It is not wonderful, therefore, if we think sometimes that he may be united to the rapt singers and prophets of old by links of feeling, and touches of privilege, which obtain no entrance into more brilliant souls; it is not wonderful, therefore, if we pause sometimes to consider whether it be not to such as him, rather than to such as them, that we ought to look for any fragments of the lost and forgotten tune, for any last faint echoes upon earth from that primeval melody which arose in heaven when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.' Now, if the distinction I have here taken be a sound one-if Dr. Newman, by some delicate thread of connection, be affiliated to the older instincts, and the more prophetic half of the poetical character-if for him the imagination be not an intellectual plaything, not a mere musical instrument, but the appointed spiritual energy by the help of which he raises himself, at intervals, to glance over the imprisoning walls of sense and matter into the spiritual world beyond— then surely he deserves from us, as a man of high and unusual nature, the most attentive consideration. I am not here, of course, to claim for him a literary station as high as if he were a Tennyson or a Browning; or, indeed, to deny that Tennyson, throughout his ‘In Memoriam' and elsewhere probably, is visited by that remoter and more authentic inspiration of which I have been speaking; but still, for Tennyson, as for others,― The rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the rose; The moon doth with delight Look round her, when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair; The sunshine is a glorious birth, Albeit he know, where'er he go, That there has passed away a glory from the earth.' For Dr. Newman, on the other hand, the inaccessible muse Urania is almost his only patroness; from her eight earthlier sisters he gets hardly any assistance. Nay, unless I misconceive his philosophy, he scarce believes in any real rose, in any actual rainbow; the stars themselves are little more than phantom lights, visionary flashings of that great dream, woven between the soul and God, which men agree here to call for the moment our visible and material universe. Now to us, originally of coarser texture, and who have knocked about the world ever since, who have gone sessions, squabbled with attorneys as revising barristers, and done work for the Poor Law Board, much of this is almost inconceivable. The children and H champions of compromise, we undergo a sense of insignificance and degradation which creeps into the marrow of our bones when, as in the Apologia,' we stumble upon a man who, really and earnestly sincere, has lived always in, for, and by the spirit alone. His love of truth is so keen, so subtly keen, that the will answers to every breath of logical impulse, just as our telegraph-wires acknowledge the lightest pulsations of an electric current. We may gasp with astonishment, when we find that a casual phrase of St. Augustine's has upset, as if it were a house of cards, some cherished theory which the labour of years had gradually wrought into shape; we may smile when we perceive how simple, how child-like in many ways was that powerful mind, beneath whose sway the hearts of so many were moved to and fro, as the trees of the wood are moved by the wind;' but still the more we know, the more we honour the man, the more do we accept him as a strange, an abnormal, a solitary, but still as a beautiful soul. Among other matters, more important no doubt, but less within my province, if we read his poetry, we read it with affectionate respect, not so much because it is exquisite in point of art, as because it is essentially spontaneous, spiritual, and deep. A good deal of it, doubtless, awakens no echo in our sympathies, it does not speak to us, possibly because our sense of hearing is not of the requisite compass; but we all of us, in our degree, have been vexed and harassed by inward struggles; we all of us have known the weight of darkness upon our life, and therefore we can all feel that in this prayer-this cry-for light, there is an intense reality and truth which lend to it no ordinary charm: THE PILLAR OF THE CLOUD. Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, The night is dark, and I am far from home- Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see I was not ever thus, nor pray'd that Thou I loved to choose and see my path, but now I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears, So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.' I have entered upon these preliminary details, and dwelt upon the inborn peculiarities which Dr. Newman himself has disclosed to us, because all his poems, 'Gerontius' among the rest, grow out of his whole character. They are the expressions of a nature, not the developments and elaborations of an art. It is remarkable how, more than once, in his 'Apologia,' this strange man recurs, with something like fear, to a haunting sense that all the outward aspects of matter are phantasmal and unreal: a sense which seems to have been about his path and about his bed from early childhood. I have known the same feeling, or one like it, in others. I have known men, yes, and young children also, with such an impression, seldom given out, but always on cross-examination found to be lurking at the heart. We poco-curanti who think life too short to be wasted on metaphysics, and who refute Berkeley in the style of Dr. Johnson, by kicking at a stone or a foot-ball, are apt, whenever we run up against such weird mystics, to feel dissatisfied with ourselves and every one else. We may go on furthermore to reflect (though that Buddhist creed implies the unimportance rather than the unreality of matter) how, at this very day, the absolute majority of mankind believe, under ancestral traditions beyond a date, in the transmigration of souls, and grow thereupon still hotter |