BOOKS A Liberal Tory ?
By SEAN O'FAOLA IN NEWMAN was so much of a recluse as com- pared to Manning, took by comparison so alight an interest in social questions and topical affairs, that at first sight it would seem to be the drawing of a rather long bow to speak of his 'political thoughts.'* And it must remain so at second and third and last sight if the two words are taken as connoting the practical science of government, or theories of government and administration, or an organised system of political philosophy, or indeed anything systematic or concrete. The words bring us back again, rather, with a jolt, to the view of Newman as not so much a thinker as an artist—a. man who could turn logic into poetry and history into reverie, something of a visionary, even of a prophet, wed- ding as nobody else has done with quite the same success the processes of reasoning and of the imagination. But if we think of his 'political thought' as meaning something like his political Principles or attitudes, then the adventure of extracting these from the scattered mass of his writings, though still an arduous prospect, be- comes at least a challenge which a brave, learned and persistent man might dare to accept. Mr. Kenny has all the necessary qualifications. If he (and his reader) comes out of the tussle breathing heavily, with ruffled locks and slightly strabismal eyes, the fault—it is not quite the right word—is Newman's. One feels more than a little Kings- leyish when it is all over; wishing, that is, that Newman would use words in their more usual sense; also a little Stracheyish, amused, however respectfully and admiringly, at Newman's efforts to describe the things of the world to men of the World while seeing both with the eyes of an angelic entomologist. Newman attempting to cope with the world: on any terms, is always a fascinat- ing sight but not always a solemn one.
Mr. Kenny's main thesis might seem to be that Newman was a Liberal disguised as a Conserva- tive; neither in so far as he was a Liberal at all ithe a pratiquant nor a croyant, at best some- thing of a fellow-traveller, liable at any moment i to shift his ground in the middle of his argument, While at the same time roundly refusing to admit that he had done anything of the kind. (This was the thing that, as we say, drove Kingsley up the wall in their famous' controversy.) It is Mr. Kenny's delight to seek for the ultimate consis- ,tency of his sinuous thought, and it is ours when he finds it, or seems to find it. He finds it, naturally, only on the loftiest Founds—Liberalism sub specie ceternitatis; and Yet at the same time, somehow or other, related
THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF JOHN HENRY NEW-
M "' BY Terence Kenny. (Longmans, 21s.) ...1' l-ErrEits OF JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. Edited by munel Spark and Derek Stanford. (Peter Owen, 25s.) to the lives of ordinary men and women engaged in their blundering pursuit of beauty and truth. But is it not precisely this two-dimensional quality of Newman's mind that we all find so entrancing? Other men's thoughts keep in the main to a horizontal movement, with occasional, rather timid levitations. Newman's thought is perpet- ually soaring and sinking like one of those helicopters that one sees above Los Angeles directing the traffic from a great height. His terminology changes its meaning a little accord- ing to his altitude, or its distance from its object; as when he said, for instance, in Historical Sketches that among the 'objects of the imagina- tion' which constituted the life of the 'barbarian,' as opposed to the civilised state we must include 'Toryism'—meaning for the purposes of this con- text 'belief in persons and families.' But this concept of Toryism as a barbarian fetish does not make him love Liberals any the more.
It would appear, however, that on his conver- sion to Rome Newman gradually found himself impelled to stabilise himself at an altitude near enough to earth to enable him to see and sympathise with the milling populace as 'human beings as well as immortal souls. He could scarcely avoid it in Birmingham, even if he did think of his Oratory as a sort of microcosm of Athens. It was one thing (and altitude) to ask, 'When was demos ever other than a tyrant?' another to listen to some poor representative of Demos in the confessional on Saturday night admitting that he had been drunk, uttered oaths and near clubbed his wife to death the week before. Also, as Mr. Kenny has shrewdly observed, Newman's painfill experiences in Ireland in the Fifties must have taught him a great deal about such matters as the Temporal Power of the Papacy, Ultramontanism and Liberal Catholicism. ('. . . It was possibly the frustration he experienced when confronted by a reactionary clergy, in particular Cardinal Cul- len, which had the deepest effect on Newman, as far as his eventual political outlook was con- cerned.') Above all, nowhere could he have been any better situated than in Birmingham to sense about him the rise of the secular State on the basis of political Liberalism, and to realise not merely that it was unlikeable, or that it was pitch, or that it was inevitable, but that, being all three, it was likely to do least harm when mediocre, neutral and tolerant—least harm, that is, to the Roman Empire to which he belonged. He mately settled for that kind of State. The Chester- tonian, romantic-mediaevalist dream of a Christian State made no appeal to Newman. (Mr. Kenny stresses throughout that, for all his philosophic detachment, Newman had a very strong fibre of realism in his nature, a persistent desire to 'see things as they really are.') But while he would tolerate the neutral State he had no admiration for it, and, in fact, despised it and thoroughly disbelieved that its purely secular ethic could ever replace the practical power of what he called the social bond of religion, expressed through a strong substantive Church, to inspire, reform and control. This is where his 'Liberalism' burgeoned finely, within a conserva- tive tradition. For if the Church were a religious State collateral with the secular State it must be benign in its wisdom, and tolerant in its realisa- tion of the way things and people really are. The idea of a Church ruling by force qr by sanctions of any kind might not disturb him as an abstract idea, but as a practice he abhorred it. He had far too much respect for the individual person- ality, he was far too much an admirer of the intellect to do anything else. So, we are led, most deviously it need scarcely be said—for I sum- marise, perforce, inadequately—to the complex image of a man who was both liberal and con- servative because he was never, whether in Church or State, a party man.
Had he been born into a later age, lived to see the modern rise to power of denios, it is a safe bet that he would now, as then, profoundly distrust the spirit of the times. For although that easy optimism of the nineteenth century which he so loathed, the belief that progress was auto- matic and accumulative, has been shaken badly, it has not been shaken to its Benthamist founda- tions. I feel he could still express himself in the terms of what I think is one of the key-letters of his life (to his mother, March 13, 1829; to be found in the handy selection from his correspon- dence now opportunely presented by Derek Stan- ford and Muriel Spark* namely, that tradi- tional or natural wisdom is rarely transmitted by 'the talents of the day' but rather by simple men and women who are often unable to prove their beliefs and of whom any clever Cambridge rationalist could make hay in ten minutes, but who nevertheless hang on to this 'ancestral wis- dom' either from pious and honest feeling or—he does not in his realism hesitate to say it—from 'prejudice and bigotry.' He would, nevertheless, loyally accept the State as he would today find it, but only so long as it was clear that, in his view, it could not hope to exist without that buried wisdom, often preserved by ignorant men, which, in the long run, alone keeps the clever Goths at bay.
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