A History of English Literature

is to recompose his youthful visions and make us see – the Rhone, the Alps, a single
tree. This calm after the storm is not ruffled by any word of his arranged marriage,
which ended in public scandal; his infatuation with Rose La Touche; his prosecution
by the American painter James Whistler.
Ruskin’s principles, in art, craft, architecture and ecology, have outlasted his
immediate causes.Praeterita (‘Things Past’) ends:

Fonte Branda I saw with Charles Norton, under the same arches where Dante saw it. We

drank of it together, and walked together that evening on the hills above, where the

fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they

shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone!

through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before,

the white edges of the mountainous clouds still lighted from the west, and the open

golden sky calm behind the gate of Siena’s heart, with its still golden words,Cor magis

tibi Sena pandit, and the fireflies everywhere in sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed

with the lightning, and more intense than the stars.

Cor magis tibi Sena panditis the city’s motto: ‘More than her gates, Siena opens her
heart to you’.
Sunset and valediction coincide in Wordsworth’s Tintern, Coleridge’s Dejection,
Keats’s Autumn and Shelley’s West Wind. Soaring skies and sad clouds are a Victorian
combination.

John Henry Newman

Romanticism, on one view, is ‘spilt religion’, a definition which suggests that reli-
gion is an emotion. This was not the view ofJohn Henry Newman(1801–1890),
the master of Victorian non-fictional prose. The departure of rationalists from
Christian belief, and the first moves to separate Church and State in England,
provoked John Keble, a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, to preach a sermon in
1833 on ‘national apostasy’:the prospect of an atheist England. This began the
Oxford or Tractarian Movement, so called from Tr acts for the Times, f ounded by
Newman and contributed to by Keble and Pusey, also Fellows of Oriel. The tracts
argued that the Church of England kept the faith of the apostles and of the early
Church. In 1841 Newman, vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin,
published Tract 90, which maintains that the 39 Articles in which the Church of
England had formulated its faith under Edward VI were those of the historic and
universal Catholic Church. Newman, originally an Evangelical and then a liberal,
came to believe that Broad Church liberalism would first dilute and then dissolve
Christian belief.
Bishops denounced Tract 90, and Newman had to consider the possibility that the
Church of England was not apostolic, and that the Roman Catholic Church was
what it claimed to be. He resigned St Mary’s and his Fellowship, and in 1845 was
received into the Catholic Church. As Oxford was the intellectual centre of the coun-
try’s religious life, Newman’s conversion was a landmark in post-Reformation
history.Other clergy and undergraduates turned to Rome. Was this a ‘Second
Spring’ of English Catholicism? In 1846 Newman left Oxford, paying a last visit to
his tutor at his undergraduate college:

Tr inity had never been unkind to me. There used to be much snap-dragon growing on

the wall opposite my freshman’s rooms there, and I had for years taken it as the emblem

THE VICTORIAN AGE 269

John Henry Newman

(1801–1890) The Arians of

the Fourth Century(1832),

Tracts for the Times

(1833–41), The Tamworth

Reading Room(1841), Essay

on the Development of

Christian Doctine(1845),

Loss and Gain(1847),

Discourses on the Scope and

Nature of University Education

(1852), Apologia Pro Vita Sua

(1864), The Dream of

Gerontius(1865), An Essay in

Aid of a Grammar of Assent

(1870), The Idea of a

University(1873).