BOOKS.

THE LIFE OF W. G. WARD.*

[SECOND NOTICE.]

IN these days, every one almost knows the difference between. maximisers and minimisers, people who make the most of those characteristic principles by which they are distinguished from their antagonists, and people who are eager, we do not say to make the least of those distinctive principles, but to bring out in the fullest way all the softening lights and shades which render these distinctive principles less irritating and objectionable than they otherwise would be to those who reject them. Mr. Ward was always a maximiser. He made the most not merely of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual differences between himself and others, but of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual weaknesses of his own friends and of himself as well as of his opponents. Even as a schoolboy he maximised his own deficiencies, his own incapacities, his own ignorance ; not only did he dwell excessively on those deficiencies.

• William George Ward and the Orford Jirovamont. By Wilfrid Ward,,. London : Macmillan and Co.

and weaknesses, but he exaggerated them. And he betrayed positive glee in these exaggerations, which, indeed, he often hardly seemed to recognise as exaggerations, except that he would hardly have taken so much pleasure as he did in dwelling upon them if he had not more or less relished the touch of ex- travagance in what he said. One of the greatest charms of this "Life" is the vivacity with which Mr. Wilfrid Ward has brought out the naivete of his father's character as a maximiser of his own shortcomings, not altogether unmixed with a certain pride in his own scorn for those who would not frankly publish to the world their own shortcomings. Even as a schoolboy at Winchester, he was a maximiser of his own incapacity for verse, whether Latin or English, and yet he was an admirable Latin scholar, and could write admirable Latin prose. But he felt a certain inaptitude for entering into poetry, and, as usual, made the most of that inaptitude, and, indeed, felt the delight of a caricaturist in exaggerating a defect which was marked indeed, but by no means so great as it pleased him to describe it.. Mr. Wilfrid Ward, in his admirable picture of his father's school-life, gives us the following humorous instances of his great faculty for making fun of himself as a poet :—

" In the next year a gold medal was given for English verses on "The Spanish Captives sacrificed to the Mexican God of War." He began his medal task with a characteristic pun :— " Far from a merry key I now must sing,

Though to America my muse takes wing—"

and then proceeded:— "Long had the Spaniards crossed the watery way And reached the fields of bright America. Long since had Cortes, glorying in might And caring little for another's right, Both planned and tried to execute his plans Against the unoffendinz Mexicans.

What had they done to him the savage man That he against their liberty should plan r Nothing at all ; but he both wanted gold And fame: no other motive are we told—"

-with a good deal more of the same quality. The commencement of his poem on The Hebrides' is another characteristic specimen of his English verses :- 'There There are some islands in the Northern seas —At least I'm told so—called the Hebrides.'

And a little later a peculiar feature of a certain barbarous nation is thus referred to

These people have but very little wood; They therefore can't build ships. They wish they could.'

One other passage from the verse exercises remembered by his contemporaries may be quoted—the culmination of a poem on the 'Mariner's Compass.' After giving an extremely prosaic account, with dates and names, of the history of its invention, he proceeds thus to the further question of its description :-

'But now, alas ! my hardest task draws hear:

I must attempt it, though the attemi t I fear.

For who can worthily describe in rhyn:n This useful instrument, this art sublime ?

In vain with the best invention would one try To understand it without sight of eye : And he that's seen it surely will not need That I explain in word what he has seen in deed. But yet unwillingly at last FR try.'

At this point he found that only three lines more were wanted to complete the -minimum quantity required, and so he thus abruptly concluded

The various points and quarters of the sky Are painted on a card beneath a hole. Atop s a magnet pointing to the pole."

After all, it was a rather neat description of the compass, though by no means an imaginative one.

What Ward was in his boyhood, he was also in his youth .and at the University. His son gives us this most amusing description of his disgust and astonishment at his examiners' attempt to minimise his ignorance of the subject of one of his Latin translations at the nivel voce in "Greats :"— " The vivd voce examination in classics was public, and when a prominent man was being examined the schools were thronged by undergraduates and fellows. Considerable curiosity was felt as to how Ward would acquit himself, and the audience was large. One of Cicero's letters to his brother Quintus is chosen, and the examiner tells Ward to turn to a particular part. Ward reads it admirably, his voice being excellent, his intonation and inflections faultless, and his sense of the meaning and spirit of the passage leaving nothing to be desired. Attention is aroused. The audience —consisting of a large number of undergraduates and a good sprinkling of dons—is on the qui sive. Here is a firstrate man evidently. The construing comes next, which, if not quite so ex- ceptionally good as the reading, still quite bears out the expecta- tion of a display of first-class ability. The examiner, in obvious good humour, says at the end, Very well, Mr. Ward, and now let me ask you, What are the principal letters which we have now extant of Cicero ? To whom were they written P'—Ward (without the slightest hesitation), I really don't know.'—The examiner (surprised, and after a short pause), The letter from which you have just construed a passage was written on the eve of a very

zventful ; can you tell me something of the events which

followed immediately afterwards ?'—Ward, I know nothing whatever about them.' This was said with perfect gravity and in a tone of philosophic resignation.—' Take your time, Mr. Ward,' says the examiner ; you are nervous.'—` No, sir,' replies Ward, it's not nervousness ; pure ignorance.'—The examiner made another attempt. In what year was it written ?'—Ward (with energy), I haven't the slightest idea.' (Father Faber used to say that as the examination proceeded he began to give his answers in a tone of resentment, as though the questions were impertinent ones.) His frank confessions of ignorance attracted the attention of the well-known Dr. Jenkyns of Darnel, and drew from him an often-quoted malaprop : There is a candid Ingenuity about the fellow which pleases me,' he remarked to a friend. Ward's scholarship, however, went for a good deal ; and though in the face of his disregard of the required historical and collateral work a first class was out of the question, the examiners gave him a second."

And it may be truly said that Mr. Ward went on to the end as he began. He was a maximiser of all his difficulties, or what his rivals and critics thought his diffi- culties, from the beginning of his life to the end. As in later days he honestly magnified the significance of the Vatican decree concerning the infallibility of the Pope in matters of religion and morality, to the great disgust of most of the ex-Anglicans, and had no patience with the school which attenuated, and made light of, the meaning of that decree,—so in early life he made much of his incapacity for poetry, made much of his incapacity for history, made much, too, of the intrinsic uninstructiveness of mere historic information, and took great delight not merely in confessing how little history he knew, but in a paradoxical exaggeration of the uselessness of knowing more. "I would as soon," he said, know all about Mr. Smith getting up in the morn- ing, having his breakfast, and going to the City in a 'bus, as the details of Cambyses conquering Egypt." And no doubt this decided contempt for the dry facts of history, had a very close connection with the course of his subsequent theological development. He left the historical side of the ecclesiastical question at issue so completely to Mr. Newman, that one of his pupils reports him as asking his friend Mr. Oakeley, purely for information's sake, and not as though it were of any real import- ance how the question might be answered, " Melancthon was not so detestable as the rest of the Reformers, was he ?" In each an attitude of mind as that question implied, you see plainly enough the maximiser of differences between him- self and his opponents ; for not only did he love to over- state his disapprobation of the Reformers, but he loved to overstate both his ignorance of the Reformation and his indifference to the real verdict of history on matters of fact connected with it, with an ostentation that must have been exceedingly irritating to those who rested their Protestantism very much on the supposed moral superiority of the Reformers to their Roman Catholic antago- nists. Just in the same maximising temper is one of his pamphlets on Tract 90, where he says that Mr. Newman " inti- mates not very obscurely, that in releasing her [the English Church] from the Roman supremacy, her then governors were guilty of rebellion, and considering that they had also sworn obedience to the Pope, for my own part, I see not how we can avoid adding—of perjury." Again, in the same attitude of mind, he denounced the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith without any attempt to get at the heart of the attraction which it undoubtedly had for spirits wearied with the effort to perform dead works," characterising it as one "which could not be held consistently even by the devils" (p. 286). And in reviewing his work as editor of the British Critic, he said, with a dogmatic glee quite unique in kind, and which probably no man but himself ever indulged to the same extent : —" Speaking still of the same abstract Lutheran doctrine, there is no one circumstance connected with my humble efforts in the British Critic on which I look back with so much satis- faction as on this,—that I have ventured to characterise that most hateful and fearful type of Antichrist in terms not wholly inadequate to its prodigious demerits." When Mr. Ward came to defend himself before the celebrated meeting of Convocation at Oxford in which his book on The Ideal of a Christian Church was discussed and condemned, he showed the same desire to avoid everything that could by any conceivable imagination be interpreted as conciliating his opponents. He laid it down, and we rather think quite truly, that there was no " natural " sense at all in which all the different parties of the Church of England could by any possibility subscribe the Thirty- nine Articles, and that if, as he cheerfully avowed, he had

subscribed them in a non-natural sense, so had all other subscribers. Mr. Wilfrid Ward gives the effect of the most unconciliatory speech ever delivered by an accused person, since the apology of Socrates, in the following interesting

passage :— "The general impression produced by it [Mr. Ward's speech] on the writer in the Times quoted above is thus recorded by him : — 'Mr. Ward's speech occupied somewhat more than an hour. He spoke with remarkable rapidity, but at the same time with great calmness and self-possession —with the air of a man, in fact, who felt a deep conviction that he was right.' It had in it little that was conciliatory. Even when his argument was strongest and most convincing, and his delivery most forcible, he would remind his hearers—paren- thetically, as Professor Jowett tells me—that he held the whole cycle of Roman doctrine.' To its power many who remember it testify in strong terms. Stanley, who was standing near Jowett, said to him, They would never have let Ward speak in English if they had known how well he could speak.' But his whole defence im- plied and expressed as its sole ground the unwelcome assumption of the hopelessly illogical character of the English Church. His judges were, he maintained, utterly unjustified, in all consistency of logic, in condemning him, because the Church to which they belonged was itself hopelessly inconsistent. If the rest of the Anglican formularies were consistent with the Articles, he had no locus slandi. But amid a hopeless jumble of inconsistent pledges, he remained free and untrammelled ;—and the Church remained convicted of folly and self-contradiction. The effect of the speech

on the hostile majority is thus described by one of them His speech in defence,' continues the writer in the Edinburgh B,etnew

already cited, was exceedingly well delivered ; boldly,

clearly, with great self-possession but the matter seemed intended audilores malevolos facere. Every statement and every inference that could offend their prejudices, irritate their vanity, or wound their self-respect, was urged with the zeal of a cAndidate for martyrdom. In deference, he said, to the advice of his lawyer, he stated that his opinions had entirely changed since his subscription ; and even if the case had been other-

wise, he denied the legal right of Convocation to punish by degradation. These matters, however (which were the strong

points of his case) he passed over briefly. He then restated his full assent to all the doctrines of Rome ; he restated his readiness to repeat his subscription ; he repeated that he be-

lieved and was ready to subscribe to the Articles in a non-

natural sense ; and he affirmed that the imponens of subscription intended that they should be so subscribed, for that, if thc. imponens did not so intend, he must have intended that they should not be subscribed at all. He contrasted the Articles in their natural sense with the Prayer-book, with each other, and with the common feelings and opinions of mankind ; and then put it to his hearers, High Church and Low Church, Calvinistic and Arminian, whether their subscription was not as unnatural as his own.' 'After all,' wrote the late Canon Mozley, two days after the scene, I really am astonished at the number of men and sort of men who supported Ward after such avowals as he made. It is really a phenomenon to me. If he said once, he said twenty times in the course of his speech, I believe all the doctrines of the Roman Church.'"

And if Mr. Ward were a maximiser of all the objections that could be taken to his position while he remained in the Church of England, he certainly did not alter his attitude after he joined the Church of Rome. This brilliant volume does not follow him beyond the year of his conversion ; but every one who knew him in later life, knew that Mr. Ward loved to press all the most characteristic of the Roman doctrines to an extreme which rendered them as unpalatable as possible to Anglicans, and that especially as regarded the infallibility of the Holy See in matters of faith and morals, he held the highest possible form of that doctrine,—a far higher form of it than any to which the present Pope would give his sanction.

And yet there was a very real sense in which this tendency of Mr. Ward's to exaggerate the disagreeableness, as one might say, as well to himself as to his friends, of any con- viction he held, was not due to a love of exaggeration for the sake of exaggeration, but to a curious blending of causes, one of which was a singular candour of intellect, and another, and still more potent cause, a logical passion for stripping off what he thought " accidents " of a dogmatic truth,—in other words, an indisposition to look at it in the way in which it is practically held by human minds, with all the modifications which actually temper its sig- nificance, a craving to see it in what he thought its naked reality, and without the lights and shadows which seemed to him to divert the mind from its essence. In many men, the love of exaggeration springs from a radical untruthfulness. In Mr. Ward, it sprang from a directly opposite cause, an extraordinary and, if one can so speak, an exaggerated candour, and a candour that was not only moral but logical, and that was, therefore, rather

irritated than impressed by any attempt to diminish the logical force of a statement in the interests of psychological accuracy. We believe, for instance, that a great deal which Mr. Ward denounced in most forcible and effective language as the Lutheran figment of "justification by faith," he really held himself, though in another and probably more accu- rate form, as the doctrine of the necessity of " prevenient " grace before any real humility, obedience, or virtue could be engendered. But he was too hasty in his logical methods to study the forms in which religious experience naturally expressed itself in natures different from his own, and he did not recognise how often the truth he would jealously have defended in one form of words, was really intended to be expressed by his opponents in another form of words. But nothing is more certain than that his exaggera- tions were the exaggerations of an extreme intellectual and moral truthfulness, rather than the exaggerations of a romancer of any kind. Indeed, the deep interest of this powerful biography consists in the exhibition of the astounding coolness and intrepidity with which Mr. Ward would strip a truth of what he thought (sometimes mistakenly) to be mis- leading accidents, and the moral intolerance of anythinglike the toning-down of a conviction, with which he pursued his "ideal" throughout a most unworldly, difficult, and often painful life. When he first joined the Roman Catholic Church, he was, as he knew, in the utmost danger of sacrificing all his worldly prospects to his convictions, and for years after he had joined it, he was compelled to live in comparative poverty; and yet he was never more happy than during the period in which he was threatened with something like need. He exulted in that sort of danger, as he exulted in the various logical and moral tortures to which he submitted minds which dared not face a naked truth, and also minds which loved to hide from them- selves the drift of their own convictions. There was nothing Mr. Ward enjoyed so much as tearing down shadowy excuses for not seeing things as they are; but we must add that to his mind things as they are, were things seen with such a fierce light beating on them, as often misrepresented their true proportions and obliterated their finer nuances altogether. Never was there a more curious alliance than the alliance between Mr. Ward, with his brilliant but somewhat hard Southern idealism and even harder moral realism, and Mr. Newman, with all the delicacy of a living insight into human character, and of a literary feeling never equalled in his own day, and never surpassed in any age of English literature. Mr. Ward's mind was one of rare vigour, eminently fitted to lead while prone in its humility to follow. But in this book he is restored to his true place as second, and a most powerful second, in a movement which has completely transformed Anglicanism, and gravely modified some of the tendencies even of Roman Catholic teaching.