This ideal of restful action and “consciously living” (despite being dead) raised a number of confounding paradoxes. Time in Judgment was conceived as being both terminal, or “intermediary” and hence leading to another state, and also immeasurable in quantifiable terms. Consequently, believers were faced with the prospect of dailiness without days, of endurance of the prosaic without a sense of the diurnal, and with an abstract idea that their souls would benefit from experiential learning without undergoing anything understood as an “experience” per se. Changes in the intermediate state could not readily be conveyed through trials and dramatic turning points, as in Dante’s Purgatorio, but only through a more understated model of plotting. In Newman’s conception, prolonged contemplation becomes tantamount to the highest form of action, an inward action not readily translated into narrative “events” but instead registering as a subtle accretion.
Newman on the Poetics
This kind of contemplative action, as Newman conceives it, runs counter to Aristotle’s definition of “action” in the Poetics. Before Newman wrote Tract 90 and The Dream, he approached the problems of describing eschatology in explicitly narrative terms in his essay “Poetry with Reference to Aristotle’s Poetics.”37 In this essay, he insists, “Seldom does any great interest arise from the action” (2). Arguing against Aristotle for the precedence of character over action, Newman’s essay is curiously replete with references to the afterlife. Modern critics have been nonplussed by Newman’s repeated and incongruous invocations of the afterlife, most often dismissing this tangential focus on eschatology as Newman’s imposition of Victorian morality on the Poetics. Yet rather than reading these passages as cultural artifacts or as strains of Newman’s moral agenda, I read these intrusions of eschatology in another light. Indeed, underneath Newman’s insistence that Greek tragedy be read in light of a Christian afterlife, there lies a provocative model of how we weigh actions—and inactions—in narratives. The afterlife occupies an important role in the essay, surfacing at critical points when Newman delves into what happens during plot lulls, or what he terms the “stationary” and “irregular” (2) parts of a composition, and why he finds these parts most satisfying. Connecting these lulls to a kind of development he associates with change in the afterlife, Newman begins to think through a model of inward action that receives its fullest treatment in his subsequent works, notably The Dream of Gerontius, a poem that both explicates and itself performs uneventful development.
As Newman insists in his essay on Aristotle’s Poetics, the “charm of Greek Tragedy does not ordinarily arise from scientific correctness of plot”:
Seldom does any great interest arise from the action; which, instead of being progressive and sustained, is commonly either a mere necessary condition of the drama, or a convenience for the introduction of matter more important than itself. It is often stationary—often irregular—sometimes either wants or outlives the catastrophe. . . . The action then will be more justly viewed as the vehicle for introducing the personages of the drama, than as the principal object of the poet’s art; it is not in the plot, but in the characters, sentiments, and diction, that the actual merit and poetry of the composition are found. (2)
Newman provides an early incarnation of Markovits’s present-day argument that character precedes action in nineteenth-century literature in focusing on those places where a plot is “often stationary—often irregular.”38 Grand turning points or “catastrophes” do not necessarily mark the most important parts of a composition for Newman. Instead, he asserts that the plot often continues onward and “outlives” them. In one place, he even posits the need for Christian belief in the “afterlife” to make sense of tragedy: “It is scarcely possible for a poet satisfactorily to connect innocence with ultimate unhappiness, when the notion of a future life is excluded. Honors paid to the memory of the dead are some alleviation of the harshness. In his use of the doctrine of a future life, Southey is admirable. Other writers are content to conduct their heroes to temporal happiness;—Southey refuses present comfort to his Ladurlad, Thalaba, and Roderick, but carries them on through suffering to another world” (17).39 The injustice of tragic endings troubled Newman, who found the need for an afterlife (or a realm of “temporal happiness”) to help right the imbalance of innocent characters dying in a state of misery. For Newman, sacrifices and grand gestures thus needed to be brought inside the orbit of Christian morality, and poetry—a term which he uses interchangeably with tragedy in this essay—is the medium through which the otherworldly can be imagined. As Newman states, poetry “provides a solace for the mind broken by the disappointments and sufferings of actual life; and becomes, moreover, the utterance of the inward emotions of a right moral feeling, seeking a purity and a truth which this world will not give.”40 The connection that he repeatedly draws in the essay between poetry and a form of understanding not available in earthly existence proves to be a twofold contradiction: Newman proposes that poetry captures the essence of the afterlife but also that it is still necessary to impose the afterlife on a tragic work to instill “right moral feeling.” He thereby ushers all tragedies into a realm where earthly time is of no account, for in Newman’s essay all tragedies properly end in the afterlife (whether they do so explicitly or by benefit of the reader’s framing agency). Grand finales are dissolved into a continuing narrative that concludes in the indefinite hereafter, and individual acts of closure—especially those that are doomed, tragic, and without “solace”—are obliterated by being subsumed into an ending that parousia alone can provide. Newman’s position can consequently be viewed as the inverse of Hannah Arendt’s discussion of action and ethics in Greek tragedy. In Arendt’s reading, actions have force because they occur in the absence of otherworldly retribution and reward, an essentially existentialist point of view.41
But if Newman diminishes the importance of death and closure in any given tragedy, it is not to privilege the “every-day” as the repository of meaning. Realism was never Newman’s main interest either as a theologian or as a novelist. “Why interrupt so transcendent a display of poetical genius by inquiries degrading it to the level of every-day events, and implying incompleteness in the action till a catastrophe arrives?” he asks.42 What, then, is Newman privileging in place of action if not the lulls of prosaic description? The simple answer would be lulls of a more transcendent nature—the lulls of an afterlife where action, in some form, “outlives” the catastrophe of death. It is no accident that in presenting his favored aspects of Greek tragedy, Newman speaks of “characters, sentiments, and diction,” making the subtle choice of distinguishing “characters” from “sentiments.” Newman’s afterlife is one in which the world of “sentiments” continues past death and past, however contradictorily, the world of the senses. These disembodied sentiments, although passively framed, are the highest form of action for Newman. Death, consequently, is only the end of one kind of action—physical action—and in his essay the most affecting movements in a drama are not feats and the final “act”