will pass, and literary monuments will accumulate, and works far more perfect than the works of Lessing and Herder will be produced in Germany; and yet the names of these two men will fill a German with a reverence and enthusiasm such as the names of the most gifted masters will hardly awaken. And why? Because they humanised knowledge; because they broadened the basis of life and intelligence; because they worked powerfully to diffuse sweetness and light, to make reason and the will of God prevail. With Saint Augustine they said: "Let us not leave thee alone to make in the secret of thy knowledge, as thou didst before the creation of the firmament, the division of light from darkness; let the children of thy spirit, placed in their firmament, make their light shine upon the earth, mark the division of night and day, and announce the revolution of the times; for the old order is passed, and the new arises; the night is spent, the day is come forth; and thou shalt crown the year with thy blessing, when thou shalt send forth labourers into thy harvest sown by other hands than theirs; when thou shalt send forth new labourers to new seedtimes, whereof the harvest shall be not yet."

LESLIE STEPHEN (1832-1904)

FROM NEWMAN'S THEORY OF BELIEF Some persons, it is said, still cherish the pleasant illusion that to write a history of thought is not, on the face of it, a chimerical undertaking. Their opinion implies the assumption that all contemporary thought has certain common characteristics, and that the various prophets, inspired by the spirit of this or any other age, utter complementary rather than contradictory doctrines. Could we attain the vantage-ground which will be occupied by our posterity, we might, of course, detect an underlying unity of purpose in the perplexing labyrinth of divergent intellectual parts. And yet, making all allowance for the distortions due to mental perspective when the objects of vision are too close to our eyes, it is difficult to see how two of the most conspicuous teachers of modern Englishmen are to be forced into neighbouring compartments of the same logical framework. Newman and J. S. Mill were nearly contemporaries; they were probably the two greatest masters of philosophical English in recent times, and the mind of the same generation will bear the impress of their

speculation. And yet they move in spheres of thought so different that a critic, judging purely from internal evidence, might be inclined to assign them to entirely different periods. The distance from Oxford to Westminster would seem to be measurable rather in centuries than in miles. Oxford, as Newman says, was, in his time, a "mediæval university.' The roar of modern controversies was heard dimly, as in a dream. Only the vague rumours of portentous phantoms of German or English origin - Pantheism and neologies and rationalism — might occasionally reach the quiet cloisters where Aristotelian logic still reigned supreme. To turn from Newman's "Apologia" to Mill's "Autobiography" is, in the slang of modern science, to plunge the organism in a totally different environment. With Newman we are knee-deep in the dust of the ancient fathers, poring over the histories of Eutychians, Monophysites, or Arians, comparing the teaching of Luther and Melanchthon with that of Augustine; and from such dry bones extracting - not the materials of antiquarian discussions or philosophical histories - but living and effective light for our own guidance. The terminal limit of our inquiries is fixed by Butler's "Analogy." Newman ends where Mill began. It was precisely the study of Butler's book which was the turning-point in the mental development of the elder Mill, and the cause of his son's education in entire ignorance of all that is generally called religion. The foundation-stone of Mill's creed is to Newman the great rock of offence; the atmosphere habitually breathed by the free-thinker was to the theologian as a mephitic vapour in which all that is pure and holy mentally droops and dies. But, for the most part, Newman would rather ignore than directly encounter this insidious evil. He will not reason with such, but pass them by with an averted glance. "Why," he asks, "should we vex ourselves to find out whether our own deductions are philosophical or no, provided they are religious?"

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That free play of the pure intellect, which with Mill is the necessary and sufficient guarantee of all improvement of the race, forms, according to Newman, the inlet for an "allcorroding and all-dissolving" scepticism, the very poison of the soul; for the intellect, when not subordinated to the conscience and enlightened by authority, is doomed to a perpetuity of fruitless wandering. The shibboleths of Mill's creed are mentioned by Newman

For the most part, as I have said, the two writers are too far apart to have even the relation of direct antagonism. But as both are profoundly interested in the bearing of their teaching upon conduct, they necessarily come into collision upon some vital questions. The contrast is instructive. Mill tells us that the study of Dumont's redaction of Bentham made him a different being. It was the dropping of the keystone into the arch of previously fragmentary belief. It gave him "a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion; the inculcation and diffusion of which would be made the principal outward purpose of a life." The progress of the race would be henceforward his aim; and the belief that such progress was a law of Nature could supply him with hope and animation. Here we have the characteristic divergence between the modes of thought native to science and theology. Utilitarianism, when Newman happens to mention it, is, of course, mentioned as equivalent to Materialism—the preference of temporal comfort to spiritual welfare. It prescribes as the ultimate end of all legislation the pursuit of "whatever tends to produce wealth." From Newman's point of view, it is less "a religion" than the antithesis of a religion, for the end which it proposes to men is, briefly, the sum-total of all the seductions by which the world attracts men from their allegiance to the Church. To emphasise and enforce this distinction, to show that the Christian morality tramples under foot and rejects as worthless all that the secular philosopher values as most precious, is the purpose of his subtlest logic and keenest rhetoric. The contrast between the prosperous self-satisfied denizen of this world and the genuine Christianity set forth in the types of the "humble monk, and the holy nun," is ever before him. In their "calm faces, and sweet plaintive voices, and spare frames, and gentle manners, and hearts weaned from the world," he sees the embodiment of the one true ideal.

What common ground can there be between such Christianity and the religion of progress? "Our race's progress and perfectibility," he says, "is a dream, because revelation contradicts it." And even if there were no explicit contradiction, how could the two ideas coalesce? The "foundation of all true doctrine as to the way of salvation" is the "great truth" of the corruption of man. His present nature is evil, not good, and produces evil things, not good things. His improvement, then, if he improves, must be supernatural and miraculous, not the spontaneous working of his natural tendencies. The very basis of rational hope of progress is therefore struck away. The enthusiasm which that hope generates in such a mind as Mill's is therefore mere folly it is an empty exul tation over a process which, when it really exists, involves the more effectual weaning of the world from God. In his sermons, Newman aims his sharpest taunts at the superficial optimism of the disciples of progress. The popular religion of the day forgets the "darker, deeper views" (darker as deeper) "of man's condition and prospects." Conscience, the fundamental religious faculty, is a "stern, gloomy principle," and therefore systematically ignored by worldly and shallow souls. A phrase, quoted in the "Apologia" with some implied apology for its vehemence, is but a vivid expression of this sentiment. It is his "firm conviction that it would be a gain to this country were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion, than at present it shows itself to be." The great instrument of his opponents is as objectionable as their end is futile and their temper shallow. The lovers of progress found their hopes on the influence of illumination in dispelling superstition. "Superstition," replies Newman, "is better than your so-called illumination." Superstition, in fact, differs from religion, not in the temper and disposition of mind which it indicates, but in the authority which it accepts; it is the blind man groping after the guiding hand vouchsafed to him in revelation. The world, when trying to turn to its Maker, has "ever professed a gloomy religion in spite of itself." Its sacrifices, its bodily tortures, its fierce delight in self-tormenting, testify to its sense of guilt and corruption. These "dark and desperate struggles" are superstition when set beside Christianity; but such superstition "is man's purest and best religion before the Gospel shines on him." To be gloomy, to see ourselves with horror, "to wait naked and

shivering among the trees of the garden" . . . "in a word, to be superstitious is Nature's best offering, her most acceptable service, her most matured and enlarged wisdom, in presence of a holy and offended God."

The contrast is drawn out most systematically in two of the most powerful of the lectures on "Anglican Difficulties" (Nos. VIII and IX). They contain some of the passages which most vexed the soul of poor Kingsley, to whom the theory was but partly intelligible, and altogether abhorrent. They are answers to the ordinary objections that Catholicism is hostile to progress and favourable to superstition. Newman meets the objections not by traversing the statements, but by denying their relevancy. Catholic countries are, let us grant, less civilised than Protestant; what then? The office of the Church is to save souls, not to promote civilisation. As he had said whilst still a Protestant (for this is no theory framed under pressure of arguments, but a primitive and settled conviction), the Church does not seek to make men good subjects, good citizens, good members of society, not, in short, to secure any of the advantages which the Útilitarian would place in the first rank, but to make them members of the New Jerusalem. The two objects are so far from identical that they may be incompatible; nay, it is doubtful whether "Christianity has at any time been of any great spiritual advantage to the world at large.' It has saved individuals, not reformed society. Intellectual enlightenment is beyond its scope, and often hurtful to its influence. So says the Protestant, and fancies that he has aimed a blow at its authority. Newman again accepts his statement without hesitation. In truth, Catholicism often generates mere superstition, and allies itself with falsehood, vice, and profanity. What if it does? It addresses the conscience first, and the reason through the conscience. Superstition proves that the conscience is still alive. If divine faith is found in alliance, not merely with gross conceptions, but with fraud and cruelty, that proves not, as the Protestant would urge, that good Catholicism may sanction vice, but that even vice cannot destroy Catholicism. Faith lays so powerful a grasp upon the soul, that it survives even in the midst of moral and mental degradation, where the less rigorous creed of the Protestant would be asphyxiated. If the power of saving souls be the true test of the utility of a religion, that is not the genuine creed which makes men most decorous, but that which stimulates the

keenest sensibility to the influences of the unseen world. The hope of ultimate pardon may make murder more frequent, but it gives a better chance of saving the murderer's soul at the very foot of the gallows.

Applying so different a standard, Newman comes to results shocking to those who would deny the possibility of thus separating natural virtue from religion. Such, for example, is the contrast between the pattern statesman, honourable, generous, and conscious by nature, and the lazy, slatternly, lying beggarwoman who has got a better chance of heaven, because in her may dwell a seed of supernatural faith; or the admiring picture of the poor nun who "points to God's wounds as imprinted on her hands and feet and side, though she herself has been instrumental in their formation." She is a liar or a hysterical patient, says blunt English common-sense, echoed by Kingsley; but Newman condones her offence in consideration of the lively faith from which it sprang. On his version, the contrast is one between the world and the Church, between care for the external and the transitory, and care for the enclosed and eternal. "We," he says, "come to poor human nature as the angels of God; you as policemen." Nature "lies, like Lazarus, at your gate, full of sores. You see it gasping and panting with privations and penalties; and you sing to it, you dance to it, you show it your picture-books, you let off your fireworks, you open your menageries. Shallow philosophers! Is this mode of going on so winning and persuasive that we should imitate it?" We, in short, are the physicians of the soul; you, at best, the nurses of the body.

Newman, so far, is the antithesis of Mill. He accepts that version of Christianity which is most diametrically opposed to the tendency of what is called modern thought. The Zeitgeist is a deluding spirit; he is an incarnation of the world, the flesh, and the devil. That two eminent thinkers should differ radically in their estimate of the world and its value, that the Church of one man's worship should be the prison of another man's reason, is not surprising. Temperament and circumstance, not logic, make the difference between a pessimist and an optimist, and social conditions have a more powerful influence than speculation in giving colour to the creeds of the day. Yet we may fairly ask for an explanation of the fact that one leader of men should express his conceptions by symbols which have lost all meaning for his contemporary. The doctrine

which, to Mill, seemed hopelessly obsolete, had still enough vitality in the mind of Newman to throw out fresh shoots of extraordinary vigour of growth. To account for such phenomena by calling one system reactionary is to make the facts explain themselves. The stream is now flowing east because it was before flowing west:

Such a reason can only satisfy those who regard all speculation as consisting in a helpless and endless oscillation between antagonist creeds. To attempt any adequate explanation, however, would be nothing less than to write the mental history of the last half-century. A more limited problem may be briefly discussed. What, we may ask, is the logic by which, in the last resort, Newman would justify his conclusions? The reasoning upon which he relies may be cause or effect; it may have prompted or been prompted by the ostensible conclusions; but, in any case, it may show us upon what points he comes into contact with other teachers. No one can quite cut himself loose from the conditions of the time; and it must be possible to find some point of intersection between the two lines of thought, however widely they may diverge.

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WALTER PATER (1839-1894)

STYLE

Since all progress of mind consists for the most part in differentiation, in the resolution of an obscure and complex object into its component aspects, it is surely the stupidest of losses to confuse things which right reason has put asunder, to lose the sense of achieved distinctions, the distinction between poetry and prose, for instance, or, to speak more exactly, between the laws and characteristic excellences of verse and prose composition. On the other hand, those who have dwelt most emphatically on the distinction between prose and verse, prose and poetry, may sometimes have been tempted to limit the proper functions of prose too narrowly; and this again is at least false economy, as being, in effect, the renunciation of a certain means or faculty, in a world where after all we must needs make the most of things. Critical efforts to limit art a priori, by anticipations regarding the natural incapacity of the material with which this or that artist works, as the sculptor with solid form, or the prosewriter with the ordinary language of men, are always liable to be discredited by the facts of

artistic production; and while prose is actually found to be a coloured thing with Bacon, picturesque with Livy and Carlyle, musical with Cicero and Newman, mystical and intimate with Plato and Michelet and Sir Thomas Browne, exalted or florid, it may be, with Milton and Taylor, it will be useless to protest that it can be nothing at all, except something very tamely and narrowly confined to mainly practical ends - a kind of "good round-hand"; as useless as the protest that poetry might not touch prosaic subjects as with Wordsworth, or an abstruse matter as with Browning, or treat contemporary life nobly as with Tennyson. In subordination to one essential beauty in all good literary style, in all literature as a fine art, as there are many beauties of poetry so the beauties of prose are many, and it is the business of criticism to estimate them as such; as it is good in the criticism of verse to look for those hard, logical, and quasi-prosaic excellences which that too has, or needs. To find in the poem, amid the flowers, the allusions, the mixed perspectives, of Lycidas for instance, the thought, the logical structure: - how wholesome! how delightful! as to identify in prose what we call the poetry, the imaginative power, not treating it as out of place and a kind of vagrant intruder, but by way of an estimate of its rights, that is, of its achieved powers, there.

Dryden, with the characteristic instinct of his age, loved to emphasise the distinction between poetry and prose, the protest against their confusion with each other, coming with somewhat diminished effect from one whose poetry was so prosaic. In truth, his sense of prosaic excellence affected his verse rather than his prose, which is not only fervid, richly figured, poetic, as we say, but vitiated, all unconsciously, by many a scanning line. Setting up correctness, that humble merit of prose, as the central literary excellence, he is really a less correct writer than he may seem, still with an imperfect mastery of the relative pronoun. It might have been foreseen that, in the rotations of mind, the province of poetry in prose would find its assertor; and, a century after Dryden, amid very different intellectual needs, and with the need therefore of great modifications in literary form, the range of the poetic force in literature was effectively enlarged by Wordsworth. The true distinction between prose and poetry he regarded as the almost technical or accidental one of the absence or presence of metrica' beauty, or, say! metrical

restraint; and for him the opposition came to be between verse and prose of course; but, as the essential dichotomy in this matter, between imaginative, and unimaginative writing, parallel to De Quincey's distinction between "the literature of power and the literature of knowledge," in the former of which the composer gives us not fact, but his peculiar sense of fact, whether past or present.

Dismissing then, under sanction of Wordsworth, that harsher opposition of poetry to prose, as savouring in fact of the arbitrary psychology of the last century, and with it the prejudice that there can be but one only beauty of prose style, I propose here to point out certain qualities of all literature as a fine art, which, if they apply to the literature of fact, apply still more to the literature of the imaginative sense of fact, while they apply indifferently to verse and prose, so far as either is really imaginative certain conditions of true art in both alike, which conditions may also contain in them the secret of the proper discrimination and guardianship of the peculiar excellences of either.

The line between fact and something quite different from external fact is, indeed, hard to draw. In Pascal, for instance, in the persuasive writers generally, how difficult to define the point where, from time to time, argument which, if it is to be worth anything at all, must consist of facts or groups of facts, becomes a pleading- a theorem no longer, but essentially an appeal to the reader to catch the writer's spirit, to think with him, if one can or will an expression no longer of fact but of his sense of it, his peculiar intuition of a world, prospective, or discerned below the faulty conditions of the present, in either case changed somewhat from the actual world. In science, on the other hand, in history so far as it conforms to scientific rule, we have a literary domain where the imagination may be thought to be always an intruder. And as, in all science, the functions of literature reduce themselves eventually to the transcribing of fact, so all the excellences of literary form in regard to science are reducible to various kinds of painstaking; this good quality being involved in all "skilled work" whatever, in the drafting of an act of parliament, as in sewing. Yet here again, the writer's sense of fact, in history especially, and in all those complex subjects which do but lie on the borders of science, will still take the place of fact, in various degrees. Your historian, for instance, with absolutely truthful intention, amid the multitude of facts pre

sented to him must needs select, and in selecting assert something of his own humour, something that comes not of the world without but of a vision within. So Gibbon moulds his unwieldy material to a preconceived view. Livy, Tacitus, Michelet, moving full of poignant sensibility amid the records of the past, each, after his own sense, modifies - who can tell where and to what degree? - and becomes something else than a transcriber; each, as he thus modifies, passing into the domain of art proper. For just in proportion as the writer's aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the world, not of mere fact, but of his sense of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine art; and good art (as I hope ultimately to show) in proportion to the truth of his presentment of that sense; as in those humbler or plainer functions of literature also, truth - truth to bare fact, there is the essence of such artistic quality as they may have. Truth! there can be no merit, no craft at all, without that. And further, all beauty is in the long run only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within.

The transcript of his sense of fact rather than the fact, as being preferable, pleasanter, more beautiful to the writer himself. In literature, as in every other product of human skill, in the moulding of a bell or a platter for instance, wherever this sense asserts itself, wherever the producer so modifies his work as, over and above its primary use or intention, to make it pleasing (to himself, of course, in the first instance) there, "fine" as opposed to merely serviceable art, exists. Literary art, that is, like all art which is in any way imitative or reproductive of fact form, or colour, or incident is the representation of such fact as connected with soul, of a specific personality, in its preferences, its volition and power.

Such is the matter of imaginative or artistic literature this transcript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinite variety, as modified by human preference in all its infinitely varied forms. It will be good literary art not because it is brilliant or sober, or rich, or impulsive, or severe, but just in proportion as its representation of that sense, that soul-fact, is true, verse being only one department of such literature, and imaginative prose, it may be thought, being the special art of the modern world. That imaginative prose should be the special and opportune art of the modern world results from two important facts about the latter: