Back to the Future in the 1840s
CARLYLE, RUSKIN, SYBIL, NEWMAN
He [Pugin] was a Catholic convert . . . who thought the medieval world better than his own time . . . This profoundly conservative, anti-democratic, anti-utilitarian and anti-industrial vision was partly derived from such recent writers as Sir Walter Scott . . . and had much in common with the ‘Young England’ movement that was fashionable among some Tories during the 1840s.
David Cannadine, Introduction to The Houses of Parliament1
The aim of this essay in cultural history is to draw together elements of the Medieval Revival, so that it may be seen as a whole. This chapter looks at four representative figures who brought ideals borrowed from the Middle Ages to bear upon the 1840s, a decade of serious economic unrest. Some aspects of this story, and some of its principal actors, are better known than others. In the case of a well-known figure, it may be enough to refocus an accepted view. John Ruskin, for example, is known to anyone interested in the history of art and architecture, or in Victorian society, and such readers must be among the audience of this book. If the first thing suggested by the words Medieval Revival might be neo-Gothic architecture, the first name to come up in a discussion might be that of John Ruskin. He accordingly receives in this essay a more summary treatment than would be found in a more systematic survey of the period.
Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present hinges on a simple contrast between an ideal past and the concerns that were most urgent in 1843, when it was written. Carlyle’s contrasts are less absolute than Pugin’s: the monastery of the twelfth century evoked in his pages is less idealised than Pugin’s fifteenth-century monastery. Unlike Pugin’s, it is not devoted to ‘the corporal works of mercy’. The impact which Past and Present had upon public opinion suggests that popular antiquarianism, and the romances of Walter Scott, had enabled readers for the first time to imagine a distant historical period neither classical nor biblical but part of national history, and to engage with an open mind in an imaginative comparison of such a past with the present state of society. The facing panels of Carlyle’s diptych of ‘Past’ and ‘Present’ are entitled ‘The Ancient Monk’ and ‘The Modern Worker’. The monk is drawn from Jocelyn of Brakelonde’s Chronicle of the monastery of Bury St Edmunds, which was published by the Camden Society in 1840. The Ancient Monk is Carlyle’s idea of Jocelyn’s hard-working abbot, Abbot Samson, one of the ‘great men’ by whom, according to Carlyle in his lectures, Heroes and Hero-Worship, history is made. Had there been a seventh lecture in the series, Samson could have exemplified Hero as Administrator.
Abbots had not featured in post-Reformation English history as good, and had regularly appeared in fiction as bad: at best, they were depicted as lazy, and at worst as depraved, as in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk of 1796 (see Plate 11), in which the monk of the title rapes a young girl in a charnel house. For educated eighteenth-century Protestant readers, English monasticism lay below the horizon of worthwhile historical enquiry. Rightly had its institutions been dissolved and rightly did its lands belong to those who held that the Church was safely governed by the state. The road back to the Middle Ages had been dug up, and the making good of this road was not an early priority of the heirs of the Enlightenment. John Lingard’s History of England in three volumes (1817–30) removed the grounds for this prejudice, if not the prejudice itself. Carlyle describes the life of a monastery of the twelfth century as ‘covered deeper than Pompeii with the lava-ashes and inarticulate wreck of seven hundred years’. ‘Monks’, he assures his readers, are ‘an extinct species of the human family’. When Carlyle wrote this, there were monks in England, English monks, between one hundred and two hundred of them – Cistercians at Mount St Bernard, and Benedictines at Downside and Ampleforth. Confident in a revealed sense of the direction of history, Carlyle dismisses these ‘live specimens which still go about under that character’ as ‘too evidently to be classed as spurious in Natural History’. Monks, then, are like those monsters who had survived the Deluge, but ought not to have done so. Carlyle treats English history as a theme park, and for him any monks found in this green and pleasant land must have strayed from the Jurassic section. Thus did Carlyle quieten any fears aroused by praise of a twelfth-century abbot.
Carlyle’s dismissal of live specimens of the religious life as spurious does not treat history in the spirit of the motto from Schiller that he quotes at the head of his treatise: ‘Ernst ist das Leben’ – ‘Life is earnest’. The medieval is a stalking horse for Carlyle’s primary target, the condition of workers in the present. His remedy for this condition is leadership, but his wish for a working aristocracy is the weaker part of his thesis. His contention is that the modern factory worker is worse off than the medieval worker. To this end, he makes repeated use of Gurth, a character from the opening chapter of Scott’s most popular title, a romance of the late twelfth century. Ivanhoe is set in the very period chronicled by Jocelyn of Brakelonde. Gurth is first introduced in Chapter III of Book I, ‘Manchester Insurrection’: ‘Gurth, a mere swineherd, born thrall of Cedric the Saxon, tended pigs in the wood, and did get some parings of the pork.’2
In Chapter V of ‘The Ancient Monk’, entitled ‘The Twelfth Century’, Carlyle tells us that in that Past: ‘A Feudal Aristocracy is still alive . . .; everywhere governing the people, – so that even a Gurth, born thrall of Cedric, lacks not his due parings of the pigs he tends . . . Governing; – and, alas, also game-preserving; so that a Robert Hood, a William Scarlet and others have in these days, put on Lincoln coats, and taken to living in some universal-suffrage manner, under the greenwood-tree!’3 The last phrase comes from a song in As You Like It, a pastoral comedy which prefers the glad poverty of the Forest of Arden to the envious corruption of court and town. Carlyle’s greenwood tree shelters Robin Hood’s ‘democracy’ of innocent outlaws in Ivanhoe, itself derived from the Robin Hood ballads published by Percy.
‘Democracy’, a chapter of ‘The Modern Worker’, produces the fullest statement of Carlyle’s message in Past and Present:
Gurth, born thrall of Cedric the Saxon, has been greatly pitied . . . Gurth, with the brass collar round his neck, tending Cedric’s pigs in the glades of the wood, is not what I call an exemplar of human felicity: but Gurth, with the sky above him, with the free air and tinted boscage and umbrage round him, and in him at least the certainty of supper and social lodging when he came home; Gurth to me seems happy, in comparison with many a Lancashire and Buckinghamshire man of these days, not born thrall of anybody! . . . Gurth had superiors, inferiors, equals. – Gurth is now ‘emancipated’ long since; has what we call ‘Liberty’. Liberty, I am told, is a divine thing. Liberty when it becomes the ‘Liberty to die by starvation’ is not so divine!4
The insecure livelihood of the millions of factory workers is again alluded to in the ‘Permanence’ chapter of Book 4. In the twelfth century, Carlyle writes, ‘Gurth was hired for life to Cedric, and Cedric to Gurth.’5 Although the hospitable Cedric is not as good an exemplar of energetic leadership as Abbot Samson, Carlyle’s paradox that Cedric was ‘hired for life’ to Gurth has some historical validity. Yet ‘hired’, though taken from a New Testament parable, is the wrong word, for Carlyle wants to say that the obligations binding lord and man were not financial and temporary, but should be understood, despite inequality of rank, as lifelong mutual service and protection. Carlyle’s application of feudal social theory was read with interest in societies less equal than England’s, as in the Southern United States.
Carlyle’s pronouncement that ‘With our present system of individual Mammonism, and Government by Laissez-faire, this Nation cannot live’ was soon to be amplified and broadcast by John Ruskin.6 The standards of social and economic justice to which Carlyle appeals are as old as the first books of the Old Testament and inform Christian social teaching. It first received full and notable expression in English in William Langland’s radical Piers Plowman. The dignity of labour and the principles of economic justice are at the core of medieval social thought, and at the heart of the General Prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in the paired portraits of the ideal Ploughman and his brother, the ideal Parson. Carlyle’s moral denunciation of industrialism and laissez-faire economics set the tone for one side of national discussions of these subjects for a hundred years or more. He saw human relations as sadly shrunken in comparison with older notions of mutual service, and he memorably crystallised the new relationship as ‘the cash nexus between man and man’. The acceptance of workhouses as part of the virtuous circle of an industrial economy meant that material interests, whether of individuals or of the economy as a whole, had finally triumphed over residual ideals of mutual obligation between different ranks of society, the ideals which Burke had intended to embrace and consecrate in his inegalitarian ‘chivalry’. Carlyle’s analysis was admired by Karl Marx, but instead of Carlyle’s remedy, of vertical cohesion under a working aristocracy, Marx prescribed class war and prophesied a dictatorship of the proletariat.
John Ruskin (1819–1900) is Britain’s great art critic, and was also a lifelong critic of the moral insensitivity with which Victorian Britain exploited its raw materials, natural or human. He was an insistent advocate both of Gothic art and of medieval ideals, not only in his eloquent chapter of The Stones of Venice on ‘The Nature of Gothic’ and his loving analyses and detailed descriptions of medieval buildings and carvings, but also at every turn of his later discussions of economics and in his prophetic vision of the polluting of the natural world in ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’. Ruskin’s historic role and wide influence are acknowledged, and the aim of the present work is not to blow the dust off accepted reputations. Yet the impression left by the name Ruskin upon the general reading public is now very general indeed. Few have read far into his copious and discursive writings. As he grew older, he engaged with more immediate political issues, and with increasing anger. Although a page of Ruskin can enlighten and possess, he can be distracted by a favourite topic, and his work is not easy to represent either as a whole or in selection. Voluminous idiosyncrasy does not lend itself to summary, but there is no alternative.
The only child of a Scottish evangelical family living in London, Ruskin grew up on the Bible and on British literature, especially the Scottish Romantics, Scott and Byron. His formal education did not conventionalise his tastes, and he had no academic training in the history of art or in philosophical aesthetics, but had instead been taught drawing, water-colour, geology and natural history. A love for Gothic art, carving and architecture developed on family holidays in Normandy. The neglect, destruction or over-restoration of the medieval buildings he saw in Italy caused him to suspend work on Modern Painters, a defence of J.M.W. Turner and other British artists, after its second volume, so that the fifth and final volume appeared only in 1860. Ruskin threw himself instead into writing The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and, from 1851 to 1853, The Stones of Venice. He championed the Gothic spirit in art both for its own sake but also, and increasingly, because for him it made a painful contrast with the unbeautiful buildings and manufactures of the new England which came into being in his lifetime. Among his prophetic denunciations of prospering England, a favourite maxim was that ‘there is no wealth but life.’
The point to be dwelt on here, in considering Ruskin and the Medieval Revival, is that for him medieval workmanship lacked the machined finish of the factory product, which he held in abhorrence, for reasons not aesthetic but ethical: because it was turned out by machine operators who could, like their machines, be discarded when worn out. Ruskin’s biblical outrage at the reduction of the modern worker into a disposable tool was such that he extended his distrust of perfectly finished art to include classical as well as neo-classical art and architecture. Perfect finish indicated that the workman was a slave, whereas free-hand meant that he was free. Thus, though by a different route, Ruskin, like his predecessor Pugin, arrived at a generally negative attitude to the art of the classical world. Both Ruskin and Pugin, had they known of it, would have agreed with William Blake’s declaration that ‘Grecian Art is Mathematic Form; Gothic is Living Form.’7
It is well enough known that Thomas Carlyle and, more insistently, John Ruskin criticised contemporary industrial practice and utilitarian theory, contrasting them with ideals drawn from the Middle Ages. That Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) also did so is less generally known. He began a trilogy of novels between 1844 and 1847, setting out his political beliefs with Coningsby and Sybil; or, The Two Nations. The third novel, Tancred, has not lasted so well. (Dickens’s anti-industrial Hard Times appeared later, in 1854.) Disraeli’s essays in fiction are more romances than novels; as Sybil’s subtitle suggests, they are also treatises of ideas, sometimes in dialogue form. In this they resemble the satires of Thomas Love Peacock, and the Platonic discourses of Kenelm Digby’s The Broad Stone of Honour of 1822.
Sybil is not familiar today and lends itself to quotation. It addresses ‘the condition of the people’ in the decade of Chartism, but it opens by contrast in a London club in St James’s, where gilded youths are gambling fortunes on the results of the 1837 Derby. It focuses then on the owners of Marney Abbey:
The founder of the family had been a confidential domestic of one of the favourites of Henry VIII, and had contrived to be appointed one of the commissioners for ‘visiting and taking the surrenders of divers religious houses’. It came to pass that divers of these religious houses surrendered themselves eventually to the use and benefit of honest Baldwin Greymount.8
Early in the seventeenth century, a Greymount was elevated to the peerage as Baron Marney:
The heralds furnished his pedigree, and assured the world that, although the exalted rank and extensive possessions enjoyed at present by the Greymounts had their origin immediately in great territorial revolutions of a recent reign, it was not for a moment to be supposed that the remote ancestors of the Ecclesiastical Commissioner of 1530 were by any means obscure. On the contrary, it appeared that they were both Norman and baronial, their real name Egremont, which, in their patent of peerage, the family now resumed. In the civil wars the Egremonts, pricked by their Norman blood, were cavaliers, and fought pretty well. But in 1688, alarmed at the prevalent impression that King James intended to insist on the restitution of the church estates to their original purposes, to wit, the education of the people and the maintenance of the poor, the Lord of Marney Abbey became a warm adherent of ‘civil and religious liberty’, the cause for which Hampden had died in the field, and Russell on the scaffold, and joined the other whig lords, and great lay improprietors, in calling over the Prince of Orange and a Dutch army, to vindicate those popular principles which, somehow or other, the people would never support.9
Later the ‘lay abbots of Marney’ become members of the Whig oligarchy which figures as ‘a Venetian constitution’ in Disraeli’s projection of English history. ‘During the seventy years of almost unbroken whig rule, from the accession of the House of Hanover to the fall of Mr. Fox, Marney Abbey had furnished a neverfailing crop of lord privy seals, lord presidents and lord lieutenants.’ This oligarchy is what Disraeli wants to end. If ‘a Greymount’ can turn into ‘Egremont’, Marney can turn into Money, the love of which motivates Egremont’s elder brother, Lord Marney.
One of Disraeli’s successors as Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, once said that television was not for looking at but for being on. This recalls Disraeli’s ‘When I want to read a novel, I write one’, supposedly said in answer to the suggestion that he might read George Eliot’s Zionist novel, Daniel Deronda. Disraeli wrote sixteen novels or romances, to advance his fortunes, his fame and his ideas. (In his youth he wrote a verse epic on the French Revolution, which was not a success.) Though written at hectic speed, and unpredictable in quality, Disraeli’s witty analyses of the life of high society were imitated by Oscar Wilde and Evelyn Waugh.
Egremont, the novel’s leading man, is a younger son of the ‘lay abbots of Marney’. Egremont is modelled on Walter Scott’s impressionable observer protagonist, Edward Waverley. In Scotland, Waverley had encountered two nations unknown to him, Lowlanders and Highlanders, and was charmed by each in turn. Egremont is, like Waverley, a young gentleman who falls for a young beauty from another social world, encountering her first in a Romantic landscape. Waverley had come upon Flora MacIvor gazing at a Highland waterfall, her ‘small Scottish harp’ held by an attendant, while ‘the sun now stooping in the west, gave a rich and varied tinge’. Disraeli’s Egremont first sees Sybil at sunset, after having overheard a lengthy discussion between two speakers previously unknown to him upon:
‘two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.’
‘You speak of –’ said Egremont, hesitatingly.
‘THE RICH AND THE POOR.’
At this moment a sudden flush of rosy light, suffusing the grey ruins [of Marney Abbey], indicated that the sun had just fallen; and, through a vacant arch that overlooked them, alone in the resplendent sky, glittered the twilight star . . . . when from the Lady’s chapel there rose the evening hymn to the Virgin. A single voice; but tones of almost supernatural sweetness; tender and solemn yet flexible and thrilling . . . . in the vacant and star-lit arch on which his glance was fixed, he beheld a female form. She was apparently in the habit of a Religious, yet . . . her veil . . . had fallen on her shoulders, and revealed her thick tresses of long fair hair.10
This is not ‘the fair phantom of some saint haunting the sacred ruins of her desecrated fane’, as Egremont at first imagines, but Sybil, the daughter of Walter Gerard, who is to lead the Chartists. Sybil is a religious sister, and, like the Sybil of antiquity, a source of spiritual wisdom. The speaker who has just instructed Egremont on the economic actualities of contemporary English society is Morley, a political journalist, a friend of Walter Gerard, and in love with his daughter. Walter Gerard ideally represents the People. Sybil, though she seems rather a free-range nun, represents the Church.
Readers familiar with the fortunes of nuns with lovely hair in the verse romances of Walter Scott will not have been surprised at the conclusion of Sybil’s penultimate chapter: ‘“We will never part again,” said Egremont. “Never,” said Sybil.’
Like Sybil, Waverley is a political fable, but as it is a novel as well as a romance, it has to have a more balanced ending. After the defeat of the Jacobite rising in 1746, Edward Waverley weds Rose, a Lowlander. Flora, on the other hand, the proud Highland lady by whom Waverley had previously been fascinated, goes into exile in Paris, to become a Benedictine nun. Sybil’s trajectory is in the opposite direction.
Disraeli wished to promote his vision of a triple alliance of People, Church and Crown against the Whig plutocracy, a vision he eventually furthered when he presided over the extension of the popular franchise with his Reform Act of 1867. Disraeli’s presentation of his case in Sybil draws directly upon an updated version of the ‘Norman Yoke’ theory expounded by Wamba to Gurth in Scott’s Ivanhoe. Disraeli speaks of Merry England and Old England, and applies the epithet ‘Saxon’ variously to the ‘race’, the ‘people’ and the ‘multitude’, the ‘yeoman’, the ‘thrall’ and the ‘serf’. He refers to ‘the drink of Saxon kings’.11 Thus a Saxon (or Gothic) people is opposed to a (pseudo-)Norman aristocracy, as in Ivanhoe. It was handy for Disraeli’s purpose that the name of the new Queen’s family was Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
The Greymount-Egremonts, ignoble impropriators of an abbey founded by Norman knights, are further rewarded for the sure-footedness of their placehunting. The de Mowbray family is similarly descended: from Warren, a waiter in a St James’s club, who became first the valet, and then the agent, of a Governor of Madras (a glance at Warren Hastings). Warren used a fortune made by buying rice cheap and selling it dear in India to burrow into British public life. Having bought a seat in the Mother of Parliaments, he sells his vote dearly, to emerge as Baron Fitz-Warene, ‘his Norman origin and descent from the old barons of this name having been discovered at Heralds’ College.’12 The rightful heirs of Mowbray Castle, burned down by a Chartist mob in the Gothic ending of the novel, turn out to have been Walter Gerard, who dies in the assault, and his daughter Sybil, who survives to marry Egremont. In these ways, Sybil; or the Two Nations rewrites the plots of both Waverley and Ivanhoe.
Disraeli’s mythos of English history gives prominence to the former role of the Church in securing what is the only ‘duty of power: the social welfare of the PEOPLE’.13 The social provision made by the medieval Church is not a theme of Carlyle, nor of Ruskin. Cobbett and Pugin had preceded Disraeli in attacking the Dissolution of the Monasteries, but neither Cardinal Gasquet nor Hilaire Belloc could have improved on the rhetoric of the case against the Dissolution put to Egremont by Walter Gerard in Chapter V of Book II in Sybil. This takes place in the ruins of Marney Abbey (which is based upon Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire).
Egremont remarks that the monks ‘would hardly have forfeited their restingplace had they deserved to retain it’, to which Gerard replies that ‘their history has been written by their enemies; they were condemned without a hearing; the people rose oftentimes in their behalf; and their property was divided among those on whose reports it was forfeited’. Among the points Gerard makes are that ‘the Monastics were easy landlords’; that ‘there were yeomen then, sir: the country was not divided into two classes’; that ‘the great majority of the heads of houses were of the people’ (like Abbot Samson); that the bare ruined choirs are ‘the children of violence, not of time’. He describes the Dissolution as ‘worse than the Norman conquest; nor has England ever lost this character of ravage’.14 Gerard concludes: ‘I don’t know whether the union workhouses will remove it. They are building something for the people at last. After an experiment of three centuries, your gaols being full, and your treadmills losing something of their virtue, you have given us a substitute for the monasteries.’ New workhouses for old monasteries: the Oxford editor of Sybil notes that ‘the graphic equivalent of this argument can be found in A.W.N. Pugin’s Contrasts,’ citing ‘Contrasted Residences for the Poor’ from the 1841 edition.
A final quotation from Sybil: ‘“Ah!” said Gerard, “if we could only have the Church on our side, as in the good old days, we would soon put an end to the demon tyranny of Capital.”’15 Such claims as these, made by Disraeli’s spokesmen for ‘the PEOPLE’, may surprise readers who know of him only that he was the first Jew either to lead the Conservative Party or to become Prime Minister. But Benjamin Disraeli had been baptised, and remained a worshipping member of the Church of England. The Anglican Church adheres in its Creed to ‘one Catholick and Apostolick Church’. Since 1833 some leading Anglicans at Oxford had, in a series of Tracts, tried to awaken the Church of England to this clause in its creed. How far Disraeli in 1845 entertained a true attachment to the historic faith of England is hard to tell, but he was historian enough to know that had there been no Catholic Christians there would have been no Christianity to reform. Pro-Catholic sentiment had for Disraeli the advantage of undermining the legitimacy of Whig claims. Wondering what Disraeli really thought was to become a national preoccupation. As for the (Anglo-)Catholic sympathies of Sybil, Sir George Smythe, one of Disraeli’s associates in ‘Young England’, a Gang of Four in the politics of the 1840s, remarked with political cynicism that ‘Dizzy’s attachment to moderate Oxfordism is something like Bonaparte’s to moderate Mohammedanism’.16 Despite his reverence for the medieval Church, Disraeli had within a few years become hostile to the impact upon British politics both of Irish nationalism and of the Vatican. Walter Gerard’s hatred of ‘the demon tyranny of Capital’ did not prevent his creator, when, much later, he was Prime Minister, from borrowing £4 million from Baron Rothschild, on the security of the British government, to buy Egyptian shares in the Suez Canal Company.17
The historian Robert Blake in his classic biography of Disraeli remarks severely that he ‘had no real historical sense; he wrote propaganda, not history; and projected the circumstances of his own times into the past’.18 It is nevertheless striking that a novel of the 1840s could make such a thesis so central. It was Disraeli’s Conservative government which in 1867 extended the popular franchise, against Liberal opposition.
Of the Medieval Revival, Robert Blake wrote:
Just as the Oxford movement set up for its ideal the revival of a pure, uncorrupted, pre-Reformation church which had never existed, in order to counter the Erastian and latitudinarian tendencies of the day, so Young England resuscitated a no less mythical benevolent feudal system to set against the radical centralizing Benthamism which seemed to be carrying all before it in the 1830s and 1840s. Yet if this may be its social explanation, and if one may easily laugh at some of its more absurd follies, the movement should not be dismissed as wholly ineffective . . . In Sybil even the Reformation is looked at with a jaundiced eye and there is much nostalgia for monasteries and the Old Faith.19
This kindly putting aside of Medieval Revival policies in Church and state, by a distinguished Conservative political historian, has something in common with David Cannadine’s list, at the head of this chapter, of Pugin’s disqualifications: ‘Catholic convert . . . thought the medieval world better than his own time . . . profoundly conservative, anti-democratic, anti-utilitarian and anti-industrial vision . . . Sir Walter Scott . . . “Young England” . . . fashionable among some Tories.’20 These two modern historians, of different generations and political persuasions, appeal to the journalistic assumption that only the contemporary is real and that past ideals are delusive. Cannadine reports that Pugin ‘thought the medieval world better than his own time’, as if no more needed be said. Yet the medieval Church passed on the command that the neighbour should be cherished in the same way as the self, and practised this command – to an extent – by relieving the poor and needy, and by running hospitals and other charities. This social duty is one which the state did not – to any extent – assume until the twentieth century. Pugin’s juxtaposition of a medieval Christian ideal with the harsh treatment of the unemployed recommended by Benthamite liberal economists is not to be dismissed in the way Professor Cannadine implies. It was not dismissed by Carlyle, Ruskin or Disraeli, nor by their readers. The 1840s were, like the 1930s, a decade in which economic crisis and social unrest showed that the usual parliamentary politics were not working. What can be rejected is the suggestion that medieval revivalists were all ‘profoundly conservative’, if conservative meant conserving the status quo. In this respect, Ruskin is representative in calling himself both a Tory of the school of Homer and Sir Walter Scott, and also ‘a communist, reddest of the red’. In that sense, Karl Marx and William Morris were medievalists, a tradition carried on into the third quarter of the twentieth century.21 In such a medievalism there is more of machine-breaking than of nostalgia.
All revivalists hold up for admiration a selective version of the past, whether their chosen ideal is medieval or classical, secular or Christian, Tory or republican. The architecture chosen by Thomas Jefferson for his house at Monticello and for the University of Virginia, which he founded, was to remind the world of the ideals of Cincinnatus and of Marcus Junius Brutus, or at least of John Locke. He also proposed that US coins should bear on the obverse the figures of the Saxon leaders Hengest and Horsa, to represent Saxon democracy. As Republican Rome was to imperial Rome, and Saxon England was to Norman England, so would the United States be to the England of George III. The world in which revivalists live seems to them to lack something which they believe to have been present in the culture of another time. Such a belief can hardly be proved or disproved. Yet medievalism is too often dismissed simply as nostalgic or escapist; the social medievalism of the 1840s was neither.
The first in Professor Cannadine’s list of Pugin’s disqualifications is that he was a Catholic convert. Catholics know that the Church is an earthen vessel and holds itself to be semper reformanda, always in need of reform. During the age of the Catholic Church’s fullest influence in Europe, when she was developing universities, cathedrals and hospitals, and patronising learning and the arts – the period of Aquinas and of Chartres – that most Catholic poet Dante Alighieri put two Popes in his Inferno. The Church then was, its members well knew, in drastic need of reform. Reformers have no language to express their hopes for the future which is not taken from the past; whether they prophesy a Christian future or a secular one, or, like most Victorian visionaries, a bit of both. The least supernatural book of the Bible records the maxim that ‘where there is no vision, the people perish’ (Proverbs, 29:18).
* * *
This chapter has so far considered the use made of medieval comparisons by writers addressing what in the 1840s was called ‘the condition of England’. Carlyle contended that the permanent bond between a feudal lord and a ‘thrall’ was more real than the freedom of a factory hand in a market economy. To Ruskin, the free-hand carving of the medieval stoneworker was living and visible proof of an organic and healthy society, very different to the one he saw around him, in which wage-slaves operated machinery supplying finished goods to the rich. Disraeli has a Chartist leader stand by a wrecked abbey, contrasting the charity to the poor of the former monastic landlords with the sordid conditions imposed on workers in Manchester and the Black Country, described luridly and at length in Sybil. Elsewhere in the novel, the Catholic Traffords are kindly paternalists, in contrast to the ruthless ‘lay abbot’, Lord Marney. The focus of all three authors is on the desperate conditions of those whose labour was making Britain the richest country in the world. All present the contemporary treatment of the poor, and an influential contemporary theory about how the poor should be treated, as falling below the theory and practice of the medieval Christian past. It is a very tenable view.
Carlyle and Ruskin have little to say about the Christianity of Britain in the past, although when abroad Ruskin admired the old communal spirit of Venice, and attended cathedral services in France. Both had had a markedly Protestant upbringing. It is striking that of the three social commentators of the 1840s that we have considered, it was not the lay pulpiteers who praised the social provision of the medieval Church but the political dandy. This aspect of Disraeli’s creed in 1845 is as polemically black and white as Pugin’s cartoons of ‘Residences for the Poor’ are in Contrasts. Unlike Disraeli, the Scots Carlyle and Ruskin avoid England’s eight Catholic centuries, the elephant in the living-room of her history – and of Scotland’s history. Like Pugin, Carlyle ventured boldly into medieval social history, but his humbly born abbot is a hard worker, an exemplar not of the monastic life of prayer and worship, but of ‘worth’ and ‘social vitality’. Ruskin turned a blind eye to the fact that the art which he loved was produced by Christians who venerated images, and that the images he admired were created as aids to prayer. When in Italy, Ruskin worshipped with the Waldensians, the sect about whom John Milton wrote his sonnet ‘Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints’. At thirty-nine, however, Ruskin rejected the Waldensian creed as stunted.22
Unitarianism has been defined as the belief that there is, at most, one God; Unitarians can be more Deist than Christian. Benjamin Disraeli, an Anglican of Jewish birth, had attended a Unitarian school, and had in his twenties visited the Levant and Jerusalem. Throughout his life he maintained a synthesis of three traditions: the Israel of the Old Testament, the Messiah of the New, and the history of English Christianity. He held that ‘Christianity is completed Judaism’. This repeats Christ’s claim to fulfil the Law, and is unacceptable to Jews, for whom Jesus is not the promised Messiah. ‘Completed Judaism’ was in 1845 a formulation strange to English ears, though since 1945 it has become more familiar to European Christians, who have had to reconsider what they owe to Judaism, and how they have treated Jews. Disraeli is said to have remarked to Queen Victoria that he was the blank page between the Old and the New Testaments.23
Disraeli approached pre-Reformation English Christianity with a mixture of romanticism and pragmatism: it was part both of providential history and of family history. Dizzy’s DIY ecclesiology side-stepped the concerns of Anglicans who held that their bishops inherited from the medieval Catholic hierarchy the powers conferred on the apostles, and equally of evangelicals within the Church of England, and Dissenters outside it, who looked upon the Pope as the Antichrist, and the Middle Ages as a Babylonian captivity. Disraeli’s Egremont, in conversation with St Lys, a High Church parson devoted to the poor, is doubtful about ceremonious forms of worship, observing that ‘the people of this country associate them with an enthralling superstition and a foreign domination’. St Lys replies to Egremont that ‘forms and ceremonies existed before Rome’ and, more surprisingly, that ‘the Church of Rome is to be respected as the only Hebraeo-christian church extant’.24 Disraeli’s religious history was, like his political history, very special. He had the courage of his convictions, and if his convictions changed, he remained an Anglican.
The medieval revivalists reviewed in this and earlier chapters all appropriated, or misappropriated, those aspects of the Middle Ages which appealed to their taste or suited their purposes. The manner of these appropriations became increasingly serious after the Reform Act of 1832 and in the 1840s. In Ivanhoe (1819), for example, the swineherd Gurth is instructed by the Fool, Wamba. In 1843 Carlyle used this puppet from light romantic fiction earnestly to instruct the public. In Victorian times medieval ideals could still be used for decorative or light purposes, but they were also given serious social applications. Ruskin taught drawing at the Working Men’s College, which the Rev. F.D. Maurice had founded in 1854. He himself founded the Guild of St George, and an Oxford college for working men was named after him. His disciple, Morris, later started up a workshop named Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., also known as Morris & Co., and as ‘the Firm’: a firm which, although it used some modern industrial processes, tried to preserve a guild spirit and produced ‘medieval’ and modern work to the highest craft standards. Morris also founded the Socialist League. Alfred Tennyson and Anthony Trollope wrote seriously, if differently, about chivalrous gentlemen, while Ruskin and Coventry Patmore idealised chivalrous ladies, and Charles Kingsley chivalrous lads. Painters and poets, following Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, used medieval romance to explore the themes and emotional states of extramarital love. The Gothic Revival radically transformed Victorian architecture, which in the period of George Street, William Butterfield, George Gilbert Scott and William Burges had great achievements. Yet the most serious form of Medieval Revival, and the one which caused most controversy, was the attempt to revive the sacramental religion of the Middle Ages within the Church of England. The Oxford Movement within the English Church strove, between 1833 and 1845, to revive the Catholicism to which Anglicanism lays claim. In the Book of Common Prayer of 1662, still used in some Anglican churches, the Apostles’ Creed ends: ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost; The holy Catholick Church; The Communion of Saints; The Forgiveness of sins; The Resurrection of the body; And the life everlasting. Amen.’ These claims remain in all Anglican creeds.
The Oxford or Tractarian Movement had begun in 1833 with a sermon by John Keble on ‘National Apostasy’. It aimed at resisting Broad Church Liberal theology, restoring the High Church ideals of the Caroline period in the seventeenth century, and reviving the sacramental dimension of pre-Reformation Christianity. John Keble, John Newman and Edward Pusey – senior members of Oxford University – and their many supporters, emphasised the Church of England’s share in the Apostolic Succession of the Catholic (or universal) Church. The strictly Tractarian phase of the Oxford Movement came to a halt with John Henry Newman’s Tract XC. In this last of the series of Tracts for the Times, Newman had argued that all the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England could be interpreted in a Catholic sense.
The Elizabethan ecclesiastical settlement had been presented by Richard Hooker as a via media between Catholicism and the Protestant sects, and a ‘high’ version of this Middle Way or troika theory of the Church of England was sustained under Charles I, in opposition to the Calvinism which had gained much ground. But this high Caroline Anglicanism fell with Archbishop Laud and Charles I, and was effectively repudiated at the Succession crisis of 1688. Although the Church of England’s episcopate has in each generation repeated its claims to apostolical continuity, many Anglicans feel a greater loyalty to her Protestant origin. It is therefore not surprising that Newman’s Tract XC was censured by his bishop. He resigned his position as Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, and after a period of reflection left the Anglican to be received into the Catholic Church in 1845, the year of the publication of Sybil. Newman’s move was an event of national importance. As late as 1870, Disraeli could still write, in the Preface to Lothair, that ‘the secession of DR NEWMAN . . . dealt a blow to the Church of England under which it still reels’.25 (The protagonist of Lothair is a Scottish nobleman, based on John Patrick Crichton Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute (1847–1900), who as an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, converted to Catholicism and became a pioneer scholar of early liturgy and of Byzantium. He devoted his great wealth to reversing the iconoclasm of the Reformation. Heir to much of the Welsh coalfield, Bute gave Cardiff £3 million to construct new docks, and built Cardiff Castle and another spectacular Gothic Revival castle, Mountstuart, on the Isle of Bute. Crichton Stuart also endowed churches and several buildings at Scottish universities. When Rector at St Andrews, Scotland’s first university, Bute began to rebuild the cathedral there, Scotland’s equivalent of Canterbury Cathedral, destroyed at the Reformation by the supporters of John Knox. For a photograph of Bute, see Plate 12.)
One of the starting-points of the present study of the Medieval Revival is a passage concerning the origins of the Oxford Movement to be found in Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua of 1864. This account confirms and repeats the terms of an assessment Newman had given in 1839. Newman’s defence of the conduct of his life was prompted by the Rev. Charles Kingsley’s having remarked in print that Dr Newman, as a Catholic clergyman, would not feel under any obligation to tell the truth. In his defence, Newman undertook to explain the history of his religious opinions, and traces the reasons which had brought him to leave the Anglican Church nineteen years earlier. He described the Oxford Movement as:
a reaction from the dry and superficial character of the religious teaching and the literature of the last generation, or century; and as a result of the need which was felt both by the hearts and the intellects of the nation for a deeper philosophy; and as the evidence and as the partial fulfilment of that need, to which even the chief authors of the then generation had borne witness. First, I mentioned the literary influence of Walter Scott, who turned men’s minds in the direction of the middle ages . . .26
Newman mentions Coleridge, who ‘made trial of his age, and succeeded in interesting its genius in the cause of Catholic truth’, as well as Robert Southey’s fiction and Wordsworth’s philosophical meditation.
Newman refers here to what he had written in the British Critic in 1839, that Walter Scott had:
prepare[d] men for some closer and more practical approximation to Catholic truth . . . stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their hopes, setting before them visions, which when once seen, are not easily forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas . . . while history in prose and verse was thus made the instrument of Church feelings and opinions, a philosophical basis for the same was under formation in England by a very original thinker . . . who instilled a higher philosophy into inquiring minds, than they had hitherto been accustomed to accept . . . it is only since the death of Coleridge that these results of his writings have fully shown themselves . . . Two living poets [Southey and Wordsworth] have addressed themselves to the same high principles and feelings, and carried forward their readers in the same direction.27
Newman’s account is surprising. It is easy to understand that he should have seen Coleridge as instilling a philosophy higher than that of empiricism. It is also clear that the Oxford Movement owes much to what is now called Romanticism. But how could a deeper and more Catholic religion be seen as having developed from reading the ‘history in prose and verse’ of Walter Scott? Scott’s representations of Catholicism are barely tolerant. On reading Waverley at the age of eighteen, Newman wrote: ‘O what a poet! his words are not like a novelist . . . Author of Waverley, thou art a second Shakespeare.’ Newman’s reaction is typical of his period and is not due simply to the age at which he read the book. Educated people today no longer read Waverley as history, and know that Ivanhoe is fiction. But Newman’s rapture was shared by two generations of European adults, for whom Scott filled a historical void exposed by fading Reformation certainties, and spoke to the emotional and imaginative deficit left by Enlightenment intellectualism. It is probable that an evangelical home such as that into which Newman was born in 1801 had no historical knowledge of the Middle Ages. It seems that Scott’s ‘history’ (we would call it historical fiction) not only turned men’s minds in medieval directions but for the first time enabled readers to imagine in detail a pre-modern way of life – the life of their ancestors. The recovery of the Middle Ages had been begun before Scott by antiquarians and was completed after Scott by historians. The transition from antiquarianism to history took place during his life, and his work was the bridge between the two.
One of the attractions of the Church of Rome for Newman was, as he wrote as an Anglican in Tract XC, that ‘She alone, amid all the errors and evils of her practical system, has given free scope to the feelings of awe, mystery, tenderness, reverence, devotedness, and other feelings which may be especially called Catholic.’ Newman’s warm approval of the devout piety he observed among Catholics is the counterpart of his view that the ‘[Anglican] religious teaching and the literature of the last . . . century’ had been ‘dry and superficial’. Coleridge wrote in his notebooks of his despair at the refrigeration of high and dry Anglicanism and the fierce emotionality of the chapels of Dissent: ‘Socinianism moonlight – Methodism a Stove! O for some Sun to ignite heat & Light!’28 The Oxford Movement was an answer to this prayer. Newman’s approval of piety agrees with the value Pugin gave to worshipful devotion. Yet the Gothic Revival of Pugin and Ambrose Phillips de Lisle did not have Newman’s support. Phillips’s ‘strong conviction that Gothick is Christian architecture, and Italian or Grecian Pagan’, classifies the basilica built over the tomb of St Peter as a pagan building, as Newman pointed out. His own view was that the Church’s liturgy, which changed ‘according to the times’, required a ‘living architecture’. Gothic was ‘now like an old dress, which fitted a man well twenty years back but must be altered to fit him now’. In Milan, Newman preferred the brightness, grace and simplicity of the classical style to Gothic: ‘as the young prefer autumn and the old spring, the young tragedy and the old comedy, so in the ceremonial of religion, younger men have my leave to prefer gothic, if they will but tolerate me in my weakness which requires the Italian . . . my heart has ever gone with Grecian. I loved Trinity Chapel at Oxford more than any other building.’29 Trinity was Newman’s undergraduate college at Oxford; its chapel is in the restrained English baroque of which Christopher Wren was the chief exponent.
The religious society which Newman chose to join after his conversion to Catholicism – the Oratory –was not medieval but had been founded by Philip Neri in the sixteenth century. The Oratory is neither contemplative nor enclosed. Oratorians are secular priests living in community under a simple vow of charity, open to the world and obliged to care for the poor. The Oratory Newman himself founded was in Birmingham, and its work was among the poor. ‘Birmingham people have souls’, as he pointed out to an English Monsignor in Rome.
Newman had a scholarly mind with an exceptional range. Rather than the churches of the fourteenth century, the chief object of Newman’s historical enquiry was the Church of the fourth century, when Christian communities in the Roman empire emerged from persecution to toleration and from acceptance to establishment. Amid the hubbub of competing theological voices, the General Councils of the Church were driven to defend and therefore to define core Christian beliefs about the two natures of Christ, both human and divine, in a single person. Arians, who denied that Christ was truly divine, were adjudged, at the Council of Constantinople of 381, to have strayed from the common faith which Christ’s followers had received from the apostles. What Arius taught was ruled out as incorrect. Newman’s studies led him to conclude that the position of Anglicans in the nineteenth century was comparable to that of Arians in the fourth century. For all the sensitive compassion towards human frailty which Newman shows in Gerontius and elsewhere in his verse, he was, as a controversialist, acute, disciplined, strategic and tough-minded. His feelings were under control. He was thus very far from the kind of aesthete or ‘cultural Catholic’ who in the 1890s and afterwards was captivated by what is often referred to as ‘smells and bells’. This smiling dismissal of ritualism is itself a ritual reaction to the worship of churches whose services use much ceremony. In England today, such a church may well be Anglo-Catholic rather than Roman Catholic.
Newman, then, wanted a revival not of medieval churches or liturgy, nor of the medieval Church, but of a fuller living of Christianity in the present. He did not think of Catholic Christians in the way that Carlyle classified monks, as a species whose natural habitat was medieval or continental.