Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  It does not require many words, then, to determine that, taking human nature as it is actually found … to say that it consists, or in any essential manner is placed, in the cultivation of Knowledge, that the mind is changed by a discovery, or saved by a diversion, and can thus be amused into immortality,—that grief, anger, cowardice, self-conceit, pride, or passion, can be subdued by an examination of shells or grasses, or inhaling of gases, or chipping of rocks, or calculating the longitude, is the veriest of pretences which sophist or mountebank ever professed to a gaping auditory. If virtue be a mastery over the mind, if its end be action, if its perfection be inward order, harmony, and peace, we must seek it in graver and holier places than in Libraries and Reading-rooms.64

  These were sentiments later echoed by Tennyson, who wrote in In Memoriam of how he rediscovered God “…not in world or sun/Or eagle’s wing, or insect’s eye/Nor through the questions men may try/The petty cobwebs we have spun” but through a child’s “doubt and fear … a child that cries/But crying, knows his father’s near.”

  If flippancy mars Arnold’s prose, honesty distinguishes his best poetry. Indeed, the poetry repudiates the theoretical irresponsibility of his prose. In “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864), Arnold wrote that “Criticism must maintain its independence of the practical spirit and its aims. Even with well-meant efforts of the practical spirit it must express dissatisfaction, if in the sphere of the ideal they seem impoverishing and limiting.”65 For Arnold, in sharp contrast to Newman, the practical was tantamount to philistinism. This fondness for “the sphere of the ideal” led Arnold to question more than simply the “practical spirit.” In “Civilization in the United States” (1888), he called for a re-translation of the text, “Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God,” remarking “Instead of again, we ought to translate from above; and instead of taking the kingdom of God in the sense of a life in Heaven above, we ought to take it, as its speaker meant it, in the sense of the reign of saints, a renovated and perfected human society on earth, the ideal society of the future.”66 Here one can see why Arnold is often regarded as the Father of Modernism. In this regard, Arnold’s boast that he “kept up communications with the future” is true enough.67 By contrast, in his poem, “The Buried Life,” the “ideal society of the future” might be a million years away. Instead, he turns his attention to something much more immediate, and infinitely more mysterious: the “unregarded river of our life.” Here, the mountebank departs his platform and Arnold is only concerned that we should “seem to be/Eddying at large in blind uncertainty …”—not the sort of admission that the witty lecturer permitted himself in his prose.

  But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,

  But often, in the din of strife,

  There rises an unspeakable desire

  After the knowledge of our buried life;

  A thirst to spend our fire and restless force

  In tracking out our true, original course;

  A longing to inquire

  Into the mystery of this heart which beats

  So wild, so deep in us …68

  Speaking of his lost faith, Arnold invokes both his father and Newman, in “Stanzas from the Green Chartreuse” (1852), a poem which Eliot might have had in mind when he was composing “Little Gidding,” with its introspective encounter with Eliot’s dead master—“The eyes of a familiar compound ghost.”

  For rigorous teachers seized my youth,

  And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire,

  Showed me the high, white star of Truth,

  These bade me gaze, and there aspire.

  Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:

  What dost thou then in this living tomb?

  Forgive me, masters of the mind!

  At whose behest I long ago

  So much unlearnt, so much resigned—

  I come not here to be your foe!

  I seek these anchorites, not in ruth,

  To curse and to deny your truth …69

  When Newman died, Richard Holt Hutton would write in the Spectator, “There are deaths yet to come which will agitate the English world more than Cardinal Newman’s, but there has been none, so far as we know, that will leave the world that really knew him so keen a sense of deprivation, of a white star extinguished, of a sign vanished, of an age impoverished, of a grace withdrawn.”70 Since Arnold died two years before Newman, he could not have savored Hutton’s allusion to his own poem. Still, as early as 1871, Arnold was writing Newman in an elegiac tone about what he saw as Newman’s influence on him. “I cannot forbear adding, what I have often wished to tell you, 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.”71 Newman was doubtless startled to learn that anything Arnold had written could remind anyone of his own writings. Nevertheless, his response was at once tactful and candid. “I thank you sincerely for it,” he wrote, “and with quite as intimate an interest have I read what you have lately written … The more so, as regards your letters as well as your writings, for the very reason that I am so sensitively alive to the great differences of opinion which separate us. I wish with all my heart I could make them less; but there they are, and I can only resign myself to them, as best I may.”72

  These “great differences” notwithstanding, Arnold would always insist that Newman’s influence on him had been equally great. After Newman sent him a volume of his verse, Arnold praised “their simple clear diction,” which was refreshing “after the somewhat sophisticated and artificial poetical diction which Mr Tennyson’s popularity has made prevalent.” This “simple clear diction” often distinguishes Arnold’s own best poetry, though Henry James complained that Arnold’s style in this regard showed “a slight abuse of meagerness for distinction’s sake.”73 Arnold also wished to thank Newman for “the more inward qualities and excellencies of the Poems,” which reminded him of “how much I, like so many others, owe to your influence and writings; the impression of which is so profound, and so mixed up with all that is most essential in what I do and say, that I can never cease to be conscious of it and to have an inexpressible sense of gratitude and attachment to its Author; though I might easily, I fear, grow tedious and obtrusive in attempting to convey to him my acknowledgment of it in words.”74

  One aspect of Newman’s influence on Arnold was to impress on him that renunciation of the Christian faith could not be undertaken lightly. Arnold’s prose writings on religion might exhibit a tiresome glibness—the professional classes enjoyed reading about a faith to which they no longer subscribed and Arnold was always ready to exploit this demand by supplying what he called “recreative religion”—but his poetry shows that his inability to believe made for an anguish that he could never dispel.75 So, in this regard, his poetry corroborates Newman’s warnings about the true nature of unbelief—a subject on which Clough’s poetry would also focus.

  That so many of Arnold’s poems are elegies is not accidental. For Arnold, the past had an enviable coherence that the faithless present lacked. In “Dover Beach,” he acknowledged that it was the loss of faith that was at the center of his own vision of loss.

  The Sea of Faith

  Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

  Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

  But now I only hear

  Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

  Retreating to the breath
<
br />   Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

  And naked shingles of the world.76

  If such loss usurps the present and evacuates the future, it invests the past with an immemorial sadness, and here, in this unhappy context, in a poem called “Bacchanalia, or The New Age,” Arnold once again invokes Newman and his father.

  Where many a splendour finds its tomb,

  Many spent fames and fallen mights—

  The one or two immortal lights

  Rise slowly up into the sky

  To shine there everlastingly,

  Like stars over the bounding hill,

  The epoch ends, the world is still.77

  And in another sad, fragmentary poem, Arnold all but admits that he could only survive the heroic example of these masters as an exile from his own true feelings, which was one measure of the depth of his distress.

  Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,

  Of what we say we feel—below the stream,

  As light, of what we think we feel—there flows

  With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,

  The central stream of what we feel indeed.78

  In his correspondence with Newman, we can see Arnold trying to share at least some of these true feelings. Accordingly, he sent Newman his preface to a selection of passages from Isaiah for schools, in which he described his aim as that “of enabling English school-children to read as a connected whole the last twenty-seven chapters of Isaiah,” which grew out of his “conviction of the immense importance in education of what is called letters; of the side which engages our feelings and imagination.” Moreover, “If poetry, philosophy, and eloquence, if what we call in one word letters, are a power, and a beneficent wonder-working power, in education, through the Bible only have the people much chance of getting at poetry, philosophy, and eloquence.”79 Here was one argument for treating the Bible as literature, and in Newman’s response we can see that he might have been reminded of Arnold’s father, one of the great architects of liberal Anglicanism. In December 1841, Newman had written to Pusey, “I think you should lecture and publish on the latter chapters of Isaiah. It is said that Arnold will do harm just on this point—teach modern history without a church—considering Christianity a philosophy.”80 Now, he had an opportunity to tell the son something of what he might have wished to say to the father. “I have read with great interest the Preface of your ‘Great Prophecy’ etc … . doubtless the Old Testament is the only book, as you bring out so well in your Preface, which can serve as literary matter in popular schools. On the other hand, I should dread to view it as literature in the first place … .”81 In principle, John Ruskin might very well have agreed with Newman, though in practice he always treated the Bible as a model for his own literary work. In his account of his early religious education in Praeterita (1899) he recalled: “My mother forced me, by steady daily toil, to learn long chapters of the Bible by heart; as well as to read it every syllable through, aloud, hard names and all, from Genesis to the Apocalypse once a year; and to that discipline—patient, accurate, and resolute—I owe, not only a knowledge of the book, which I find occasionally serviceable, but much of my general powers of taking pains, and the best part of my taste in literature … . Once knowing the 32nd of Deuteronomy, the 119th Psalm, the 15th of 1st Corinthians, the Sermon on the Mount, and most of all the Apocalypse, every syllable by heart, and having always a way of thinking with myself what words meant, it was impossible for me, even in the foolishest times of youth, to write entirely superficial or formal English …”82 Newman’s writings show that his familiarity with Scripture was comparable, though he always resisted the temptation of regarding the Bible as literature, about which T. S. Eliot was so witheringly critical: “I could fulminate against the men of letters who have gone into ecstasies over ‘the Bible as literature,’” he wrote in 1935. “Those who talk of the Bible as a “monument of English prose’ are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.”83 Newman’s reasons for not treating Scripture as literature were rather different, though no less incisive.

  Literature is one thing, and … Science is another … Literature has to do with ideas, and Science with realities … Literature is of a personal character … Science treats of what is universal and eternal. In proportion, as Scripture excludes the personal colouring of its writers, and rises into the region of pure and mere inspiration when it ceases in any sense to be the writing of man, of St. Paul or St. John, of Moses or Isaias, then it comes to belong to Science, not Literature. Then it conveys the things of heaven, unseen verities, divine manifestations, and them alone—not the ideas, the feelings, the aspirations, of its human instruments …84

  In response to Newman’s letter, Arnold wrote: “What you say about the reception of the prophetical Scriptures by the young has great weight …” Still, he was convinced that it would be “better to give them the historical side plainly. But I did not mean to write of this; only to thank you …” What interested Arnold were not the details of their differences but what he imagined was the grander scheme of their affinities.

  There are four people, in especial, from whom I am conscious of having learnt – a very different thing from merely receiving a strong impression – learnt habits, methods, ruling ideas, which are constantly with me; and the four are – Goethe, Wordsworth, Sainte Beuve and yourself. You will smile and say I have made an odd mixture and that the result must be a jumble: however that may be as to the whole, I am sure in details you must recognise your own influence often, and perhaps this inclines you to indulgence.85

  Newman usually dealt with those who disagreed with him with indulgence (always excepting Dr. Arnold’s heretical friend, R. D. Hampden) but he might very well have goggled at seeing himself impressed into this odd pantheon.

  When Arnold sent Newman another book he had written on education, Newman responded, “what specially interested and pleased me was your Preface, advocating the claims of the Irish Catholic University on State recognition. Your argument, as deduced from the Prussian policy and system, is clear and good, if it really be the fact, as I understand you to say, that Catholics have in Prussia two state-recognized Universities.” He also clarified his views on the Catholic laity, which are as little understood in the twenty-first century as they were in the nineteenth. Specifically, he could not follow Arnold “in thinking that by ‘the Church’ ought to be meant ‘the laity,’ any more than the word is equivalent to ‘the clergy.’ I think the people are the matter, and the hierarchy the form, and that both together make up the Church. If you object that this virtually throws the initiative and the decision of questions into the hands of the clergy, this is but an internal peculiarity of the Catholic Religion. The Anglican Church is also made up of a like form and matter; though here, in consequence of the genius of Anglicanism, the power of the matter predominates. But if you attempt to destroy the existing relation between form and matter, whether in Anglicanism or Catholicism, you change the religion; it is more honest to refuse to recognize Catholicism, than to refuse to take it as it is.” In this same letter, Newman wrote in passing, “By the bye, I don’t acquiesce in your definition of a truism, which I conceive to be a truth too true for proof or for insistence. Triteness is at best an accident of it. If this be so, a falsism is a falsehood too false for refutation, not a trite falsehood”—a nice distinction. And then, in closing, Newman showed Arnold something of what one correspondent called his “captivating urbanity,” when he wrote, “Now is it not ungracious in me to have said all this, when I am really grateful for your advocacy of us? As to your other Volume, your Edition of Isaiah, I will only say that it is a most attractive book – and your (excuse me) standing aloof from Revelation does not mar its beauty. It is that sympathy you have for what you do not believe, which so affects me about your future. It is one of my standing prayers that you and your brother may become good Catholics.”86

  Arnold’s last years were so consumed with producing what
Richard Holt Hutton called his “lay sermons” that he never got around to returning to poetry, which he had effectively stopped composing in 1869. As he told his mother in 1861, “I must finish off for the present my critical writings … and give the next ten years earnestly to poetry. It is my last chance. It is not a bad ten year of one’s life for poetry if one resolutely uses it, but it is time in which, if one does not use it, one dries up and becomes prosaical altogether.”87 Still, in his last pieces, he did manage to write a few poems of an unsparing honesty—which were nearer to Clough’s more prosaic poems than the academic elaborateness of his earlier verse. In “Growing Old,” which he wrote in 1864 in response to Browning’s “Rabbi Ben Ezra” with its famous summons, “Grow old along with me/The best is yet to be,” Arnold anticipated Yeats and Eliot in their poems of disillusioned old age, but, alas, he wrote with far greater bitterness.