NEWMAN AND TENNYSON.

THE unveiling of Cardinal Newman's statue on Wednes- day at the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, was an event which we cannot help looking on as the consequence of a

national mistake. Newman was no doubt a Roman Catholic, and a deserter from the Anglican communion, but he was a

great Englishman before he was either, and perhaps more distinctively a great Oxonian than anything else. Oxford ought to have claimed him instead of rejecting him, as unluckily she did. His genius was full of the very essence of Oxford's great motto, "Deus illuminati° mea," and his

manner was the embodiment of that "sweetness and light" which has characterised so many of the best Oxford teachers, till it has often been called the Oxford manner. The Roman Catholics saw this and generously offered the statue of their great thinker to Oxford ; but Oxford was too shy of the Roman Catholic faith,—though it was the faith of Oxford itself in an age when the University was more of a European than of an English institution,—to accept the offer, and has thereby lost the memorial of one of the greatest and most impressive figures amongst her sons. The late Poet-Laureate, whose most characteristic aim in life was by no means far

removed from Cardinal Newman's, seeing that both these great men confronted the deepest doubt boldly, and yet in a spirit eager to show that faith is deeper and truer than doubt, has said with something of paradox,— " There is more faith in honest doubt,

Believe me, than in half the creeds."

Bat though Newman would hardly have said that, for he did not love paradox, and perhaps would have been more disposed to say, what is also true, "There is more doubt in shrinking faith, believe me, than in half the heresies," there never was a religions thinker, certainly never a great ecclesiastic, who expressed more powerfully and more candidly the great doubts with which he grappled, or who taught his friends to face them with a calmer and a clearer glance. Mr. Wilfrid Ward, who has done so much to promote the knowledge of the great Cardinal's writings,—with a complete belief in his hero's ultimate solution of those doubts which we have never been able to share,—has quite lately published in a paper, to which we referred a fortnight ago, in the New Review, a study of Tennyson, which seems to us to demonstrate how much and how deep a sympathy there was between the most charac- teristic aim of Tennyson as a religious thinker and that of the Oxford leader who ended his days as a Cardinal of the Church of Rome. And though Cardinal Newman's name is never mentioned, so far as we remember, in Mr. Wilfrid Ward's article, we are very glad to avail ourselves of its drift, to illustrate our contention that there was quite enough of parallelism between the religions aims of these two very different men, with their two widely different manners, to show how ill Oxford understood her own characteristic aims, when she practically declined to recog- nise Newman except as a deserter from her fold. Newman, no doubt, was a far more earnest believer in the dogmas of Christianity than Tennyson, who never succeeded in recon- ciling himself wholly to the Christian creeds, profoundly aa he revered and loved the person of Christ. But we do not scruple to say that his method was the same as Newman's, though he could not go so far as Newman went in accepting the intellectual form in which historical Christianity had embodied itself in the creeds of the Church. Mr. Wilfrid Ward's paper

has been talked of as if it were an unauthorised revelation of private confidences between Tennyson and himself. Nothing ean be more ridiculous than such a statement, and we doubt whether those who think so have carefully read what they so describe. It is, we venture to say, a lucid exhibition of thoughts written all over the most definitely religions of Lord Tennyson's poems, and though, with the exception of "The Two Voices," they are by no means amongst his greatest poems, they are certainly amongst the writings which most definitely express the aims dearest to Tennyson's heart, and bring him nearer to the great Tractarian leader as regards his inmost thoughts, than we could ever have expected men so different and so widely severed in their origin and their walk in life, to come.

What was certainly common to the dearest objects of Newman and Tennyson is—that while they both believed that faith is deeper than doubt, they both endeavoured to confront doubt with the steadiest and most intrepid gaze, and held that the more frankly we meet and measure it, even when it seems to threaten us with utter disaster, the more surely shall we ultimately triumph over, not indeed all our doubts, but all those which would leave us without any helm in the storm, and without any compass by which to steer. Let us trace the principles which seem to be common to Newman and Tennyson in dealing with the fundamental incredulities of the human intellect. In the first place, there is perfect agreement on the point that the sense of duty is the deepest root of faith. Cardinal Newman, naturally enough, put this with more point and effectiveness than the Poet-Laureate, though both of them put it clearly and definitely enough.

Newman is never tired of pressing the point that the spirit of obedience to duty is the beginning of all true

He held that even the most heretical parents should find their ohildren obedient, and that in that early obedience the first step would be taken towards a truer faith. He makes his hero in "Loss and Gain" rebuke a friend for saying, "I can't believe this or that," and declare that, if only he could find any one with proper authority to say, "this is true," then he "ought

to believe it," and not to say that he cannot believe it simply because it is beyond the power of the human intellect to com- prehend. Tennyson took the same line of thought in dealing with doubt. He regarded the instinct of the conscience as the root of faith. "His method," says Mr. Wilfrid Ward, "con- sisted in the presentation of two opposing veins of thought, of questioning and doubt on the one hand, and of instinctive assurance on the other. Each line of thought is given its weight The instinctive assurance is not set aside in con- sequence of the speculative doubt, nor is it allowed to check the doubt in its critical function. Doubt and questioning may lead to the discovery that some instinctive beliefs are based on mere prejudice. Yet there are instincts which bear in them signs of authority,—as the inner voice appealed to in 'The Ancient Sage,'—and the fact is recognised that doubt and questioning may be morbid and a consequence of in- tellectual defect. In 'The Two Voices' these two elements

are formally expressed." And Mr. Wilfrid Ward quotes the poet's own definition of his aim :—

"As far as might be, to carve out Free spars for every human doubt, That the whole mind might orb about.

To search thro' all I felt or saw

The springs of life, the depths of awe, And read the law within the law."

We do not suppose that Cardinal Newman ever desired to provide fresh space "for every human doubt" for which he thought that there was ample space already in our restless

intelligence as we know it. But he undoubtedly desired greatly "to reach the law within the law," and there he and Tennyson were working on common ground. Moreover, as his University lectures show, he wholly disapproved any attempt to stifle doubt as distinct from the effort to confront

it fairly with the deeper facts of life.

Again, look at the profound sympathy between the view of the late Poet-Laureate and the view of Cardinal Newman on the subject of the limited and closely hedged-in free-will of man. Mr. Wilfrid Ward reports Lord Tennyson as saying,— "Man is free, but only free in certain narrow limits. His character and his acquired habits limit his freedom. They are like the cage of a bird. The bird can hop at will from one perch to another, and to the floor of the cage, but not beyond its bars." And so, too, Cardinal Newman, though on this

point more of an idealist than Tennyson, insisted on the narrow verge of human liberty, and even ventured to satirise

the disposition to glory only in the possession of a liberty which we do not know how to use. Liberty, he insisted, is only valuable to those who can find the highest guidance for its exercise, and is even injurious to those who are satisfied with the mere possession of it, and regard the mode in which it is to be exercised as something more or less irrelevant to the joy of being at liberty to go wrong. He could not endure the jauntiness with which men riot in the idle possession of one of the most responsible of gifts. Those, he declared, who say to themselves, "I am examining, I am scrutinising, I am free to choose or reject, I am exercising the right of private judgment," are about as wise as the person who ostentatiously exults in his grief for a friend, and says, "I am weeping, I am overcome and agonised for the second or third time, I am resolved to weep," and of such a one we should certainly say that his grief was not profound. And so the sense of liberty cannot be serious in a man who is content to make a great fuss over it, and not to take that anxious care to exercise it rightly which alone shows his real value for it. To Newman liberty of choice was a " dread " gift :—

" Son of immortal seed, high-destined Man ! Know thy dread gift,—a creature, yet a cause : Each mind is its own centre, and it draws Home to itself, and moulds in its thought's span All outward things, the vassals of its will, Aided by Heaven, by earth unthwarted still."

That is written in the noblest style of Tennyson's verse, but it was published before Tennyson had produced anything in that high strain.

Of course the most important and remarkable of the analogies between Newman and Tennyson was the very deep conviction shared by both, of the absolute certainty of the relation of God to the soul of man. Newman tells in his " Apologia " that "from a very early age" he had "rested in the thought of two, and two only, supreme and luminously

self-evident beings, myself and my Creator," and that con- viction may be regarded as the very root of all he had to say in this world, however wide-spreading may have been its leaves and branches. It was nearly the same with Tennyson. Let us hear Mr. Wilfrid Ward's account of the manner in which Lord Tennyson, almost at the last, read to him the "Be Pro- fundis " as his deepest profession of faith :—

" He raised his eyes from the book at the seventh line and looked for a moment at his hearer with an indescribable expression of awe before he uttered the word 'spirit':—' Out of the deep- Spirit—out of the deep.' When be had finished the second greeting he was trembling much. Then he read the prayer—a prayer, he had told me, of self-prostration before the Infinite. I think he intended it as a contrast with the analytical and re- flective character of the rest. It is an outpouring of the simplest and most intense self-abandonment to the Creator, an acknowledg- ment, when all has been thought and said with such insight and beauty, that our best thoughts and words are as nothing in the Great Presence—in a sense parallel to the breaking off in the ode to the Duke of Wellington :—` Speak no more of his renown, Lay your earthly fancies down."

That is Tennyson, and what says Cardinal Newman in his de profundis :— " Take me sway, and in the lowest deep

There let me be, And there in hope the lone night-watches keep, Told out for me.

There, motionless and happy in my pain,

Lone, not forlorn,—

There will I sing my sad perpetual strain, Until the morn.

There will I sing, and soothe my stricken breast, Which ne'er can cease To throb, and pine, and languish, till possest Of its Sole Peace."

Surely there we see a singular depth of ultimate sympathy between the almost Puritan poet, whose face, with its haggard and even moody lines, has spoken the deepest spiritual truth to this generation of the English people, and the great Cardinal whom Oxford disowned, because he had in some sense dis- owned Oxford when he left the University be loved so tenderly in the fashion which he himself had foreshadowed long before, when he described himself as "a pilgrim pale with Paul's sad girdle bound." Surely Newman, Roman Catholic though he was, should have been claimed for England as Tennyson was claimed for England. Of course he was not nearly so great a poet, but perhaps he was even greater as a man.