Eminent Victorians | Page 9

right.
But, after all, something more was needed than even the excitement of
Froude combined with the conviction of Keble to ruffle seriously the
vast calm waters of Christian thought; and it so happened that that thing
was not wanting: it was the genius of John Henry Newman. If Newman
had never lived, or if his father, when the gig came round on the fatal
morning, still undecided between the two Universities, had chanced to
turn the horse's head in the direction of Cambridge, who can doubt that
the Oxford Movement would have flickered out its little flame
unobserved in the Common Room of Oriel? And how different, too,
would have been the fate of Newman himself! He was a child of the
Romantic Revival, a creature of emotion and of memory, a dreamer
whose secret spirit dwelt apart in delectable mountains, an artist whose
subtle senses caught, like a shower in the sunshine, the impalpable
rainbow of the immaterial world. In other times, under other skies, his
days would have been more fortunate. He might have helped to weave
the garland of Meleager, or to mix the lapis lazuli of Fra Angelico, or to
chase the delicate truth in the shade of an Athenian palaestra, or his
hands might have fashioned those ethereal faces that smile in the niches
of Chartres. Even in his own age he might, at Cambridge, whose

cloisters have ever been consecrated to poetry and common sense, have
followed quietly in Gray's footsteps and brought into flower those seeds
of inspiration which now lie embedded amid the faded devotion of the
Lyra Apostolica.
At Oxford, he was doomed. He could not withstand the last
enchantment of the Middle Age. It was in vain that he plunged into the
pages of Gibbon or communed for long hours with Beethoven over his
beloved violin. The air was thick with clerical sanctity, heavy with the
odours of tradition and the soft warmth of spiritual authority; his
friendship with Hurrell Froude did the rest. All that was weakest in him
hurried him onward, and all that was strongest in him too. His curious
and vaulting imagination began to construct vast philosophical fabrics
out of the writings of ancient monks, and to dally with visions of
angelic visitations and the efficacy of the oil of St Walburga; his
emotional nature became absorbed in the partisan passions of a
University clique; and his subtle intellect concerned itself more and
more exclusively with the dialectical splitting of dogmatical hairs. His
future course was marked out for him all too clearly; and yet by a
singular chance the true nature of the man was to emerge triumphant in
the end. If Newman had died at the age of sixty, today he would have
been already forgotten, save by a few ecclesiastical historians; but he
lived to write his Apologia, and to reach immortality, neither as a
thinker nor as a theologian, but as an artist who has embalmed the
poignant history of an intensely human spirit in the magical spices of
words.
When Froude succeeded in impregnating Newman with the ideas of
Keble, the Oxford Movement began. The original and remarkable
characteristic of these three men was that they took the Christian
Religion au pied de la lettre. This had not been done in England for
centuries. When they declared every Sunday that they believed in the
Holy Catholic Church, they meant it. When they repeated the
Athanasian Creed, they meant it. Even, when they subscribed to the
Thirty-nine Articles, they meant it-or at least they thought they did.
Now such a state of mind was dangerous--more dangerous indeed--
than they at first realised. They had started with the innocent
assumption that the Christian Religion was contained in the doctrines
of the Church of England; but, the more they examined this matter, the

more difficult and dubious it became. The Church of England bore
everywhere upon it the signs of human imperfection; it was the
outcome of revolution and of compromise, of the exigencies of
politicians and the caprices of princes, of the prejudices of theologians
and the necessities of the State. How had it happened that this piece of
patchwork had become the receptacle for the august and infinite
mysteries of the Christian Faith? This was the problem with which
Newman and his friends found themselves confronted. Other men
might, and apparently did, see nothing very strange in such a situation;
but other men saw in Christianity itself scarcely more than a convenient
and respectable appendage to existence, by which a sound system of
morals was inculcated, and through which one might hope to attain to
everlasting bliss.
To Newman and Keble it was otherwise. They saw a transcendent
manifestation of Divine power flowing down elaborate and immense
through the ages; a consecrated priesthood,