by George Moore
The Bible wasn’t written by Catholics.
The Colonel had to admit that it wasn’t, and after watching and rejoicing in his discomfiture for a while I went on to speak of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, declaring them to be robust livers, whose philosophy was to live out their day in love of wine and women, as frequenters of the Mermaid Tavern and of wenches, haters of the Puritan.
You’ll not claim Marlowe, I suppose? You’ll admit that there was very little Catholic about him except a very Catholic taste for life. You mentioned just now the Brownists; they were overcome, you tell me, for the time being. But Puritanism is an enemy, if it be really one, that I can meet in a friendly spirit. Landor says that Virgil and St Thomas Aquinas could never cordially shake hands; but I dare say I could shake hands with Knox. The Puritan closed the theatres, an act which I won’t pretend to sympathise with; but England’s dramatic genius had spent itself, and for its intolerance of amusement Puritanism made handsome amends by giving us Milton, and a literature of its own. Of course everything can be argued, and some will argue that Milton’s poem was written in spite of Puritan influence; but this I do think, that if ever a religious movement may be said to have brought a literature along with it, Puritanism is that one. As much as any man that ever lived, Milton’s whole life was spent in emancipating himself from dogma. In his old age he was a Unitarian.
You’ve forgotten The Pilgrim’s Progress, written out of the very heart of the language, and out of the mind of the nation.
Thank you for reminding me of it. A manly fellow was Bunyan, without clerical unction, and a courage in his heart that nothing could cast down, the glory and symbol of Puritanism for ever and ever.
Puritanism is more inspiring than Protestantism; it is a more original attitude of mind —
The Agnostic mind is the original mind, the mind which we bring into the world.
Milton was a Unitarian, Bunyan a Puritan; where does your Protestantism come in? Who is the great Protestant poet?
I don’t limit Protestantism to the Established Church. Protestantism is a stage in human development. But if you want a poet who would shed the last drop of his blood for the Established Church, there is one, Wordsworth, and he is still considered to be a pretty good poet; Coleridge was nearly a divine.
You make a point with Wordsworth, I admit it. He seems, however, to have overstepped the line in his Intimations of Immortality.
But you miss my point somewhat; it is that there is hardly any line of Protestantism to overstep.
I set Newman against —
Against whom? Not against Wordsworth, surely? And if you do, think of the others — shall I enumerate?
It wouldn’t be worth while; it is evident that all that is best in England has gone into Agnosticism.
And into Protestantism; confronted by Wordsworth and Coleridge, you can’t deny to Protestantism a large share in the shaping of modern poetry. But there isn’t a Catholic writer, only a few converts.
Newman.
But, my dear Colonel, we cannot for one moment compare Newman’s mind to Wordsworth’s or Coleridge’s? To do so I may contend is ridiculous, without laying myself open to a charge of being much addicted to either writer. Wordsworth moralised Nature away, and it is impossible, for me, at least, to forgive him his:
A primrose by a river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.
That nothing more is a moral stain that no time shall wash away. One would have thought that flowers, especially wild flowers, might be freed from all moral obligations. I am an Objectivist, reared among the Parnassians, an exile from the Nouvelle Athènes, and neither poet has ever unduly attracted me. Three or four beautiful poems more or less in the world are not as important as a new mind, a new way of feeling and seeing. Mere writing —
A theory invented on the spot so as to rid yourself of Newman.
There you are mistaken. Allow me to follow the train of my thoughts, and you will understand me better. And don’t lose your head and run away frightened if I dare to say that Newman could not write at all. But you have dislocated my ideas a little. Allow me to continue in my own way, for what I’m saying to you today will be written tomorrow or after, and talking my mind to you is a great help. I’m using you as an audience. Now, we were speaking about Coleridge, and I was saying that the mere fact that a man has written three or four beautiful poems is not enough; my primary interest in a writer being in the mind that he brings into the world; by a mind I mean a new way of feeling and seeing. I think I’ve said that before, but no harm is done by repeating it.
If you’ll allow me to interrupt you once more, I will suggest that Newman brought a new way of feeling and seeing into the world — a new soul.
I suppose he did; a sort of ragged weed which withered on till it was ninety. It is a mistake to speak of him as a convert to Catholicism; he was a born Catholic if ever a man was born one. Were it not for him the term a born Catholic would be a solecism, for at first sight it doesn’t seem very easy to understand how a man can be born a Catholic. A man is born blind, or deaf, or dumb, a hunchback, or an idiot, but it’s difficult to see how he can be born a Catholic. Yet it is so; Newman proves it. A born Catholic would seem to mean one predisposed to rely upon the help of priests, sacraments, texts, amulets, medals, indulgences; and Newman, you will not deny, brought into the world an inordinate appetite for texts, decrees, councils, and the like; even when he was a Protestant he was always talking about his Bishop. He was disposed from the beginning to seek authority for his every thought. Obedience in spiritual matters is the watchword of the Catholic, and surely Newman was always replete with it. He was a born Catholic; he justified the phrase. My dear Colonel, I’m aware that I’m delivering a little sermon, but to speak to you like this is a great help to me. He seems to have been the least spiritual of men, bereft of all sense of divinity. He seems to have lived his life in ignorance that religion existed before Christianity, that Buddhism preceded it, and that in China — But we need not wander so far afield. Newman was a sectarian, if ever there was one, astride on a rail between Protestantism and Catholicism, timidly letting down one leg, drawing it back, and then letting down the other leg. In the ‘sixties men were frightened lest their ancestors might turn out to be monkeys, and a great many ran after Newman clapping their hands in praise of his broken English.
Broken English! interrupted the Colonel.
Yes, broken mutterings about an Edict in the fourth century, and that the world has been going astray ever since. He seems to have really believed that the destiny of nations depended on the chatter of the Fathers, and he totters after them, like an old man in a dark corridor with a tallow dip in his hand. A simple-minded fellow, who meant well, I think; one can see his pale soul through his eyes, and his pale style is on his face. The best that can be said about it is that it is homely. You never saw The Private Secretary, did you?
The Colonel shook his head.
When Mr Spalding came on the stage, saying, I obey my Bishop, I at once thought of Newman, and, though I have no shred of evidence to support my case, I shall always maintain that that amusing comedy was suggested by The Apologia. It seems to have risen out of it, and I can imagine the writer walking up and down his study, his face radiant, seeing Mr Spalding as a human truth, a human objectification of an interest in texts, decrees, and in Bishops. I never thought of it before, but Newman confesses to Mr Spalding’s wee sexuality in The Apologia. I have been reading The Apologia this morning, and for the first time. Here it is:
I am obliged to mention, though I do it with great reluctance, another deep imagination, which at this time, the autumn of 1816, took possession of me — there can be no mistake about the fact; viz., that it would be the will of God that I should lead a single life. This anticipation, which has held its ground almost continuously ever since — with the break of a month now and a month then, up to 1829, and, after that date, without any break at all — was mor
e or less connected in my mind with the notion, that my calling in life would require such a sacrifice as celibacy involved.
He is himself in this paragraph, and nothing but himself. Even on a subject in which his whole life concerned he can only write dryly.
And we wrangled for some time over the anticipation which had held its ground almost continuously.
I admit that it isn’t very good; but how do you explain that he has always been considered a master of English?
All in good time, my dear Colonel. We are now concerned with Newman’s mind; it is the mind that produces the style. Listen to this:
The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fall, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.
This passage, I believe, was read with considerable piety and interest by the age which produced it, and I wonder why it has fallen out of favour; for to sentimentalise is to succeed, and it was really very kind of Newman to sentimentalise over the miseries which our lightest sins cause our Creator. An unfortunate case his is indeed, since the Catholic Church holds that venial sins are committed every moment of the day and night. The Creator torments us after we are dead by putting us into hell, but while we are on earth we give him hell. And our difficulties don’t end with the statement that we make the Creator’s life a hell for him, for we are told that it would be better that all humanity should perish in extremest agony than that, etc. If that be so, why doesn’t the Creator bring humanity to an end? The only possible answer to this question is that the Creator and the Catholic Church are not agreed on the point, and it would be pretentious on my part to offer arbitration. They must settle their differences as best they can. I’m afraid, Colonel, you look at me a little contemptuously, as if you thought my criticism frivolous.
Logically, of course, the Colonel answered — logically, of course, Newman is right.
We wasted at least ten minutes discussing how something that seemed utterly absurd could be said to be logical; and to bring the discussion to an end, I reminded the Colonel that Carlyle had said that Newman’s mind was not much greater than that of a half-grown rabbit. Perhaps Carlyle libelled the rabbit; he should have said the brain of a half-grown insect, a blackbeetle.
But, said the Colonel, do you believe the blackbeetle to be less intelligent than the rabbit? In my experience —
I’m inclined to agree with you, but we’re wandering from the point. I want to draw your attention to some passages, and to ask you if they are as badly written as they seem to be?
When you say that Newman wrote very badly, do you mean that he wrote in a way which does not commend itself to your taste, or that he wrote incorrectly?
His sentences are frequently incorrect, but I don’t lay stress on their occasional incorrectness. An ungrammatical sentence is by no mean incompatible with beauty of style; all the great writers have written ungrammatically; I suppose idiom means ungrammatical phrases made acceptable by usage; dialect is generally ungrammatical; but Newman’s slips do not help his style in the least. You’re watching me, my dear Colonel, with a smile in your eyes, wondering into what further exaggeration my detestation of Catholicism will carry me.
You have abused Newman enough. Let us get to facts. You say that he writes incorrectly.
The passage in which he deplores the suffering that man causes God convinced me that his mind was but a weed, and, though there was no necessity for my doing so, I said: Let us see how he expresses himself. You will admit that a man of weak intellect cannot write a fine style.
Let us get to the grammatical blunders which you say you have discovered in Newman.
I turned to the first pages and read:
He, emphatically, opened my mind, and taught me to think and to use my reason.
Don’t you think, Colonel, that emphatically opened my mind is a queer sentence for a master of English style to write, and that we should search in Carlyle or Landor a long while before we came upon such draggle-tailed English as we read on page 7?
He, emphatically, opened my mind, and taught me to think and to use my reason. After being first noticed by him in 1822, I became very intimate with him in 1825, when I was his Vice-Principal at Alban Hall. I gave up that office in 1826, when I became Tutor of my College, and his hold upon me gradually relaxed. He had done his work towards me or nearly so, when he taught me to see with my own eyes and to walk with my own feet. Not that I had not a good deal to learn from others still, but I influenced them as well as they me, and co-operated rather than merely concurred with them. As to Dr Whately, his mind was too different from mine for us to remain long on one line.
I know folks that is in the vegetable line, and I think I know one chap who should be tuk up for the murder of the King’s English if he warn’t dead already.
I recollect how dissatisfied he was with an Article of mine in the London Review, which Blanco White, good-humouredly, only called Platonic. When I was diverging from him in opinion (which he did not like), I thought of dedicating my first book to him, in words to the effect that he had not only taught me to think, but to think for myself. He left Oxford in 1831; after that, as far as I can recollect, I never saw him but twice, when he visited the University; once in the street in 1834, once in a room in 1838. From the time that he left, I have always felt a real affection for what I must call his memory; for, at least from the year 1834, he made himself dead to me. He had practically indeed given me up from the time that he became Archbishop in 1831; but in 1834 a correspondence took place between us,
A prize fight takes place; a correspondence begins.
which, though conducted, especially on his side, in a friendly spirit, was the expression of differences of opinion which acted as a final close to our intercourse. My reason told me that it was impossible we could have got on together longer, had he stayed in Oxford; yet I loved him too much to bid him farewell without pain. After a few years had passed, I began to believe that his influence on me in a higher respect than intellectual advance,
He means than that of intellectual advance.
(I will not say through his fault) had not been satisfactory. I believe that he has inserted sharp things in his later works about me. They have not come in my way, and I have not thought it necessary to seek out what would pain me so much in the reading.
The next page consists mainly of quotations from Dr Whately, who apparently is capable of expressing himself, and we pick up Newman farther on.
The case was this: though at that time I had not read Bishop Bull’s Defensio nor the Fathers, I was just then very strong for that ante-Nicene view of the Trinitarian doctrine, which some writers, both Catholic and non-Catholic, have accused of wearing a sort of Arian exterior.
I really don’t see, said the Colonel, that that sentence is —
Don’t trouble to defend it. There is worse to come. But how is it that the writer of such sentences is still spoken about as a master of style? Am I the only man living who has read The Apologia? It is almost impossible to read; that I admit.
It would be against my nature to act otherwise than I do; but besides, it would be to forget the lessons which I gained in the experience of my own history in the past.
One doesn’t gain lessons. How shall we amend it? — the experience I gained from the lessons of my own history.
The Bishop has but said that a certain Tract is objectionable, no reason being stated.
Without giving his reasons, the Bishop has only said that a certain Tract is objectionable, is how the editor of the halfpenny paper would probably revise Newman’s sentence. And who will say that the revised text is not better than the original?
As I declared on occasion of Tract 90, I claimed, in behalf of who would in the Anglican Church,
Ca
n he mean those who so desired in the Anglican Church? But it would take too long to put this passage right, for it is impossible to know exactly what the greatest master of lucid English meant —
the right of holding with Bramhall a comprecation with the Saints, and the Mass all but Transubstantiation with Andrewes, or with Hooker that Transubstantiation itself is not a point for Churches to part communion upon,
The kind of English that one would rap a boy of twelve over the knuckles for writing!
or with Hammond that a General Council, truly such, never did, never shall err in a matter of faith,
A thousand years of Catholicism is needed to write like this, so perhaps the present Duke of Norfolk is the author of The Apologia.
or with Bull that man had in Paradise, and lost on the fall, a supernatural habit of grace,
The style is the man, a simpleton cleric, especially anxious about his soul; no, I am mistaken — about a Text.
or with Thorndike that penance is a propitiation for post-baptismal sin, or with Pearson that the all-powerful name of Jesus is no otherwise given than in the Catholic Church.
What does he mean by given? In what sense? Does he mean that the name of Jesus is rendu in all churches in the same way? But, then, what exactly does he mean by given?
The Colonel, who writes a letter to a newspaper as well as anybody I know, took the book from my hand, saying:
It is barely credible ... I can write as well as that myself.
A great deal better, I answered, and we continued to look through The Apologia, astonished at the feebleness of the mind behind the words, and at the words themselves.
Like dead leaves, I said.
What surprises me is the lack of distinction, the Colonel murmured.
If the writing were a little worse it would be better, I answered. Am I going too far, my dear Colonel, if I say that The Apologia reads more like a mock at Catholic literature than anything else; and that it would pass for such if we didn’t know that it was written in great seriousness of spirit, and read with the same seriousness? No Protestant divine ever wrote so badly. Perhaps Newman —