Eminent Victorians - Lytton Strachey (essential books to read TXT) 📗

lady penitents, Miss Giberne, was less discreet. “Holy Father,” she suddenly said to the Pope in an audience one day, “why don’t you make Father Newman a bishop?” Upon which the Holy Father looked much confused and took a great deal of snuff.

For the next five years Newman, unaided and ignored, struggled desperately, like a man in a bog, with the overmastering difficulties of his task. His mind, whose native haunt was among the far aerial boundaries of fancy and philosophy, was now clamped down under the fetters of petty detail and fed upon the mean diet of compromise and routine. He had to force himself to scrape together money, to write articles for the students’ gazette, to make plans for medical laboratories, to be ingratiating with the City Council; he was obliged to spend months travelling through the remote regions of Ireland in the company of extraordinary ecclesiastics and barbarous squireens. He was a thoroughbred harnessed to a four-wheeled cab⁠—and he knew it. Eventually, he realised something else: he saw that the whole project of a Catholic University had been evolved as a political and ecclesiastical weapon against the Queen’s Colleges of Peel, and that was all. As an instrument of education, it was simply laughed at; and he himself had been called in because his name would be a valuable asset in a party game. When he understood that, he resigned his rectorship and returned to the Oratory.

But, his tribulations were not yet over. It seemed to be God’s will that he should take part in a whole succession of schemes, which, no less than the project of the Irish University, were to end in disillusionment and failure. He was persuaded by Cardinal Wiseman to undertake the editorship of a new English version of the Scriptures, which was to be a monument of Catholic scholarship and an everlasting glory to Mother Church. He made elaborate preparations; he collected subscriptions, engaged contributors, and composed a long and learned prolegomena to the work. It was all useless; Cardinal Wiseman began to think of other things; and the scheme faded imperceptibly into thin air. Then a new task was suggested to him: The Rambler, a Catholic periodical, had fallen on evil days; would Dr. Newman come to the rescue, and accept the editorship? This time he hesitated rather longer than usual; he had burned his fingers so often⁠—he must be specially careful now. “I did all I could to ascertain God’s Will,” he said, and he came to the conclusion that it was his duty to undertake the work. He did so, and after two numbers had appeared, Dr. Ullathorne, the Bishop of Birmingham, called upon him, and gently hinted that he had better leave the paper alone. Its tone was not liked at Rome; it had contained an article criticising St. Pius V, and, most serious of all, the orthodoxy of one of Newman’s own essays had appeared to be doubtful. He resigned, and in the anguish of his heart, determined never to write again. One of his friends asked him why he was publishing nothing. “Hannibal’s elephants,” he replied, “never could learn the goose-step.”

Newman was now an old man⁠—he was sixty-three years of age. What had he to look forward to? A few last years of insignificance and silence. What had he to look back upon? A long chronicle of wasted efforts, disappointed hopes, neglected possibilities, unappreciated powers. And now all his labours had ended by his being accused at Rome of lack of orthodoxy. He could no longer restrain his indignation, and in a letter to one of his lady penitents, he gave vent to the bitterness of his soul. When his Rambler article had been complained of, he said, there had been some talk of calling him to Rome.

“Call me to Rome,” he burst out⁠—“what does that mean? It means to sever an old man from his home, to subject him to intercourse with persons whose languages are strange to him⁠—to food and to fashions which are almost starvation on the one hand, and involve restless days and nights on the other⁠—it means to oblige him to dance attendance on Propaganda week after week and month after month⁠—it means his death. (It was the punishment on Dr. Baines, 1840⁠–⁠1, to keep him at the door of Propaganda for a year.)

“This is the prospect which I cannot but feel probable, did I say anything which one Bishop in England chose to speak against and report. Others have been killed before me. Lucas went of his own accord indeed⁠—but when he got there, oh! How much did he, as loyal a son of the Church and the Holy See as ever was, what did he suffer because Dr. Cullen was against him? He wandered (as Dr. Cullen said in a letter he published in a sort of triumph), he wandered from Church to Church without a friend, and hardly got an audience from the Pope.

“And I too should go from St. Philip to Our Lady, and to St. Peter and St. Paul, and to St. Laurence and to St. Cecilia, and, if it happened to me as to Lucas, should come back to die.”

Yet, in spite of all, in spite of these exasperations of the flesh, these agitations of the spirit, what was there to regret? Had he not a mysterious consolation which outweighed every grief? Surely, surely, he had.

“Unveil, O Lord, and on us shine,
In glory and in grace,”

he exclaims in a poem written at this time, called “The Two Worlds”:

“This gaudy world grows pale before
The beauty of Thy face.

“Till Thou art seen it seems to he
A sort of fairy ground,
Where suns unsetting light the sky,
And flowers and fruit abound.

“But when Thy keener, purer beam
Is poured upon our sight,
It loses all its power to charm,
And what was day is night⁠ ⁠…

“And thus, when we renounce for Thee
Its restless aims and fears,
The tender memories of the past,
The hopes of coming years,

“Poor is our sacrifice, whose eyes
Are