CARDINAL NEWMAN AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHERS


In literature mere egotism is delightful. It is what fascinates us in
the letters of personalities so different as Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert
and Berlioz, Byron and Madame de Sevigne. Whenever we come across it,
and, strangely enough, it is rather rare, we cannot but welcome it, and
do not easily forget it. Humanity will always love Rousseau for having
confessed his sins, not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchant
nymphs that Cellini wrought in bronze for the castle of King Francis, the
green and gold Perseus, even, that in the open Loggia at Florence shows
the moon the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have not given
it more pleasure than has that autobiography in which the supreme
scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his splendour and his
shame. The opinions, the character, the achievements of the man, matter
very little. He may be a sceptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or
a saint like the bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us his own
secrets he can always charm our ears to listening and our lips to
silence. The mode of thought that Cardinal Newman represented--if that
can be called a mode of thought which seeks to solve intellectual
problems by a denial of the supremacy of the intellect--may not, cannot,
I think, survive. But the world will never weary of watching that
troubled soul in its progress from darkness to darkness. The lonely
church at Littlemore, where 'the breath of the morning is damp, and
worshippers are few,' will always be dear to it, and whenever men see the
yellow snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity they will think of
that gracious undergraduate who saw in the flower's sure recurrence a
prophecy that he would abide for ever with the Benign Mother of his
days--a prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or her folly, suffered not to
be fulfilled. Yes; autobiography is irresistible.--_The Critic as