I. CARDINAL MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC II. PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF CARDI- Contemporary Review, For SIX DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for warded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & CO. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 15 cents. TO TERENCE-A LITTLE CHILD. Here in this quiet woodland place, Hid in the folds of Surrey hills, I found you first; a flower-like face, A bird's voice babbling like a rill's The lore of that mysterious land I once, like you, could understand. A fragile thing of fairy mould, You meditate with grave brown eyes, Do memories of a land divine Or like a young bird, from the nest And hears the awakened forest-choir And nothing sees that is not fair Alas! child, we were once like you, Unending seemed the years to be, Our hold on them would ne'er grow less, Was it a mirage all we saw Then in the infinite future bright, Ideals fair, faith without flaw, And must you feel, as we have felt We know not: for your life we see While haply now the treacherous hours For of the future who may say The course, who scan man's years at birth, And see, like clouds, passing away, Boyhood and all its light-heart mirth, And manhood's strength, and see draw nigh Old age, and the last hour's agony? So we must watch with dimming gaze Bringing one end to one and all. Yet once from the utter darkness where Immeasurable and infinite That Hope's low sunrise on our way The perfect day we all shall meet, past, When Love shall in His kingdom sweet From The Contemporary Review. CARDINAL MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL. 1 I. Mr. Purcell's "Life of Cardinal Manning" is a book which awakens the most opposite feelings, and the most contradictory judgments. Its author has been a sort of inverted Balaam, called in to bless the cardinal he has yet, in the view of his admirers and friends, cursed him altogether. Then, his literary offences are too many and too flagrant to allow the mere critic to speak well of his book. He is certainly no master in the craft of letters, style he knows not; order, chronology, easy and correct reference, continuity of narrative, consecutiveness of thought, economy in the use of material, coherence and vividness of portraiture are things to which he has not attained. He is a laborious biographer, but an inaccurate writer, manifestly unacquainted with the religious history of our times, unable on this account to interpret many of his own documents or deal intelligently with the characters, careers, and opinions of many of the persons who crowd his pages. The book is thus difficult to read, a sore tax on one's patience, a continual trial to one's temper, mocking during perusal all attempts at a fair and balanced judgment. But when one has finished the book, and retreated from it far enough to see it in perspective, and as a whole, some very remarkable qualities begin to show themselves. It is, perhaps, rather a frank than an honest book, written by a man whose lack of insight is redeemed by a sort of blunt courage, guided by a rather robust common sense. He is anxious to be just, yet does not quite foresee the effects of his justice. His judgments are at once candid and naïve, the judgments of a man who has lived in a very narrow circle, has mistaken its whispers for the murmur of the 1 Life of Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster. By Edmund Sheridan Purcell, Member of the Roman Academy of Letters, London: Macmillan & Co. 1895. world, and has published, to the dismay of multitudes, the gossip it likes to talk but does not love to print. In its light, he has studied his documents, and inquired at his living sources, and then ne has laboriously poured out the results in this book, which, though a marvel of cumulative and skilled awkwardnesses, yet leaves us with a distinct and breathing image of its hero, who is certainly no pallid shadow, but an actual person, all too concrete and articulate. This is no small merit, and rare enough in modern biography to. deserve cordial praise. But the value of the book does not. lie in the text of its author, but in the original documents it contains. The question as to the right or wrong of their publication is not one for me to discuss; what is obvious is that access to first-hand authorities is always a gain to historical knowledge. Cardinal Manning was neither a recluse nor a private citizen, but a man who lived for more than half a century in the full blaze of the public eye. From the first he was a conspicuous figure, the leader of an army; a man of strong loves and intense hates, who handled too many men, fought too many battles both in the dark and in the day; in a word, was too much a force working for change and conflict to be commemorated in a biography which should be at once innocuous and veracious. If his life had caused no alarm or given no offence, it might have been edifying, but would not have been informing, for it would have told us nothing of the secrets of his character, or the springs of his conduct, or the reasons of his policy. But he was too much the sum of certain great moments and events to be dealt with as a delicate plant, or hidden within the muddy atmosphere of circumspect commonplace. More harm is done by the diplomatic suppression of the truth than by its frank publication; the one is the way of wisdom, the other of discretion; and the promise is that wisdom, not discretion, shall be justified of her children. Of course, I feel that the character of a lost leader is not a thing to be movement, and most of all by its leadlightly dealt with. While he lives his ers themselves. The earliest expresreputation is his own, but after his sion of this feeling is Hurrell Froude's death it becomes man's, every blot "Remains," the most classical is Newupon it being a stain, as it were, upon man's "Apologia," the largest is the our common good. It can never be to still unfinished "Life of Pusey," and the the advantage of religion that any re- | latest, this "Life of Cardinal Manning," ligious man should be dispraised. The which is, in its original documents, so heroes of Protestantism are no reproach | largely the work of his own hands. to Catholicism; the saints the Catholic Of these, the "Apologia" has the greatChurch reveres, the Protestant Church est personal value, but the least hisgrows better by admiring. There is torical worth. It is neither a biography nothing that so proves poverty of soul nor an autobiography, but simply what as the tendency, so common in ecclesi- it professes to be, a dialectical apology astical controversy, to make our own for a life by the man who had lived plain features look comely by darken- it. The real history is not there, but ing the fairer features of another face. only a history idealized, all the more Mr. Gladstone, addressing Manning in completely that the ideal represents a his Anglican days, says: "Your char- reality seen in retrospect, and under acter is a part of the property of the the transfiguring light of a superlative Church and of the truth in the Church, ratiocinative genius, whose imagination and must be husbanded for the sake made his successive experiences like of the association with that truth." steps in the logical process which led This is even more true to-day than it him from a dubious to an assured and was then, and in a larger sense than infallible faith. But a man's history is was at first intended. In his good too complex a thing to be done into any name all Churches share, and any dialectic, even though it be the supreme shadow of reproach that falls on him feat of the most dexterous dialectician will send a chill through the heart of of his age. The mistakes, the falterall our good. But, then, to attempt anings, the lapses, the blind gropings, analysis of his character in relation to his work is to do him no dishonor; what the man did depended upon what he was, and so we study him only that we may the better watch the evolution of a movement in which he was a potent factor. What is here termed the Catholic Revival began with three men, whose spirit it may be said to have incarnated: Hurrell Froude, who was its impulsive force; John Henry Newman, who embodied its intellectual and ethical energy; and John Keble, who created the atmosphere of emotion or sentiment within which he lived, and by which it was nourished. But while these men presided over its birth, its later fortunes were shaped within the Anglican Church mainly by Dr. Pusey, and within the Roman Church mainly by Cardinal Manning. The significance of the personal factor has been recognized by every serious student of the 1 Vol. i. 269 | | | the ignorances, the confusions, the unreasoning likes and dislikes which marked the actual way of the man are lost sight of, forgotten, or softened out of all significance, the end being made to illuminate the beginning rather than the beginning to explain the end. Froude's "Remains," on the other hand, have even more historical than personal worth. Here we see the man as he actually lived, the circle he lived in, how they thought and spoke, believed and acted. The men are intensely sincere, but curiously superficial; where most thoroughly in earnest, there most audaciously ignorant, full of the inconsiderate speech which came of hatreds they were too impatient to justify and too prejudiced to be ashamed of. In the "Remains," in the tracts, and in the private correspondence, when we can get it unexpurgated, the real men live; and history must know the real man before it can construe the man idealized. Now this life of Manning is full of the same sort of documents as Froude's "Remains." We have not all we could wish, but we have enough to be grateful for. We have the man in his every-day habit, in the flesh and blood reality of his ecclesiastical being; and we can interpret him in terms we owe altogether to himself, or to the men he worked with, and for, and through. We are admitted into his secret soul, we hear his solemn confessions or astute suggestions to the men he trusted, and then we have the records of the public policy which now contradicted and now carried out his inner mind. What this biography does, no other and later biography can ever undo; for what gives it character is not what the author writes, but what he publishes. The picture is not, indeed, quite complete; some of Manning's most characteristic letters, written at the crisis of his career, perished under his own hand. By the same hand certain of his diaries and memoranda have, as a rule, at the most critical places or in connection with the most decisive events, been expurgated, amended, adjusted to reminiscence, adapted to history; but, happily, the untouched originals reflect the living man. And it is the man as he lived, and not the man apologetically idealized, which explains the history he contributed to make. II. In attempting an estimate and analysis of Manning's character in relation to his work we shall, as far as possible, confine ourselves to the documents our author has published. We cannot, indeed, entirely dismiss himself from our minds, nor would it be just to do so. His very attitude is significant, and has been assumed, not according to his original bias, but against it. It is apparent that he began as an admirer, that he did not mean to be unfriendly, and that he believes, in the heart of him, that his hero could stand being painted as he really was, warts and all. If he is to be held responsible for the use of the materials entrusted to him, we ought also to remember that the responsibility for much in his tone of mind and for many of his judgments, lies with the materials themselves. 1. Well, then, looked at in the light of the documents here published and the inner history they unfold, we may say Manning's character seems, though strong, neither subtle nor complex. Subtlety was too little the note of his mind to be the distinction of his conduct. His ends were clearly and easily conceived, and his means, though often underhand, were, as a rule, obvious and simple, their efficiency lying in the strength of his will rather than in their delicate fitness. While fond of intrigue, he was too self-conscious to hide his designs from the observant. His characteristic qualities appear very early in his career. As a boy he was averse to real and serious study,' and happily without the curse of precosity; but he had ambition, claiming as his motto "Aut Cæsar aut nullus," "2 only his ambitions were as yet neither intellectual nor academic. He found fame at Oxford in the Union, and once he became famous, men said, "Manning is self-conscious even in his nightcap." He "drew into his orbit a certain number of satellites," assumed "omniscience," and "spoke as one having authority," now and then, to the disaster of his claims. His reminiscences seem to show that, even in later life, he had more interest in himself than in any of his schoolfellows." These were, in a boy, natural traits; they indicate a nature which by attempting to conceal only the more revealed itself; but the traits natural in a boy may grow into much less innocuous qualities in a man. Possibly Manning suffered through his whole career from the want of an early period of storm and stress, especially those higher and more tragic religious experiences which do so much to purify the character. Accident, rather than necessity, drove him into the Church; compulsion of circumstances more than the vocation which will not hear a 1 i. 27. 2 i. 28, 48. 3 i. 30. 4 The words of Sir Francis Doyle, i. 46-7. 5 i. 18. |