Art. 11.-CARDINAL MANNING.

1. Henry Edward Manning, His Life and Labours. By Shane Leslie. Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1921. 2. Eminent Victorians (Cardinal Manning). By Lytton Strachey. Chatto and Windus, 1918.

3. Cardinal Manning. By A. W. Hutton. Methuen, 1892. 4. The Life of Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster. By E. S. Purcell. Two vols. Macmillan, 1896. 5. Out of the Past, Vol. I. (Manning and the Catholic Reaction of our Times.) By Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff. John Murray, 1903.

6. Essays. (Life of Cardinal Manning.) By the Rev. H. I. D. Ryder. Longmans, 1911.

THE appearance, this year, of a new and very successful life of Cardinal Manning, as well as the priority accorded to a critique of his career in one of the most widely-read books of recent times, are in their way interesting and instructive phenomena. For something besides the talents of the authors and the merit of the subject has contributed to the good-fortune and high-favour of these biographical studies; and this is the apparently unexhausted magic of the Roman purple. The lives of princes, indeed, are at all times popular reading, but the lives of the princes of the Church enjoy some little pre-eminence of interest above the rest. A Cardinal adds or should add-startling paradox to supreme dignity. Pledged to maintain his position, clothed to outward appearance in purple and fine linen, attended even still sometimes by the pomp and circumstance of great place, he has to set forth in life, in word, in gesture, the very opposite of that which these things seem to imply. It is as if an athlete were set to run the hardest of races in the most cumbrous imaginable clothing, or a mountaineer to climb the steepest of mountains with the worst possible equipment. No wonder the world has watched with eager attention this walking about-as Bunyan has it-of religion in satin shoes. For as there has been no bolder attempt to lay the crown of Cæsar visibly at the feet of Christ, so success has often been wanting, and men have sometimes thought the thing attempted impossible and

Catholic asceticism incapable of triumphing over the glories-the transient glories of earth. And even when this miracle of humility has been accomplished, and the sack-cloth of a saint has, as we might say, penetrated the splendour of the purple, there will still be those who doubt whether the human spirit is really sufficient for these things and for whom the paradox of the cardinalate continues to pass acceptance.

Everywhere, perhaps, princes of the Church scanned with a certain suspicion, but in England, where, until lately, Cardinals were practically unknown and where Shakespeare has caused Beaufort and Wolsey to be unfavourably remembered, they used to be viewed with honest concern. There was probably no greater outburst of popular indignation in this country throughout the Victorian Age than that which greeted Cardinal Wiseman's letter reconstituting under papal sanction a Catholic, or, as some may prefer to say, a Roman Catholic, diocesan episcopate in England. And yetso just is the spirit of this country when it is calmthere was within this same period, if reports are to be trusted, no crowd so large as that which followed Wiseman's body to the grave except only that which went mourning for Wellington.

But among the four Cardinals with whose lives the English Catholic revival of the 19th century is bound up, it is probably the figure of Manning that best realises the English conception of a prince of the Church; and to this notion various circumstances have contributed. In the first place, his presence was precisely that which cardinals might be expected to possess. He .was dignified and the master of an exquisite courtesy ; he was impressive, as men are impressive who have had the best education and known the best society; in the severe lines of his ascetic face there lay, as it seemed, the traces of a perpetual rejection of that very world which all his natural being seemed to court; while his chequered career and unfamiliar creed raised among some of his contemporaries the suspicion that God and the Devil were fiercely contesting the possession of his soul. Then, in the second place, he was, what his countrymen love, a very practical and a very philanthropic man. No one of the other three Cardinals of

this group can touch him here. Wiseman's work was to inaugurate a hierarchy in which his co-religionists alone could be expected to feel an interest. Vaughan was presently to build a Cathedral whose subtle and mysterious beauty only his co-religionists, perhaps, are capable of appreciating. Newman, working a little apart from the rest, was producing a philosophy too delicate for common minds to grasp. But Manning preached the Gospel to the poor; and, in one of those days of decision when the Gospel alone seems to interpose between the naked passions of wealth and poverty, he knew how to make the cause of the poor his own and the hearts of the poor his conquest. No one could doubt that he was a man and a leader of men. What sort of a Cardinal he may have been-how far he solved, or failed to solve, the paradox of the cardinalate—has remained open for discussion to this day.

The answer is presumably to be read in the books that lie before us, if not, perhaps, in any one of them alone. Mr Leslie, indeed, though his standpoint is quite his own, modestly describes his biography of Manning as a supplement to that of Purcell; and Purcell's Life is certainly not one that can be lightly set aside. Lord Rosebery is credited with having placed it among the five best biographies in the language; and, even if more than one subsequent piece of biographical work has driven it further down the list, it remains, in spite of some discreditable blunders to which Mr Leslie draws attention, a work to be reckoned with. Not the least difficulty in appraising its merit lies in the uncertainty that surrounds Purcell's intention. He claimed, indeed, as Mr Strachey claims, as we all claim, that purity of purpose which should set a man free from malice or favour, from suggestion of what is false and suppression of what is true. But this claim was unfortunately not in perfect harmony with the reputation he enjoyed; and the damaging tradition about the way in which he obtained one of Manning's diaries, even if it be correctly recalled in Mr Leslie's rather attenuated version of the tale, reduces him, so far as character is concerned, to the level of a journalist of the baser sort. Anyhow, he got so thorough a possession of the field that for two decades the Cardinal was generally

reckoned to have suffered a damaging exposure. Such defences as Mr Aubrey de Vere's article and Father Ignatius Ryder's posthumously-published but important paper, were open to the charge of being Catholic in origin. Hutton's generous Anglican estimate had long passed out of notice; Bodley's study was not much more than a personal impression; and Grant Duff's essay largely sacrificed the Cardinal's personality to a review of the Catholic revival in England, France, and Germany during the 19th century. Meanwhile one age was passing into another; and no one who, after looking at the books just enumerated, takes up Mr Strachey's essay or Mr Leslie's biography can doubt that the transition has been effected. The atmosphere is completely changed. The sober style, the considered opinion, the religious, or at least ethical interest has gone; and instead there reigns a philosophy almost purely psychological and a manner almost tediously entertaining. Never, perhaps, has the Time-Spirit executed so rapid, so startling a metamorphosis.

Mr Strachey, to give him his due, is probably the best example of a literary valet that any country has ever had the good fortune to possess. He has no heroes at all; and he consequently valets the Victorian Age, where heroes abounded, with the most finished perfection. At any trial of character the evidence of so attentive a servant would be invaluable, though the jury would have to be reminded that one does not learn quite all a master's secrets by listening in likely corners or looking for mud-stains to brush. There was nothing perhaps that Mr Strachey was more sure of than the Cardinal's desire to bury the recollection of his early marriage. And so it seemed until Baron von Hügel suddenly upset the critic's inference by disclosing an anecdote which displayed in the most touching fashion Manning's unchanging spiritual devotion to the memory of his beautiful wife. Reserve is, indeed, one of the qualities that the 20th century has no aptitude for, and does not therefore easily detect. But Mr Strachey is so clever that he might have escaped a limitation which hampers others of us, if only the contemplation of the poverty and weakness

* 'Contemp. Review,' March 1896.

of human nature had not given him quite so much pleasure.

Mr Leslie, though he lacks something of Mr Strachey's extreme skill in selection, composition, and expression, and though he professes a faith at which Mr Strachey would probably smile, betrays himself not the less unmistakably as a child of the same century. There is a restless cleverness about his writing that has its root, perhaps, in the constant effort of literature to arrest attention in an age of headlines, but that is unfortunately incompatible with the finest art, and perhaps with finer things than art can ever be. It is true that in the later chapters of the book the style becomes calmer and the thought less embarrassed by the scintillations of a lively wit; but it must remain doubtful whether the subject of the biography, with his austere ideas about literary method, would have approved the technique of his latest biographer. But, if the form of the book suffers to some extent from the journalistic habit of the day, it may at least be claimed that its matter possesses the distinction of vitality, the force of enthusiasm, and the merit of novelty. Things that Purcell never knew have been derived from a variety of sources of which some previously untapped volumes of Manning's Diary and one or two previously unprinted but vitally important letters to Monsignor Talbot are the chief. No future writer is likely to be in a position to throw on Manning's life any further documentary light of any consequence, at least until the Vatican archives of the later 19th century are thrown open to view. And perhaps not even then! For the correspondence with Monsignor Talbot appears to be now complete; and Talbot, the protagonist in the most obscure and canvassed episode in Manning's life, being, according to Manning's own estimate, 'the most imprudent man that ever lived.'

The facts then are, or may be presumed to be, at our disposal. What impression do they render? Mr Leslie, who of all Manning's critics is in the best position to reply, is perhaps among them all the least ready with any answer. His conclusion, which is hardly to be called an estimate, extends little beyond a quotation; and that quotation is drawn from Griffith's speech to Katharine in Shakespeare's Henry VIII (IV, 2) :