Newmanianism/IX. Mr. R.H. Hutton's "Cardinal Newman"

I now proceed to notice a few points in Mr. R.H. Hutton's Cardinal Newman, which require correction.

8. As I shall have to show that in most of his errors Mr. Hutton errs on the side of partiality for Newman, it seems fair to mention the only instance in which he errs on the side of the injustice. It is where he says (p.10) "Hurrell Froude and he chose at Rome a motto for the Lyra Apostolica. Newman makes a careful distinction: We borrowed a Homer ... and Froude chose. The motto was the well-known Achillean boast, "You shall know the difference, now that I am back again; and this was to be prefixed to a volume of Christian poetry, sheltering itself (in its title) under a dedication to the Apostles! Newman originated many mistakes, perhaps; but this one, at all events, he did not originate.

9. For the rest Mr. Hutton's main fault is that he is taken in by Newman's plausible style. He is the victim of those rethorical arts which I have described as "Oscillation", "Lubrication" and "Assimilation". So completely does he identify himself with some of Newman's most fallacious statements and most baseless conclusions, that I cannot blame anyone one of his readers for being, at least for a time, imposed upon by what, at the first reading, completely imposed upn me. But let anyone read Mr. Hutton's extracts two or three times over; let him write them out (an excellent habit! one of the best habits for which I am indebted to Newman's teaching!) at least once; then let him take them to pieces, putting nouns for prononuns where necessary, carefully supplying latent assumptions, and noting any shifting use of words -and in almost all of them it will be found that we seemed a safe fabric of smoothly cogent logic bursts like the merest bubble of a hollow rethoric. All these errors (without mentioning Mr. Hutton's name) I have exposed in Philomythus and, of course, shall not detail here.

10. The following passage in Mr. Hutton's Life seems to demand careful consideration. It concerns a letter written by Newman to his bishop in 1842, in which the former met the complaint that he "was erecting an Anglo-Catholic monastery at Littlemore, and that the cells, chapel, dormitories belonging thereto, were all advancing rapidly to to completion. This", continues Mr. Hutton, from whom I am quoting, "was in 1842, before Newman had resigned the vicarage of St. Mary's ... Newman merely said that he was building a parsonage for Littlemore, which it much needed, without a chapel... and that so far as regarded like-minded friends, he was of course, glad that they should share his mode of life if they wished, but that no sort of institution of any kind was in process or formation. "I am attempting nothing ecclesiastical", he said, "but something personal and private".

Mr. Hutton here correctly represents Newman's reply. Newman also added, "Your Lordship will perceive from what I have said that no monastery is in process of erection; there is no chapel, no refectory, hardly a dining room or parlour. The cloisters are my shed connecting the cottages. I do not understand what "cells or "dormitories means".

Now in commenting upon the tone of this letter which Newman writes in a spirit of offended dignity -as if he should ever for a moment have contemplated a monastery or a chapel, or cloisters, and were absolutely unable to understand the imputation of cells! - I think Mr. Hutton ought to have inserted in justification of the popular suspicion, Newman's own admission (Apologia p.131), that in 1840 "he had in view a monastic house". And to future commentators I would commend the Letter of 20 May 1840, in which Newman speaks of "the cells to be added as required". "the oratory, or chapel, a matter of future consideration", and proposes to have "the cells upon a cloister, as at Magdalen". There is no ground (as I shall show in its proper place) for imputing to Newman conscious insincerity in this matter; but there appears to be ground for understanding why ordinary English people suspected him, and why he ought not to have been altogether surprised that he was suspected.

11. Mr. Hutton is a little too fond of the language of eulogy in subjects on which it is difficult to eulogize well without a good deal of knoewledge. He speaks of Newman's Arian as a "careful and scholarly book". I do not knew enough about the book to say it is not; but I have heard from good judges that it is undeserving of these praises. Mr. T.Mozley indicates that, at the time of the publication of the Arians, the judgment of the ablest critics was unfavourable. As regards more recent opinion, on turning to Studies of Arianism, by H.M.Gwatkin, Cambridge, 1882, I find, at the end of a long list of some fifty authorities, the following significant note (Preface, p.XIX) :-"The above will all be found more or less useful to the student. Of Newman's Arians of the Forth Century let it suffice to say that his theories have always been scrupulously examined; so that if they have not often been accepted, it is only because there is good reason for rejecting them".

From the way in which Newman spent too many of his vacations, and this, too, long after he ought to have cast away the dissipating and wasteful impulses of youth -putting off what he ought to have done and could have done well, in order to begin to do what he must do, if at all, badly; now studying Hebrew, and aspiring to Chaldee and Syriac, but finding his actual goal somewhere near the end of Genesis; now thinking about German; now getting up a smattering of some mathematical treatise that a well-educated boy would have mastered before he was fifteen; now "reading various things" when he ought to have been preparing for the work of an Examiner in the Schools; delaying from year to year that "reading for Fathers" which we had so early set himself to accomplish; constantly (during his early manhood) "fagged", and "fussed", and "in a stew"; and, during almost every long vacation, breaking down more or less under the strain of too much work undertaken with too little deliberation -I should be predisposed to believe that in his Arians, as in some other matters, he had attempted moroe than he could accomplish, and that he never accomplished anything well that depend, for its successful accomplishment, upon an exact knowledge of a large subject. In any case, Mr. Hutton should not say that Arians was "finished in July 1832;" it was altered, and apparently altered a good deal, in the autumn of 1833.

12. Mr. Hutton thinks that Newman's Essay on Development "is marked by the keenest penetration into one of the most chatacteristic conceptions of modern science;" in his judgment, "it betrays so deep an insight into the generating thoughts which are transforming the present and moulding the future;" and his marvel at this prophetic sagacity is increased by the fact of its early date, since it "was written in in 1844 and 1845" (Cardinal Newman, p.165).

I shall have more to say, in a later section, about this, as it appears to me, blindly exaggerated praise of a treatise which, so far as I have studied it, appears to me to be pre-eminent, among all books of the kind known to me, in deserving the title of pseudo-scientific. Meantime let me say that the attempt to increase the reader's sense of the sagacity of the forecasting element in this treatise by calling attention to the early date, contains a slight error. There is good evidence to show that the Essay, though conceived towards the end of 1844, was not written till 1845.