about it does clearly emerge. Whatever else is right, the theory that
Newman went over to Rome to find peace and an end of argument, is quite
unquestionably wrong. He had far more quarrels after he had gone over to
Rome. But, though he had far more quarrels, he had far fewer
compromises: and he was of that temper which is tortured more by
compromise than by quarrel. He was a man at once of abnormal energy and
abnormal sensibility: nobody without that combination could have written
the _Apologia_. If he sometimes seemed to skin his enemies alive, it was
because he himself lacked a skin. In this sense his _Apologia_ is a
triumph far beyond the ephemeral charge on which it was founded; in this
sense he does indeed (to use his own expression) vanquish not his
accuser but his judges. Many men would shrink from recording all their
cold fits and hesitations and prolonged inconsistencies: I am sure it
was the breath of life to Newman to confess them, now that he had done
with them for ever. His _Lectures on the Present Position of English
Catholics_, practically preached against a raging mob, rise not only
higher but happier, as his instant unpopularity increases. There is
something grander than humour, there is fun, in the very first lecture
about the British Constitution as explained to a meeting of Russians.
But always his triumphs are the triumphs of a highly sensitive man: a
man must feel insults before he can so insultingly and splendidly
avenge them. He is a naked man, who carries a naked sword. The quality
of his literary style is so successful that it succeeds in escaping
definition. The quality of his logic is that of a long but passionate
patience, which waits until he has fixed all corners of an iron trap.
But the quality of his moral comment on the age remains what I have
said: a protest of the rationality of religion as against the increasing
irrationality of mere Victorian comfort and compromise. So far as the
present purpose is concerned, his protest died with him: he left few
imitators and (it may easily be conceived) no successful imitators. The