BOOKS.
WILLIAM GEORGE WARD AND THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL.*
[FIRST NOTICE.]
THIS is a most amusing, as well as an extremely able and in- teresting, book. It is at least as lively, and at least as interesting, as the volume on Mr. Ward and the Oxford Move- ment; and to English readers it is certainly the newer, if not the more attractive, of the two. It has probably cost the author even greater labour, and the fruit of that labour is shown in one of the most effective pieces of pictorial biography and of exposition of a great movement which it has ever fallen • William George Ward and the CatholicE.uis. By Wilfrid Ward. London: Macmillan and 00. to the present writer's lot to read. In the great controversy which raged round the Vatican Council, and the question as to the scope and meaning of Roman Catholic Infallibility, it is obvious that Mr. Wilfrid Ward, while he does his father's view the most ample justice, is himself identified with the view rather of Cardinal Newman than of Mr. Ward and the Dublin Review. But he is so absolutely fair to both parties, that we can only wish the great Cardinal as able, terse, and graphic a biographer, as the quaint and humorous logician and the devout theologian has found in his son.
Mr. Ward is, in many respects, a better subject for biography than it is at all common to find even among men of the first mark. His character was full of contrasts, and yet full of naïveté, There was nothing artificial in him, and yet nothing commonplace. He was thoroughly robust in character, and yet could dance on the point of a logical needle as well as any company of angels of them all. He revelled in authority, and wished for a fresh Papal Bull every morning at breakfast with his Times ; but he declared that, for him, salvation came from the Haymarket, that he should die happy if he could see Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft at that theatre. He was one of the simplest men who ever lived, and yet one to whom theulogy was much more real than the life of the world around him. He was one of the most dogmatic, and yet one of the most candid. He would humbly consult his most dreaded opponents on questions with which he wrongly sup- posed them to be familiar, as if their authority were final ; and he would resist the theological leader whom he almost revered as the next thing to infallible, with a keenness and a vigour, when he thought him on the wrong track, that for many years thoroughly estranged them. He delighted in " mornings dogmatic and evenings dramatic;" and yet some- times it was the dogmatic mornings that filled him with hope, and sometimes the evenings dramatic that cast a shadow on his heart. There is no more pathetic passage in this remark- able volume than the following. In it one sees at once the childlike enjoyment of small absurdities of situation and droll exaggerations of feeling, and the singular depth of melancholy from which Mr. Ward suffered. Nowhere else can we bettet see the vivid and striking contrasts in Mr. Ward's charaetet reaching their climax:— "He was delighted with the Figaro of Signor Padilla, and said he hardly remembered a bettor Figaro since Bonconi. When the scene came in which Bartolo and Basilio go out together, and Signor Zoboli and the Basilio of the evening, whose name I forget, wont through the usual gag '—each making polite speeches and begging of the other to go through the door first, and finally each simultaneously accepting the other's invitation, so that they are squeezed together in the doorway, he went, as usual, into a roar of laughter. A few moments afterwards he said, very seriously, Do you know, I have seen that joke time after time for nearly sixty years, and probably seven eighths of the people who played it are dead.' And a little later he resumed, 'It is to me at my age a most solemn thought. I remember as far back as De Begni's performance of Figaro in 1825, and, ever since then, year after year, I have seen all the same "points" made in the acting and singing—Bosina's bigiictto, Figaro's constant gossip, all the Count's rather fruitless scheming, and then the whole thing ending joy- fully with " Almaviva son io, von son Lindoro " followed by the charming finale ; and now here are all the same jokes, the same scene, the same story, and generation after generation of singers who have gone through ii all, who have succeeded each other in presenting these living pictures, has passed away—gone over to the majority, and before many years are gone I shall have to follow them. He reverted two or three times in the course of the evening to the same thought."
But we must turn to the more serious part of Mr. Ward's life and work after he had joined the Roman Catholic Com- munion, One great aim of Mr. Ward's book on The Ideal o) a Christian Church had been to show that, in the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church, with its detachment from the main joys and griefs and distractions of home, its single devo- tion to the service of God and the moral and spiritual purifi- cation and, elevation of the lives of others, the true conception of a priesthood is more nearly reached than in any other humbler, soberer, and less tempted, but also less devoted and more distracted, Christian priesthood; as well as that the dogmatic unity and consistency of the Christian teach- ing is more adequately preserved under the stricter and more centralised rules. As Mr. Ward had married before he be- came a Catholic, he could not, of coarse, enter the priesthood be so much admired, nor did he, indeed, ever think it his vocation to do BO. But within a year or two of his joining the Roman Catholic Communion, he was asked to take a part in training the priesthood of his new Church. And
on this work he entered in fear and trembling, not with any notion of ministering to the divinity students' intellectual interest—there was nothing he dreaded and disavowed more eagerly than such a degradation, as he held it to be, of the true purpose of the priesthood,—but, on the contrary, in the hope, which seems to have been not an idle one, that he could deepen the determination of the students whom he was teaching, to devote their intel- lects to the most loyal service of their spiritual nature and duties. Nothing in this book is more characteristic of Mr. Ward than the reply he gave to the address of farewell on his resignation of this professorship. It shows so charac- teristically what his aim had been, and how humbly he had estimated his own personal fitness for his work, that we cannot refrain from quoting it here as displaying at once the modesty and the enthusiasm of the man :—
" May God ever protect you from seeking any part of your rest and peace in the empty, delusive, and most unspiritualising pleasures of mere intellectual excitement. It has been my very deep conviction on the fearfulness of this evil which has goaded sue (as I may say) to the prominent introduction of ascetical truth. How often have I absolutely forced myself to put before you those high lessons of spirituality which are at last the only matters really worth the attention of an immortal being I How often have I forced myself (I say) to speak of them while suffering most keenly under a sense of bitter self-contempt and self- reproach I Who am I, and of what kind is my daily life, that I should dare so to speak ? And to whom was I speaking P To ecclesiastical students ; to persons who had had the heart to correspond with that high and noble vocation with which God has favoured you, and who are looking forward to a career from which I should shrink in craven fear and ignominious despond- ency. Willingly, most willingly, would I have been silent, were it only for very shame, but that I have been stung with the remembrance of those great principles which I have just been stating. It was impossible for me to be neutral. Had I succeeded in obtaining your deep interest in a purely intellectual view of that great science committed to my charge, I should have been your worst enemy. I should have been preparing the way for the greatest calamity which under ordinary circumstances can here- after befall you,—I mean the habit of east° ad externa,, of being carried away by the excitement of present work from the heart's deep and tranquil anchorage in God. I should have simply in- jured, the more seriously in proportion to the degree of my success, that very cause of Almighty God which I was labouring to serve. I would rather engage in the most irksome and menial occupation which could be found by looking through the world, than handle the sacred truths of Theology in so vile and degrading a spirit."
Note the words describing his own unfitness for the vocation for which he was trying to prepare these divinity students. He should himself, he said, have shrunk from that great voca- tion, "in craven fear and ignominious despondency." No wonder he made his pupils zealous to justify the estimate he had formed of their great sacrifice. To complete the picture, we must quote two of his pupils' accounts of the character of his lectures :—
"Dr. Ward's manner of lecturing, I should suppose, was entirely his own. He dispensed with all the usual externals of the lecturer ; he sat in the midst of us in one of our own places, and might have been taken by a visitor for a student himsetf, except when he was speaking :—seldom any action—it was more like one who was reading with a clear and beautifully musical voice what be saw written upon his own mind. You could not be distracted in his presence while he lectured, for his bright eye caught and fixed you. I suppose he has seldom had his equal in power of illustra- tion, by means of which he made every point not only clear but interesting also • while the illustration itself (always a remarkable one) served us all the purpose of a technical memory. His moral influence over us was simply unbounded. In fact it was this power which, perhaps more than anything else, brought down upon us and him no little portion of our persecution. . . . . His great love of the poor also, and his extreme desire that we should Carry to them the real substantial food of the Gospel, of doctrinal truth, won the love of all of us. He got quite moved to tears, whilst, with uplifted face to Heaven, he dwelt on their unfair Position ;—the beautiful truths of the Church often unknown to them, and nothing to gratify their propensions but sin. I must not forget to say a word on his great personal love of God which came out in these lectures. Coming from his lecture was like coining from the lectures of St. Thomas, whose heart burned with what he taught. I shall never forget the way in which he brought Wore us strongly the Presence of God amongst us, and the in- gratitude of forgetting One who, though our greatest benefactor. stood like a forgotten friend in a corner of the room. It was like an electric shock. The manner in. which he got absorbed in his subject when he poured out the claims of God, with his eyes lifted up to Heaven, was 'something which leaves a picture which cannot be described. Yet, with all this power of conquest over us, be has told students that he went often to his lectures with far and trembling, lest he should be a bore to us."
That will give some impression of the intensity of the man,— of the strong grooves which his Moral and spiritual convic-
tions had cut in his nature, and which scored it all the more conspicuously by reason of the gay and sensuous temperament through which they clove so deep a channel. Something like the deep gullies in a limestone region, were the striking and picturesque lines chiselled in Mr. Ward's smiling and jocund face by the deep religious passion and the equally deep melancholy of which he exhibited the plainest traces. When the present writer first made Mr. Ward's acquaintance at that omnium gatherum of metaphysicians, physicists, psycholo- gists, physiologists, mystics, rationalists, priests, and agnostics, called the Metaphysical Society, of which Mr. Wilfrid Ward gives so admirable an account in this volume, Mr. Ward's ruddy face struck him as one of the least meditative in that carious assembly. It was a face at once bold and sensitive, hilarious and anxious, but not at all one which gave the impression of a gaze fixed intently on the world within. Nor indeed was there anything of the mystic about Mr. Ward, nor yet of the keen critic of life. He was a great and very clever logician, and he loved authority so much, —perhaps so much too much,—because without it he regarded the world as a labyrinth to which no man could find the clue. It was his deep sense at once of the ideal attraction by which the conscience was drawn towards higher things, and of the sheer impossibility of finding one's way among the puzzles and paradoxes of life to those higher things without a helping hand constantly held out from the world above us, which made him a Catholic. He craved definite spiritual authority, and he certainly exaggerated the degree in which our nature was intended to lean upon it and to be guided by it. When he first took his place in the chair of the Meta- physical Society, his smiling and deprecatory look reminded one of a happy but bashful bride receiving congratulations on her new position in the world. No one more modest as regarded the extent of his powers, and at the same time more sure of his ground, so far as he had examined it, ever undertook to defend a metaphysical thesis ; and no one ever defended such a thesis who made it more lucid, and drove it home with greater force to the minds of others. But Mr. Ward could not bear too continuous a concentration on any serious aspect of life. His director, Father Faber, of the London Oratory, was asked by him if he ought to go into retreat to concentrate his mind on spiritual things. "A retreat," exclaimed Faber, "it would be enough to send you to Hell. Go to the play as often as you can, but don't dream of a retreat !" No man needed the stimulus of a complete reaction. against the anxieties of the world more keenly and snore habitually-. No man felt the pressure of painful and solemn subjects more intolerably. His buoyancy was half the recoil of the spring against his melancholy. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why his metaphysical papers were so definite and so clear. He took his sensuous temperament into his metaphysics, and rejected every line of thought of which he could not clearly see and measure the precise significance, force, and bearing. In his papers on the agnostic controversy so admirably summarised in this book, there is plenty of illustration of this keen lucidity. The argument, for instance, drawn from the agnostic mice sup. posed to inhabit a grand piano without any means of access to the origin of the movement of the keys, is an excellent specimen of it. Bat we must defer the consideration of Mr. Ward's relation to the Catholic controversies of his times for another paper, and take leave for the present of this singularly vivid and effective book.
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