Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  … to a romantic imaginative mind at least, the Roman claims stand out in a very obvious manner, and the English deficiencies are quite confessed and palpable. “Yours,” they will tell us, “undeniably is the poor, the homely, the unattractive side of the alternative. Who would not have God’s Saints, and their miracles, disclosed to Him, rather than regard them as so many unrevealed mysteries? Who would not possess rather than want an entire and definite system of doctrine, and poetical ritual, extending through all parts of life? Who, if he could help it, would acknowledge such as the Tudor monarchs and their favourites as framers in any sense of the religious system he lives under?” In these and many more instances, which Roman Catholics are never tired of alleging, let it be granted that we stand, prima facie, in a position more or less humiliating: I say, to acquiesce in it, because it is providentially our own position,— to be dutiful and loyal amid the full consciousness of it,—savours of the same kind of generous contentment, as the not being ashamed of lowly parentage, nor unloving towards a dull monotonous home.60

  This was the “a poor thing but mine own” defense of Anglicanism. Battiscombe regrets that Keble did not mount the case for the legitimacy of the Anglo-Catholic version of Anglicanism more forcefully; Anglo-Catholic readers of his “Preface” can only be grateful that he kept his comments on the subject to a minimum. Newman captured the essence of Keble’s position rather unsparingly in Anglican Difficulties, in which he has a suppositious Tractarian mount the case for stasis along the same lines to which Keble would resort. “The question is deeper than argument while it is very easy to be captious and irreverent. It is not to be handled by intellect or talent, or decided by logic.” Anglo-Catholics unfortunately find themselves “in a very anomalous state of things, a state of transition; but they must submit for a time to be without a theory of the Church, without an intellectual basis on which to plant themselves. It would be an utter absurdity of them to leave the Establishment, merely because they do not at the moment see how to defend their staying in it. Such accidents will from time to time happen in large and complicated questions …”61 Still, the Anglo-Catholic party “have light enough to guide them practically—first, because even though they wished to move ever so much, they see no place to move into; and, next, because, however it comes to pass, however contrary it may be to all the rules of theology and the maxims of polemics, to Apostles, Saints, common-sense, and the simplest principles of reason,—though it ought not be so in the way of strict science,—still, so it is, they are, in matter of fact, abundantly blest where they are.”62 Here was parody of an unmerciful accuracy.

  What Keble lacked in coherence, he made up for in personal influence. For W. J. Copeland, Newman’s curate at Littlemore, who had made a long study of Tractarianism, without ever finishing his proposed history of the movement, “The secret of the influence exercised by Keble was a loving sympathy which seemed to be always endeavoring to do one good, unknown, as it were by oneself, and avoiding, above all, the least acknowledgement.”63 In the Apologia, Newman recalled meeting the man who would become one of his dearest friends with unforgettable vividness. “The first time that I was in a room with him was on occasion of my election to a fellowship at Oriel, when I was sent for into the Tower, to shake hands with the Provost and Fellows. How is that hour fixed in my memory after the changes of forty-two years, forty-two this very day on which I write! … I bore it till Keble took my hand, and then felt so abashed and unworthy of the honour done me, that I seemed desirous of quite sinking into the ground.”64 Frederick Oakeley, who would become the most avid of the younger Rome-leaning Tractarians, along with his good friend, William George Ward, recalled Keble as someone who “who speaks the more forcibly in proportion as he speaks less often, and whose sayings so calm, deep, and comprehensive, strike on many ears in these tumultuous days with almost the force of oracular intimations.”65 This is certainly how Newman saw Keble. “His had been the first name which I had heard spoken of, with reverence rather than admiration, when I came up to Oxford,” Newman remembered. “When one day I was walking in High Street with my dear earliest friend … with what eagerness did he cry out, “There’s Keble!” and with what awe did I look at him! Then at another time I heard a Master of Arts of my college give an account how he had just then had occasion to introduce himself on some business to Keble, and how gentle, courteous, and unaffected Keble had been, so as almost to put him out of countenance.”66

  After joining Keble on a reading party at Southrop in 1823, Hurrell Froude wrote to his father, “I think the more I see of him I get to like and admire him more; in everything but person and manner he seems so very like my mother.” All who knew her confirmed that Margaret Froude exuded true sanctity. In his brilliant study of Froude, Piers Brendon writes of how “She imbued the good life with a heroic quality and identified self-denial and suffering with the chivalric privilege of the saint and the ascetic.” By likening Keble to his mother, Froude could not have paid his friend and counselor a handsomer compliment. Moreover, as Brendon points out, “When Froude understood truths intellectually he only grasped them partially and passively; he needed the full-blooded example of a Margaret Froude or a Keble to provide the imaginative stimulus which made him accept these truths with his whole being and use them as a basis for action.” Froude was unsparingly critical of most of the people he met, but he saw in Keble rare goodness, and understood that it was not the kind that would meet with much success in the world. “He is the sort of person that the generality will not approve of,” he wrote to his father, “till they are prepared to venerate him.”67 Froude’s father, for his part, after Froude’s early death, acknowledged that Keble “was the most valued of my dear Hurrell’s friends.”68

  Dean Church recognized how essential Froude was to the dissemination of Keble’s influence. “Mr. Keble had not many friends and was no party chief. He was a brilliant university scholar overlaying the plain, unworldly country parson; an old-fashioned English Churchman, with great veneration for the Church and its bishops, and a great dislike of Rome, Dissent, and Methodism, but with a quick heart; with a frank, gay humility of soul, with great contempt of appearances, great enjoyment of nature, great unselfishness, strict and severe principles of morals and duty. What was it that turned him by degrees into so prominent and so influential a person? It was the result of his convictions and ideas, and still more of his character, on the energetic and fearless mind of a pupil and disciple, Richard Hurrell Froude …”69 As Church shows, Keble inspired Froude, and vice versa. “Keble attracted and moulded Froude: he impressed Froude with his strong Churchmanship, his severity and reality of life, his poetry and high standard of scholarly excellence. Froude learned from him to be anti-Erastian, anti-methodistical, anti-sentimental, and as strong in his hatred of the world, as contemptuous of popular approval as any Methodist … But Froude, in accepting Keble’s ideas, resolved to make them active, public, aggressive …”70 It is questionable, for example, whether Keble would have had the impetus to write his assize sermon, “On National Apostasy,” without the inspiration of his younger, more incendiary friend.

  Isaac Williams, the Welsh devotional poet, recalled his tutor and friend with equally glowing fondness. He had never met anyone like him. “It was to me quite strange and wonderful that one so distinguished should always ask one’s opinion, as if he was younger than myself. And one so overflowing with real genuine love in thought, word, and action, was quite new to me, I could scarcely understand it. I had been used to much gentleness and kindness, which is so fascinating in good society, but this was always understood to be chiefly on the surface; but to find a person always endeavouring to do one good, as it were, unknown to one’s self, and in secret, and even avoiding that his kindness should be felt and acknowledged as such, this opened upon me quite a new world.”71 Many who knew Keble would have seen their own experience in Williams’ description of how this “new world” affected him. “Religion a reality, and a man wholly made up of love,
with charms of conversation, thought, and kindness, beyond what one had experienced among boyish companions,—this broke in upon me all at once …”72

  Newman and Keble

  Newman and Keble initially were shy of one another. Keble was High Church and Newman still had tinges of the Evangelical about him, which he only gradually outgrew. And there was an age difference of nine years. Nonetheless, the two had more in common than they might have recognized. Both were profoundly influenced by their fathers. Newman took from his father’s life a profound distrust of worldly success and Keble took from his a yearning for the High Church that he had known as a child. Both came from large, close-knit families. Both were deeply changed by the death of a beloved sister—Newman losing his 19-year-old sister Mary when he was 27 and Keble losing his 18-year-old sister Sarah when he was 22. Both were fairly well-read and yet looked askance at the pretensions of learning undisciplined by faith. Both had a profound sense of place. Both were renowned for gentleness and courtesy, which never prevented their being ruthless when principle was at stake. Both had beautiful voices. Both were poets. Both delighted in women. Both were prescient about what would be the consequences of liberal reform. Both recognized the evils that would accompany the rise of the periodical press.73

  Yet, important as these similarities were, nothing bound Newman and Keble together more than their religious vows. Newman wrote in his journal, “As the time approaches for my ordination, thank God, I feel more and more happy. Make me Thy instrument … make use of me, when Thou wilt, and dash me to pieces when Thou wilt. Let me, living or dying, in fortune and misfortune, in joy and sadness, in health & Sickness, in honour and dishonour, be Thine.”74 On the day itself, Sunday, 13 June 1825, he wrote: “It is over. I am thine, O Lord; I seem quite dizzy, and cannot altogether believe and understand it … Yet, Lord, I ask not for comfort in comparison of sanctification … I feel as a man thrown suddenly into deep water.” Then, the day after, the full import of his new life took hold: “I have the responsibility of souls on me to the day of my death.”75 Keble was no less serious about his vows. After his ordination, he wrote to his good friend John Coleridge: “Pray earnestly, my dear, my best friend, that He would give me His grace, that I may not be altogether unworthy of the sacred office on which I am, rashly I fear, even now entering; but that some souls hereafter may have cause to bless me. Pray that I may be freed from vanity, from discontent, from impure imaginations; that I may not grow weary, nor wander in heart from God’s service; that I may not be judging others uncharitably, nor vainly dreaming how they will judge me, at the very moment that I seem most religiously and most charitably employed.”76 Newman took as his motto cor ad cor loquitor—“heart speaks to heart.” What enabled the hearts of Newman and Keble to speak so clearly to one another, despite their many differences, was their shared commitment to their pastoral vows.

  Newman made many friends at Oxford, most notably his oldest and, before Froude, his closest friend, John Bowden, the memory of whose “happy and cheerful deportment” he never forgot, as well as Frederic Rogers, with whom he would later have so painful a falling out.77 But Keble linked Newman to something beyond Oxford: unaffected, personal sanctity, the manifest love of God, without which religion is hollow, “a mere system, a law, a name …”78 A sister of one of Keble’s friends captured something of what Newman prized in Keble when she confided to her diary, “Without making any fuss about it, he seems so interested in every one, and has such a continual quiet cheerfulness about him … But it is his religious character that has struck me more than anything else, as it is indeed that from which everything else proceeds. I never saw any one who made so little display of it … he seems to me a union of Hooker and George Herbert—the humility of the one and and love of the other. In short, altogether he is a man whom the more you see of and know, the less you must think of yourself.”79 Then, again, Keble was Newman’s link to Hurrell Froude, whose dissatisfaction with the Anglican Church influenced Keble so deeply. For Newman, Keble personified that hunger for catholicity, which Newman never stopped hoping would motivate like-minded Anglicans to repudiate their de facto Protestant church and embrace the “one true Fold of the Redeemer.”80

  Newman and Keble first joined forces over the controversy that arose in Oxford over Catholic Emancipation (1829). Many historians have tended to view the controversy merely in terms of Robert Peel’s volte-face. A. J. P. Taylor, for example, acknowledged the principle at issue but only to call attention to Peel’s duplicity. “Peel was for many years the outstanding spokesman of the Protestant cause. Emancipation, he argued, would destroy the historic constitution; it would threaten the security of the established Church; it would not satisfy the Irish. Faced with rebellion in Ireland, he turned round, jettisoned his previous arguments, and announced that emancipation was the only way to keep Ireland quiet. Both sets of arguments made sense but not in the same mouth.”81

  Keble and Newman opposed Catholic Emancipation not because they were wedded to the Established Church but because they saw it as strengthening the liberal assault on dogmatic Christianity. When Peel was turned out of his Oxford seat by Robert Inglis, the candidate for whom Newman and Keble had campaigned, Newman was exultant. “We have achieved a glorious Victory,” he crowed. “We have proved the independence of the Church and of Oxford.”82 Some have suggested that this was proof of how much Newman had fallen under the High Church influence of Keble but he did not need Keble’s influence to recognize that the dismantling of the old order would necessarily dismantle the old order’s religion. Newman was very clear about this: “Emancipation is the symptom of a systematic hatred to our Church borne by Romanists, Sectarians, Liberals and Infidels. If it were not for the Revolution which one would think must attend it, I should say the Church must fall …” This was a sweeping prediction, as Newman acknowledged in his postscript: “What glorious enunciations I have excathedrized at the end of my letter.”83 Yet scarcely four years later, after the passing of the First Reform Bill (1832), Wellington, an incisive critic of these events, would confirm the accuracy of Newman’s predictions: “The revolution is made,” he wrote, “power is transferred from one class of society, the gentlemen of England, professing the faith of the Church of England, to another class of society, the shopkeepers, being Dissenters from the Church, many of them Socinians, others atheists.” In 1838, Wellington would confirm Newman’s prescience even more starkly: “The real question that now divides the country and which truly divides the House of Commons is church or no church. People talk of the war in Spain, and the Canada question. But all that is of little moment. The real question is church or no church.”84 The historian Jonathan Clark also shows the extent to which Newman’s reading of the likely impact of Catholic Emancipation on the religion of the English was borne out by subsequent events. “The Church’s identification with the old order turned her into a scapegoat; far from radical opinion being assuaged, the very scale and profundity of the revolution of 1828–1832 meant that, for the Church, there was no forgiveness. Even the Whig Lord Melbourne soon declared: ‘What all the wise men promised has not happened; and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’”85

  Melbourne may have conceded that Newman saw things with more clarity than his clever Whig friends, but he still found his writings impenetrable. In a letter to Lord Holland, the Prime Minister confessed: “I hardly make out what Puseyism is. Either I am dull or its apostles are very obscure. I have got one of their Newman’s publications with an appendix of four hundred and forty-four pages. I have read fifty-seven and cannot say I understand a sentence, or any idea whatever.”86 Yet Newman was equally critical of the defenders of the English Church. “The talent of the day is against the Church,” he admitted to his Mother. “The Church party, (visibly at least, for there may be latent talent, and great times give birth to great men,) is poor in mental endowments. It has not activity, shrewdness, dexterity, eloquence, practical powers. On what then does it depend? on prejudi
ce and bigotry.”87

  Keble’s position on Catholic Emancipation has often been confused with that of High Church die-hards, but it was more nuanced than that. In his Apologia, Newman noted how in Keble the defenders “of the political doctrines of the great clerical interest though the country” might find “intellectual, as well as moral support” but they would find something else as well. Keble’s “weak point, in their eyes, was his consistency; for he carried his love of authority and old times so far, as to be more than gentle towards the Catholic Religion, with which the Toryism of Oxford and of the Church of England had no sympathy. Accordingly, if my memory be correct, he never could get himself to throw his heart into the opposition made to Catholic Emancipation, strongly as he revolted from the politics and the instruments by means of which that Emancipation had been won. I fancy he would have had no difficulty in accepting Dr. Johnson’s saying about ‘the first Whig’ …” 88 In fact, Keble’s response to the revolutionary implications of Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill that followed it was at once pragmatic and far-sighted. He saw that the old order was being toppled, and if the religion of the old order was not to suffer the same fate it would need to distance itself from a liberal parliament that was hostile to any dogmatic Christianity. In this regard, Keble was always interested in the example of the disestablished American Episcopal Church, which held out the possibility that the new world might somehow salvage the old. “I had a pleasant letter this morning from a clergyman in the USA,” he wrote to his friend John Cornish in the wake of the First Reform Bill. “The letter would much comfort me if I were inclined to despond about our Church, but I don’t know how it is, I can’t help hoping well for her. I would not be a party to separating her from the State but if Providence should so order it, and if we are to get sound Discipline by it, ’twill be a very great consolation. I only hope the clergy will stand firm and avoid all base compromise; what I fear most is our continuing in a kind of modified connection with the present republican State of England.” In the same letter, Keble did not rule out pulling up stakes and seeking asylum elsewhere. “Will you join me in buying some land in New Brunswick, or somewhere, that we may have a place to fly to in the case of the worst? I am seriously thinking of it. I don’t so much mean a place to fly to as a place where one might find bread and cheese if we could not pick it up here, for it seems to me as if one ought to be among the last to leave the wreck.”89 For those who had grown up under the shadow of the French Revolution such gibes were not entirely facetious.