ay
roughly be called (in a cosy and domestic Victorian metaphor) having
your cake and eating it too. It saw that the solid and serious
Victorians were fundamentally frivolous--because they were
fundamentally inconsistent.

A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent
talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So
long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a
shape. Mahomet created, when he forbade wine but allowed five wives: he
created a very big thing, which we have still to deal with. The first
French Republic created, when it affirmed property and abolished
peerages; France still stands like a square, four-sided building which
Europe has besieged in vain. The men of the Oxford Movement would have
been horrified at being compared either with Moslems or Jacobins. But
their sub-conscious thirst was for something that Moslems and Jacobins
had and ordinary Anglicans had not: the exalted excitement of
consistency. If you were a Moslem you were not a Bacchanal. If you were
a Republican you were not a peer. And so the Oxford men, even in their
first and dimmest stages, felt that if you were a Churchman you were not
a Dissenter. The Oxford Movement was, out of the very roots of its
being, a rational movement; almost a rationalist movement. In that it
differed sharply from the other reactions that shook the Utilitarian
compromise; the blinding mysticism of Carlyle, the mere manly
emotionalism of Dickens. It was an appeal to reason: reason said that if
a Christian had a feast day he must have a fast day too. Otherwise, all
days ought to be alike; and this was that very Utilitarianism against
which their Oxford Movement was the first and most rational assault.

This idea, even by reason of its reason, narrowed into a sort of sharp
spear, of which the spear blade was Newman. It did forget many of the
other forces that were fighting on its side. But the movement could
boast, first and last, many men who had this eager dogmatic quality:
Keble, who spoilt a poem in order to recognise a doctrine; Faber, who
told the rich, almost with taunts, that God sent the poor as eagles to
strip them; Froude, who with Newman announced his return in the arrogant
motto of Achilles. But the greater part of all this happened before what
is properly our period; and in that period Newman, and perhaps Newman
alone, is the expression and summary of the whole school. It was
certai