SOURCE: “Keble and Newman: Tractarian Aesthetics and the Romantic Tradition,” in Victorian Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4, Summer, 1987, pp. 475-94.

[In the following essay, Goodwin interprets Keble's aesthetic theory in relation to the Romantic Tradition, arguing that Keble's poetry is ignored by that tradition. Goodwin goes on to enumerate areas of divergence in the aesthetics of Keble and of his Tractarian contemporary John Henry Newman.]

John Henry Newman was the theologian of the Tractarian Movement, but John Keble was its poet. Any inquiry into the thinking of the Tractarians on poetry and literature may end with Newman, but it should begin with Keble. Keble's greatest contribution to the Oxford movement and to English literature was The Christian Year. This book of devotional verse, first published in 1827, went through ninety-five editions during Keble's lifetime, and “at the end of the year following his death, the number had arisen to a hundred-and-nine.”¹ The volume appealed not only to those sympathetic with the Anglo-Catholic movement, but also to a broader spectrum of Victorian readers who agreed with Newman's remark that “if poems can be found to enliven in dejection, and to comfort in anxiety, to cool the over-sanguine, and to refresh the weary, to awe the worldly, and to instill resignation into the impatient, and calmness into the fearful and agitated, they are these.”²

The popularity of Keble's verse has not survived; instead, modern readers have been interested in the thinking of the leaders of the Oxford movement on the nature of poetry. Keble and Newman—pillars of Victorian religious orthodoxy—seem to have used poetry for the expression and even discovery of religious truth and perhaps anticipated the late-Romantic and modern tendency to view poetry as a “new spiritual mythus.”³ This approach to the Tractarians needs attention. M. H. Abrams found in Keble “a surprisingly modern view of poetry,” elements of which were an equation of poetry and religion and a “radical proto-Freudian theory.” More recently, connections between Romantic and Tractarian aesthetics have been studied by Stephen Prickett and G. B. Tennyson. Tennyson fully agrees with Prickett on the general equation of poetry and religion in Tractarian aesthetics, but he has less confidence than Prickett in the synthetic impulse to group Keble and Newman “with Romantic predecessors like Herder, and Victorian successors like Carlyle and Arnold.”⁴

While connections between Tractarianism and the Romantic tradition exist, there is danger of over-emphasizing the extent to which Keble and Newman could feel comfortable with the tradition, or the tradition with them. As I will show, while both writers borrowed from the Romantics, Keble handled what he borrowed in so conservative a fashion that the tradition simply ignored him. Newman was admired by the tradition, not for a religio-aesthetic theory that he might have shared with it, but for quite another reason. As to a supposed unity between Keble and Newman on aesthetics, no such thing existed.

I

Before considering Keble's extensive comments on the relationship between poetry and religion, a short survey of his theory of poetry and its debt to Romanticism is in order. We encounter Keble's definition of poetry early in his review of J. G. Lockhart's Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1838): “Poetry is the indirect expression in words, most appropriately in metrical words, of some overpowering emotion, or ruling taste, or feeling, the direct indulgence whereof is somehow repressed” (Occasional Papers, p. 6). The striking thing about this definition is that it looks both backwards and forwards in the history of criticism. “Expression … of overpowering emotion” is suggestive of William Wordsworth's 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, where he describes poetry as the “overflow of powerful feelings.” Later in the essay, Keble says that “poetry is the overflow of sentiment and expression.” Both statements are near paraphrases of Wordsworth, and in this Keble was no different from most other writers on poetry in the nineteenth century who found that, try as they might, their words always echoed Wordsworth's. The phrase “most appropriately in metrical words” takes us back even further than Wordsworth, to classical poetry and the Poetics of Aristotle, who valued meter as one of the elements of poetry but who insisted that “it is not metrical form that makes the poem.”⁵ But if the definition reminds us of much that had already been said about poetry, it also points ahead. Simplify Keble's definition and we have “expression … repressed,” a troublesome and contradictory phrase that is central to Keble's thinking on poetry.

Keble explains that poetry involves a conflict between assertive and defensive tendencies within the individual mind. On the one hand, poetry proceeds from “wild and tumultuous feelings,” feelings “whose very excess and violence would seem to make the utterance of them almost impossible.” It “concerns certain longings of our nature after perfection.” This is the strong assertive element of poetry, which, as Keble notes, makes the poet resemble the lunatic and the possessed. On the other hand, poetry is defensive; its ideas and feelings are presented indirectly and in veiled form. In the mind of the poet, “the direct enunciation of a fact or feeling is impeded, and the mind, full of that fact or feeling, finds out for itself indirect ways of conveying it to others.” For Keble, poetry is always a conflict of expression and repression—a conflict that is originally in the mind of the poet but is also evident in the poem. In fact, Keble asserts, “the difficulty, and the way of overcoming it, … marks the poetical” (Occasional Papers, pp. 17, 14, 8, 11).

To resolve the antithetical impulses of expression and repression, the poet, Keble thought, typically turns to meter. While meter channels the poet's strongest feelings, it is “no less useful in throwing a kind of veil over those strong or deep emotions, which need relief, but cannot endure publicity.” Meter is not the only channel and veil to which the poet may turn to resolve this difficulty. In poetic prose, something “will always be discoverable … which answers the purpose … assigned to numbers.” In the prose romances of Walter Scott, the stories themselves serve this function. The poetry that emerges from this struggle between expression and repression will evince the writer's “ruling passion,” but under a sort of “shading” which renders it “tolerable” and “interesting to us” (Occasional Papers, pp. 17, 18). Poetry represents at once difficulty and resolution—the struggle and its outcome.

Keble's contribution to aesthetics is not, as he would have us believe, a mere restatement of Aristotle's theories of imitation and catharsis. His several references to Aristotle—placed before, during, and after his own treatment of poetry—are instances of Keble's modesty. Aristotle is the veil or shading that Keble employs to disguise the radical nature of his aesthetics. Others, Wordsworth among them, had maintained that poetry was the reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities, but Keble was among the first to insist that the discord be as much in evidence in the poem as the reconciliation, that the poem to be a poem must present us with difficulty.

Keble uses the concept of difficulty to distinguish primary from secondary poets. Dryden he judges to be “at the very head of the list of secondary poets.” Dryden writes with the greatest balance and beauty, and, Keble admits, it would be a very “strange definition of poetry which should exclude him.” Yet, while there is the greatest control in Dryden, there was nothing in him in need of repression. He “seems to have written con amore on opposite sides of the same question: his thoughts breathe and his words burn as keenly for Cromwell as for Charles.” He lacked “enthusiasm, the passionate devotion to some one class of objects or train of thought.” Keble concludes that a “want of reality about his manner” hinders his admission into the higher class of poets (Occasional Papers, pp. 21-22).

If Dryden's poetry is secondary because it lacks difficulty, the work of the primary poets always contains it. Such poetry “does not always succeed in finding out, among existing moulds and forms, the most appropriate whereby to express itself.” The primary poet may have to break with the form in order to find his or her own voice, and these breaks will be evident in the poetry. Keble's example is Virgil. By nature a “rural and melancholy poet” whose instinctive voice was heard in the Georgics, Virgil found “the professed character of a warlike Homeric tale” an incumbrance to his muse. As far as he kept to epic conventions in the Aeneid, “working evidently by rule and against the grain,” he produced secondary poetry. Virgil wrote primary poetry when he departed from the convention and allowed for the “development of his true self”—the expression of his melancholia channeled and veiled by reference to “country sights and sounds” (Occasional Papers, pp. 23-24).

Though Keble's thinking on poetry owes much to Wordsworth, it anticipates developments in the Romantic tradition that had not yet taken place when Keble wrote in 1838. The idea that the best poetry is flawed would find its finest expression in John Ruskin and Robert Browning, Keble's younger contemporaries. Ruskin, in The Stones of Venice (1853), held that works that “are more perfect in their kind … are always inferior to those which are, in their nature, liable to more faults and shortcomings. … We are … not to set the meaner thing in its narrow accomplishment above shattered majesty.”⁶ Browning dramatized this theory in Men and Women (1855), particularly in the portrait of Andrea del Sarto who laments the vacuity of his own “faultless” painting and admires the flawed intensity of younger painters whose achievement stems from their confusion, from “their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain.”

But Keble's thinking goes beyond the Victorian age. It anticipates Freudian ideas of repression and the related theory of poetic precursors developed by Harold Bloom.⁷ Keble's examples of repression are drawn from Walter Scott's attempts to express indirectly his boyhood affection for the life of the Scottish Border. Scott's tendency to romanticize childhood was due in part, Keble thought, to his lameness, which cut him off from the active life of the countryside. His failures in love led him to create ethereal enchantresses like the Lady of the Lake (Occasional Papers, pp. 50-51, 54-55). The idea of emotional displacement or psychic substitution vaguely expressed by Keble would not be developed fully until Freudian theories of psychoanalysis were taken up by modern poets and critics. Yet Bloom's theory of precursors is presaged in Keble's explanation of Virgil's breaking with Homeric conventions in the Aeneid in order to express his melancholia under the veil of the pastoral. Keble's primary poet expresses his own authentic voice despite the weight of the tradition.

While Keble owes much to the Romantic tradition and might have contributed much to it, his contributions went largely unnoticed until recently. Even those writers who because of shared interests were likely to know his work were not impressed by it. Gerard Manley Hopkins is a good instance. His letters contain many references to Newman but few to Keble, and in the most sustained of these he says that in Keble, Frederick Faber, and Cardinal Newman “the Lake School expires.”⁸ Hopkins was, I believe, wrong about Newman, and clearly wrong as well in thinking that the “Lake School” would entirely expire. He was, however, right in thinking that Keble had ended rather than begun or continued something. Not even those most excited about Newman's contributions to the Romantic movement—Walter Pater and the critics of the nineties—cared much about Keble or knew his writings. Pater at age fifteen visited Keble, but by 1860 had sold his copy of The Christian Year along with other “overtly Christian books.” In a February 1886 letter to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, Oscar Wilde admitted that in The Christian Year there are “poetic qualities of a certain kind,” but added that any large appreciation of Keble as a poet would require an “absolute catholicity of taste” that “is not without its dangers.”⁹ Matthew Arnold, Keble's godson, began to read John Taylor Coleridge's Memoir (1870) of Keble and put it down, impatient with Keble's “provinciality”; Arnold thought that Newman, alone among the Tractarians, might be exempted from this judgment.¹⁰

Despite his great popularity with the Victorian public, Keble was ignored by the Romantic tradition—not simply because he led a retired life and pursued antiquarian research in the Church Fathers and the Caroline divines, but rather because his mind was fundamentally conservative. He referred nearly everything he took from the Romantic tradition backwards to traditions in which he had more faith. This tendency in his thinking is evident in small matters—his lecturing at Oxford in Latin long after it was necessary to do so, and his reflexive references to Aristotle in the review of Lockhart's Scott.¹¹ But it can also be observed in larger matters—his life-long commitment to Tory politics, his devotion to his father, and his unshakable attachment to the communion of his birth. J. C. Shairp notes that Keble, even after his marriage, lived with his father, who did not die until age ninety. Keble “never outgrew the period of absolute filial reverence, never questioned a single opinion or prepossession which he had imbibed from his father.”¹² To Newman's many arguments in support of conversion to Roman Catholicism, Keble replied that he felt safer in the position in which he had been placed.¹³

II

This same conservatism also governs Keble's thoughts about the connections between religion and poetry, the great question of the Romantic tradition. In his review of Lockhart's Scott, Keble draws parallels between poets and religious writers, but his treatment of the matter has a decidedly conservative tone and constitutes a strong argument against the Romantic tradition's tendency to see poetry and religion as equivalent. Early in the review, Keble hints at a hierarchical arrangement that should be kept in mind when religion and poetry are spoken of together. He hopes that his remarks on poetry will contribute to “higher interests” to which poetry, “to be worth cultivating at all, must eventually do suit and service” (Occasional Papers, p. 6). Having subordinated poetry to religion, Keble feels free to pursue parallels between the two.

The first of these parallels appears several paragraphs later, in Keble's account of the general use of the word “poetical.” The term, Keble notes, is rightly used to describe not just a certain arrangement of words, but all modes of expression where “overpowering emotion” is presented indirectly or in veiled form. Such are the “expressions of uneducated men,” which are “said to have more or less of unconscious ‘poetry’ in them.” The “poetical” can also be found in arts kindred to poetry, so that we can speak of a “poetry of painting, of sculpture, of architecture, of music.” There is even, Keble allows, a poetry of theology. The “orthodox and Catholic side in theological debate” argues “not by reason, but by feelings akin to poetical ones” (Occasional Papers, pp. 6-8). Although Keble's comments on a poetry of theology are sketchy, he suggests that the best religious thinking begins not with the “cold” argument of reasoning, but with the warm, intuitive vision of an imaginative mind, later confirmed by more “accurate examination” or rational inquiry.

This position is similar to Newman's in the Grammar of Assent (1870), where intuition is seen as an important aspect of any full act of reasoning. Newman's reference to “an unscientific reasoning” found in “rude as well as … gifted minds” and his comparison of this form of reasoning to poetry's “spontaneous outpouring of thought” may be marks of Keble's influence, though Newman might have drawn the same ideas from Wordsworth.¹⁴ In his notes of 1860 on “Assent and Intuition,” in part the basis for these remarks in the Grammar, Newman cites both Wordsworth and Keble as having supplied evidence for the role of intuition in reasoning.¹⁵

Neither Newman nor Keble insisted on a strict separation of poetical and theological ways of thinking, because neither thought the two were likely to be confused. Following his remarks on intuition in the Grammar, Newman goes on to explain that religious assent is a complex act involving intuition, logic, memory, and the conscience—the latter faculty providing the supernatural element always present in religious reasoning. Its parallel in formal theological reasoning is the voice of the Church: “theological reasoning professes to be sanctioned by a more than human power, and to be guaranteed by a more than human authority” (Grammar, p. 383). Newman and Keble would never have thought that poetry, however high it aimed, could partake of the same supernatural guarantee—unless of course it was religious poetry, a special case that Keble treats in his review of Lockhart's Scott and more fully in his tract “On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church.”

In the review Keble's instances of religious poetry are the Psalmist and the Church Fathers, but he also considers the possibility of a Catholic poetry that might in some measure share the supernatural certainties available to inspired writers. In Keble's opinion, Scott's only deficiency was that he was not a Catholic poet. His positive attitude toward the supernatural, his careful preservation of “family relics,” and his deep “natural piety” pointed towards a faith that Scott never possessed. “What if,” Keble asks, “these generous feelings had been allowed to ripen into that of which undoubtedly they are the germ and rudiment?” The question tantalizes Keble, not only as it refers to the particular case of Walter Scott, but also as it applies to the larger issue of Catholic poetry. Such a poetry, Keble maintains, would not feel cramped by the discipline of the Church. Romantic poetry that depends on the “free exercise of sympathy and imagination” would in fact benefit from the restraining influence of the Church—the “severe calmness in her tone and sentiment.” The Church would veil and channel the poet's tumultuous feelings, and this perfect balance would make the poet “sure he was telling substantial truth” (Occasional Papers, pp. 79-80).

The prospect of the Church giving her blessing to new voices that would interpret the divine in the spirit of the early Church is a question from which Keble turns aside in the final paragraph of the review, but takes up again in his later commentary on the Fathers and on poetry. But before examining this, we should consider just what kind of question Keble is asking. He is not asking whether poetry could by means of its own imaginative vision apprehend the divine—the question that intrigued Percy Bysshe Shelley in “The Skylark” and Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey.” This traditional Romantic question links Wordsworth with Pater, W. B. Yeats, and Wallace Stevens, and gives the Romantic tradition its special edge and urgency. Keble does not ask himself this question because he already knows the answer. The “free exercise of sympathy and imagination” would be unbalanced if it lacked the restraining influence of the Church. Such a poetry, no matter how intense and high-minded, would remain raw expression, without the blessing of veil or channel. The question that Keble does ask himself is whether the work of the Fathers could be extended, whether under the guidance of the Church a new set of signs and symbols could be found to augment those received from Scripture and elaborated on by the Fathers. The same question occupied Newman in the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). It was the great question toward which all of the Tractarian movement tended and on which it finally split apart. Both Keble and Newman answered the question by reference to the Church Fathers, but their approaches were different. Keble looked for a developing symbolic tradition, an idea suggested to him by his study of poetry. Newman, as we shall see, refused to accept this literary approach.

Keble wrote Tract 89, “On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church,” shortly after the review of Lockhart's Scott. His object was to defend the Fathers against the Protestant tendency to discount them. Particularly, Keble defends their habit of allegorizing Scripture and the natural world. The numerologies of the Epistle Attributed to St. Barnabas, St. Cyprian's meditations on the wood of the Cross, St. Augustine's readings of the Psalms—all of this seemed to Protestants to be mere enthusiasm and fancy, if not rank superstition. Keble explains that the Fathers were doing no more than elaborating on the sacramental nature of the world, sanctioned by Christ's use of parables and by St. Paul in the letter to the Romans, who says “the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.”¹⁶

Poetry comes into Keble's defense of the Fathers since they employed poetry—a system of images and symbols—to embody their faith and to teach it. In fact, Keble ends the tract with a great tribute to poetry. Remarking on “the studied preference of poetical forms of thought and language, as the channel of supernatural knowledge to mankind,” Keble continues,

Poetry traced up as high as we can go, may almost seem to be God's gift from the beginning, vouchsafed to us for this very purpose; at any rate the very fact is unquestionable, that it was the ordained vehicle of revelation, until God himself was made manifest in the flesh. And since the characteristic tendency of poetical minds is to make the world of sense, from the beginning to end, symbolical of the absent and unseen, any instance of divine favour shown to Poetry, any divine use of it in the training of God's people, would seem, as far as it goes, to warrant that tendency; to set God's seal upon it, and witness it as remarkable and true.

(Tracts, VI, 189-190).

These are nearly the last words of a 190-page tract (the Tracts for the Times were no three-page give-aways).¹⁷

The considerable eloquence of this passage is due to its careful blending of assertion and reservation. With the reservations extracted, we might conclude that Keble had in Tract 89 moved quite beyond the question he had asked himself in the essay on Lockhart's Scott and instead now asked himself the Romantic question of whether poetry could by its own unaided vision apprehend the divine. Without the qualifications, the passage seems to answer: “Poetical forms of thought and language” are “the channel of supernatural grace.” But as soon as we restore the reservations the answer changes, as does the question the passage answers: poetry is a channel of supernatural grace when it enjoys “divine favour” and when “divine use” of it is made in “the training of God's people.” The question answered when the whole of the passage is considered is the Tractarian question asked at the end of the essay on Lockhart's Scott—whether the work of the Fathers can be augmented under the guidance of the Church—and the answer seems to be a tentative “yes.” The qualifications of the passage are as important as the assertions. To favor one to the exclusion of the other is to misinterpret Keble—to make him a Romantic instead of a Tractarian. The reservations are in this final passage of the tract not just for the sake of a modest, unassuming style; they reflect definite lines of argument pursued in the discussion that the passage is meant to end.

The poetry that Keble discusses in the tract is what he calls “mystical” poetry, a phrase whose meaning he tries to rescue from the reductionist versions employed by Protestant commentators on the Fathers. “Mystical” poetry was not, as the Protestants thought, something fanciful—something vague and indeterminate, whose source might be everywhere and nowhere—it originated with God and was expressed both in Scripture and in the created world. Scripture is, Keble tells us, poetical because it employs “symbolical language taken from natural objects.” But this symbolic language is not at all ordinary. The Holy Ghost raises symbolic language in Scripture to “the rank of Divine Hieroglyphics.” The hieroglyphs or types differ from mere illustrations or analogies in that the former are divine and certain, while the latter have about them “no particular certainty, much less any sacredness.” The types are certain and unchanging because they come from God and were “ordered … from the beginning, with reference to that meaning.” The physical world was created to include a “fixed and regular” number of these hieroglyphs, and Scripture revealed them. Thereafter this system of symbols was the special study of God's people (Tracts, VI, 171, 170).

The “supposed mysticism” of the Fathers was no more than a meditation on this symbolic system. Although these symbols were limited in number and treasured for their scarcity, they were also, by means of divine dispensation, protean. From the sacred symbols of Scripture could be deduced a larger system of correspondences, which might seem to be equally holy. Meditation involved elaboration. From Scripture's use of “one such image taken from the works of nature … we might … begin to speculate on other possible associations” (Tracts, VI, 171). Keble was aware that he had reached the most difficult part of his argument. Here Keble's Protestant might put his finger down on what was most adventitious about the writing of the Fathers: they had pursued inference beyond what was reasonable, had departed from the simple words of Scripture, and had indulged in an unreal and fanciful mysticism. At the same time, Keble's thinking might seem to support the Romantic tradition that would make a religion out of poetry. Given that there is a set of sacred symbols to which we can add by inference, does it not follow that any poetic assessment of the world of correspondences would issue, if not in a new set of symbols, at least in an elaboration that might be consonant with the work of the Fathers and qualify as religious activity? To both his Protestant antagonist and the Romantic tradition, Keble answers no. He would have us conclude that Protestant attempts to minimize the deposit of faith and Romantic attempts to maximize it are both wrong in neglecting the manner in which the divine hieroglyphs of Scripture were pursued by the Fathers.

The Fathers were not afraid to follow inferences from the types of Scripture because they seemed “almost driven to such speculations.” They were impelled by the force of logic and by Scripture itself, especially the “manner in which the Old Testament is commented on in the New” (Tracts, VI, 171). Their interpretations had the character of sacred criticism because they were both sanctioned and restricted by the system of correspondences and by the voice of the Church. Keble tells us that the Fathers were protected against the twin errors of the “minimum of the mystical sense” and the tendency “to extract as much as ever we can” by a reverential approach to the logic of the system in which they were working. They were conscious of degrees, as have been all those who have followed them (Tracts, VI, 176). There was, Keble thought, another and even more unimpeachable safeguard against the tendency to “unsettle foundations, making all doctrines subjective rather than objective.” A faithful adherence to the limitations of the system of analogies was reinforced for the Fathers by the community of believers: “The Catholic Faith, the Mind of Christ testified by His universal Church, limits the range of symbolical interpretation both in Scripture and in nature” (Tracts, VI, 182).

From Keble's reference to a “universal Church” that acts as a judge of poetry that would hope to extend the work of the Fathers, we can assume that such a poetry might be possible, since the existence of a judge implies someone who might make a plea. But this is as close as we get in Tract 89 to an avowal of a developing symbolic tradition in the Church. This accounts, in part, for the general tentativeness of the concluding passage of the tract and for the reservations that accompany each of its assertions. In the final analysis, Keble could not get beyond the Fathers. There might be such a developing tradition; Keble was not sure. But he was sure that if there were such a developing tradition, it was not the contemporary tradition of private inquiry or what we have since learned to call the Romantic tradition. The making of religious symbols took place in the Church and only there, for only in the confines of the Church could one be sure of divine favor: “Let an uninspired poet or theologian be never so ingenious in his comparisons between earthly things and heavenly, we cannot build anything upon them; there is no particular certainty, much less any sacredness in them: but let the same words come out of the mouth of God, and we know the resemblance was intended from the beginning, and intended to be noticed and treasured up by us” (Tracts, VI, 170-171).

Tract 89 is the last time Keble gave direct attention to the question of a Christian symbolic tradition developing through time. He does, though, consider the subject indirectly in the last lectures given while he was professor of poetry at Oxford. In these his references are not to the Fathers, but to the classical tradition of poetry that preceded them. Standing for a moment with poets who had not been influenced by the Christian tradition, Keble can ask himself the Romantic question: whether the creative imagination of poetry can, without the aid of the teaching Church, apprehend the divine. He answers, though, as a Tractarian and as a student of the Fathers. Poets like Lucretius and Virgil are worthy of praise for having readied people's minds for revelation. Like the Hebrew prophets, there was in the work of these classical poets “a certain implicit suggestion of aims and aspirations unfulfilled.”¹⁸ This observation led Keble to a discussion of a “hidden kinship” between poetry and religion, the brief delineation of which he thought a fitting end to his whole course of lectures—a noble “crown upon our whole work.” He ends by calling poetry the “high-born handmaid” to religion, always its “minister” but never its equal (Lectures, II, 479-480, 484).

Here is the same clear subordination of poetry to religion with which Keble begins the essay on Lockhart's Scott. But the end of that earlier essay is also present in these last of the poetry lectures. The possibility of a Catholic poetry that had fascinated him in the earlier essay still interests him. His approach to it, though, is the same. The principle of balancing the creative mind of the poet with the restraining influence of the Church had allowed him in the essay on Lockhart's Scott to imagine a Catholic poetry that would refresh the Church with signs and symbols that reflected “substantial truth.” As he closes his poetry lectures, he allows himself a last look at this, the greatest of his visions.

Although he is still tentative and hesitant, he imagines a reciprocity between poetry and religion, where “Poetry lends Religion her wealth of symbols and similes,” and “Religion restores these again to Poetry, clothed with so splendid a radiance that they appear to be no longer merely symbols, but to partake (I might almost say) of the nature of sacraments” (Lectures, II, 481). As he conceives of them, poetry and religion are correspondent, though in no sense the same. Poetry gives its language to religion because without religion its language is merely aspiration, or, as Keble had said earlier about the poetry of Lucretius, a wandering “near the doors and thresholds with sadness and longing desire” (Lectures, II, 368). Once it has passed beyond the doorway and entered the “inmost shrine,” poetry almost becomes religion, for its voice is no longer uncertain but spiritualized, so that it “partakes … almost … of the nature of sacraments.” Such a voice Keble knew to be present in the Fathers; but nowhere else, except in his own imagination, was he so sure of its existence.

Although Keble's aesthetic theory owes much to the Romantic tradition, his special genius is manifested in the attempt to accommodate this new tradition with the older—and to his mind more reliable—one of Scripture and the Church Fathers. What emerges from this effort is not a spiritualized Romanticism, as some have imagined, but a deeper understanding of the Christian symbolic tradition most perfectly illustrated in the Church Fathers. The Romantic tradition as it developed in the Victorian and modern periods could make nothing of this; and so it simply bypassed Keble, preferring to draw its inspiration from less conservative thinkers than the Vicar of Hursley. One of these was John Henry, Cardinal Newman.

III

As I have indicated, there was no simple unanimity between Keble and Newman on the matter of aesthetics. In the first place, Newman takes much less delight in poetry than does Keble and holds a much lower opinion of it. One critic has said that Newman's references to poetry are always condescending (Starzyk, pp. 159-160), and when we look into The Idea of a University (1873) we find this to be the case. In the lecture on “Literature,” Newman seems to have just put down Keble's essay on Lockhart's Scott. He expatiates on the connection between thought and speech and then turns to give some examples:

But can they really think that Homer, or Pindar, or Shakespeare, or Dryden, or Walter Scott, was accustomed to aim at diction for its own sake, instead of being inspired by their subject, and pouring forth beautiful words because they had beautiful thoughts? … Rather it is the fire within the author's breast which overflows in the torrent of his burning, irresistible eloquence; it is the poetry of his inner soul, which relieves itself in the Ode or the Elegy; and his mental attitude and bearing, the beauty of his moral countenance, the force and keeness of his logic, are imagined in the tenderness, or energy, or richness of his language.¹⁹

The remarkable thing about this passage is not so much its close resemblance to Keble's essay on Lockhart's Scott as how little Newman seems to have entered into Keble's thinking. The examples are the same—Homer, Shakespeare, Dryden, and Walter Scott—and the definition is a neat paraphrase of Keble—poetry is “a fire within the author's breast which overflows … and relieves itself”—but what we have is merely the shell of Keble's thinking. The reference to Dryden signals this. Keble placed Dryden at the head of his list of secondary poets because his verse displayed none of that difficulty which Keble thought necessary to primary poetry. Newman either sees more in Dryden than Keble or did not entirely follow Keble's thinking on the place of difficulty in poetry. If we look more closely at Newman's statement, the second of these conclusions seems forced upon us. The poet, Newman tells us, pours forth “beautiful words” because he has “beautiful thoughts.” Poetry is balanced, measured, harmonious. What is this but a pre-Romantic or even classical view of poetry onto which Keble's words have been grafted?

Not only does Newman not seem to follow Keble's modern views of poetry, he is much quicker than Keble to speak of poetry's limitations and especially to distinguish it from religion. In the ninth of the Dublin discourses, Newman is almost brutal in his denigration of literature to a place well below religion and theology in the hierarchy of subjects of which a liberal education is composed. Literature is not a science, Newman tells us. Rather, literature is an account of human history not as religion would have it be, but as humanity is without religion's illuminating aid. Newman allows that literature may be “tinctured by a religious spirit,” and gives as his example Hebrew literature, as in the Old Testament. But this is not altogether literature, since it “certainly is simply theological, and has a character imprinted on it which is above nature.” Ordinary literature is not at all innocent. Man is “sure to sin, and his literature will be an expression of his sin, and this whether it be heathen or Christian” (Idea, p. 173).

While Keble was fascinated with the possibility of a Catholic poetry that would extend the symbolic tradition of the Fathers, Newman discounted all such theorizing. In “English Catholic Literature,” a lecture included in the second part of The Idea of a University, Newman insists that in using the phrase “Catholic literature” one cannot mean more than the “works of Catholics” on all the subjects which literature ordinarily treats. The subject matter of religious literature would not be the world of men and things, but rather “Catholic doctrine, controversy, history, persons, or politics.” This is the work not of the laity, but mainly of “ecclesiastics” in “a Seminary or a Theological School” (Idea, p. 222). Newman draws a stricter line than Keble between literature and religion because he is sure that they have different subject matters. As we have noted earlier in the case of the Grammar of Assent, theology, and by extension religion, have to do with what is “more than human.” Literature addresses the world of the natural man, and, according to Newman, it will always find a mixture of good and bad, a world deeply flawed. Literature “will have the beauty and the fierceness, the sweetness and rankness of the natural man” (Idea, p. 237).

Such judgments are to be found throughout Newman's writings. Newman's general assessment of the natural world and its literature differs both from Keble's and from the Romantic tradition inherited from Wordsworth. When Keble speaks of a “system of correspondences,” he is using the language of Bishop Butler, who saw everywhere in the natural world hints of a divine author. Butler's argument for the existence of God from design had a profound influence on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century religious thinking. No doubt Wordsworth owes something at least indirectly to Butler when in “Tintern Abbey” he catches glimpses of “something far more deeply interfused.” In the Apologia (1864), Newman tells us that he received the doctrine of the sacramental world from Butler, but more especially as it was recast by Keble in The Christian Year, and that thereafter it was a principle that was at the bottom of “a great portion” of his teaching.²⁰ Although Newman never entirely departed from this doctrine, he never relied on it as Keble did. He was suspicious of the argument from design when used as an exclusive proof for God's existence, mainly because he did not share Keble's or Butler's ready faith in a natural order that spoke of its divine authorship.

Almost all Newman's major works speak to this point. In the second of the University Sermons (1843), Newman explicitly accepts Butler's argument for correspondence between the natural and revealed systems, while at the same time he employs language that qualifies that acceptance. Revealed religion, Newman says, is “rooted” in nature. But how deeply? Nature's accents are “faint or broken,” and only in Christ are they interpreted in a fashion that would make them clearly consonant with revelation. The doctrine of the Incarnation has “no parallel in this world,” and without it the best of paganism had to be content with “laws of our being, which wander idle and forlorn over the surface of the moral world, and often appear to diverge from each other.” Pre-Christian thinkers could, as a rule, make nothing of these “multiplied and inconsistent images”; hence, they shattered “the moral scheme of the world into partial and discordant systems, in which appetite and expedience received the sanction due only to virtue.”²¹ When, much later, Newman comes to this subject in the Apologia, he explains that while he is “far from denying” the argument from design and the doctrine of a sacramental world on which that argument rests, he could nevertheless say for himself that these “do not warm or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desolation.” The sight of this world is nothing else than “lamentations, and mourning, and woe” (Apologia, p. 217).

Unlike Keble or Butler or Wordsworth, Newman fully entered into the desolation of skepticism, and thus always said that there was no medium between Christianity and atheism. The natural world, when fully considered, did not provide enough to support a visionary apprehension of the divine. In fact, its unaided testimony went all the other way. In “Dejection: An Ode,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge gives voice to a skepticism that destroys the poet's image-making capacity. It was a profound skepticism, but for Coleridge it was intermittent—a passing cloud over an otherwise more hopeful view of the world. For Newman it was an “encircling gloom” and a constant element in his thinking. This, more than anything else, marks his divergence from the Romantic tradition.

Newman's attitude towards the natural world and natural religion made it impossible for him to share the Romantic tradition's interests in connections between literature and religion, and it made him suspicious of Keble's inquiries into a developing Christian symbolic tradition. Newman's most sustained commentary on Keble's poetry comes in his 1846 review of Keble's Lyra Innocentium (Essays, II, 435-461). Among the first things that Newman wrote after becoming a Catholic, the essay is in part a defense of the step he had taken. His theme is that the Catholic sentiment present in Keble's poems is foreign to the Anglican Church and really only natural to Roman Catholics. Behind this general approach, though, lies Newman's conviction that Keble had made too much of poetry and that Keble's readers would be inclined to compound this error.

Newman's prose displays a double intent. He begins with generous praise for The Christian Year in the passage quoted at the beginning of this paper. His praise seems so generous that Pusey, apparently unaware of the general direction of Newman's essay, placed the passage at the beginning of Keble's Occasional Papers and Reviews (p. vii). Out of its context the passage seems simply to bless Keble's verse, but Newman's intent was more complicated and ambivalent than Pusey and many subsequent readers have imagined.²² Following close upon this passage is Newman's admission that the author of The Christian Year did much by his “happy magic” to make the Anglican Church “seem what Catholicism was and is.” Keble found the Anglican system “all but destitute of [the] divine element,” and “his poems became a sort of comment on its formularies and ordinances, and almost elevated them into the dignity of a religious system.” Keble's poetry brought enthusiasm where before there had only been a dreary indifference, and it had given hope to “the gentle and forlorn” (Essays, II, 443-445). But after giving attention to all that is positive in Newman's statements, we are left with an overwhelming sense of how guarded he is in his praise. Keble had applied a “happy magic” to Anglicanism, a transforming power akin to Prospero's “rough magic,” gentler but no more substantial than that “airy charm” that Prospero abjures at the end of The Tempest. His poems made the Anglican system “seem” Catholic and “almost elevated” it, giving a “something” to cling to. In Newman's estimation Keble's poetry did all that poetry could do to serve the cause of religion, but in the last analysis it could not, because of its nature, produce religion. Keble had called poets “high-born” handmaidens. Newman is less expansive. Poets live under the Church's “shadow” and are taken “into her service”; a few rise to the heights of Aquinas, while most go about rather ordinary business—they “embellish shrines, or … determine ceremonies, or … marshall processions” (Essays, II, 443).

Poetry, Newman says, is “the refuge of those who have not the Catholic Church to turn to” (Essays, II, 442). This refuge is comforting, but potentially deadly. In concluding the essay on Keble, Newman notes that “Anglo-Catholic writers may reduce the inquiring mind;—they may throw it, by a reaction, into rationalism.” Newman hints at his meaning: if the refuge that poetry supplies is treated as a substitute for the faith that it merely serves, if it is treated as an end in itself and not some secondary and middle term, then it becomes false and the mind will be thrown back on itself. With reference to Keble and to all that poetry can do to serve religion, Newman observes: “When the opening heart and eager intellect find themselves led on by their teachers, as if by the hand, to the See of St. Peter, and then all of a sudden, without good reason assigned, are stopped in their course, bid stand still in some half position, on the middle of a steep, or in the depth of a forest, the natural reflection which such a command excites is, ‘This is a mockery; I have come here for nothing; If I do not go on, I must go back’” (Essays, II, 451). The imagery of steep and forest is Dantesque. Is not Newman suggesting that Keble's situation and that of those who would make poetry their refuge is similar to what Dante's would have been had he stopped along the way, either at the entrance to Hell or somewhere on Mt. Purgatory, and refused to enter Paradise?

The connection between skepticism and a literature that is made to supplant religion is perhaps only hinted at in the 1846 essay partly in deference to Keble and partly because Newman had already given so much attention to it in his writings. The most recent instance had been his 1841 essays collected and published under the title The Tamworth Reading Room. Newman thought so much of the essays that he reprinted parts of them verbatim in the Grammar of Assent. There he tells us that the essays had been written in response to “a dangerous doctrine maintained … by Lord Brougham and Sir Robert Peel … to the effect that the claims of religion could be secured … by acquaintance with literature and physical science, and through the instrumentality of Mechanics Institutes and Reading Rooms, to the serious disparagement … of direct Christian instruction” (Grammar, p. 91).

In the 1841 essays Newman noted that Peel and Brougham intended to exclude religion from the reading rooms, since in their view it engendered “party feeling.” To Newman this was tantamount to saying that for them religion was dead and fit only to be abandoned. In its place they would put knowledge. But knowledge, Newman argued, whether discovered and expressed by literature or by science, is no substitute for religion. Science proceeds by deductions and literature by conclusions and inferences, but neither has the power to display directly the concrete realities of supernatural religion. All human forms of knowledge are founded upon doubt, a fact that Newman believed was observable in the very nature of language, where every affirmation suggests its own negation: “To say that a thing must be, is to admit that it may not be.” Religious knowledge does not admit of doubt because its foundations are not merely in language, but in the testimony of “facts and events, by history.” It is not “a deduction from what we know”; it has “ever been synonymous with Revelation.”²³ To attempt to build a religion upon inference—on science, literature, or art—is to invite skepticism: “We shall ever be laying our foundations; we shall turn theology into evidences, and divines into textuaries. We shall never get at our first principles. Resolve to believe nothing, and you must prove your proofs and analyze your elements, sinking further and further, and finding ‘in the lower depth a lower deep,’ till you come to the broad bosom of scepticism” (Discussions, p. 295).

Newman's distrust of natural religion, or a religion of inferences, had intensified during the Tractarian years. He had come to think of Anglicanism as little more than a “paper religion,” at best a highly selective but inchoate grouping of doctrine and opinion gathered from the Church Fathers and from the Reformation. Keble's Christian symbolic tradition, had he been able to define it fully, would have been part and parcel of a religion of inferences. It would have been based in the Fathers, and hence on a more trustworthy foundation than the scientific religion of Brougham and Peel, but nevertheless it would have remained a religion of the intellect, prone to doubt. As Newman reread the Fathers in the late 1830s and early 1840s—reading them for the first time with his own eyes, rather than as the Caroline divines dictated that they should be read—he discovered that the Fathers appealed to more than a system of symbols or body of doctrine. Their appeal was to something broader than their own interpretations of Scripture and history. Such interpretations were ever, they thought, to be tested against the faith of revelation, the faith held by a living, infallible Church. Newman speaks most fully of this in the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), the work toward which all of his Tractarian writings point. There Newman explains that the Fathers supply us with “tokens of the multiplicity of openings which the mind of the Church was making into the treasure-house of Truth; real openings, but incomplete or irregular.”²⁴ They do not provide, as Keble had argued, an unimpeachable meditation on a “fixed and regular” set of divine hieroglyphs. The Fathers, though closer to the truth than we, were still prone to error. In the startling language of the introduction to the essay, “St. Ignatius may be considered a Patripassian, St. Justin Arianizes, and St. Hippolytus is a Photinian” (Development, p. 80). The Fathers are not so much exponents of orthodox opinions as they are of an orthodox faith present in a community of believers. Against a religion of the intellect, Newman recommends a religion of history and of fact, defined by a “living and present guide,” who is the “arbiter of all true doctrine and holy practice to her children” (Development, p. 175).

Keble, as I have said, referred the Romantic tradition to the Fathers and arrived at a fuller view of Patristics. His conservative response to the tradition went unnoticed. Newman drew from the Fathers and from a number of traditions but was mastered by none of them, save that universal tradition to which he believed all other traditions referred. As he could take from the Caroline divines a deep interest in the Fathers and yet part company with them over the way in which the Fathers were to be regarded as authorities, as he could credit Gibbon with having been the only English ecclesiastical writer worthy of the name and yet reverse Gibbon's interpretations, so too could Newman borrow Keble's enthusiasm for poetry and the Romantic tradition's emphasis on intuition and make them part of a system of his own that was larger than they were and, when contrasted with them, serve as a commentary on their deficiencies.

Newman's originality did not go unnoticed by the Romantic tradition. Despite his having judged the tradition and found it wanting, exponents of the tradition in the latter half of the nineteenth century were drawn to Newman's genius. Walter Pater, whom Harold Bloom has described as “a kind of hinge upon which turns the single gate, one side of which is Romantic and the other modern poetry,”²⁵ found in Newman's writings, particularly the Grammar of Assent, the perfect expression of a religion of aesthetics—a religion based on intuition and personal experience that tended toward the Catholic faith. As David DeLaura has explained, Pater exploited one element of Newman's thinking to the exclusion of the rest; he accepted Newman's emphasis on “inwardness” and spiritual individualism and discarded most of what Newman had said about a religion based on revelation (DeLaura, p. 314).

Pater and the critics of the nineties—particularly Oscar Wilde and Lionel Johnson—were intrigued with Newman for many reasons.²⁶ Who else had looked so steadily at skepticism and yet had triumphed over it by an act of faith? More importantly, who else had been able to rise above the Romantic tradition that had held the century in thrall? Newman, they knew, had put his finger on the tradition's greatest difficulty—its constant war with precursors, who, Newman had said, exercised an oppressive influence over the writing of the day, making the writing self-conscious and leaving it with the impression that in Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope “an existing want” had been supplied and there was “no need for further workmen” (Idea, p. 244). They realized that in his own field of theological inquiry, Newman had escaped the Romantic predicament. His mind, “unresting and powerful,” had imposed its “own pattern” on all its material.²⁷ His was the very type of mind that Romantic poets and prose writers had always celebrated. He had written with the freshness of earlier times and had fearlessly bridged gaps between logic and intuition, religion and science, doubt and certainty—the great antitheses of nineteenth-century thought.

Despite his considerable modesty, Newman would not have disowned this influence. He would, though, have deeply regretted the tendency, observable first in Pater and then later in some modern criticism, to emphasize one portion of his teaching to the exclusion of others, to take him as a model for a synthetic approach to religion and human experience and yet to ignore the particular synthesis before which he humbled himself.

Notes

1. E. B. Pusey, “Preface,” in John Keble, Occasional Papers and Reviews, ed. E. B. Pusey (Oxford: James Parker, 1877), p. viii.

2. John Henry Newman, “John Keble” (1846), in Essays Critical and Historical, 2 vols. (New York: Longmans, Green, 1897), II, 441.

3. The phrase comes from Lawrence J. Starzyk, The Imprisoned Splendor: A Study of Victorian Critical Theory (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977), p. 179. The tendency of the late Romantic tradition to make a religion out of poetry was observed much earlier in this century by T. S. Eliot in his essay “Arnold and Pater.” Eliot notes that in the latter part of the nineteenth century “religious art” and in due course “aesthetic religion” developed (Selected Essays [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1964], p. 390).

4. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Poetry and the Critical Tradition (New York: Norton, 1958), pp. 147-148; G. B. Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 60-61, 69; Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

5. S. H. Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (1911; rpt. ed. New York: Dover, 1951), p. 141.

6. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. II, chap. 6, quoted by Donald Smalley, ed. Poems of Robert Browning (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), p. 510 n. 233.

7. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

8. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Selected Prose, ed. Gerald Roberts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 107.

9. Thomas Wright, The Life of Walter Pater (London: Everett, 1907), p. 89; Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 66.

10. David J. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), pp. 58-59.

11. Matthew Arnold was the first to dispense with Latin for the Oxford poetry lectures. Keble found writing in Latin difficult, but preferred to abide by the tradition; see J. T. Coleridge, A Memoir of the Rev. John Keble (1870; rpt. ed. Farnborough, England: Gregg International, 1969), pp. 207-213.

12. J. C. Shairp, Studies in Poetry and Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), p. 220. Although this sounds exaggerated, I think it correct in its general assessment of Keble.

13. Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and Others, 1839-1845, ed. at the Birmingham Oratory (London: Longmans, Green, 1917), p. 319.

14. John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870; rpt. London: Longmans, 1892), p. 331.

15. The Theological Papers of John Henry Newman on Faith and Certainty, ed. Hugo M. de Achaval and J. Derek Holmes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 74-75.

16. Romans 1:20, quoted in John Keble, On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church, Tract 89 of Tracts for the Times, 6 vols. (Oxford: James Parker, 1868), VI, 189.

17. This well-known passage is reprinted in the standard modern source on the Tractarian movement, Owen Chadwick, The Mind of the Oxford Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), p. 68.

18. Keble's Lectures on Poetry: 1832-1841, trans. Edward Kershaw Francis, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), II, 474.

19. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, ed. Martin J. Svaglic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 210.

20. John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. Martin J. Svaglic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 23, 29.

21. Newman's University Sermons: Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford 1826-43, ed. D. M. MacKinnon and J. D. Holmes (London: Society for the Promulgation of Christian Knowledge, 1970), pp. 31, 27, 24.

22. For instance, see G. B. Tennyson's use of the passage in Victorian Devotional Poetry, pp. 112-113.

23. John Henry Newman, “The Tamworth Reading Room,” Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects (London: Basil Montague, 1872), pp. 285-286, 293, 296.

24. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine: The Edition of 1845, ed. J. M. Cameron (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 360.

25. Harold Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 186-187.

26. Lionel Johnson very nearly worshiped Newman and claimed to know his work from the most “splendid and familiar passages down to their slightest and most occasional note.” Newman, Johnson says, “takes up the scattered and wayward influences of his day, and sifts them through his conscience” (Post Liminium: Essays and Critical Papers of Lionel Johnson [London: Elkin Mathews, 1911], pp. 303, 307). Oscar Wilde respected Newman because he was both a good Christian and a good philosopher. During his imprisonment, Wilde had sent to him—along with St. Augustine's Confessions, Pater's Renaissance, and Renan's Vie de Jesus—Newman's Grammar of Assent, Apologia, Two Essays on Miracles, and The Idea of a University (Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis [London: Hart-Davis, 1962], pp. 20, 399 n. 4, 405 n. 1). To these judgments of Newman might be added that of John Holloway, who accounts for the admiration of Newman among non-Catholics by saying that Newman “proves to have had perhaps the most comprehensive, detailed and integrated view of things—in the sage's sense—of any English writer of the century” (The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument [New York: Norton, 1965], p. 158).

27. Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman: The Idea of Doctrinal Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), p. 111.