by Edward Short
William found the Grammar of Assent unpersuasive. Writing to Newman in 1871, Catherine summed up the quixotic skepticism that prevented her husband from assenting to the truths of Christianity: “I believe from what you have said when we have talked on the subject, that you do understand him certainly. It seems to me that Wm is so utterly removed from the common run of Sceptics; and his mistakes appear to me to proceed in great measure from crankiness, and a sort of over-scrupulousness.” This has the ring of truth, for certainly William was free of the peevishness that distinguished so many Victorian agnostics from Mark Pattison to Leslie Stephen. As his biographer, David K. Brown attests, William “was a very lovable man, admired by Admirals and dockyard mateys alike.”104 In 1863, Newman confirmed this assessment in a letter to Sister Mary Gabriel Du Boulay: “I am engaged just now in receiving one of the Froudes – a boy of 16 who arrived here yesterday from school. My dear friend, his Father, who is not a Catholic has seen his children one after another, (this is the fourth) received into the Church: and he has borne it so gently, so meekly, so tenderly, (though it has given him a sense of desolation most cruel to bear) that I do trust God’s mercy has the same gift in store for himself. Please give him your prayers, and ask your Sisters to do the like. It is the infallibility of the Church which is his stumbling stone. He would confess that her authority is probable, – but he cannot receive her absolute infallibility, and since she claims (as he thinks) what she has not, therefore the claim itself is a proof against her. What a good Catholic he would make, if the grace of God touched his heart! Get our Lady to ask for him – what a joyful day it would be!105 That Catherine never despaired of her husband’s eventual conversion is clear from a letter she wrote to Newman in July 1876 in which she thanked him for a recent visit he had made to Chelston Cross: “I have been intending day after day to write to you: – but somehow, whenever I have thought of your stay here, I have felt ready to cry. – It was such a delight, – and it passed so quickly – as all happy times do; – and it leaves the sort of ache on my mind in thinking that I did not enjoy it half enough, – and that also is what happy times do. – I think when a longer time has passed, I shall enjoy more to look back upon it; – to the drives, – and the talks in the hall, – and the great pleasure it gave us all to see that you seemed to enjoy it. – I cannot tell you all that my dear husband has said since, of his love for you, and admiration of you, – that too makes me inclined to cry, – for I want, – what I cannot have, and the very sweetness and affection he shows us all makes me feel the separation more keenly. But somehow I cannot believe that any one so good can be out of God’s favour: – and so I hope and hope.”106 After Catherine’s death in July 1878, William sought to beguile his bereavement on a cruise and suddenly died himself at Simonstown, South Africa. Newman was composing a long letter to him on the very themes that he had addressed so painstakingly in the Grammar—certitude and assent—when he heard the news. The Devonshire Association recalled William glowingly. “He would bring the same intense, yet almost playful attention to the construction of a toy as to the analysis of the curves of an ironclad or the behavior of an Atlantic wave. With such a character, he brought brightness wherever he went. His voice had an almost pathetic tone, the outcomes of a sympathetic heart. And one in any trouble, not knowing who or what he was, must have thought his life was spent in tender concern for others which springs from forgetfulness of self, and sense of the mystery of human life.”107 Shortly before her own death, Catherine confirmed something of that mystery when she remarked of her obdurate, talented, heart-broken husband: “It is always extraordinary to me (seeing what excellent sense and judgment he has on most subjects) that in talking of Catholic matters, he does talk such nonsense. Such as ‘there can be nothing in the system of spiritual direction unless every director is infallible,’ as if one ought never to go to a doctor unless the doctor is infallible …’”108 This was doubtless true, though Newman never allowed such nonsense to prevent him from sharing with William the certitude of his own vocation and indeed his own love. As Newman wrote to his friend in his last letter, which, alas, William never received: “the Moral Governor of the world extends a supernatural aid to the efforts of nature to find religious truth, which He does not accord to inquirers in the theory of Natural Science. That φρόνησις which in every branch of inquiry is required for obtaining knowledge, is guided and enlightened by Him to right conclusions in religion, as it is not prospered supernaturally in the arts and sciences. And the conditions of obtaining this aid are faith, dependence on him and a spirit and habit of prayer.”109
Three years before Froude’s death, Newman put the matter even more bluntly to Edmond G. Holmes, a young man who took a First in Classics at St. John’s and later went on to become an Inspector of Schools. Holmes had sent Newman a paper taking issue with the rationalism of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill, and Newman wrote back to him that while his correspondent “must make allowance for an old man, who finds it very difficult to screw up his mind to a metaphysical argument … I can truly say that I warmly sympathise and concur with you in the substance of your argument, and am rejoiced to have evidence in it that there are those in the rising generation who will in their day make a successful stand against the tyranny under which we at present lie of a ‘science falsely so called,’ which is so shallow, so audacious, so arrogant, and so widely accepted.”110
Chapter 5
A Better Country: Newman’s Idea of Public Life
“Life passes, riches fly away, popularity is fickle, the senses decay, the world changes, friends die. One alone is constant; One alone is true to us: One alone can be true; One alone can be all things to us; One alone can supply our needs; One alone can train us up to our perfections; One alone can give meaning to our complex and intricate nature; One alone can give us a tune and harmony; One alone can form and possess us.”
John Henry Newman, “The Thought of God and the Stay of the Soul” (1839)
In “Who’s To Blame?” (1855), written in response to the public outcry against the Crimean War, Newman captured perfectly the predicament of ministers first goaded into war and then blamed once the campaign turned sour. No campaign—or only the Sicilian Expedition of the Peloponnesian War—ever turned sour in quite so calamitous a way as the siege of Sebastopol. It cost the British more than 21,000 lives and did nothing to protect the Holy Places for which it was initially launched. “Cholera and drunkenness, courts martial and floggings” is the way Christopher Hibbert summed it up.1 Yet while Newman thought it “a piece of simple Johnbullism,” he refused to scapegoat either the cabinet or Whitehall.2 He had been made a scapegoat too frequently himself to wish to scapegoat others. Instead, in a passage of exuberant irony, he came to the defense of John’s Bull’s “workhouse apprentices:”
England, surely, is the paradise of little men, and the purgatory of great ones. May I never be a Minister of State or a Field-Marshal! I’d be an individual, self-respecting Briton, in my own private castle, with the Times to see the world by, and pen and paper to scribble off withal to some public print, and set the world right. Public men are only my employés; I use them as I think fit, and turn them off without warning. Aberdeen, Gladstone, Sidney Herbert, Newcastle, what are they muttering about services and ingratitude? were they not paid? … can they be profitable to me their lord and master? … having no tenderness or respect for their persons, their antecedents, or their age … I think it becoming and generous,—during, not after their work … to institute a formal process of inquiry into their demerits, not secret, not indulgent to their sense of honour, but in the hearing of all Europe, and amid the scorn of the world,—hitting down, knocking over, my workhouse apprentices, in order that they may get up again, and do my matters for me better.3
Newman’s empathy for public men came to the fore most admirably after Gladstone was blamed for the death of General Gordon in January 1885—a death he felt deeply. “Though I know no one in the Soudan, and scarcely any of thei
r relatives, I am in real distress at the thought of what those relatives are suffering. Neither the Crimea nor the Indian Mutiny has come home to me, I don’t know why, as this has. Perhaps it is because the misfortune is so wanton, and on that ground makes one so indignant. Five successful engagements, won at a cruel price, but all for nothing.”4 His registration of the tragedy was only sharpened when he learned that Gordon had read and reread his poem “The Dream of Gerontius” (1865) throughout the siege of Khartoum. Of course, what Newman was feeling about the losses in the Sudan was shared by many in England. In March 1885, Henry James gave a vivid description of the fallout of Gordon’s death in London:
The ministry is still in office, but hanging only by a hair, Gladstone is ill and bewildered, the mess in the Soudan unspeakable, London full of wailing widows and weeping mothers, the hostility of Bismarck extreme, the danger of complications with Russia imminent, the Irish in the House of Commons more disagreeable than ever, the dynamiters more active, the income tax threatening to rise to its maximum, the general muddle, in short, of the densest and darkest … Gladstone hates foreign relations and has tried to shirk them all, and is paying his penalty in the bitter censure of his own party as well as the execration of the other. It is a pitiful end of a great career. The people that abuse him most are the good old Liberals …5
Newman shared James’s concern for “the poor fellows in the Soudan” but he refused to scapegoat Gladstone. “I think that all praise is due to Gladstone for being so exemplary both personally and publicly as Prime Minister,” he wrote, “and I am unspeakably shocked and indignant to be told … of his private character having been the butt of slander.”6 The magnanimity of this has to be seen in light of the fact that only ten years before Gladstone had publicly accused Newman and indeed all English Catholics not only of disloyalty but intellectual and moral subservience. Another example of Newman’s empathy for public men can be seen from The Rambler of September 1859. A correspondent had written in accusing France and her “impious apostles” of trying to attack the Pope’s temporal power. Newman responded back: “I [am] far too cautious … to take Louis Napoleon’s part; but it is another thing to indulge in invectives, nay slanderous invectives, against him. Public men have characters, as other men; and their characters are dear to them. We should do as we would be done by. We may fairly criticize what they have done; we cannot fairly impute what they have not done as yet, and what they disown.”7
Newman’s refusal to impute bad motives to public men grew out of his recognition that this was precisely what English Protestants had been doing to Catholics for centuries. In that witty anatomy of Protestant prejudice, The Present Position of Catholics in England (1851)—a book as indispensable to understanding the English as Astolphe de Custine’s Letters from Russia (1843) is to understanding the Russians —Newman showed with what methodical thoroughness “the fathers and patrons of the English Reformation … fastened on … Catholics first the imputation, [and] then the repute of ignorance, bigotry, and superstition.” Long before Herbert Butterfield exposed the fallacies of the Whig version of history or G. R. Elton showed how Thomas Cromwell had used English law to outlaw English Catholicism or Eamon Duffy proved how resented that outlawing was by a people fond enough of their traditional Catholic faith, Newman showed “what had to be done in order to perpetuate Protestantism” in England.8
Convoke the legislature, pass some sweeping ecclesiastical enactments, exalt the Crown above the Law and the Gospel, down with the Cross and up with the lion and the dog, toss all priests out of the country as traitors; let Protestantism be the passport to office and authority, force the King to be a Protestant, make his Court Protestant, bind Houses of Parliament to be Protestant, clap a Protestant oath upon judges, barristers-at-law, officers in army and navy, members of the universities, national clergy; establish this stringent Tradition in every function and department of the State, surround it with the luster of rank, wealth, station, name, and talent; and this people, so careless of abstract truth, so apathetic to historical fact, so contemptuous of foreign ideas, will ex animo swear to the truth of a religion which indulges their natural turn of mind, and involves no severe thought or tedious application.9
The respect Newman showed public men—even those whose policies he opposed—was usually reciprocated. In a general preface to his political novels, Disraeli blamed the failure of Young England not on the misrepresentations of his Liberal opponents nor on the short-sightedness of the British electorate but on “the secession of Dr. Newman”, which, he thought, “dealt a blow to the Church of England under which it still reels.”10 Newman’s Plain and Parochial Sermons (1834–1843) inspired “supreme admiration” in Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury. “For a conservative-minded young man with a feeling for history”, his biographer Andrew Roberts pointed out, “Tractarianism was an intoxicating force, preaching a traditional creed with clarity and conviction and it was to provide the main spiritual and intellectual influence on Cecil’s life.”11 Rosebery, Gladstone’s protégé, revered Newman. Recalling a meeting with him at Norfolk House in 1880, when Newman was 79, he wrote: “He is much younger looking than his photographs, less wrinkled, has a deliciously soft voice and manner … He said he was very gratified to me for the anxiety to see him … I told him I had always had the Apologia in my room, at which he used even stronger expressions of courtly but genuine surprise.”12 Later, when Newman’s body was laid out on the high altar of the Oratory Church in Birmingham, Rosebery wrote in his Journal, “This was the end of the young Calvinist, the Oxford don, the austere vicar of St. Mary’s. It seemed as if a whole cycle of human thought and life were concentrated in that august repose. That was my overwhelming thought. Kindly light had led and guided Newman to this strange, brilliant end …”13 For Newman’s influence at Oxford, Gladstone thought “there is no parallel in the academical history of Europe, unless you go back to the twelfth century or the University of Paris.” That influence had played a considerable part in causing first his sister Helen and then his two dearest friends, Henry Manning and James Hope-Scott, to convert—or, to come “unfixed”, as he liked to put it—but he could never discount it.14 In a letter to Dean Church, Newman wrote, apropos the Liberal Prime Minister, “Gladstone is making up for the late savageness towards us, by eating up the Turks. Certainly I rejoice at it, though I doubt the prudence of a statesman committing himself to such a fancy as a sudden expulsion of the Turks from Europe. They were long in getting into Europe, and their expulsion must be gradual, except that in this time of the world things move much faster than they did centuries ago. As to G. I suppose he has given up party politics, and thinks he has a right to indulge himself in what is called sentiment. For myself, not being a politician I don’t know enough, to be so terrified at Russia, as both Whigs and Tories are.”15 The only major Victorian Prime Minister who remained immune to Newman’s spell was Palmerston, which was perhaps not surprising, since it was Palmerston, as Secretary for Foreign Affairs, who first received the ineffable Dr. Achilli into England, the Dominican apostate whose successful libel action set Newman back £12,000 in court costs.
Newman had not always shown magnanimity towards ministers of state. In 1829, he called Sir Robert Peel a “Rat” for abandoning his opposition to Catholic Emancipation and led the campaign at Oxford to unseat him as “unworthy to represent a religious, straightforward, unpolitical body, whose interests … he had betrayed.” When Peel’s loss to Sir Robert Inglis was announced, Newman was exultant: “We have achieved a glorious Victory,” he crowed. “We have proved the independence of the Church and of Oxford.”16 A few weeks before the Whigs pushed through the first Reform Bill, Newman was gloomy about what the consequences would be for the Established Church: “I dread above all things the pollution of such men as Lord Brougham affecting to lay a finger hand upon it. This vile Ministry. I cannot speak of them with patience.” Afterwards, he was no less resigned: “As to the ministry, their conduct is so atrocious that it is almost out of the wo
rld’s proceedings that they should escape without punishment.”17 A year later, in sunny Italy, he was still stewing: “I have (alas) experienced none of that largeness and expansion of mind, which one of my friends privately told me I should get from traveling—I cannot boast of any greater gift of philosophic coolness than before, and on reading the papers of the beginning and middle of February, hate the Whigs … more bitterly than ever.”18
Cardinal Manning called Newman a “great hater.”19 Newman hated Peel and Brougham because they were usurping the prerogatives of the Anglican Church and attempting to replace religion with rationalism, God’s laws with political expedients. Of course, it was a futile fight. Newman was attempting to eradicate Erastianism from a Church Erastian to its very roots. Yet his quarrel with liberal reform extended beyond his solicitude for the autonomy of the English Church. In 1832, he wrote to S. F. Wood, his Oriel friend who later became a barrister: “I am willing to grant for argument’s sake all that any sensible well-judging man may believe on the questions of reform but still … the difference between this and that system is as nothing compared with the human will … till the will be changed from evil to good, the difference of the results between two given systems will be imperceptible.”20 Or, as Johnson told Boswell: “Sir, most political schemes of human improvement are very laughable things.”21
Newman might have deplored what he called the “gross, carnal, unbelieving world” but he recognized its power.22 “Many persons openly defend the aim at rising in the world, and speak in applause of an honourable ambition as if the prizes of this world were from heaven,” he wrote, “and the steps of this world’s ladder were the ascent of Angels … Others, again, consider that their duty lies simply in this,—in making money for their families … Faith, hope, love, devotion, are mere names; some visible idol is taken as the substitute for God.”23 Newman could be full of eloquent contempt for such worldly enterprise: