by Edward Short
This was to be Newman’s own account of his conversion and he was writing it at breakneck speed. Proofs of Newman’s genius abound in his life and work but none is quite as astonishing as the fact that he managed to compose the Apologia in less than three months. “I am writing from morning to night, hardly having time for my meals,” he wrote to Keble. “I write this during dinner time – This will go on for at least 3 weeks more …” What is remarkable is that he knew that Keble would not take issue with his account of their pivotal relationship, which shows how confident he was in his own veracity. “I dare say, when it comes to the point, you will find nothing you have to say as to what I send you – but I am unwilling not to have eyes upon it of those who recollect the history. You will be startled at my mode of writing.”37 Keble could scarcely contain his delight with what Newman sent. On June 28th, he wrote: “My very dear Newman I will not wait any longer before thanking you with all my heart for your loving words to me and far too loving of me—If I wait till I write as I could wish, I should never write at all—for indeed dear friend the more and the more intently I look at this self drawn photograph (what a cruel strain it must have been to you) the more I love and admire the Artist—Whatever comes of controversial points, I see no end to the good which the whole Church, we may reasonably hope, may derive from such an example of love and candour under most trying circumstances.”38 If Newman regretted Keble’s reference to what he called “the whole Church,” he rejoiced in his old friend grasping at least one of the book’s elemental objects: “You have said things,” Keble told Newman, “which by the blessing of God will … materially help us in our sad weary struggle against Unbelief.”39
In September 1865, Newman shared with Keble his impression of Pusey’s Eirenicon (1865), his belated response to Newman’s Lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in submitting to the Catholic Church (1850), which set out to bring Anglicans and Roman Catholics closer by suggesting that what kept them apart was Rome’s acquiescence in extravagant devotions to the Blessed Virgin—not an argument likely to win any support from Newman. “If Pusey is writing to hinder his own people from joining us, well and good,” Newman wrote to Keble, “he has a right to write as he has done – but how can he fancy that to exaggerate, instead of smoothing contrarieties, is the way to make us listen to him? I wish I were not obliged to say that his mode of treating with us is rhetorical and unfair.”40 Later, in his Letter to Pusey (1866), Newman addressed Pusey directly, observing that: “There was one of old time who wreathed his sword in myrtle; excuse me—you discharge your olive-branch as if from a catapult.”41
In the same month, Newman finally met Keble for the first and only time after he converted. The account Newman gave of their meeting is memorable. At first, after a fair amount of shilly-shally, Newman decided against going to see his old friend; Pusey, he knew, would be meeting with Keble at Hursley and he decided to put off his meeting until he could see Keble alone. But the account Newman gave to Ambrose St. John is better than any paraphrase, particularly the picture it paints of Pusey recoiling as Newman made his unexpected entrance.
I had forgotten the country and was not prepared for such beauty, in the shape of Woods. Keble was at the door, he did not know me, nor I him. How mysterious that first sight of friends is! for when I came to contemplate him, it was the old face and manner, but the first effect and impression was different. His wife had been taken ill again in the night, and at the first moment he, I think, and certainly I, wished myself away. Then he said, Have you missed my letters? meaning Pusey is here, and I wrote to stop your coming. He [[then]] said I must go and prepare Pusey. He did so, and then took me into the room [[where Pusey was]]. I went in rapidly, and it is strange how action overcomes pain. Pusey, as being passive, was evidently shrinking back into the corner of the room – as I should have done if he had rushed in upon me. He could not help contemplating the look of me narrowly and long – Ah, I thought, you are thinking how old I am grown, and I see myself in you – though you, I do think, are more altered than I am. Indeed, the alteration in him shocked me (I would not say this to every one) – it pained and grieved me. I should have known him any where – his face is not changed, but it is as if you looked at him through a prodigious magnifier. I recollect him short and small – with a round head – smallish features – flaxen curly hair – huddled up together from his shoulders downward – and walking fast. This was as a young man – but comparing him even when last I saw him [[in 1846]], when he was slow in his motions and staid in his figure, still there is a wonderful change. His head and his features are half as large again – his chest is very broad (don’t say all this) – and he has, I think, a paunch – His voice is the same – were my eyes shut, I should not have been sensible of any lapse of time. As we three sat together at one table, I had as painful thoughts as I ever recollect, though it was a pain, not acute, but heavy. There were three old men, who had worked together vigorously in their prime. This is what they have come to – poor human nature – after 20 years they meet together round a table, but without a common cause, or free outspoken thoughts – but, though kind yet subdued, and antagonistic in their mode of speaking, and all of them with broken prospects.42
On February 3rd, Keble wrote Newman one of his most heartfelt letters: “that which I have daily and almost hourly feared for so many years is now, humanly speaking without doubt coming upon me. We came here [Bournemouth] for the second time after I saw you at Hursley; my wife had begun to look up a little and so she has once or twice for a day or two at a time since then: but on the whole it has been what G. Herbert calls a steady “undressing” – something or other which seemed to be a part of her laid by day after day – chess, the piano, drawing, writing, accounts – and now even reading a few verses is almost too much for her … . You never saw much of her dear Newman, so I ought not to run on about her …”43 His old friend responded with affectionate solitude: “What am I to say to your most touching letter? I can do no more than think of you and her … You are under the severest trial which man can suffer; and I earnestly pray that you and she may be supplied in all your need, day by day, and have every grace necessary to bring you both to heaven … I can do no more than think of you and love you. I wish I could do more—but there is only One who is powerful, One who can will and do.”44 As it happened, this would be Newman’s last letter to Keble, who died little over a month later.
Post-Mortems
Comments that Newman made about Keble after his death may have qualified the sympathetic esteem in which he held his elusive friend but they never diminished it. To Henry James Coleridge, John Coleridge’s second son, who became a Jesuit, Newman wrote: “Keble had from youth a great drawing to Catholicism”—something “Pusey had never had,” though he was quick to add that it was wrong to “infer from this that Keble was not in good faith …”45 To Pusey, he elaborated: “According to my own idea it was Jewel, as forced upon Keble’s attention by Froude, whose writings first opened Keble’s eyes to the unsatisfactory doctrine of the Reformers … in contradistinction to the high Anglican school; and from that time Keble took a much higher line of theology, and hardly recollected himself what he held before, as is the case with men who have originally taken what they received, without question, and have not precisely examined its meaning, coherence, and grounds.”46 In a letter to H. A. Woodgate, Newman recalled: Keble “was most diffident of his own opinion, and with difficulty made up his mind. I recollect Rickards, a great judge of character, saying forty years ago, ‘Don’t you see K’s special infirmity! indecision – You see it in the rolling of his eyes.’ Hence you could not get his own opinion on an important point. It was the opinion of his brother, his sister, or his wife.”47 This estimate of Keble’s thinking was far more critical than the one that found its way into the Apologia. Still, if Keble reluctantly acknowledged the shortcomings of Jewel and the other Reformers, he never revised his view of the papacy. “The one doctrine dear Keble did not receive was that comm
union with the Holy See was necessary for being in the Church,” Newman wrote to one correspondent. “The few hours that I saw him in September, it astonished me how far he seemed to go. I suppose he looked forward to Purgatory with real comfort, as a mode of honouring God.”48
In 1875, Newman was asked to provide some introduction to a collection of Keble’s essays and in response he wrote a letter full of suave evasion, which, in its way, achieved something of Keble’s own accustomed reticence. “I wish it were easier for me than it is to comply with the request you have made me to give you my judgment upon Mr Keble’s literary merits,” he wrote to his correspondent. “Not that it would be any great effort to descant in a general way on his various endowments as an author, on his learning, his conscientiousness, his incessant and persevering industry, and the classical taste with which he writes; but praise of this kind, to which others besides him have a claim, would come very short of doing justice to him, or of satisfying you. Yet I should not succeed in the attempt to do more … . As to Mr Keble, all I venture to say of him in this respect is this:– that his keen religious instincts, his unworldly spirit, his delicacy of mind, his tenderness of others, his playfulness, his loyalty to the Holy Fathers, and his Toryism in politics, are all ethical qualities, and by their prominence give a character of their own …”49 What this letter shows, if it shows anything, is how careful Newman was to eschew criticizing Keble in public, not only because he respected and loved his old friend but because he did not wish to offend those Anglicans who might still be brought round to making the move to Catholicism that Keble himself so spectacularly failed to make.
In 1878, Newman wrote to Edward Stuart Talbot, the first warden of Keble College, “I wonder whether you would care to have any letters of Keble which I find. The other day I came on a parcel of them belonging to the years 1830–1835. They have only this importance, but this they have, to refute the notion which the Times and others have put out, that Keble was diverted from his characteristic line and position in the Anglican Church, and made a tool of by others.”50 Another misconception that Newman helped Talbot dispel was the one that charged that Newman misled Keble. Isaac Williams, who, as a member of the more conservative High Church Bisley school, opposed Newman’s influence on Keble and put it about that Keble actually regretted this influence. In his autobiography, Williams quoted Keble telling him, apropos the claims of Rome, “Now that I have thrown off Newman’s yoke, these things appear quite different.” Even more improbably, he quoted Keble telling him that the 1830s constituted “a sort of parenthesis in my life,” and he was happy that he had now regained “my old views such as I had before.” This sounds like Williams putting words in Keble’s mouth, as does this: “Pusey and Newman were full of the wonderful progress and success of the Movement, whereas I had always been taught that the truth must be unpopular and despised, and to make confession for it was all one could do, but I see I was fully carried away by their sanguine views.”51 In no correspondence did Keble ever suggest that he considered Newman’s influence “a yoke;” nor is it credible to suggest that Pusey and Newman were overly sanguine about the progress of the Tractarian Movement. And if Keble regarded the 1830s as a “parenthesis” in his life, during which he came to embrace the via media, where did this leave the “catholic” version of Anglicanism to which he remained so loyal?
When, in August 1878, Newman provided Talbot with a packet of Keble’s letters, he included a memorandum, entitled “Notice to Letters of 1843–1845,” which was as revelatory of Newman as it was of Keble. “In the Letters which follow I have made erasures, which may seem strange and arbitrary, unless I say something to account for them.” This was particularly true in light of Newman’s stated opposition to suppressing biographical information, but Keble posed a special case. “Let me observe then that dear John Keble’s heart was too tender and his religious sense too keen, for him not to receive serious injury to his spirits and his mental equilibrium by the long succession of trials, in which his place in the Oxford Movement involved him.” Newman usefully catalogued the trials in which Keble was forced to act in those pivotal years. “The affair of Number 90, Williams’s failure in his contest for the Poetry Professorship, the Jerusalem Bishoprick, Young’s rejection when offering himself for Orders, Pusey’s censure by the six Doctors, the promotion of Thirlwall and others, my own religious unsettlement and that of so many others, the charges and hostile attitude of the Bishops, the publication of Arnold’s Life and Letters, and the prospect of the future thus opened upon him, (not to dwell upon the serious illness of his wife and his brother) were too much for him, and threw him into what must be called a morbid state of mind, which showed itself to his intimate friends in the language of self accusation and even of self abhorrence.” For Newman, “This heart-rending trial, of which perhaps I saw more than any one, is remarked upon by Sir John Coleridge in his Life of him … though he has not attempted any sufficient explanation of it.” Neither Coleridge nor, it has to be said, any subsequent biographer has done justice to this aspect of Keble’s life. Newman realized how central it was. “One of Keble’s special imaginations at this time was, that in some way or other, directly or indirectly, positively or negatively, he was the cause of my own distrust of the Church of England, and in his letters to me he expressed in obiter dicta, in ejaculations, in single words and half sentences, in shocking language to one who knew and loved him so well as I did, his keen realization of these and other fancies, and the anguish which they caused him.
To me nothing is more piercingly painful than the contrast between the cheerfulness and playfulness which runs through his early letters and the sadness of his later. This must remain any how; it is founded on the successive circumstances of his history; it is part of his life; nor could one expect it to be otherwise; but I could not be so cruel to that meek, patient, and affectionate soul, to that dearly, deeply beloved friend, as so leave to a future generation the exhibition of those imaginary thoughts about himself which tormented him, which grew out of grave troubles, which were very real, and which are sufficiently recorded for posterity when they are made, as in a notice like this, to suggest to a reader the weight of those troubles.52
Charlotte Keble
Newman fully recognized how much Keble relied on his wife in all his trials. To Jemima, he explained how, after meeting Keble, he agreed to meet his friend again when Charlotte Keble’s health improved, “but she never got better, and [Keble] was obliged to give up the idea. The wonder is how he could ever bear so long the suffering which his wife has undergone. Spasmodic asthma is a fearful complaint to see. Mr. St. John has for years suffered from it, though he is better now—it is like seeing a person in a chronic condition of hanging or drowning.”53 To Henry Wilberforce, apropos Charlotte, Newman candidly speculated: “She suffered a great deal at last; so, Keble was spared a great deal. When I found she was surviving, it struck me (I trust it is really a charitable thought) that she was to be kept awhile to do penance for having kept Keble from being a Catholic.”54 This was the sort of matter-of-factness about the supernatural that gives so much of Newman’s correspondence its power. Charlotte was an obstacle in the way of Keble’s converting. If Keble had followed Newman into the Catholic Church he would have found himself without means of supporting himself and this would have created grave practical problems for his sickly wife. One need only recall the fury that Thomas Arnold’s two conversions inspired in his wife, Julia (née Sorell) to appreciate what might have been Charlotte’s point of view, or indeed that of any wife of an Anglican clergyman contemplating conversion. After Arnold’s second conversion, Julia sent off a blistering letter to Newman on Guy Fawkes Day, 1876:
Sir,
You have now for the second time been the cause of my husband’s becoming a member of the Church of Rome and from the bottom of my heart I curse you for it. You know well how very weak and unstable he is, and you also know that he has a wife and eight children. You know well that he did nothing for the Roman Ca
tholic Church in the ten years he belonged to it before, and you know well that he will do nothing for it now, but the temptation of having one of his father’s sons under your direction was too much for you, and for the second time you counselled him to ignore every social duty and become a pervert. He has brought utter ruin upon us all, but what is that to you? …55