Dr Newman has far too humble and delicate a mind to dream of thinking or saying anything which would look like hinting at any kind of terms with the Sovereign Pontiff…. I think, however, that I ought to express my own sense of what Dr Newman’s dispositions are, and that it will be expected of me…. I am thoroughly confident that nothing stands in the way of his most grateful acceptance, except what he tells me greatly distresses him, namely, the having to leave the Oratory at a critical period of its existence and the impossibility of his beginning a new life at his advanced age.
And in his private letter the Bishop said:
Dr Newman is very much aged, and softened with age and the trials he has had, especially the loss of his two brethren, St John and Caswall; he can never refer to these losses without weeping and becoming speechless for the time. He is very much affected by the Pope’s kindness, would, I know, like to receive the great honour offered him, but feels the whole difficulty at his age of changing his life, or having to leave the Oratory, which I am sure he could not do. If the Holy Father thinks well to confer on him the dignity, leaving him where he is, I know how immensely he would be gratified, and you will know how generally the conferring on him the Cardinalate will be applauded.
These two letters, together with Newman’s refusal, reached Manning as he was on the point of starting for Rome. After he had left England, the following statement appeared in The Times:
‘Pope Leo XIII has intimated his desire to raise Dr Newman to the rank of Cardinal, but with expressions of deep respect for the Holy See, Dr Newman has excused himself from accepting the Purple.’
When Newman’s eyes fell upon the announcement, he realized at once that a secret and powerful force was working against him. He trembled, as he had so often trembled before; and certainly the danger was not imaginary. In the ordinary course of things, how could such a paragraph have been inserted without his authority? And consequently, did it not convey to the world, not only an absolute refusal which he had never intended, but a wish on his part to emphasize publicly his rejection of the proffered honour? Did it not imply that he had lightly declined a proposal for which in reality he was deeply thankful? And when the fatal paragraph was read in Rome, might it not actually lead to the offer of the Cardinalate being finally withheld?
In great agitation, Newman appealed to the Duke of Norfolk. ‘As to the statement,’ he wrote, ‘of my refusing a Cardinal’s Hat, which is in the papers, you must not believe it, for this reason:
‘Of course it implies that an offer has been made me, and I have sent an answer to it. Now I have ever understood that it is a point of propriety and honour to consider such communications sacred. This statement therefore cannot come from me. Nor could it come from Rome, for it was made public before my answer got to Rome.
‘It could only come, then, from someone who not only read my letter, but, instead of leaving to the Pope to interpret it, took upon himself to put an interpretation upon it, and published that interpretation to the world.
‘A private letter, addressed to Roman Authorities, is interpreted on its way and published in the English papers. How is it possible that anyone can have done this?’
The crushing indictment pointed straight at Manning. And it was true. Manning had done the impossible deed. Knowing what he did, with the Bishop of Birmingham’s two letters in his pocket, he had put it about that Newman had refused the Hat. But a change had come over the spirit of the Holy See. Things were not as they had once been: Monsignor Talbot was at Passy, and Pio Nono was – where? The Duke of Norfolk intervened once again; Manning was profuse in his apologies for having misunderstood Newman’s intentions, and hurried to the Pope to rectify the error. Without hesitation, the Sovereign Pontiff relaxed the rule of Roman residence, and Newman became a Cardinal.
He lived to enjoy his glory for more than ten years. Since he rarely left the Oratory, and since Manning never visited Birmingham, the two Cardinals met only once or twice. After one of these occasions, on returning to the Oratory, Cardinal Newman said, ‘What do you think Cardinal Manning did to me? He kissed me!’
On Newman’s death, Manning delivered a funeral oration, which opened thus:
‘We have lost our greatest witness for the Faith, and we are all poorer and lower by the loss.
‘When these tidings came to me, my first thought was this, in what way can I, once more, show my love and veneration for my brother and friend of more than sixty years?’
In private, however, the surviving Cardinal’s tone was apt to be more… direct. ‘Poor Newman!’ he once exclaimed in a moment of genial expansion. ‘Poor Newman! He was a great hater!’
10
IN that gaunt and gloomy building – more like a barracks than an Episcopal palace – Archbishop’s House, Westminster, Manning’s existence stretched itself out into an extreme old age. As his years increased, his activities, if that were possible, increased too. Meetings, missions, lectures, sermons, articles, interviews, letters – such things came upon him in redoubled multitudes, and were dispatched with an unrelenting zeal. But this was not all; with age, he seemed to acquire what was almost a new fervour, an unaccustomed, unexpected, freeing of the spirit, filling him with preoccupations which he had hardly felt before. ‘They say I am ambitious,’ he noted in his Diary, ‘but do I rest in my ambition?’ No, assuredly he did not rest; but he worked now with no arrière pensée for the greater glory of God. A kind of frenzy fell upon him. Poverty, drunkenness, vice, all the horrors and terrors of our civilization, seized upon his mind, and urged him forward to new fields of action and new fields of thought. The temper of his soul assumed almost a revolutionary cast. ‘I am a Mosaic Radical,’ he exclaimed; and, indeed, in the exaltation of his energies, the incoherence of his conceptions, the democratic urgency of his desires, combined with his awe-inspiring aspect and his venerable age, it was easy enough to trace the mingled qualities of the patriarch, the prophet, and the demagogue. As, in his soiled and shabby garments, the old man harangued the crowds of Bermondsey or Peckham upon the virtues of Temperance, assuring them, with all the passion of conviction, as a final argument, that the majority of the Apostles were total abstainers, this Prince of the Church might have passed as a leader of the Salvation Army. His popularity was immense, reaching its height during the great Dock Strikes of 1889, when, after the victory of the men was assured, Manning was able, by his persuasive eloquence and the weight of his character, to prevent its being carried to excess. After other conciliators – among whom was the Bishop of London had given up the task in disgust, the octogenarian Cardinal worked on with indefatigable resolution. At last, late at night, in the schools in Kirby Street, Bermondsey, he rose to address the strikers. An enthusiastic eye-witness has described the scene. ‘Unaccustomed tears glistened in the eyes of his rough and work-stained hearers as the Cardinal raised his hand, and solemnly urged them not to prolong one moment more than they could help the perilous uncertainty and the sufferings of their wives and children. Just above his uplifted hand was a figure of the Madonna and Child; and some among the men tell how a sudden light seemed to swim round it as the speaker pleaded for the women and children. When he sat down all in the room knew that he had won the day, and that, so far as the Strike Committee was concerned, the matter was at an end.’
In those days, there were strange visitors at Archbishop’s House. Careful priests and conscientious secretaries wondered what the world was coming to when they saw labour leaders like Mr John Burns and Mr Ben Tillett, the land-reformers like Mr Henry George, being ushered into the presence of his Eminence. Even the notorious Mr Stead appeared, and his scandalous paper with its unspeakable revelations lay upon the Cardinal’s table. This proved too much for one of the faithful tonsured dependents of the place, and he ventured to expostulate with his master. But he never did so again.
When the guests were gone, and the great room was empty, the old man would draw himself nearer to the enormous fire, and review once more, for the thousandth tim
e, the long adventure of his life. He would bring out his diaries and his memoranda, he would rearrange his notes, he would turn over again the yellow leaves of faded correspondences; seizing his pen, he would pour out his comments and reflections, and fill, with an extraordinary solicitude, page after page with elucidations, explanations, justifications, of the vanished incidents of a remote past. He would snip with scissors the pages of ancient journals, and with delicate ecclesiastical fingers drop unknown mysteries into the flames.
Sometimes he would turn to the four red folio scrapbooks with their collection of newspaper cuttings concerning himself over a period of thirty years. Then the pale cheeks would flush and the close-drawn lips grow more menacing even than before. ‘Stupid, mulish malice,’ he would note. ‘Pure lying – conscious, deliberate and designed.’ ‘Suggestive lying. Personal animosity is at the bottom of this.’
And then he would suddenly begin to doubt. After all, where was he? What had he accomplished? Had any of it been worth while? Had he not been out of the world all his life! Out of the world! ‘Croker’s “Life and Letters”, and Hayward’s “Letters”,’ he notes, ‘are so full of politics, literature, action, events, collision of mind with mind, and that with such a multitude of men in every state of life, that when I look back, it seems as if I had been simply useless.’ And again, ‘The complete isolation and exclusion from the official life of England in which I have lived, makes me feel as if I had done nothing’. He struggled to console himself with the reflection that all this was only ‘the natural order’. ‘If the natural order is moved by the supernatural order, then I may not have done nothing. Fifty years of witness for God and His Truth, I hope, has not been in vain.’ But the same thoughts recurred. ‘In reading Macaulay’s life I had a haunting feeling that his had been a life of public utility and mine a vita umbratilis, a life in the shade.’ Ah! it was God’s will. ‘Mine has been a life of fifty years out of the world as Gladstone’s has been in it. The work of his life in this world is manifest. I hope mine may be in the next. I suppose our Lord called me out of the world because He saw that I should lose my soul in it.’ Clearly, that was the explanation.
And yet he remained sufficiently in the world to discharge with absolute efficiency the complex government of his diocese almost up to the last moment of his existence. Though his bodily strength gradually ebbed, the vigour of his mind was undismayed. At last, supported by cushions, he continued, by means of a dictated correspondence, to exert his accustomed rule. Only occasionally would he lay aside his work, to plunge into the yet more necessary duties of devotion. Never again would he preach; never again would he put into practice those three salutary rules of his in choosing a subject for a sermon: ‘(1) asking God to guide the choice; (2) applying the matter to myself; (3) making the sign of the cross on my head and heart and lips in honour of the Sacred Mouth; but he could still pray; he could turn especially to the Holy Ghost. ‘A very simple but devout person,’ he wrote in one of his latest memoranda,
asked me why in my first volume of sermons I said so little about the Holy Ghost. I was not aware of it; but I found it to be true. I at once resolved that I would make a reparation every day of my life to the Holy Ghost. This I have never failed to do to this day. To this I owe the light and faith which brought me into the true fold. I bought all the books I could about the Holy Ghost. I worked out the truths about His personality, His presence, and His office. This made me understand the last paragraph in the Apostles’ Creed and made me a Catholic Christian.
So, though Death came slowly, struggling step by step with that bold and tenacious spirit, when he did come at last the Cardinal was ready. Robed in his archiepiscopal vestments, his rochet, his girdle, and his mozzetta, with the scarlet biretta on his head, and the pectoral cross upon his breast, he made his solemn Profession of Faith in the Holy Roman Church. A crowd of lesser dignitaries, each in the garments of his office, attended the ceremonial. The Bishop of Salford held up the Pontificale and the Bishop of Amycla bore the wax taper. The provost of Westminster, on his knees, read aloud the Profession of Faith, surrounded by the Canons of the Diocese. Towards those who gathered about him the dying man was still able to show some signs of recognition, and even, perhaps, of affection; yet it seemed that his chief preoccupation, up to the very end, was with his obedience to the rules prescribed by the Divine Authority. ‘I am glad to have been able to do everything in due order’, were among his last words. ‘Si fort qu’on soit,’ says one of the profoundest of the observers of the human heart, ‘on peut éprouver le besoin de s’incliner devant quelqu’un ou quelque chose. S’incliner devant Dieu, c’est toujours le moins humiliant.’
Manning died on 14 January 1892, in the eighty-fifth year of his age. A few days later Mr Gladstone took occasion, in a letter to a friend, to refer to his relations with the late Cardinal. Manning’s conversion was, he said, ‘altogether the severest blow that ever befell me. In a late letter the Cardinal termed it a quarrel, but in my reply I told him it was not a quarrel, but a death; and that was the truth. Since then there have been vicissitudes. But I am quite certain that to the last his personal feelings never changed; and I believe also that he kept a promise made in 1851, to remember me before God at the most solemn moments; a promise which I greatly valued. The whole subject is to me at once of extreme interest and of considerable restraint.’ ‘His reluctance to die,’ concluded Mr Gladstone, ‘may be explained by an intense anxiety to complete unfulfilled service.’
The funeral was the occasion of a popular demonstration such as has rarely been witnessed in the streets of London. The route of the procession was lined by vast crowds of working people, whose imaginations, in some instinctive manner, had been touched. Many who had hardly seen him declared that in Cardinal Manning they had lost their best friend. Was it the magnetic vigour of the dead man’s spirit that moved them? Or was it his valiant disregard of common custom and those conventional reserves and poor punctilios which are wont to hem about the great? Or was it something untameable in his glances and in his gestures? Or was it, perhaps, the mysterious glamour lingering about him of the antique organization of Rome? For whatever cause, the minds of the people had been impressed; and yet, after all, the impression was more acute than lasting. The Cardinal’s memory is a dim thing today. And he who descends into the crypt of that Cathedral which Manning never lived to see, will observe, in the quiet niche with the sepulchral monument, that the dust lies thick on the strange, the incongruous, the almost impossible object which, with its elaborations of dependent tassels, hangs down from the dim vault like some forlorn and forgotten trophy – the Hat.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
E.S. Purcell, Life of Cardinal Manning.
A. W. Hutton, Cardinal Manning.
J. E. C. Bodley, Cardinal Manning and Other Essays.
F.W. Cornish, The English Church in the Nineteenth Century.
Dean Church, The Oxford Movement.
Sir J. T. Coleridge, Memoir of the Rev. John Keble.
Hurrell Froude, Remains
Cardinal Newman, Letters and Correspondence in the English Church. Apologia pro Vita Sua.
Wilfrid Ward, Life of Cardinal Newman.
W. G. Ward and the Oxford Movement.
W. G. Ward and the Catholic Revival.
Life of Cardinal Wiseman.
H. P. Liddon, Life of E. B. Pusey.
Tracts for the Times, by Members of the University of Oxford.
Lord Morley, Life of Gladstone.
Lives of the Saints, edited by J. H. Newman.
Herbert Paul, Life of J. A. Froude.
Mark Pattison, Autobiography.
T. Mozley, Letters from Rome on the Occasion of the Oecumenical Council.
Lord Acton, Letters.
H. L. Smith and V. Nash, The Story of the Dockers’ Strike.
Florence Nightingale
1
EVERY one knows the popular conception of Florence Nightingale. The saintly, self-sacrificing woman, the delicate maiden
of high degree who threw aside the pleasures of a life of ease to succour the afflicted, the Lady with the Lamp, gliding through the horrors of the hospital at Scutari, and consecrating with the radiance of her goodness the dying soldier’s couch – the vision is familiar to all. But the truth was different. The Miss Nightingale of fact was not as facile fancy painted her. She worked in another fashion, and towards another end; she moved under the stress of an impetus which finds no place in the popular imagination. A Demon possessed her. Now demons, whatever else they may be, are full of interest. And so it happens that in the real Miss Nightingale there was more that was interesting than in the legendary one; there was also less that was agreeable.
Her family was extremly well-to-do, and connected by marriage with a spreading circle of other well-to-do families. There was a large country house in Derbyshire; there was another in the New Forest; there were Mayfair rooms for the London season and all its finest parties; there were tours on the Continent with even more than the usual number of Italian operas and of glimpses at the celebrities of Paris. Brought up among such advantages, it was only natural to suppose that Florence would show a proper appreciation of them by doing her duty in that state of life unto which it had pleased God to call her – in other words, by marrying, after a fitting number of dances and dinner-parties, an eligible gentleman, and living happily ever afterwards. Her sister, her cousins, all the young ladies of her acquaintance, were either getting ready to do this or had already done it. It was inconceivable that Florence should dream of anything else; yet dream she did. Ah! To do her duty in that state of life unto which it had pleased God to call her! Assuredly she would not be behindhand in doing her duty; but unto what state of life had it pleased God to call her? That was the question. God’s calls are many, and they are strange. Unto what state of life had it pleased Him to call Charlotte Corday, or Elizabeth of Hungary? What was that secret voice in her ear, if it was not a call? Why had she felt, from her earliest years, those mysterious promptings towards… she hardly knew what, but certainly towards something very different from anything around her? Why, as a child in the nursery, when her sister had shown a healthy pleasure in tearing her dolls to pieces, had she shown an almost morbid one in sewing them up again? Why was she driven now to minister to the poor in the cottages, to watch by sick-beds, to put her dog’s wounded paw into elaborate splints as if it was a human being? Why was her head filled with queer imaginations of the country house at Embley turned, by some enchantment, into a hospital, with herself as matron moving about among the beds? Why was even her vision of heaven itself filled with suffering patients to whom she was being useful? So she dreamed and wondered, and, taking out her diary, she poured into it the agitations of her soul. And then the bell rang, and it was time to go and dress for dinner.
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