Cardinal-priest and Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, was, according to the German translator of his “Horæ Syriæ” (1828), “descended from an Irish family, born in Spain, educated in England, consecrated in Italy, Syrian scholar.” He entered the Catholic College at Ushaw, near Durham, in 1810, and was removed to the English College at Rome in 1818. He was made D.D. in 1824, he was promoted to the priesthood in 1825, and became, in 1827, professor of Oriental literature, and afterwards, in 1828, rector of the English College. In 1835 he lectured in the Catholic Chapel at Lincoln’s Inn Fields on “The Principal Doctrines and Practice of the Catholic Church.” In 1840 he was chosen bishop-coadjutor to Dr. Walsh, the Vicar Apostolic of the Central District in England, and was consecrated Bishop of Melipotamus in partibus at Rome by Cardinal Frenzoni. He soon arrived at Oscott, and presided over St. Mary’s College till 1847, when he was removed to the London district. In 1850, on the establishment of the hierarchy, he was nominated Archbishop of Westminster, and was made cardinal-priest of the title of St. Pudenziana. His conciliatory attitude during the storm that followed was highly commended by several of the leaders of the Whig party, and throughout his life he was the object of the deep veneration of all Roman Catholics. Cardinal Wiseman has been characterised as a great Biblical scholar, a profound divine, a judicious critic, an able linguist, and a scientist of note. The Gentleman’s Magazine for May, 1865, gives a complete list of his works, in which appear:—“The Connection between Science and Revealed Religion” (1836); “Real Presence” (1836); “Lives of Five Saints Newly Canonised” (1839); “Prayers for the Conversion of England” (1840); “Papal and Royal Supremacy Contrasted” (1850); “The Hierarchy” (1850); and “Fabiola” (1854).

Personal

  The evening I passed with the Trevelyans who had asked Dr. Wiseman, the head of the English College here, and an eloquent preacher, to meet me. He seemed a genuine priest, not without talent, very good-looking and able-bodied, and with much apparent practice in the world. He talked well, but not so well as I expected.

  Yesterday I saw Cardinal Wiseman and heard him speak. It was at a meeting for the Roman Catholic Society of St. Vincent de Paul; the Cardinal presided. He is a big portly man something of the shape of Mr. Morgan; he has not merely a double but a treble and quadruple chin; he has a very large mouth with oily lips, and looks as if he would relish a good dinner with a bottle of wine after it. He came swimming into the room smiling, simpering, and bowing like a fat old lady, and sat down very demure in his chair and looked the picture of a sleek hypocrite. He was dressed in black like a bishop or dean, in plain clothes, but wore scarlet gloves and a brilliant scarlet waistcoat. A bevy of inferior priests surrounded him, many of them very dark-looking and sinister men. The Cardinal spoke in a smooth, whining manner, just like a canting Methodist preacher. The audience seemed to look up to him as to a god. A spirit of the hottest zeal pervaded the whole meeting.

  Manning took me to-day to see Cardinal Wiseman, who lives in a plain house. His library is good and contains all the standard Catholic works. We found him clad in a black gown with a red band about his neck. He has a fine, imposing figure, wears gold glasses, is cautious and measured in his utterance, and looks more like a well-fed Italian prelate, fond of good living, than like an ascetic. The impression upon me was not pleasant. He impressed me not as a man of winning amiability but of calculating shrewdness. His face is almost entirely lacking in spirituality and intellectuality, both of which his writings would lead you to look for. He betrayed almost total ignorance of German theology.

  The Cardinal is portly, with a feeble sweet voice, and most beautiful hands, which were always in movement. He did not give a very able lecture; it was confused and illogical, though in parts very clever and eloquent. He took me captive at first, for he began by expatiating on the admirable proposal of the Committee for the Prince’s Memorial, of a hall to unite the purposes of science and art; then he read a few lines from the Report. He told, also, some good stories, showing his aptitude for humour, which his slight Irish tone makes one expect. His lecture, like his sermons, I suppose, was meant for an illogical audience, and brevity was as little studied as close reasoning, for instead of one hour he was just two.

  His life and education had been somewhat cosmopolitan. Some German translator of his “Horæ Syriacæ” had described him in one many-syllabled word as the “from-an-Irish-family-descended-in-Spain-born-in-England-educated-in-Italy-consecrated Syrian Scholar,” but he showed no inclination to merge his British nationality in his sacerdotal or scholastic character.

  In the life of Cardinal Wiseman we find a new exemplification of the inscrutable justice of the Divine Power. Here is a boy, an orphan, whose ancestors had to fly their native land for their devotion to the Catholic faith; raised up, nurtured, and trained in the center of Christendom and sent to recall to a knowledge of God the very nation that had so cruelly persecuted his forefathers. In the early ages, Ireland sent many holy and zealous men to convert the Anglo-Saxons, but it is very doubtful if any among them were more learned, more earnest, or more successful in their mission than the illustrious bishop whose body lies mouldering without the confines of the English capital.

  Nor must we omit to mention the death of Cardinal Wiseman, on February 15, 1865. Cardinal Wiseman had outlived the popular clamour once raised against him in England. There was a time when his name would have set all the pulpit-drums of no-popery rattling; he came at length to be respected and admired everywhere in England as a scholar and a man of ability. He was a devoted ecclesiastic, whose zeal for his church was his honour, and whose earnest labour in the work he was set to do had shortened his busy life.

  The great variety of his pursuits might seem at first sight suggestive of the dilettante. Over and above his professional duties, we have seen him occupied with Oriental studies, with art, with literature, with the Tractarian Movement, at one time on a diplomatic mission on behalf of the liberal Pope, at another lecturing to a London audience on the Crimean war; then again busy with practical reforms among the poor, and soon afterwards offering suggestions as to the hanging of a national portrait gallery. Yet his intimate friends are unanimous as to the unity of his work and purpose. The key to the explanation of this apparent contradiction is, I think, found in a saying of his friend Father Whitty, in a letter to Henry Edward Manning, written just after Wiseman’s death. The cause of Wiseman’s influence did not lie, Father Whitty said, only in his talents and acquirements, considerable as they were, but in his being in his tastes, in his policy and work, and in his writings, a faithful representative of the Catholic Church—not, he adds, as a Saint represents her, solely on the ethical side, but as a national poet represents the all-round genius of a particular country in his various poems.

  Of the ecclesiastics who have illustrated this century, there is one to whom none has refused, or could refuse, the recognition of his brilliant qualifications as a man of learning, of letters and of science, nor yet of his fitness for the high and responsible position he held in ecclesiastical authority, yet whose grand character, broad views and private virtues are too little known to the general public…. I am quite sure that all who were so fortunate as to enjoy his personal acquaintance will bear me out in my testimony to his admirable qualities of heart and mind, his winning manners, habitual forbearance, never-failing consideration for others, and his courteous and cordial hospitality. I may venture to say I knew Cardinal Wiseman intus et in cute, and might record instance upon instance of his universal benevolence, of his kindness to the sick generally, his thoughtfulness, and also tenderness in visiting them, his cheery tone in talking to them, and also the personal attention he has often been known to bestow on those who, whether from falling ill in a foreign country, or from other causes, have had no relations or friends at hand; with such he has not hesitated to watch through the night, to administer medicines and apply lotions, and no trained nurse could show more skill in dressing blisters, manipulating leeches, or applying bandages.

  We have several times cited passages in which Cardinal Wiseman is called a great Englishman, but it would be very unjust did we terminate this notice of his life without pointing out that he was also a great Irishman! For his mother was Irish, and it is a question physiology has by no means decided in the negative whether a mother has not a much larger share in determining the innermost nature and the essential character of a son than has his father. The geniality, the kindness, the ready eloquence, and—when not in pain and suffering—the light-heartedness of Wiseman are surely genuinely “Irish;” and genuinely “Irish,” also, was the reception given him when, in 1858, he made a tour in the Island of St. Patrick…. We knew Nicholas Wiseman from the spring of 1844, for more than twenty years; and we have no recollection, as to that intercourse, of anything which it is not a pleasure to recollect, save alone that physical suffering and occasional mental depression by which he was from time to time so severely tried.

  My recollections of England’s great Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster, Nicholas Wiseman, are strong and vivid. His relations with Dr. Newman, and with that crowd of converts which clustered around that great founder of the English Oratory as their natural leader in the current of conversions to the old and only true Faith, has no signs of weakness in it. My judgment will not tolerate any theory which imputes any weakness to Wiseman’s will. No theory of that kind can ever be made to hold water. It is contrary to Wiseman’s natural disposition, which in the recollection of too many living men that once knew him towers above all suggestion of such weakness.

  Wiseman’s reputation was worldwide. He was conspicuous for rare intellect and abilities, for “the general justice of his mind,” for the suavity of his demeanour, and the wide range of his literary and artistic knowledge and sympathies. As a linguist and scholar he was especially distinguished. He was often called the English Mezzofanti. Speaking of his linguistic facility to the present writer, he once said that, if he were allowed to choose his own path westwards, he could talk all the way from the most eastern point of the coast of Asia to the most western point of the coast of Europe. The poet Browning attempted an unfavourable interpretation of Wiseman’s character in his “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” (first published in Browning’s “Men and Women,” 1855); “Sylvester Blougram,” Browning’s bishop, was undoubtedly intended for Wiseman, but Blougram’s worldly and self-indulgent justification of his successful pursuit of the clerical career in the Roman catholic church, although dramatically most effective, cannot be accepted as a serious description of Wiseman’s aims in life or conduct. According to Father Prout, Wiseman in “The Rambler” temperately reviewed “Men and Women” on its publication, and favourably noticed “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” as a masterly intellectual achievement, although he regarded it as an assault on the groundworks of religion.

Fabiola, 1854

  In the first place I must inform you that your little work “Fabiola” is most highly appreciated by the Catholics of Germany, and some influential persons on reading this admirable description of the “Church in the Catacombs” have come to the conclusion that you alone are capable of giving the same life, and colouring, to the two or three other tales in illustration of the different periods of Church history, to which you allude in your preface. I could not, therefore, refuse the aid of my humble pen to lay at the feet of your Eminence the petition of those whose wish (so entirely in accordance with mine) is, that you will continue what you have so happily begun, and not trust to weaker hands the completion of a work so highly calculated to advance the cause of truth, and for which we are all convinced you alone have the learning, knowledge of the localities, and talent requisite for rendering the whole series such as we should wish it to be, in order to produce the deepest impression on the public mind.

  Translations of “Fabiola” appeared in Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, German, Danish, Polish, Slavonian, and Dutch. There were seven Italian versions, and I find among his papers several requests to translate it into Spanish, and many to render it into French and German. It has been impossible to read all the “appreciations” which, especially in France and Italy, it drew forth both in public and in private.

General

  This [“Connection between Science and Revealed Religion”] is one of the most entertaining as well as valuable works which learning and ingenuity have produced for confirming the truth of the Holy Scriptures.

  Wiseman’s answer is also just out, and, I confess, seems to me very powerful. He has greatly the advantage of Palmer in style and temper—though quite as cutting, yet more quietly so; and as Palmer’s tone was certainly enough to provoke an opponent, one must let a man have his revenge; at least it is ὑπὲρ ἄνθρωπον not to give tit-for-tat.

  He is a man of great natural abilities, considerable scholarship, and no little taste, when his critical palate is not tempted to excess. But disingenuous statements, and gorgeous and luxuriating descriptions, whether of art or nature, are not calculated to remove certain impressions respecting scarlet ladies from the severe English mind; and it would have done no harm to the credit given him, and I dare say justly given him, for consideration towards others when speaking in his own person, if he had spared his fellow-readers of the English poets the necessity of charging him with false accusations of their common benefactors.

  Besides his theological works, and his numerous controversial pamphlets, Cardinal Wiseman published many occasional lectures and essays on subjects connected with literature and art. These lectures and essays showed broad views and generous culture, and gained for the author a lasting place in the respect of his countrymen outside of his own communion. He writes with singular grace and elegance, and his thoughts are often strikingly beautiful.

  These discourses [“Connection Between Science and Revealed Religion”] were most interesting to all who heard them, and, though, perhaps, the wide range they took created some distrust in the perfect accuracy of the author, yet his acknowledged eminence in one portion of Oriental philology fairly suggested the inference that he would not run the risk of careless assertions or inadequate knowledge in other portions of his work…. His style never became agreeable to ordinary English taste; the foreign education of his young manhood damaged the force and even the correctness of his diction, and a certain natural taste for richness of form and colour encumbered his writings with superfluous epithets and imagery…. Dr. Wiseman, in the ordinary course of his profession, would have exercised a very wide moral influence by the general justice of his mind and the sweetness of his disposition. If he had to be intolerant, it was against the grain; and perhaps he gladly took refuge in a somewhat pompous rhetoric from the necessity of plainly expressing unpalatable truths and harsh conclusions.

  Cardinal Wiseman wrote in a clear and polished style, sometimes too much in the florid Italian manner; but often too with a calm eloquence peculiarly suited to the English temperament.

  He was a prelate of the largest sympathies, of a broad and highly cultivated and many-sided mind.

  One great cause of the interest felt in him was the work he had written “On the Connection between Science and Revealed Religion,” which was first made known in the form of lectures, delivered in Cardinal Weld’s rooms at Rome in the Lent of 1835, and which were speedily published. Devoted as they were to the consideration of the difficulties which were then felt with regard to various questions which had arisen concerning physical science and criticism, they were welcomed and read with extraordinary avidity. In the present day some of his arguments are, of course, out of date, owing to the advance of science; but they have an historical interest, and an especial interest for us who seek to understand Wiseman. They show that he had a real sympathy for science as well as art, that his mind was a broad one, that he deprecated most earnestly anxious fears with respect to human intellectual progress, and that his great desire was that Churchmen should show themselves to be sympathetic with science, and the Church to be evidently an aid to, instead of a check upon, intellectual advancement in all directions.

  Except in the beauty of some of his imagery, Wiseman’s language does not bear many signs of Taylor’s influence. Wiseman is more verbose and intricate in the composition of his sentences. Yet this is rather the peculiarity of the sermons composed between the years 1827 and 1837 than of his later discourses. It belongs to the time rather than to the person…. Mr. Ward also blames Wiseman’s style as being “overcharged with imagery,” and elsewhere speaks of his “usual exuberance of metaphor.” Had he said “occasional,” Wiseman’s greatest admirer must have allowed the censure. Yet it must not be misunderstood. It is very seldom that Wiseman introduces a mixed metaphor; though sometimes his images press so closely one upon the other as to produce the effect of a Dutch painting of tulips and fruit. More commonly, however, he imitated the Japanese artist who displays one lovely plant alone on his polished panel.

  It was in 1854 that he published his historical romance, “Fabiola;” “a good book which had all the success of a bad one,” the Archbishop of Milan wittily said. It was speedily translated into almost all European languages, and new editions of it are still appearing in England and on the Continent.

  His verse is loose in texture, but flowing and melodious. His style lacked compression. It could never be said of him, in Landor’s phrase, that he “inspissated his yellows into blacks.” There was ever the something too much of facile genius. He loved, in diction as in life, splendor for its own sake. He liked his state as Prince of the Church. He graciously vested himself in his official robes to furnish Charles Kean the correct costume for Cardinal Wolsey…. He was rich in humor, which diffused itself through his genial demeanor. Above all, he was an honest man, pure and good, a worthy dignitary. His spirit was devout. His mood was of faith and worked by love. The Roman church may well be proud of giving him birth and nurture, of recognizing his gifts, and setting him in her high places of authority. It may be questioned if every Protestant denomination could breed just such a man, or would know precisely what to do with him. The Roman Catholic Church has its narrow doors and cramped vestibules, but there seems room and verge enough for those who are fairly inside.