The Victorian Age in Literature | Page 9

but
allowed five wives: he created a very big thing, which we have still to
deal with. The first French Republic created, when it affirmed property
and abolished peerages; France still stands like a square, four-sided
building which Europe has besieged in vain. The men of the Oxford
Movement would have been horrified at being compared either with
Moslems or Jacobins. But their sub-conscious thirst was for something
that Moslems and Jacobins had and ordinary Anglicans had not: the
exalted excitement of consistency. If you were a Moslem you were not
a Bacchanal. If you were a Republican you were not a peer. And so the
Oxford men, even in their first and dimmest stages, felt that if you were
a Churchman you were not a Dissenter. The Oxford Movement was,
out of the very roots of its being, a rational movement; almost a
rationalist movement. In that it differed sharply from the other
reactions that shook the Utilitarian compromise; the blinding mysticism
of Carlyle, the mere manly emotionalism of Dickens. It was an appeal
to reason: reason said that if a Christian had a feast day he must have a
fast day too. Otherwise, all days ought to be alike; and this was that
very Utilitarianism against which their Oxford Movement was the first
and most rational assault.
This idea, even by reason of its reason, narrowed into a sort of sharp
spear, of which the spear blade was Newman. It did forget many of the
other forces that were fighting on its side. But the movement could
boast, first and last, many men who had this eager dogmatic quality:
Keble, who spoilt a poem in order to recognise a doctrine; Faber, who
told the rich, almost with taunts, that God sent the poor as eagles to
strip them; Froude, who with Newman announced his return in the
arrogant motto of Achilles. But the greater part of all this happened
before what is properly our period; and in that period Newman, and

perhaps Newman alone, is the expression and summary of the whole
school. It was certainly in the Victorian Age, and after his passage to
Rome, that Newman claimed his complete right to be in any book on
modern English literature. This is no place for estimating his theology:
but one point about it does clearly emerge. Whatever else is right, the
theory that Newman went over to Rome to find peace and an end of
argument, is quite unquestionably wrong. He had far more quarrels
after he had gone over to Rome. But, though he had far more quarrels,
he had far fewer compromises: and he was of that temper which is
tortured more by compromise than by quarrel. He was a man at once of
abnormal energy and abnormal sensibility: nobody without that
combination could have written the Apologia. If he sometimes seemed
to skin his enemies alive, it was because he himself lacked a skin. In
this sense his Apologia is a triumph far beyond the ephemeral charge
on which it was founded; in this sense he does indeed (to use his own
expression) vanquish not his accuser but his judges. Many men would
shrink from recording all their cold fits and hesitations and prolonged
inconsistencies: I am sure it was the breath of life to Newman to
confess them, now that he had done with them for ever. His Lectures
on the Present Position of English Catholics, practically preached
against a raging mob, rise not only higher but happier, as his instant
unpopularity increases. There is something grander than humour, there
is fun, in the very first lecture about the British Constitution as
explained to a meeting of Russians. But always his triumphs are the
triumphs of a highly sensitive man: a man must feel insults before he
can so insultingly and splendidly avenge them. He is a naked man, who
carries a naked sword. The quality of his literary style is so successful
that it succeeds in escaping definition. The quality of his logic is that of
a long but passionate patience, which waits until he has fixed all
corners of an iron trap. But the quality of his moral comment on the age
remains what I have said: a protest of the rationality of religion as
against the increasing irrationality of mere Victorian comfort and
compromise. So far as the present purpose is concerned, his protest
died with him: he left few imitators and (it may easily be conceived) no
successful imitators. The suggestion of him lingers on in the exquisite
Elizabethan perversity of Coventry Patmore; and has later flamed out
from the shy volcano of Francis Thompson. Otherwise (as we shall see

in the parallel case of Ruskin's Socialism) he has no followers in his
own age: but very many in ours.
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