e
past.

He had, too, the sublime egotism of the poet. His own salvation--"Shall
I be safe if I die to-night?"--that, he confesses, was the thought
which eventually outweighed all others. He had little of the priestly
hunger to save souls; the way in which others trusted him, confided in
him, watched his movements, followed him, was always something of a
terror to him, and yet in another mood it ministered to his
self-absorption. He had not the stern sense of being absolutely in the
right, which is the characteristic of the true leaders of men, but he
had a deep sense of his own importance, combined with a perfectly real
sense of weakness and humility, which even disguised, I would think,
his own egotism from himself.

Again his extraordinary forensic power, his verbal logic, his exquisite
lucidity of statement, all these concealed from him, as they have
concealed from others, his lack of mental independence. He had an
astonishing power of submitting to his imagination, a power of
believing the impossible, because the exercise of faith seemed to him
so beautiful a virtue. It is not a case of a noble mind overthrown, but
of the victory of a certain kind of poetical feeling over all rational
inquiry.

To revert to Newman's literary genius, he seems to me to be one of the
few masters of English prose. I used to think, in old University days,
that Newman's style was best tested by the fact that if one had a piece
of his writing to turn into Latin prose, the more one studied it,
turned it over, and penetrated it, the more masterly did it become;
because it was not so much the expression of a thought as the thought
itself taking shape in a perfectly pure medium of language. Bunyan had
the same gift; of later authors Ruskin had it very strongly, and
Matthew Arnold in a lesser degree. There is another species of
beautiful prose, the prose of Jeremy Taylor, of Pater, even of
Stevenson; but this is a slow and elaborate construction, pinched and
pulled this way and that; and it is like some gorgeous picture, of
stately persons in seemly and resplendent dress, with magnificently
wrought backgrounds of great buildings and curious gardens. But the
work of Newman and of Ruskin is a white art, like the art of sculpture.

I find myself every year desiring and admiring this kind of lucidity
and purity more and more. It seems to me that the only function of a
writer is to express obscure, difficult, and subtle thoughts easily.
But t