Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/175

 Both passages concur in giving an impression of cool dispassionateness that contrasts with some of the impassioned language he used in self-defence against Kingsley and in his newspaper letters. Both Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Meynell remark that this passion was simulated and calculated on the part of Newman, who defended it on the plausible ground that the British public will never believe a man is in earnest unless he loses, or seems to lose, his temper.

The end of the first volume and the whole of the second are entirely taken up with letters and documents relating to the 'Movement' which gave new life to the Anglican Church, and led the leader of it to the Roman fold. It clearly forms the raw material—the very raw material—out of which Newman drew up his own lucid account, and it affords explicit information on every phase and divagation of Tractarianism in its formative period. But its very minuteness renders it practically unreadable; there is little or no connecting narrative—only a few 'Chronological Notes' of Newman's which assume in the reader a minute acquaintance with every turn of events in the long struggle. It thus affords a mine of evidence for the Oxford Movement, but its riches have to be dug for, and it is only to be used as a supplement to the Apologia or to a book like that of Dean Church.