Eminent Victorians | Page 4

the art of writing has been
relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is
perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one. Those two fat
volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead--who
does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their
slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of
selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortege
of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism.
One is tempted to suppose, of some of them, that they were composed
by that functionary as the final item of his job. The studies in this book
are indebted, in more ways than one, to such works-- works which
certainly deserve the name of Standard Biographies. For they have
provided me not only with much indispensable information, but with
something even more precious-- an example. How many lessons are to
be learned from them! But it is hardly necessary to particularise. To
preserve, for instance, a becoming brevity-- a brevity which excludes
everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant-- that, surely,
is the first duty of the biographer. The second, no less surely, is to
maintain his own freedom of spirit. It is not his business to be
complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he
understands them. That is what I have aimed at in this book-- to lay
bare the facts of some cases, as I understand them, dispassionately,
impartially, and without ulterior intentions. To quote the words of a
Master--'Je n'impose rien; je ne propose rien: j'expose.'
A list of the principal sources from which I have drawn is appended to
each Biography. I would indicate, as an honourable exception to the
current commodity, Sir Edward Cook's excellent Life of Florence

Nightingale, without which my own study, though composed on a very
different scale and from a decidedly different angle, could not have
been written.

Cardinal Manning
HENRY EDWARD MANNING was born in 1807 and died in 1892.
His life was extraordinary in many ways, but its interest for the modern
inquirer depends mainly upon two considerations--the light which his
career throws upon the spirit of his age, and the psychological problems
suggested by his inner history. He belonged to that class of eminent
ecclesiastics -- and it is by no means a small class -- who have been
distinguished less for saintliness and learning than for practical ability.
Had he lived in the Middle Ages he would certainly have been neither a
Francis nor an Aquinas, but he might have been an Innocent. As it was,
born in the England of the nineteenth century, growing up in the very
seed-time of modern progress, coming to maturity with the first onrush
of Liberalism, and living long enough to witness the victories of
Science and Democracy, he yet, by a strange concatenation of
circumstances, seemed almost to revive in his own person that long line
of diplomatic and administrative clerics which, one would have thought,
had come to an end for ever with Cardinal Wolsey.
In Manning, so it appeared, the Middle Ages lived again. The tall gaunt
figure, with the face of smiling asceticism, the robes, and the biretta, as
it passed in triumph from High Mass at the Oratory to philanthropic
gatherings at Exeter Hall, from Strike Committees at the Docks to
Mayfair drawing-rooms where fashionable ladies knelt to the Prince of
the Church, certainly bore witness to a singular condition of affairs.
What had happened? Had a dominating character imposed itself upon a
hostile environment? Or was the nineteenth century, after all, not so
hostile? Was there something in it, scientific and progressive as it was,
which went out to welcome the representative of ancient tradition and
uncompromising faith? Had it, perhaps, a place in its heart for such as
Manning--a soft place, one might almost say? Or, on the other hand,
was it he who had been supple and yielding? He who had won by art
what he would never have won by force, and who had managed, so to
speak, to be one of the leaders of the procession less through merit than
through a superior faculty for gliding adroitly to the front rank? And, in

any case, by what odd chances, what shifts and struggles, what
combinations of circumstance and character, had this old man come to
be where he was? Such questions are easier to ask than to answer; but it
may be instructive, and even amusing, to look a little more closely into
the complexities of so curious a story.
I
UNDOUBTEDLY, what is most obviously striking in the history of
Manning's career is the persistent strength of his innate