CONTENTS II. EXPOSITORY AND ARGUMENTATIVE : Revealed Religion, from The Grammar of Assent Divided Allegiance, from A Letter to His Grace the Duke Mental Sufferings of our Lord in His Passion, from Dis- 148 The Peoples of the Plains, from Historical Sketches Marcus Tullius Cicero, from Historical Sketches St. Philip and Savonarola, from Sermons Preached on VI. DESCRIPTIVE AND IMAGINATIVE: The Possession of Juba, from Callista 1 INTRODUCTION In the beginning of this little book of selections from the works of Cardinal Newman, it is best that I should avoid misunderstanding by saying that it is not intended for persons who have already studied them and expect new and even subtle illumination. It is intended for those younger students who ought to begin to consider English style in the light of an art as soon as they begin to write. It is intended, too, for those and there are many who admire Newman while they think that they are too busy to read his most important books. To the latter this volume may serve as a practical introduction to a new world; but too much in that way must not be expected of it; it cannot supply the place of the culture without which the reader must miss some of the strongest and finest qualities of Newman's substance and style; and he who comes to it to complete an education not yet begun, will of course be disappointed. It aims primarily to show that Newman's style was the result of constant care on his part, and that, as far as he could control it, it was the result of study as conscious as that of Stevenson.1 No one can tell us what quality of force sends the sap in May to the stems of a rosebush; but Mr. Burbank of Los Angeles knows exactly what tints of color a rose may have, since he knows the process by which roses are made more splendid year after year. English prose style has grown by processes that can be analyzed since the end of the fourteenth century, when Chaucer's Parson's Tale dragged its slow length along. The writer of to-day mustto be even the equal of his fellows have a fixed artistic 1 See Memories and Portraits: "A College Magazine." intention, as well as a conscious technical process. The ancient system that made rhetoric a study in itself, with little relation to actual practice, is disappearing. A book of rhetoric to-day is merely a box of tools, which the student is taught to use for practical purposes. One of the most valuable qualities at the basis of Newman's style-formation is his taste, a quality dependent in most men on what they read in early life, a quality which above all literary qualities is least cultivated in our schools. Newman's education in taste began very early. In 1871 he wrote a letter to Mr. J. R. Hope-Scott, thanking him for a copy of the abridged Life of Scott: "In one sense," he says, "I deserve it, I have ever had such a devotion, I may call it, to Sir Walter Scott. As a boy in the early summer mornings I read Waverley and Guy Mannering in bed when they first came out, before it was time to get up; and long before that I think when I was eight years old - I listened eagerly to the Lay of the Last Minstrel, which my mother and aunt were reading aloud."1 He began to write very early. "In the year 1812," he writes, in a book recalling memories, "I wrote a mock drama of some kind; also, whether included in it or not I cannot recollect, a satire on the Prince Regent. At one time I wrote a dramatic piece in which Augustus comes in. Again I wrote a burlesque opera in 1815, composing tunes for the songs." All the Newman family loved music. It was part of their domestic life. To his latest day, Cardinal Newman could follow the threads of melody through the most complicated symphony as skilfully as if he were a conductor, baton in hand. The fineness of his musical ear is evident in the un equalled cadences of his prose, more so in the Dream of Gerontius, which needed only Elgar, the composer, to wed music to word music. At the age of fourteen, in 1815, he wrote two periodicals, the Spy and the Anti-Spy. They 1 Memoirs of J. R. Hope-Scott, vol. ii, p. 243. |