Newman and His Contemporaries by Edward Short

Author:Edward Short [Short, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-04-20T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Newman, Thackeray and Vanity Fair

This was the greatness of Thackeray, the man whom sentimentalists without hearts or stomachs have conceived as a mere satirist … he felt, perhaps, more fully … than any other Englishman the immeasurable and almost unbearable emotion that is involved in the mere fact of human life. Dickens, with his indestructible vanity and boyishness, is always looking forward. Thackeray is always looking back in life. And no man will ever properly comprehend him until he has reached for a moment that state of the soul in which melancholy is the greatest of all the joys.

G. K. Chesterton, Thackeray (1903)

In “What Then Does Dr. Newman Mean?” Charles Kingsley quoted a passage from Newman’s Anglican Difficulties to substantiate his charge that “Truth, for its own sake is no virtue in his eyes, and he teaches that it need not be.” The passage was one of those gleeful grenades that Newman could not resist tossing at the Protestant Establishment now and again:

Take a mere beggar-woman, lazy, ragged, and filthy, and not over-scrupulous of truth—(I do not say she had arrived at perfection)—but if she is chaste, and sober, and cheerful, and goes to her religious duties (and I am supposing not at all an impossible case), she will, in the eyes of the Church, have a prospect of heaven, which is quite closed and refused to the State’s pattern-man, the just, the upright, the generous, the honourable, the conscientious, if he be all this, not from a supernatural power—(I do not determine whether this is likely to be the fact, but I am contrasting views and principles)—not from a supernatural power, but from mere natural virtue.

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