Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (romantic novels in english .txt) 📕
Description
Eminent Victorians consists of four short biographies by Lytton Strachey of Victorians who were famous in their day: Cardinal Manning, a powerful cleric; Florence Nightingale, founder of modern nursing; Thomas Arnold, founder of the modern-day English public school style; and General Gordon, a popular officer of the British Army.
In Strachey’s day, these people were considered heroes and paragons of Victorian morality and ethics. But instead of lengthy, glowing biographies, Strachey opts for short, witty, and biting biographies that skewer their subjects. All of the subjects are portrayed with their human flaws and moral contradictions on full display, implicitly knocking down the sanctimonious visions of these former heroes (perhaps with the exception of Nightingale, who, while portrayed as an often-cold and mercilessly-driven taskmistress, nevertheless escaped with her reputation enhanced).
The biographies are not only interesting for their wit, humor, and readability, but because of the windows they open to the issues of the age. Manning’s biography occurs against the backdrop of a time of upheaval in the English Catholic church, with concepts like Papal Infallability entering the picture; Nightingale’s biography shines light on the appalling conditions of war; Arnold’s biography is a lens on the development of formal education and schools; and Gordon’s biography reveals England as an empire growing more unsteady, whose ability to influence and control faraway lands is not as certain as it might think.
Eminent Victorians took six years to write and was met with glowing reviews on its publication. It made Strachey famous and cemented his name in the list of top-tier biographers.
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- Author: Lytton Strachey
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Among the letters of congratulation which Manning received, was one from Mr. Gladstone, with whom he had remained on terms of close friendship since their days together at Oxford.
“I rejoice,” Mr. Gladstone wrote, “on your account personally; but more for the sake of the Church. All my brothers-in-law are here and scarcely less delighted than I am. With great glee am I about to write your new address; but, the occasion really calls for higher sentiments; and sure am I that you are one of the men to whom it is specially given to develop the solution of that great problem—how all our minor distractions are to be either abandoned, absorbed, or harmonised through the might of the great principle of communion in the body of Christ.”
Manning was an Archdeacon; but he was not yet out of the woods. His relations with the Tractarians had leaked out, and the Record was beginning to be suspicious. If Mrs. Shuttleworth’s opinion of him were to become general, it would certainly be a grave matter. Nobody could wish to live and die a mere Archdeacon. And then, at that very moment, an event occurred which made it imperative to take a definite step, one way or the other. That event was the publication of Tract No. 90.
For some time it had been obvious to every impartial onlooker that Newman was slipping down an inclined plane at the bottom of which lay one thing, and one thing only—the Roman Catholic Church. What was surprising was the length of time which he was taking to reach the inevitable destination. Years passed before he came to realise that his grandiose edifice of a Church Universal would crumble to pieces if one of its foundation stones was to be an amatory intrigue of Henry VIII. But, at last he began to see that terrible monarch glowering at him wherever he turned his eyes. First he tried to exorcise the spectre with the rolling periods of the Caroline divines; but it only strutted the more truculently. Then in despair he plunged into the writings of the early Fathers, and sought to discover some way out of his difficulties in the complicated labyrinth of ecclesiastical history. After months spent in the study of the Monophysite heresy, the alarming conclusion began to force itself upon him that the Church of England was perhaps in schism. Eventually he read an article by a Roman Catholic on St. Augustine and the Donatists, which seemed to put the matter beyond doubt. St. Augustine, in the fifth century, had pointed out that the Donatists were heretics because the Bishop of Rome had said so. The argument was crushing; it rang in Newman’s ears for days and nights; and, though he continued to linger on in agony for six years more, he never could discover any reply to it. All he could hope to do was to persuade himself and anyone else who liked to listen to him that the holding of Anglican orders was not inconsistent with a belief in the whole cycle of Roman doctrine as laid down at the Council of Trent. In this way he supposed that he could at once avoid the deadly sin of heresy and conscientiously remain a clergyman in the Church of England; and with this end in view, he composed Tract No. 90.
The object of the Tract was to prove that there was nothing in the Thirty-nine Articles incompatible with the creed of the Roman Church. Newman pointed out, for instance, that it was generally supposed that the Articles condemned the doctrine of Purgatory; but they did not; they merely condemned the Romish doctrine of Purgatory—and Romish, clearly, was not the same thing as Roman. Hence it followed that believers in the Roman doctrine of Purgatory might subscribe the Articles with a good conscience. Similarly, the Articles condemned “the sacrifices of masses,” but they did not condemn “the sacrifice of the Mass.” Thus, the Mass might be lawfully celebrated in English Churches. Newman took the trouble to examine the Articles in detail from this point of view, and the conclusion he came to in every case supported his contention in a singular manner.
The Tract produced an immense sensation, for it seemed to be a deadly and treacherous blow aimed at the very heart of the Church of England. Deadly it certainly was, but it was not so treacherous as it appeared at first sight. The members of the English Church had ingenuously imagined up to that moment that it was possible to contain, in a frame of words, the subtle essence of their complicated doctrinal system, involving the mysteries of the Eternal and the Infinite on the one hand, and the elaborate adjustments of temporal government on the other. They did not understand that verbal definitions in such a case will only perform their functions so long as there is no dispute about the matters which they are intended to define: that is to say, so long as there is no need for them. For generations this had been the case with the Thirty-nine Articles. Their drift was clear enough; and nobody bothered over their exact meaning. But directly someone found it important to give them a new and untraditional interpretation, it appeared that they were a mass of ambiguity, and might be
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