Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  In 1827, when the provostship of Oriel fell vacant, Froude zealously campaigned for Keble’s election. Newman and Pusey plumped for Edward Hawkins because, as Mark Pattison later recalled, he “was superior to Keble in some of those more superficial qualities which recommend a man as a head of a college—in ready tact, in aptitude for the small details of administration, and strict attention to the enforcement of college rules … when Hawkins, by Newman’s support, obtained the prize, it was not denied that the college had made a proper choice.”32 Froude had felt otherwise, arguing that if Keble were made Provost he “would bring in with him quite a new world,”—one in which “donnishness and humbug would be no more in the College, nor pride of talent, nor an ignoble secular ambition.”33 Yet, his view might very well have changed in light of Newman’s argument that “we are not electing an angel but a Provost.”34 In all events, Froude, unlike Isaac Williams, another Keble supporter, bore no grudges when Keble withdrew his candidacy. After the election, Froude was instrumental in bringing Newman and Keble closer together. Later, with his own death imminent, Froude would often say to family and friends, “Do you know the story of the murderer who had done one good thing in his life? Well, if I was ever asked what good deed I have ever done, I should say I had brought Keble and Newman to understand each other.”35

  In the same year as the election for provost, Keble published The Christian Year (1827), the single best-selling book of poetry in the nineteenth century; in 1873, when the book’s copyright expired, 158 editions had been published with total sales of 379,000. The modest Keble found the popularity of the book embarrassing, though he was pleased to be able to use the proceeds to renovate his church at Hursley. Later, in 1831, when Keble became Oxford’s Professor of Poetry, he spoke of poetry as “a kind of medicine divinely bestowed upon man, which gives healing relief to mental emotion, yet without detriment to modest reserve, and while giving scope to enthusiasm yet rules it out with order and due control.” Reserve, for Keble, was an essential attribute of the good poet: “the more keenly a man pursues any desired object the less keen is he to discourse of it to all and sundry;” and to substantiate his contention, he cited the example of “our own Hebert, who hides the deep love of God which consumed him behind a cloud of precious conceits.”36 This conception of poetry as impersonal and indirect—what one might call expressive concealment—recalls that of another Anglo-Catholic poet, T. S. Eliot, who famously held that “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape these things.”37 Keble’s poetry also recalls Eliot’s in its allusiveness; the Bible, the Prayer Book, George Herbert, Wordsworth and the work of the Caroline divines all find echoes in his stanzas.38 There was another resemblance: both poets were keenly aware of how form calls forth unforthcoming thought and feeling. The poet Anne Ridler, who was Eliot’s secretary at Faber and Faber between 1935 and 1940, when he was managing director there, recalled Eliot “saying that sometimes for the release of the deepest and most secret feeling to use a very strict form is a help because you concentrate on the technical difficulties of mastering the form and allow the content of the poem a more unconscious and freer release.”39 For Keble, the demands of metrical composition enabled poets “to soothe and compose their deepest emotions without violating a true reserve.” Eliot tried to benefit from the same metrical therapy in “The Waste Land” (1922). On Margate Sands, the disenchanted poet mesmerized a generation by confessing that he could connect nothing with nothing, though whether what he called his “grouse against life” gave him the solace he sought is doubtful. Keble’s views on poetry paralleled his views on theological matters.40 If there was no place in poetry for the explicit, neither was there any place in theology for certainty, which, citing the work of Bishop Butler, he would increasingly adjudge unwarrantable.

  In 1829, Keble persuaded Newman and Froude to join him in contesting Robert Peel’s re-election to the Oxford seat over his volte-face with respect to Catholic Emancipation and helped elect in his place the conservative High Church candidate Robert Inglis. Keble was also joined by Newman and Froude in his opposition to the first Reform Bill of 1832. In his assize sermon, “On National Apostasy,” preached on 13 July 1833, Keble made his opposition to the depredations of the liberals more explicit still by taking the Whig government to task over its Irish Temporalities Bill, which reduced the number of bishoprics and reallocated resources within the Church of Ireland. For Keble, the Whig government of Earl Grey was arrogating to itself privileges that only the Anglican Church should possess, and he saw in their hostility to the established religion a wider, more insidious apostasy spreading through the nation, which he urged his compatriots to resist. Keble’s sermon helped launch the Oxford Movement, which was founded to defend the integrity of the Anglican Church against what Newman, Keble, Froude and their fellow Tractarians considered the encroachments of liberal politicians. The Cambridge intellectual historian Basil Willey recognized that “the movement was only political and anti-liberal because it was primarily spiritual; its deepest concern was with the invisible world; not with politics … its driving power, a hunger and thirst after righteousness, an effort towards true sanctity.”41

  In 1831, Keble returned to Oxford to take up the Poetry Professorship, which he held for four years. While fulfilling the duties of the Poetry Chair and supporting the Tractarians with tracts and the prestige of his reputation, Keble continued to assist his ailing father with his parish work until his death in 1834. In 1836, he took over the living of Hursley in Hampshire. Charlotte Yonge described the dutiful solicitude with which Keble ministered to his parishioners. “The vicar was the personal minister to each individual in his flock—teaching in the school, catechizing in the church, most carefully preparing for Confirmation, watching over the homes, and, however otherwise busied, always at the beck and call of every one in the parish. To the old men and women of the workhouse he paid special attention, bringing them little dainties, trying to brighten their dull minds as a means of reaching their souls, and endeavouring to raise their spirits to higher things.”42 Keble himself was fond of saying that “nothing in the world is really important except in so far as it may be brought to bear upon religion and nothing in religion itself is important except as in so far as it may be brought to bear upon practice.”43 However, before and after Newman’s conversion, Keble’s sense of the relation between profession and practice encountered unforeseen difficulties.

  In 1835 Keble married Charlotte Clarke, who, judging from the miniature that was painted of her in the year of her marriage, was a bright beauty. “The lady,” Tom Mozley recalled in his memoir, “was a strikingly handsome, pleasing, and dignified woman.” Frederick Faber’s brother thought her too handsome, describing her as a “pretty, showy person.”44 Hurrell Froude weighed in with his accustomed bluntness: “I hear that K’s αποστασία has been announced to the papers—I do verily believe that 9 tenths of the people who hear of it will be a little shocked.”45 Few of Keble’s letters after his marriage failed to mention his wife’s delicate health, though this did not prevent her teaching the village children, making improvements to the garden or dancing minuets with her husband at vicarage parties. After Hurrell Froude’s death in 1836, Charlotte’s heart went out to Newman. “I shall be very glad for poor Newman to have the comfort of John’s being in Oxford,” she wrote to Elizabeth Keble. “He seems very much to need it; and nobody, I suppose, can so entirely sympathize with him both in his distress for the loss, and also in the views and opinions which knit them all three together.”46 Battiscombe summed up Charlotte as “cultured, affectionate, attractive, with just sufficient poise and knowledge of the world to fill up what was lacking in her husband.”47 That she complemented Keble must have been comically obvious on his wedding day when he appeared late with a broken collar-bone, suffered the day before af
ter falling from his horse. He often composed his verses while riding, which did not redound to his horsemanship.

  Keble’s marriage was happy. Whether at home in Hursley vicarage or wintering in Penzance, Torquay or Bournemouth, he delighted in the wife he called “my conscience, my memory, and my common-sense.”48 If the marriage began in some trepidation, it flowered in affection and respect. Even in the poetry of reticence there was a place for joy.

  The voice that breathed o’er Eden,

  That earliest wedding-day

  The primal marriage blessing,

  It hath not passed away.

  In 1836, Keble broke with his friend Thomas Arnold over Melbourne’s appointment of R. D. Hampden to the Divinity Chair. In Oxford Malignants, written in response to the Tractarians’ opposition to Hampden, Arnold took off the gloves: “The attack on Doctor Hampden bears upon it the character not of error but of moral wickedness … for such persecution, the plea of conscience is not admissible; it can only be a conscience so blinded by willful neglect of the highest truths, or so corrupted by the habitual indulgence of evil passions, that it rather aggravates than excuses the guilt of those whom it misleads.”49 Against this lively invective Keble held his ground. When John Coleridge wrote to tell him that he had visited Arnold at his home, Fox How, Keble wrote back a stinging reply: “I cannot but judge it unkind to our old friend and also hardly fair to others who want to be guided in forming a correct judgement of his opinions that after this treason to the Holy Catholic Church (I cannot call it less) of which he has been guilty, good churchmen should still think it right to carry themselves towards him as if he had not taken part, and a prominent part, with the prevailing form of Anti-Christianism. It is unkind to him as it makes him judge lightly of the amount of his own errors, unkind to others as encouraging them to sympathise with him, to say nothing of the graver questions as to whether it be not something like disloyal communication with our Master’s enemies. I had therefore rather direct to you anywhere but at Arnold’s, but I suppose the post-man will not be much corrupted by seeing your two names together on the direction, so I shall even venture. But unless the view which I take of the whole drift of Scripture and of Christian antiquity can be altogether shaken it is impossible for me to think any person voluntarily drawing closer his connection with a person under such circumstances is in a certain sense partaker of his misdeeds … I do not know what friends are for if they are not to mention such things to one another.”50 Here was proof of how much what Keble called “the Holy Catholic Church” meant to him and also of how ready he was to shun those—even good friends—who assailed her doctrines. Apropos Newman’s attack on Hampden’s Bampton Lecture, Arnold wrote to one of his Rugby pupils, William Charles Lake, who would later become a Fellow of Balliol and write glowing reminiscences of Newman, “Hampden is a good man, and an able one; a lover of truth and fairness; and I should think that the wholesome air of such a man’s lectures would tend to freshen men’s faith, and assure them that it had a foundation to rest upon, when the infinite dishonesty and foolery of such divinity as I remember in the lecture-rooms and pulpits in times past, would be enough to drive a man of sound mind into any extravagance of unbelief.”51 What Arnold omitted to mention was that Hampden had written a pamphlet calling for the abolition of the 39 Articles and was as opposed by most Broad Churchmen for his liberal anti-dogmatical views as he was by the Tractarians, who recoiled from the prospect of opening Oxford’s doors to dissenters and atheists. Frederic Rogers was an exception, arguing, “if Dissenting tradesmen begin to send their sons to Oxford, it might chance that the effect would be just that the Church would appropriate some of the best blood of Dissent, the very people who would otherwise be most effective against her.”52 Newman took an unalloyedly hostile view of the liberal divine. “As to Dr Hampden,” he wrote to a friend, “your imagination, I am sure, cannot picture any thing a quarter so bad as he really is – I do think him worse than a Socinian – In the British Magazine of this month, you will see a Pamphlet called ‘Elucidations etc’ stitched in, which gives you some but a very faint notion of his opinions. There is no doctrine, however sacred, which he does not scoff at – and in his Moral Philosophy he adopts the lowest and most groveling utilitarianism as the basis of Morals – he considers it is a sacred duty to live to this world – and that religion by itself injuriously absorbs the mind. Whately, whatever his errors, is openhearted, generous, and careless of money – Blanco White is the same, though he has turned Socinian – Arnold is amiable and winning – but this man, judging by his writings, is the most lucre loving, earthly minded, unlovely person one ever set eyes on.”53

  After years of failing health, Hurrell Froude died in 1836 of tuberculosis, and two years later Keble and Newman published his controversial Remains in four volumes. In 1841, Newman shared Tract 90 with Keble, who saw no grounds for counseling against publication. From 1841 to 1843, after the outcry against the alleged Romanizing tendencies of Tract 90, Newman wrote Keble a series of letters seeking advice on his doubts about the Anglican Church. In the wake of Tract 90, Keble braced himself for what he knew would be open season on the Tractarians. In the summer of 1841, when Keble invited him to attend the laying of the foundation stone of St. Saviour’s, Leeds, which Pusey, at the instigation of F. W. Hook, financed—it was intended to be a model urban Tractarian church—Keble declined. “I have no great appetite just at present to go where clergy meet, for I expect I shall get (to use a significant expression) a monkey’s allowance. So I stay to be kicked at home, with full expectation of getting plenty more.”54

  Payback for the perceived transgressions of the Apostolical party took petty forms. Peter Young, Keble’s curate, was denied ordination by the Bishop of Winchester because he cited Caroline divines in answer to questions about the Real Presence.55 Keble’s pupil Isaac Williams was passed over for the Poetry Professorship. “A system of espionage, whisperings, backbitings, and miserable tittle-tattle,” Dean Church recalled in his history of the Oxford Movement, “sometimes of the most slanderous or the most ridiculous kind, was set going in Oxford. Never in Oxford, before or since, were busybodies more truculent or more unscrupulous. Difficulties arose between Heads of Colleges and their tutors. Candidates for fellowships were closely examined as to their opinions and their associates. Men applying for testimonials were cross-questioned on No. 90, as to the infallibility of general councils, purgatory, the worship of images, the Ora pro nobis, and the intercession of the saints; the real critical questions upon which men’s minds were working being absolutely uncomprehended and ignored … It was enough to suppose that a Popish Conspiracy was being carried on.”56 Battiscombe accurately summed up the response Keble made to this campaign of covert persecution. “Keble had always admired the Non-Jurors for their fidelity to their oath, for their High Church principles, and for their total disregard of worldly profit. If they had faced the dreary prospect of living in an ecclesiastical no-man’s-land he supposed that he could do likewise, and from now onwards their example was never far from his mind.”57 It was one of the ironies of Keble’s life that in choosing to remain in the English Church—which he associated with all that he held most dear, his wife, his father, his family, his friends, the then unspoiled loveliness of the English countryside, and his beloved Hursley vicarage—he willy-nilly chose a place of exile in a mid-Victorian society intent on casting away all that constituted the “perfect harmony” of his High Church upbringing. He died on 29 March 1866.

  The Personal Influence of John Keble

  “It seems strange,” the entry for Keble in the old DNB pointed out, “that so shy, homely, unambitious man, living so retired a life, should yet have been the prime factor in the great religious movement of his time. Newman emphatically asserts in his Apologia that Keble was the “true and primary author” of the Oxford Movement. The explanation must be sought in his character …”58 Newman wrote of his dear friend in the Apologia, recalling how: “Keble was a man who guided himself and forme
d his judgments, not by processes of reason, by inquiry or by argument, but, to use the word, in a broad sense, by authority. Conscience is an authority; the Bible is an authority; such is the Church; such is Antiquity; such are the words of the wise; such are hereditary lessons; such are ethical truths; such are historical memories, such are legal saws and state maxims; such are proverbs; such are sentiments, passages, and prepossessions. It seemed to me as if he ever felt happier, when he could use argument mainly as a means of recommending or explaining what had claims on his reception prior to proof.”59 This was a fair description of Keble’s accustomed approach to argument. In his “Preface on the Present Position of English Churchmen” (1847), with which he opened Sermons Academical and Occasional (1848), he forgoes argument altogether: