Eminent Victorians

In that gaunt and gloomy building—­ more like a barracks than an Episcopal palace—­ Archbishop’s House, Westminster, Manning’s existence stretched itself out into an extreme old age.  As his years increased, his activities, if that were possible, increased too.  Meetings, missions, lectures, sermons, articles, interviews, letters—­ such things came upon him in redoubled multitudes, and were dispatched with an unrelenting zeal.  But this was not all; with age, he seemed to acquire what was almost a new fervour, an unaccustomed, unexpected, freeing of the spirit, filling him with preoccupations which he had hardly felt before.  ’They say I am ambitious,’ he noted in his Diary, ’but do I rest in my ambition?’

No, assuredly he did not rest; but he worked now with no arriere pensee for the greater glory of God.  A kind of frenzy fell upon him.  Poverty, drunkenness, vice, all the horrors and terrors of our civilisation seized upon his mind, and urged him forward to new fields of action and new fields of thought.  The temper of his soul assumed almost a revolutionary cast.  ‘I am a Mosaic Radical,’ he exclaimed; and, indeed, in the exaltation of his energies, the incoherence of his conceptions, the democratic urgency of his desires, combined with his awe-inspiring aspect and his venerable age, it was easy enough to trace the mingled qualities of the patriarch, the prophet, and the demagogue.  As, in his soiled and shabby garments, the old man harangued the crowds of Bermondsey or Peckham upon the virtues of Temperance, assuring them, with all the passion of conviction, as a final argument, that the majority of the Apostles were total abstainers, this Prince of the Church might have passed as a leader of the Salvation Army.  His popularity was immense, reaching its height during the great Dock Strikes of 1889, when, after the victory of the men was assured, Manning was able, by his persuasive eloquence and the weight of his character, to prevent its being carried to excess.  After other conciliators—­ among whom was the Bishop of London—­ had given up the task in disgust, the octogenarian Cardinal worked on with indefatigable resolution.  At last, late at night, in the schools in Kirby Street, Bermondsey, he rose to address the strikers.  An enthusiastic eye-witness has described the scene:  ’Unaccustomed tears glistened in the eyes of his rough and work-stained hearers as the Cardinal raised his hand and solemnly urged them not to prolong one moment more than they could help the perilous uncertainty and the sufferings of their wives and children.  Just above his uplifted hand was a figure of the Madonna and Child; and some among the men tell how a sudden light seemed to swim around it as the speaker pleaded for the women and children.  When he sat down all in the room knew that he had won the day, and that, so far as the Strike Committee was concerned, the matter was at an end.’

In those days, there were strange visitors at the Archbishop’s House.  Careful priests and conscientious secretaries wondered what the world was coming to when they saw labour leaders like M.r John Burns and Mr. Ben Tillett, and land-reformers like Mr. Henry George, being ushered into the presence of his Eminence.  Even the notorious Mr. Stead appeared, and his scandalous paper with its unspeakable revelations lay upon the Cardinal’s table.  This proved too much for one of the faithful tonsured dependents of the place, and he ventured to expostulate with his master.  But he never did so again.

When the guests were gone, and the great room was empty, the old man would draw himself nearer to the enormous fire, and review once more, for the thousandth time, the long adventure of his life.  He would bring out his diaries and his memoranda, he would rearrange his notes, he would turn over again the yellow leaves of faded correspondences; seizing his pen, he would pour out his comments and reflections, and fill, with an extraordinary solicitude, page after page with elucidations, explanations, justifications, of the vanished incidents of a remote past.  He would snip with scissors the pages of ancient journals, and with delicate ecclesiastical fingers, drop unknown mysteries into the flames.

Sometimes he would turn to the four red folio scrapbooks with their collection of newspaper cuttings, concerning himself, over a period of thirty years.  Then the pale cheeks would flush and the close-drawn lips would grow even more menacing than before.  ’Stupid, mulish malice,’ he would note.  ’Pure lying—­conscious, deliberate and designed.’  ’Suggestive lying.  Personal animosity is at the bottom of this.’

And then he would suddenly begin to doubt.  After all, where was he?  What had he accomplished?  Had any of it been worthwhile?  Had he not been out of the world all his life!  Out of the world!  ‘Croker’s “Life and Letters”, and Hayward’s “Letters”,’ he notes, ’are so full of politics, literature, action, events, collision of mind with mind, and that with such a multitude of men in every state of life, that when I look back, it seems as if I had been simply useless.’  And again, ’The complete isolation and exclusion from the official life of England in which I have lived, makes me feel as if I had done nothing’.  He struggled to console himself with the reflexion that all this was only ‘the natural order’.  ’If the natural order is moved by the supernatural order, then I may not have done nothing.  Fifty years of witness for God and His Truth, I hope, has not been in vain.’  But the same thoughts recurred.  ’In reading Macaulay’s life I had a haunting feeling that his had been a life of public utility and mine a vita umbratilis, a life in the shade.’  Ah! it was God’s will.  ’Mine has been a life of fifty years out of the world as Gladstone’s has been in it.  The work of his life in this world is manifest.  I hope mine may be in the next.  I suppose our Lord called me out of the world because He saw that I should lose my soul in it.’  Clearly, that was the explanation.

And yet he remained sufficiently in the world to discharge with absolute efficiency the complex government of his diocese almost up to the last moment of his existence.  Though his bodily strength gradually ebbed, the vigour of his mind was undismayed.  At last, supported by cushions, he continued, by means of a dictated correspondence, to exert his accustomed rule.  Only occasionally would he lay aside his work to plunge into the yet more necessary duties of devotion.  Never again would he preach; never again would he put into practice those three salutary rules of his in choosing a subject for a sermon:  ’(1) asking God to guide the choice; (2) applying the matter to myself; (3) making the sign of the cross on my head and heart and lips in honour of the Sacred Mouth;’ but he could still pray; he could turn especially to the Holy Ghost.  ‘A very simple but devout person,’ he wrote in one of his latest memoranda, ’asked me why in my first volume of sermons I said so little about the Holy Ghost.  I was not aware of it; but I found it to be true.  I at once resolved that I would make a reparation every day of my life to the Holy Ghost.  This I have never failed to do to this day.  To this I owe the light and faith which brought me into the truefold.  I bought all the books I could about the Holy Ghost.  I worked out the truths about His personality, His presence, and His office.  This made me understand the last paragraph in the Apostles’ Creed, and made me a Catholic Christian.’

So, though Death came slowly, struggling step by step with that bold and tenacious spirit, when he did come at last the Cardinal was ready.  Robed in his archiepiscopal vestments, his rochet, his girdle, and his mozzetta, with the scarlet biretta on his head, and the pectoral cross upon his breast, he made his solemn Profession of Faith in the Holy Roman Church.  A crowd of lesser dignitaries, each in the garments of his office, attended the ceremonial.  The Bishop of Salford held up the Pontificale and the Bishop of Amycla bore the wax taper.  The provost of Westminster, on his knees, read aloud the Profession of Faith, surrounded by the Canons of the Diocese.  Towards those who gathered about him, the dying man was still able to show some signs of recognition, and even, perhaps, of affection; yet it seemed that his chief preoccupation, up to the very end, was with his obedience to the rules prescribed by the Divine Authority.  ’I am glad to have been able to do everything in due order’, were among his last words.  ‘Si fort qu’on soit,’ says one of the profoundest of the observers of the human heart, ’on peut eprouver le besoin de s’incliner devant quelqu’un ou quelque chose.  S’incliner devant Dieu, c’est toujours le moins humiliant.’

Manning died on January 14th, 1892, in the eighty-fifth year of his age.  A few days later Mr. Gladstone took occasion, in a letter to a friend, to refer to his relations with the late Cardinal.  Manning’s conversion was, he said, ’altogether the severest blow that ever befell me.  In a late letter the Cardinal termed it a quarrel, but in my reply I told him it was not a quarrel, but a death; and that was the truth.  Since then there have been vicissitudes.  But I am quite certain that to the last his personal feelings never changed; and I believe also that he kept a promise made in 1851, to remember me before God at the most solemn moments; a promise which I greatly valued.  The whole subject is to me at once of extreme interest and of considerable restraint.’  ‘His reluctance to die,’ concluded Mr. Gladstone, ’may be explained by an intense anxiety to complete unfulfilled service.’

The funeral was the occasion of a popular demonstration such as has rarely been witnessed in the streets of London.  The route of the procession was lined by vast crowds of working people, whose imaginations, in some instinctive manner, had been touched.  Many who had hardly seen him declared that in Cardinal Manning they had lost their best friend.  Was it the magnetic vigour of the dead man’s spirit that moved them?  Or was it his valiant disregard of common custom and those conventional reserves and poor punctilios which are wont to hem about the great?  Or was it something untameable in his glances and in his gestures?  Or was it, perhaps, the mysterious glamour lingering about him, of the antique organisation of Rome?  For whatever cause, the mind of the people had been impressed; and yet, after all, the impression was more acute than lasting.  The Cardinal’s memory is a dim thing today.  And he who descends into the crypt of that Cathedral which Manning never lived to see, will observe, in the quiet niche with the sepulchral monument, that the dust lies thick on the strange, the incongruous, the almost impossible object which, with its elaborations of dependent tassels, hangs down from the dim vault like some forlorn and forgotten trophy—­ the Hat.