Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  And he ended his letter with a cri de coeur that shows what an impact Thackeray’s work had on him. “What a world this is – how wretched they are, who take it for their portion. Poor Thackeray – it seems but the other day since we became Catholics – now all his renown has been since that – he has made his name, has been made much of, has been fêted, and has gone out, all since 1846 or 1847, all since I went to Propaganda and came back a Philippine.”32

  Thackeray would have greatly enjoyed the fact that Newman saw a frazzled preacher in his last things. In his Roundabout essay, “De Finibus,” Thackeray confessed, “Among the sins of commission which novel-writers not seldom perpetuate, is the sin of grandiloquence, or tall-talking, against which, for my part, I will offer up a special libera me. This is the sin of schoolmasters, governesses, critics, sermoners, and instructors of young or old people. Maybe (for I am making a clean breast, and liberating my soul), perhaps of all the novel-spinners now extant, the present speaker is the most addicted to preaching.”33 It is noteworthy that G. K. Chesterton also recognized this aspect of the novelist, confirming that “Thackeray, from the beginning of his life until the end, consistently and seriously preached a gospel. His gospel, like all deep and genuine ones, may be hard to sum up in a phrase, but if we wished to sum it up we could hardly express it better than by saying that it was the philosophy of the beauty and glory of fools.”34 Certainly this would apply to William Dobbin, Amelia Sedley, Joseph Sedley, Rawdon Crawley, even to Becky Sharp, if we agree that her cleverness ultimately proved a very beautiful, even a glorious foolishness. After all, she brings together Dobbin and Amelia. But Chesterton’s paradoxical wit divined something even deeper in Thackeray’s preaching. “He believed as profoundly as St. Paul that in the ultimate realm of essential values God made the foolish things of the earth to confound the wise. He looked out with lucent and terrible eyes upon the world with all its pageants and achievements; he saw men of action, he saw men of genius, he saw heroes; and amid men of action, men of genius, and heroes he saw with absolute sincerity only one thing worth being—a gentleman. And when we understand what he meant by that phrase, the absolute sufficiency of a limpid kindliness, of an obvious and dignified humility, of a softness for noble memories and a readiness for any minute self-sacrifice, we may, without any affected paradox, but rather with serious respect, sum up Thackeray’s view of life by saying that amid all the heroes and geniuses he saw only one thing worth being—a fool.”35

  Newman took a similar position with respect to the Oratory. As he told his fellow Oratorian, John Dalgairns, “We must be content to be despised in (what the Protestant version calls) ‘our day of small things.’”36 To Ambrose St. John, with whom he studied for the Catholic priesthood in Rome, he explained what he meant more fully.

  I said not so long ago in Chapter, what I deeply feel, that no Oratory, which is likely to be in England, can so exactly fulfil the maxim of St Philip of ‘amare nesciri.’ It is our great privilege, that we can work in many ways here, and get no credit at all for it; and that, first, because we are not seen, and next because those, to whom we minister, are persons of low estate, of whom the world thinks little. And as to contempt, recollect, my dear Fathers, that St Philip, as Fr Bacci tells us, ‘took great pleasure in being lightly esteemed, nay, even in being actually despised, and regarded as a man of no worth; and he was always saying to his spiritual children, ‘Throw yourselves into God’s hands, and be sure, that, if He wants any thing of you, He will make you good in all that He wishes to use you for.’ Again ‘As a crowning maxim, he laid it down as a rule, that to obtain the gift of humility perfectly, four things were necessary, spernere mundum, spernere nullum, spernere se ipsum, spernere se sperni.’ ‘He scarcely ever had this sentence of St Bernard out of his mouth, “to despise the world, to despise no one, to despise self, to despise being despised.”’37

  Another thing the two men shared was a rather generous view of Charles Kingsley, the acolyte of Carlyle and Maurice, whose exaltation of the natural man made him a fierce foe of everything Catholic. While seeing his “grave and gratuitous slander” as that of “a furious foolish fellow,” Newman bore Kingsley no grudges.38 In the preface to the Apologia, he made it clear that, “I am in warfare with him, but I wish him no ill; it is very difficult to get up resentment towards persons whom one has never seen.”39 When the controversy had run its course, he told one correspondent, “I should not have singled out Mr Kingsley for public notice unless I thought it really worth while to deal a blow against a virulent blasphemer of the Catholic Church.” After Kingsley’s death, Newman was sorry that they had never had a chance to meet. He was convinced that Kingsley had done him a favor by attacking him: it gave him an opportunity to clear his name and defend the Catholic faith. Indeed, Newman went further: “by his passionate attack on me [he] became one of my best friends, whom I always wished to shake hands with when living, and towards whose memory I have much tenderness.”40 He even said a “Mass for his soul on the news of his death.”41

  After Thackeray met Kingsley, he wrote of him as “a fine honest goahead fellow, who charges a subject heartily impetuously with the greatest courage and simplicity, but with narrow eyes (his are extraordinary brave blue & honest) and with little knowledge of the world I think. But he’s superior to us worldlings in many ways, and I wish I had some of his honest pluck.”42 Despite this favorable impression, Thackeray was not entirely impressed with Kingsley’s fiction. He recognized the provocative power of Yeast (1848), Kingsley’s fictional ragbag into which he threw his views on everything from the rustic poor, Roman Catholicism, Tractarianism, non-conformity, and the game laws to celibacy, sex, marriage, banking, sanitary reform, and the irrepressible Irish. But Thackeray found Alton Locke (1850), Kingsley’s chartist novel, an unreadable bore. Indeed, the condition-of-England novel, whether Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) or Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) struck him as conventional as any other genre of fiction—and as little faithful to the reality of life.43 What set Vanity Fair (1847) apart was Thackeray’s witty defiance of convention, though he could never resist lampooning the conventions he eschewed. Early on in the novel, he makes his readers aware of how aware he is of these literary protocols in an amusing aside.

  We might have treated this subject in the genteel, or in the romantic, or in the facetious manner. Suppose we had laid the scene in Grosvenor-square, with the very same adventures—would not some people have listened? Suppose we had shown how Lord Joseph Sedley fell in love, and the Marquis of Osborne became attached to Lady Amelia, with the full consent of the Duke, her noble father; or instead of the supremely genteel, suppose we had resorted to the entirely low, and described what was going on in Mr. Sedley’s kitchen;— how black Sambo was in love with the cook, (as indeed he was), and how he fought a battle with the coachman in her behalf; how the knife-boy was caught stealing a cold shoulder of mutton, and Miss Sedley’s new femme de chambre refused to go to bed without a wax candle; such incidents might be made to provoke much delightful laughter, and be supposed to represent scenes of ‘life.’

  In Vanity Fair, Thackeray confounded expectations by abandoning the approved fictional conventions and offering instead what the poet Delmore Schwartz called the “scrimmage of appetite”—which exemplifies Newman’s understanding of the inalienably secular nature of literature.44 “Man’s work will savour of man,” Newman wrote in one of his discourses on university education, “in his elements and powers excellent and admirable, but prone to disorder and excess, to error and to sin. Such too will be his literature; it will have the beauty and the fierceness, the sweetness and the rankness, of the natural man …”45

  One can see Thackeray also confounding conventional expectations in his travel writing. The Irish Sketch Book (1843) is full of surprisingly favorable accounts of Irish priests. For Thackeray, Bishop Doyle, the founding pastor of Carlow Cathedral, “has the place of honour within it; nor, perhaps, did any Christian pastor ever merit the affection of his flock
more, than that great and high-minded man. He was the best champion that the Catholic Church and cause ever had in Ireland: in learning and admirable kindness and virtue, the best example to the clergy of his religion; and if the country is now filled with schools, where the humblest peasant in it can have the benefit of a liberal and wholesome education, it owes this great boon mainly to his noble exertions and to the spirit which they awakened.”46 This echoes Newman’s views. Writing to Miss Holmes in 1854 after he had been in Ireland off and on for three years to set up the Catholic University, Newman gave it as his decided opinion that “the Irish Priesthood is a nobly devoted body of men. You must not judge of them by the newspapers. I admire them exceedingly. Many of them are persons of cultivated minds generally. Those I have met about the country are zealous, hardworking men. You, who are getting so philosophically liberal about Italian architecture and Italian ways, will soon understand that, being intended for the people, they are taken from the people. There are but few in the upper classes Catholic in Ireland, and if the Bishops looked out for parish priests among the upper classes, even if they could get them, they would not suit the classes for whom they have to work. They are commonly taken out of the families of small farmers, they have strong constitutions, they know the habits of the people, and are fully trusted by them.”47 Nearly thirty years later, when Newman received the red hat, George Butler, Bishop of Limerick, wrote to congratulate him: “I do not know that any event in the Ecclesiastical world ever gave me more real joy than your elevation to the Cardinalate. I have been desiring it, and speaking of it as a thing that ought to be – and now that it is come I have a right to rejoice. It is strongly in my mind … that amongst your many claims to favour and honor at the hands of the Church, what you did for Ireland in connexion with the Catholic University was not, and could not have been forgotten by our Holy Father. You laboured hard and suffered much, and made many sacrifices in our Cause whilst you were with us; and you did this because you loved our Nation, and you wished to give effect, as no one else could with equal power, to the behests of the Holy Father in our regard. It is most pleasant to me to think that Leo XIIIth, who loves us too, has remembered this …”48

  When it came to the Catholic priesthood, both Newman and Thackeray had been born into a world steeped in No Popery, but it is remarkable that when they saw real priests, not caricatures, they tended to be full of admiration.49 This was the sort of thing that Thackeray prided himself on in his best work—stripping away convention and uncovering the truth beneath. Many good critics, from Gordon Ray to John Carey to D. J. Taylor, have touched on how irksome Thackeray found the taboos of nineteenth-century English fiction. “There are things we do and know perfectly well in Vanity Fair, though we never speak of them,” the narrator of the novel observes: “as the Ahrimanians worship the devil, but don’t mention him: and a polite public will no more bear to read an authentic description of vice than a truly refined English or American female will permit the word breeches to be pronounced in her chaste hearing. And yet, madam, both are walking the world before our faces every day, without much shocking us. If you were to blush every time they went by, what complexions you would have!”50 Nevertheless, for all his willingness to have his fiction honor the truth of experience, it is remarkable how seldom he managed this when he was considering Catholics and Catholicism. In choosing to perpetuate the slurs of No Popery, he often chose caricature over reality, though there were revealing exceptions to this rule, when he seemed to recognize that the conventions of No Popery were as falsifying as the conventions of fiction. And his tour of Ireland, where he had the occasion to meet Catholic clergy face to face, was one of those exceptions.

  To understand how Thackeray and Newman viewed the world, it is necessary to look a little more closely at their formative years. At Charterhouse, Thackeray was met with a kind of mob rule inescapable at a public school where the boys were often left to themselves. In his excellent biography of the novelist, D. J. Taylor gives a vivid picture of Carthusian school life beyond the classroom. “What the boys did outside school hours was largely ignored. Extra-curricular activities consequently ranged from bringing in pornographic books and planning excursions to watch public hangings at nearby Newgate to wandering around Holywell Street, where the local prostitutes stood soliciting custom. Even the most innocent activities took place against a distant clamour of moaning animals—the beasts of Smithfield being herded up for slaughter.”51 This may have been good fodder for the future novelist but scarred the intelligent, gentle boy. Once he escaped to Cambridge, Thackeray wrote to his mother, “I have not that gratitude and affection for that respectable seminary near Smithfield, which I am told good scholars always have for their place of education. I cannot think that school to be a good one, when as a child I was lulled into indolence & when I grew older and & could think for myself was abused into sulkiness and bullied into despair.”52 Later, in The Irish Sketch Book, he said of Eton what he could have said of Charterhouse: “There are at this present writing five hundred boys at Eton, kicked, and licked, and bullied, by another hundred—scrubbing shoes, running errands, making false concords, and … putting their posteriors on a block for Dr. Hawtrey to lash at; and still calling it education. They are proud of it—good heavens!—absolutely vain of it; as what dull barbarians are not proud of their dulness and barbarism? They call it the good old English system.”53 Nevertheless, like so many Old Boys, Thackeray looked back on his schooldays with unabashed nostalgia, feeling for the ignominies of school life the same reminiscential tenderness that old soldiers often feel for war. Thackeray, for example, had his nose broken by a bully named Venables, which disfigured him for life, and yet repeatedly throughout his later writing he revisits the episode as though it had been all good fun. Nevertheless, however wistful Thackeray might have become about a place that was more brutalizing than nurturing, it gave him the sense of mission that made him a writer.

  I have long gone about with a conviction on my mind that I had a work to do—a Work, if you like, with a great W; a Purpose to fulfil; a chasm to leap into, like Curtius, horse and foot; a Great Social Evil to Discover and to Remedy. That Conviction Has Pursued me for Years. It has Dogged me in the Busy Street; Seated Itself By Me in The Lonely Study; Jogged My Elbow as it Lifted the Wine-cup at The Festive Board; Pursued me through the Maze of Rotten Row; Followed me in Far Lands. On Brighton’s Shingly Beach, or Margate’s Sand, the Voice Outpiped the Roaring of the Sea; it Nestles in my Nightcap, and It Whispers, ‘Wake, Slumberer, thy Work Is Not Yet Done.’ Last Year, By Moonlight, in the Colosseum, the Little Sedulous Voice Came To Me and Said, ‘Smith, or Jones’ (The Writer’s Name is Neither Here nor There), ‘Smith or Jones, my fine fellow, this is all very well, but you ought to be at home writing your great work on SNOBS.54

  Here was the sense of purpose that animates all of Thackeray’s best work and it was Charterhouse that gave it to him. It was also Charterhouse that left him with a view of the world that was keenly ambivalent. Walter Bagehot once wrote, apropos this aspect of Thackeray: “Hazlitt used to say of himself … that he could not enjoy the society in a drawing room for thinking of the opinion which the footman formed of his odd appearance as he went upstairs. Thackeray had too healthy and stable a nature to be thrown so wholly off his balance; but the footman’s view of life was never out of his head … just so this most impressible, susceptible genius could not help half accepting, half believing the common … view of life, although he perfectly knew in his inner mind and deeper nature that this apparent and superficial view of life was misleading, inadequate and deceptive.”55 At the same time, Thackeray’s highly satirical view of the world convinced him that it was presumptuous of men to bother “the Awful Divinity … with their private concerns.” For Thackeray, the idea of a personal God taking a personal interest in each of his creatures seemed faintly ridiculous. On the contrary, he saw in God a kind of impersonality: “In health, disease, birth, life, death, here, hereafter, I am His subject & creature
. He lifts me up and sets me down … so He orders my beard to grow.”56 For one contemporary critic, “His fatalism is connected with a strong sense of the powerlessness of the human will. He is a profound sceptic. Not a sceptic in religious conviction, or one who ignores devotional feeling—far from it; but a sceptic of principles, of human will, of the power in man to ascertain his duties or direct his aims. He believes in God out of the world.”57

  In contrast, Newman’s faith was profoundly personal, originating, as it did, “in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator.”58 After a childhood in which, as he says, “I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true: my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers, and talismans …,” he was converted by the Rev. Walter Mayers, of Pembroke College, Oxford, his Evangelical classical master at Ealing School, whom he recognized as “the human means of divine faith in me.”59 Mayers put into his hands the book that made such a deep impression on Samuel Johnson, William Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, as well as Philip Doddridge’s Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, which converted William Wilberforce. Ealing also enabled Newman to pursue his delight in Latin verse and the English prose of Johnson and Gibbon. And yet, like Thackeray, Newman left school with a deep distrust of the world, caused, not by the snobbery of schoolboys but by his father’s financial reverses, which ended in bankruptcy. Newman was also prone, as he said, from an early age, to a “mistrust of the reality of material phenomena.”60 Indeed, as a child, he confessed, “I thought life might be a dream, or I an Angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world.”61 One salutary result of his conversion was that he was disabused of this notion, though he always tended to regard the unseen, supernatural world as more real than the seen, physical world, a tendency which would only deepen with the death of his beloved sister, Mary. “The world of spirits … though unseen, is present; present, not future, not distant. It is not above the sky, it is not beyond the grave; it is now and here; the kingdom of God is among us.”62