A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895) Part 13

Among the dead writers of the century who are known wholly or mainly for the cultivation of philosophical studies, Bentham, Mackintosh, John Stuart Mill (to whom some would add his father James), Sir William Hamilton, Dean Mansel, are likely to hold a place in history, while at present many might be disposed to add the name of Mr. T. H. Green, a tutor of Balliol College, who between 1870 and his death propagated in Oxford a sort of neo-Hegelianism much tinctured with political and social Liberalism, and obtained a remarkable personal position. It is however as yet too early to a.s.sign a distinct historical place to one whose philosophy was in no sense original, though it was somewhat originally combined and applied, and who exhibited very small literary skill in setting forth. The others are already set "in the firm perspective of the past," and, with yet others who, still living, escape our grasp, have their names clearly marked for a place in an adequate history.

Jeremy Bentham, a curious person who reminds one of a Hobbes without the literary genius, was born in London, near Houndsditch, as far back as 5th February 1748. He was the son of a solicitor who was very well off, and wished his son to take to the superior branch of the law. Jeremy was sent to Westminster, and thence to Queen's College, Oxford, in his thirteenth year. He was a Master of Arts at eighteen, and was called to the Bar six years later; but he never practised. He must have been very early drawn to the study of the French _philosophes_; much indeed of the doctrine which afterwards made him famous was either taken from, or incidentally antic.i.p.ated by, Turgot and others of them, and it was a common remark, half in earnest half in gibe, that Bentham's views had made the tour of Europe in the French versions of Dumont before they attained to any attention in England. In 1776 he wrote a _Fragment on Government_, a kind of critique of Blackstone, which is distinguished by acute one-sided deduction from Whig principles; and he became a sort of prophet of the Whigs, who sometimes plagiarised and popularised, sometimes neglected, his opinions. He never married, though he would have liked to do so; and lived on his means till 1832, when he died in the eighty-fifth year of his age. His chief books after the _Fragment_ had been his _Theory of Punishments and Rewards_; 1787, _Letters on Usury_; 1789, _Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation_; 1813, _Treatise on Evidence_; and 1824, _Fallacies_.

The central pillar and hinge of all Bentham's doctrines in politics, morals, and law is the famous principle of Utility, or to use the cant phrase which he borrowed from Priestley, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." What the greatest number is--for instance whether in a convict settlement of forty thieves and ten honest men, the thieves are to be consulted--and what happiness means, what is utility, what things have brought existing arrangements about, and what the loss of altering them might be, as well as a vast number of other points, Bentham never deigned to consider. Starting from a few crude phrases such as this, he raised a system remarkable for a sort of apparent consistency and thoroughness, and having the luck or the merit to hit off in parts not a few of the popular desires and fads of the age of the French Revolution and its sequel. But he was a political theorist rather than a political philosopher, his neglect of all the n.o.bler elements of thought and feeling was complete, and latterly at least he wrote atrocious English, clumsy in composition and crammed with technical jargon. The brilliant fas.h.i.+on in which Sydney Smith has compressed and spirited his _Fallacies_ into the famous "Noodle's Oration" is an example of the kind of treatment which Bentham requires in order to be made tolerable in form; and even then he remains one-sided in fact.

Sir James Mackintosh has been mentioned before, and is less of a philosopher pure and simple than any person included in this list--indeed his philosophical reputation rests almost wholly upon his brilliant, though rather slight, _Dissertation on Ethics_ for the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. The greater part by far of his by no means short life (1765-1832) was occupied in practising medicine and law, in defending the French Revolution against Burke (_Vindiciae Gallicae_, 1791); in defending the French Royalists in the person of Peltier against Bonaparte, 1803; in acting as Recorder and Judge in India, 1804-1811; and in political and literary work at home for the last twenty years, his literature being chiefly history, and contributions to the _Edinburgh Review_. But there has been a certain tendency, both in his own time and since, to regard Mackintosh as a sort of philosopher thrown away. If he was so, he would probably have made his mark rather in the history of philosophy than in philosophy itself, for there are no signs in him of much original depth. But he wrote very well, and was a sound and on the whole a fair critic.

Of the two Mills, the elder, James, was like Mackintosh only an _interim_ philosopher: his son John belongs wholly to our present subject. James was the son of a farmer, was born near Montrose in 1773, and intended to enter the ministry, but became a journalist instead. In the ten years or so after 1806, he composed a _History of British India_, which was long regarded as authoritative, but on which the gravest suspicions have recently been cast. Mill, in fact, was a violent politician of the Radical type, and his opinions of ethics were so peculiar that it is uncertain how far he might have carried them in dealing with historical characters. His book, however, gained him a high post in the East India Company, the Directors of which just at that time were animated by a wish to secure distinguished men of letters as servants. He nevertheless continued to write a good deal both in periodicals and in book form, the chief examples of the latter being his _Political Economy_, his _a.n.a.lysis of the Human Mind_, and his _Fragment on Mackintosh_. James Mill, of whom most people have conceived a rather unfavourable idea since the appearance of his son's _Autobiography_, was an early disciple of Bentham, and to a certain extent resembled him in hard clearness and superficial consistency.

His son John Stuart was born in London on 20th May 1806, and educated by his father in the unnatural fas.h.i.+on which he has himself recorded.

Intellectually, however, he was not neglected, and after some years, spent mainly in France, he was, through his father's influence, appointed at seventeen to a clerks.h.i.+p in the India House, which gave him a competence for the rest of his life and a main occupation for thirty-four years of it. He was early brought into contact (by his father's friends.h.i.+p with Grote and others) with the Philosophical Radicals, as well as with many men of letters, especially Carlyle, of the destruction of the first version of whose _French Revolution_ Mill (having lent it to his friend Mrs. Taylor) was the innocent cause. To this Mrs. Taylor, whom he afterwards married, Mill was fanatically attached, the attachment being the cause of some curious flights in his later work. His character was very amiable, and the immense influence which, especially in the later years of his life, he exercised, was partly helped by his personal friends.h.i.+ps. But it was unfortunate for him that in 1865 he was returned to Parliament. His political views, though it was the eve of the triumph of what might be called his party, were _doctrinaire_ and out of date, and his life had given him no practical hold of affairs, so that he more than fulfilled the usual prophecy of failure in the case of men of thought who are brought late in life into action. Fortunately for him he was defeated in 1868, and pa.s.sed the rest of his life mostly in France, dying at Avignon on 8th May 1873.

Brought up in an atmosphere of discussion and of books, Mill soon took to periodical writing, and in early middle life was for some years editor of the _London and Westminster Review_; but his literary ambition, which directed itself not to pure literature but to philosophical and political discussion, was not content with periodical writing as an exercise, and his circ.u.mstances enabled him to do without it as a business. In 1843 he published what is undoubtedly his chief work, _A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive_, five years later a companion treatise on _Political Economy_ which may perhaps rank second. In 1859 his essay on _Liberty_, a short but very attractive exposition of his political principles, appeared; next year a collection of essays ent.i.tled _Dissertations and Discussions_. After lesser works on _Utilitarianism_ and on Comte, of whom he had been a supporter in more senses than one, but whose later eccentricities revolted him, he issued in 1865 his _Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy_, which ranks as the third of his chief works, and completes his system, as far as a system so negative can be said to be completed, on the side of theology and metaphysics. Among his smaller works may be mentioned _Representative Government_, and (very late) the fanatical and curious _Subjection of Women_. His _Autobiography_, an interesting but melancholy book, appeared shortly after his death.

Mill must be accounted on the whole by good judges, even if they are utterly opposed to his whole system of philosophy, the chief philosophical _writer_ of England in this century; and the enormous though not permanent influence which he attained about its middle was deserved, partly by qualities purely literary, but partly also by some purely philosophical. He had inherited from his father not merely the theoretical exaltation of liberty (except in the philosophical sense) which characterised eighteenth century philosophers, but also that arrogant and pragmatical impatience of the supernatural which was to a still greater extent that century's characteristic. The arrogance and the pragmaticality changed in John Stuart Mill's milder nature to a sort of nervous dread of admitting even the possibility of things not numerable, ponderable, and measurable; and it may be observed with amus.e.m.e.nt that for the usual division of logic into Deductive and Inductive he subst.i.tuted _Ratiocinative_ for the first member, so as not even by implication to admit the possibility of deduction from any principles not inductively given. So, too, later, in his _Examination of Sir William Hamilton_, between the opposing spectres of Realism and Idealism, he was driven to take refuge in what he called "permanent possibilities" of Sensation, though logicians vainly asked how he a.s.sured himself of the permanence, and jesters rudely observed that to call a bottle of gin a "permanent possibility of drunkenness" was an unnecessary complication of language for a very small end or meaning.

His great philosophical weapon (borrowed from though of course not invented by his father) was the a.s.sociation of Ideas, just as his clue in political economy was in the main though not exclusively _laissez-faire_, in ethics a modified utilitarianism, and in politics an absolute deference to, tempered by a resigned distrust of, the majority.

The defect in a higher and more architectonic theory of the world with which he has been charged is not quite justly chargeable, for from his point of view no such theory was possible.

Even those, however, who, as the present writer acknowledges in his own case, are totally opposed to the whole Millian conception of logic and politics, of metaphysics and morality, must, unless prejudiced, admit his great merits of method and treatment. He not only very seldom smuggles in sophistry into the middle of his arguments, but even paralogisms are not common with him; it is with his premises, not with his conclusions, that you must deal if you wish to upset him. Unlike most contemners of formal logic, he is not in much danger, as far as his merely dialectic processes go, from formal logic itself; and it is in the arbitrary and partial character of his preliminary admissions, a.s.sumptions, and exclusions that the weak points of his system are to be found.

His style has also very considerable merits. It is not brilliant or charming; it has neither great strength nor great stateliness. But it is perfectly clear, it is impossible to mistake its meaning, and its simplicity is unattended by any of the down-at-heel neglect of neatness and elegance which is to be found, for instance, in Locke. Little scholastic as he was in most ways, Mill had far outgrown the ignorant eighteenth century contempt of the Schoolmen, and had learnt from them an exact precision of statement and argument, while he had managed to keep (without its concomitant looseness and vulgarity) much of the eighteenth century's wholesome aversion to jargon and to excess of terminology. In presenting complicated statements of detail, as in the _Political Economy_, the _Representative Government_, and elsewhere, he has as much lucidity as Macaulay, with an almost total freedom from Macaulay's misleading and delusive suppression of material details. And besides his usual kind of calm and measured argument, he can occasionally, as in divers pa.s.sages of the _Sir William Hamilton_ and the political books, rise or sink from the logical and rhetorical points of view respectively to an impa.s.sioned advocacy, which, though it may be rarely proof against criticism, is very agreeable so far as it goes.

That Mill wholly escaped the defects of the popular philosopher, I do not suppose that even those who sympathise with his views would contend; though they might not admit, as others would, that these defects were inseparable from his philosophy in itself. But it may be doubtful whether, all things considered, a better _literary_ type of the popular philosopher exists in modern English; and it certainly is not surprising that, falling in as he did with the current mode of thought, and providing it with a defence specious in reasoning and attractive in language, he should have attained an influence perhaps greater than that of which any English philosophical writer has been able during his lifetime to boast.

The convenience of noticing the Mills together, and of putting Sir William Hamilton next to his most famous disciples, seems to justify a certain departure from strict chronological order. Hamilton was indeed considerably the senior of his critic, having been born on 8th March 1788. His father and grandfather, both professors at the University of Glasgow, had been plain "Dr. Hamilton." But they inherited, and Sir William made good, the claim to a baronetcy which had been in abeyance since the days of Robert Hamilton, the Covenanting leader. He himself proceeded from Glasgow, with a Snell Exhibition, to Balliol in 1809. He was called to the Scottish Bar, but never practised, though some business came to him as Crown solicitor in the Court of Teinds (t.i.thes).

He competed in 1820 for the Chair of Moral Philosophy, which Wilson, with far inferior claims, obtained; but it is fair to say that at the time the one candidate had given no more public proofs of fitness than the other. Soon, however, he began to make his mark as a contributor of philosophical articles to the _Edinburgh Review_, and in 1836 he obtained a professors.h.i.+p in the University for which he was even better fitted--that of Logic and Metaphysics. His lectures became celebrated, but he never published them; indeed his only publication of any importance during his lifetime was a collection of his articles under the t.i.tle of _Dissertations_, with the exception of his monumental edition of Reid, on which he spent, and on which it has sometimes been held that he wasted, most of his time. He died in 1856, and his lectures were published after his death by his successor, Professor Veitch (himself an enthusiastic devotee of literature, especially Border literature, as well as of philosophy), and his greatest disciple, Mansel, between 1859 and 1861. And this was how Mill's _Examination_ came to be posthumous. The "Philosophy of the Conditioned," as Hamilton's is for shortness called, could not be described in any brief, and perhaps not with propriety in any, s.p.a.ce of the present volume. It is enough to say that it was an attempt to reinforce the so-called "Scotch Philosophy" of Reid against Hume by the help of Kant, as well as at once to continue and evade the latter without resorting either to Transcendentalism or to the experience-philosophy popular in England. In logic, Hamilton was a great and justly honoured defender of the formal view of the science which had been in persistent disrepute during the eighteenth century; but some of the warmest lovers of logic doubt whether his technical inventions or discoveries, such as the famous Quantification of the Predicate, are more than "pretty" in the sense of mathematicians and wine-merchants. This part of his doctrine, by the way, attracted special attention, and was carefully elaborated by another disciple, Professor Thomas Spencer Baynes (1823-1887), who, after chequering philosophy with journalism, became editor of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and a careful Shakespearian student. Yet another disciple, and the most distinguished save one, was James Frederick Ferrier, nephew of Susan Ferrier, to whom we owe three most brilliant novels, who was born in 1808 and died in 1864 at St. Andrews, where he had for nearly twenty years been Professor of Moral Philosophy, after previously holding for a short time a History Professors.h.i.+p at Edinburgh. Of this latter University Ferrier had been an alumnus, as well as of Oxford. He edited his father-in-law Wilson's works, and was a contributor to _Blackwood's Magazine_, but his chief book was his _Inst.i.tutes of Metaphysic_, published in 1854. Too strong a Hamiltonian influence (not in style but in some other ways), and an attempt at an almost Spinosian rigidity of method, have sometimes been held to have marred Ferrier's philosophical performance; but it is certain that he had the makings of a great metaphysician, and that he was actually no small one.

The great merit of Hamilton was that he, in a somewhat irregular and informal way (for, as has been said, he was ostensibly more a commentator and critic than an independent theorist), introduced German speculation into England after a fas.h.i.+on far more thorough than the earlier but dilettante and haphazard attempts of De Quincey and Coleridge, and contributed vastly to the lifting of the whole tone and strain of English philosophic disputation from the slovenly commonsense into which it had fallen. In fact, he restored metaphysics proper as a part of English current thought; and helped (though here he was not alone) to restore logic. His defects were, in the first place, that he was at once too systematic and two piecemeal in theory, and worse still, that his philosophical style was one of the very worst existing, or that could exist. That this may have been in some degree a designed reaction from ostentatious popularity is probable; and that it was in great part caught from his studious frequentation of that Hercynian forest, which takes the place of the groves of Academe in German philosophical writing, is certain. But the hideousness of his dialect is a melancholy fact; and it may be said to have contributed at least as much to the decadence of his philosophical vogue as any defects in the philosophy itself. He was, in fact, at the antipodes from Mill in attractiveness of form as well as in character of doctrine.

There are some who think that Henry Longueville Mansel was actually in more than one respect, and might, with some slight changes of accidental circ.u.mstance, have been indisputably, the greatest philosopher of Britain in the nineteenth century. Of the opinion entertained by contemporaries of great intellectual gifts, that of Mark Pattison, a bitter political and academical opponent, and the most acrimonious critic of his time, that Mansel was, though according to Pattison's view, an "arch-jobber," an "acute thinker, and a metaphysician" seems pretty conclusive. But Mansel died in middle age, he was much occupied in various kinds of University business, and he is said by those who knew him to have been personally rather indolent. He was born in Northamptons.h.i.+re on 6th October 1820, and after school-days at Merchant Taylors' pa.s.sed in the then natural course to St. John's College, Oxford, of which he became fellow. He was an active opponent of the first University Commission, in reference to which he wrote the most brilliant satire of the kind proper to University wits which this century has produced--the Aristophanic parody ent.i.tled _Phrontisterion_.

But the Commission returned him good for evil, insomuch as he became the first Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, a post created in consequence of it. In 1859 he was Bampton Lecturer, and his sermons in this office again attained the first excellence in style, though they were made the subject of severe criticism not merely by the disciples of Liberal philosophy, but by some timid defenders of orthodoxy, for their bold application of the philosophy of the conditioned, on scholastic lines, to the problems of theodicy. Mansel was not a more frequent lecturer than the somewhat indulgent conditions of the English Universities, especially Oxford, even after the Commission, required; but his deliverances were of exceptional importance, both in conception and expression. At the death of Milman, his political friends being in power, he was made Dean of St. Paul's, but enjoyed the dignity only a short time, and died in 1870. Besides _Phrontisterion_ and his _Bampton Lectures_, which bring him under both the divisions of this chapter, he had published in his lifetime an excellent edition of Aldrich's "Logic," _Prolegomena Logica_ (the princ.i.p.al work of the Hamiltonian school, though quite independent in main points), and an enlarged edition of an Encyclopaedia dissertation on _Metaphysics_. His essays, chiefly from the _Quarterly Review_, were published after his death, with _Phrontisterion_ and other things.

It will appear from this brief summary that Mansel was a many-sided man; and it may be added that he possessed an exceptionally keen wit, by no means confined to professional subjects, and was altogether far more of a man of the world than is usual in a philosopher. But though this man-of-the-worldliness may have affected the extent and quant.i.ty of his philosophical work, it did not touch the quality of it. It may be contended that Mansel was on the whole rather intended for a critic or historian of philosophy than for an independent philosophical teacher; and in this he would but have exhibited a tendency of his century. Yet he was very far from mere slavish following even of Hamilton, while the copying, with a little travesty and adjustment of German originals, on which so much philosophical repute has been founded in England, was entirely foreign to his nature and thought. In Mill's _Examination of Hamilton_, the _Bampton Lectures_, above referred to, came in for the most vehement protest, for Mill, less blind than the orthodox objectors, perceived that their drift was to steer clear of some of the commonest and most dangerous reefs and shoals on which the orthodoxy of intelligent but not far-sighted minds has for some generations past been wrecked. But Mansel's rejoinder, written at a time when he was more than ever distracted by avocations, and hampered certainly by the necessity of speaking for his master as well as for himself, and probably by considerations of expediency in respect to the duller of the faithful, was not his happiest work. In fact he was too clear and profound a thinker to be first-rate in controversy--a function which requires either unusual dishonesty or one-sidedness in an unusual degree. He may sometimes have been a very little of a sophist--it is perhaps impossible to be a great philosopher without some such touch. But of paralogism--of that sincere advancing of false argument which from the time of Plato has been justly regarded as the most fatal of philosophic drawbacks--there is no trace in Mansel. His natural genius, moreover, a.s.sisted by his practice in miscellaneous writing, which though much less in amount of result than Mill's was even more various in kind, equipped him with a most admirable philosophical style, hitting the exact mean between the over-popular and the over-technical, endowing even the _Prolegomena Logica_ with a perfect readableness, and in the _Metaphysics_ and large parts of the editorial matter of the _Aldrich_ showing capacities which make it deeply to be regretted that he never undertook a regular history of philosophy.

The place which might have been thus filled, was accepted but partially and with no capital success by divers writers. Frederick Denison Maurice, who will be mentioned again in this chapter, wrote on _Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy_, but the book, though like all his work attractively written, does not show very wide or very profound knowledge of the subject. The _Lectures on the History of Ancient Philosophy_, by William Archer Butler, a Dublin professor, who died prematurely, would probably, had the author lived, have formed the best history of the subject in English, and even in their fragmentary condition make an admirable book, free from jargon, not unduly popular, but at once sound and literary. The most ambitious attempt at the whole subject was that of George Henry Lewes, the companion of George Eliot, a versatile man of letters of great ability, who brought out on a small scale in 1845, and afterwards on a much larger one, a _Biographical History of Philosophy_. This, though occasionally superficial, and too much tinged with a sort of second-hand Positivism, had, as the qualities of these defects, an excellent though sometimes a rather treacherous clearness, and a unity of vision which is perhaps more valuable for fairly intelligent readers than desultory profundity. But it can hardly take rank as a book of philosophical scholars.h.i.+p, though it is almost a brilliant specimen of popular philosophical literature.

Philosophy, science, and perhaps theology may dispute between them two remarkable figures, nearly contemporary, the one an Oxford and the other a Cambridge man--Whately and Whewell. Besides the differences which their respective universities impress upon nearly all strong characters, there were others between them, Whately being the better bred, the more accomplished writer, and the more original, Whewell the more widely informed, and perhaps the more thoroughgoing. But both were curiously English in a sort of knock-me-down Johnsonian dogmatism; and both were in consequence extremely intolerant. For Whately's so-called impartiality consisted in being equally bia.s.sed against Evangelicals and Tractarians; and both were accused by their unfriends of being a little addicted to the encouragement of flatterers and toadies. Richard Whately, the elder, was born in London in 1787, his father being a clergyman in the enjoyment of several pluralities. He went to Oriel, gained a fellows.h.i.+p there in 1811, and was with intervals a resident in Oxford for some twenty years, being latterly Princ.i.p.al of St. Alban Hall (where he made Newman his Vice-Princ.i.p.al), and in 1829 Professor of Political Economy. In 1831 the Whigs made him Archbishop of Dublin, which difficult post he held for more than thirty years till his death in 1863. His work is not very extensive, but it is remarkable. His _Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte_ was an exceedingly clever "skit" on the Rationalist position in regard to miracles and biblical criticism generally; though Whately's orthodoxy was none of the strictest. His Bampton Lectures on _Party Feeling in Religion_ preceded rather curiously the greatest outburst of the said party feeling which had been seen in England since the seventeenth century. But the books by which he is or was most widely known are his _Logic_ and _Rhetoric_, expansions of Encyclopaedia articles (1826 and 1828) intentionally popular and perhaps almost unnecessarily exoteric, but extremely stimulating and clear. Whately, who had some points in common with Sydney Smith, was, like him, in part the victim of the extreme want of accuracy and range in the Oxford education of his youth; but his mental and literary powers were great.

William Whewell, the son of a carpenter, showed talent for mathematics early, and obtaining an exhibition at Trinity, Cambridge, became fellow, tutor, and Master of his College. He had the advantage, which his special studies gave, of more thorough training, and extended his attention from pure and applied mathematics to science and a kind of philosophy. His chief works were _The History_ (1837) and _The Philosophy_ (1840) _of the Inductive Sciences_, his Bridgewater Treatise on _Astronomy and Physic in Reference to Natural Philosophy_ (1833) and his _Plurality of Worlds_ (1853) being also famous in their day; but he wrote voluminously in various kinds. He was rather a bully, and his work has no extraordinary merit of style, but it is interesting as being among the latest in which science permitted her votaries not to specialise very much, and rather to apply the ancient education to the new subjects than to be wholly theirs.

If the difficulty of deciding on rejection or admission be great in the case of philosophers proper, much greater is it in the numerous subdivisions which are themselves applied philosophy as philosophy is applied literature. The two chief of these perhaps are Jurisprudence and Political Economy. Under the head of the first, three remarkable writers at least absolutely demand notice--Austin, Maine, and Stephen. The first of these was in respect of influence, if not also of actual accomplishment, one of the most noteworthy Englishmen of the century.

Born in 1790, he died in 1859, having begun life in the Army which he exchanged for the Bar not long after Waterloo. He was made Professor of Jurisprudence in the new University College of London in 1827. He held this post for five years only; but it resulted in his famous _Province of Jurisprudence Determined_, a book standing more or less alone in English. He did not publish much else, though he did some official work; and his _Lectures on Jurisprudence_ were posthumously edited by his wife, a Miss Taylor of Norwich, who has been referred to as translator of the _Story without an End_, and who did much other good work. Austin (whose younger brother Charles (1799-1874) left little if anything in print but acc.u.mulated a great fortune at the Parliamentary Bar, and left a greater, though vague, conversational reputation) had bad health almost throughout his life, and his work is not large in bulk. At first pooh-poohed and neglected, almost extravagantly prized later, and later still, according to the usual round, a little cavilled at, it presents Utilitarian theory at its best in the intellectual way; and its disciplinary value, if it is not taken for gospel, can hardly be overrated. But its extreme clearness, closeness, and logical precision carry with them the almost inevitable defects of hardness, narrowness, and want of "play," as well as of that most fatal of intellectual att.i.tudes which takes for granted that everything is explicable. Still, these were the defects of Austin's school and time; his merits were individual, and indeed very nearly unique.

Sir Henry James Summer Maine was born in 1822, and educated first as a Blue Coat boy and then at Pembroke College, Cambridge. After a quite exceptional career as an undergraduate, he became fellow of Trinity Hall, of which he died Master in 1888. But he had only held this latter post for eleven years, and the midmost of his career was occupied with quite different work. He had been made Professor of Civil Law in his University in 1847, at a very early age, when he had not even been called to the Bar; but he supplied this omission three years later, and a little later still exchanged his Cambridge Professors.h.i.+p for a Readers.h.i.+p at Lincoln's Inn. In 1862 he obtained the appointment, famous from its connection with letters, of Legal Member of the Viceroy's Council in India. On quitting it after seven years he was transferred to the Council at Home, and became Professor of Comparative Jurisprudence at Oxford. Besides his work as a reviewer, which was considerable, Maine wrote--in an admirable style, and with a scholars.h.i.+p and sense which, in the recrudescence of more barbaric thought, have brought down socialist and other curses on his head--many works on the philosophy of law, politics, and history, the chief of which were his famous _Ancient Law_ (1861), _Village Communities_ (1871), _Early Law and Custom_ (1883), with a severe criticism on Democracy called _Popular Government_ (1885).

Few writers of our time could claim the phrase _mitis sapentia_ as Maine could, though it is possible that he was a little too much given to theorise. But his influence in checking that of Austin was admirable.

A colleague of Maine's on the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, his successor in his Indian post, like him a _malleus demagogorum_, but in some ways no small contrast, was Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-94), the most distinguished member of a family unusually distinguished during the past century in the public service and in literature. His father, Sir James Stephen, was himself well known as a reviewer, as a civil servant, as Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, and as author of _Essays in Ecclesiastical History_ and _Lectures on the History of France_ (1849 and 1851). The second Sir James was born at Kensington in 1829, went to Eton, thence to King's College, London, and thence to Trinity, Cambridge, and was called to the Bar in 1854. His legal career was brilliant and varied, and led him to the Bench, which he resigned shortly before his death. Sir James Stephen published some works of capital importance on his own subject, the chief relating the Criminal Law, collected both earlier and later a good deal of his _Sat.u.r.day_ work, discussed a famous pa.s.sage of Indian History in the _Story of Nuncomar_ (1885), and wrote not a little criticism--political, theological, and other--of a somewhat negative but admirably clear-headed kind--the chief expression of which is _Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity_ (1873).

Even less room can be given to the Political Economists than to the "Jurisprudents," partly because the best writers of them, such as J. S.

Mill, have figured or will figure elsewhere; partly because, from Ricardo to Jevons and Cliffe Leslie, though they have often displayed no mean literary power, the necessities or supposed necessities of their subject have usually kept their books further away from _belles lettres_ than the doc.u.ments of any other department of what is widely called philosophy. But a paragraph must at least be given to one of the earliest and one of the most famous of them.

If a prize were offered to the best-abused person in English literature, few compet.i.tors would have much chance with Thomas Robert Malthus, author of the _Essay on the Principles of Population_ (1798), and of divers works on Political Economy, of which he was Professor in the East India College at Haileybury. To judge from the references which for many years used to be, and to some extent still are, made to Malthus, still more from the way in which the term "Malthusian" is still often used, he might be supposed to have been a reprobate anarchist and revolutionary, who had before his eyes neither the fear of G.o.d, nor the love of man, nor the respect of morality and public opinion. As a matter of fact Malthus was a most respectable and amiable clergyman, orthodox I believe in religion, Tory I believe in politics, who incurred odium chiefly by his inculcation of the most disagreeable lessons of the new and cheerless science which he professed. Born on 24th February 1766 near Dorking, of a very respectable family, he went to Cambridge, took honours, a fellows.h.i.+p at his college (Jesus), and orders, obtained a benefice, and spent most of the last thirty years of his life in the Professors.h.i.+p above referred to, dying in 1854. His _Essay_ was one of the numerous counter-blasts to G.o.dwin's anarchic perfectibilism, and its general drift was simply to show that the increase of population, unless counter-acted by individual and moral self-restraint, must reduce humanity to misery. The special formula that "population increases in a geometrical, food in a arithmetical ratio," is overstrained and a little absurd; the general principle is sound beyond all question, and not only consistent with, but absolutely deducible from, the purest Christian doctrines. Malthus wrote well, he knew thoroughly what he was writing about, and he suffers only from the inevitable drawback to all writers on such subjects who have not positive genius of form, that a time comes when their contentions appear self-evident to all who are not ignorant or prejudiced.

The greatest _theological_ interest of the century belongs to what is diversely called the Oxford and the Tractarian Movement; while, even if this statement be challenged on non-literary grounds, it will scarcely be so by any one on grounds literary. For the present purpose, of course, nothing like a full account of the Movement can be attempted. It is enough to say that it arose partly in reaction from the Evangelical tendency which had dominated the more active section of the Church of England for many years, partly in protest against the Liberalising and Lat.i.tudinarian tendency in matters both temporal and spiritual. In contradistinction to its predecessor (for the Evangelicals had been the reverse of literary), it was from the first--_i.e._ about 1830, or earlier if we take _The Christian Year_ as a harbinger of it--a very literary movement both in verse and prose. Of its three leaders, Pusey--whose name, given to it in derision and sometimes contested by sympathisers as unappropriate, unquestionably ranks of right as that of its greatest theologian, its most steadfast character, and the most of a born leader engaged in it--was something less of a pure man of letters than either Keble or Newman. But he was a man of letters; and perhaps a greater one than is usually thought.

Edward Bouverie Pusey, who belonged to the family of Lord Folkestone by blood, his father having become by bequest the representative of the very old Berks.h.i.+re house of Pusey, was born at the seat of this family in 1800. He went to Eton and to Christ Church, and became a fellow of Oriel, studied theology and oriental languages in Germany, and was made Professor of Hebrew at the early age of twenty-seven. He was a thorough scholar, and even in the times of his greatest unpopularity no charge of want of competence for his post was brought against him by any one who knew. It is, however, somewhat comic that charges of Rationalism were brought against his first book, a study of contemporary German theology.

In or soon after 1833 he joined Newman and Keble in the famous _Tracts for the Times_, at the same time urging the return to a more primitive and catholic theology in his sermons, and by means of the great enterprise in translation called the _Oxford Library of the Fathers_, of which he executed part and sedulously edited others. Pusey first came before general public notice outside Oxford in 1843, in consequence of a very high-handed exertion of power by the authorities of the University, who, without allowing him a hearing, suspended him for a sermon on the Eucharist from preaching for three years. His mouth was thus closed at the very moment when Newman "went over"; and when some of the enemies of the movement declared that Pusey would go too. Others were equally certain that if he stayed it was either from base motives of self-interest, or, still more basely, in order to do underhand damage to the Church. But all who unite knowledge and fairness now admit, not only his perfect loyalty, but the almost unexampled heroism and steadfastness with which for some ten or fifteen years after Newman's secession, against popular obloquy, against something very like persecution from the authorities of the Church and the University, and against the constant and repeated discouragement given by the desertion of friends and colleagues, he upheld his cause and made the despised and reproached "Puseyites" of his middle life what he lived to see them--the greatest and almost the dominant party in the Anglican Church. He was less fortunate in his opposition to the secularising of the Universities, and in his attempts (which ill-willers did not fail to liken to the attempts made to stifle his own teaching) to check by legal means the spread of Rationalism. But he was nearly as full of honours as of years when he died on 16th September 1882.

Many of the const.i.tuents of this remarkable and perhaps unexampled success--Pusey's personal saintliness, his unselfish use of his considerable income, his unwearied benevolence in other than pecuniary ways--do not concern us here. But his works, which are numerous, and the most literary of which are his _Sermons_ and his _Eirenicon_, contributed not a little to it. Pusey's style was accused by some of bareness and by others of obscurity; but these accusations may be safely dismissed as due merely to the prevalent fancy for florid expression, and to the impatience of somewhat scholastically arranged argument which has also distinguished our times.

The second of this remarkable trio, John Keble, was the eldest, having been born on 24th April 1792, at Fairford, in Gloucesters.h.i.+re, with which county his family had for some centuries been connected. Keble's father was a clergyman, and there was a clerical feeling and tradition in the whole family. John went to no public school, but was very carefully educated at home, obtained an open scholars.h.i.+p at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, when he was only fourteen, and went into residence next year--for just at this time extremely early entrance at the University was much commoner than a little earlier or later. He had only just entered his nineteenth year when he took a double first, and had not concluded it when he was elected, at the same time with Whately, to an Oriel fellows.h.i.+p. He followed this up by winning both the Chancellor's Essays, English and Latin, and established his reputation as the most brilliant man of his day. He was ordained as soon as he could be, and served the usual offices of tutor in his College and examiner in the University. But even such semi-public life as this was distasteful to him, and he soon gave up his Oriel tutors.h.i.+p for a country curacy and private pupils. Indeed the note, some would say the fault, of Keble's whole life was an almost morbid retiringness, which made him in 1827 refuse even to compete with Hawkins for the Provosts.h.i.+p of Oriel. It is possible that he would not have been elected, for oddly enough his two future colleagues in the triumvirate, both Fellows, were both in favour of his rival; but his shunning the contest has been deeply deplored, and by some even blamed as a _gran rifiuto_. The publication of _The Christian Year_, however, which immediately followed, probably did more for the Movement and for the spiritual life of England than any office-holding could have done; and in 1831, Keble, being elected Professor of Poetry, distinguished himself almost as much in criticism as he had already done in poetry. He obtained, and was contented with, the living of Hursley, in Hamps.h.i.+re, where he resided till his death on 29th March 1866.

Keble's very generally granted character as one of the holiest persons of modern times, and even his influence on the Oxford Movement, concern us less here than his literary work, which was of almost the first importance merely as literature. The reaction from an enormous popularity of nearly seventy years' date, and the growth of anti-dogmatic opinions, have brought about a sort of tendency in some quarters to belittle, if not positively to sneer at, _The Christian Year_, which, with the _Lyra Innocentium_ and a collection of _Miscellaneous Poems_, contains Keble's poetical work. There never was anything more uncritical. The famous reference which Thackeray--the least ecclesiastically inclined, if by no means the least religious, of English men of letters of genius in this century--makes to its appearance in _Pendennis_, shows what the thoughts of unbia.s.sed contemporaries were. And no very different judgment can be formed by unbia.s.sed posterity. With Herbert and Miss Rossetti, Keble ranks as the greatest of English writers in sacred verse, the irregular and unequal efforts of Vaughan and Crashaw sometimes transcending, oftener sinking below the three. If Keble has not the exquisite poetical mysticism of Christina Rossetti he is more copious and more strictly scholarly, while he escapes the quaint triviality, or the triviality sometimes not even quaint, which mars Herbert. The influence of Wordsworth is strongly shown, but it is rendered and redirected in an entirely original manner.

The lack of taste which mars so much religious poetry never shows itself even for a moment in Keble; yet the correctness of his diction, like the orthodoxy of his thought, is never frigid or tame. There are few poets who so well deserve the nickname of a Christian Horace, though the phrase may seem to have something of the paradox of "prose Shakespeare." The careful melody of the versification and the exact felicity of the diction exclude, it may be, those highest flights which create most enthusiasm, at any rate in this century. But for measure, proportion, successful attainment of the proposed end, Keble has few superiors.

It would indeed be surprising if he had many, for, with his gift of verse, he was also one of the most accomplished of critics. His _Praelectiones Academicae_, written, as the rule then was, in Latin, is unfortunately a sealed book to too many persons whom modern practice calls and strives to consider "educated"; but he did not confine himself even in these to cla.s.sical subjects, and he wrote not a few reviews in English dealing with modern poetry. His aesthetics are of course deeply tinged with ethic; but he does not in the least allow moral prepossessions to twist his poetic theory, which may be generally described as the Aristotelian teaching on the subject, supplied and a.s.sisted by the aid of a wide study of the literatures not open to Aristotle. There can be no doubt that if Keble's mind had not been more and more absorbed by religious subjects he would have been one of the very greatest of English critics of literature; and he is not far from being a great one as it is. He did not publish many sermons, though one of his, the a.s.size Sermon at Oxford in 1833, is considered to have started the Movement; and opinions as to his pulpit powers have varied.

But it is certainly not too much to say that it was impossible for Keble not to make everything that he wrote, whether in verse or prose, literature of the most perfect academic kind, informed by the spirit of scholars.h.i.+p and strengthened by individual talent.

John Henry Newman was the eldest son of a man of business of some means (who came of a family of Cambridges.h.i.+re yeomen) and of a lady of Huguenot descent. He was born in London on 21st February 1801, was educated privately at Ealing, imbibed strong evangelical principles, and went up to Oxford (Trinity College) so early that he went in for "Greats" (in which he only obtained a third cla.s.s) before he was nineteen. He continued, however, to reside at Trinity, where he held a scholars.h.i.+p, and more than made up for his mishap in the schools by winning an Oriel fellows.h.i.+p in 1823. In three successive years he took orders and a curacy in the first, the Vice-Princ.i.p.als.h.i.+p of St. Alban's Hall under Whately in the second, and an Oriel tutors.h.i.+p in the third; while in 1827 he succeeded Hawkins, who became Provost, in the Vicarage of St. Mary's, the most important post of the kind--to a man who chose to make it important--in Oxford.

Newman did so choose, and his sermons--not those to the University, though these also are notable, but those nominally "Parochial," really addressed to the undergraduates who soon flocked to hear him--were the foundation and mainstay of his influence, const.i.tute the largest single division of his printed work, and perhaps present that work in the best and fairest light. His history for the next sixteen years cannot be attempted here; it is the history of the famous thing called the Oxford Movement, which changed the intellectual as well as the ecclesiastical face of England, on which libraries have been written, and which, even yet, has not been satisfactorily or finally judged. His travels with Hurrell Froude in the Mediterranean during 1832-33 seem to have been the special turning-point of his career. After ten years, perhaps of "development," certainly of hard fighting, he resigned St. Mary's in 1843, and after two years more of halting between two opinions he was received into the Church of Rome in October 1845. He left Oxford, never to return to it as a residence, and not to visit it for thirty-two years, in the following February.

His first public appearance after this was in the once famous Achilli trial for libel, in which the plaintiff, an anti-Roman lecturer, recovered damages from Newman for an utterly d.a.m.ning description of Achilli's career in the Roman Church itself. Impartial judges generally thought and think that the verdict was against the weight of evidence.

At any rate it produced a decided revulsion in Newman's favour, of which he was both too convinced of his own position and too astute not to take advantage. He had hitherto since his secession resided (he had been re-ordained in Rome) at Birmingham, London, and Dublin, but he now took up his abode, practically for the rest of his life, at Birmingham or rather Edgbaston. In 1864 the great opportunity, presented by Kingsley's unguarded words (_vide supra_), occurred, and he availed himself of it at once. Most of those who read the _Apologia pro Vita Sua_ were not familiar with Newman's masterly English, and his competent, if not supreme, dialectic and sophistic. They were not, as a former generation had been, prejudiced against him; the untiring work of those of his former friends who remained faithful to the Church of England had of itself secured him a fair hearing. During the remaining twenty-five years of his life he had never again to complain of ostracism or unfair prejudice. The controversy as to the Vatican Council brought him once more forward, and into collision with Mr. Gladstone, but into no odium of any kind. Indeed he was considerably less popular at Rome than at home, the more supple and less English character of Manning finding greater favour with Pius IX. The late seventies, however, were a time of triumph for Newman. In 1877 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of his own College, Trinity, and next year paid what may be called a visit of restoration to Oxford, while in 1879 the new Pope Leo XIII., a man of great abilities and wide piety, raised Newman to the cardinalate. He visited Rome on the occasion, but returned to Birmingham, where the Edgbaston Oratory was still his home for the remaining years of his life. This did not end till 11th August 1890, when almost all men spoke almost all good things over his grave, though some did not spare to interpose a sober criticism. The books composed during this long and eventful career, especially in the first half of it, were very numerous, Cardinal Newman's works at the time of his death, and before the addition of Letters, etc., extending to nearly forty volumes. Much of the matter of these is still _cinis dolosissimus_, not to be trodden on save in the most gingerly manner in such a book as this. Yet there are probably few qualified and impartial judges who would refuse Newman, all things considered, the t.i.tle of the greatest theological writer in English during this century; and there are some who uphold him for one of the very greatest of English prose writers. It is therefore impossible not to give him a place, and no mean place, here.

Although his chief work, indeed all but a very small part of it, was in prose, he was a good verse writer. The beautiful poem or hymn usually called from its first words "Lead, kindly Light," but ent.i.tled by its author "The Pillar of Cloud," is not merely as widely known as any piece of sacred verse written during the century, but may challenge anything of that cla.s.s (out of the work of Miss Christina Rossetti) for really poetical decoction and concoction of religious ideas. It was written, with much else, during a voyage in a sailing s.h.i.+p from Sicily to Ma.r.s.eilles at the close (June 1833) of that continental tour which was of such moment in Newman's life; and the whole batch ferments with spiritual excitement. Earlier, and indeed later, Newman, besides plenty of serious verse, contributed to the _Lyra Apostolica_ or written independently, was a graceful writer of verse trifles; but his largest and best poetical work, _The Dream of Gerontius_, was not produced till he was approaching old age, and had long pa.s.sed the crisis of his career. Possibly the new ferment of soul into which the composition of the _Apologia_ had thrown him, may have been responsible for this, which is dated a year later. It is the recital in lyrical-dramatic form of an antic.i.p.atory vision, just before death, of the Last Things, and unites dignity and melody in a remarkable manner. The only other parts of his work to which Newman himself attached the t.i.tle "literature" were the prose romances of _Callista_ and _Loss and Gain_. They display his power over language, but are exposed on one side to the charges usually incurred by novels with a purpose, and on the other to a suspicion of bad taste, incurred in the effort to be popular.

By far the larger bulk of the works, however, belongs to theology. This includes twelve volumes of Sermons, all but a small part delivered before Newman's change of creed, and eight of them the _Parochial and Plain Sermons_, preached in the pulpit of St. Mary's but not to the University; four of treatises, including the most famous and characteristic of Newman's works except the _Apologia_, _The Grammar of a.s.sent_, and _The Development of Christian Doctrine_; four of Essays; three of Historical Sketches; four theological, chiefly on Arianism, and translations of St. Athanasius; and six Polemical, which culminate in the _Apologia_. With respect to the substance of this work it is soon easy, putting controversial matters as much as possible apart, to discover where Newman's strength and weakness respectively lay. He was distinctly deficient in the historic sense; and in the _Apologia_ itself he threw curious light on this deficiency, and startled even friends and fellow-converts, by speaking contemptuously of "antiquarian arguments."

The same defect is quaintly ill.u.s.trated by a naf and evidently sincere complaint that he should have been complained of for (in his own words) "attributing to the middle of the third century what is certainly to be found in the fourth." And it is understood that he was not regarded either by Anglican or by Roman Catholic experts as a very deep theologian in either of his stages. The special characteristic--the _ethos_ as his own contemporaries and immediate successors at Oxford would have said--of Newman seems to have been strangely combined. He was perhaps the last of the very great preachers in English--of those who combined a thoroughly cla.s.sical training, a scholarly form, with the incommunicable and almost inexplicable power to move audiences and readers. And he was one of the first of that cla.s.s of journalists who in the new age have succeeded the preachers, whether for good or ill, as the prophets of the illiterate. It may seem strange to speak of Newman as a journalist; but if any one will read his essays, his _Apologia_, above all the curious set of articles called _The Tamworth Reading-Room_, he will see what a journalist was lost, or only partly developed, in this cardinal. He had the conviction, which is far more necessary to a journalist than is generally thought; and yet his convictions were not of that extremely systematic and far-reaching kind which no doubt often stands in the journalist's way. He had the faculty of mixing bad and good argument, which is far more effective with mixed audiences than unbated logic. And, little as he is thought of as sympathising with the common people, he was entirely free from that contempt of them which always prevents a man from gaining their ear unless he is a consummately clever scoundrel.

It may however be retorted that if Newman was a born journalist, sermons and theology must be a much better school of style in journalism than articles and politics. And it is quite true that his writing at its best is of extraordinary charm, while that charm is not, as in the case of some of his contemporaries and successors, derived from dubiously legitimate ornament and flourish, but observes the purest cla.s.sical limitations of proportion and form. It has perhaps sometimes been a little over-valued, either by those who in this way or that--out of love for what he joined or hate to what he left--were in uncritical sympathy with Newman, or by others it may be from pure ignorance of the fact that much of this charm is the common property of the more scholarly writers of the time, and is only eminently, not specially, present in him. But of the fact of it there is no doubt. In such a sermon for instance as that on "The Individuality of the Soul," a thought or series of thoughts, in itself poetically grandiose enough for Taylor or even for Donne, is presented in the simplest but in the most marvellously impressive language. The sentences are neither volleying in their shortness, nor do they roll thundrously; the cadences though perfect are not engineered with elaborate musical art; there are in proportion very few adjectives; the writer exercises the most extreme continence in metaphor, simile, ill.u.s.tration, all the tricks and frounces of literary art. Yet Taylor, though he might have attained more sweetness or more grandeur, could hardly have been more beautiful; and though Donne might have been so, it would have been at the expense of clearness. Newman is so clear that he has often been accused of being, and sometimes is, a little hard; but this is not always or often the case: it is especially not so when he is dealing with things which, as in the sermon just referred to and that other on "The Intermediate State," admit the diffusion of religious awe. The presence of that awe, and of a constant sense and dread of Sin, have been said, and probably with truth, to be keynotes of Newman's religious ideas, and of his religious history; but they did not harden, as in thinkers of another temper has often been the case, his style or his thought. On the contrary, they softened both; and it is when he is least under the influence of them that unction chiefly deserts him. Yet he by no means often sought to excite his hearers. He held, as he himself somewhere says, that "impa.s.sioned thoughts and sublime imaginings have no strength in them." And this conviction of his can hardly be strange to the fact that few writers indulge so little as Newman in what is called fine writing. He has "organ pa.s.sages," but they are such as the wind blowing as it lists draws from him, not such as are produced by deliberate playing on himself.

In a wider s.p.a.ce it would be interesting to comment on numerous other exponents of the Movement. Archdeacon afterwards Cardinal Manning (1807-93), the successful rival of Newman among those Anglican clergymen who joined the Church of Rome, was less a man of letters than a very astute man of business; but his sermons before he left the Church had merit, and he afterwards wrote a good deal. Richard Hurrell Froude (1803-36), elder brother of the historian, had a very great and not perhaps a very beneficent influence on Newman, and through Newman on others; but he died too soon to leave much work. His chief distinguis.h.i.+ng note was a vigorous and daring humour allied to a strong reactionary sentiment. Isaac Williams, the second poet of the Movement (1802-65), was in most respects, as well as in poetry, a minor Keble.

W. G. Ward, commonly called "Ideal" Ward from his famous, very ill-written, very ill-digested, but important _Ideal of a Christian Church_, which was the alarm-bell for the flight to Rome, was a curiously const.i.tuted person of whom something has been said in reference to Clough. He had little connection with pure letters, and after his secession to Rome and his succession to a large fortune he finally devoted himself to metaphysics of a kind. His acuteness was great, and he had a scholastic subtlety and logical deftness which made him very formidable to the loose thinkers and reasoners of Utilitarianism and anti-Supernaturalism. One of the latest important survivors was Dean Church (1815-91), who, as Proctor, had arrested the persecution of the Tractarians, with which it was sought to complete the condemnation of Ward's _Ideal_, and who afterwards, both in a country cure and as Dean of St. Paul's, acquired very high literary rank by work on Dante, Anselm, Spenser, and other subjects, leaving also the best though unfortunately an incomplete history of the Movement itself; while the two Mozleys, the one a considerable theologian, the other an active journalist, brothers-in-law of Newman, also deserve mention. Last of all perhaps we must notice Henry Parry Liddon (1829-90), of a younger generation, but the right-hand man of Pusey in his later day, and his biographer afterwards--a popular and pleasing, though rather rhetorical than argumentative or original, preacher, and a man very much affected by his friends. Even this list is nothing like complete, but it is impossible to enlarge it.

Midway between the Movement and its enemies, a partial sympathiser in early days, almost an enemy when the popular tide turned against it, almost a leader when public favour once more set in in its favour, was Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and Winchester (1805-73). The third son of the celebrated emanc.i.p.ationist and evangelical, he had brothers who were more attracted than himself by the centripetal force of Roman doctrine, and succ.u.mbed to it. Worldly perhaps as much as spiritual motives kept him steadier. He did invaluable work as a bishop; and at all times of his life he was in literature a distinct supporter of the High Church cause, though with declensions and defections of Erastian and evangelical backsliding. He was a very admirable preacher, though his sermons do not read as well as they "heard"; some of his devotional manuals are of great excellence; and in the heyday of High Church allegory (an interesting by-walk of literature which can only be glanced at here, but which was trodden by some estimable and even some eminent writers) he produced the well hit-off tale of _Agathos_ (1839). But it may be that he will, as a writer, chiefly survive in the remarkable letters and diaries in his _Life_, which are not only most valuable for the political and ecclesiastical history of the time, but precious always as human doc.u.ments and sometimes as literary compositions.

Three remarkable persons must be mentioned among the opponents of (and in one case harsh judgment might say the deserters of) the Movement.

These were Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Mark Pattison, and Benjamin Jowett.

Stanley, born in 1815, was the son of the (afterwards) Bishop of Norwich and a nephew of the first Lord Stanley of Alderley, and was brought up very much under the influence of Arnold, whose biographer he became. But he went further than Arnold in Broad Church ways. His career at Rugby and at Oxford was distinguished, and after being fellow and tutor of University College for some ten years, he became successively Canon of Canterbury, Canon of Christ Church, and Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, and Dean of Westminster, in which last post he had almost greater opportunities than any bishop, and used them to the full.

He also wrote busily, devoting himself especially to the geography of Palestine and the history of the Eastern Church, which he handled in a florid and popular style, though not with much accuracy or scholars.h.i.+p.

Personally, Stanley was much liked, thou