Arthur Christopher Benson's John Henry Cardinal Newman

What was his purpose in writing The Upton Letters (pub. 1905)anonymously? The new English Literature fellow at Magdalen College Cambridge since 1904 had a prose style which was unmistakeable. His educational theories were well known and the persona of a teacher in a public school adopted for the letters fitted his own history. Plausible deniability is useful when you wish to controvert certain long established educational practices such as the teaching of the Classics to all boys regardless of their interest and ability.

When the Upton Letters were published, more than a year ago, I meant them to be anonymous, it was a perfectly honest device. I did not want to mystify any one, or to excite any one’s curiosity. I had a number of things I wanted to say, or rather I wished said, because I had no wish to promulgate them as my own opinions. I wanted the book to speak for itself, to be judged on its own merits. I disguised rather carefully I thought, the writing of the book, and my publishers will bear witness to the careful precautions which were taken that the authorship should be kept concealed.

( from the Preface to the Seventh Edition)

Irony I believe this is known as when even the reviewer in the Times spotted his form in the light fog. There are things that he might have uttered sua cuique persona . One letter in particular on the subject of John Henry Cardinal Newman would strike me as a transparent emanation from a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury. I can’t remember the term in rhetoric for the device of initially uttering an encomium and then by gradual declension taking away its force. Is there such?

He begins:

DEAR HERBERT,—You ask what I have been reading. Well, I have been going through Newman's Apologia for the twentieth time, and as usual have fallen completely under the magical spell of that incomparable style; its perfect lucidity, showing the very shape of the thought within, its simplicity (not, in Newman's case, I think, the result of labour, but of pure instinctive grace), its appositeness, its dignity, its music. I oscillate between supreme contentment as a reader, and envious despair as a writer; it fills one's mind up slowly and richly, as honey fills a vase from some gently tilted bowl. There is no sense of elaborateness about the book; it was written swiftly and easily out of a full heart; then it is such a revelation of a human spirit, a spirit so innocent and devoted and tender, and, moreover, charged with a sweet naive egotism as of a child. It was written, as Newman himself said, IN TEARS; but I do not think they were tears of bitterness, but a half-luxurious sorrow, the pathos of the past and its heavinesses, viewed from a quiet haven.

In the same paragraph without a break the defeating parenthesis:

I have no sympathy whatever with the intellectual attitude it reveals, but as Roderick Hudson says, I don't always heed the sense: it is indeed a somewhat melancholy spectacle of a beautiful mind converted in reality by purely aesthetic considerations, by the dignity, the far-off, holy, and venerable associations of the great Church which drew him quietly in, while all the time he is under the impression that it is a logical clue which he is following. And what logic! leaping lightly over difficult places, taking flowery by-paths among the fields, the very stairs on which he treads based on all kinds of wide assumptions and unverifiable hypotheses.

Benson continues :

One cannot help feeling that had  Newman been a Pharisee, he would have been, with his love of precedent, and antiquity, and tradition, one of the most determined and deadly opponents of the spirit of Christ. For the spirit of Christ is the spirit of freedom, of elasticity, of unconventionality. Newman would have upheld in the Sanhedrim with pathetic and exquisite eloquence that it was not time to break with the old, that it was miserable treachery to throw over the ancient safeguards of faith, to part with the rich inheritance of the national faith delivered by Abraham and Moses to the saints. Newman was a true fanatic, and the most dangerous of fanatics, because his character was based on innocence and tenderness and instinctive virtue. It is rather pathetic than distressing to see Newman again and again deluded by the antiquity of some petty human logician into believing his utterance to be the very voice of God.

Go on Benson, give ‘im one!

He had not the stern sense of being absolutely in the right, which is the characteristic of the true leaders of men, but he had a deep sense of his own importance, combined with a perfectly real sense of weakness and humility, which even disguised, I would think, his own egotism from himself.
Again his extraordinary forensic power, his verbal logic, his exquisite lucidity of statement, all these concealed from him, as they have concealed from others, his lack of mental independence. He had an astonishing power of submitting to his imagination, a power of believing the impossible, because the exercise of faith seemed to him so beautiful a virtue. It is not a case of a noble mind overthrown, but of the victory of a certain kind of poetical feeling over all rational inquiry.

find at :
The Upton Letters