Chapter VI

The careful gradation of values in Newman’s style and the far-reaching sweep of his periods connect themselves closely with another of his noteworthy characteristics--his breadth of handling. He manipulates with perfect ease and precision vast masses of facts, and makes them all contribute with unerring coöperation to the production of a single effect. However minute his detail,--and his liking for concreteness which will be presently illustrated often incites him to great minuteness,--he is careful not to confuse his composition, destroy the perspective, or lose sight of total effect. The largeness of his manner and the certainty of his handling place him at once among really great constructive artists.

Against this assertion it may be urged that in his fiction it is just this breadth of effect and constructive skill that are most noticeably lacking; that each of his novels, whatever its merits in places, is unsuccessful as a whole, and leaves a blurred impression. This must at once be granted. But, after all, it is in his theoretical, or moral, or historical work that the real Newman is to be found; in such work he is much more himself, much more thoroughly alive and efficient than in his stories, which, though cleverly turned out, were, after all, things by the way, were amateurish in execution, and never completely called forth his strength. Moreover, even in his novels, we find occasionally the integrating power of his imagination remarkably illustrated. The description in _Callista_ of the invading and ravaging locusts is admirably sure in its treatment of detail and even and impressive in tone; the episode of Gurta’s madness is powerfully conceived, is swift and sure in its action, and is developed with admirable subordination and colouring of detail and regard to climax.

On the whole, however, it must be granted that in his fiction Newman’s sense of total effect and his constructive skill are least conspicuous. In his abstract discussions they never fail him. First and foremost, they show themselves in the plan of each work as a whole. The treatment is invariably symmetrical and exhaustive; part answers to part with the precision and the delicacy of adjustment of a work of art. Each part is conscious of the whole and has a vitally loyal relation to it, so that the needs and purposes of the whole organism seem present as controlling and centralizing instincts in every chapter, paragraph, and sentence.

In his use of elaborate illustrations for the sake of securing concreteness and sensuous beauty, Newman shows this same integrating power of imagination. In the long illustrations, which often take almost the proportions of episodes in the epical progress of his argument or exposition, the reader has no sense of bewilderment or uncertainty of aim; the strength of Newman’s mind and purpose subdues his endlessly diverse material, and compels it into artistic coherence and vital unity; all details are coloured in harmony with the dominant tone of the piece, and reënforce a predetermined mood. When a reader commits himself to one of Newman’s discussions, he must resign himself to him body and soul, and be prepared to live and move and have his being in the medium of Newman’s thought, and, moreover, in the special range of thought, and the special mood, that this particular discussion provokes. Perhaps this omnipresence of Newman in the minutest details of each discussion becomes ultimately to the careful student of his writing the most convincing proof of the largeness of his mind, of the intensity of his conception, and of the vigour and vitality of his imagination.

It may be urged that the copiousness of Newman at times becomes wearisome; that he is over-liberal of both explanation and illustration; and that his style, though never exuberant in ornament, is sometimes annoyingly luminous, and blinds with excess of light. This is probably the point in which Newman’s style is most open to attack. It is a cloyingly explicit, rather than a stimulatingly suggestive, style; it does almost too much for the reader, and is almost inconsiderately generous. Yet these qualities of his style are so intimately connected with its peculiar personal charm that they can hardly be censured. And it may be noted that so strenuous an advocate of the austere style as Walter Pater has instanced Newman’s _Idea of a University_ as an example of “the perfect handling of a theory.”

One characteristic of the purely suggestive style is certainly to be found in Newman’s writing,--great beauty and vigour of phrase. This fact is the more noteworthy because a writer who, like Newman, is impressive in the mass, and excels in securing breadth of effect, very often lacks the ability to strike out memorable epigrams. A few quotations, brought together at random, will show what point and terseness Newman could command when he chose. “Ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt.” “Great things are done by devotion to one idea.” “Calculation never made a hero.” “All aberrations are founded on, and have their life in, some truth or other.” “Great acts take time.” “A book after all cannot make a stand against the wild living intellect of man.” “To be converted in partnership.” “It is not at all easy (humanly speaking) to wind up an Englishman to a dogmatic level.” “Paper logic.” “One is not at all pleased when poetry, or eloquence, or devotion is considered as if chiefly intended to feed syllogisms.” “Here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” In terseness and sententiousness these utterances could hardly be surpassed by the most acrimonious searcher after epigram, though of course they have not the glitter of paradox to which modern coiners of phrases aspire.

Of wit there is very little to be found in Newman’s writings; it is not the natural expression of his temperament. Wit is too dryly intellectual, too external and formal, too little vital, to suit Newman’s mental habit. To the appeal of humour he was distinctly more open. It is from the humorous incongruities of imaginary situations that his irony secures its most persuasive effects. Moreover, whenever he is not necessarily preoccupied with the tragically serious aspects of life and of history, or forced by his subject-matter, and audience, into a formally restrained manner and method, he has, in treating any topic, that urbanity and half-playful kindliness that come from a large-minded and almost tolerant recognition of the essential imperfections of life and human nature. The mood of the man of the world, sweetened and ennobled, and enriched by profound knowledge and deep feeling and spiritual seriousness, gives to much of Newman’s work its most distinctive note. When he is able to be thoroughly colloquial, this mood and this tone can assert themselves most freely, and the result is a style through which a gracious kindliness, which is never quite humour, and which yet possesses all its elements, diffuses itself pervasively and persuasively. Throughout the _Rise and Progress of Universities_ this tone is traceable, and, to take a specific example, it is largely to its influence that the description of Athens, in the third chapter, owes its peculiar charm. What can be more deliciously incongruous than the agent of a London “mercantile firm” and the Acropolis? or more curiously ill-mated than his standards of valuation and the qualities of the Grecian landscape? Yet how little malicious is Newman’s use of this incongruity or disproportion, and how unsuspiciously the “agent of a London Company” ministers to the quiet amusement of the reader, and also helps to heighten, by contrast, the effect of beauty and romance and mystery that Newman is aiming at.

Several allusions have already been made to Newman’s liking for concreteness, and in an earlier paragraph his distrust of the abstract was described and illustrated at length. These predilections of his have left their unmistakable mark on his style in ways more technical than those that have thus far been noted. His vocabulary is, for a scholar, exceptionally idiomatic and unliterary; the most ordinary and unparsable turns of every-day speech are inwrought into the texture of his style. In the _Apologia_ he speaks of himself in one place as having had “a lounging, free-and-easy way of carrying things on,” and the phrase both defines and illustrates one characteristic of his style. Idioms that have the crude force of popular speech, the vitality without the vulgarity of slang, abound in his writings. Of his increasingly clear recognition, in 1839, of the weakness of the Anglican position, he says: “The Via Media was an impossible idea; it was what I had called ‘standing on one leg.’” In describing his loss of control over his party in 1840 he declares: “I never had a strong wrist, but at the very time when it was most needed, the reins had broken in my hands.” Of the ineradicableness of evil in human nature, he exclaims: “You do but play a sort of ‘hunt the slipper,’ with the fault of our nature, till you go to Christianity.” Illustrations of this idiomatic and homely phrasing might be endlessly multiplied. Moreover, to the concreteness of colloquial phrasing, Newman adds the concreteness of the specific word. Other things being equal, he prefers the name of the species to that of the genus, and the name of the class to that of the species; he is always urged forward towards the individual and the actual; his mind does not lag in the region of abstractions and formulas, but presses past the general term, or abstraction, or law, to the image or the example, and into the tangible, glowing, sensible world of fact. His imagery, though never obtrusive, is almost lavishly present, and though never purely decorative, is often very beautiful. It is so inevitable, however, springs so organically from the thought and the mood of the moment, that the reader accepts it unmindfully, and is conscious only of grasping, easily and securely, the writer’s meaning. He must first look back through the sentences and study the style in detail before he will come to realize its continual, but decisive, divergence from the literal and commonplace, and its essential freshness and distinction.

On occasion, of course, Newman uses elaborate figures; but commonly for purposes of exposition or persuasion. In such cases the reader may well note the thoroughness with which the figure adjusts itself to every turn and phase of the thought, and the surprising omnipresence and suggestiveness of the tropical phrasing. These qualities of Newman’s style are illustrated in the following passage from the _Development of Christian Doctrine_:--

“Whatever be the risk of corruption from intercourse with the world around, such a risk must be encountered if a great idea is duly to be understood, and much more if it is to be fully exhibited. It is elicited and expanded by trial, and battles into perfection and supremacy. Nor does it escape the collision of opinion even in its earlier years, nor does it remain truer to itself, and with a better claim to be considered one and the same, though externally protected from vicissitude and change. It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which, on the contrary, is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary, and is employed in efforts after freedom which become more vigorous and hopeful as its years increase. Its beginnings are no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope. At first no one knows what it is, or what it is worth. It remains perhaps for a time quiescent; it tries, as it were, its limbs, and proves the ground under it, and feels its way. From time to time, it makes essays which fail, and are in consequence abandoned. It seems in suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length strikes out in one definite direction. In time it enters upon strange territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and fall around it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles reappear under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”[23] The image of the river pervades this passage throughout, and yet is never obtrusive and never determines or even constrains the progress of the thought. The imagery simply seems to insinuate the ideas into the reader’s mind with a certain novelty of appeal and half-sensuous persuasiveness. Another passage of much this kind has already been quoted, where Newman describes the adventurous investigator scaling the crags of truth.[24]

Closely akin to this use of figures is Newman’s generous use of examples and illustrations. Whatever be the principle he is discussing, he is not content till he has realized it for the reader in tangible, visible form, until he has given it the cogency and intensity of appeal that only sensations or images possess. In all these ways, then, by his idiomatic and colloquial phrasing, by his specific vocabulary, by his delicately adroit use of metaphors, by his carefully elaborated imagery, and by his wealth of examples and illustrations, Newman keeps resolutely close to the concrete, and imparts everywhere to his style warmth, vividness, colour, convincing actuality.