SOURCE: “Tractarian Aesthetics: Analogy and Reserve in Keble and Newman,” in The Victorian Newsletter, No. 55, Spring, 1979, pp. 8-10.

[In the following essay, Tennyson summarizes Tractarian aesthetics and its emphasis on “the religious character of poetry” as exemplified in Keble's verse.]

Among the many aspects of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement that have captured the attention of subsequent students of the subject the matter of aesthetics has until recently been one of the least thoroughly explored. To be sure, theology, politics, social events, ecclesiastical developments, and even personal experience all played their part in the emergence and course of what the participants thought of as a campaign to redeem the Church of England. Recently, however, there has emerged an awareness that an approach through aesthetics casts a good deal of light on the deepest nature of Tractarianism, not in opposition to any of the previously cited aspects but rather complementary to them, especially to the most important of all—Tractarian theology. I propose today to summarize the findings on Tractarian aesthetics,¹ and then to do what has still hitherto been very little done—to apply a few of the important aspects of Tractarian aesthetics to some of the literary works written in the spirit of that aesthetic position to see what kind of practical critical insights flow from the recently won understanding of the theoretical critical principles. It is, to adopt and modify Matthew Arnold's phrase for his effort in God and the Bible, an “attempt literary, and an attempt religious,”² for, as we shall see, it is imprudent to approach the Tractarians exclusively from one or the other perspective. They best come alive through an approach from both.

The Tractarian aesthetic insists above all on the religious character of poetry and by extension of all art. Poetry is the result of a welling-up and expression of an intense emotion, which in turn is the desire of the soul to know God. Poetry is thus the outward expression of a powerful inward, even subconscious, religious feeling. This is the fundamental principle of Tractarian aesthetics, perhaps indeed of the Tractarian worldview, and it represents the ultimate subordination of poetry, and art, to theology. For, if art is in origin religious, it can best be judged, pursued, and evaluated from a theological standpoint. And the Tractarians did just that, which accounts for the religious character of all of their literary works.

In addition to the fundamental Tractarian principle of arts as religious self-expression, we should note also the importance for the Tractarians of what one may call the two essential Tractarian corollaries. These are the Doctrine of Analogy and the Doctrine of Reserve. Briefly stated, the Doctrine of Analogy or Correspondences is the application to art of the text from St. Paul: “The invisible things of [God] from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” (Romans, i. 20). That is, the visible world is a world full of correspondences with the invisible world; physical things are signs and symbols of spiritual things. The doctrine of Reserve held by the Tractarians was that in communicating religious knowledge (which would, of course, in their view include also poetry and art) the communicator (including of course the poet) should exercise “due religious reserve,”³ a kind of restraint and even indirection in expression appropriate to the sacredness of the subject being discussed.

Recent commentators on Tractarian aesthetics point out also the importance of the following emphases in Tractarian theory which I can no more than cite in passing. They are: the use of the terms “poetry” and “poetic” in Tractarian discourse as equivalents to “imagination” and “aesthetic”; the tendency of the Tractarians to speak of religion itself as a work of art; and the inclination of the Tractarian aesthetic position to issue in a theologized and sacramentalized view of Nature.⁴

The relation of theology and aesthetics in Tractarianism, then, is one of a mutually stimulating and modifying union of the two disciplines. This may best be grasped by considering Newman's assertion that poetry is for those who do not have the benefit of the Catholic Church. His statement becomes two-edged: that is, poetry is inferior to the Church and to her theology, but only because the Church and her theology are the greater poem.⁵

II

Now, having arrived at this understanding of Tractarian aesthetics, we should, I believe, raise what has hitherto been a quite secondary or wholly ignored consideration. It is: what, if anything, were the actual literary consequences of the Tractarian aesthetic position? That is, are there notable literary works that illustrate Tractarian aesthetics in action? Can we better grasp them as a result of our understanding of Tractarian aesthetics? To each of these questions I would answer, Yes, and in the remaining time I shall endeavor to justify those affirmative answers.

First of all, it is important to note that all of our sources on Tractarian aesthetics come from men who were, not only theologians and Tractarians, but literary artists as well. The two most prominent of these are of course Keble and Newman. Writing on the death of Keble, J. C. Shairp claimed that the two “permanent monuments of genius” left by the Oxford Movement were Keble's The Christian Year and Newman's parochial sermons.⁶ Taking these two as the pre-eminent Tractarian works, let us apply Tractarian critical precepts to them.

First, The Christian Year. If a canvass were taken here as to whether that volume had poetic merit, I think the most common responses would be No, Undecided, and No Opinion—especially No Opinion. But that it exemplifies Tractarian aesthetics can hardly be disputed. Virtually all students of the subject have turned at once to Keble's poem for Septuagesima Sunday to illustrate the Doctrine of Analogy in practice. That is the poem that begins, “There is a Book, who runs may read. …”⁷ That “Book,” I need hardly tell you, is the Book of Nature. Since the remainder of the poem illustrates the doctrine of Analogy more successfully than it does anything else, I will not dwell on it further here. Rather more subtly and, I think, more poetically a similar Tractarian vision of a sacramentalized Romantic nature is captured in the poem for the Fourth Sunday in Advent.

In the poem for Advent IV, Keble unites several favorite Tractarian ideas about poetry in a way that seems to me to exhibit considerably greater poetic vigor than in the more doctrinaire poem for Septuagesima. We have here above all the sense of the surcharged spirit, the overburdened soul, seeking release for the tensions within. We have too the action of a nature filled with correspondences. We have, further, the sense of restraint or reserve in expressing both the emotion and the recognition of the correspondences. For it is all rendered as an inward struggle, not as a simple matter of applying the theological textbook to nature. It begins with the Romantic dream world through which the speaker struggles to discern the analogical relationships. But Keble's orthodoxy pulls the poem away from merely echoing Coleridge. In stanza six he asserts that with patience the time will come when eye and ear will see and hear aright. With the “blissful vision” one will “deeper and deeper plunge in light.” This is, I believe, an effort to supplant, or complete the Romantic vision with the beatific one.

Keble goes on in the poem to instruct the reader that the soul itself—“if duly purged our mental view”—will approach ever nearer that goal of light, till it will “with that inward Music fraught, / For ever rise, and sing, and shine.” The ultimate aim of the Tractarian aesthetic vision is also the ultimate aim of the Tractarian religious vision. The soul of the poet, or of the simple believer, fraught with the inward music of divine love, will one day “for ever rise, and sing and shine.”

Virtually all of the poems of The Christian Year offer examples of Tractarian aesthetic-theological ideas, especially of the idea of Analogy. Perhaps more of these poems have literary merit than is commonly supposed. The curious should look especially at Keble's poems for the Second Sunday after Easter and the Fourth Sunday after Trinity for successful illustrations of Tractarian aesthetics in action. As understanding of Tractarian aesthetics grows, appreciation of Keble as a poet is likely to grow with it.

When we come to the other of the enduring monuments of the Oxford Movement, Newman's parochial sermons, the issue of merit is not a disputed one, and I will accordingly take it for granted that we all recognize Newman's mastery as a prose writer. One cause for this, I believe, is that Newman's writing has not generally been approached through Tractarian theory. But I think we can profitably do so as a means of understanding one of the most commonly remarked aspects of Newman's prose—its intensity in the face of its apparent objectivity and rationality.

The matter of the emotional appeal of what by most analyses seems unemotional prose is one of the continuing themes or puzzlements in Newman studies. Let me suggest that we consider the peculiar power of Newman's writing in terms of some of the leading ideas of Tractarian aesthetics and especially in terms of the doctrine of Reserve.

We must remember that the Doctrine of Reserve was not only theological; it was also aesthetic and, as I have argued, it was a corollary to the fundamental principle that artistic creation was the personal outpouring of an overwhelmingly religious impulse. Reserve comes into play as the means whereby such an outpouring is prevented from becoming vulgar and profane and merely emotional. One might say that Reserve was the means of insuring that what would come forth from the artist would be Tractarian rather than merely Romantic or, worse, Evangelical.

When we think of Newman's motto—“Cor ad cor loquitur”—Heart speaking to Heart—we should have no trouble linking that with the Tractarian first principle of the deep emotion lying behind artistic utterance. And when we try to understand how Newman managed to convey such intensity without the verbal pyrotechnics of, say, Thomas Carlyle, we would do well to bring into play the doctrine of Reserve. Hear him, for example, concluding a sermon of 1832 titled, after a common Tractarian conviction, “On Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth”:

Let all those, then, who acknowledge the voice of God speaking within them, and urging them heavenward, wait patiently for the End, exercising themselves, and diligently working, with a view to that day when the books shall be opened, and all the disorder of human affairs reviewed and set right; when “the last shall be first, and the first last”; when “all things that offend and they which do iniquity,” shall be gathered out and removed; when “the righteous shall shine forth as the sun,” and Faith shall see her God; when “they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars, for ever and ever.⁸

The reference to God speaking and urging within calls to mind the Tractarian view of the interior power of the religious-poetic impulse. In keeping with the doctrine of Reserve, however, it is linked to the idea of patience and diligence. And the highly Tractarian stringing together of Biblical passages leads finally to the emergence of the righteous to shine like those visible analogues of the invisible world, the sun and the stars of the heavens. “For ever rise, and sing, and shine,” as Keble had it.

Even on the matter of Newman's personal style in preaching we may see the effects of Tractarian aesthetic doctrine. David DeLaura has ably traced the abundant references throughout the Victorian age to Newman's personal preaching style and provided us with a rich picture of the effect of that “unforgotten voice” as it echoed down the decades of the nineteenth century.⁹ Anyone who has read his account must be struck by the frequency with which Newman's auditors, among them Matthew Arnold, remember his delivery as having been “soft,” “sweet,” “mournful,” “subduing,” yet withal “thrilling,” “magnetic,” “entrancing,” and—the one that struck DeLaura so forcefully—“silvery” like the cool radiance of the Church as Keble described it in the Septuagesima Sunday poem, basking in the glow of the moon, which in turn derives its light from the sun that is also the Son of God. This subtle, sweet, restrained, and silvery eloquence that haunted the memories of Oxonians for the rest of their lives is, I believe, an eloquence wholly consonant with the precepts of Tractarian aesthetics and even dictated by those precepts. It is the eloquence of an irresistible religious emotion tempered by a humbling and self-effacing religious reserve.

We can still hear the pathos that such a combination elicits from Newman well after the time of the University sermons. And perhaps in “The Parting of Friends,” in 1843, his great sermon of leavetaking from the Church of England, we can see Reserve almost giving way before the intensity of the emotion, which is surely religious as well as personal, that provoked this particular jewel of Newman literary art:

And, O my brethren, O kind and affectionate hearts, O loving friends, should you know any one whose lot it has been, by writing or by word of mouth, in some degree to help you thus to act; if he has ever told you what you knew about yourself, or what you did not know; has read to you your wants or feelings, and comforted you by the very reading; has made you feel that there was a higher life than this daily one, and a brighter world than that you see; or encouraged you, or sobered you, or opened a way to the inquiring, or soothed the perplexed; if what he has said or done has ever made you feel well inclined towards him; remember such a one in time to come, though you hear him not, and pray for him, that in all things he may know God's will, and at all times he may be ready to fulfill it.¹⁰

J. C. Shairp called Newman's sermons “high poems … as of an inspired singer, or the outpourings as of a prophet, rapt yet self-possessed.”¹¹ “Rapt yet self-possessed”—the exact combination propounded by Tractarian aesthetics of an overwhelming religious emotion conveyed with due religious reserve. Newman may have subsequently enjoyed the benefits of what he viewed as in itself the greatest of poems, the Catholic Church, but that he was able to see it in such a light was possible only because of the Tractarian aesthetic he took with him when he parted from his friends.

Notes

1. Modern study of Tractarian aesthetics begins in the 1950's with Alba H. Warren, Jr., English Poetic Theory 1825-1865 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950); and M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953) (rpt. New York: W. W. Norton, 1958). Recent studies include Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Lawrence G. Starzyk, The Imprisoned Splendor: A Study of Early Victorian Critical Theory (Port Washington, N. Y.: Kennikat Press, 1977); and G. B. Tennyson, “The Sacramental Imagination” in U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson, eds., Nature and the Victorian Imagination (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 370-390.

   Among the Tractarians a primary source is Keble's Latin Lectures on Poetry, delivered between 1831 and 1841, but not translated into English until 1912. His other essays are collected in his Occasional Papers and Reviews (1877). Newman's critical views are found chiefly in his essays, “Poetry, with Reference to Aristotle's Poetics,” and “Literature,” and scattered throughout his works. The most important of the Tracts for the Times for critical theory are No. 80, “On Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge,” by Isaac Williams, and No. 89, “On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church,” by John Keble.

2. Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960-77), 7:398. Arnold's phrase was “an attempt conservative, and an attempt religious.”

3. Keble uses this and similar expressions throughout the Lectures on Poetry. The most celebrated formulation of the idea occurs in Isaac Williams' Tract 80, cited above, note 1.

4. See especially Prickett, pp. 105-107; Starzyk, pp. 160-161; and Tennyson, p. 374.

5. Prickett, pp. 172-173; Starzyk, pp. 157-162.

6. John Campbell Shairp, Studies in Poetry and Philosophy, 2nd. Am. ed. (Boston, 1887), p. 219. The essay was originally published in the North British Review in 1866, the year of Keble's death.

7. John Keble, The Christian Year, Lyra Innocentium, and Other Poems (London: Oxford University Press, 1914). The texts from Keble are taken from this edition, but for ease in using any of the many editions of The Christian Year reference is made only to the title of the poem.

8. Newman's University Sermons, ed. D. M. MacKinnon and J. D. Holmes (London: SPCK, 1970), p. 98.

9. David J. DeLaura, “‘O Unforgotten Voice’: The Memory of Newman in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Uses of Nineteenth-Century Documents: Essays in Honor of C.L. Cline (Austin: Department of English and Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, 1975), pp. 23-55. Quoted words in this paragraph are from this article, passim. See also DeLaura's “Some Victorian Experiments in Closure,” and Benjamin Dunlap's “Newman in the Pulpit: The Power of Simplicity,” both in Studies in the Literary Imagination, 7 (1975), 19-35, 63-75.

10. Sermons Bearing on Subjects of the Day (London, 1869), p. 409.

11. Shairp, p. 212. See also DeLaura, “‘O Unforgotten Voice,’” pp. 41-42.