The Upton Letters | Page 8

while all the time he is under the
impression that it is a logical clue which he is following. And what
logic! leaping lightly over difficult places, taking flowery by-paths
among the fields, the very stairs on which he treads based on all kinds
of wide assumptions and unverifiable hypotheses. Then it is distressing
to see his horror of Liberalism, of speculation, of development, of all
the things that constitute the primal essence of the very religion that he
blindly followed. One cannot help feeling that had Newman been a
Pharisee, he would have been, with his love of precedent, and antiquity,
and tradition, one of the most determined and deadly opponents of the
spirit of Christ. For the spirit of Christ is the spirit of freedom, of
elasticity, of unconventionality. Newman would have upheld in the
Sanhedrim with pathetic and exquisite eloquence that it was not time to
break with the old, that it was miserable treachery to throw over the
ancient safeguards of faith, to part with the rich inheritance of the
national faith delivered by Abraham and Moses to the saints. Newman
was a true fanatic, and the most dangerous of fanatics, because his
character was based on innocence and tenderness and instinctive virtue.
It is rather pathetic than distressing to see Newman again and again
deluded by the antiquity of some petty human logician into believing
his utterance to be the very voice of God. The struggle with Newman
was not the struggle of faith with scepticism, but the struggle between
two kinds of loyalty, the personal loyalty to his own past and his own
friends and the Church of his nativity, and the loyalty to the infinitely

more ancient and venerable tradition of the Roman Church. It was, as I
have said, an aesthetic conversion; he had the mind of a poet, and the
particular kind of beauty which appealed to him was not the beauty of
nature or art, but the beauty of old tradition and the far-off dim figures
of saints and prelates reaching back into the dark and remote past.
He had, too, the sublime egotism of the poet. His own salvation--
"Shall I be safe if I die to-night?"--that, he confesses, was the thought
which eventually outweighed all others. He had little of the priestly
hunger to save souls; the way in which others trusted him, confided in
him, watched his movements, followed him, was always something of
a terror to him, and yet in another mood it ministered to his
self-absorption. He had not the stern sense of being absolutely in the
right, which is the characteristic of the true leaders of men, but he had a
deep sense of his own importance, combined with a perfectly real sense
of weakness and humility, which even disguised, I would think, his
own egotism from himself.
Again his extraordinary forensic power, his verbal logic, his exquisite
lucidity of statement, all these concealed from him, as they have
concealed from others, his lack of mental independence. He had an
astonishing power of submitting to his imagination, a power of
believing the impossible, because the exercise of faith seemed to him
so beautiful a virtue. It is not a case of a noble mind overthrown, but of
the victory of a certain kind of poetical feeling over all rational inquiry.
To revert to Newman's literary genius, he seems to me to be one of the
few masters of English prose. I used to think, in old University days,
that Newman's style was best tested by the fact that if one had a piece
of his writing to turn into Latin prose, the more one studied it, turned it
over, and penetrated it, the more masterly did it become; because it was
not so much the expression of a thought as the thought itself taking
shape in a perfectly pure medium of language. Bunyan had the same
gift; of later authors Ruskin had it very strongly, and Matthew Arnold
in a lesser degree. There is another species of beautiful prose, the prose
of Jeremy Taylor, of Pater, even of Stevenson; but this is a slow and
elaborate construction, pinched and pulled this way and that; and it is

like some gorgeous picture, of stately persons in seemly and
resplendent dress, with magnificently wrought backgrounds of great
buildings and curious gardens. But the work of Newman and of Ruskin
is a white art, like the art of sculpture.
I find myself every year desiring and admiring this kind of lucidity and
purity more and more. It seems to me that the only function of a writer
is to express obscure, difficult, and subtle thoughts easily. But there are
writers, like Browning and George Meredith, who seem to hold it a
virtue to express simple thoughts obscurely. Such writers