I hope, however, that the following pages may prove to be of interest
from the strictly biographical, no less than from the historical point
of view.
from the strictly biographical, no less than from the historical point
of view.
Strachey - Eminent Victorians
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Title: Eminent Victorians
Author: Lytton Strachey
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EMINENT VICTORIANS
by Lytton Strachey
Preface
THE history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know too much
about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian--ignorance,
which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid
perfection unattainable by the highest art. Concerning the Age which has
just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and
accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a
Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would
quail before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous
narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular
epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack
his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the
rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure
recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of
material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which
will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from
those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity. Guided by
these considerations, I have written the ensuing studies. I have
attempted, through the medium of biography, to present some Victorian
visions to the modern eye. They are, in one sense, haphazard
visions--that is to say, my choice of subjects has been determined by no
desire to construct a system or to prove a theory, but by simple motives
of convenience and of art. It has been my purpose to illustrate rather
than to explain. It would have been futile to hope to tell even a precis
of the truth about the Victorian age, for the shortest precis must fill
innumerable volumes. But, in the lives of an ecclesiastic, an
educational authority, a woman of action, and a man of adventure, I have
sought to examine and elucidate certain fragments of the truth which
took my fancy and lay to my hand.
I hope, however, that the following pages may prove to be of interest
from the strictly biographical, no less than from the historical point
of view. Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms
of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal
processes--which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake. The art
of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. We have had,
it is true, a few masterpieces, but we have never had, like the French,
a great biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and
Condorcets, with their incomparable eloges, compressing into a few
shining pages the manifold existences of men. With us, the most delicate
and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated
to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as
difficult to write a good life as to live one. Those two fat volumes,
with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead--who does not know
them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style,
their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of
detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortege of the
undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism. One is
tempted to suppose, of some of them, that they were composed by that
functionary as the final item of his job. The studies in this book are
indebted, in more ways than one, to such works--works which certainly
deserve the name of Standard Biographies. For they have provided me not
only with much indispensable information, but with something even more
precious--an example. How many lessons are to be learned from them! But
it is hardly necessary to particularise. To preserve, for instance, a
becoming brevity--a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant
and nothing that is significant--that, surely, is the first duty of the
biographer. The second, no less surely, is to maintain his own freedom
of spirit. It is not his business to be complimentary; it is his
business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them. That
is what I have aimed at in this book--to lay bare the facts of some
cases, as I understand them, dispassionately, impartially, and without
ulterior intentions. To quote the words of a Master--'Je n'impose rien;
je ne propose rien: j'expose. '
L. S.
A list of the principal sources from which I have drawn is appended to
each Biography. I would indicate, as an honourable exception to the
current commodity, Sir Edward Cook's excellent Life of Florence
Nightingale, without which my own study, though composed on a very
different scale and from a decidedly different angle, could not have
been written.
Cardinal Manning
HENRY EDWARD MANNING was born in 1807 and died in 1892. His life was
extraordinary in many ways, but its interest for the modern inquirer
depends mainly upon two considerations--the light which his career
throws upon the spirit of his age, and the psychological problems
suggested by his inner history. He belonged to that class of eminent
ecclesiastics--and it is by no means a small class--who have been
distinguished less for saintliness and learning than for practical
ability. Had he lived in the Middle Ages he would certainly have been
neither a Francis nor an Aquinas, but he might have been an Innocent. As
it was, born in the England of the nineteenth century, growing up in the
very seed-time of modern progress, coming to maturity with the first
onrush of Liberalism, and living long enough to witness the victories of
Science and Democracy, he yet, by a strange concatenation of
circumstances, seemed almost to revive in his own person that long line
of diplomatic and administrative clerics which, one would have thought,
had come to an end for ever with Cardinal Wolsey.
In Manning, so it appeared, the Middle Ages lived again. The tall gaunt
figure, with the face of smiling asceticism, the robes, and the biretta,
as it passed in triumph from High Mass at the Oratory to philanthropic
gatherings at Exeter Hall, from Strike Committees at the Docks to
Mayfair drawing-rooms where fashionable ladies knelt to the Prince of
the Church, certainly bore witness to a singular condition of affairs.
What had happened? Had a dominating character imposed itself upon a
hostile environment? Or was the nineteenth century, after all, not so
hostile? Was there something in it, scientific and progressive as it
was, which went out to welcome the representative of ancient tradition
and uncompromising faith? Had it, perhaps, a place in its heart for such
as Manning--a soft place, one might almost say? Or, on the other hand,
was it he who had been supple and yielding? He who had won by art what
he would never have won by force, and who had managed, so to speak, to
be one of the leaders of the procession less through merit than through
a superior faculty for gliding adroitly to the front rank? And, in any
case, by what odd chances, what shifts and struggles, what combinations
of circumstance and character, had this old man come to be where he was?
Such questions are easier to ask than to answer; but it may be
instructive, and even amusing, to look a little more closely into the
complexities of so curious a story.
I
UNDOUBTEDLY, what is most obviously striking in the history of Manning's
career is the persistent strength of his innate characteristics. Through
all the changes of his fortunes the powerful spirit of the man worked on
undismayed. It was as if the Fates had laid a wager that they would
daunt him; and in the end they lost their bet.
His father was a rich West Indian merchant, a governor of the Bank of
England, a Member of Parliament, who drove into town every day from his
country seat in a coach and four, and was content with nothing short of
a bishop for the christening of his children. Little Henry, like the
rest, had his bishop; but he was obliged to wait for him--for as long as
eighteen months. In those days, and even a generation later, as Keble
bears witness, there was great laxity in regard to the early baptism of
children. The delay has been noted by Manning's biographer as the first
stumbling-block in the spiritual life of the future Cardinal; but he
surmounted it with success.
His father was more careful in other ways.
'His refinement and delicacy of mind were such,' wrote Manning long
afterwards, 'that I never heard out of his mouth a word which might not
have been spoken in the presence of the most pure and sensitive--except,'
he adds, 'on one occasion. He was then forced by others to repeat a
negro story which, though free from all evil de sexu, was indelicate. He
did it with great resistance. His example gave me a hatred of all such
talk. '
The family lived in an atmosphere of Evangelical piety. One day the
little boy came in from the farmyard, and his mother asked him whether
he had seen the peacock. 'I said yes, and the nurse said no, and my
mother made me kneel down and beg God to forgive me for not speaking the
truth. ' At the age of four the child was told by a cousin of the age of
six that 'God had a book in which He wrote down everything we did wrong.
This so terrified me for days that I remember being found by my mother
sitting under a kind of writing-table in great fear. I never forgot this
at any time in my life,' the Cardinal tells us, 'and it has been a great
grace to me. ' When he was nine years old he 'devoured the Apocalypse;
and I never all through my life forgot the "lake that burneth with fire
and brimstone". That verse has kept me like an audible voice through all
my life, and through worlds of danger in my youth. '
At Harrow the worlds of danger were already around him; but yet he
listened to the audible voice. 'At school and college I never failed to
say my prayers, so far as memory serves me, even for a day. ' And he
underwent another religious experience: he read Paley's Evidences. 'I
took in the whole argument,' wrote Manning, when he was over seventy,
'and I thank God that nothing has ever shaken it. ' Yet on the whole he
led the unspiritual life of an ordinary schoolboy. We have glimpses of
him as a handsome lad, playing cricket, or strutting about in tasselled
Hessian top-boots. And on one occasion at least he gave proof of a
certain dexterity of conduct which deserved to be remembered. He went
out of bounds, and a master, riding by and seeing him on the other side
of a field, tied his horse to a gate, and ran after him. The astute
youth outran the master, fetched a circle, reached the gate, jumped on
to the horse's back and rode off. For this he was very properly
chastised; but, of what use was chastisement? No whipping, however
severe, could have eradicated from little Henry's mind a quality at
least as firmly planted in it as his fear of Hell and his belief in the
arguments of Paley.
It had been his father's wish that Manning should go into the Church;
but the thought disgusted him; and when he reached Oxford, his tastes,
his ambitions, his successes at the Union, all seemed to mark him out
for a political career. He was a year junior to Samuel Wilberforce, and
a year senior to Gladstone. In those days the Union was the
recruiting-ground for young politicians; Ministers came down from London
to listen to the debates; and a few years later the Duke of Newcastle
gave Gladstone a pocket borough on the strength of his speech at the
Union against the Reform Bill. To those three young men, indeed, the
whole world lay open. Were they not rich, well-connected, and endowed
with an infinite capacity for making speeches? The event justified the
highest expectations of their friends; for the least distinguished of
the three died a bishop. The only danger lay in another direction.
'Watch, my dear Samuel,' wrote the elder Wilberforce to his son, 'watch
with jealousy whether you find yourself unduly solicitous about
acquitting yourself; whether you are too much chagrined when you fail,
or are puffed up by your success. Undue solicitude about popular
estimation is a weakness against which all real Christians must guard
with the utmost jealous watchfulness. The more you can retain the
impression of your being surrounded by a cloud of witnesses of the
invisible world, to use the scripture phrase, the more you will be armed
against this besetting sin. '
But suddenly it seemed as if such a warning could, after all, have very
little relevance to Manning; for, on his leaving Oxford, the brimming
cup was dashed from his lips. He was already beginning to dream of
himself in the House of Commons, the solitary advocate of some great
cause whose triumph was to be eventually brought about by his
extraordinary efforts, when his father was declared a bankrupt, and all
his hopes of a political career came to an end forever.
It was at this time that Manning became intimate with a pious lady, the
sister of one of his College friends, whom he used to describe as his
Spiritual Mother. He made her his confidante; and one day, as they
walked together in the shrubbery, he revealed the bitterness of the
disappointment into which his father's failure had plunged him. She
tried to cheer him, and then she added that there were higher aims open
to him which he had not considered. 'What do you mean? ' he asked. 'The
kingdom of Heaven,' she answered; 'heavenly ambitions are not closed
against you. ' The young man listened, was silent, and said at last that
he did not know but she was right. She suggested reading the Bible
together; and they accordingly did so during the whole of that Vacation,
every morning after breakfast. Yet, in spite of these devotional
exercises, and in spite of a voluminous correspondence on religious
subjects with his Spiritual Mother, Manning still continued to indulge
in secular hopes. He entered the Colonial Office as a supernumerary
clerk, and it was only when the offer of a Merton Fellowship seemed to
depend upon his taking orders that his heavenly ambitions began to
assume a definite shape. Just then he fell in love with Miss Deffell,
whose father would have nothing to say to a young man without prospects,
and forbade him the house. It was only too true; what WERE the prospects
of a supernumerary clerk in the Colonial Office? Manning went to Oxford
and took orders. He was elected to the Merton Fellowship, and obtained
through the influence of the Wilberforces a curacy in Sussex. At the
last moment he almost drew back. 'I think the whole step has been too
precipitate,' he wrote to his brother-in-law. 'I have rather allowed the
instance of my friends, and the allurements of an agreeable curacy in
many respects, to get the better of my sober judgment. ' His vast
ambitions, his dreams of public service, of honours, and of power, was
all this to end in a little country curacy 'agreeable in many respects'?
But there was nothing for it; the deed was done; and the Fates had
apparently succeeded very effectively in getting rid of Manning. All he
could do was to make the best of a bad business.
Accordingly, in the first place, he decided that he had received a call
from God 'ad veritatem et ad seipsum'; and, in the second, forgetting
Miss Deffell, he married his rector's daughter. Within a few months the
rector died, and Manning stepped into his shoes; and at least it could
be said that the shoes were not uncomfortable. For the next seven years
he fulfilled the functions of a country clergyman. He was energetic and
devout; he was polite and handsome; his fame grew in the diocese. At
last he began to be spoken of as the probable successor to the old
Archdeacon of Chichester. When Mrs. Manning prematurely died, he was at
first inconsolable, but he found relief in the distraction of redoubled
work. How could he have guessed that one day he would come to number
that loss among 'God's special mercies? Yet so it was to be. In after
years, the memory of his wife seemed to be blotted from his mind; he
never spoke of her; every letter, every record, of his married life he
destroyed; and when word was sent to him that her grave was falling into
ruin: 'It is best so,' the Cardinal answered, 'let it be. Time effaces
all things. ' But, when the grave was yet fresh, the young Rector would
sit beside it, day after day, writing his sermons.
II
IN the meantime, a series of events was taking place in another part of
England, which was to have a no less profound effect upon Manning's
history than the merciful removal of his wife. In the same year in which
he took up his Sussex curacy, the Tracts for the Times had begun to
appear at Oxford. The 'Oxford Movement', in fact, had started on its
course. The phrase is still familiar; but its meaning has become
somewhat obscured both by the lapse of time and the intrinsic ambiguity
of the subjects connected with it. Let us borrow for a moment the wings
of Historic Imagination, and, hovering lightly over the Oxford of the
thirties, take a rapid bird's-eye view.
For many generations the Church of England had slept the sleep of the
. . . comfortable. The sullen murmurings of dissent, the loud battle-cry of
Revolution, had hardly disturbed her slumbers. Portly divines subscribed
with a sigh or a smile to the Thirty-nine Articles, sank quietly into
easy living, rode gaily to hounds of a morning as gentlemen should, and,
as gentlemen should, carried their two bottles of an evening. To be in
the Church was in fact simply to pursue one of those professions which
Nature and Society had decided were proper to gentlemen and gentlemen
alone. The fervours of piety, the zeal of Apostolic charity, the
enthusiasm of self-renunciation--these things were all very well in
their way and in their place; but their place was certainly not the
Church of England. Gentlemen were neither fervid nor zealous, and above
all they were not enthusiastic. There were, it was true, occasionally to
be found within the Church some strait-laced parsons of the high Tory
school who looked back with regret to the days of Laud or talked of the
Apostolical Succession; and there were groups of square-toed
Evangelicals who were earnest over the Atonement, confessed to a
personal love of Jesus Christ, and seemed to have arranged the whole of
their lives, down to the minutest details of act and speech, with
reference to Eternity. But such extremes were the rare exceptions. The
great bulk of the clergy walked calmly along the smooth road of ordinary
duty. They kept an eye on the poor of the parish, and they conducted the
Sunday Services in a becoming manner; for the rest, they differed
neither outwardly nor inwardly from the great bulk of the laity, to whom
the Church was a useful organisation for the maintenance of Religion, as
by law established.
The awakening came at last, however, and it was a rude one. The liberal
principles of the French Revolution, checked at first in the terrors of
reaction, began to make their way into England. Rationalists lifted up
their heads; Bentham and the Mills propounded Utilitarianism; the Reform
Bill was passed; and there were rumours abroad of disestablishment. Even
Churchmen seemed to have caught the infection. Dr. Whately was so bold
as to assert that, in the interpretation of Scripture, different
opinions might be permitted upon matters of doubt; and, Dr. Arnold drew
up a disquieting scheme for allowing Dissenters into the Church, though
it is true that he did not go quite so far as to contemplate the
admission of Unitarians.
At this time, there was living in a country parish, a young clergyman of
the name of John Keble. He had gone to Oxford at the age of fifteen,
where, after a successful academic career, he had been made a Fellow of
Oriel. He had then returned to his father's parish and taken up the
duties of a curate. He had a thorough knowledge of the contents of the
Prayer-book, the ways of a Common Room, the conjugations of the Greek
Irregular Verbs, and the small jests of a country parsonage; and the
defects of his experience in other directions were replaced by a zeal
and a piety which were soon to prove themselves equal, and more than
equal, to whatever calls might be made upon them. The superabundance of
his piety overflowed into verse; and the holy simplicity of the
Christian Year carried his name into the remotest lodging-houses of
England.
As for his zeal, however, it needed another outlet. Looking forth upon
the doings of his fellow-men through his rectory windows in
Gloucestershire, Keble felt his whole soul shaken with loathing, anger,
and dread. Infidelity was stalking through the land; authority was
laughed at; the hideous doctrines of Democracy were being openly
preached. Worse still, if possible, the Church herself was ignorant and
lukewarm; she had forgotten the mysteries of the sacraments, she had
lost faith in the Apostolical Succession; she was no longer interested
in the Early Fathers; and she submitted herself to the control of a
secular legislature, the members of which were not even bound to profess
belief in the Atonement. In the face of such enormities what could Keble
do? He was ready to do anything, but he was a simple and an unambitious
man, and his wrath would in all probability have consumed itself
unappeased within him had he not chanced to come into contact, at the
critical moment, with a spirit more excitable and daring than his own.
Hurrell Froude, one of Keble's pupils, was a clever young man to whom
had fallen a rather larger share of self-assurance and intolerance than
even clever young men usually possess. What was singular about him,
however, was not so much his temper as his tastes. The sort of ardour
which impels more normal youths to haunt Music Halls and fall in love
with actresses took the form, in Froude's case, of a romantic devotion
to the Deity and an intense interest in the state of his own soul. He
was obsessed by the ideals of saintliness, and convinced of the supreme
importance of not eating too much. He kept a diary in which he recorded
his delinquencies, and they were many. 'I cannot say much for myself
today,' he writes on September 29th, 1826 (he was twenty-three years
old). 'I did not read the Psalms and Second Lesson after breakfast,
which I had neglected to do before, though I had plenty of time on my
hands. Would have liked to be thought adventurous for a scramble I had
at the Devil's Bridge. Looked with greediness to see if there was a
goose on the table for dinner; and though what I ate was of the plainest
sort, and I took no variety, yet even this was partly the effect of
accident, and I certainly rather exceeded in quantity, as I was fuzzy
and sleepy after dinner. ' 'I allowed myself to be disgusted, with--'s
pomposity,' he writes a little later, 'also smiled at an allusion in the
Lessons to abstemiousness in eating. I hope not from pride or vanity,
but mistrust; it certainly was unintentional. ' And again, 'As to my
meals, I can say that I was always careful to see that no one else would
take a thing before I served myself; and I believe as to the kind of my
food, a bit of cold endings of a dab at breakfast, and a scrap of
mackerel at dinner, are the only things that diverged from the strict
rule of simplicity. ' 'I am obliged to confess,' he notes, 'that in my
intercourse with the Supreme Being, I am be come more and more
sluggish. ' And then he exclaims: 'Thine eye trieth my inward parts, and
knoweth my thoughts . . . Oh that my ways were made so direct that I might
keep Thy statutes. I will walk in Thy Commandments when Thou hast set my
heart at liberty. '
Such were the preoccupations of this young man. Perhaps they would have
been different, if he had had a little less of what Newman describes as
his 'high severe idea of the intrinsic excellence of Virginity'; but it
is useless to speculate.
Naturally enough the fierce and burning zeal of Keble had a profound
effect upon his mind. The two became intimate friends, and Froude,
eagerly seizing upon the doctrines of the elder man, saw to it that they
had as full a measure of controversial notoriety as an Oxford common
room could afford. He plunged the metaphysical mysteries of the Holy
Catholic Church into the atmosphere of party politics. Surprised Doctors
of Divinity found themselves suddenly faced with strange questions which
had never entered their heads before. Was the Church of England, or was
it not, a part of the Church Catholic? If it was, were not the Reformers
of the sixteenth century renegades? Was not the participation of the
Body and Blood of Christ essential to the maintenance of Christian life
and hope in each individual? Were Timothy and Titus Bishops? Or were
they not? If they were, did it not follow that the power of
administering the Holy Eucharist was the attribute of a sacred order
founded by Christ Himself? Did not the Fathers refer to the tradition of
the Church as to something independent of the written word, and
sufficient to refute heresy, even alone? Was it not, therefore, God's
unwritten word?
I hope, however, that the following pages may prove to be of interest
from the strictly biographical, no less than from the historical point
of view. Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms
of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal
processes--which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake. The art
of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. We have had,
it is true, a few masterpieces, but we have never had, like the French,
a great biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and
Condorcets, with their incomparable eloges, compressing into a few
shining pages the manifold existences of men. With us, the most delicate
and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated
to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as
difficult to write a good life as to live one. Those two fat volumes,
with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead--who does not know
them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style,
their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of
detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortege of the
undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism. One is
tempted to suppose, of some of them, that they were composed by that
functionary as the final item of his job. The studies in this book are
indebted, in more ways than one, to such works--works which certainly
deserve the name of Standard Biographies. For they have provided me not
only with much indispensable information, but with something even more
precious--an example. How many lessons are to be learned from them! But
it is hardly necessary to particularise. To preserve, for instance, a
becoming brevity--a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant
and nothing that is significant--that, surely, is the first duty of the
biographer. The second, no less surely, is to maintain his own freedom
of spirit. It is not his business to be complimentary; it is his
business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them. That
is what I have aimed at in this book--to lay bare the facts of some
cases, as I understand them, dispassionately, impartially, and without
ulterior intentions. To quote the words of a Master--'Je n'impose rien;
je ne propose rien: j'expose. '
L. S.
A list of the principal sources from which I have drawn is appended to
each Biography. I would indicate, as an honourable exception to the
current commodity, Sir Edward Cook's excellent Life of Florence
Nightingale, without which my own study, though composed on a very
different scale and from a decidedly different angle, could not have
been written.
Cardinal Manning
HENRY EDWARD MANNING was born in 1807 and died in 1892. His life was
extraordinary in many ways, but its interest for the modern inquirer
depends mainly upon two considerations--the light which his career
throws upon the spirit of his age, and the psychological problems
suggested by his inner history. He belonged to that class of eminent
ecclesiastics--and it is by no means a small class--who have been
distinguished less for saintliness and learning than for practical
ability. Had he lived in the Middle Ages he would certainly have been
neither a Francis nor an Aquinas, but he might have been an Innocent. As
it was, born in the England of the nineteenth century, growing up in the
very seed-time of modern progress, coming to maturity with the first
onrush of Liberalism, and living long enough to witness the victories of
Science and Democracy, he yet, by a strange concatenation of
circumstances, seemed almost to revive in his own person that long line
of diplomatic and administrative clerics which, one would have thought,
had come to an end for ever with Cardinal Wolsey.
In Manning, so it appeared, the Middle Ages lived again. The tall gaunt
figure, with the face of smiling asceticism, the robes, and the biretta,
as it passed in triumph from High Mass at the Oratory to philanthropic
gatherings at Exeter Hall, from Strike Committees at the Docks to
Mayfair drawing-rooms where fashionable ladies knelt to the Prince of
the Church, certainly bore witness to a singular condition of affairs.
What had happened? Had a dominating character imposed itself upon a
hostile environment? Or was the nineteenth century, after all, not so
hostile? Was there something in it, scientific and progressive as it
was, which went out to welcome the representative of ancient tradition
and uncompromising faith? Had it, perhaps, a place in its heart for such
as Manning--a soft place, one might almost say? Or, on the other hand,
was it he who had been supple and yielding? He who had won by art what
he would never have won by force, and who had managed, so to speak, to
be one of the leaders of the procession less through merit than through
a superior faculty for gliding adroitly to the front rank? And, in any
case, by what odd chances, what shifts and struggles, what combinations
of circumstance and character, had this old man come to be where he was?
Such questions are easier to ask than to answer; but it may be
instructive, and even amusing, to look a little more closely into the
complexities of so curious a story.
I
UNDOUBTEDLY, what is most obviously striking in the history of Manning's
career is the persistent strength of his innate characteristics. Through
all the changes of his fortunes the powerful spirit of the man worked on
undismayed. It was as if the Fates had laid a wager that they would
daunt him; and in the end they lost their bet.
His father was a rich West Indian merchant, a governor of the Bank of
England, a Member of Parliament, who drove into town every day from his
country seat in a coach and four, and was content with nothing short of
a bishop for the christening of his children. Little Henry, like the
rest, had his bishop; but he was obliged to wait for him--for as long as
eighteen months. In those days, and even a generation later, as Keble
bears witness, there was great laxity in regard to the early baptism of
children. The delay has been noted by Manning's biographer as the first
stumbling-block in the spiritual life of the future Cardinal; but he
surmounted it with success.
His father was more careful in other ways.
'His refinement and delicacy of mind were such,' wrote Manning long
afterwards, 'that I never heard out of his mouth a word which might not
have been spoken in the presence of the most pure and sensitive--except,'
he adds, 'on one occasion. He was then forced by others to repeat a
negro story which, though free from all evil de sexu, was indelicate. He
did it with great resistance. His example gave me a hatred of all such
talk. '
The family lived in an atmosphere of Evangelical piety. One day the
little boy came in from the farmyard, and his mother asked him whether
he had seen the peacock. 'I said yes, and the nurse said no, and my
mother made me kneel down and beg God to forgive me for not speaking the
truth. ' At the age of four the child was told by a cousin of the age of
six that 'God had a book in which He wrote down everything we did wrong.
This so terrified me for days that I remember being found by my mother
sitting under a kind of writing-table in great fear. I never forgot this
at any time in my life,' the Cardinal tells us, 'and it has been a great
grace to me. ' When he was nine years old he 'devoured the Apocalypse;
and I never all through my life forgot the "lake that burneth with fire
and brimstone". That verse has kept me like an audible voice through all
my life, and through worlds of danger in my youth. '
At Harrow the worlds of danger were already around him; but yet he
listened to the audible voice. 'At school and college I never failed to
say my prayers, so far as memory serves me, even for a day. ' And he
underwent another religious experience: he read Paley's Evidences. 'I
took in the whole argument,' wrote Manning, when he was over seventy,
'and I thank God that nothing has ever shaken it. ' Yet on the whole he
led the unspiritual life of an ordinary schoolboy. We have glimpses of
him as a handsome lad, playing cricket, or strutting about in tasselled
Hessian top-boots. And on one occasion at least he gave proof of a
certain dexterity of conduct which deserved to be remembered. He went
out of bounds, and a master, riding by and seeing him on the other side
of a field, tied his horse to a gate, and ran after him. The astute
youth outran the master, fetched a circle, reached the gate, jumped on
to the horse's back and rode off. For this he was very properly
chastised; but, of what use was chastisement? No whipping, however
severe, could have eradicated from little Henry's mind a quality at
least as firmly planted in it as his fear of Hell and his belief in the
arguments of Paley.
It had been his father's wish that Manning should go into the Church;
but the thought disgusted him; and when he reached Oxford, his tastes,
his ambitions, his successes at the Union, all seemed to mark him out
for a political career. He was a year junior to Samuel Wilberforce, and
a year senior to Gladstone. In those days the Union was the
recruiting-ground for young politicians; Ministers came down from London
to listen to the debates; and a few years later the Duke of Newcastle
gave Gladstone a pocket borough on the strength of his speech at the
Union against the Reform Bill. To those three young men, indeed, the
whole world lay open. Were they not rich, well-connected, and endowed
with an infinite capacity for making speeches? The event justified the
highest expectations of their friends; for the least distinguished of
the three died a bishop. The only danger lay in another direction.
'Watch, my dear Samuel,' wrote the elder Wilberforce to his son, 'watch
with jealousy whether you find yourself unduly solicitous about
acquitting yourself; whether you are too much chagrined when you fail,
or are puffed up by your success. Undue solicitude about popular
estimation is a weakness against which all real Christians must guard
with the utmost jealous watchfulness. The more you can retain the
impression of your being surrounded by a cloud of witnesses of the
invisible world, to use the scripture phrase, the more you will be armed
against this besetting sin. '
But suddenly it seemed as if such a warning could, after all, have very
little relevance to Manning; for, on his leaving Oxford, the brimming
cup was dashed from his lips. He was already beginning to dream of
himself in the House of Commons, the solitary advocate of some great
cause whose triumph was to be eventually brought about by his
extraordinary efforts, when his father was declared a bankrupt, and all
his hopes of a political career came to an end forever.
It was at this time that Manning became intimate with a pious lady, the
sister of one of his College friends, whom he used to describe as his
Spiritual Mother. He made her his confidante; and one day, as they
walked together in the shrubbery, he revealed the bitterness of the
disappointment into which his father's failure had plunged him. She
tried to cheer him, and then she added that there were higher aims open
to him which he had not considered. 'What do you mean? ' he asked. 'The
kingdom of Heaven,' she answered; 'heavenly ambitions are not closed
against you. ' The young man listened, was silent, and said at last that
he did not know but she was right. She suggested reading the Bible
together; and they accordingly did so during the whole of that Vacation,
every morning after breakfast. Yet, in spite of these devotional
exercises, and in spite of a voluminous correspondence on religious
subjects with his Spiritual Mother, Manning still continued to indulge
in secular hopes. He entered the Colonial Office as a supernumerary
clerk, and it was only when the offer of a Merton Fellowship seemed to
depend upon his taking orders that his heavenly ambitions began to
assume a definite shape. Just then he fell in love with Miss Deffell,
whose father would have nothing to say to a young man without prospects,
and forbade him the house. It was only too true; what WERE the prospects
of a supernumerary clerk in the Colonial Office? Manning went to Oxford
and took orders. He was elected to the Merton Fellowship, and obtained
through the influence of the Wilberforces a curacy in Sussex. At the
last moment he almost drew back. 'I think the whole step has been too
precipitate,' he wrote to his brother-in-law. 'I have rather allowed the
instance of my friends, and the allurements of an agreeable curacy in
many respects, to get the better of my sober judgment. ' His vast
ambitions, his dreams of public service, of honours, and of power, was
all this to end in a little country curacy 'agreeable in many respects'?
But there was nothing for it; the deed was done; and the Fates had
apparently succeeded very effectively in getting rid of Manning. All he
could do was to make the best of a bad business.
Accordingly, in the first place, he decided that he had received a call
from God 'ad veritatem et ad seipsum'; and, in the second, forgetting
Miss Deffell, he married his rector's daughter. Within a few months the
rector died, and Manning stepped into his shoes; and at least it could
be said that the shoes were not uncomfortable. For the next seven years
he fulfilled the functions of a country clergyman. He was energetic and
devout; he was polite and handsome; his fame grew in the diocese. At
last he began to be spoken of as the probable successor to the old
Archdeacon of Chichester. When Mrs. Manning prematurely died, he was at
first inconsolable, but he found relief in the distraction of redoubled
work. How could he have guessed that one day he would come to number
that loss among 'God's special mercies? Yet so it was to be. In after
years, the memory of his wife seemed to be blotted from his mind; he
never spoke of her; every letter, every record, of his married life he
destroyed; and when word was sent to him that her grave was falling into
ruin: 'It is best so,' the Cardinal answered, 'let it be. Time effaces
all things. ' But, when the grave was yet fresh, the young Rector would
sit beside it, day after day, writing his sermons.
II
IN the meantime, a series of events was taking place in another part of
England, which was to have a no less profound effect upon Manning's
history than the merciful removal of his wife. In the same year in which
he took up his Sussex curacy, the Tracts for the Times had begun to
appear at Oxford. The 'Oxford Movement', in fact, had started on its
course. The phrase is still familiar; but its meaning has become
somewhat obscured both by the lapse of time and the intrinsic ambiguity
of the subjects connected with it. Let us borrow for a moment the wings
of Historic Imagination, and, hovering lightly over the Oxford of the
thirties, take a rapid bird's-eye view.
For many generations the Church of England had slept the sleep of the
. . . comfortable. The sullen murmurings of dissent, the loud battle-cry of
Revolution, had hardly disturbed her slumbers. Portly divines subscribed
with a sigh or a smile to the Thirty-nine Articles, sank quietly into
easy living, rode gaily to hounds of a morning as gentlemen should, and,
as gentlemen should, carried their two bottles of an evening. To be in
the Church was in fact simply to pursue one of those professions which
Nature and Society had decided were proper to gentlemen and gentlemen
alone. The fervours of piety, the zeal of Apostolic charity, the
enthusiasm of self-renunciation--these things were all very well in
their way and in their place; but their place was certainly not the
Church of England. Gentlemen were neither fervid nor zealous, and above
all they were not enthusiastic. There were, it was true, occasionally to
be found within the Church some strait-laced parsons of the high Tory
school who looked back with regret to the days of Laud or talked of the
Apostolical Succession; and there were groups of square-toed
Evangelicals who were earnest over the Atonement, confessed to a
personal love of Jesus Christ, and seemed to have arranged the whole of
their lives, down to the minutest details of act and speech, with
reference to Eternity. But such extremes were the rare exceptions. The
great bulk of the clergy walked calmly along the smooth road of ordinary
duty. They kept an eye on the poor of the parish, and they conducted the
Sunday Services in a becoming manner; for the rest, they differed
neither outwardly nor inwardly from the great bulk of the laity, to whom
the Church was a useful organisation for the maintenance of Religion, as
by law established.
The awakening came at last, however, and it was a rude one. The liberal
principles of the French Revolution, checked at first in the terrors of
reaction, began to make their way into England. Rationalists lifted up
their heads; Bentham and the Mills propounded Utilitarianism; the Reform
Bill was passed; and there were rumours abroad of disestablishment. Even
Churchmen seemed to have caught the infection. Dr. Whately was so bold
as to assert that, in the interpretation of Scripture, different
opinions might be permitted upon matters of doubt; and, Dr. Arnold drew
up a disquieting scheme for allowing Dissenters into the Church, though
it is true that he did not go quite so far as to contemplate the
admission of Unitarians.
At this time, there was living in a country parish, a young clergyman of
the name of John Keble. He had gone to Oxford at the age of fifteen,
where, after a successful academic career, he had been made a Fellow of
Oriel. He had then returned to his father's parish and taken up the
duties of a curate. He had a thorough knowledge of the contents of the
Prayer-book, the ways of a Common Room, the conjugations of the Greek
Irregular Verbs, and the small jests of a country parsonage; and the
defects of his experience in other directions were replaced by a zeal
and a piety which were soon to prove themselves equal, and more than
equal, to whatever calls might be made upon them. The superabundance of
his piety overflowed into verse; and the holy simplicity of the
Christian Year carried his name into the remotest lodging-houses of
England.
As for his zeal, however, it needed another outlet. Looking forth upon
the doings of his fellow-men through his rectory windows in
Gloucestershire, Keble felt his whole soul shaken with loathing, anger,
and dread. Infidelity was stalking through the land; authority was
laughed at; the hideous doctrines of Democracy were being openly
preached. Worse still, if possible, the Church herself was ignorant and
lukewarm; she had forgotten the mysteries of the sacraments, she had
lost faith in the Apostolical Succession; she was no longer interested
in the Early Fathers; and she submitted herself to the control of a
secular legislature, the members of which were not even bound to profess
belief in the Atonement. In the face of such enormities what could Keble
do? He was ready to do anything, but he was a simple and an unambitious
man, and his wrath would in all probability have consumed itself
unappeased within him had he not chanced to come into contact, at the
critical moment, with a spirit more excitable and daring than his own.
Hurrell Froude, one of Keble's pupils, was a clever young man to whom
had fallen a rather larger share of self-assurance and intolerance than
even clever young men usually possess. What was singular about him,
however, was not so much his temper as his tastes. The sort of ardour
which impels more normal youths to haunt Music Halls and fall in love
with actresses took the form, in Froude's case, of a romantic devotion
to the Deity and an intense interest in the state of his own soul. He
was obsessed by the ideals of saintliness, and convinced of the supreme
importance of not eating too much. He kept a diary in which he recorded
his delinquencies, and they were many. 'I cannot say much for myself
today,' he writes on September 29th, 1826 (he was twenty-three years
old). 'I did not read the Psalms and Second Lesson after breakfast,
which I had neglected to do before, though I had plenty of time on my
hands. Would have liked to be thought adventurous for a scramble I had
at the Devil's Bridge. Looked with greediness to see if there was a
goose on the table for dinner; and though what I ate was of the plainest
sort, and I took no variety, yet even this was partly the effect of
accident, and I certainly rather exceeded in quantity, as I was fuzzy
and sleepy after dinner. ' 'I allowed myself to be disgusted, with--'s
pomposity,' he writes a little later, 'also smiled at an allusion in the
Lessons to abstemiousness in eating. I hope not from pride or vanity,
but mistrust; it certainly was unintentional. ' And again, 'As to my
meals, I can say that I was always careful to see that no one else would
take a thing before I served myself; and I believe as to the kind of my
food, a bit of cold endings of a dab at breakfast, and a scrap of
mackerel at dinner, are the only things that diverged from the strict
rule of simplicity. ' 'I am obliged to confess,' he notes, 'that in my
intercourse with the Supreme Being, I am be come more and more
sluggish. ' And then he exclaims: 'Thine eye trieth my inward parts, and
knoweth my thoughts . . . Oh that my ways were made so direct that I might
keep Thy statutes. I will walk in Thy Commandments when Thou hast set my
heart at liberty. '
Such were the preoccupations of this young man. Perhaps they would have
been different, if he had had a little less of what Newman describes as
his 'high severe idea of the intrinsic excellence of Virginity'; but it
is useless to speculate.
Naturally enough the fierce and burning zeal of Keble had a profound
effect upon his mind. The two became intimate friends, and Froude,
eagerly seizing upon the doctrines of the elder man, saw to it that they
had as full a measure of controversial notoriety as an Oxford common
room could afford. He plunged the metaphysical mysteries of the Holy
Catholic Church into the atmosphere of party politics. Surprised Doctors
of Divinity found themselves suddenly faced with strange questions which
had never entered their heads before. Was the Church of England, or was
it not, a part of the Church Catholic? If it was, were not the Reformers
of the sixteenth century renegades? Was not the participation of the
Body and Blood of Christ essential to the maintenance of Christian life
and hope in each individual? Were Timothy and Titus Bishops? Or were
they not? If they were, did it not follow that the power of
administering the Holy Eucharist was the attribute of a sacred order
founded by Christ Himself? Did not the Fathers refer to the tradition of
the Church as to something independent of the written word, and
sufficient to refute heresy, even alone? Was it not, therefore, God's
unwritten word? And did it not demand the same reverence from us as the
Scriptures, and for exactly the same reason--BECAUSE IT WAS HIS WORD?
The Doctors of Divinity were aghast at such questions, which seemed to
lead they hardly knew whither; and they found it difficult to think of
very apposite answers. But Hurrell Froude supplied the answers himself
readily enough. All Oxford, all England, should know the truth. The time
was out of joint, and he was only too delighted to have been born to set
it right.
But, after all, something more was needed than even the excitement of
Froude combined with the conviction of Keble to ruffle seriously the
vast calm waters of Christian thought; and it so happened that that
thing was not wanting: it was the genius of John Henry Newman. If Newman
had never lived, or if his father, when the gig came round on the fatal
morning, still undecided between the two Universities, had chanced to
turn the horse's head in the direction of Cambridge, who can doubt that
the Oxford Movement would have flickered out its little flame unobserved
in the Common Room of Oriel? And how different, too, would have been the
fate of Newman himself! He was a child of the Romantic Revival, a
creature of emotion and of memory, a dreamer whose secret spirit dwelt
apart in delectable mountains, an artist whose subtle senses caught,
like a shower in the sunshine, the impalpable rainbow of the immaterial
world. In other times, under other skies, his days would have been more
fortunate. He might have helped to weave the garland of Meleager, or to
mix the lapis lazuli of Fra Angelico, or to chase the delicate truth in
the shade of an Athenian palaestra, or his hands might have fashioned
those ethereal faces that smile in the niches of Chartres. Even in his
own age he might, at Cambridge, whose cloisters have ever been
consecrated to poetry and common sense, have followed quietly in Gray's
footsteps and brought into flower those seeds of inspiration which now
lie embedded amid the faded devotion of the Lyra Apostolica.
At Oxford, he was doomed. He could not withstand the last enchantment of
the Middle Age. It was in vain that he plunged into the pages of Gibbon
or communed for long hours with Beethoven over his beloved violin. The
air was thick with clerical sanctity, heavy with the odours of tradition
and the soft warmth of spiritual authority; his friendship with Hurrell
Froude did the rest. All that was weakest in him hurried him onward, and
all that was strongest in him too. His curious and vaulting imagination
began to construct vast philosophical fabrics out of the writings of
ancient monks, and to dally with visions of angelic visitations and the
efficacy of the oil of St Walburga; his emotional nature became absorbed
in the partisan passions of a University clique; and his subtle
intellect concerned itself more and more exclusively with the
dialectical splitting of dogmatical hairs. His future course was marked
out for him all too clearly; and yet by a singular chance the true
nature of the man was to emerge triumphant in the end. If Newman had
died at the age of sixty, today he would have been already forgotten,
save by a few ecclesiastical historians; but he lived to write his
Apologia, and to reach immortality, neither as a thinker nor as a
theologian, but as an artist who has embalmed the poignant history of an
intensely human spirit in the magical spices of words.
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Title: Eminent Victorians
Author: Lytton Strachey
Posting Date: February 21, 2012 [EBook #2447]
Release Date: December, 2000
[Last updated: August 19, 2012]
Language: English
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EMINENT VICTORIANS
by Lytton Strachey
Preface
THE history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know too much
about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian--ignorance,
which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid
perfection unattainable by the highest art. Concerning the Age which has
just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and
accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a
Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would
quail before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous
narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular
epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack
his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the
rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure
recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of
material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which
will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from
those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity. Guided by
these considerations, I have written the ensuing studies. I have
attempted, through the medium of biography, to present some Victorian
visions to the modern eye. They are, in one sense, haphazard
visions--that is to say, my choice of subjects has been determined by no
desire to construct a system or to prove a theory, but by simple motives
of convenience and of art. It has been my purpose to illustrate rather
than to explain. It would have been futile to hope to tell even a precis
of the truth about the Victorian age, for the shortest precis must fill
innumerable volumes. But, in the lives of an ecclesiastic, an
educational authority, a woman of action, and a man of adventure, I have
sought to examine and elucidate certain fragments of the truth which
took my fancy and lay to my hand.
I hope, however, that the following pages may prove to be of interest
from the strictly biographical, no less than from the historical point
of view. Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms
of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal
processes--which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake. The art
of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. We have had,
it is true, a few masterpieces, but we have never had, like the French,
a great biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and
Condorcets, with their incomparable eloges, compressing into a few
shining pages the manifold existences of men. With us, the most delicate
and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated
to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as
difficult to write a good life as to live one. Those two fat volumes,
with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead--who does not know
them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style,
their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of
detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortege of the
undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism. One is
tempted to suppose, of some of them, that they were composed by that
functionary as the final item of his job. The studies in this book are
indebted, in more ways than one, to such works--works which certainly
deserve the name of Standard Biographies. For they have provided me not
only with much indispensable information, but with something even more
precious--an example. How many lessons are to be learned from them! But
it is hardly necessary to particularise. To preserve, for instance, a
becoming brevity--a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant
and nothing that is significant--that, surely, is the first duty of the
biographer. The second, no less surely, is to maintain his own freedom
of spirit. It is not his business to be complimentary; it is his
business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them. That
is what I have aimed at in this book--to lay bare the facts of some
cases, as I understand them, dispassionately, impartially, and without
ulterior intentions. To quote the words of a Master--'Je n'impose rien;
je ne propose rien: j'expose. '
L. S.
A list of the principal sources from which I have drawn is appended to
each Biography. I would indicate, as an honourable exception to the
current commodity, Sir Edward Cook's excellent Life of Florence
Nightingale, without which my own study, though composed on a very
different scale and from a decidedly different angle, could not have
been written.
Cardinal Manning
HENRY EDWARD MANNING was born in 1807 and died in 1892. His life was
extraordinary in many ways, but its interest for the modern inquirer
depends mainly upon two considerations--the light which his career
throws upon the spirit of his age, and the psychological problems
suggested by his inner history. He belonged to that class of eminent
ecclesiastics--and it is by no means a small class--who have been
distinguished less for saintliness and learning than for practical
ability. Had he lived in the Middle Ages he would certainly have been
neither a Francis nor an Aquinas, but he might have been an Innocent. As
it was, born in the England of the nineteenth century, growing up in the
very seed-time of modern progress, coming to maturity with the first
onrush of Liberalism, and living long enough to witness the victories of
Science and Democracy, he yet, by a strange concatenation of
circumstances, seemed almost to revive in his own person that long line
of diplomatic and administrative clerics which, one would have thought,
had come to an end for ever with Cardinal Wolsey.
In Manning, so it appeared, the Middle Ages lived again. The tall gaunt
figure, with the face of smiling asceticism, the robes, and the biretta,
as it passed in triumph from High Mass at the Oratory to philanthropic
gatherings at Exeter Hall, from Strike Committees at the Docks to
Mayfair drawing-rooms where fashionable ladies knelt to the Prince of
the Church, certainly bore witness to a singular condition of affairs.
What had happened? Had a dominating character imposed itself upon a
hostile environment? Or was the nineteenth century, after all, not so
hostile? Was there something in it, scientific and progressive as it
was, which went out to welcome the representative of ancient tradition
and uncompromising faith? Had it, perhaps, a place in its heart for such
as Manning--a soft place, one might almost say? Or, on the other hand,
was it he who had been supple and yielding? He who had won by art what
he would never have won by force, and who had managed, so to speak, to
be one of the leaders of the procession less through merit than through
a superior faculty for gliding adroitly to the front rank? And, in any
case, by what odd chances, what shifts and struggles, what combinations
of circumstance and character, had this old man come to be where he was?
Such questions are easier to ask than to answer; but it may be
instructive, and even amusing, to look a little more closely into the
complexities of so curious a story.
I
UNDOUBTEDLY, what is most obviously striking in the history of Manning's
career is the persistent strength of his innate characteristics. Through
all the changes of his fortunes the powerful spirit of the man worked on
undismayed. It was as if the Fates had laid a wager that they would
daunt him; and in the end they lost their bet.
His father was a rich West Indian merchant, a governor of the Bank of
England, a Member of Parliament, who drove into town every day from his
country seat in a coach and four, and was content with nothing short of
a bishop for the christening of his children. Little Henry, like the
rest, had his bishop; but he was obliged to wait for him--for as long as
eighteen months. In those days, and even a generation later, as Keble
bears witness, there was great laxity in regard to the early baptism of
children. The delay has been noted by Manning's biographer as the first
stumbling-block in the spiritual life of the future Cardinal; but he
surmounted it with success.
His father was more careful in other ways.
'His refinement and delicacy of mind were such,' wrote Manning long
afterwards, 'that I never heard out of his mouth a word which might not
have been spoken in the presence of the most pure and sensitive--except,'
he adds, 'on one occasion. He was then forced by others to repeat a
negro story which, though free from all evil de sexu, was indelicate. He
did it with great resistance. His example gave me a hatred of all such
talk. '
The family lived in an atmosphere of Evangelical piety. One day the
little boy came in from the farmyard, and his mother asked him whether
he had seen the peacock. 'I said yes, and the nurse said no, and my
mother made me kneel down and beg God to forgive me for not speaking the
truth. ' At the age of four the child was told by a cousin of the age of
six that 'God had a book in which He wrote down everything we did wrong.
This so terrified me for days that I remember being found by my mother
sitting under a kind of writing-table in great fear. I never forgot this
at any time in my life,' the Cardinal tells us, 'and it has been a great
grace to me. ' When he was nine years old he 'devoured the Apocalypse;
and I never all through my life forgot the "lake that burneth with fire
and brimstone". That verse has kept me like an audible voice through all
my life, and through worlds of danger in my youth. '
At Harrow the worlds of danger were already around him; but yet he
listened to the audible voice. 'At school and college I never failed to
say my prayers, so far as memory serves me, even for a day. ' And he
underwent another religious experience: he read Paley's Evidences. 'I
took in the whole argument,' wrote Manning, when he was over seventy,
'and I thank God that nothing has ever shaken it. ' Yet on the whole he
led the unspiritual life of an ordinary schoolboy. We have glimpses of
him as a handsome lad, playing cricket, or strutting about in tasselled
Hessian top-boots. And on one occasion at least he gave proof of a
certain dexterity of conduct which deserved to be remembered. He went
out of bounds, and a master, riding by and seeing him on the other side
of a field, tied his horse to a gate, and ran after him. The astute
youth outran the master, fetched a circle, reached the gate, jumped on
to the horse's back and rode off. For this he was very properly
chastised; but, of what use was chastisement? No whipping, however
severe, could have eradicated from little Henry's mind a quality at
least as firmly planted in it as his fear of Hell and his belief in the
arguments of Paley.
It had been his father's wish that Manning should go into the Church;
but the thought disgusted him; and when he reached Oxford, his tastes,
his ambitions, his successes at the Union, all seemed to mark him out
for a political career. He was a year junior to Samuel Wilberforce, and
a year senior to Gladstone. In those days the Union was the
recruiting-ground for young politicians; Ministers came down from London
to listen to the debates; and a few years later the Duke of Newcastle
gave Gladstone a pocket borough on the strength of his speech at the
Union against the Reform Bill. To those three young men, indeed, the
whole world lay open. Were they not rich, well-connected, and endowed
with an infinite capacity for making speeches? The event justified the
highest expectations of their friends; for the least distinguished of
the three died a bishop. The only danger lay in another direction.
'Watch, my dear Samuel,' wrote the elder Wilberforce to his son, 'watch
with jealousy whether you find yourself unduly solicitous about
acquitting yourself; whether you are too much chagrined when you fail,
or are puffed up by your success. Undue solicitude about popular
estimation is a weakness against which all real Christians must guard
with the utmost jealous watchfulness. The more you can retain the
impression of your being surrounded by a cloud of witnesses of the
invisible world, to use the scripture phrase, the more you will be armed
against this besetting sin. '
But suddenly it seemed as if such a warning could, after all, have very
little relevance to Manning; for, on his leaving Oxford, the brimming
cup was dashed from his lips. He was already beginning to dream of
himself in the House of Commons, the solitary advocate of some great
cause whose triumph was to be eventually brought about by his
extraordinary efforts, when his father was declared a bankrupt, and all
his hopes of a political career came to an end forever.
It was at this time that Manning became intimate with a pious lady, the
sister of one of his College friends, whom he used to describe as his
Spiritual Mother. He made her his confidante; and one day, as they
walked together in the shrubbery, he revealed the bitterness of the
disappointment into which his father's failure had plunged him. She
tried to cheer him, and then she added that there were higher aims open
to him which he had not considered. 'What do you mean? ' he asked. 'The
kingdom of Heaven,' she answered; 'heavenly ambitions are not closed
against you. ' The young man listened, was silent, and said at last that
he did not know but she was right. She suggested reading the Bible
together; and they accordingly did so during the whole of that Vacation,
every morning after breakfast. Yet, in spite of these devotional
exercises, and in spite of a voluminous correspondence on religious
subjects with his Spiritual Mother, Manning still continued to indulge
in secular hopes. He entered the Colonial Office as a supernumerary
clerk, and it was only when the offer of a Merton Fellowship seemed to
depend upon his taking orders that his heavenly ambitions began to
assume a definite shape. Just then he fell in love with Miss Deffell,
whose father would have nothing to say to a young man without prospects,
and forbade him the house. It was only too true; what WERE the prospects
of a supernumerary clerk in the Colonial Office? Manning went to Oxford
and took orders. He was elected to the Merton Fellowship, and obtained
through the influence of the Wilberforces a curacy in Sussex. At the
last moment he almost drew back. 'I think the whole step has been too
precipitate,' he wrote to his brother-in-law. 'I have rather allowed the
instance of my friends, and the allurements of an agreeable curacy in
many respects, to get the better of my sober judgment. ' His vast
ambitions, his dreams of public service, of honours, and of power, was
all this to end in a little country curacy 'agreeable in many respects'?
But there was nothing for it; the deed was done; and the Fates had
apparently succeeded very effectively in getting rid of Manning. All he
could do was to make the best of a bad business.
Accordingly, in the first place, he decided that he had received a call
from God 'ad veritatem et ad seipsum'; and, in the second, forgetting
Miss Deffell, he married his rector's daughter. Within a few months the
rector died, and Manning stepped into his shoes; and at least it could
be said that the shoes were not uncomfortable. For the next seven years
he fulfilled the functions of a country clergyman. He was energetic and
devout; he was polite and handsome; his fame grew in the diocese. At
last he began to be spoken of as the probable successor to the old
Archdeacon of Chichester. When Mrs. Manning prematurely died, he was at
first inconsolable, but he found relief in the distraction of redoubled
work. How could he have guessed that one day he would come to number
that loss among 'God's special mercies? Yet so it was to be. In after
years, the memory of his wife seemed to be blotted from his mind; he
never spoke of her; every letter, every record, of his married life he
destroyed; and when word was sent to him that her grave was falling into
ruin: 'It is best so,' the Cardinal answered, 'let it be. Time effaces
all things. ' But, when the grave was yet fresh, the young Rector would
sit beside it, day after day, writing his sermons.
II
IN the meantime, a series of events was taking place in another part of
England, which was to have a no less profound effect upon Manning's
history than the merciful removal of his wife. In the same year in which
he took up his Sussex curacy, the Tracts for the Times had begun to
appear at Oxford. The 'Oxford Movement', in fact, had started on its
course. The phrase is still familiar; but its meaning has become
somewhat obscured both by the lapse of time and the intrinsic ambiguity
of the subjects connected with it. Let us borrow for a moment the wings
of Historic Imagination, and, hovering lightly over the Oxford of the
thirties, take a rapid bird's-eye view.
For many generations the Church of England had slept the sleep of the
. . . comfortable. The sullen murmurings of dissent, the loud battle-cry of
Revolution, had hardly disturbed her slumbers. Portly divines subscribed
with a sigh or a smile to the Thirty-nine Articles, sank quietly into
easy living, rode gaily to hounds of a morning as gentlemen should, and,
as gentlemen should, carried their two bottles of an evening. To be in
the Church was in fact simply to pursue one of those professions which
Nature and Society had decided were proper to gentlemen and gentlemen
alone. The fervours of piety, the zeal of Apostolic charity, the
enthusiasm of self-renunciation--these things were all very well in
their way and in their place; but their place was certainly not the
Church of England. Gentlemen were neither fervid nor zealous, and above
all they were not enthusiastic. There were, it was true, occasionally to
be found within the Church some strait-laced parsons of the high Tory
school who looked back with regret to the days of Laud or talked of the
Apostolical Succession; and there were groups of square-toed
Evangelicals who were earnest over the Atonement, confessed to a
personal love of Jesus Christ, and seemed to have arranged the whole of
their lives, down to the minutest details of act and speech, with
reference to Eternity. But such extremes were the rare exceptions. The
great bulk of the clergy walked calmly along the smooth road of ordinary
duty. They kept an eye on the poor of the parish, and they conducted the
Sunday Services in a becoming manner; for the rest, they differed
neither outwardly nor inwardly from the great bulk of the laity, to whom
the Church was a useful organisation for the maintenance of Religion, as
by law established.
The awakening came at last, however, and it was a rude one. The liberal
principles of the French Revolution, checked at first in the terrors of
reaction, began to make their way into England. Rationalists lifted up
their heads; Bentham and the Mills propounded Utilitarianism; the Reform
Bill was passed; and there were rumours abroad of disestablishment. Even
Churchmen seemed to have caught the infection. Dr. Whately was so bold
as to assert that, in the interpretation of Scripture, different
opinions might be permitted upon matters of doubt; and, Dr. Arnold drew
up a disquieting scheme for allowing Dissenters into the Church, though
it is true that he did not go quite so far as to contemplate the
admission of Unitarians.
At this time, there was living in a country parish, a young clergyman of
the name of John Keble. He had gone to Oxford at the age of fifteen,
where, after a successful academic career, he had been made a Fellow of
Oriel. He had then returned to his father's parish and taken up the
duties of a curate. He had a thorough knowledge of the contents of the
Prayer-book, the ways of a Common Room, the conjugations of the Greek
Irregular Verbs, and the small jests of a country parsonage; and the
defects of his experience in other directions were replaced by a zeal
and a piety which were soon to prove themselves equal, and more than
equal, to whatever calls might be made upon them. The superabundance of
his piety overflowed into verse; and the holy simplicity of the
Christian Year carried his name into the remotest lodging-houses of
England.
As for his zeal, however, it needed another outlet. Looking forth upon
the doings of his fellow-men through his rectory windows in
Gloucestershire, Keble felt his whole soul shaken with loathing, anger,
and dread. Infidelity was stalking through the land; authority was
laughed at; the hideous doctrines of Democracy were being openly
preached. Worse still, if possible, the Church herself was ignorant and
lukewarm; she had forgotten the mysteries of the sacraments, she had
lost faith in the Apostolical Succession; she was no longer interested
in the Early Fathers; and she submitted herself to the control of a
secular legislature, the members of which were not even bound to profess
belief in the Atonement. In the face of such enormities what could Keble
do? He was ready to do anything, but he was a simple and an unambitious
man, and his wrath would in all probability have consumed itself
unappeased within him had he not chanced to come into contact, at the
critical moment, with a spirit more excitable and daring than his own.
Hurrell Froude, one of Keble's pupils, was a clever young man to whom
had fallen a rather larger share of self-assurance and intolerance than
even clever young men usually possess. What was singular about him,
however, was not so much his temper as his tastes. The sort of ardour
which impels more normal youths to haunt Music Halls and fall in love
with actresses took the form, in Froude's case, of a romantic devotion
to the Deity and an intense interest in the state of his own soul. He
was obsessed by the ideals of saintliness, and convinced of the supreme
importance of not eating too much. He kept a diary in which he recorded
his delinquencies, and they were many. 'I cannot say much for myself
today,' he writes on September 29th, 1826 (he was twenty-three years
old). 'I did not read the Psalms and Second Lesson after breakfast,
which I had neglected to do before, though I had plenty of time on my
hands. Would have liked to be thought adventurous for a scramble I had
at the Devil's Bridge. Looked with greediness to see if there was a
goose on the table for dinner; and though what I ate was of the plainest
sort, and I took no variety, yet even this was partly the effect of
accident, and I certainly rather exceeded in quantity, as I was fuzzy
and sleepy after dinner. ' 'I allowed myself to be disgusted, with--'s
pomposity,' he writes a little later, 'also smiled at an allusion in the
Lessons to abstemiousness in eating. I hope not from pride or vanity,
but mistrust; it certainly was unintentional. ' And again, 'As to my
meals, I can say that I was always careful to see that no one else would
take a thing before I served myself; and I believe as to the kind of my
food, a bit of cold endings of a dab at breakfast, and a scrap of
mackerel at dinner, are the only things that diverged from the strict
rule of simplicity. ' 'I am obliged to confess,' he notes, 'that in my
intercourse with the Supreme Being, I am be come more and more
sluggish. ' And then he exclaims: 'Thine eye trieth my inward parts, and
knoweth my thoughts . . . Oh that my ways were made so direct that I might
keep Thy statutes. I will walk in Thy Commandments when Thou hast set my
heart at liberty. '
Such were the preoccupations of this young man. Perhaps they would have
been different, if he had had a little less of what Newman describes as
his 'high severe idea of the intrinsic excellence of Virginity'; but it
is useless to speculate.
Naturally enough the fierce and burning zeal of Keble had a profound
effect upon his mind. The two became intimate friends, and Froude,
eagerly seizing upon the doctrines of the elder man, saw to it that they
had as full a measure of controversial notoriety as an Oxford common
room could afford. He plunged the metaphysical mysteries of the Holy
Catholic Church into the atmosphere of party politics. Surprised Doctors
of Divinity found themselves suddenly faced with strange questions which
had never entered their heads before. Was the Church of England, or was
it not, a part of the Church Catholic? If it was, were not the Reformers
of the sixteenth century renegades? Was not the participation of the
Body and Blood of Christ essential to the maintenance of Christian life
and hope in each individual? Were Timothy and Titus Bishops? Or were
they not? If they were, did it not follow that the power of
administering the Holy Eucharist was the attribute of a sacred order
founded by Christ Himself? Did not the Fathers refer to the tradition of
the Church as to something independent of the written word, and
sufficient to refute heresy, even alone? Was it not, therefore, God's
unwritten word?
I hope, however, that the following pages may prove to be of interest
from the strictly biographical, no less than from the historical point
of view. Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms
of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal
processes--which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake. The art
of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. We have had,
it is true, a few masterpieces, but we have never had, like the French,
a great biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and
Condorcets, with their incomparable eloges, compressing into a few
shining pages the manifold existences of men. With us, the most delicate
and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated
to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as
difficult to write a good life as to live one. Those two fat volumes,
with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead--who does not know
them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style,
their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of
detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortege of the
undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism. One is
tempted to suppose, of some of them, that they were composed by that
functionary as the final item of his job. The studies in this book are
indebted, in more ways than one, to such works--works which certainly
deserve the name of Standard Biographies. For they have provided me not
only with much indispensable information, but with something even more
precious--an example. How many lessons are to be learned from them! But
it is hardly necessary to particularise. To preserve, for instance, a
becoming brevity--a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant
and nothing that is significant--that, surely, is the first duty of the
biographer. The second, no less surely, is to maintain his own freedom
of spirit. It is not his business to be complimentary; it is his
business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them. That
is what I have aimed at in this book--to lay bare the facts of some
cases, as I understand them, dispassionately, impartially, and without
ulterior intentions. To quote the words of a Master--'Je n'impose rien;
je ne propose rien: j'expose. '
L. S.
A list of the principal sources from which I have drawn is appended to
each Biography. I would indicate, as an honourable exception to the
current commodity, Sir Edward Cook's excellent Life of Florence
Nightingale, without which my own study, though composed on a very
different scale and from a decidedly different angle, could not have
been written.
Cardinal Manning
HENRY EDWARD MANNING was born in 1807 and died in 1892. His life was
extraordinary in many ways, but its interest for the modern inquirer
depends mainly upon two considerations--the light which his career
throws upon the spirit of his age, and the psychological problems
suggested by his inner history. He belonged to that class of eminent
ecclesiastics--and it is by no means a small class--who have been
distinguished less for saintliness and learning than for practical
ability. Had he lived in the Middle Ages he would certainly have been
neither a Francis nor an Aquinas, but he might have been an Innocent. As
it was, born in the England of the nineteenth century, growing up in the
very seed-time of modern progress, coming to maturity with the first
onrush of Liberalism, and living long enough to witness the victories of
Science and Democracy, he yet, by a strange concatenation of
circumstances, seemed almost to revive in his own person that long line
of diplomatic and administrative clerics which, one would have thought,
had come to an end for ever with Cardinal Wolsey.
In Manning, so it appeared, the Middle Ages lived again. The tall gaunt
figure, with the face of smiling asceticism, the robes, and the biretta,
as it passed in triumph from High Mass at the Oratory to philanthropic
gatherings at Exeter Hall, from Strike Committees at the Docks to
Mayfair drawing-rooms where fashionable ladies knelt to the Prince of
the Church, certainly bore witness to a singular condition of affairs.
What had happened? Had a dominating character imposed itself upon a
hostile environment? Or was the nineteenth century, after all, not so
hostile? Was there something in it, scientific and progressive as it
was, which went out to welcome the representative of ancient tradition
and uncompromising faith? Had it, perhaps, a place in its heart for such
as Manning--a soft place, one might almost say? Or, on the other hand,
was it he who had been supple and yielding? He who had won by art what
he would never have won by force, and who had managed, so to speak, to
be one of the leaders of the procession less through merit than through
a superior faculty for gliding adroitly to the front rank? And, in any
case, by what odd chances, what shifts and struggles, what combinations
of circumstance and character, had this old man come to be where he was?
Such questions are easier to ask than to answer; but it may be
instructive, and even amusing, to look a little more closely into the
complexities of so curious a story.
I
UNDOUBTEDLY, what is most obviously striking in the history of Manning's
career is the persistent strength of his innate characteristics. Through
all the changes of his fortunes the powerful spirit of the man worked on
undismayed. It was as if the Fates had laid a wager that they would
daunt him; and in the end they lost their bet.
His father was a rich West Indian merchant, a governor of the Bank of
England, a Member of Parliament, who drove into town every day from his
country seat in a coach and four, and was content with nothing short of
a bishop for the christening of his children. Little Henry, like the
rest, had his bishop; but he was obliged to wait for him--for as long as
eighteen months. In those days, and even a generation later, as Keble
bears witness, there was great laxity in regard to the early baptism of
children. The delay has been noted by Manning's biographer as the first
stumbling-block in the spiritual life of the future Cardinal; but he
surmounted it with success.
His father was more careful in other ways.
'His refinement and delicacy of mind were such,' wrote Manning long
afterwards, 'that I never heard out of his mouth a word which might not
have been spoken in the presence of the most pure and sensitive--except,'
he adds, 'on one occasion. He was then forced by others to repeat a
negro story which, though free from all evil de sexu, was indelicate. He
did it with great resistance. His example gave me a hatred of all such
talk. '
The family lived in an atmosphere of Evangelical piety. One day the
little boy came in from the farmyard, and his mother asked him whether
he had seen the peacock. 'I said yes, and the nurse said no, and my
mother made me kneel down and beg God to forgive me for not speaking the
truth. ' At the age of four the child was told by a cousin of the age of
six that 'God had a book in which He wrote down everything we did wrong.
This so terrified me for days that I remember being found by my mother
sitting under a kind of writing-table in great fear. I never forgot this
at any time in my life,' the Cardinal tells us, 'and it has been a great
grace to me. ' When he was nine years old he 'devoured the Apocalypse;
and I never all through my life forgot the "lake that burneth with fire
and brimstone". That verse has kept me like an audible voice through all
my life, and through worlds of danger in my youth. '
At Harrow the worlds of danger were already around him; but yet he
listened to the audible voice. 'At school and college I never failed to
say my prayers, so far as memory serves me, even for a day. ' And he
underwent another religious experience: he read Paley's Evidences. 'I
took in the whole argument,' wrote Manning, when he was over seventy,
'and I thank God that nothing has ever shaken it. ' Yet on the whole he
led the unspiritual life of an ordinary schoolboy. We have glimpses of
him as a handsome lad, playing cricket, or strutting about in tasselled
Hessian top-boots. And on one occasion at least he gave proof of a
certain dexterity of conduct which deserved to be remembered. He went
out of bounds, and a master, riding by and seeing him on the other side
of a field, tied his horse to a gate, and ran after him. The astute
youth outran the master, fetched a circle, reached the gate, jumped on
to the horse's back and rode off. For this he was very properly
chastised; but, of what use was chastisement? No whipping, however
severe, could have eradicated from little Henry's mind a quality at
least as firmly planted in it as his fear of Hell and his belief in the
arguments of Paley.
It had been his father's wish that Manning should go into the Church;
but the thought disgusted him; and when he reached Oxford, his tastes,
his ambitions, his successes at the Union, all seemed to mark him out
for a political career. He was a year junior to Samuel Wilberforce, and
a year senior to Gladstone. In those days the Union was the
recruiting-ground for young politicians; Ministers came down from London
to listen to the debates; and a few years later the Duke of Newcastle
gave Gladstone a pocket borough on the strength of his speech at the
Union against the Reform Bill. To those three young men, indeed, the
whole world lay open. Were they not rich, well-connected, and endowed
with an infinite capacity for making speeches? The event justified the
highest expectations of their friends; for the least distinguished of
the three died a bishop. The only danger lay in another direction.
'Watch, my dear Samuel,' wrote the elder Wilberforce to his son, 'watch
with jealousy whether you find yourself unduly solicitous about
acquitting yourself; whether you are too much chagrined when you fail,
or are puffed up by your success. Undue solicitude about popular
estimation is a weakness against which all real Christians must guard
with the utmost jealous watchfulness. The more you can retain the
impression of your being surrounded by a cloud of witnesses of the
invisible world, to use the scripture phrase, the more you will be armed
against this besetting sin. '
But suddenly it seemed as if such a warning could, after all, have very
little relevance to Manning; for, on his leaving Oxford, the brimming
cup was dashed from his lips. He was already beginning to dream of
himself in the House of Commons, the solitary advocate of some great
cause whose triumph was to be eventually brought about by his
extraordinary efforts, when his father was declared a bankrupt, and all
his hopes of a political career came to an end forever.
It was at this time that Manning became intimate with a pious lady, the
sister of one of his College friends, whom he used to describe as his
Spiritual Mother. He made her his confidante; and one day, as they
walked together in the shrubbery, he revealed the bitterness of the
disappointment into which his father's failure had plunged him. She
tried to cheer him, and then she added that there were higher aims open
to him which he had not considered. 'What do you mean? ' he asked. 'The
kingdom of Heaven,' she answered; 'heavenly ambitions are not closed
against you. ' The young man listened, was silent, and said at last that
he did not know but she was right. She suggested reading the Bible
together; and they accordingly did so during the whole of that Vacation,
every morning after breakfast. Yet, in spite of these devotional
exercises, and in spite of a voluminous correspondence on religious
subjects with his Spiritual Mother, Manning still continued to indulge
in secular hopes. He entered the Colonial Office as a supernumerary
clerk, and it was only when the offer of a Merton Fellowship seemed to
depend upon his taking orders that his heavenly ambitions began to
assume a definite shape. Just then he fell in love with Miss Deffell,
whose father would have nothing to say to a young man without prospects,
and forbade him the house. It was only too true; what WERE the prospects
of a supernumerary clerk in the Colonial Office? Manning went to Oxford
and took orders. He was elected to the Merton Fellowship, and obtained
through the influence of the Wilberforces a curacy in Sussex. At the
last moment he almost drew back. 'I think the whole step has been too
precipitate,' he wrote to his brother-in-law. 'I have rather allowed the
instance of my friends, and the allurements of an agreeable curacy in
many respects, to get the better of my sober judgment. ' His vast
ambitions, his dreams of public service, of honours, and of power, was
all this to end in a little country curacy 'agreeable in many respects'?
But there was nothing for it; the deed was done; and the Fates had
apparently succeeded very effectively in getting rid of Manning. All he
could do was to make the best of a bad business.
Accordingly, in the first place, he decided that he had received a call
from God 'ad veritatem et ad seipsum'; and, in the second, forgetting
Miss Deffell, he married his rector's daughter. Within a few months the
rector died, and Manning stepped into his shoes; and at least it could
be said that the shoes were not uncomfortable. For the next seven years
he fulfilled the functions of a country clergyman. He was energetic and
devout; he was polite and handsome; his fame grew in the diocese. At
last he began to be spoken of as the probable successor to the old
Archdeacon of Chichester. When Mrs. Manning prematurely died, he was at
first inconsolable, but he found relief in the distraction of redoubled
work. How could he have guessed that one day he would come to number
that loss among 'God's special mercies? Yet so it was to be. In after
years, the memory of his wife seemed to be blotted from his mind; he
never spoke of her; every letter, every record, of his married life he
destroyed; and when word was sent to him that her grave was falling into
ruin: 'It is best so,' the Cardinal answered, 'let it be. Time effaces
all things. ' But, when the grave was yet fresh, the young Rector would
sit beside it, day after day, writing his sermons.
II
IN the meantime, a series of events was taking place in another part of
England, which was to have a no less profound effect upon Manning's
history than the merciful removal of his wife. In the same year in which
he took up his Sussex curacy, the Tracts for the Times had begun to
appear at Oxford. The 'Oxford Movement', in fact, had started on its
course. The phrase is still familiar; but its meaning has become
somewhat obscured both by the lapse of time and the intrinsic ambiguity
of the subjects connected with it. Let us borrow for a moment the wings
of Historic Imagination, and, hovering lightly over the Oxford of the
thirties, take a rapid bird's-eye view.
For many generations the Church of England had slept the sleep of the
. . . comfortable. The sullen murmurings of dissent, the loud battle-cry of
Revolution, had hardly disturbed her slumbers. Portly divines subscribed
with a sigh or a smile to the Thirty-nine Articles, sank quietly into
easy living, rode gaily to hounds of a morning as gentlemen should, and,
as gentlemen should, carried their two bottles of an evening. To be in
the Church was in fact simply to pursue one of those professions which
Nature and Society had decided were proper to gentlemen and gentlemen
alone. The fervours of piety, the zeal of Apostolic charity, the
enthusiasm of self-renunciation--these things were all very well in
their way and in their place; but their place was certainly not the
Church of England. Gentlemen were neither fervid nor zealous, and above
all they were not enthusiastic. There were, it was true, occasionally to
be found within the Church some strait-laced parsons of the high Tory
school who looked back with regret to the days of Laud or talked of the
Apostolical Succession; and there were groups of square-toed
Evangelicals who were earnest over the Atonement, confessed to a
personal love of Jesus Christ, and seemed to have arranged the whole of
their lives, down to the minutest details of act and speech, with
reference to Eternity. But such extremes were the rare exceptions. The
great bulk of the clergy walked calmly along the smooth road of ordinary
duty. They kept an eye on the poor of the parish, and they conducted the
Sunday Services in a becoming manner; for the rest, they differed
neither outwardly nor inwardly from the great bulk of the laity, to whom
the Church was a useful organisation for the maintenance of Religion, as
by law established.
The awakening came at last, however, and it was a rude one. The liberal
principles of the French Revolution, checked at first in the terrors of
reaction, began to make their way into England. Rationalists lifted up
their heads; Bentham and the Mills propounded Utilitarianism; the Reform
Bill was passed; and there were rumours abroad of disestablishment. Even
Churchmen seemed to have caught the infection. Dr. Whately was so bold
as to assert that, in the interpretation of Scripture, different
opinions might be permitted upon matters of doubt; and, Dr. Arnold drew
up a disquieting scheme for allowing Dissenters into the Church, though
it is true that he did not go quite so far as to contemplate the
admission of Unitarians.
At this time, there was living in a country parish, a young clergyman of
the name of John Keble. He had gone to Oxford at the age of fifteen,
where, after a successful academic career, he had been made a Fellow of
Oriel. He had then returned to his father's parish and taken up the
duties of a curate. He had a thorough knowledge of the contents of the
Prayer-book, the ways of a Common Room, the conjugations of the Greek
Irregular Verbs, and the small jests of a country parsonage; and the
defects of his experience in other directions were replaced by a zeal
and a piety which were soon to prove themselves equal, and more than
equal, to whatever calls might be made upon them. The superabundance of
his piety overflowed into verse; and the holy simplicity of the
Christian Year carried his name into the remotest lodging-houses of
England.
As for his zeal, however, it needed another outlet. Looking forth upon
the doings of his fellow-men through his rectory windows in
Gloucestershire, Keble felt his whole soul shaken with loathing, anger,
and dread. Infidelity was stalking through the land; authority was
laughed at; the hideous doctrines of Democracy were being openly
preached. Worse still, if possible, the Church herself was ignorant and
lukewarm; she had forgotten the mysteries of the sacraments, she had
lost faith in the Apostolical Succession; she was no longer interested
in the Early Fathers; and she submitted herself to the control of a
secular legislature, the members of which were not even bound to profess
belief in the Atonement. In the face of such enormities what could Keble
do? He was ready to do anything, but he was a simple and an unambitious
man, and his wrath would in all probability have consumed itself
unappeased within him had he not chanced to come into contact, at the
critical moment, with a spirit more excitable and daring than his own.
Hurrell Froude, one of Keble's pupils, was a clever young man to whom
had fallen a rather larger share of self-assurance and intolerance than
even clever young men usually possess. What was singular about him,
however, was not so much his temper as his tastes. The sort of ardour
which impels more normal youths to haunt Music Halls and fall in love
with actresses took the form, in Froude's case, of a romantic devotion
to the Deity and an intense interest in the state of his own soul. He
was obsessed by the ideals of saintliness, and convinced of the supreme
importance of not eating too much. He kept a diary in which he recorded
his delinquencies, and they were many. 'I cannot say much for myself
today,' he writes on September 29th, 1826 (he was twenty-three years
old). 'I did not read the Psalms and Second Lesson after breakfast,
which I had neglected to do before, though I had plenty of time on my
hands. Would have liked to be thought adventurous for a scramble I had
at the Devil's Bridge. Looked with greediness to see if there was a
goose on the table for dinner; and though what I ate was of the plainest
sort, and I took no variety, yet even this was partly the effect of
accident, and I certainly rather exceeded in quantity, as I was fuzzy
and sleepy after dinner. ' 'I allowed myself to be disgusted, with--'s
pomposity,' he writes a little later, 'also smiled at an allusion in the
Lessons to abstemiousness in eating. I hope not from pride or vanity,
but mistrust; it certainly was unintentional. ' And again, 'As to my
meals, I can say that I was always careful to see that no one else would
take a thing before I served myself; and I believe as to the kind of my
food, a bit of cold endings of a dab at breakfast, and a scrap of
mackerel at dinner, are the only things that diverged from the strict
rule of simplicity. ' 'I am obliged to confess,' he notes, 'that in my
intercourse with the Supreme Being, I am be come more and more
sluggish. ' And then he exclaims: 'Thine eye trieth my inward parts, and
knoweth my thoughts . . . Oh that my ways were made so direct that I might
keep Thy statutes. I will walk in Thy Commandments when Thou hast set my
heart at liberty. '
Such were the preoccupations of this young man. Perhaps they would have
been different, if he had had a little less of what Newman describes as
his 'high severe idea of the intrinsic excellence of Virginity'; but it
is useless to speculate.
Naturally enough the fierce and burning zeal of Keble had a profound
effect upon his mind. The two became intimate friends, and Froude,
eagerly seizing upon the doctrines of the elder man, saw to it that they
had as full a measure of controversial notoriety as an Oxford common
room could afford. He plunged the metaphysical mysteries of the Holy
Catholic Church into the atmosphere of party politics. Surprised Doctors
of Divinity found themselves suddenly faced with strange questions which
had never entered their heads before. Was the Church of England, or was
it not, a part of the Church Catholic? If it was, were not the Reformers
of the sixteenth century renegades? Was not the participation of the
Body and Blood of Christ essential to the maintenance of Christian life
and hope in each individual? Were Timothy and Titus Bishops? Or were
they not? If they were, did it not follow that the power of
administering the Holy Eucharist was the attribute of a sacred order
founded by Christ Himself? Did not the Fathers refer to the tradition of
the Church as to something independent of the written word, and
sufficient to refute heresy, even alone? Was it not, therefore, God's
unwritten word? And did it not demand the same reverence from us as the
Scriptures, and for exactly the same reason--BECAUSE IT WAS HIS WORD?
The Doctors of Divinity were aghast at such questions, which seemed to
lead they hardly knew whither; and they found it difficult to think of
very apposite answers. But Hurrell Froude supplied the answers himself
readily enough. All Oxford, all England, should know the truth. The time
was out of joint, and he was only too delighted to have been born to set
it right.
But, after all, something more was needed than even the excitement of
Froude combined with the conviction of Keble to ruffle seriously the
vast calm waters of Christian thought; and it so happened that that
thing was not wanting: it was the genius of John Henry Newman. If Newman
had never lived, or if his father, when the gig came round on the fatal
morning, still undecided between the two Universities, had chanced to
turn the horse's head in the direction of Cambridge, who can doubt that
the Oxford Movement would have flickered out its little flame unobserved
in the Common Room of Oriel? And how different, too, would have been the
fate of Newman himself! He was a child of the Romantic Revival, a
creature of emotion and of memory, a dreamer whose secret spirit dwelt
apart in delectable mountains, an artist whose subtle senses caught,
like a shower in the sunshine, the impalpable rainbow of the immaterial
world. In other times, under other skies, his days would have been more
fortunate. He might have helped to weave the garland of Meleager, or to
mix the lapis lazuli of Fra Angelico, or to chase the delicate truth in
the shade of an Athenian palaestra, or his hands might have fashioned
those ethereal faces that smile in the niches of Chartres. Even in his
own age he might, at Cambridge, whose cloisters have ever been
consecrated to poetry and common sense, have followed quietly in Gray's
footsteps and brought into flower those seeds of inspiration which now
lie embedded amid the faded devotion of the Lyra Apostolica.
At Oxford, he was doomed. He could not withstand the last enchantment of
the Middle Age. It was in vain that he plunged into the pages of Gibbon
or communed for long hours with Beethoven over his beloved violin. The
air was thick with clerical sanctity, heavy with the odours of tradition
and the soft warmth of spiritual authority; his friendship with Hurrell
Froude did the rest. All that was weakest in him hurried him onward, and
all that was strongest in him too. His curious and vaulting imagination
began to construct vast philosophical fabrics out of the writings of
ancient monks, and to dally with visions of angelic visitations and the
efficacy of the oil of St Walburga; his emotional nature became absorbed
in the partisan passions of a University clique; and his subtle
intellect concerned itself more and more exclusively with the
dialectical splitting of dogmatical hairs. His future course was marked
out for him all too clearly; and yet by a singular chance the true
nature of the man was to emerge triumphant in the end. If Newman had
died at the age of sixty, today he would have been already forgotten,
save by a few ecclesiastical historians; but he lived to write his
Apologia, and to reach immortality, neither as a thinker nor as a
theologian, but as an artist who has embalmed the poignant history of an
intensely human spirit in the magical spices of words.
