of the older
divines. And their successors remain to the present day.
Not far apart from them, yet still somewhat in isolation, was
the striking figure of John Mason Neale, not an Oxford but a
Cambridge man. He was antiquary, historian, poet, novelist,
priest; and in none of these activities can he be forgotten.
He was as facile as he was learned. He poured forth book
after book of amazing erudition on almost every conceivable
subject of theological and historical interest. As a translator
of Latin and Greek hymns no Englishman has surpassed him.
But, above all things, he loved 'a story' and he could tell it—as
such an historical novel as Theodora Phranza, which tells the
fall of Christian Constantinople, evidences—with the best of
them. While his knowledge was diffused, that of James Bowling
Mozley was intense and concentrated. Master of a stern and
somewhat arid style, which still could rise into eloquence and
passion, he exercised a profound influence on the generation
which succeeded him. He was the foe of shallow thinking and
shallow writing. Many of the idols of the market-place, past
or present, from Martin Luther to Thomas Carlyle, suffered his
gwashing blows. His brother Thomas had abilities of a more
popular cast: he was, for a while, editor of The British Critic:
for many years he was a leader writer for The Times, and he
represented that paper at Rome during the time of the council
1869–70, when liis letters, unsympathetic though Roman catholics
have complained that they are, presented a most vivid and re-
markable picture of a great historical episode. In his old age,
he wrote Reminiscences of the days of struggle, which are
entertaining, but not always accurate. 'If a story cannot stand
on two legs,' said Newman, whose sister he had married, 'Tom
18
9
E. L. XII.
CH. XII.
## p. 274 (#298) ############################################
274
[CH.
The Oxford Movement
supplies a third. From him comes a touching tribute to the
self-effacing labours of Charles Marriott, like himself a fellow
of Oriel, who was the helper of every one, great and small, who
belonged to the movement, and its great stay in scholarship, as
editing with Keble and Pusey The Oxford Library of the Fathers.
Outside Oxford, the same interests which had awakened the
ecclesiastical learning and catholic orthodoxy of the university
were represented in many writers who were affected, in greater
or less degree, by the principles of the tractarians.
Walter Farquhar Hook was one of the most masterful figures
of his time, first as vicar of Leeds for twenty-two years and then
as dean of Chichester. He accepted nearly all the principles of the
tractarians, but frequently stood apart from their expression and
was often a vehement critic. He was an industrious compiler
of dictionaries and biographies, without sufficient research or
originality to give them permanent vitality. His successor at
Chichester, John William Burgon, held a similar position of in-
dependent judgment. He was a keen and biting controversialist
and the most conservative of biblical critics ; but he had an
intense love of 'good men,' among whom he placed some of the
authors of the tracts. His biographies are essential to a knowledge
of the movement.
Two sons of the famous statesman and philanthropist, and
brothers of that bishop of Oxford who revolutionised the ideal of
English episcopacy, Robert Isaac and Henry William Wilberforce,
both at Oriel, passed into the Roman church. The elder had
been an archdeacon and yet had written theological books of
real value, notably one on The Doctrine of The Incarnation,
which was on strictly tractarian lines and won great fame. The
younger after his secession gave important help to the Roman
catholic cause in the press.
Some of those who had abandoned their orders and left the
English church seemed eager to disclaim any connection with it.
Some vehemently attacked what they had before as vehemently
defended, but no one of them save Newman made any great mark
in literature. Some were content with a change of clothes, sub-
stituting for their customary suits of solemn black the vagaries of
'blue ties and ginger-coloured trousers. '
More formidable was the Anglo-Roman hierarchy created in
1850, whose head announced its creation by a letter from out the
Flaminian Gate. '
Nicholas Wiseman, Roman catholic controversialist and
1
## p. 275 (#299) ############################################
X1)
275
Converts to Rome
cardinal, whose education had not been English, was a capable
craftsman in letters. He was an orientalist, and a cultured student
of many subjects, who became the first archbishop of Westminster
in 1850, after devoting himself to confuting ‘High Church Claims'
(1841), and embodying his theories of church history in a pretty
story called Fabiola, or the Church of the Catacombs (1854).
Henry Edward, cardinal Manning, who had been an English
archdeacon and became Wiseman's successor, wrote, while he
was a member of the English church, volumes of sermons which
reached at least a fifth edition, and, as a controversial papalist,
many vehement criticisms of the Anglican position; but, though
his personal influence was great, his work is negligible as literature.
John Hungerford Pollen, as an English priest wrote the most
touching and tragic of all the records of struggle in parish
work for tractarian principles (A Narrative of Five Years at
St Saviour's, Leeds, 1851), and then, as a Romanist layman,
devoted himself to art, wrote some valuable lectures, was the
friend of Morris and Rossetti, Swinburne and Patmore, and
became in artistic literature, what his friend Baron von Hügel
said he was in life, 'the perfect type of l'homme du monde. '
Another convert, Frederick William Faber, endowed with high
gifts of imagination, deplored, as a Roman catholic, the position
of the Magi, with, perhaps, an undercurrent of reference to the
protestants' unhappy lot,
No Pope, no blessèd Pope had they
To guide them with his hand,-
and was generally sentimental and sugary, very unlike the
tractarians; but he wrote some devotional poetry of sincerity
and pathos. John Dobree Dalgairns was capable and solid
as a Roman controversialist on behalf of Christian belief; but
he was far surpassed by another of the later disciples of the
tractarians who became a power in the church of his adoption.
William George Ward, the crisis of whose stormy career was
critical also in the movement itself, has won immortality in the
verse of Tennyson and the prose of dean Church. The latter
finds it his chief distinction that as 'a profound metaphysical
thinker he was the equal antagonist on their own ground of John
Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. ' His work hardly belongs to
pure literature: its manner and method are, for the most part,
cumbrous, only occasionally vivid or comprehensive. His own
generation read what he wrote because he was famous for what
he said: it was meat and drink to him to argue and to chop logic,
5
18-2
## p. 276 (#300) ############################################
276 The Oxford Movement [CH.
and his swordplay was a delight to the onlookers. But, if his
Ideal, his intuitionist philosophy and his controversial treatises
are forgotten, he will ever be remembered by the poet's farewell
to him as one
Whose Faith and Work were bells of full accord,
My friend, the most unworldly of mankind,
Most generous of all Ultramontanes, Ward.
Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, another English convert to the Roman
obedience, followed the Tracts for the Times with keenest in-
terest from the first. He had been ten years a Roman catholic
when they began to appear and he set himself before long to
correspond with their writers in the hope of 'producing a good
understanding between the Catholic and Anglican churches, with
a view to the ultimate restoration of that happy and blessed unity,
which formerly existed between them for more than a thousand
years, and which,' he added, “I am perfectly certain will one day be
restored. ' The letters which passed between him and Mont-
alembert illustrate how close at some points was the connection
between the ecclesiastical revival in England and in France.
The French man of letters had no hope
that Catholicity will make any real progress in England, as long as the
fanatical spirit of Archbishop Manning, Mr Ward, and others of the same
stamp is prevalent among English Catholics;
and, on the other side, Newman was equally hopeless about reunion
or 'the conversion of that corporate body which we call the
Anglican Church. ' De Lisle's own work, sympathetic in aim,
trivial in result, is an example of the rift between the two bodies,
in literature as well as in religion. Only in Newman himself was
the influence of the Oxford movement to be discerned among
Romanist writers.
But the glamour of tractarian theology extended far beyond
those who were its first teachers or their direct heirs. It created
a religious literature effective if ephemeral: it ‘tuned the pulpits'
for some half a century to a gravity which strove, often success-
fully, after the majesty of classical sculpture. And, in the poetry
of Digby Mackworth Dolben, only recently given to the world, and
of Christina Rossetti, it formed a new life exuberant and aflame.
Dolben pursued its teaching till it yielded to him a certain medieval
richness of ecclesiastical imagery that touched at many points a
religious passion which was older than Christianity, and almost
1 Purcell, E. , Life of Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, vol. II, p. 360.
## p. 277 (#301) ############################################
XII]
Tractarian Novels
277
hostile to it. To Christina Rossetti, the catholic theology of the
English church was the very breath of life, and she accepted its
sternness without dispute. Yet, while the accent of severity
clings to all she wrote, we are, in her company, on the road to a
reaction which yet has its roots in the past: the splendour of
Jeremy Taylor is not forgotten and the exotic richness of Walter
Pater is in sight.
In humbler literature, 'tractarianism' may be thought to
have created an epoch by inaugurating the dreary succession
of religious novels. But they were not dreary in their beginnings.
J. M. Neale was a great writer of romance. Newman himself put
some very good polemical work into Loss and Gain (with an
immortal description of an Oxford tutor's breakfast) and Callista.
Wiseman's Fabiola was an effort of the same kind. Francis
Edward Paget, student of Christ Church and then rector of
Elford, published a series of most interesting tales, containing
quite delicious descriptions of country life and character which
no novelist of his time surpassed. But most prominent of all
was the long line of stories, exquisite in domestic portraiture,
strong in moral power, keen in understanding of character and
touched with a gracious humour, which issued from the parish of
Hursley-where Keble was to the authoress a true guide, phi-
losopher and friend-and were the work of Charlotte M. Yonge.
The Heir of Redclyffe and The Little Duke have their place
in English literature. They have had many imitators and suc-
cessors but few rivals, unless John Inglesant may claim to be of
their company.
A movement which had so many means of making itself felt
throughout the country had, naturally, an influence in many phases
of literature. It was primarily religious, with a religion, said one
of its lay disciples, an eminent public official, 'which was fervent
and reforming in essentials with a due reverence for existing
authorities and habits and traditions'; but it was not narrow
or cloistered, it was 'a religion which did not reject, but aspired
to embody in itself, any form of art and literature, poetry,
philosophy, and even science which could be pressed into the
service of Christianity? '
But its permanent effects may be seen most clearly in the fields
of history and dogma. During the eighteenth century, the constant
study of the Fathers of the early church which had been the
basis of the theological writings of the reformers and the Caroline
1 Letters of Lord Blachford, p. 15.
## p. 278 (#302) ############################################
278 The Oxford Movement [CH. XII
divines had passed into desuetude. In the seventeenth century,
no one would have dared to write theology without quoting long
passages of crabbed Latin and obscure Greek. In the eighteenth
century, the habit had gone entirely out of fashion, and Wesley,
scholar though he was, was the last man in the world to wish
for its revival. But, while the tractarians were in their cradles,
Routh of Magdalen had recalled to the church of England the
thought of the rock whence it was digged, by the publication of
the first part of his Reliquiae Sacrae (1814), in which he collected
the fragments of early Christian writings up to the first Nicene
council and edited them with a remarkable combination of affec-
tion, erudition and sagacity. He set the tone for the Oxford
writers.
