BOOKS

Cardinal Virtues

By DAVID LODGE

THE biographical fortunes of the eminent Vic- ." torians have tended to follow a uniform curve, beginning with a solemn, eulogistic official Life in the nineteenth century, sinking to an irreve- rent, satirical treatment in the inter-war period, and rising to a sober, objective reassessment in our own time. Henry Edward Manning, how- ever, has been less fortunate than most of his contemporaries: not only did he get the full treatment from the arch-debunker, Strachey himself, but, for reasons too complex to discuss here, his 'official' biographer Purcell produced a startlingly hostile portrait of. the Cardinal only four years after his death. There is thus a temp- tation for the modern student of Manning to over-compensate for the harsh treatment he has received in the past. That Mr. McClelland has yielded to this temp- tation is not immediately apparent. His study' is restricted to Manning's 'Public Life and In- fluence,' i.e., his work in the fields of Catholic education, the rights of labour, the Irish Ques- tion and various characteristically Victorian Philanthropic activities such as teetotalism and anti-vivisection. These areas of Manning's life are ably documented and elucidated, with the help of a good deal of interesting and unpub- lished material. The picture that emerges is of a man passionately dedicated to social justice, and admirably fitted to represent the Catholic com- munity in difficult negotiations with the govern-

- Meat of a Protestant or sceptical society. The Picture is valid, but it is artfully framed. Asser- tions that 'Manning was to transform the out- look and status of the Church' (beneficially, it is implied), or that he created 'a sympathetic Catholic conscience for the intellectual changes of the twentieth century,' cannot be substan- tiated by an account of his life which excludes his fanatical advocacy of the Pope's temporal Power and an extreme definition of papal in- fallibility, and which minimises the ruthlessly authoritarian manner in which he sought to im- pose his will in all matters on the English

ath°lics, opening wounds which have scarcely healed yet.

Mr. McClelland is seeking to present Man- ning with to an accolade that properly belongs to

thewman, and it is in his treatment of Newman that the weakness of his case is most signifi-

cantly revealed. Manning's social work, for

'CARDINAL MANNING : His PUBLIC LIFE AND IN- FLUENCE. By Vincent Alan McClelland. (O.U.P., 35s.) 2 NEWMAN : LIGHT IN WINTER. By Meriol Trevor. (Macmillan, 50s.) 8 -r.,„,„

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= LETTERS AND DIARIES OF JOHN HENRY NEVVMAN: VOL. XII, ROME TO BIRMINGHAM. Edited by Charles Stephen Dessain. (Nelson, 63s.) NEwmAN FAMILY LETTERS. Introduced and edited by Dorothea Mozley. (S.P.C.K., 25s.) example, is used as a stick with which to beat Newman. It is untrue and unjust to say that Newman 'had never worked or lived among the poor,' or that he was one of those ecclesiastics 'who could keep their Christianity in a kind of watertight compartment, and remain oblivious to the world about them.' Newman's,social work was mainly on a pastoral and parochial level; but in the literary and educational apostolate he did more than any other man of his age to demonstrate the relevance and validity of Catholic Christianity in a rationalist and secu- larised age. 'To Manning a human being was a soul-body, to be treated as a whole,' says Mr. McClelland. This sounds good, but in practice it meant securing a decent physical environment for a man's body (all credit to Manning for that), and then demanding unquestioning obedi- ence and loyalty from his soul on all questions relating to the Church, whether or not they were of Faith. This explains how Manning was able to Make up an 'advanced' position on social questions and a reactionary one on religious questions. Mr. McClelland's attempt to force Newman into these categories produces some odd distortions and contradictions. On page 94 we are told that, in .contrast to Manning, 'New- man never really appreciated the danger to organised religion constituted by the new Ger- manic liberalism,' while on page 111 it is said that 'Newman was fighting against the new scien- tific liberalism . . . whereas Manning was trying to ally it to the Church and thus Christianise it.' In his `biglietto' speech Newman said: 'For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion.' But this involved no obscurantist resis- tance to science—as his record at the Irish Uni- versity proves—but an attempt to define the province of scientific inquiry and to adjust the claims of reason and faith. As Miss. Trevor so wisely, says of these issues: 'To many the ten- sion seemed then, and seems now, to be between two views only: the progressive or revolutionary, and the traditional or reactionary. It is because Newman from the beginning proposed a third to this antagonistic duo and because all through his life he was the representative of a view at once apocalyptic and developmental, which combined tradition with intellectual inquiry, that his influence increased rather than diminished.' This also explains why Manning could never understand or appreciate Newman, and why the former, for all his virtues, remains locked in his own age, while Newman transcends it.

It is not, I think, merely in the context of Mr. McClelland's study that Miss Trevor's pro- tectiveness towards Newman seems less cloying in the second volume of her massive biography" than in the first. The mere facts of Newman's Catholic life after 1850, the long succession of

humiliations and disappointments he suffered, naturally invite passionate championship. The frustration of his idea of a university in Dublin, the bishopric dangled before his eyes and whisked away without explanation, the equally mysterious abandonment of the Bible transla- tion project, the schism between the Oratories of Birmingham and London, the delation to Rome for heresy, the squashing of the Oxford Oratory scheme—all these and many other set- backs were exacerbated for Newman by malicious and damaging gossip of a kind en- demic to ecclesiastical circles, from which he could not clear himself without impugning others. This he was nearly always too charitable to do, but he did keep exhaustive records of correspondence, conversations and private re- flections, to be used, as he specifically directed, only in defence of his reputation. Miss Trevor has grasped this opportunity, almost unique in the wealth and authority of the materials it offers to a biographer, with both hands. But she has, too, in this second volume, written herself into a more relaxed and generous mood. In the chapter on Newman's cardinalate, for instance, an honour which so nearly eluded Newman like many others, she leaves the accusing finger point- ing plainly at Manning (who was chiefly respon- sible for spreading the idea that Newman declined the Pope's offer), but refrains from actually prodding it into the Archbishop's mid- riff.

I have looked in vain in Miss Trevor's two volumes for some tribute to Wilfred Ward's fine biography of 1912. No doubt his emphases and interpretations—even his facts--can be chal- lenged, but for me, and surely for many others, his work afforded the first, vital insight into the significance and the greatness of Newman; and in my opinion Ward's Life is not superseded with regard to Newman as a writer, or with re- gard to the wider background of the Liberal- Ultramontane conflict in the Church of the nine- teenth century. It is clear that Miss Trevor has set herself primarily to disentangle the many confusions, misunderstandings and intrigues that clouded Newman's life and reputation, to stress the prophetic relevance of his general lines of thought to our present discontents, and to bring out the attractiveness of the man himself. She has carried out this programme splendidly, or- ganising a vast quantity of complex data into an orderly and always readable narrative (though I still regret the absence of references to printed sources). If Newman's cause is successful it will owe a good deal to Miss Trevor.

The nearest thing we are likely to get to a `definitive' biography of Newrrizin is his own— the canon of his literary works, and the Letters and Diaries, of which Volume XII, the second to be issued, has just been published by Father Dessain.3 This volume covers the years 1847-48, immediately after Newman's conversion. If the rest of the thirty volumes are produced as im- peccably as the first two, the set will stand as one of the great editorial achievements of the century.

Newman Family Letters' throws little new light

on Newman, but much on the effects of religious upheaval on the ordinary, educated Victorian bourgeois mind. Most of the letters are written --and very well written—by Harriet Mozley, Newman's sister, a minor novelist and an early fan of Jane Austen. She strongly disapproved

of Newman's apostasy, comparing it to 'a dis- graceful marriage.' Relations were cool and distant between Newman and his family subse- quently, but it is pleasant to find that his last visitor was Harriet's daughter Grace.