The Critics' Probation

Extract

A recent reading of the reviews of Wilfrid Ward's Life of Cardinal Newman in 1912 has deepened a long-harboured suspicion that appreciation of Newman is very much a moral matter. Whether you agree or disagree with his conclusions, you will never do him justice until you yourself begin to feel some spark of his deep and self-disregarding love of truth. Just acknowledgements have yet to be made by the literary spokesmen of England to the titanic genius of this great Englishman; but the failure, if failure it can be shown to be, is mainly a moral one.

When his biography appeared in 1912 it was met by a cautious but unmistakable disparagement of the Cardinal’s intellect. None of the writers indeed stooped so low as some of those of the generation before, when Carlyle, with shattering imperceptiveness, had described him as possessing “the intellect of a moderate-sized rabbit’’. Lord Morley too, more sweetly but with hardly less critical obtuseness, had written: “Mill had none of the incomparably winning graces by which Newman made mere syren style (italics mine) do duty for exact, penetrating and coherent thought: by which moreover he actually raised his church to what would not so long before have seemed a strange and inconceivable rank in the mind of Protestant England. Style has worked many a miracle before now, but none more wonderful than Newman’s.” To trace the Catholic Revival in England to Newman’s style needs nerve enough. But only the conviction that his readers knew the writings of Newman as little as he, could have steeled honest John Morley to accuse the author of The Grammar of Assent of abandoning exact, penetrating and coherent thought for mere honeyed words.