Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  84 LD, 21:121, JHN to RHH (18 June 1864).

  85 LD, 23:385, RHH to JHN (21 December 1867).

  86 Gladstone to RHH (6 October 1890), in Correspondence on Church and Religion of William Ewart Gladstone, ed. Lathbury (London, 1910), Vol. I, pp. 405–08.

  87 LD, 21:123 RHH to JHN (28 June 1864).

  88 See “Dr. Newman’s Oxford Sermons,” in A Victorian Spectator: Uncollected Writings of R.H. Hutton, ed. Tener and Woodfield (Bristol, 1989), p. 155.

  89 Apologia, pp. 245–46.

  90 W. E. Gladstone, The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: An Expostulation (London, 1874), p. 37.

  91 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, p. 225.

  92 Ibid., pp. 229–30.

  93 LD, 25:42, JHN to RHH (24 February 1870).

  94 LD, 25:29, JHN to RHH (13 February 1870).

  95 LD, 25:111, RHH to JHN (4 April 1870).

  96 LD, 25:111, JHN to RHH (27 April 1870).

  97 Hutton’s Spectator obituary on Newman in LD, 32:630.

  98 LD, 26:38, RHH to JHN (20 February 1872).

  99 J. H. Newman, “The Religion of the Day” (1832), in Plain and Parochial Sermons, Book 1, Sermon 24.

  100 LD, 26:39, RHH to JHN (20 February 1872).

  101 LD, 26:39–41, JHN to RHH (1 March 1872).

  102 LD, 30:294–95, RHH to JHN (13 January 1884).

  103 LD, 30:295, JHN to RHH (14 January 1884).

  104 LD, 30:356, JHN to RHH (6 May 1884).

  105 LD, 30:356, RHH to JHN (10 May 1884). See also the Contemporary Review, Vol. 45 (May 1884), pp. 642–65.

  106 LD, 26:223–24, JHN to RHH (29 December 1872).

  107 Loss and Gain, pp. 385–86.

  108 Hutton’s Spectator obituary on Newman in LD, 32:631.

  109 J. H. Newman, “Inward Witness to the Truth of the Gospel” (1825), in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Book 8, Sermon 8.

  110 The Idea of a University, p. 121.

  111 J. H. Newman, “The Religion of the Day,” in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Book 1, Sermon 24.

  112 Cf. Grammar of Assent, Ch. X, pp. 395–96. “It may at first sight seem strange, that, considering I have laid such stress upon the progressive nature of man, I should take my ideas of his religion from his initial, and not his final testimony about its doctrines; and it may be urged that the religion of civilized times is quite opposite in character to the rites and traditions of barbarians, and has nothing of that gloom and sternness, on which I have insisted as their characteristic. Thus the Greek Mythology was for the most part cheerful and graceful, and its new gods certainly more genial and indulgent than the old ones. And, in like manner, the religion of philosophy is more noble and more humane than those primitive conceptions which were sufficient for early kings and warriors. But my answer to this objection is obvious: the progress of which man’s nature is capable is a development, not a destruction of its original state; it must subserve the elements from which it proceeds, in order to be a true development and not a perversion. And those popular rituals do in fact subserve and complete that nature with which man is born. It is otherwise with the religion of so-called civilization; such religion does but contradict the religion of barbarism; and since this civilization itself is not a development of man’s whole nature, but mainly of the intellect, recognizing indeed the moral sense, but ignoring the conscience, no wonder that the religion in which it issues has no sympathy either with the hopes and fears of the awakened soul, or with those frightful presentiments which are expressed in the worship and traditions of the heathen. This artificial religion, then, has no place in the inquiry; first, because it comes of a one-sided progress of mind, and next, for the very reason that it contradicts informants which speak with greater authority than itself.”

  113 J. H. Newman, “Doing Glory to God in Pursuits of the World,” in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Book 8, Sermon 11.

  114 R. H. Hutton, Cardinal Newman (London, 1891), p. 251.

  115 See LD, 23:629 for Hutton’s Spectator obituary on Newman.

  Chapter 11 Culture and Hollowness: Newman and Matthew Arnold

  1 A. P. Stanley, Life of Thomas Arnold (London, 1904), pp. 156–57.

  2 LD, 27:280, William Ullathorne to James Knowles (15 July 1877).

  3 Matthew Arnold, “Emerson,” from Discourses in America (New York, 1924), pp. 142–43.

  4 Ibid., p. 195.

  5 Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Mulhauser (Oxford, 1957), p. 215.

  6 See Letter of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough (23 September 1849) in Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Howard Foster Lowry (Oxford, 1932), p.111. This is also quoted in Simon Heffer’s lively biography, Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle (London, 1995), p. 274.

  7 Matthew Arnold, God and the Bible (New York, 1883), p. xi.

  8 Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism: Second Series (London, 1903), p. 2.

  9 Ibid., p. 2.

  10 T. S. Eliot, “Matthew Arnold,” in

  The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London, 1933), pp. 113–14.

  11 Ibid., p. 113.

  12 Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Matthew Arnold: The Oxford Authors, ed. Allott and Super (Oxford, 1986), p. 319.

  13 See “The Progress of Poesy,” p. 268: “Youth rambles on life’s arid mount/And strikes the rock, and finds the vein/And brings the water from the fount/The fount which shall not flow again.”

  14 Essays Critical and Historical, Vol. 2, p. 430.

  15 Ibid., p. 436.

  16 Ibid., p. 433.

  17 Ibid., p. 445.

  18 Water Pater, “Coleridge’s Writings,” in Sketches and Reviews (London, 1919), pp. 103–04.

  19 Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics from the French Revolution and the First World War (New York, 2005), p. 273.

  20 The Poems and Prose Remains of A.H. Clough, ed. Blanche (Smith) Clough (London, 1869), p. 68.

  21 Ian Hamilton, A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold (London, 1998), p. 42.

  22 Dr. Arnold, quoted in A. P. Stanley, Life of Thomas Arnold, p. 380.

  23 See LD, 18:559, Lord Acton to Richard Simpson (1 January 1859): “I had a 3 hours’ talk with the venerable Noggs who came out at last with his real sentiments to an extent which startled me, with respect both to things and persons, as H E [His Eminence], Ward, Dalgairns, etc., etc., natural inclination of men in power to tyrannise, ignorance and presumption of our would-be theologians, in short what you and I would comfortably say over a glass of whiskey. I did not think he could ever cast aside his diplomacy and buttonment so entirely, and was quite surprised at the intense interest he betrayed in the Rambler. He was quite miserable when I told him the news and moaned for a long time, rocking himself backwards and forward over the fire, like an old woman with the toothache …” R. G. Collingwood said something in his autobiography about an Oxford philosophy don—John Cook Wilson (1849–1915)—which has always seemed to me the last word on Lord Acton: “There are two reasons why people refrain from writing books: either they are conscious that they have nothing to say, or they are conscious that they are unable to say it … if they give any other reason than these it is to throw dust in other people’s eyes or their own.” See R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford, 1939), pp. 19–20. To be fair to Wilson, as the ODNB points out, if he produced no books, he was not idle: “Wilson was an energetic man who combined a passion for cycling with an interest in war games … During the last year of his life he was a regular writer in the correspondence columns of The Times, offering advice on military matters, including the establishment of an army cyclist corps to fight in Belgium.”

  24 Matthew Arnold, “Emerson,” in Discourses in America (London, 1924), pp. 139–40.

  25 “Peace in Believing” (1839), in Parochial and Plain Sermons (Ignatius Press, 1997), p. 1412.

  26 See Gerard Tracey, Preface to John Henry Newman: Sermons 1824–1843,
Vol. 1: Sermons on the Liturgy and Sacraments and on Christ the Mediator, ed. Placid Murray (Oxford, 1991), p. v.

  27 Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough (6 September 1853), in The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Howard Foster Lowry (Oxford, 1968), p. 143.

  28 Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (New York, 1993), p. 485.

  29 T. S. Eliot, “Arnold and Pater” (1930), in Selected Essays (London, 1951), p. 436.

  30 Arnold, quoted in J. D. Jump, Matthew Arnold (London, 1955), p. 48.

  31 The Letters of Thomas Arnold the Younger, ed. James Bertram (Auckland and Oxford, 1980), pp. 60–61. See Discourses to Mixed Congregations, pp. 260–61, for Arnold’s reference to Newman’s work.

  32 Matthew Arnold, quoted in Bernard Bergonzi, A Victorian Wanderer: The Life of Thomas Arnold the Younger (Oxford, 2003), p. 189.

  33 Ibid., p. 108. Verrey’s Restaurant at 233 Regent Street was one of the most fashionable in Victorian London, its patrons including the Prince of Wales, Charles Dickens and Disraeli. Sherlock Holmes had sweetmeats delivered from the restaurant whenever he wanted a break from Mrs. Hudson’s cooking. See The London Encyclopedia, ed. Weinreb and Hibbert (London, 1983), p. 912.

  34 The Idea of a University, p. 315.

  35 LD, 29:169, JHN to Lady Herbert of Lea (19 August 1879).

  36 Park Honan, Matthew Arnold: A Life (Harvard, 1981), p. 187.

  37 Ibid., p. 237.

  38 See “To My Friends,” and Hamilton, A Gift Imprisoned, p. 106.

  39 Autobiographical Writings (25 March 1840), p. 138.

  40 LD, 11:95, JHN to Ambrose St. John (20 January 1846).

  41 LD, 5:313, JHN to Mrs. John Mozley (26 June 1836).

  42 Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma (New York, 1903), p. 261.

  43 See Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma (London, 1883), p. 315.

  44 Ibid., p. v.

  45 Ibid., pp. v–vi.

  46 “The Scholar-Gypsy,” lines 203–04.

  47 “Rugby Chapel,” lines 171–81.

  48 The convert Lord Ripon (1827–1909), who was roundly abused in The Times for abandoning the Established Church and converting to Rome, had come to say goodbye to Newman before he departed for India to take up his duties as Viceroy.

  49 “Matthew Arnold,” in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, pp. 105–06.

  50 “Scholar-Gipsy,” pp. 171–80.

  51 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (New York, 1920), p. viii.

  52 Ibid., pp. 63–64.

  53 Letters of Max Beerbohm 1892–1956, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (Oxford, 1989), pp. 139–40.

  54 Culture and Anarchy, p. 10.

  55 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, ed. Alvan Ryan (Notre Dame, 1962), p. 129. See also Gerard J. Hughes, “Conscience,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman, ed. Ker and Merrigan (Cambridge, 2009).

  56 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (New York, 1920), p. 23.

  57 Ibid., p. 23.

  58 See Tamworth Reading Room, p. 275.

  59 See Henry Sidgwick, “The Prophet of Culture,” in Macmillan’s Magazine, Vol. 16 (1867), pp. 271–80. Sidgwick’s review is also included as an appendix to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy edited by Jane Garnett (Oxford, 2006), where this quote appears on pages 166–67.

  60 Matthew Arnold, “Democracy” (1851), in Mixed Essays (New York, 1903), p. 43.

  61 Referring to the ideas of Lord Brougham, on which Peel relied for his Tamworth Reading Room, Newman recalled how Mr. Brougham talked much and eloquently of “the sweetness of knowledge,” and “the charms of philosophy,” of students “smitten with the love of knowledge,” of “wooing truth with the unwearied ardour of a lover,” of “keen and overpowering emotion, of ecstasy,” of “the absorbing passion of knowledge,” of “the strength of the passion, and the exquisite pleasure of its gratification”—all very Arnoldian terms. See Tamworth Reading Room, pp. 256–57.

  62 Tamworth Reading Room, p. 268.

  63 LD, 25:271–72, JHN to B. M. Pickering (21 January 1871).

  64 Tamworth Reading Room, p. 275.

  65 Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Matthew Arnold: The Oxford Authors, p. 335.

  66 See “Civilization in the United States” (1888), in Matthew Arnold: The Oxford Authors, p. 504.

  67 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, p. 28.

  68 “The Buried Life,” lines 45–53.

  69 “Stanzas from the Green Chartreuse,” lines 67–78.

  70 See Hutton, quoted in LD, 32:628.

  71 LD, 25:440–41, Matthew Arnold to JHN (29 November 1871).

  72 LD, 25:442, JHN to Matthew Arnold (3 December 1871).

  73 English Illustrated Magazine, January 1884, quoted in Matthew Arnold: The Oxford Authors, p. 561.

  74 LD, 25:442, Matthew Arnold to JHN (20 January 1868).

  75 See Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, p. 3.

  76 “Dover Beach,” lines 1–14.

  77 “Bacchanalia, or The New Age,” lines 26–28.

  78 “Below the Surface-Stream” (1869). Arnold wrote these lines around the same time that he composed St. Paul and Protestantism (1870).

  79 See LD, 26:95, notes 1 and 2.

  80 LD, 8:376, JHN to Edward Pusey (December 1841), p. 376.

  81 LD, 26:95, JHN to Matthew Arnold (24 May 1872).

  82 John Ruskin, Praeterita (Oxford, 1978), pp. 5–6.

  83 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London, 1951), p. 390.

  84 The Idea of a University, p. 218.

  85 LD, 26:96, Matthew Arnold to JHN (28 May 1872).

  86 LD, 28:5–6, JHN to Matthew Arnold (3 January 1876).

  87 Arnold, quoted in Hamilton, A Gift Imprisoned, p. 212.

  88 “Growing Old,” lines 1–5.

  89 Ibid., lines 16–20.

  90 Ibid., lines 21–25.

  91 Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma (London, 1873), p. 46.

  92 “The Religious Use of Excited Feelings” (1831), in Parochial and Plain Sermons (Ignatius Press, 1997), p. 76.

  93 “Growing Old,” lines 31–35.

  94 Arnold was pleased with the essays contained in Discourses in America but was embarrassed by the success that met Literature and Dogma, which he regarded as a pot boiler. Still, it was his most critically acclaimed and commercially successful composition.

  95 Autobiographical Writings, pp. 124–25.

  96 For a lively critical analysis of Arnold’s hollowness, see J. Matthew Hillis, “Matthew Arnold,” in Matthew Arnold: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. David J. DeLaura (New Jersey, 1973), pp. 24–45. Hillis is particularly astute about all of those catchphrases that Disraeli told Arnold made him a classic in his own lifetime. “Arnold’s expressions of the truths which are the center of his own system are left deliberately vague,” Hillis points out. They are scrupulously empty phrases. Their repetition empties them further of meaning … “make reason and the will of God prevail,” “the best that has been thought and said in the world,” “high seriousness,” “the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty,” the “Eternal, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness,” etc… . See page 42. In this regard, no Victorian writer was guiltier of what Newman called ‘unreal words’ than Arnold.

  97 “Christ on the Waters,” pp. 161–62.

  98 LD, 20:30, JHN to Sister Mary Gabriel Du Boulay (18 August 1861).

  Chapter 12 Newman and Arthur Hugh Clough

  1 Francis Turner Palgrave, “Memoir” to The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough (1862), from Arthur Hugh Clough: The Critical Heritage, ed. Michael Thorpe (London, 1972), p. 110.

  2 Walter Bagehot, “Mr. Clough’s Poems,” from National Review (October 1862), in Arthur Hugh Clough: The Critical Heritage, p. 168.

  3 V. S. Pritchett, “The Poet of Tourism,” in Complete Collected Essays (New York, 1991), p. 353.

  4 Anthony Kenny, Arthur Hugh Clough: A Poet’s Life (London, 2005), p. 1. Although I take issue w
ith Sir Anthony in various ways, I am indebted to his lively biography for much of my own knowledge of Clough’s life.

  5 The Poems and Prose Remains of A.H. Clough, ed. Blanche (Smith) Clough (London, 1869), p. 4.

  6 Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (London, 1938), p. 271.

  7 Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Mulhauser (Oxford, 1957), p. 310.

  8 John H. Jones, “Balliol: From Obscurity to Pre-Eminence,” in The History of the University of Oxford, ed. Brock and Curthoys (Oxford, 1997), Vol. VI, Pt. 1, p. 180.

  9 Epilogue, Dipsychus, line 84.

  10 Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, pp. 81–82.

  11 Ibid., p. 66.

  12 Ibid., pp. 68–69.

  13 See Sir James Stephen, K.C.B., “The Lives of Whitfield and Froude: Oxford Catholicism,” in Edinburgh Review, Vol. LXVII (July 1838), pp. 500–35.

  14 See Anthony Kenny, Arthur Hugh Clough: A Poet’s Life (London, 2005), p. 48, and The Oxford Diaries of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford, 1991), pp. xxv and 92–94.

  15 Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, p. 96.

  16 The Idea of a University, p. 229.

  17 Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, p. 319.

  18 LD, 20:169, JHN to W. G. Ward (15 March 1862).

  19 Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, p. 67.

  20 Apologia, pp. 291–92.

  21 Readers of Flann O’Brien’s comic masterpiece At-Swim-Two-Birds (1939) will recognize that it was from Clough that O’Brien took the idea of unifying his narrative with conversations between a young author and his irascible uncle. It is also interesting that it was Graham Greene who accepted O’Brien’s first novel for publication, when he was working as a publisher’s reader for Longman. Doubtless, Green found O’Brien’s debt to Clough endearing.

  22 Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, p. 71.