The story of the foundation of theEdinburgh Reviewhas been told so often as hardly to bearrepeating. Enough of the facts, however, must be gone over again to make clear the change that the new periodical wrought in reviewing and in the relations between critics and the public.
The classical account of the origin of theReviewis Sydney Smith’s and is to be found in the Preface to his collectedWorks; it has been reproduced in Lord Cockburn’sLife of Jeffrey[5]and in theLife and Times of Lord Brougham.[6]With his usual crabbedness Brougham disputes a few minor details, but he leaves the substantial accuracy of “Sydney’s” story unimpeached.
The idea of the newReviewwas Sydney Smith’s. The most important conspirators were Sydney, Jeffrey, Francis Horner, and Brougham. The plot was discussed and matured in Jeffrey’s house in Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh. Sydney Smith’s famous proposal of a motto,Tenui musam meditamur avena, “We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal,” was rejected; the “sage Horner’s” suggestion was adopted,—a line from Publius Syrus,Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur, which foretold the righteous severity of tone that was to characterize theReview. The first number was to have appeared in June, 1802, but, owing to dilatory contributors and Jeffrey’s faintheartedness, was seriously delayed; it finally appeared in October, 1802, under the supervision of Sydney Smith. After the publication of the first number Jeffrey was formally appointed editor, and, with some hesitation, accepted the post.
The success of theReviewwas from the start beyond all expectation. “The effect,” says Lord Cockburn, “was electrical. And instead of expiring, as many wished, in their first effort, the force of the shock was increased on each subsequent discharge. It is impossible for those who did not live at the time, and in the heart of the scene, to feel, or almost to understand the impression made by the new luminary, or the anxieties with which its motions were observed.” Lord Brougham’s account of the matter is no less emphatic. “The success was far beyond any of our expectations. It was so great that Jeffrey was utterly dumbfounded, for he had predicted for our journal the fate of the originalEdinburgh Review, which, born in 1755, died in 1756, having produced only two numbers! The truth is, the most sanguine among us, even Smith himself, could not have foreseen the greatness of the first triumph, any more than we could have imagined the long and successful career theReviewwas afterwards to run, or the vast reforms and improvements in all our institutions, social as well as political, it was destined to effect.”
The subscription list of theReviewgrew within six years from 1750 to 9000; and by 1813 it numbered more than 12,000. The importance of these figures will be better understood when the reader recollects that in 1816 the LondonTimessold only 8000 copies daily. Moreover, it should be remembered that one copy of a magazine went much further then than it goes now, and did service in more than a single household. In 1809 Jeffrey boasted that theReviewwas read by 50,000 thinking people within a month after it was printed; doubtless this was a perfectly sound estimate.
Various causes have been suggested as contributing to the instant and phenomenal success of theReview,—the puzzling anonymity of its articles, its magisterial tone, the audacity of its attacks, what Horner calls its “scurrility,” the novelty of its Scotch origin. All these causes doubtless had their influence. More important still, however, were the wit, the knowledge, and the originality of the brilliant contributors that Jeffrey rallied round him. Writing to his brother in July, 1803, Jeffrey thus describes his fellow-workers: “I do not think you know any of my associates. There is the sage Horner, however, whom you have seen, and who has gone to the English bar with the resolution of being Lord Chancellor; Brougham, a great mathematician, who has just published a book upon the Colonial Policy of Europe, which all you Americans should read; Rev. Sydney Smith and P. Elmsley, two Oxonian priests, full of jokes and erudition; my excellent little SanscritHamilton, who is also in the hands of Bonaparte at Fontainebleau; Thomas Thomson and John Murray, two ingenious advocates; and some dozen of occasional contributors, among whom the most illustrious, I think, are young Watt of Birmingham and Davy of the Royal Institution.”[7]Many of these names are now forgotten, but those of Sydney Smith, Brougham, Horner, and Davy speak for themselves and are guarantees of brilliancy of style, originality of treatment, and vigorous thought.
The editor and the contributors, then, must receive their full share of credit for the success of the newReview; but their ability alone can hardly account for a success that converted the “blue and yellow” into a national institution. To explain a success so permanent and far-reaching, we must look beyond editor and contributors and consider the relation of theReviewto its social environment. TheEdinburgh Reviewcame into being in answer to a popular need; it developed a new literary form to meet this need; and its business arrangements were such as enabled the cleverest and most suggestive writers to adapt their work to the requirements of the reading public more readily and more effectively than ever before. The meaning of these assertions will grow clearer as we consider the difference between theEdinburgh Reviewand earlier English Reviews.
Prior to 1802 there were two standard Reviews in Great Britain,—theMonthly Reviewand theCritical Review. Minor Reviews there had been in plenty, of longer or shorter life; but these two periodicals had pushed beyond their competitors and were regarded as the best of their kind. TheMonthly Reviewhad been founded in 1749 by Ralph Griffiths, a bookseller; it was Whig in politics and Low Church in religion. Its rival, theCritical Review, of which Smollett was for many years editor, had been founded in 1756, and was Tory and High Church. These Reviews were alike in form and in ostensible aim; they were published monthly, were made up of unsigned articles of moderate length, and professed to give competent accounts of the qualities of all new books. But though thus apparently worthy predecessors of the great Reviews with which nineteenth-century readers are familiar, they were really quite unlike them in general policy, in scope and style, and in influence. They were merely booksellers’ organs, under the strict supervision of booksellers, and often edited by booksellers. They were used persistently and systematically, though, of course, discreetly, to further the bookseller’s business schemes, to quicken the sale in case of a slow market, and to damage the publications of rivals. They were written for the most part by drudgesand penny-a-liners, who worked under the orders of the bookseller like slaves under the lash of the slave-driver. These characteristics of the older Reviews may be best illustrated by a brief account of the methods in accordance with which Griffiths, the editor of theMonthly, conducted hisReview, and by some choice anecdotes of his treatment of subordinates.
Griffiths was originally a bookseller; and, though he was able later to retire from this business and to devote himself wholly to the management of hisReview, he retained still the instincts of a petty tradesman, and kept his eye on the state of the market like a skilful seller of perishable wares. Of scholarship, of genuine taste, and literary ability he had next to nothing; but he had shrewd common sense, sound business instincts, tact in dealing with men, readiness to bully or to fawn as might be needful, and unlimited patience in scheming for the commercial success of his venture.
His dealings with Goldsmith between 1755 and 1765, and with William Taylor of Norwich between 1790 and 1800, illustrate his narrow policy in the conduct of theMonthlyand his tyranny towards contributors. Goldsmith, he by turns bullied and bribed according as poor Goldsmith was more or less in need of money. On one occasion he became Goldsmith’s security with his tailor for a new suit of clothes on condition that Goldsmith at once write four articles for theReview;these articles were turned out to order, and appeared in December, 1758. On Goldsmith’s failing to pay his tailor’s bill in the specified time, Griffiths demanded the return of the suit and also of the books; and when he found that Goldsmith had pawned the books, he wrote him abusively, terming him sharper and villain, and threatening him with jail. In 1759, on the appearance of Goldsmith’s first book, Griffiths ordered one of his hacks, the notorious Kenrick, to ridicule the work, and to make a personal attack on the author. These orders were faithfully carried out in the next number of theMonthly Review.[8]
With William Taylor of Norwich Griffiths took a very different tone. Taylor was one of the few men of breeding and of parts who, before 1802, condescended to write for Reviews, and he was moreover for many years the great English authority on German literature. For these reasons, Griffiths always used him with the utmost tenderness, and, even when giving him orders or refusing his articles, took a flattering tone of deference and admiration. On one occasion Taylor demanded an increase of pay; Griffiths’s answer gives a very instructive glimpse of the relations between the bookseller-editor and his hack-writers. The “gratuity” for review work, Griffiths assures Taylor, had been settled fifty years before at two guineas a sheet of sixteen printed pages, “a sumnot then deemed altogether puny,” and in the case of most writers had since remained unchanged, although there had been certain “allowed exceptions in favour of the most difficult branches of the business.” These exceptions, however, had tended to cause much jealousy and heart-burning among the contributors; for “it could not be expected that those labourers in the vineyard, who customarily executed the less difficult branches of the culture, would ever be cordially convinced thattheirmerits and importance were inferior to any.” After these laborious explanations Griffiths agrees to raise Taylor’s compensation to three guineas per sheet of sixteen printed pages, though he expressly points out that by so doing he risks “exciting jealousy in the corps, similar, perhaps, to what happened among the vine-dressers, Matt., chap. xx.” “If objections arise,” he shrewdly continues, “we must resort for consolation to a list of candidates for the next vacancy, for in the literary harvest there is never any want of reapers.”[9]Griffiths’s slave-driving propensities show clearly through the thin disguise of politic words. Plainly he feels himself absolute master of the minds and wills of an indefinite number of penny-a-liners; and it is on these penny-a-liners that he resolves to depend for the great mass of his articles.
The evil influence of the publisher’s despotism ran through theReviewand vitiated all its judgments. The editor-publisher prescribed to his hacks what treatment a book should receive. Sometimes this was with a view to the market. “I send also theHoræ Bibilicæat a venture,” writes Griffiths to Taylor, “... it signifies not much whether we notice it or not, as it is noton sale.”[10]The italics are Griffiths’s own. Sometimes, the publisher-editor merely wanted to favour a friend or injure an enemy. Griffiths’s dictation in the case of Goldsmith’s first book has already been noted. On another occasion Griffiths sent a copy of Murphy’sTacitusto Taylor with the following significant suggestion: “One thing I have to mention,entre nous, that Mr. M. isone of us, and that it is a rule in our society for the members to behave with due decorum toward each other, whenever they appear at their own bar asauthors, out of their own critical province. If a kingdom (like poor France at present) be divided against itself, ‘how shall that kingdom stand’?”[11]If Griffiths ventured on this dictation with a man of Taylor’s standing and independence, his tyranny over his regular dependents must have been complete and relentless.
As a result, review-writing became purely hackwork. The reviewer had no voice of his own in his criticism; what little individuality he might, in his feebleness, have put into his work, had hebeen left to himself, disappeared under the eye of his taskmaster. He became a mere machine, praising and blaming perfunctorily and conventionally, at the bidding of the editor-publisher. Mawkish adulation or random abuse became the staple of critical articles; and in neither kind of work did the critic rise above the dead level of hopeless mediocrity.
A final result of this whole system of review-managing and hack-writing was unwillingness on the part of men of position to have anything to do with review-writing. If a man criticised books in a Review, he felt that he was putting himself on a level with Kenrick, Griffiths’s notorious hireling, who had been imprisoned for libel, with Kit Smart, who had bound himself to a bookseller for ninety-nine years, and with other like wretches. William Taylor of Norwich was one of the few gentlemen who, before 1802, ventured to write for Reviews.
With the establishment of theEdinburgh Reviewall this was changed. The prime principle of the newReviewwas independence of booksellers. The plan was not a bookseller’s scheme, but was the outcome of the ambitious fervour of half a dozen young adventurers in law, literature, and politics. From the start the bookseller was a “mere instrument,” as Brougham specially notes. The management of theReviewwas at first in the hands of Sydney Smith. When he set out for London his last words to the publisher, Constable,were, “If you will give £200 per annum to your editor and ten guineas a sheet, you will soon have the best Review in Europe.” Accordingly, the editorship was at once offered to Jeffrey, at even a higher salary, £300, than Sydney Smith had named. Jeffrey hesitated because of “the risk of general degradation.” But he found the £300 “a monstrous bribe”; moreover, the other contributors were all planning to take their ten guineas a sheet; accordingly, after many qualms, he swallowed his scruples and became a paid editor. “The publication,” he wrote to his brother, in July, 1803, “is in the highest degree respectable as yet, as there are none but gentlemen connected with it. If it ever sink into the ordinary bookseller’s journal, I have done with it.”
So began Jeffrey’s “reign” of twenty-six years; and so ended the despotism of booksellers. Henceforth the editor, not the publisher, was master. It was Jeffrey who decided what books should be handled, or rather what subjects should be discussed; it was Jeffrey who determined the price to be paid for each article,—“I had,” he declares, “an unlimited discretion in this respect”; it was Jeffrey who pleaded with the dilatory, mollified the refractory, and reached out here and there after new contributors; in short, it was Jeffrey who shaped the policy of theReviewand impressed on it its distinctive character.
But there were several other hardly less importantpoints in which the business policy of theEdinburghwas a new departure. The pay for reviewing was greatly increased. The old price had been two guineas a sheet of sixteen printed pages; theEdinburgh Review, after the first three numbers, paid ten guineas a sheet, and very soon sixteen guineas. Moreover, this was the minimum rate; over two-thirds of the articles were, according to Jeffrey, “paid much higher, averaging from twenty to twenty-five guineas a sheet on the whole number.”
Again, every contributor was forced to take pay; no contributor, however nice his honour, was suffered to refuse. This regulation was of the utmost importance; the rule salved the consciences of many brilliant young professional men, who were glad of pay, but ashamed to write for it, and afraid of being dubbed penny-a-liners. By Jeffrey’s clever arrangement they could write for fame or for simple amusement, and then have money “thrust upon them.” With high prices and enforced compensation the newReviewat once drew into its service men of a totally different stamp from the old hack-writers.
Finally, theEdinburghwas published quarterly, whereas the old Reviews were published monthly. This change was for two reasons important: in the first place, writers had more time in which to prepare their articles and led less of a hand-to-mouth life intellectually; and, in the second place, theReviewmade no attempt to notice all publications,and chose for discussion only books of real significance. Coleridge particularly commends this part of the policy of theReview: “It has a claim upon the gratitude of the literary republic, and, indeed, of the reading public at large, for having originated the scheme of reviewing those books only, which are susceptible and deserving of argumentative criticism.”[12]
These, then, were the principal points in which the organization and policy of theEdinburgh Reviewcontrasted with those of its predecessors; and the influence of these changes on the tone and spirit of the articles in the newReviewcan hardly be exaggerated. TheEdinburgh Reviewwas not a catch-all for waste information; it was an organ of thought, a busy intellectual centre, from which the newest ideas were sent out in a perpetual stream through the minds of sympathetic readers. TheReviewhad opinions of its own on all public questions. In politics, it advocated the principles of the Constitutional Whigs, at first in a nonpartisan spirit, after 1808, fiercely and aggressively; it pleaded for reform of the representation, for Catholic emancipation, for a wise recognition of the just discontent of the lower classes, and for judicious measures to allay this discontent without violent Constitutional changes. In social matters,it urged reforms of all kinds, the repeal of the game-laws, the improvement of prisons, the protection of chimney-sweeps and other social unfortunates. In religion, it argued for toleration. In education, it attacked pedantry and tradition, ridiculed the narrowness of university ideals, and contended for the adoption of practical methods and utilitarian aims. In all these departments it criticised the existing order of things, always brilliantly and suggestively, and sometimes fiercely and radically, and stirred the public into a keener consciousness and more intelligent appreciation of the questions of the hour, social, political, and religious.
Now it is plain that, to accomplish all this, writers would find it necessary to go far outside of the old limits of book-reviewing, and to make their articles express their own independent ideas on various important topics, rather than simply their critical opinions of the merits of new publications. And this is precisely what happened. A book-review became in most cases merely a mask for the writer’s own ideas on some burning question of the hour. In other words, the establishment of theEdinburgh Reviewreally led to the evolution of a new literary form; the old-fashioned review-article was converted into a brief argumentative essay discussing some living topic, political or social, in the light of the very latest ideas. This kind of essay had been unknown in the eighteenth century, andwas developed at the opening of the nineteenth century in response to the needs of the moment.
Nor was this change in the nature of the review-article unremarked at the time; Hazlitt noted it, and with his usual sourness protested against it. “If [the critic] recurs,” he says, “to the stipulated subject in the end, it is not till after he has exhausted his budget of general knowledge; and he establishes his own claims first in an elaborate inaugural dissertationde omni scibili et quibusdam aliis, before he deigns to bring forward the pretensions of the original candidate for praise, who is only the second figure in the piece. We may sometimes see articles of this sort, in which no allusion whatever is made to the work under sentence of death, after the first announcement of the title-page.”[13]Coleridge, on the other hand, approved of the change, and commended the “plan of supplying the vacant place of the trash or mediocrity wisely left to sink into oblivion by their own weight, with original essays on the most interesting subjects of the time, religious or political; in which the titles of the books or pamphlets prefixed furnish only the name and occasion of the disquisition.”[14]The reviewers themselves recognized, of course, the change they were working, though they did not altogether realize its significance. In 1807, Horner writes Jeffrey, “Have you any goodsubjects in view for your nineteenth? There are two I wish you,yourself, would undertake, if you can pick up books that would admit of them.”[15]This quotation illustrates the fact that the important question in the minds of the reviewers was always, not “What new books have appeared?” but “What topics just now have the greatest actuality and are best worth discussing?”
This, then, was largely the cause of the success of theReview: it offered, in its articles, a literary form by means of which the most active and original minds could at once come into communication with “the intelligent public” on all vital topics; it made the best thought and the newest knowledge more readily available than ever before for readers who were every day becoming more alive to their value.
The times were plainly favourable. The French Revolution had stirred men’s imaginations as they had not been stirred for a century, and had shaken portentously in all directions the foundations of belief. Traditions in politics, in social organization, in religion, were violently assailed by men like Godwin, Horne Tooke, and Holcroft, and loyally defended by enthusiastic conservatives. The fever of Romanticism was already making itself felt and was quickening men’s hearts to new passions and firing their imaginations with new visions of possible bliss. The air was full ofquestions and doubts, of eager forecasts, and of ominous warnings. All this ferment of life and feeling demanded freer utterance than could be found through old literary forms and with old methods of publication.
Moreover, the increasing importance of the middle class and the spread of popular education were favourable to the development of the new literary form. The number of men who read and thought for themselves had been rapidly growing. These men were not scholars or deep thinkers, and had no leisure to puzzle out learned treatises. They were overworked professional men or business men, who were alive to the questions of the hour, who had thought over them and discussed them wherever and whenever they could, and who were anxious for guidance from “men of light and leading.” The essays of the newReviewgave them just what they wanted,—brief, clear, yet original and suggestive, dissertations by the best-trained minds on the most important current topics.
These, then, are some of the causes, over and beyond Jeffrey’s editorial skill, and the brilliancy and originality of his co-workers, that led to the unprecedented success of theEdinburgh Review. Their importance and their significance are shown by the fact that within a few years several other Reviews were founded on precisely the same plan with theEdinburgh, and soon rivalled it in popular favour. In 1809 the ToryQuarterly Reviewwasstarted with William Gifford as editor, and Scott, Southey, Canning, Ellis, and Croker among its contributors. In 1820 theRetrospective Reviewwas established, and in 1824 theWestminster Review, the organ of the Radicals; Bentham was its patron, Bowring its editor, and James Mill and John Stuart Mill were constant contributors. These Reviews were all quarterlies, and in the details of their organization were modelled after the famousEdinburgh. They all found a ready welcome, and, with the exception of theRetrospective, have continued to thrive down to our own day.
The bearing of all this upon the history of Jeffrey’s literary reputation must be fairly obvious. Jeffrey profited from the conspiracy of a great many fortunate circumstances, and for a series of years enjoyed, as dictator of the policy of theEdinburgh Review, a reputation as critic that was really far beyond what his intrinsic merit justified. Leigh Hunt and Lamb were much more delicate and imaginative appreciators of literature than Jeffrey; Hazlitt, despite his waywardness and arrogance, was a subtler and more stimulating literary interpreter. Coleridge was incomparably Jeffrey’s superior in penetrating insight, in learning and scholarship, in philosophic scope, and in refinement and sureness of taste. Yet Jeffrey,by dint of his cleverness, versatility, brilliancy, readiness of resource, and, above all, because of his commanding position as the director of the new WhigReview, outstripped all these competitors and imposed himself on public opinion as the typically infallible critic of his day and generation. His personal charm, too, worked in his favour; his Whig following was enthusiastically loyal. Everything tended to increase, for the time being, his fame as a literary autocrat.
The later reaction, which has so nearly consigned Jeffrey to the region of unread authors, was in its turn extreme, and yet followed naturally. Wordsworth and Coleridge, whom Jeffrey had assailed persistently till he had become in the public mind the representative foe of Romanticism, had won their cause, and been received by wider and wider circles of the most cultivated and discerning readers as among the foremost poets of their age. Jeffrey, their arch-enemy, suffered correspondingly in public esteem. Time seemed to have proved him wrong in one of his most strenuously asserted prejudices. Moreover, this particular defeat was merely one special instance of the evil effect that far-reaching influences were having upon Jeffrey’s reputation. His modes of conceiving life were being outgrown. His genial, man-of-the-world wisdom and somewhat narrow range of feeling seemed more and more unsatisfactory, as the public gradually made their own the deeper spiritualexperience of idealistic poets, like Shelley, and of transcendental prose-writers, like Carlyle. Jeffrey’s dry intellectuality and his shallow associational psychology seemed unequal to the vital problems in art and in ethics that the new age was canvassing. Moreover, his autocratic style and omniscient air had been caught up by all the quarterly Reviews, and no longer served to distinguish him; the methods and the tone of theEdinburghwere copied far and wide, and the critics of the new generation were quite a match for Jeffrey in gay, domineering assurance and in easy, swift omniscience. Jeffrey had trained many followers into his own likeness; or, at any rate, the methods and the tone that he had hit upon “survived” and had been universally received as fit.
Finally, Jeffrey’s essays, even at their best, had many of the qualities of “occasional” writing, and too often seemed merely meant for the moment; the trail of the periodical was over them all. Their very rapidity, sparkle, and plausibility gave them an air of perishableness; they seemed clever and entertaining improvisations. Work of this sort could hardly hope to maintain itself permanently in public favour. Nor was the collection of his essays, that Jeffrey saw fit to publish in 1843, of a sort to make a stand against the general indifference that was clouding his fame. Two thousand pages of improvised comments on all manner of topics, from theMemoirs of Baberto DugaldStewart’sPhilosophical Essays, could scarcely be expected to secure a fixed place for themselves in the affections of large masses of readers. A far smaller volume, that should have included only the essays, or portions of essays, that were best wrought in style, most vigorously thought out, and contained the most characteristic and final of Jeffrey’s opinions, would have been more likely—except in so far as Jeffrey based his claims on his versatility—to have insured him permanent remembrance as critic and prose-writer.
The reaction, then, against Jeffrey was necessary and, in some degree, just. Yet, now that the air is cleared of Romantic prejudices, Jeffrey’s real services to the causes both of criticism and of sound literature may be more accurately perceived and defined. Not for a moment can the student who aims at genuine insight into the history of literature and of literary opinion during the first quarter of our century afford to disregard Jeffrey and hisEdinburgh ReviewEssays, or to pass him by with a phrase as a mere unsuccessful opponent of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Jeffrey influenced public opinion decisively and beneficially on a vast range of subjects. He broadened the methods of literary criticism and won for it new points of view and new fields. He put the relations between critic and public on a sounder basis, and raised the profession of literary criticism into an honourable calling. Finally, he developed Englishstyle, added to its swiftness of play and brilliant serviceableness, and prepared the way for the dazzlingly effective, if somewhat mechanical, technique of Macaulay. All these good works are nowadays too often forgotten; and on the injustice of such neglect one cannot comment more aptly than through the quotation of Jeffrey’s own famous phrase—“This will never do.”
Inthese “uncanonical times,” it may seem somewhat grotesque to go for information about an author’s style to his patron saint. Yet no surer way exists for gaining an insight into the peculiar charm of Cardinal Newman’s writings than through an appeal to St. Philip Neri, the founder of the Congregation of the Oratory, whom Newman chose for his “own special Father and Patron.” In at least two of his discourses, or essays, Newman has analyzed the character and peculiar influence of St. Philip Neri. “Whatever was exact and systematic,” Newman tells us, “pleased him not; he put from him monastic rule and authoritative speech, as David refused the armour of his king. No; he would be but an ordinary individual priest as others; and his weapons should be but unaffected humility and unpretending love. All he did was to be done by the light, and fervour, and convincing eloquence of his personal character and his easy conversation.” In another essay, Newman describes St. Philip’s distrust of “the severity of the Regular” as a meansfor the control of those whom he sought to subjugate. “Influence,” adroit intimacy, winning intercourse, these were the means by which St. Philip preferred to work on those about him.
Newman’s loving regard for these traits of St. Philip’s genius is a revelation of some of the deepest instincts of his nature,—instincts which must at once be brought into view in any attempt to appreciate his style as a writer of prose. A peculiar personal charm is impressed on all the most characteristic of Newman’s prose-writings,—on whatever he wrote after he had, as an artist, found himself and realized his essential genius. Abstract as his subject may be, he gives it some colour of life and some of the beauty and grace of friendly discourse. Every one knows what charm there is in the talk of a man of the world who puts before his listeners, in picturesque phrases, the variable incidents of actual life as he himself has encountered them. The whim, the personal idiom, the glancing humour, the concrete image, the vivacious disorderliness, the skilful dealing at first hand with glowing human experience, give to talk of this sort a peculiarly winning quality. And the style that in literature mimics afar the colloquial rhythms and the idiom of such familiar talk has also, its peculiar charm. The writer seems to escape from the blank region of authorship, to realize himself before the reader as a friendly face and form, and to communicate himself through thehundred and one subtle signs of eye and voice and gesture and smile that give to actual human intercourse its delight and stimulating power. The extreme form of this colloquial style, where an author is merely amiably garrulous, is not to be found in Newman’s writings; Newman’s temper was, after all, too academic for this, and his subjects were too abstract and difficult. Rarely, however, have topics as speculative as are many of Newman’s been treated with so much of the wayward charm and pliant grace of friendly discourse as Newman reaches. His style, at its best, has the urbanity, the affability, the winning adroitness, even the half-careless desultoriness of the familiar talk of a man of the world with his fellows.
Yet it is not this colloquial grace by itself that gives to Newman’s discussions of abstract topics their peculiar distinction; it is rather his reconciliation of the charm of colloquial freedom with the demands of logical method and thoroughness of treatment. Garrulity to no purpose is usually easy enough. But the peculiarity of Newman’s style and method is that, with all their apparent casualness, they lead the reader to a complete and essentially logical command of the topic under discussion. When he chose, Newman was absolute master of the severe beauty of rational discourse,—of the beauty of that kind of discourse that disdains to follow any associations save those of logic,—discusses with fine economic precision just theaspects of truth that right reason detects as essential to the question in hand, and is everywhere formally correct, systematic, and dignified. His earliest work is often austerely wrought in accordance with this ideal. Ultimately, however, the essential charm that made him so winning in personal intercourse passed over into his prose, and conveyed into it the warmth, and elasticity, and colour of life. Yet this change involved no real sacrifice of structure or loss of firmness in the texture of his thought. And for the trained student of literary method much of the surpassing charm of Newman’s work is due to the possibility of finding in it, on analysis, a continual victorious union of logical strenuousness with the grace and ease and charm of a colloquial manner and idiom. This victory is so easily won as to seem something by the way; but the student and analyst knows that it is the result of rare tact, finely disciplined instinct, exquisite rhetorical insight and foresight, and extraordinary luminousness and largeness of thought.
The very perfection of Newman’s rhetorical manner has exposed him to some unpleasant charges of insincerity. It is not strange that in the midst of a people like the English, who are perhaps somewhat affectedly straightforward and pretentiously downright, Newman should, now and then, have suffered for his adroitness and grace. The bluff, impetuous man is proverbially ready to interpretsubtlety as duplicity, and to rebuke reticence and indirectness as deceit and hypocrisy. Prejudice of this sort was probably the real cause of Canon Kingsley’s famous attack upon Newman. He had an instinctive dislike of Newman’s sinuousness and suppleness, and, without pausing to analyze very carefully, he spoke out fiercely against Newman’s whole work as containing a special variety of ecclesiastical hypocrisy. The charge was the more plausible inasmuch as there is unquestionably a certain debased ecclesiastical manner whose cheaply insinuating suavity might, by hasty observers, be confused with Newman’s bearing and style. Yet the injustice of this confusion and the unfairness of Kingsley’s charges become plain after a moment’s analysis.
In spite of Newman’s ease and affability, a fair-minded reader feels, throughout his writings, when he stops to consider, an underlying suggestion of uncompromising strength and unwavering conviction. He is sure that the author is really revealing himself frankly and unreservedly, notwithstanding his apparent self-effacement, and that he is imposing his own conclusions, persuasively and constrainingly. Moreover, the reader is sure that, however adroitly Newman may be developing his thesis, with an eye to the skilful manipulation of his readers’ prejudices, he would at any moment give a point-blank answer to a point-blank question. There is never any real doubt of Newman’s courage and manly English temper, or of his readiness to meet an opponent fairly on the grounds of debate. In the last analysis, it is this fundamental sincerity of tone and this all-pervasive, but unobtrusive self-assertion that preserve Newman’s style from the undue flexibility and the insincerity of the debased ecclesiastical style, just as his unfailing good taste preserves him from its cheap suavity or unctuousness.
But Newman’s adroitness and rhetorical skill have exposed him to charges of still another kind, charges that concern the very substance of his thought and intellectual life, and charges that have been urged with much greater dialectical skill than Canon Kingsley could attain to. In a general examination of Newman’s theories, Mr. E. A. Abbott[16]has accused him of systematically doctoring truth, and of having elaborated, though perhaps unconsciously, various ingenious methods for inveigling unsuspecting readers into the acceptance of doubtful propositions, methods for which Mr. Abbott has devised satirical names, the Art of Lubrication, the Art of Oscillation, the Art of Assimilation. He does not assert that Newman consciously palters with truth, or tries to make the worse appear the better reason. But he urges that Newman was constitutionally fonder of other things than of truth, that he desired, with an over-mastering strength, to establish certain conclusions,and that he persuaded himself of their correctness by a series of manœuvres which really involved insincere logic.
Here, again, the charges that are made against Newman seem the result of prejudice and temperamental hostility on the part of his critic. Mr. Abbott is a bit of a formalist, a Caledonian intellect, a thorough-going positivist, a thinker for whom the only truth that exists is truth that can be scientifically verified. He is quite unable to comprehend, or, at any rate, to tolerate, Newman’s mental constitution and his resulting methods of conceiving of life and relating himself to its facts. Truth is to Newman a much subtler matter, a much more elusive substance, than it is to the positivist, to the mere intellectual dealer in facts and in figures; it cannot be packed into syllogisms as pills are packed into a box; it cannot be conveyed into the human system with the simple directness which the Laputa wiseacre aimed at who was for teaching his pupils geometry by feeding them on paper duly inscribed with geometrical figures. Moreover, language is an infinitely treacherous medium; words are so “false,” so capable of endless change, that one is “loath to prove reason with them.” Readers, too, are widely diverse, and are open to countless other appeals than that of sheer logic. Because of such considerations as these, Newman is continually studious of effect in his writings; he is intensely conscious of his audience; and he is alwaysstriving to win a way for his convictions, and aiming to insinuate them into the minds and hearts of his hearers by gently persuasive means.
But all this by no means implies any real carelessness of truth on Newman’s part, or any sacrifice of truth to expediency. Truth is difficult of attainment, and hard to transmit; all the more strenuously does Newman set himself to trace it out in its obscurity and remoteness, and to reveal it in all its intricacies. Moreover, subtle and elusive as it may be, it is nevertheless something tangible and describable and defensible; something, furthermore, of the acquisition of which Newman can give a very definite account; something as far as possible from mere misty sentiment, and something, furthermore, to be strenuously asserted and defended.
Sympathetic and patient readers of Newman, then, can hardly doubt his essential mental integrity or his courage and readiness to be frank, even in those passages or in those works where the search for the subtlest shades of truth, or the desire to avoid clashing needlessly on prejudice, or the wish to win a favourable hearing, takes the author most indirectly and tortuously towards his end. It is his underlying manliness of mind and frank readiness to give an account of himself that prevent Newman’s prevailing subtlety, adroitness, and suavity from leaving on the mind of an unprejudiced reader any impression of timorousness or disingenuousness.
In what has been said of Newman’s realization of the elusive nature of truth and of the great difficulty of securing a welcome for it in the minds and hearts of the mass of men lies the key to what is most distinctive in his methods. He was a great rhetorician, and whatever he produced shows evidence, on analysis, of having been constructed with the utmost niceness of instinct and deftness of hand. He himself frankly admitted his rhetorical bent. Writing to Hurrell Froude in 1836, about the management of the Tractarian agitation, he says, “You and Keble are the philosophers, and I the rhetorician.”[17]And in a somewhat earlier letter he speaks of his aptitude for rhetoric in even stronger terms: “I have a vivid perception of the consequences of certain admitted principles, have a considerable intellectual capacity of drawing them out, have the refinement to admire them, and a rhetorical or histrionic power to represent them.”[18]
This rhetorical skill was partly natural and instinctive, and partly the result of training. From his earliest years as a student, Newman had been conspicuous for the subtlety and flexibility of his intelligence, for his readiness in assuming for speculative purposes the most diverse points ofview, and for his insight into temperaments and his comprehension of their modifying action on the white light of truth. With this admirable equipment for effective rhetorical work, he came directly under the influence, in Oriel College, of two exceptionally great rhetoricians, Dr. Copleston, for many years Provost of Oriel, and Whately, one of its most influential Fellows. Copleston was a famous controversialist and dialectician, who had long been regarded as the chief champion of the University against the attacks of outsiders. HisAdvice to a Young Reviewer with a Specimen of the Art(1807), had turned into ridicule the airs and pretensions of the young Edinburgh reviewers and had led them into severe strictures on University methods, against which attacks, however, Dr. Copleston had vigorously defended Oxford in various publications, to the satisfaction of all University men. He was the Provost of Oriel during the first year of Newman’s residence there, and suggestions of the influence of his ideas and methods are to be found throughout the early pages of theApologiaand theAutobiographical Memoir. Still more decisive, however, was the influence of a yet more famous rhetorician, Dr. Whately, whose lectures on logic and on rhetoric remained almost down to the present day standard text-books in those subjects. Whately was also renowned as a controversialist, and hisHistoric Doubts relative to Napoleon Buonapartewas perhaps the cleverest andmost famous piece of ironical argumentation produced in England during the first quarter of the century. Newman, for several of his most impressionable years, was intimately associated with Whately. “He emphatically opened my mind,” Newman says in theApologia, “and taught me to think and to use my reason.” Under the influence of these two masters of rhetoric and redoubtable controversialists Newman’s natural aptitude for rhetorical methods was encouraged and fostered, so that he became a perfect adept in all the arts of exposition and argumentation and persuasion.
Whatever work of Newman’s, then, we take up, we may be sure that its construction will repay careful analysis. In trying to present any set of truths, Newman was consciously confronting a delicate psychological problem; he was aware of the elements that entered into the problem; he knew what special difficulties he had to face because of the special nature of the truth he was dealing with,—its abstractness, or complexity, or novelty. He had measured, also, the precise degree of resistance he must expect because of the peculiar prejudices or preoccupations of his readers. And the shape which his discussion finally took—the particular methods that he followed—were the result of a deliberate adaptation of means to ends; they were the methods that his trained rhetorical instinct and his insight into the truth he was handling and into the temperaments and intelligences he was to address himself to dictated as most likely to persuade.
Although ordinarily Newman does not explain the method he follows or comment on the difficulties of his problem, he has, in hisApologia, departed from this rule, and taken his readers into his confidence. In the first thirty pages of this self-justificatory piece of writing, he sets forth minutely the prejudices against which he must make his way, considers various possible modes of overcoming these prejudices, notes the precise reasons that finally lead him to the actual plan he chooses, and is entirely explicit as to the elaborate design that underlies and controls the seeming desultoriness of his whole discussion.
The problem which in this case confronted Newman was briefly as follows. He had been charged by Kingsley with teaching “lying on system.” He had protested against the charge and had obtained a half-hearted apology. Later, however, the charge had been reiterated more formally, and with the added taunt that as Newman recommended systematic dissimulation no one could be expected to accept his self-exculpating word. These charges fell in, as Newman recognized, first, with the general trend of British prejudice against Roman Catholics, and, secondly, with the particular prejudice against Newman himself that sprang from his early attempts to make the Anglican Church more Catholic, and his subsequent secession toRome. How, then, was Newman to persuade the public of Kingsley’s injustice and his own innocence? He saw at once that to deal with each separate charge would be mere waste of time; to prove that in a special case he had not lied or recommended lying would carry him no whit towards his end, as long as contemptuous distrust remained the dominant mood of the British mind towards himself and his party. First of all, he must conquer this mood; he must overthrow the presumption against him, and win for his cause at least such an unbiassed hearing as is accorded to the ordinary man upon trial whose record has been hitherto clean; then he might hope to secure for his particular denials a universal scope. The method that he chose in order to win his readers was admirably conceived. He would put himself vitally and almost dramatically before them; he would bring them within the actual sound of his voice and the glance of his eye; he would let them follow him through the long course of his years as student, tutor, preacher, and leader, and come to know him as intimately as those few friends had known him with whom he had lived most freely. Then, he would ask his readers, when he had put his personality before them in its many shifting, but continuous aspects, and with all the intense persuasiveness of a dramatic portrayal, whether they were ready to believe of the man they had thus watched through the round of his duties thathe was a liar. Of the peculiar power which Newman could count on exerting in thus appealing to his personal charm he was, of course, unable to speak in his Preface. In truth, however, he was having recourse to an influence which had always been potent whenever it had had a chance to make itself felt. Throughout his life at Oxford it was true of his relations to others that “friends unasked, unhoped” had “come,”—all men who met him falling almost inevitably under the sway of his winning and commanding personality. Newman was, therefore, well advised when he resolved to reveal himself to the world and to trust to the conciliating effect of this self-revelation to prepare for his specific denial of Kingsley’s charges.
In accordance with this purpose and plan, theApologia pro Vita Sua, or History of his Religious Opinions, was written; and for these reasons his answer to certain definite charges of equivocation and systematic and elaborate misrepresentation was so shaped as to include in its scope the story of his whole life. Of the 384 pages of the original edition of theApologia, only the last 93 pages are devoted to the actual refutation of Kingsley’s charges; the 238 pages that precede are merely persuasive, and simply prepare the way for the final defence. Probably in no other piece of writing is the actual demonstration so curiously small in proportion to the means that are taken to make the logic effective. Of course, itmay be urged in reply to this view of the construction of theApologia, that to look at the book as purely a reply to Kingsley, is to judge it from an arbitrary and artificial point of view, and hence to distort it inevitably and throw its parts out of proportion; that the real aim of the book was simply and sincerely autobiographic, and that, regarding the book as frank autobiography, the critic need find nothing strange in the proportioning of its parts. In answer to this objection, it should be noted that the last pages of the book deal directly and argumentatively with “Mr. Kingsley’s accusations”; that the transition in Part VII. from the history of Newman’s opinions to the discussion of the theory of truth-telling is almost imperceptible; and, finally, that Newman himself has declared in the early pages of the book that the sole reason for his self-revelations is his wish to clear away misconceptions, to win once again the confidence of that English public that had long been distrustful of him, and to make widely effective his refutation of Kingsley’s charges. The book, then, is fairly to be described as an enormously elaborate and ingenious piece of special pleading to prepare the way for a few syllogisms that have now become grotesquely insignificant.
It has been worth while to lay great stress on this disproportion between persuasion and demonstration in theApologia, because this disproportion illustrates, with almost the over-emphasis of caricature, certain of Newman’s fundamental beliefs and resulting tricks of method. First and foremost, it illustrates the slight esteem in which he held the formal logic of the schools and syllogistic demonstrations. Not that he failed to recognize the value of analysis and logical demonstration as verifying processes; but he unhesitatingly subordinated these processes to those by which truth is originally won, and to those also by which truth is persuasively inculcated.
In a sermon onImplicit and Explicit Reason, he distinguishes with great elaborateness between the method by which the mind makes its way almost intuitively to the possession of a new truth, or set of truths, and the subsequent analysis by which it takes account of this half-instinctive original process and renders the moments of the process self-conscious and articulate. His description of the intellect delicately and swiftly feeling its way towards truth may well be quoted entire: “The mind ranges to and fro, and spreads out and advances forward with a quickness which has become a proverb, and a subtlety and versatility which baffle investigation. It passes on from point to point, gaining one by some indication; another on a probability; then availing itself of an association; then falling back on some received law; next seizing on testimony; then committing itself to some popular impression, or some inward instinct, or some obscure memory; and thus it makes progress not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff, who, by quick eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends, how, he knows not himself, by personal endowments and by practice, rather than by rule, leaving no track behind him, and unable to teach another. It is not too much to say that the stepping by which great geniuses scale the mountain of truth is as unsafe and precarious to men in general as the ascent of a skilful mountaineer up a literal crag. It is a way which they alone can take; and its justification lies alone in their success. And such mainly is the way in which all men, gifted or not gifted, commonly reason—not by rule, but by an inward faculty. Reasoning, then, or the exercise of reason, is a living, spontaneous energy within us, not an art.”[19]
But not only is syllogistic reasoning not the original process by which truth is attained; it is in no way essential to the validity or completeness of the process. “Clearness in argument certainly is not indispensable to reasoning well. Accuracy in stating doctrines or principles is not essential to feeling and acting upon them. The exercise of analysis is not necessary to the integrity of the process analyzed. The process of reasoning is complete in itself, and independent.”[20]
Finally, logical demonstration has relatively little value as a means of winning a hearing fornew truth, of securing its entrance into the popular consciousness, and of giving it a place among the determining powers of life. “Logic makes but a sorry rhetoric with the multitude; first shoot round corners, and you may not despair of converting by a syllogism.” Men must be inveigled into the acceptance of truth; they cannot be driven to accept it at the point of the syllogism. “The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. People influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us.”
The application of all this,—particularly of what Newman says touching the persuasiveness of a personal appeal,—to the whole method of theApologiahardly needs pointing out. The work is, from first to last, intensely personal in its tone and matter, persuasive because of its concreteness, its dramatic vividness, the modulations of the speaker’s voice, the sincerity and dignity of his look and bearing. Logic, of course, gives coherence to the discussions. The processes of thought by which Newman moved from point to point in his theological development are consistently set forth; but the convincing quality of the book comes from its embodiment of a life, not from its systematization of a theory.
In accordance with this general character of the book is its tone throughout; its style is the perfection of informality and easy colloquialism. Now and then, in describing his ideas on specially complicated questions, Newman makes use of numbered propositions, and proceeds, for the time being, with the precaution and precision of the dialectician. But, for the most part, he is as unconstrained and apparently fortuitous in his presentation of ideas as if he were merely emulating Montaigne in confidential self-revelation, and were guided by no controversial purpose. Perhaps no writer has surpassed, or even equalled, Newman in combining apparent desultoriness of treatment with real definiteness of purpose and clairvoyance of method.
Another admirable example of Newman’s least formal, and most characteristic, method may be found in his series of papers on theRise and Progress of Universities. Here, again, there is apparent desultoriness, or, at most, a careless following of historical sequence. One after another, with what seems like a haphazard choice, Newman describes a half-dozen of the most famous universities of the past, explains popularly their organization, methods, and aims, entertaining the reader meanwhile with such superlative pieces of rhetoric as the description of Attica and Athens, and with such dramatic episodes as that of Abelard. Yet underneath this apparent caprice runs the controlling purpose of putting the reader in possession, through concrete illustrations, of the complete idea of a typically effective university. Each special school that Newman describes illustrates some essential attribute of the ideal school; and incidentally the reader, who is all the time beguiled, from chapter to chapter, by Newman’s picturesque detail, takes into his mind the various features, and ultimately the complete image, of the perfect type.
In the series ofDiscourses on the Idea of a University, Newman’s method is more formal and his tone more controversial. Newman was this time addressing a distinctly scholarly audience, and was treating of a series of abstract topics, on which he was called to pronounce in his character of probable vice-chancellor of the proposed university. Accordingly, throughout theseDiscourseshe is consistently academic in tone and manner, and formal and elaborate in method. He lays out his work with somewhat mechanical precision; he sketches his plan strictly beforehand; he defines terms and refines upon possible meanings, and guards at each step against misinterpretations; he pauses often to come to an understanding with his hearers about the progress already made, and to consider what line of advance severe logical method next dictates. In all these ways, he is deliberate, explicit, and demonstrative. Yet despite this strenuous regard for system and method, not even here does Newman become crabbedly scholastic orpedantically over-formal; the result of his strenuousness is, rather, a finely conscientious circumspection of demeanour and an academic dignity of bearing. There is something irresistibly impressive in the perfect poise with which he moves through the intricacies of the many abstractions that his subject involves. He exhibits each aspect of his subject in just the right perspective and with just the requisite minuteness of detail; he leads us unerringly from each point of view to that which most naturally follows; he keeps us always aware of the relation of each aspect to the total sum of truth he is trying to help us to grasp; and so, little by little, he secures for us that perfect command of an intellectual region, in its concrete facts and in its abstract relations, which exposition aims to make possible. TheseDiscoursesare as fine an example as exists in English of the union of strict method with charm of style in the treatment of an abstract topic.
In theDevelopment of Christian Doctrineand theGrammar of Assentthe severity of Newman’s method is somewhat greater, as is but natural in strictly scientific treatises. Yet even in these abstract discussions his style retains an inalienable charm, due to the luminousness of the atmosphere, the wide-ranging command of illustrations, the unobtrusively tropical phrasing, and the steady harmonious sweep of the periods. Few books on equally abstract topics are as easy reading.
Newman’s methods as a controversialist may advantageously be studied in hisPresent Position of Catholics in England,—a work that contains some of his most ingenious and caustic irony. In plan and construction, these discourses illustrate once more Newman’s consummate skill in adapting his method to the matter in hand. His purpose in this case is to right the Roman Catholic Church with the English nation, to exhibit the Roman Catholics as he knows them to be, a conscientious, honourable, patriotic body of men, and to put an end once for all, if possible, to the long tradition of calumny that has persecuted them. Such is his problem. He sets about its solution characteristically. He does not undertake to demonstrate the truth of Roman Catholic doctrines, or, by direct evidence and argument, to refute the wild charges of hypocrisy and corruption which Protestants are habitually making against Roman Catholics. His methods are much subtler than these and also much more comprehensive and final. He sets himself to analyze Protestant prejudice, and to destroy it by resolving it into its elements. He takes it up historically, and exhibits its origin in an atmosphere of intense partisan conflict, and its development in the midst of peculiarly favourable intellectual and moral conditions; he shows that it is political in its origin and has been inwrought into the very fibre of English national life: “English Protestantism is thereligion of the throne; it is represented, realized, taught, transmitted in the succession of monarchs and an hereditary aristocracy. It is religion grafted upon loyalty; and its strength is not in argument, not in fact, not in the unanswerable controversialist, not in an apostolic succession, not in sanction of Scripture—but in a royal road to faith, in backing up a King whom men see, against a Pope whom they do not see. The devolution of its crown is the tradition of its creed; and to doubt its truth is to be disloyal towards its Sovereign. Kings are an Englishman’s saints and doctors; he likes somebody or something at which he can cry, ‘huzzah,’ and throw up his hat.”
To hate a “Romanist,” then, is as natural for John Bull as to hate a Frenchman, and to libel him is a matter of patriotism. The Englishman’s romantic imagination has for generations been spinning myths of Catholic misdoing to satisfy these deep instinctive animosities. Moreover, many other typical English qualities, in addition to loyalty and patriotism, have contributed to foster and develop this Protestant prejudice. Such are the controlling practical interests of the middle-class English, their content with compromise-working schemes, and their contempt for abstractions and subtleties; their shuddering dislike of innovation; their well-meaning obstinacy in ignorance, and their heroic adherence to familiar, though undeniable error; their insularity; their hatred of foreignersin general, and their frenzied fear of the Pope in particular. With unfailing adroitness of suggestion, Newman makes clear how these national traits, and many others closely related to them, have coöperated to originate and develop Protestant hatred of Roman Catholicism. His mastery of the details of social life and of motives of action is in this discussion of English history and contemporary life specially conspicuous. Every phase of peculiarly English thought and feeling is present to him; every intricacy of the curiously subterranean British national temperament is traced out. And the result is that prejudice is explained out of existence. The intense hostility that seems so primitive an instinct as to justify itself like the belief in God or in an outer world, is resolved into the expression of a vast mass of petty, and often discreditable instincts, and so loses all its validity in losing its apparent primitiveness and mystery.
Such is the general plan and scope of Newman’s attack on Protestant prejudice; in carrying out the plan and making his attack brilliantly effective, he shows inexhaustible ingenuity and unwearied invention. He uses fables, allegories, and elaborate pieces of irony; he develops an unending series of picturesque illustrations of Protestant prejudice, drawn from all sources, past and present; he sets curious traps for this prejudice, catches it at unawares, and shows it up to his readers in guises they can hardly defend; he plays skilfully uponthe instincts that lie at its root, and by clever manipulation makes them declare themselves in a twinkling in favour of some aspect of Roman Catholicism. In short, he uses all the rhetorical devices of which he is master to win a hearing from the half-hostile, to beguile the unwilling, to amuse the captious, and, finally, to insinuate into the minds of his readers an all-permeating mood of contempt for Protestant narrowness and bigotry, and of open-minded appreciation of the merits of Roman Catholics.
For still another reason the lectures on thePresent Position of Catholicsare specially interesting to a student of Newman’s methods; they illustrate exceptionally well his skill in the use of irony. To the genuine rhetorician there is something specially attractive in the duplicity of irony, because of the opportunity it offers of playing with points of view, of juggling with phrases, of showing virtuosity in the manipulation of both thoughts and words. Newman was too much of a rhetorician not to feel this fascination. Moreover, he had learned from his study of Copleston and Whately the possibilities of irony as a controversial weapon. Copleston’sAdvice to a Young Reviewer, and Whately’sHistoric Doubts relative to Napoleon Buonapartewere typical specimens of academic irony, where, with impressive dignityand suavity and the most plausible simplicity and candour, the writers, while seemingly advocating a certain policy, or theory, or set of conclusions, were really sneering throughout at a somewhat similar policy or theory—that of their opponents—and laying it open to helpless ridicule.
One of the most noteworthy characteristics of Newman’s irony—and in this point his irony resembled that of his masters—was its positive argumentative value. Often an elaborate piece of irony is chiefly destructive; it turns cleverly into ridicule the general attitude of mind of the writer’s opponents, but makes no attempt to supply a substitute for the faith it destroys. Swift’s irony is usually of this character. It is intensely ill-natured, even savage, and is so extravagant that it sometimes defeats its own end as argument. Its hauteur and bitterness produce a reaction in the mind of the reader, and force him to distrust the judgment and sanity of a man who can be so inveterately and fiercely insolent. Its indictment is so sweeping and its mood so cynical, that the reader, though he is bullied out of any regard for the ideas that Swift attacks, is repelled from Swift himself, and made to hate his notions as much as he despises those of Swift’s opponents. Moreover, full of duplicity and innuendo as it is, its innuendoes are often merely disguised sneers, and not suggestions of genuinely valid reasons why the opinions or prejudices which the writer is assailingshould be abandoned. In theModest Proposaland theArgument against Abolishing Christianity, for example, the irony reduces to one long sneer at the prejudice, the selfishness, and the cruelty of Yahoo human nature; there is very little positive argument in behalf of the oppressed Irish on the one hand, or in favour of Christianity on the other.
Newman’s irony, on the contrary, is subtle, intellectual, and suggestive. It is positive in its insinuation of actual reasons for abandoning prejudice against Roman Catholics; it is tirelessly adroit, and adjusts itself delicately to every part of the opposing argument; it is suggestive of new ideas, and not only makes the reader see the absurdity of some time-worn prejudice, but hints at its explanation and is ready with a new opinion to take its place. In tone, too, it is very different from Swift’s irony; it is not enraged and blindly savage, but more like the best French irony—self-possessed, suave, and oblique. Newman addresses himself with unfailing skill to the prejudices of those whom he is trying to move, and carries his readers with him in a way that Swift was too contemptuous to aim at. Newman’s irony wins the wavering, while it routs the hostile. This is the double task it proposes to itself.
An example of his irony at its best may be found in the amusing piece of declamation against the British Constitution and John Bullism which Newman puts into the mouth of a Russian count. Thepassage occurs in a lecture on thePresent Position of Catholics, which was delivered just before the war with Russia, when English jealousy of Russia and contempt for Russian prejudice and ignorance were most intense. It was, of course, on these feelings of jealousy and contempt that Newman skilfully played when he represented the Russian count as grotesquely misinterpreting the British Constitution andBlackstone’s Commentaries, and as charging them with irreligion and blasphemy. His satirical portrayal of the Russian and the clever manipulation by which he forces the count to exhibit his stores of ungentle dulness and his stock of malignant prejudice delighted every ordinary British reader, and threw him into a pleasant glow of self-satisfaction, and of sympathy with the author; now this was the very mood, as Newman was well aware, in which, if ever, the anti-Catholic reader might be led to question with himself whether, after all, he was perfectly informed about Roman Catholicism, or whether he did not, like the Russian count, take most of his knowledge at second-hand and inherit most of his prejudice. Throughout this passage the ingenuity is conspicuous with which Newman makes use of English dislike of Russia and loyalty to Queen and Constitution; the passage everywhere exemplifies the adroitness, the flexibility, the persuasiveness, and the far-reaching calculation of Newman’s irony.
Indeed, this elaborateness and self-consciousness,and deliberateness of aim, are perhaps, at times, limitations on the success of his irony; it is somewhat too cleverly planned and a trifle over-elaborate. In these respects it contrasts disadvantageously with French irony, which, at its best, is so delightfully by the way, so airily unexpected, so accidental, and yet so dextrously fatal. It would be an instructive study in literary method to compare Newman’s ironical defence of Roman Catholicism in the passage already referred to with Montesquieu’s ironical attack upon the same system in theLettres Persanes.