Eminent Victorians

UNDOUBTEDLY, what is most obviously striking in the history of Manning’s career is the persistent strength of his innate characteristics.  Through all the changes of his fortunes the powerful spirit of the man worked on undismayed.  It was as if the Fates had laid a wager that they would daunt him; and in the end they lost their bet.

His father was a rich West Indian merchant, a governor of the Bank of England, a Member of Parliament, who drove into town every day from his country scat in a coach and four, and was content with nothing short of a bishop for the christening of his children.  Little Henry, like the rest, had his bishop; but he was obliged to wait for him—­for as long as eighteen months.  In those days, and even a generation later, as Keble bears witness, there was great laxity in regard to the early baptism of children.  The delay has been noted by Manning’s biographer as the first stumbling-block in the spiritual life of the future Cardinal; but he surmounted it with success.

His father was more careful in other ways.  ’His refinement and delicacy of mind were such,’ wrote Manning long afterwards, ’that I never heard out of his mouth a word which might not have been spoken in the presence of the most pure and sensitive—­except,’ he adds, ’on one occasion.  He was then forced by others to repeat a negro story which, though free from all evil de sexu, was indelicate.  He did it with great resistance.  His example gave me a hatred of all such talk.’

The family lived in an atmosphere of Evangelical piety.  One day the little boy came in from the farmyard, and his mother asked him whether he had seen the peacock.  ’I said yes, and the nurse said no, and my mother made me kneel down and beg God to forgive me for not speaking the truth.’  At the age of four the child was told by a cousin of the age of six that ’God had a book in which He wrote down everything we did wrong.  This so terrified me for days that I remember being found by my mother sitting under a kind of writing-table in great fear.  I never forgot this at any time in my life,’ the Cardinal tells us, ’and it has been a great grace to me.’  When he was nine years old he ’devoured the Apocalypse; and I never all through my life forgot the “lake that burneth with fire and brimstone”.  That verse has kept me like an audible voice through all my life, and through worlds of danger in my youth.’

At Harrow the worlds of danger were already around him; but yet he listened to the audible voice.  ’At school and college I never failed to say my prayers, so far as memory serves me, even for a day.’  And he underwent another religious experience:  he read Paley’s Evidences.  ‘I took in the whole argument,’ wrote Manning, when he was over seventy, ’and I thank God that nothing has ever shaken it.’  Yet on the whole he led the unspiritual life of an ordinary schoolboy.  We have glimpses of him as a handsome lad, playing cricket, or strutting about in tasselled Hessian top-boots.  And on one occasion at least he gave proof of a certain dexterity of conduct which deserved to be remembered.  He went out of bounds, and a master, riding by and seeing him on the other side of a field, tied his horse to a gate, and ran after him.  The astute youth outran the master, fetched a circle, reached the gate, jumped on to the horse’s back and rode off.  For this he was very properly chastised; but, of what use was chastisement?  No whipping, however severe, could have eradicated from little Henry’s mind a quality at least as firmly planted in it as his fear of Hell and his belief in the arguments of Paley.

It had been his father’s wish that Manning should go into the Church; but the thought disgusted him; and when he reached Oxford, his tastes, his ambitions, his successes at the Union, all seemed to mark him out for a political career.  He was a year junior to Samuel Wilberforce, and a year senior to Gladstone.  In those days the Union was the recruiting-ground for young politicians; Ministers came down from London to listen to the debates; and a few years later the Duke of Newcastle gave Gladstone a pocket borough on the strength of his speech at the Union against the Reform Bill.  To those three young men, indeed, the whole world lay open.  Were they not rich, well-connected, and endowed with an infinite capacity for making speeches?  The event justified the highest expectations of their friends; for the least distinguished of the three died a bishop.  The only danger lay in another direction.  ‘Watch, my dear Samuel,’ wrote the elder Wilberforce to his son, ’watch with jealousy whether you find yourself unduly solicitous about acquitting yourself; whether you are too much chagrined when you fail, or are puffed up by your success.  Undue solicitude about popular estimation is a weakness against which all real Christians must guard with the utmost jealous watchfulness.  The more you can retain the impression of your being surrounded by a cloud of witnesses of the invisible world, to use the scripture phrase, the more you will be armed against this besetting sin.’  But suddenly it seemed as if such a warning could, after all, have very little relevance to Manning; for, on his leaving Oxford, the brimming cup was dashed from his lips.  He was already beginning to dream of himself in the House of Commons, the solitary advocate of some great cause whose triumph was to be eventually brought about by his extraordinary efforts, when his father was declared a bankrupt, and all his hopes of a political career came to an end forever.

It was at this time that Manning became intimate with a pious lady, the sister of one of his College friends, whom he used to describe as his Spiritual Mother.  He made her his confidante; and one day, as they walked together in the shrubbery, he revealed the bitterness of the disappointment into which his father’s failure had plunged him.  She tried to cheer him, and then she added that there were higher aims open to him which he had not considered.  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.  ’The kingdom of Heaven,’ she answered; ’heavenly ambitions are not closed against you.’  The young man listened, was silent, and said at last that he did not know but she was right.  She suggested reading the Bible together; and they accordingly did so during the whole of that Vacation, every morning after breakfast.  Yet, in spite of these devotional exercises, and in spite of a voluminous correspondence on religious subjects with his Spiritual Mother, Manning still continued to indulge in secular hopes.  He entered the Colonial Office as a supernumerary clerk, and it was only when the offer of a Merton Fellowship seemed to depend upon his taking orders that his heavenly ambitions began to assume a definite shape.  Just then he fell in love with Miss Deffell, whose father would have nothing to say to a young man without prospects, and forbade him the house.  It was only too true; what were the prospects of a supernumerary clerk in the Colonial Office?  Manning went to Oxford and took orders.  He was elected to the Merton Fellowship, and obtained through the influence of the Wilberforces a curacy in Sussex.  At the last moment he almost drew back.  ‘I think the whole step has been too precipitate,’ he wrote to his brother-in-law.  ’I have rather allowed the instance of my friends, and the allurements of an agreeable curacy in many respects, to get the better of my sober judgment.’  His vast ambitions, his dreams of public service, of honours, and of power, was all this to end in a little country curacy ’agreeable in many respects’?  But there was nothing for it; the deed was done; and the Fates had apparently succeeded very effectively in getting rid of Manning.  All he could do was to make the best of a bad business.

Accordingly, in the first place, he decided that he had received a call from God ‘ad veritatem et ad seipsum’; and, in the second, forgetting Miss Deffell, he married his rector’s daughter.  Within a few months the rector died, and Manning stepped into his shoes; and at least it could be said that the shoes were not uncomfortable.  For the next seven years he fulfilled the functions of a country clergyman.  He was energetic and devout; he was polite and handsome; his fame grew in the diocese.  At last he began to be spoken of as the probable successor to the old Archdeacon of Chichester.  When Mrs. Manning prematurely died, he was at first inconsolable, but he found relief in the distraction of redoubled work.  How could he have guessed that one day he would come to number that loss among ’God’s special mercies?  Yet so it was to be.  In after years, the memory of his wife seemed to be blotted from his mind; he never spoke of her; every letter, every record, of his married life he destroyed; and when word was sent to him that her grave was falling into ruin:  ’It is best so,’ the Cardinal answered, ‘let it be.  Time effaces all things.’  But, when the grave was yet fresh, the young Rector would sit beside it, day after day, writing his sermons.