by Edward Short
After Newman’s conversion, Keble spent the last twenty years of his life trying to convince himself that remaining within the decidedly uncatholic English Church had not been a mistake. He began this enterprise with some flourish, famously asserting, in the teeth of the Gorham Judgment, that, “If the Church of England were to fail altogether yet it would be found in my parish.”15 Battiscombe gamely commends this “declaration of faith” by saying that it “might have been uttered by the North Country saint, Bernard Gilpin, or by any other of the many parish priests who, like Gilpin, stayed with their people through all the religious changes and chances of the reigns of Henry VIII, Mary, and Elizabeth I.” What she omits to mention is that Gilpin flatly rejected transubstantiation and, during Elizabeth’s reign, prided himself on working to separate recusants from their Catholic faith. “A mischief doth increase easily and spread and creep further in one day than good lessons in a whole month,” Gilpin observed of the residual potency of the outlawed faith against which he so sedulously labored.16 If this was the sort of English faith that Keble possessed, he was further away from Rome than Newman dared imagine.
As time passed, Keble found himself increasingly on the defensive about the tenability of Anglicanism. In 1846, Keble got word that George Ryder (1838–1905), who later become the Chairman of the Board of Customs, was contemplating going over. “If it is not too late,” Keble wrote to his old pupil, “I beseech you by whatever is dear to you to reconsider what you are doing; have pity on the broken hearts and bewildered minds, which are more and more broken and bewildered by every step; and be quite sure—for how can anyone doubt it that reflects? –that it must come of some evil principle, when one is urged to do anything whatever without regard to consequences and so much the more, as one is responsible for others besides.” Again, any argument in favor of Rome must be satanic delusion. Moreover, conceding that Rome was more coherent than Canterbury was no argument in Rome’s favor: “I cannot see, supposing our Church ever so defective, how it follows that of course the Roman Catholic Church is right and yet according to the engagement you make in acceding to it, you must be prepared to die for the truth of each separate statement that it makes, as unreservedly as for the truth of the Incarnation.” Moreover, for Keble, “the onus probandi lies on those who go, not those who stay, and therefore I hope to go quietly on—comfortably is another thing, but one feels that one has been all one’s life much more comfortable than one deserves.”17 The mixture here of funk and sanctimony was typical of Keble. Such considerations carried no weight with his aristocratic friend. Once Ryder went over, Keble closed his doors to him. “I could not have him to dine,” he explained; “I should consider it scandalous in respect to the servants.”18 Such ostracism awaited all who converted in nineteenth-century England. As Battiscombe notes: Ryder’s “decision cut him off not only from Keble and like-minded friends but also from his aristocratic relations. His daughter never forgot her bitter sensations when, as a small child, she passed the Ryder family mansions in Berkeley Square and realised that she and her mother could never enter those stately doors.”19
Then Keble charged that Ryder, like Newman, was overly swayed by intellectual considerations. “In this case all is purely abstract and intellectual—the aim of development—political rather than religious.” For Keble, “the word intellectual” was “a sort of mark set upon this Roman Catholic Movement, to warn English Catholics against it; and the kind of person whom I see everywhere being carried away by it are either of the sort to be dazzled by intellect themselves, or else in such relation to J.H.N. or some other person, that they are tempted to put faith in him individually.” This was not true of Manning or Faber or Robert Wilberforce or many others who found their way to the faith largely without any direct help from Newman. Nonetheless, Keble had decided to dig in. “On one way or the other, every single instance has been such to drive me further and further away back from any tendency I might have had that way; and I hope I am sincere in thanking God that I am a much more contented Anglican now than I was a year ago.” Here, the note of defensiveness had become pitiably shrill, and again, he called on Bishop Butler to fortify his doubt. “Will you forgive my saying that you yourself, my dear Ryder, betray to my mind the intellectual restlessness I complain of, where you complain in your letter that you cannot ‘maintain the cause of the Church of England.’—and that you have ‘found no sufficient answer to what the Roman Catholics urge.’” The second of those propositions was bad enough but it was the first that rankled Keble even more; why should Anglicans suddenly need to defend Anglicanism? “I am sure it is long since I dreamed of ‘maintaining the cause’ of all the truths I firmly believe, or of ‘finding sufficient answers’ to all objections. In such matters I should have made shipwreck long ago had I not accepted, and tried to act upon the theory of Bishop Butler—that theory which now seems to be so sadly despised and forsaken by so many of our friends.”20
Writing in December 1845 to an Anglican who confessed himself similarly incapable of finding a “sufficient answer to what the Roman Catholics urge,” Newman wrote: “there is no conviction such as to preclude all hesitation or delay in joining the Catholic Church; the test of our being called” was “not any great vividness of impression, but its continuance. I have generally said to persons, Fix a time, and observe whether your conviction lasts through it, and how it stands at the end of it.” Of course, this was what Newman himself did from 1839 till his conversion in 1845. But then he made an observation that could very well have been prompted by the case of Keble: “And this, I suppose must be considered, – that, if a person be external to the aids and graces of the Church, he cannot have the true gift of faith, and can at best but rule his course by reason, which is an uncertain guide – and almost involves doubt as its attendant. Persons then, in waiting to be certain, may be waiting for that which from the nature of the case cannot be theirs.” Of course it was ironic that Newman should characterize such cases as overly reliant on reason but it was doubly ironic that he should urge his correspondent to consult Butler: “On the whole I should say about such cases as yours, Wait till you have such a conviction as Bishop Butler would say is sufficient in a practical matter, recollecting that doubt is the condition of our nature, and that the merit of faith consists in making ventures.”21 Again, different interpretations of Butler caused Newman and Keble to see the crisis of Tractarianism differently.
Still, Keble had convinced himself that Newman and those influenced by Newman were the ones who were relying excessively on reason. When Robert Wilberforce (1802–1857), the Oriel Fellow who wished to tutor along the same pastoral lines as Froude and Newman, prepared to convert in 1854, Keble lashed out at what he complained was his friend’s overly rational approach to faith: Wilberforce, like Newman, went “on general or abstract principles, metaphysical, legal, or what not, instead of clinging to Scripture and to primitive antiquity.” This contradicted Keble’s own understanding of the role of unwritten tradition in the deposit of the faith, which he extolled in his sermon on tradition. To another correspondent he wrote: “Poor dear R.W.; I own I was surprised … for the last report I had heard was an improved one, and I had heard nothing for a long time … I dare say your account of it is the right one; but it disappoints and mortifies one to see one, who used to be so truthful and candid, lending himself at once to the violent contradictions of fact, and petitiones principii, which are quite necessary to every part almost of the Roman Theory.”22 Here it is interesting to note that, if, in his correspondence with Newman, Keble showed Rome a certain resolute neutrality, he relaxed this restraint with other correspondents. To Wilberforce himself, when his doubts about the Anglican Church first surfaced in 1851, Keble wrote: “Your kind letter did me good. It made me hope that you were consenting to measure things by the standard that God has appointed, and to bear the uncertainty where he leaves us uncertain rather than insist on being distinctly guided in everything by the present Church … Do you not think there is in this
view a kind of lowliness more suitable to the Christian ethos than in the sort of claim to Inspiration (for it is really not less) that the opposite view implies?”23 As far as Wilberforce could see, one did not require any special inspiration to recognize that the Act of Supremacy (1534) excommunicated the English Church. And Wilberforce was not motivated by pride when he resigned his living at Burton Agnes in Yorkshire, left England for Paris and entered the Roman Church on All Saint’s Eve. Although an Anglican priest twice married and twice widowed, Wilberforce was given a special dispensation by the pope to enter Holy Orders. Wilberforce entered the same Accademia Ecclesiastica where Manning had received his instruction. David Newsome’s claim that Wilberforce was an unhappy Catholic is not borne out by Wilberforce’s correspondence.24 On 9 April 1856, he wrote to Newman: “I went into Retreat at St. Eusebio the beginning of last month, and was amazingly impressed by the Exercises. Moreover, they chimed in remarkably with the tendency of my own mind. I felt a greater freedom than before in giving myself up to the service of the Church; and those usages, which I had before looked upon as an impediment, became a positive object of attraction. This is especially the case with Devotion to Our Blessed Lady, which I have come to regard as a reward to my faith in being a Catholic. I cannot say how this has arisen; it has been the result of meditating on the truths of the Gospel and of seeking guidance by prayer.”25 Wilberforce’s conversion might have particularly stung Keble because it put him in mind of how his own living wife might be preventing him from taking the final step that Wilberforce took after his second wife’s death.
Defensiveness bred incoherence in Keble. While ready enough to argue that Newman was to blame for encouraging Ryder and Wilberforce to see their faith in merely intellectual terms, Keble also held, in a letter to John Coleridge of October 1847 that “Newman went (unconsciously of course) rather from impulse than from reason, and that good treatment and sympathy would probably have kept him.”26 This was wrong: it was intellect that had kept Newman Anglican when his heart and conscience told him to convert. As he wrote to one correspondent: “It is sad to me, to think that you still remain uncertain and unsettled; and, while others have seized and are enjoying the high calling offered to them, you are, if you will allow me to say so, wasting precious years in vanity. Having myself been called to the Church late in life, when my best days were gone, I feel for those who persevere in losing what cannot be recalled. You say that, ‘though you feel this’ (the ground on which you rest your position,) ‘in a dry argumentative way, you constantly feel your position to be most painful.’ Others have had and have the same feeling. Is not this a reductio ad absurdum of that ground? Is it not the witness of heart and conscience, of the whole man, that that argument will not work, and therefore cannot be true, difficult as it may be to find what is the intellectual flaw in what seems so specious? It will serve as an excuse for the insincere, not as a stay for the earnest.”27 In the Apologia, Newman would express this truth even more powerfully: “For myself, it was not logic that carried me on; as well might one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather. It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? the whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it. All the logic in the world would not have made me move faster towards Rome than I did; as well might you say that I have arrived at the end of my journey, because I see the village church before me, as venture to assert that the miles, over which my soul had to pass before it got to Rome, could be annihilated, even though I had had some far clearer view than I then had, that Rome was my ultimate destination. Great acts take time.”28
That Keble’s last years were not altogether happy is clear from his letters. “I cannot give a good account of my parish,” he wrote to Coleridge in 1862, “people are sadly disappointing, and neither ‘true religion, nor useful learning’ appears to me to flourish and abound. I often think that ‘tempus abire tibi est,’—do think of it for me a little calmly, and—and yet I creep on from day to day, fancying that perhaps I may do better, and quite ashamed to think of the condition in which my successor would find things, if I were to make a vacancy at present. ‘Too late, too late,’ are the words that haunt me from morning to night; and sometimes I wish I had been at a public school, that I might be a man of business, and get on with things as I ought …”29 Coleridge tried to account for this dissatisfaction by remarking that Keble was given to bouts of depression but additional woes now fed his disenchantment: Charlotte was gravely ill; Hursley could no longer epitomize any living Church; Oxford was rife with the impious liberalism of Jowett and Pattison; and the apostasy about which he had warned his contemporaries in 1833 was everywhere gaining ground. Recoiling from what he could glimpse of the future, he turned more and more to the past.
Meeting in Old Age
On 4 August 1863, Keble wrote to Newman a letter after a silence of nearly twenty years. “It is a great thing, I know, for me to ask, after so many years, that you should look kindly upon what comes from me, for I cannot conceal it from myself, nor yet acknowledge it without a special sort of pang, that what I have heard occasionally from Crawley and Copeland of your feeling as to your friends’ silence touches me perhaps as much as any, and it is one of the many things which now in my old age I wish otherwise.” Newman could not have been unmoved by Keble’s honesty. “I ought to have felt more than I did what a sore burden you were bearing for conscience’s sake and that it was the duty of us all to diminish rather than aggravate it so far as other claims allowed … I can but ask that if I had been towards you too much as if you have been dead, you will now be to me as if I were dying, which, of course, must early be my condition; for though (D.G.) wonderfully well, I am in my seventieth year. Do then, my dear friend, pardon me what has been wrong in this (I can see it in some measure but I dare say there is more which I do not see) and let me have the comfort of hoping that your recollection of me will not henceforth be embittered by anything more than is inseparable from our sad position, as I am sure your kindness to me has always been the same.”30
Newman’s response teemed not only with fond memories but large-hearted forgiveness. “Did you ever read Mrs Sheridan’s Tale of Nourjahad? such I think is the name. I have not read it since a boy. I am like one of the seven sleepers awakened, when you so write to me, considering all my recollections of Hursley and of Bisley, which remain photographed on my mind, are of twenty-five years ago, or thirty. I cannot think of little Tom but as of the boy I carried pick a back, when he was tired in getting from the steep valley to the table land of Bisley. And I recollect your Father, and your dear Sister, and your wife, as you cannot recollect them – at least the latter two – for in my case their images are undimmed by the changes which years bring upon us all …” When it came to Keble’s silence Newman bore no grudges. “Never have I doubted for one moment your affection for me – never have I been hurt at your silence. I interpreted it easily – it was not the silence of men, nor the forgetfulness of men, who can recollect about me and talk about me enough, when there is something to be said to my disparagement. You are always with me a thought of reverence and love, and there is nothing I love better than you, and Isaac, and Copeland and many others I could name, except Him whom I ought to love best of all and supremely. May He Himself, who is the over abundant compensation for all losses, give me His own Presence – and then I shall want nothing and desiderate nothing – but none but He, can make up for the losses of those old familiar faces which haunt me continually.”31 The appositeness of the allusion to Lamb’s poem could not have been lost on Keble, who probably knew the lines by heart: “I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man/Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly/Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.”
Four months after these exchanges, on 30 December 1863, Newman opened a parcel sent to him by an unknown correspondent and found a heavily marked review of volumes 7 and 8 of Anthony Froude’s History of England signed by “C.K.” One of the marked
passages read:
Truth for its own sake had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and one the whole ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which Heaven had given to the Saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage. Whether his notion is doctrinally correct or not, it is at least historically so.32
Here was the charge by Charles Kingsley that goaded Newman into writing his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), in which he revisited the events leading up to his conversion to refute what Newman called Kingsley’s “gratuitous slander.”33 That Newman frequently had Keble in his thoughts while at work on the book is evident from his correspondence. To William Copeland, Newman’s old curate at Littlemore, who brought Keble, Rogers and Church back in touch with Newman after they had been out of touch for nearly twenty years, he wrote: “I am very low – it is one of the most terrible trials that I have had. And I have to write against time, and to refresh my memory against time. Longman seemed to think an answer ought not to be delayed, if there was to be any – and people won’t read a fat book – so the only way was to begin at once, and write as I printed. I do trust I shall be carried through it, but at my age it is a perilous toil. There will be at least five parts. The one on which I need your assistance is the fourth. It will be most kind if Keble looks at it too. The single point is, Have I made mistakes of fact, over-stated things, etc? or again left out important things? or can some point be strengthened? What I shall ask Keble (as well as you) to look at, is my sketch from (say) 1833 to 1840 – but, mind, you will be disappointed – it is not a history of the movement but of me – it is an egotistical matter from beginning to end. It is to prove that I did not act dishonestly – I have doubts whether anyone could supply instead of me what I have to say – but, when you see it, you will see what a trial it is. In writing I kept bursting into tears …”34 On April 25th, Keble wrote to Newman: “I feel as if I ought to write you a long letter, but it must be only a few lines just now, to implore you not to be seriously worried by such trash as Mr Kingsley’s … . We (if I may say) want you, dear J.H.N. – all Christendom wants you – to take your stand against the infidelity which seems to be so fast enveloping us all … . I wish, if it please God, we may meet before very long …”35 On April 27th, Newman responded: “Thank you for your affectionate letter. When you see part of my publication, you will wonder how I ever could get myself to write it. Well, I could not, except under some very great stimulus. I do not think I could write it, if I delayed it a month. And yet I have for years wished to write it as a duty. I don’t know what people will think of me, or what will be the effect of it – but I wish to tell the truth, and to leave the matter in God’s hands.”36