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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2024
A great and peculiarly many-sided historic character like that of Cardinal Wiseman must always offer a number of angles of approach to the student. Speaking more particularly of his literary work, the power of retaining after death the art of making friends (to use the phrase of Hazlitt) is one which Wiseman may be said to have possessed in an exceptional degree. As a constant and ever-appreciative reader of Wiseman—nowadays, I venture to think, read far less than he deserves to be—I may perhaps in the course of years have developed some points of view which it is worth while setting out in a connected fashion: though I should perhaps warn the reader that I shall have no startling discoveries to announce, no unknown material to make public.
The peculiar importance which attaches to Rome as a key to the personality and achievement of Wiseman springs, of course, primarily from the fact that so long a period of his youth and early manhood was spent there almost without interruption: practically the whole, that is, of twenty-two years, from 1818 to 1840. And the call of Rome was one which Wiseman had felt ever since his earliest youth; in that incomparable first chapter of what is, I think, perhaps his most lovable book, the Recollections of the Last Four Popes and of Rome in their Times (1858), in which he describes in so marvellously graphic a fashion the arrival of the first party of English students, sent to re-occupy the English College at Rome—in that chapter he reveals that the history and antiquities of Rome had formed the bonds of a little college society to which he had belonged, no doubt as its moving spirit, at Ushaw; and when much later in life he received the congratulations of St. Cuthbert’s College upon his elevation to the Cardinalate, the phrase which came quite naturally to him, in explaining why he had left Ushaw so early, when barely sixteen, was that of ‘the splendid temptation of Rome,’
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