BOOKS.

THE LIFE OF W. G. WARD.*

[FIRST NOTICE.]

Mn. WILFRID WARD has written a very entertaining as well as a very instructive book concerning the remarkable man who may be said to have been the logical and moral goad of the Tractarian party. No son could have performed his task with better taste or fuller sympathy, though at the same time without any of that exclusive partisanship for his father's share in the movement which prevents him from appreciating fairly many of the difficulties which Mr. (now Cardinal) New- man had in acting with him, or rather in preventing himself from being driven on by Mr. Ward faster than his own more sensitive and wider religious nature could approve. We have spoken of Mr. Ward as the logical and moral goad of the Tractarian movement, and we believe that both these terms really apply to him. He was the most intrepid of logicians, and never seemed to shrink from the consequences fairly to be deduced from any principle to which he had once given his sanction. But he was something more than this. Mr. Wilfrid Ward tells us that there was Spanish blood in the family, and there is something that seems to have a certain connection with this Spanish blood in the positive • Witham George Ward and the Orford Movement. By Wilfrid Ward. London : Macmillan and Co.

liking for what we may, without offence, perhaps call the moral glare of continental Roman Catholicism, visible in the late Mr. Ward. It is perfectly clear that this was a great source of difficulty to Cardinal Newman, as well as to all the more reserved and sensitive Anglicans, so soon as they found that they had committed themselves to principles which were gradually carrying them Romewards. But it was no diffi- culty, it was, we think, an additional attraction, to Mr.

Ward. We can see in all that his son tells us of his musical, theatrical and dramatic tastes, a good deal of that satisfaction in full-blown, not to say over-blown, religious and moral feeling which was so utterly out of accord with the extreme reserve, reticence, self-distrust, and self-repression of the original High Church movement. If there was anything that was remarkable in the Anglican movement while it remained in the hands of Newman, Keble, and Pusey, it was its dislike of the over-expression or exaggeration of any religious feeling or conviction ; in fact, the feeling which Newman expresses in the well-known lines :-

"Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control

That o'er thee swell and throng ; They will condense within thy soul, And change to purpose strong : But he who lets his feelings run In soft luxurious flow,

Shrinks when hard service must be done, And faints at every woe."

That is not, for the most part, the spirit of continental Catholicism, which has shown itself in every kind of popular devotional efflorescence, and in pilgrimages founded on lively traditions which are quite foreign to the spirit of the original Tractarian movement. But it is clear that Mr. Ward, with his Spanish blood, his delight in dramatic exhibitions of feeling, in artistic extravagance, in humorous caricature, as well as in intellectual paradox and doctrinal point, was in far closer sympathy with the Southern type of Catholicism than with the reticence and self-suppression of Mr. Newman's school. Mr. Wilfrid Ward, while he describes with a vigorous pen the very great moral earnestness as well as logical ardour of his father's mind, gives a most vivid and amusing picture of the flamboyant side of his nature, both emotional and

intellectual, of the abandon with which he threw himself into operatic music and stage effects, of his keen love of caricature, and the amazing élan with which he descanted to incredulous friends and interlocutors on the depth and breadth and height of his own ignorance in particular fields of learning of which he really had a good superficial though not a thorough

knowledge. No livelier picture than that of Mr. Ward's Oxford life and influence amongst his contemporaries has

been given in our generation. Indeed, Mr. Wilfrid Ward has evidently been very fortunate in collecting such rich materials from so many of his father's Oxford friends, as well as in the skill and judgment and artistic feeling which have enabled him to use them with so much success. At a much later period of his life, Mr. Ward was well known to the present writer, who may honestly say that he can

by his own knowledge verify the main outlines of the portrait here presented, while he finds in the volume before him a great deal that makes the remarkable figure of the masterly meta- physician and the Ultramontane theologian on whom Pio None. conferred an honorary degree soon after the close of the Vatican Council, a good deal more definite and more intelligible than it was before. Lord Tennyson, in the graphic epitaph which he has written upon his friend and neighbour at Freshwater, speaks of Mr. Ward as the most unworldly of mankind,.

the most generous of Ultramontanes, as one of the most subtle " at tierce and quart of mind with mind," and of the most loyal in the following of his Lord, whom he has ever known. Mr. Ward was all this and more, and yet he certainly was not one of those whom Tennyson has else- where painted as ideally English in their habit of " turning to scorn, with lips divine, the falsehood of extremes." Mr. Ward loved extremes, loved violent contrasts, loved the lessons to be learned by violent contrasts, loved to work out ideas to their limits instead of qualifying them by the modifying influence of related ideas, loved the very shock of an intellec- tual paradox, and was never better pleased with himself than when he had uttered such an apophthegm as this against

equivocation : " Make yourself sure that you are justified in deception, and then lie like a trooper ;" or this against men of high worldly repute : " If any man be called moderate' or

4 venerable,' beware of him ; if he be called both, you may be sure he is a scoundrel."

Here is the picture of Ward's musical feats at Oxford :—

" The musical seances with his friends, which formed one of his chief modes of escape from this depression and weariness, were varied in character. Sometimes Coffin, afterwards Bishop of Southwark, used to play, and Ward, who had a magnificent voice, would go right through some of the best arias in Mozart's and Rossini's operas, in true dramatic style, before a select audience. Non piu andrai,' from the Nozze de Figaro, and the rapid buffo song, Largo al factotum,' from the Barbiere, were among those most frequently chosen. An equally favourite form of amusement was to sketch a ballet d'action on some event of university interest ; Mr. Macmullen's dispute with the Regius professor, Dr. Fausset's attack on Dr. Pusey, or Ward's own relations with the Master of Balliol, were represented in this way. Dr. Jenkyns of Balliol was an especially favourite character in these performances, and Mr. Ward would send his company into fits of laughter by a combined imitation of the peculiarities of the master's manner, and the received movements of the ballerina—the pirouette and the various forms of step, fast and slow, and the pantomimic expression of wrath, pleasure, or amazement, as each was called for, according to the recognised rules of the ballet d'action. Ward would represent each character in turn, while Coffin or Oakeley played the piano- forte. The contrast between these performances and his more normal occupation of deep discussion on religious metaphysics, was startling. 'It is just as though Thomas Aquinas were to dance a ballet,' one of his friends said. On one of these occasions the performance was more vigorous than usual, and Ward was for the moment impersonating Cupid. Mr. Chapman, one of the tutors, was unable to continue his reading in the room below, and sent his scout to ascertain the cause of the disturbance. The scout came back with the assurance, 'It's honly Mr. Ward, sir. 'E's a hacting of a cherubym.' After he had joined the Newmanites he considerably curtailed the amount of dramatic and musical recreation he allowed himself. He never entered a theatre at all for eleven years, and in Lent, by Dr. Pusey's advice, as the ordinary corporal austerities injured his health, he made it a rule to forego all music whatever. One Lent when three weeks had passed in this way he met Coffin in the High Street and said, I have such an awful fit of depression that I feel as if I should go out of my mind ; don't you think that a little music for once may be allowed ?' After some discussion it was agreed that a little strictly sacred music might pass. Beginning with Cherubini's 0 Salutaris ' they gradually passed to Possenti Numi ' in the Flauto Magico. But this opened a book containing songs somewhat lighter, and the duet between Papageno and Papagena followed. The music waxed faster and livelier till it culminated in Largo al factotum,' the lightest and raciest of buffo songs, in the middle of which one of the company suddenly recollected that the room in Christ Church in which he was singing was separated only by a thin wall from Dr. Pusey's own rooms."

Was it not an opera of Cherubini which gave the scout the notion that Mr. Ward was " hacting of a cherubym "?

After this specimen of the power with which his son paints Mr. Ward's florid enjoyment of the brightness of the world,— an enjoyment that reminds one of Sydney Smith's jocular defi- nition of perfect bliss, "eating pcites de foie gras to the sound of trumpets,"—we must give a specimen of his delineation of Mr. Ward's moral and religious character, that character which led to his taking the great part he did in the Tractarian move- ment. Mr. Ward began by being a warm admirer of Dr.

Arnold, and passed from the influence of Arnold to the in- fluence of Newman. That transition is thus described :—

" The change which seemed so fundamental was really logical, and was the carrying out of principles rather than the change of principles. His earnest and constant cry was in spiritual matters, Give me a guide.' A deep cry,' he writes, is heard from human nature, " Teach us the truth, for we cannot find it ourselves, yet we need it more than aught else on earth."' Again and again he quoted Carlyle's saying, True guidance in return for loving obedieece, did he but know it, is man's prime need.' The great note which attracted him towards a religious teacher was personal sanctity. 'The moral faculty,' he wrote, is not left to its own unaided powers ; for one of the very earliest lessons it teaches us is the perception of superior goodness • and the duty of reposing an ardent and loving trust in the dictates of that goodness.' And again, Holy men are the great fountains from which moral and religious truth flows to the world : if a revelation be given, they are the authorised interpreters ; if there be a living authoritative tribunal, their spiritual experience furnishes materials for the decrees of that tribunal ; if no special revelation, on them must the task be imposed of collecting and discriminating the various scattered traditions which are afloat in the current of human speculation.' On these principles an ethical system or a spiritual authority which, as. such, seemed higher and more thorough than Arnold's, had a prima facie claim on his allegiance, and such a system he eventually found in Mr. Newman's teaching. It was opposed to Arnold's intellectual system, but that system Mr. Ward could no longer accept. It was not opposed to, it was the more complete carrying out of the high and unworldly morality which Arnold inculcated. And another thought, too, associated with these points, must be referred to as having paved the way for acceptance of the elaborate doctrinal creed of New- inanism, a creed which laid such stress on those very minutiss of dogmatic beliefs which liberalism treated as unreal and unim- portant. His original tendency had been, feeling the difficulty attending on all proof in matters of doctrine on the one hand, and on the other the absolute and undeniable reality of the conscience and the moral law, to minimise the former, and to insist on the latter. But when as time went on he came to feel that that very minimum of doctrine which was necessary as a support and sanc- tion to the moral law must fade away before the consistent applica- tion of the latitudinarian intellectual principles, the question presented itself : May there not be after all some indissoluble con- nection between the plenitude of doctrine and the highest morality ? Those dogmas which I have looked on as burdens, may they not be after all as helpful to the full development of the moral life as belief in God's existence is indispensable to its first rudiments ? Then following on this came the conception of Church authority as the external embodiment of conscience, completing and defining both in religious knowledge and moral precept what conscience traced faintly and imperfectly : recognised by men of good-will as the vicegerent of God in the world : confirming with a directly divine sanction those reasonings from Scripture which by them- selves had seemed so imperfect, just as the arguments for God's existence seemed imperfect without the clear confirming voice of conscience to seal and secure them."

Such, in outline at least, was William George Ward, a man of Southern temperament and Southern realism of mind, with a Northern training and a rigid Northern logic. His hatred of anything like unreality and formalism in religion was shown long before he became a follower of Mr. New- man ; but his notion of formalism was not that zeal for elaborate devotional rites which Englishmen usually convey under that term, as if formalism meant anything that ex- presses itself freely in outward forms, but was nearer to conventionalism,—and conventionalism shown at least as much in the repression, as in the expression, of inward feeling. He could not help saying what he thought and felt both of himself and of others. What most Church- men called "moderation," and what seemed to him simply indifference to truth and principle, he utterly detested. When he had got hold of a principle, whether rationally or morally, he wanted at once to apply it, to push the logic of it to its

ultimate point, to make the practice of it a part of real life ; and he recoiled as from a sort of insincerity which he regarded as much worse than deliberate lying wherever a good moral

reason could be given for a lie (and he thought it sometimes could be), from that trimming between truth and falsehood which is nothing but reluctance to choose boldly between right and wrong. Thus he goaded on the High Church party as a consequence of two distinct tendencies within him, the logical impatience of half-truths, and a Southern impatience of reticence when he had once found what seemed to him a genuine and natural mode of expressing a genuine and natural attitude of mind.

We shall return again to this fascinating volume, and show how largely it illustrates the history and fate of the Tractarian movement, as well as Mr. Ward's masculine command of the metaphysics of religious thought. No doubt his greatest achievements in the latter direction,—which we are astonished to see in otherwise intelligent contemporary completely ignoring,—belonged to a later part of his career. But even before Mr. Ward's conversion, he showed his mastery of philo- sophical method. A very full and skilfully constructed table of contents adds greatly to the value of Mr. W ilfrid Ward's volume.