Читать книгу Selections from the Prose Writings of John Henry Cardinal Newman - John Henry Newman - Страница 4

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Newman's best essays display a delicate and flexible treatment of language, without emphasis, without oddity, which hardly arrests the attention at first,—the reader being absorbed in the argument or statement,—but which, in course of time, fascinates, as a thing miraculous in its limpid grace and suavity.

—Edmund Gosse's History of Modern English Literature.

The work of Newman reveals him as one of the great masters of graceful, scholarly, finished prose. It is individual, it has charm, and this is the secret of its power to interest. No writer of our time has reflected his mind and heart in his pages as has Newman. He has light for the intellect and warmth for the heart.

—A. J. George's Types of Literary Art.

Newman towers, with only three or four compeers, above his generation; and now that the benignity of his great nature has passed from our sight, its majesty is more evident year by year.

—Scudder's Modern English Poets.

The finish and urbanity of Newman's prose have been universally commended even by those who are most strenuously opposed to his opinions.

—H. J. Nicoll.

All the resources of a master of English style are at Newman's command: pure diction, clear arrangement, delicate irony, gracious dignity, a copious command of words combined with a chaste reserve in using them.

All these qualities go to make up the charm of Newman's style—the finest flower that the earliest system of a purely classical education has produced.

—J. Jacobs's Literary Studies.

Newman combines a thoroughly classical training, a scholarly form, with the incommunicable and almost inexplicable power to move audiences and readers.

—George Saintsbury.

The pure style of Newman may be compared in its distinguishing quality to the atmosphere. It is at once simple and subtle, vigorous and elastic; it penetrates into every recess of its subject; it is transparent, allowing each object it touches to display its own proper color.

—H. E. Beeching's English Prose.

There are touching passages characteristic of Newman's writings which give them a peculiar charm. They are those which yield momentary glimpses of a very tender heart that has a burden of its own, unrevealed to man.... It is, as I have heard it described, as though he suddenly opened a book and gave you a glimpse for a moment of wonderful secrets, and then as quickly closed it.... In Newman's Sermons, how the old truth became new; how it came home, as he spoke, with a meaning never felt before! He laid his finger how gently, yet how powerfully, on some inner place in the hearer's heart, and told him things about himself he had never known till then. Subtlest truths, which it would have taken philosophers pages of circumlocution and big words to state, were dropped out by the way in a sentence or two of the most transparent Saxon. What delicacy of style, yet what strength! how simple, yet how suggestive! how penetrating, yet how refined! how homely, yet how tender-hearted! You might come away still not believing the tenets peculiar to the High Church System, but you would be harder than most men if you did not feel more than ever ashamed of coarseness, selfishness, worldliness, if you did not feel the things of faith brought closer to the soul.... Newman's innate and intense idealism is, perhaps, his most striking characteristic.... It is a thought of his, always deeply felt and many times repeated, that this visible world is but the outward shell of an invisible kingdom, a screen which hides from our view things far greater and more wonderful than any which we see, and that the unseen world is close to us and ever ready to break through the shell and manifest itself.

—Shairp.

Newman's great reputation for prose and the supreme interest attaching to his life seem to have obscured the fame he might have won as a poet. He was in poetry, as in theology, a more masculine Keble, but with all the real purity of Keble, with also the indispensable flavor of earth.

—H. Walker.

The Dream of Gerontius resembles Dante more than any other poetry written since the great Tuscan's time. —Sir Henry Taylor.

The Dream is a rare poetic rendering into English verse of that high ritual which from the death-bed to the Mass of Supplication encompasses the faithful soul.... Newman has no marked affinities with English writers of his day. He is strikingly different from Macaulay, whose eloquence betrays the fury, as it is annealed in the fire, of the Western Celt. To Ruskin, who deliberately built up a monument, stately as the palace of Kubla Khan, he is a contrast, for the very reason that he does not handle words as if they were settings in architecture or colors in a palette; rather, he would look upon them as transparencies which let his meaning through. He is more like De Quincey, but again no player upon the organ for the sake of its music; and that which is common to both is the literary tradition of the eighteenth century enhanced by a power to which abstract and concrete yielded in almost equal degree.... With so prompt and intense an intellect at his call, there was no subject, outside purely technical criticism, which Newman could not have mastered. —Barry's Literary Lives.

It is when Newman exerts his flexible and vivid imagination in depicting the deepest religious passion that we are most carried away by him and feel his great genius most truly.... Whether tried by the test of nobility, intensity, and steadfastness of his work, or by the test of the greatness of the powers which have been consecrated to that work, Cardinal Newman has been one of the greatest of our modern great men.

—R. H. Hutton's Life of Newman.

Newman's mind was world-wide. He was interested in everything that was going on in science, in the highest form of politics, in literature.... Nothing was too large for him, nothing too trivial, if it threw light upon the central question,—what man really is and what is his destiny.

—J. A. Froude.

In Newman's sketch of the influence of Abelard on his disciples is seen his belief in the immense power for good or ill of a dominating personality. And he himself supplied an object-lesson in his theory. Shairp, Froude, Church, Wilberforce, Gladstone, are only a few of those who have borne testimony to the personal magnetism which left its mark on the whole of thinking Oxford. "Cor ad cor loquitur," the motto chosen by Newman on his receiving the Cardinal's hat, expressed to him the whole reality of intercourse between man and man, and man and God.

—Wilfrid Ward's Problems and Persons.

Newman's mind swung through a wide arc, and thoughts apparently antagonistic often were to him supplemental each to each.... A man of dauntless courage and profound thoughtfulness, while his intellect was preëminently a logical one, both the heart and the moral sense possessed with him their sacred tribunals in matters of reasoning as well as of sentiment.... The extreme subtlety of his intelligence opposed no hindrance to his power of exciting vehement emotion.

—A. De Vere's Literary Reminiscences.