Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  This is the backdrop of accelerating apostasy that gives so much of the poetry of Clough its point. Conversely, when Clough turns to affirming Christianity, he does so with marked astringency, as if to acknowledge that fallen human nature is necessarily reluctant to speak glibly of such terrible truths. As Samuel Johnson pointed out in his Life of Cowley, “Sacred history has been always read with submissive reverence, and an imagination over-awed and controlled. We have been accustomed to acquiesce in the nakedness and simplicity of the authentick narrative … All amplification is frivolous and vain; all addition to that which is already sufficient for the purpose of religion, seems not only useless, but in some degree profane.”66 After briskly repudiating the disavowals of the earlier poem, Clough makes the case for belief in “Easter Day II” without elaboration—indeed with a kind of humility.

  So in the sinful streets, abstracted and alone,

  I with my secret self held communing of mine own.

  So in the southern city spake the tongue

  Of one that somewhat overwildly sung,

  But in a later hour I sat and heard

  Another voice that spake—another graver word.

  Weep not, it bade, whatever hath been said,

  Though He be dead, He is not dead.

  In the true creed

  He is yet risen indeed;

  Christ is yet risen.

  In Amours de Voyage (1848), Clough again returned to the question of faith in an epistolary novel set in Catholic Italy, which features a group of English Protestants, “Murray, in hand, as usual,” trying to make sense of the ancient faith that their forbears renounced.67 In the prologue to Canto II, Claude is in Rome and asks his friend Eustace a question that the poem as a whole will set out to answer.

  Is it illusion? or does there a spirit from perfecter ages,

  Here, even yet, amid loss, change, and corruption abide?

  Does there a spirit we know not, though seek, though we find, comprehend not,

  Here to entice and confuse, tempt and evade us, abide?68

  Newman began posing the same question on his first trip to Rome in March of 1833, when he asked: “How shall I name thee, Light of the wide west, or heinous error-seat?”69 Ten years later, he would return to the question in his brilliant Oxford sermon, “The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine” (1843), which served as the prolegomena to his conversion. That Clough set his verse novel in Catholic Italy among English tourists was a stroke of genius. To dramatize how removed the nineteenth-century English were from the central reality of European civilization Clough had only to have his characters speak their minds. Here is Claude, the poem’s hero:

  Rome disappoints me much; I hardly as yet understand it, but

  Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it.

  All the foolish destructions, and all the sillier savings,

  All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages,

  Seem to be treasured up here to make fools of present and future.

  Would to Heaven the old Goths had made a cleaner sweep of it!

  Would to Heaven some new ones would come and destroy these churches!70

  As Kenny points out in his biography, some of these sentiments clearly were those of the poet.71 In one letter written to his mother from Rome, he remarked: “St. Peter’s disappoints me: the stone of which it is made is a poor plastery material. And indeed Rome in general might be called a rubbishy place …”72 Still, in capturing his own aversion to Rome he captured that of an entire English civilization. After all, Clough was in no minority. Dean Church, visiting the immortal city for the first time in 1882, confessed to Newman’s friend, Lord Blachford, “It is hopeless to talk of Rome … my feeling was one almost of hatred of the place. It seemed such a mixture of all incompatible things—ruins and magnificence, waste and civilization, tumbledown squalidness and untidiness, stateliness and grandeur … an anti-religious world and an ostentatiously religious world … I had the feeling that it is the one city in the world, besides Jerusalem, in which we know that God’s eye is fixed, and that He has some purpose or other about it—one can hardly tell of good or evil.”73 Newman would have seen in Clough’s epistolary hexameters echoes of the prejudices that he nicely enumerated in The Idea of a University, which he saw as stemming from what he called, “Intellectualism:”

  Catholicism, as it has come down to us from the first, seems to be mean and illiberal; it is a mere popular religion; it is the religion of illiterate ages or servile populations or barbarian warriors; it must be treated with discrimination and delicacy, corrected, softened, improved, if it is to satisfy an enlightened generation. It must be stereotyped as the patron of arts, or the pupil of speculation, or the protégé of science; it must play the literary academician, or the empirical philanthropist, or the political partisan; it must keep up with the age; some or other expedient it must devise, in order to explain away, or to hide, tenets under which the intellect labours and of which it is ashamed—its doctrine, for instance, of grace, its mystery of the Godhead, its preaching of the Cross, its devotion to the Queen of Saints, or its loyalty to the Apostolic See. Let this spirit be freely evolved out of that philosophical condition of mind … and it is impossible but, first indifference, then laxity of belief, then even heresy will be the successive results.74

  If Clough looked askance at the Catholicism of Rome, he was not comfortable with the sort of high-toned Socinianism that his character Claude approves.75 When he was in America trying to find work, he wrote his wife apropos the Unitarians of Cambridge, “They are so awfully rococo in their religious notions that were I much in the way of hearing them expressed I should infallibly speak out and speak strongly.”76 But if we only see Claude as a stand-in for Clough, we lose half the satirical fun of the poem and all of its art. Asking himself what value the architecture of Rome has for him, Claude says:

  No one can cavil, I grant, at the size of the great Coliseum.

  Doubtless the notion of grand and capacious and massive amusement,

  This the old Romans had; but tell me, is this an idea?77

  Matthew Arnold probably would not have thought so. But as this shows, the point of the novelistic form of the poem was to allow others to have their say. And here again Claude gives voice to four hundred years of Protestant prejudice.

  No, the Christian faith, as I, at least, understood it,

  Is not here, O Rome, in any of these thy churches;

  Is not here, but in Freiburg, or Rheims, or Westminster Abbey.

  What in thy Dome I find, in all thy recenter efforts,

  Is a something, I think, more rational far, more earthly,

  Actual, less ideal, devout not in scorn and refusal,

  But in a positive, calm, Stoic-Epicurean acceptance.78

  This, one might say, is the “sane theory of things” in excelsis. After commending what he calls the “positive, calm, Stoic-Epicurean” strain in Protestantism—in itself a finely articulated absurdity—Claude shows what a good John Bull he is by traducing the Spanish contribution to the Counter Reformation in lines which recall the satirical exuberance of Newman’s Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1851).79

  Luther, they say, was unwise; he didn’t see how things were going;

  Luther was foolish,—but, O great God! what call you Ignatius?

  O my tolerant soul, be still! but you talk of barbarians,

  Alaric, Attila, Genseric;—why, they came, they killed, they

  Ravaged, and went on their way; but these vile, tyrannous Spaniards,

  These are here still,—how long, O ye heavens, in the country of Dante?

  These, that fanaticized Europe, which now can forget them, release not

  This, their choicest of prey, this Italy; here you see them,—

  Here, with emasculate pupils and gimcrack churches of Gesu,

  Pseudo-learning and lies, confessional-boxes and postures,—

  Here, with metallic beliefs and
regimental devotions,—

  Here, overcrusting with slime, perverting, defacing, debasing,

  Michael Angelo’s Dome, that had hung the Pantheon in heaven,

  Raphael’s Joys and Graces, and thy clear stars, Galileo!80

  That the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius helped convert Newman at a time when he, too, suffered from doubts is a striking irony, especially since the Exercises gave him the clarity of purpose without which he could not have acted on his hard-won convictions.81 Clough, in his way, also dramatizes the need for moral action, though he does so by immersing his readers in the velleities of the tea table, where paltering Claude prefigures Prufrock.

  Action will furnish belief,—but will that belief be the true one?

  This is the point, you know. However, it doesn’t much matter.

  What one wants, I suppose, is to predetermine the action

  So as to make it entail, not a chance belief, but the true one

  Out of the question, you say; if a thing isn’t wrong we may do it.

  Ah! but this wrong, you see—but I do not know that it matters …82

  Of course, Clough also suffered from the inability to act. Indeed, his vacillations were representative of an entire age. In this regard, he was no different from many modern Hamlets whom Thomas Cook, the teetotal Baptist, sent moping about the Mediterranean on his inveterately popular Cook Tours. The cultural historian John Pemble, in his superb tour d’horizon, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (1987) observes how “The intelligentsia were prone to fitful moods of revolt against the idea of reaching light through labyrinths of thought, and to sudden sharp awareness of needs unsatisfied in a life of introspection. It was this mood which drove George Meredith, Leslie Stephen, and Frederic Harrison to vigorous activity like club-swinging, hiking, and mountaineering, and which inspired Clough’s yearning for action and Arnold’s ‘ineffable longing for the life of life.’ ‘Congestion of the brain is what we suffer from,’ Arnold told Clough; ‘I always feel it and say it and cry for air like my own Empedocles.’”83 In Dipsychus, Clough gave the theme candid expression:

  ’Tis gone, the fierce inordinate desire,

  The burning thirst for Action utterly;

  Gone, like a ship that passes in the night

  On the high seas: gone, yet will come again

  Gone, yet expresses something that exists.

  Is it a thing ordained, then? is it a clue

  For my life’s conduct? is it a law for me

  That opportunity shall breed distrust,

  Not passing until that pass? Chance and resolve,

  Like two loose comets wandering wide in space,

  Crossing each other’s orbits time on time,

  Meet never. Void indifference and doubt

  Let through the present boon, which ne’er turns back

  To await the after sure-arriving wish.

  How shall I then explain it to myself,

  That in blank thought my purpose lives?84

  Here, in the precinct of the labyrinth, Newman’s work provides a clue that is proof against “void indifference and doubt.” It can also help us to understand the fundamental predicament not only of Clough and Arnold but of most of their English contemporaries. In The Tamworth Reading Room, Newman wrote how “People say to me, that it is but a dream to suppose that Christianity should regain the organic power in human society which once it possessed. I cannot help that; I never said it could. I am not a politician; I am proposing no measures, but exposing a fallacy, and resisting a pretence. Let Benthamism reign, if men have no aspirations; but do … not attempt by philosophy what once was done by religion. The ascendancy of Faith may be impracticable, but the reign of Knowledge is incomprehensible.”85 Yet, faced with the “problem of our being here,” Clough has Claude at the end of Amours de Voyage reaffirm a trust in knowledge that is worthy of Arnold.

  Ere our death-day,

  Faith, I think, does pass, and Love; but Knowledge abideth.

  Let us seek Knowledge;—the rest may come and go as it happens.

  Knowledge is hard to seek, and harder yet to adhere to.

  Knowledge is painful often; and yet when we know we are happy.

  Seek it, and leave mere Faith and Love to come with the chances.

  As for Hope,—to-morrow I hope to be starting for Naples.

  Rome will not do, I see, for many very good reasons.

  Eastward, then, I suppose, with the coming of winter, to Egypt.86

  Claude’s trust in knowledge dramatizes Clough’s Newmanian insight into how intellectual cultivation, if treated as an end in itself, betrays faith and love. Newman, for his part, always responded to the cult of knowledge by reaffirming the irreplaceability of faith. In one of his Oxford University Sermons, in which he differentiates between superstition and faith, he describes the latter as “a presumption, yet not a mere chance conjecture,—a reaching forward, yet not of excitement or of passion,—a moving forward in the twilight, yet not without clue or direction;—a movement from something known to something unknown, but kept in the narrow path of truth by the Law of dutifulness… .” Here, Newman might have been addressing Claude directly: faith, he wrote “is perfected, not by intellectual cultivation, but by obedience. It does not change its nature or its function, when thus perfected. It remains what it is in itself, an initial principle of action; but it becomes changed in its quality, as being made spiritual. It is as before a presumption, but the presumption of a serious, sober, thoughtful, pure, affectionate, and devout mind. It acts, because it is Faith; but the direction, firmness, consistency, and precision of its acts, it gains from Love.”87 This is why Newman was so adamant that “Devotion and self rule are worth all the intellectual cultivation in the world.”88 This is not the sort of definite statement of which Claude would approve but it is a useful corrective to what Arnold called the “light half-believers of our casual creeds.”89

  In reviewing Clough’s first posthumous collection of verse, Walter Bagehot described the author as a man “who seemed about to do something, but who died before he did it.”90 Of course, he was speaking of what he regarded as Clough’s unfulfilled literary promise. But if we look at Clough in Newmanian terms we can see that the “something” he did not live to do might have been more substantial than writing additional verses. The man who prized simplicity and hungered for reality and longed for peace might have fully reclaimed the faith he nearly lost in the “war of conscience and conviction.” He might have joined those “uneducated persons, who have hitherto thought little of the unseen world,” as Newman described them, who on “turning to God, looking into themselves, regulating their hearts, reforming their conduct, and meditating on death and judgement, heaven and hell … seem to become, in point of intellect, different beings from what they were. Before they took things as they came, and thought no more of one thing than another. But now every event has a meaning; they have their own estimate of whatever happens to them; they are mindful of times and seasons, and compare the present with the past; and the world, no longer dull, monotonous, unprofitable, and hopeless, is a various and complicated drama, with parts and an object, and an awful moral.”91

  Chapter 13

  Newman on Newman

  “To make yourself an object external to yourself,” Ronald Knox observed in his witty autobiography A Spiritual Aeneid (1918), “is to encourage in yourself habits of posing, of attitudinizing, of speculating over the figure you cut before the world; it may be of advantage in the literary profession to acquire such habits; in life it is a permanent nuisance. Children detected in the habit should certainly be smacked.”1 If this is true of self-absorbed authors and precocious children, it was not true of Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman. No one can fairly say that he made his detached evaluations of himself and his work for purposes of “posing” or “attitudinizing.” He made them to give himself and his readers some better understanding of his life and work. In this, he resembles Henry James, who
was obliged to become his own best critic largely because there was too much of what he was trying to accomplish that his contemporaries could not fathom. The prefaces James wrote for the New York Edition of his works are a brilliant testimony to “the vigil of searching criticism” to which he subjected his novels.2 Newman wrote some of his best books, his Oxford University Sermons, his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, his Idea of the University and his Grammar of Assent in a similarly critical spirit to share with his contemporaries what he had in mind when he was coming to his various religious, educational and philosophical positions, most of which were fairly pioneering. If James wrote his prefaces and critical essays—especially those on Balzac, Maupassant, Hawthorne, George Eliot and Flaubert—to educate the taste by which he meant to be understood, Newman wrote his copious letters, in part, with the same purpose. After Frederic Rogers, Lord Blachford and Dean Church made him a gift of a violin, Newman wrote to Church: “I really think it will add to my power of working, and the length of my life. I never wrote more than when I played the fiddle. I always sleep better after music. There must be some electric current passing from the strings through the fingers into the brain and down the spinal marrow. Perhaps thought is music.”3 Here Newman captured the music that animates his own thought. This, in turn, recalled something he had said twenty years before in his great sermon, “The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine” (1843), which illuminates the attention he paid to underlying realities, to what one might call the music of the supernatural. Speaking of “musical sounds, as they are exhibited most perfectly in instrumental harmony,” Newman wrote:

  There are seven notes in the scale; make them fourteen; yet what a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What science brings so much out of so little? Out of what poor elements does some great master in it create his new world! Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere ingenuity or trick of art, like some game or fashion of the day, without reality, without meaning? We may do so; and then, perhaps, we shall also account the science of theology to be a matter of words; yet, as there is a divinity in the theology of the Church, which those who feel cannot communicate, so is there also in the wonderful creation of sublimity and beauty of which I am speaking. To many men the very names which the science employs are utterly incomprehensible. To speak of an idea or a subject seems to be fanciful or trifling, to speak of the views which it opens upon us to be childish extravagance; yet is it possible that that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should be a mere sound, which is gone and perishes? Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in itself? It is not so; it cannot be. No; they have escaped from some higher sphere; they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in the medium of created sound; they are echoes from our Home; they are the voice of Angels, or the Magnificat of Saints, or the living laws of Divine Governance, or the Divine Attributes; something are they besides themselves, which we cannot compass, which we cannot utter,—though mortal man, and he perhaps not otherwise distinguished above his fellows, has the gift of eliciting them.4