Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  In response to a pamphlet by the High Churchman Frederick Meyrick entitled Does Dr. Newman deserve Mr. Gladstone’s Praises? (1875), Gladstone gave what was perhaps his most considered assessment of Newman’s character:

  I have, without doubt, spoken freely and largely of his merits, but indirectly and with reserve of his defects. To this I was moved by recollection of much kindness; by my belief in his truthfulness of intention; by my admiration of the disinterestedness which has marked his life, his content in an outward obscurity, his superiority to vulgar ambitions. I was sure, too, that he had, in dealing with me, repressed thoughts and words of wrath; and finally, as I was at this time in much correspondence with thorough-paced Vaticanists, I saw him shine morally in the contrast with them. Besides a want of robustness of character, I have ventured to glance at an obliquity of intellect. The first he has shown by shrinking from the bold action to which his insight, and many of his avowals, should have led him, and also in his adopting for some time after his secession too much of the ordinary tone of the Romish controversialist. The latter defect of his mind is too traceable in all his works, and the effect is, for practical purposes, you might as well argue with a Jesuit. His mind seems to be nearly the opposite of Bishop Butler’s, whom, nevertheless, he sincerely, but I should say ignorantly, worships, as the Athenians worshipped the unknown God. He constantly reminds me of a very different man, Lord Westbury, in this great point, that he is befooled by the subtlety of his own intellect. I always felt that Westbury, when he was wrong, lost the chance that we ordinary mortals possess of getting right, because we feel a greater difficulty in sustaining untrue propositions; but in Westbury it was the same thing, in point of difficulty, to sustain a sound or unsound argument. So it is with Dr. Newman. But I must not pursue further this very curious subject.187

  Newman would have been amused to know that he put Gladstone in mind of Richard Bethell, 1st Baron Westbury (1800–1873), one of Victorian England’s most brilliant legal minds. After establishing an equity practice that brought in an income of over ₤20,000 a year, Bethell rose to the peak of his profession with what seemed effortless inevitability. In 1851, he was elected MP for Alyesbury; in the same year, he was appointed vice-chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster; in 1852, he became solicitor-general; in 1853, he received a knighthood; in 1856, he became attorney-general. It is true that he was passed over for Lord Chancellor in 1859 when Lord Campbell—the presiding judge at Newman’s Achilli trial—was given the nod. But, in 1861, Campbell obligingly died and Bethell succeeded him. Once installed, he took the title of Baron Westbury of Westbury in the county of Wiltshire. In addition to his ambition and his brains, Bethell was notable for distrusting the common law system, convinced that the law of precedent was too unsystematic. He also became famous for ruling in the proceedings arising out of the publication of Essays and Reviews (1860), one of the authors of which had contended that there was no Hell. When Westbury found for the appellants in the case, contemporary wags suggested that his epitaph ought to be that “he took away from orthodox members of the Church of England their last hope of everlasting damnation.”188 In his witty entry for Westbury in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, R. C. J. Cocks sums up Westbury’s life deftly: “Looking back on his career, late Victorians were surely right in seeing him as someone afflicted with both an overwhelming belief in his own intellectual superiority and an emotional need to prove this ability at every possible point, often at the cost of others. What made him so striking was the extent to which the quality of his mind often justified his own view of his talents.”189 However amusing it is to think of Westbury and Newman in the same light, it is difficult to see much resemblance in the two men. Gladstone’s contention that Newman, like Westbury, could not somehow admit when he was wrong was an odd claim. If that were true, how could Gladstone account for Newman’s conversion?

  Gladstone availed himself of another opportunity to take a swipe at Newman in a piece called “The Place of Heresy and Schism in The Modern Christian Church,” (1894), in which he defined his view of conscience:

  The Christian Church, no longer entitled to speak with an undivided and universal authority, and thus to take her place among the paramount facts of life, is not thereby invaded in her inner citadel. That citadel is, and ever was, the private conscience within this sacred precinct, that matured the forces which by a long incubation grew to such a volume of strength, as legitimately to obtain the mastery of the world. It would be a fatal error to allow the voice of that conscience to be put down by another voice, which proceeds not from within, but from without, the sanctuary. The private conscience is indeed for a man, as Cardinal Newman has well said, the viceregent of God.190

  Had Gladstone published this during Newman’s life, he would have received a sharp rebuke from the man whose understanding of conscience he so deliberately distorted. Gladstone, of course, was making reference to Newman’s inveterately misinterpreted sally in A Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, where he observed: “If I am obliged to bring into after-dinner toasts (which indeed does not seem quite the thing) I shall drink—to the Pope, if you please—still, to Conscience, first, and to the Pope afterwards.”191 Newman never claimed that the Roman Catholic Church “put down” the dictates of conscience. On the contrary, for Newman, conscience corroborates the authority of the Roman Church, embodied as that is in the Magisterium.

  Thus viewing [the Pope’s] position, we shall find that it is by the universal sense of right and wrong, the consciousness of transgression, the pangs of guilt, and the dread of retribution, as first principles, deeply lodged in the hearts of men, thus and only thus, that he has gained his footing in the world and achieved his success. It is his claim to come from the Divine Lawgiver, in order to elicit, protect, and enforce those truths which the Lawgiver has sown in our very nature—it is this and this only—that is the explanation of his length of life more than antediluvian. The championship of the Moral Law and of conscience is his raison d’être.192

  Newman recognized that there could conceivably be occasions when the dictates of individual conscience might collide with the injunctions of a pope—he cites, for example, the rather droll hypothetical of a pope requiring the faithful to abjure wine—but he also recognized that only spiritual arrogance and pride could suggest that such occasions were likely to be frequent.

  Unless a man is able to say to himself, as in the Presence of God, that he must not, and dare not, act upon papal injunction, he is bound to obey it, and would commit a great sin disobeying it. Prima facie it is his bounden duty, even from a sentiment of loyalty, to believe the Pope right and to act accordingly. He must vanquish that mean, ungenerous, selfish, vulgar spirit of his nature, which, at the very first rumour of a command, places itself in opposition to the Superior who gives it, asks itself whether he is not exceeding his right, and rejoices, in a moral and practical matter to commence with scepticism. He must have no willful determination to exercise a right of thinking, saying, doing just what he pleases, the question of truth and falsehood, right and wrong, the duty if possible of obedience, the love of speaking as his Head speaks, and of standing in all cases on his Head’s side, being simply discarded. If this necessary rule were observed, collisions between the Pope’s authority and the authority of conscience would be very rare.193

  Pope Benedict XVI’s reading of Newman’s statement in the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk about after-dinner toasts is worth noting here because he reads Newman with discerning sympathy. As Dr. Rowland points out, the after-dinner remark “is usually interpreted to mean that [Newman] put the authority of his own conscience above that of the pope’s. Ratzinger offers a completely different interpretation. He says that Newman intended this to be a clear confession of his faith in the papacy … he meant it to be an interpretation of the papacy as an office which guarantees, rather than opposes, the primacy of conscience. In other words, Newman was making the point, which Ratzinger himself made prior to assuming the Office of Peter, that t
he pope cannot do whatever he likes, that the exercise of his prerogative powers are circumscribed by both Scripture and Tradition, that is, by the very data upon which a well-formed conscience relies.”194

  What is remarkable about Gladstone and Newman is that their very differences bound them together. Gladstone longed to be free of what he considered the slavery of politics so he could devote himself to God. In Newman, he saw a man who had made that devotion his life’s work, his master-pursuit. The thought that he might have done the same if he had not stood for Newark all those many years ago made Newman a lifelong fascination. 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.”195 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 defect to Rome—or, to come ‘unfixed’, as he liked to put it—but, much as he agreed with Dean Church in seeing his influence as a “catastrophe”, he could never discount it. And while it would be risible to suggest that Newman ever had any hankerings to enter politics, it is clear from his writings that he had great respect for public men and for the genuine good that public life could accomplish. In his funeral oration for Hope-Scott, he wrote: “We owe very much to those who devote themselves to public life, whether in the direct service of the State or in the prosecution of great national or social undertakings. They live laborious days, of which we individually reap the benefit.” In Gladstone he saw possibilities for a renewed Christian public life that were not far short of the possibilities Gladstone himself saw. While the realism of his Catholic faith would never tempt Newman to share what Matthew refers to as Gladstone’s “dream of a moral state married to a cleansed church together countering ‘the moral movement … of the day … away from religion and towards infidelity,’”196 he did see a place in the State for avowed men of religion working to advance the cause of religion, however Sisyphean that advance might prove. If Anglicanism could be made to serve as a bulwark against the rising tide of unbelief, there was no reason why Gladstone could not be similarly useful. Newman followed Gladstone’s career with such closeness and such interest not because it was Gladstone’s career—about Gladstone himself he once said, “Somehow there is great earnestness, but a want of amiableness about him”197—but because it was the career of a man of genuine faith grappling with what Newman once called the “gross, carnal, unbelieving world.”198

  Biographers from John Morley and Philip Magnus to Colin Matthew and Richard Shannon have charted Gladstone’s political course from stern, unbending Tory to Grand Old Man of the Liberal Party. Yet when it came to the Church of Rome, which he likened to “an Asian monarchy: nothing but one giddy height of despotism and one dead level of religious subservience,” Gladstone never outgrew the bigotry of his boyhood.199 Much is made of Bishop Butler’s influence on his religious thinking200 and of the religious interest he took in Homer201 but no one had more lasting influence than his first tutor, the Rev. Mr. Rawson, “a good man,” as Gladstone recalled in an autobiographical fragment, “of high No Popery opinions.”202 Newman’s religious development was infinitely richer. Yet he shared Gladstone’s respect for liberty. At the end of his life, Gladstone would say: “I was brought up to distrust and dislike liberty, I learned to believe in it.”203 Newman could have said the same, though the liberty that most interested him was the liberty of a responsible laity taking a responsible part in the life of what he once pointedly called the “Catholic Roman Church.”204

  Chapter 8

  Newman, Thackeray and Vanity Fair

  This was the greatness of Thackeray, the man whom sentimentalists without hearts or stomachs have conceived as a mere satirist … he felt, perhaps, more fully … than any other Englishman the immeasurable and almost unbearable emotion that is involved in the mere fact of human life. Dickens, with his indestructible vanity and boyishness, is always looking forward. Thackeray is always looking back in life. And no man will ever properly comprehend him until he has reached for a moment that state of the soul in which melancholy is the greatest of all the joys.

  G. K. Chesterton, Thackeray (1903)

  In “What Then Does Dr. Newman Mean?” Charles Kingsley quoted a passage from Newman’s Anglican Difficulties to substantiate his charge that “Truth, for its own sake is no virtue in his eyes, and he teaches that it need not be.” The passage was one of those gleeful grenades that Newman could not resist tossing at the Protestant Establishment now and again:

  Take a mere beggar-woman, lazy, ragged, and filthy, and not over-scrupulous of truth—(I do not say she had arrived at perfection)—but if she is chaste, and sober, and cheerful, and goes to her religious duties (and I am supposing not at all an impossible case), she will, in the eyes of the Church, have a prospect of heaven, which is quite closed and refused to the State’s pattern-man, the just, the upright, the generous, the honourable, the conscientious, if he be all this, not from a supernatural power—(I do not determine whether this is likely to be the fact, but I am contrasting views and principles)—not from a supernatural power, but from mere natural virtue.

  From Kingsley’s response, it was clear that the distinction between grace and natural virtue that Newman meant to make was not one his English Protestant audience was likely to appreciate. “He has taught the whole Celtic Irish population, that as long as they are chaste … and sober … and ‘go to their religious duties’ … they may look down upon the Protestant gentry who send over millions to feed them in famine; who found hospitals and charities to which they are admitted freely; who try to introduce among them capital, industry, civilization, and, above all, that habit of speaking the truth, for want of which they are what they are and are likely to remain such, as long as they have Dr. Newman for their teacher …” Indeed, for Kingsley, “if the Roman Catholic hierarchy in these realms had any sense of their own interests” … they would have sent Newman not to the Catholic University in Dublin, but to “their furthest mission among savages of the South Seas.”1 After Newman published his Apologia, Kingsley sent off a defiant letter to Alexander Macmillan, in whose magazine his initial charge against Newman’s veracity appeared: “I have determined to take no notice whatever of Dr Newman’s apology. I have nothing to retract, apologize for, explain. Deliberately, after 20 years of thought, I struck as hard as I could. Deliberately I shall strike again … though not one literary man in England approved. I know too well of what I am talking.” As for the Apologia itself, “I cannot trust – I can only smile at – the autobiography of a man who (beginning with Newman’s light, learning, and genius,) ends in believing … in the Infallibility of the Church, and in the Immaculate Conception. If I am to bandy words, it must be with sane persons.” Nor was he impressed by public opinion siding with Newman. “The world seems inclined to patronize Dr Newman and the Cafards just now, because having no faith of its own, it is awed by the seeming strength of fanaticism. I know them too well either to patronize or to fear them.” And he closed with an interesting comment. “I wish poor dear Thackeray had been alive. He knew what I know, and would have taken a tone about this matter … He was too true a liberal to pat lies and bigotry on the back.”2

  What Thackeray would have made of the Apologia and indeed of the controversy that brought it into being is an interesting question. Thackeray paid a fair amount of attention to Newman before his sudden death at the age of 52 in December 1863—the very month that Kingsley’s calumny appeared. He attended Newman’s King William Street lectures in 1850 and followed the Achilli trial, telling Lady Georgiana Fullerton, the Catholic convert and novelist, that Achilli was “a rascal hypocrite no doubt; but; as the law is, the verdict was right—though I think the judge’s behaviour in the trial was most unfair and unworthy.”3 Newman, for his part, also followed Thackeray’s career. Vanity Fair was published in book form in 1848, the year Newman founded the Birmingham Oratory. He also must have seen a g
ood deal of Thackeray’s fiction corroborating his own view of nineteenth-century English society. The Oratorian Ignatius Ryder told Thackeray’s biographer Gordon Ray that “Newman was fond of Thackeray, reading faithfully everything that he wrote down to the last unfinished work.”4 When Thackeray died, Newman wrote a heartfelt letter lamenting his death. So Kingsley was right: Thackeray would probably have had a decided view of the row between him and Newman, but in order to see what that view might have been, we shall need to revisit Thackeray’s life and work and, especially, his correspondence.