by Edward Short
Your kind note gave me great pleasure though it was quite needless, as my article was a mere act of justice. It gives me however an opportunity which I have long wished for of expressing to you personally my profound admiration of your genius and my gratitude for the influence of your writings generally, which though they failed to persuade me of the truth of the Roman Catholic principles, have done more to enlarge and I believe also in many respects elevate my own faith than any other writer of the time when my mind was first turned to these subjects. Widely as of course I must differ from you, I trust I shall never forget the debt I owe you. ‘Loss and Gain’ was in some sense an era in my life, though it did not produce the only impression which you would say it ought to have produced.10
The passage from Loss and Gain (1847) that made such an indelible impression on Hutton was at the core of why Newman affected him so deeply and it would crop up in his correspondence and his reviews again and again. Speaking of the Mass, one of the book’s characters says: “It is not a mere form of words,—it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is, not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evocation of the Eternal. He becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful event which is the scope, and is the interpretation, of every part of the solemnity. Words are necessary, but as means, not as ends; they are not mere addresses to the throne of grace, they are instruments of what is far higher, of consecration, of sacrifice.”11 This passage meant so much to Hutton because it touched on many of the themes that preoccupied him: not only faith, but the relationship between authority and personal belief; the reality of words; and the primacy of action in all religious endeavor. It also called into question the rationalism that Hutton had acquired as a Unitarian and never entirely abandoned.
Since I shall be looking at Newman’s relationship with Hutton, in part, as a study in influence, it will be helpful to put that influence in some context. A number of nineteenth-century literary men would attest Newman’s influence, especially those unpersuaded by “the truth of Roman Catholic principles.” In 1871 Matthew Arnold wrote to Newman to say that “no words can be too strong to express the interest with which I used to hear you at Oxford, and the pleasure with which I continue to read your writings now. We are all of us carried in ways not of our own making or choosing, but nothing can ever do away the effect you have produced upon me, for it consists in a general disposition of mind rather than in a particular set of ideas. In all the conflicts I have with modern Liberalism and Dissent, and with their pretensions and shortcomings, I recognize your work; and I can truly say that no praise gives me so much pleasure as to be told (which sometimes happens) that a thing I have said reminds people, either in manner or matter, of you.”12 After Newman sent a letter to his old friend Mark Pattison, when the latter was sick and dying, the frustrated academic on whose intensely cerebral character George Eliot based Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch (1871–1872), wrote back: “If I have not dared to approach you in any way of recent years, it has been only from the fear that you might be regarding me as coming to you under false colours. The veneration and affection which I felt for you at the time you left us, are in no way diminished and however remote my intellectual standpoint may now be from that which I may presume to be your own, I can still truly say that I have learnt more from you than from any one else with whom I have ever been in contact.”13 Even Walter Bagehot, the Unitarian founder of the Economist, and one of Hutton’s best friends, had good things to say about Newman’s influence: “Nothing but a very long illness could have prevented my acknowledging before the kind gift of your poems. I have known these in the Lyra by heart for many years, and am deeply gratified at being brought into personal communication with one whose writings – amid much difference of opinion – have fallen so deep into my mind. I should hold that some of the poems indeed have an intrinsic claim to a permanent place in English literature … With the greatest respect of very many years standing, I am Yours sincerely Walter Bagehot.”14
Pleased as he was with these warm testimonials, Newman recognized something different in Hutton’s writings. They were the witness not merely of an admirer or even a critic but a man in search of the truth. Hutton read and wrote about Newman largely to prosper his own evolving faith. He was particularly interested in how Newman tackled the themes of skepticism and authority, since these were the matters that most troubled him in his struggles with his own Christian faith. As their correspondence proceeded, a true bond grew up between the two men. In one characteristic letter, Hutton confided to Newman: “It was a very real and deep satisfaction to me to know that you find a good deal in my essays that seems to you on the track of truth. If any thing you or any one else has written should strike you as likely to help me in any of my difficulties, I am sure I may trust you to point it out. I sometimes almost despair of gaining in this life the light I crave.”15 Here was a religious seriousness that deeply appealed to Newman. But what also appealed to him was Hutton’s astute sympathy. In order to appreciate that sympathy, we should know something of Hutton’s life.
Richard Holt Hutton, whom John Morley thought “the finest and bravest critic of his generation,” was born in Leeds in 1826.16 Both his father and grandfather—a lachrymose Dubliner—were Unitarian ministers. A short-sighted, diminutive, self-effacing man, Hutton was educated at University College, London, with the expectation that he would follow in his forebears’ footsteps, but he chose instead to prepare himself for a career in the law. When the law proved unsuitable, he turned to journalism. It was at the “godless place in Gower Street” that Hutton first met Walter Bagehot, with whom he would become a close friend and colleague. “It is sometimes said,” he wrote in a reminiscence of Bagehot, “that it needs the quiet of a country town remote from the capital, to foster the love of genuine study in young men. But of this, at least, I am sure, that Gower Street, and Oxford Street, and the New Road, and that dreary chain of squares from Euston to Bloomsbury, were the scenes of discussions as eager and as abstract as ever were the sedate cloisters or the flowery river-meadows of Cambridge or Oxford. Once I remember, in the vehemence of an argument as to whether the so-called logical principle of identity (A is A) were entitled to rank as ‘a law of thought’ or only as a postulate of language, Bagehot and I wandered up and down Regent Street for something like two hours in the vain attempt to find Oxford Street …”17
After taking his M.A. in 1845 Hutton went on, first, to the University of Bonn, where he studied with Theodor Mommsen, the great historian of Rome, (whose disparagement of Cicero would not have met with Newman’s approval) and, then, to the University of Heidelberg, where he studied under the Unitarian James Martineau’s son Russell. On his return in 1847, Hutton briefly prepared for the Unitarian ministry at Manchester New College (where Newman’s brother Frank taught classics after resigning his Balliol fellowship), before returning to Germany to study theology with the Martineaus père et fils. Matthew Arnold, who was in Europe at this same volatile time, came away enamored of what he regarded as the Continent’s superior intellectual life. England, he told his sister in 1848, “is … far behind the Continent. In conversation, in the newspapers, one is so struck with the fact of the utter insensibility … of people to the number of ideas and schemes now ventilated on the Continent—not because they have judged them or seen beyond them, but from sheer habitual want of wide reading and thinking … I am not sure but I agree in Lamartine’s prophecy that 100 years hence the Continent will be a great united Federal Republic, and England, all her colonies gone, in a dull steady decay.”18 Although an admirer of European literature, Hutton was never uncritical of it, and as a result he was spared the grandiosity and the vagueness that often afflicted Arnold when he wrote of European authors. His fondness for Goethe and Heine, for example, bordered on hero-worship. As the bookman H.W. Garrod once observed, Arnold never dropped “the cosmopolitan pose, the affectation of being born on the Continent.�
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On his return from Germany, Hutton succeeded the poet Arthur Hugh Clough as Principal of University Hall, Gordon Square, which had been set up as a religious meeting place for Dissenters enrolled at University College, but he resigned after one year due to poor health. In 1851, his journalistic career began when he was invited to join the editorial staff of the weekly Inquirer, the Unitarian paper, which reunited him with Bagehot. At the same time, he married Anne Roscoe, the sister of his friend and fellow editor, William Roscoe. No sooner did he marry, however, than his health worsened. Ordered south by his doctor, Hutton and his wife succumbed to yellow fever in Barbados. In 1852, when he finally recovered from a week-long coma, he awoke to find his young wife dead, a shock which only deepened his interest in the world beyond the grave. Six years later, he married Elizabeth Roscoe, a first cousin of his first wife, to whom he was devoted. Like T. S. Eliot, another High Churchman cradled in Unitarianism, Hutton left instructions in his will that no biography should be written. Consequently, little is known about his domestic life—or, for that matter, his professional life. Although he held the professorship of Mathematics at Bedford College, London, he spent most of his time on his editorial and critical work. Over the course of his career, Hutton wrote over 7,000 articles and over 3,000 essays for various papers, including the Inquirer, the National Review, the Economist, the North British Review, the Saturday Review, the Spectator and the Contemporary Review. The only sure thing we know about his personal life is that, again like Eliot’s, it was rife with misery. Elizabeth, after being knocked down by a horse and carriage in 1888, succumbed to deep depression and for the last nine years of her life declined to speak to her aggrieved husband. H. H. Asquith, whom Hutton hired to write leaders for the Spectator, observed how “His devotion to his poor mad wife makes an almost unique story.”20 Six months after his wife’s death, on 9 September 1897, Hutton fell into a coma and died at his home at Crossdeep Lodge, Twickenham.
Another thing we know about Hutton is that he brought a keen sense of purpose to his professional life. Unlike many of his colleagues, he did not disdain reviewing or resort to it merely to take his mind off other business or to confound his enemies. For Hutton, the reviewer had an important job to perform, however lowly it might be in the larger scheme of literature. “No doubt it is a trial to men steeped in the culture of the noblest literature in the world, to appreciate fairly the ephemeral productions of a busy generation,” he wrote. However, he was convinced that, “The more they trample it beneath them, the less are they competent to detect its higher tendencies. But still the critic who allows this feeling to grow upon him abdicates his true office. Unless he can enter into the wants of his generation, he has no business to pretend to direct its thoughts.”21
In this, Newman would have entirely agreed. However critical he might have been of the biases of newspapers, magazines and periodicals, he recognized that they offered an important forum for the defense of truth. That he wrote one of his very best works of controversy, The Tamworth Reading Room (1841), as a series of letters to The Times was proof of his own readiness to enter that forum. For Newman, writing was a form of action, and the field in which that action was carried out was often London. As he pointed out in the Rise and Progress of Universities, “In every great country, the metropolis itself becomes a sort of necessary University, whether we will or no. As the chief city is the seat of the court, of high society, of politics, and of law, so as a matter of course is it the seat of letters also; and at this time, for a long term of years, London and Paris are in fact and in operation Universities, though in Paris its famous University is no more, and in London a University scarcely exists except as a board of administration.” Hutton and Bagehot would certainly have objected to this Oxonian dismissal of University College London but not to what Newman had to say otherwise. In London, “The newspapers, magazines, reviews, journals, and periodicals of all kinds, the publishing trade, the libraries, museums, and academies there found, the learned and scientific societies, necessarily invest it with the functions of a University; and that atmosphere of intellect, which in a former age hung over Oxford or Bologna or Salamanca, has, with the change of times, moved away to the centre of civil government. Thither come up youths from all parts of the country, the students of law, medicine, and the fine arts, and the employés and attachés of literature. There they live, as chance determines; and they are satisfied with their temporary home, for they find in it all that was promised to them there … They have not learned any particular religion, but they have learned their own particular profession well. They have, moreover, become acquainted with the habits, manners, and opinions of their place of sojourn, and done their part in maintaining the tradition of them. We cannot then be without virtual Universities; a metropolis is such: the simple question is, whether the education sought and given should be based on principle, formed upon rule, directed to the highest ends, or left to the random succession of masters and schools, one after another, with a melancholy waste of thought and an extreme hazard of truth.”22
Hutton took advantage of this “virtual University” by writing primarily about figures whose work was likely to endure, including Wordsworth, Carlyle, Browning, Clough, Arnold, George Eliot, Tennyson, Trollope, Thackeray and Newman.
Although he commanded a loyal readership, Hutton bristled at being thought overly intellectual. “I quite understand, my dear Richard, your mortification at being called too profound in your teaching,” Martineau once commiserated with his friend after he was criticized for trying to explain Hegel to his readers, “I faithfully believe we must bear up against this reproach, and speak faithfully what is given us to say, without much regard to that standard of usage which regulates ‘unintelligibilities.’”23 That Hutton came in for such criticism is surprising; compared to our own academic reviewers, he is a model of clarity. Nevertheless, doubtless because of his serious moral interests, his Victorian contemporaries read him with avidity. Indeed, the Spectator was the most successful paper not only in England but throughout the British Empire. Even the Spectator’s chief competitor, the Tory Speaker, conceded that “bit by bit the conviction has been forced on us that if English journalism has a chief he is to be found in Mr. Hutton.”24
Hutton’s criticism is still undervalued. In addition to the 36 essays he wrote on Newman, principally for the Spectator, Hutton also wrote particularly insightful pieces about Bagehot, whom G. M. Young considered “the greatest Victorian.” And consistently good pieces on Tennyson. In one, he observed “There is a not a single one of his greater poems which does not bear the signs of careful thought and meditation, not to say study. There is both care and ease in every line,—the care of delicate touches, the ease which hides the care. Tennyson is not a poet whose poetry bubbles up and flows on with the superfluous buoyancy and redundancy of a fountain or rapid. It is inlaid with conscious emotion, saturated with purpose and reflection. Its grace and ease—and it is almost always graceful and easy—are the grace and ease of vigilant attention. There is what theologians call ‘recollection’ in every line.”25 Recollection, in this sense, according to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, is “A term used by spiritual writers to denote the concentration of the soul on the presence of God. It involves the renunciation of all avoidable dissipations and its use is habitually recommended to all those who wish to lead an interior life. In a more restricted sense the word is applied to a certain stage of prayer, in which the memory, understanding, and will are held to be stilled by Divine action and the soul left in a state of peace in which grace can work without hindrance.”26 This opens a path to In Memoriam (1850), which has not yet been properly explored. About Newman’s verse, Hutton recognized that it “engraves even more powerfully because with a greater reticence and severer reserve of manner, the scars and vestiges of a unique experience.”27 Towards the end of his career, Hutton even wrote a piece about the young Henry James, in which he observed: “The duty of lucid observation … is almost
the only duty which … Mr. Henry James thoroughly and universally approves. A sadder remnant of the old Puritanism is not easy to conceive.”28 As these few examples show, Hutton’s view of literature was robustly moral, even Johnsonian. Unsurprisingly, in the predominantly l’art pour l’art critical milieu of the twentieth century, Hutton’s criticism fell out of favor and it has never regained its former vogue.
Nevertheless, it is precisely his moral approach to literature that makes him a reliable guide to Newman’s literary achievement. Although he pays frequent tribute to Newman’s mastery of English style, he is careful to specify the source of that mastery. “That [Newman] has the most musical and the most lustrous of English styles, would be nothing, if that style itself were not a living witness of the supernatural life in him which it expresses and reveals. For no one can love the style and not feel that its tenderness, and its severity, its keen thrusts and its noble simplicity, its flexibility of movement and its firm grasp, its ideal music, its iridescent lights, and its pathetic sweetness, could never have existed at all except as the echo of a great mind living under the immediate eye of God.”29 This understanding of the moral import of Newman’s literary achievement enabled Hutton to rate Newman’s work as a whole more accurately than most of his contemporaries, or indeed, most subsequent critics. In his biography of Newman, Hutton remarks in the opening of his chapter on “Newman as a Roman Catholic:” “I do not know that he ever again displayed quite the same intensity of restrained and subdued passion as found expression in many of his Oxford sermons. But in irony, in humour, in eloquence, in imaginative force, the writing of the later and, as we may call it, the emancipated portion of his career far surpass the writings of his theological apprenticeship.”30