but a
half-luxurious sorrow, the pathos of the past and its heavinesses,
viewed from a quiet haven. I have no sympathy whatever with the
intellectual attitude it reveals, but as Roderick Hudson says, I don't
always heed the sense: it is indeed a somewhat melancholy spectacle of
a beautiful mind converted in reality by purely aesthetic
considerations, by the dignity, the far-off, holy, and venerable
associations of the great Church which drew him quietly in, while all
the time he is under the impression that it is a logical clue which he
is following. And what logic! leaping lightly over difficult places,
taking flowery by-paths among the fields, the very stairs on which he
treads based on all kinds of wide assumptions and unverifiable
hypotheses. Then it is distressing to see his horror of Liberalism, of
speculation, of development, of all the things that constitute the
primal essence of the very religion that he blindly followed. One
cannot help feeling that had Newman been a Pharisee, he would have
been, with his love of precedent, and antiquity, and tradition, one of
the most determined and deadly opponents of the spirit of Christ. For
the spirit of Christ is the spirit of freedom, of elasticity, of
unconventionality. Newman would have upheld in the Sanhedrim with
pathetic and exquisite eloquence that it was not time to break with the
old, that it was miserable treachery to throw over the ancient
safeguards of faith, to part with the rich inheritance of the national
faith delivered by Abraham and Moses to the saints. Newman was a true
fanatic, and the most dangerous of fanatics, because his character was
based on innocence and tenderness and instinctive virtue. It is rather
pathetic than distressing to see Newman again and again deluded by the
antiquity of some petty human logician into believing his utterance to
be the very voice of God. The struggle with Newman was not the struggle
of faith with scepticism, but the struggle between two kinds of
loyalty, the personal loyalty to his own past and his own friends and
the Church of his nativity, and the loyalty to the infinitely more
ancient and venerable tradition of the Roman Church. It was, as I have
said, an aesthetic conversion; he had the mind of a poet, and the
particular kind of beauty which appealed to him was not the beauty of
nature or art, but the beauty of old tradition and the far-off dim
figures of saints and prelates reaching back into the dark and remot