Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  “The truth, friend!” Arthur said imperturbably; “where is the truth? Show it me.” That is the question between us. I see it on both sides. I see it on the Conservative side of the House, and amongst the Radicals, and even on the Ministerial benches. I see it in this man who worships by Act of Parliament, and is rewarded with a silk apron and five thousand a year; in that man, who driven fatally by the remorseless logic of his creed, gives up everything, friends, fame, dearest ties, closest vanities, the respect of an army of churchmen, the recognised position of a leader, and passes over, truth-impelled, to the enemy, in whose ranks he is ready to serve henceforth as a nameless private soldier:—I see the truth in that man, as I do in his brother, whose logic drives him to quite a different conclusion, and who, after having passed a life in vain endeavours to reconcile an irreconcilable book, flings it at last down in despair, and declares, with tearful eyes, and hands up to Heaven, his revolt and recantation. If the truth is with all these, why should I take side with any one of them?106

  This deeply autobiographical passage shows that if Thackeray had a good deal of respect for Newman, he also found the assaults on the Old Testament that Frank Newman made in his various books compelling. About Frank’s book, The Soul: Her Sorrows and her Aspirations (1849), he was effusive. “There speaks a very pious loving humble soul … with an ascetical continence too—and a beautiful love and reverence –I’m a publican and sinner; but I believe those men [Arthur Hugh Clough and Frank Newman] are on the true track.”107 Nevertheless, by having Pen claim that both the orthodoxy of John Henry Newman and the heterodoxy of Frank Newman could simultaneously lay claim to truth, Thackeray, in effect, was attempting to justify his own growing skepticism. Indeed, in Thackeray’s table-talk, jotted down by Charles Bray, the friend of George Eliot, Thackeray claimed that Newman himself was prey to skepticism, which he converted to Roman Catholicism to repel—a charge that A. M. Fairbairn would level in the Contemporary Review twenty years later in May 1885. Thackeray, according to this account: “Talked of Newman. Called him a saint, in a way that was a blessing to hear, so heartily and truly did he utter it. Said that somewhere in his heart he (Newman) was a sceptic, but he had shut it down and locked it up as with Solomon’s Seal, and went on really believing in the Catholic faith.”108

  Thackeray’s ambivalence towards Newman and his faith has to be seen in the context of his more general ambivalence towards religion as a whole, which was aggravated by his lifelong opposition to his mother’s Bible religion. In Pendennis, the literary hero articulates an approach to Truth that, at first, seems thoroughly conventional and conformist. “Some are called upon to preach: let them preach. Of these preachers there are somewhat too many, methinks, who fancy they have the gift. But we cannot all be parsons in church … I will take off my hat in the place, and say my prayers there too, and shake hands with the clergyman as he steps on the grass outside.” This was the latitudinarianism at the heart of so much Broad Church Christianity. But then Thackeray has Pen point out that the religious conventions to which he is willing to submit are not quite what they might be. “Don’t I know that [the clergyman] being there is a compromise, and that he stands before me an Act of Parliament? That the church he occupies was built for other worship? That the Methodist chapel is next door; and that Bunyan the tinker is bawling out the tidings of damnation on the common hard by? Yes, I am a Sadducee; and I take things as I find them, and the world, and the Acts of Parliament of the world, as they are …”109 The Church of England might be imperfect but, for Thackeray, it was better than the alternatives, even if it was only kept together by opposition to what Soapy Sam Wilberforce called “the accursed abominations of the Papacy.”110 And yet it is impossible to read Thackeray’s fiction without seeing how deeply torn he was about England’s exile from Rome. In The Newcomes (1853), for example, he has Clive Newcome, whom he based on the Victorian painter Frederic Leighton (1830–96), describe the gulf between the Protestant English and the Roman Church with great poignancy. “There must be moments, in Rome especially, when every man of friendly heart, who writes himself English and Protestant, must feel a pang at thinking that he and his countrymen are insulated from European Christendom. An ocean separates us. From one shore or the other one can see the neighbour cliffs on clear days: one must wish sometimes that there were no stormy gulf between us … Of the beautiful parts of the great Mother Church I believe among us many people have no idea; we think of lazy friars, of pining cloistered virgins, of ignorant peasants worshipping wood and stones, bought and sold indulgences, absolutions, and the like common-places of Protestant satire.” And in this category, Thackeray was clearly including himself. Yet, like Macaulay, he also admired the staying power of the ancient faith. Beholding St. Peter’s in Rome, Clive Newcome is enraptured: “Lo! yonder inscription, which blazes round the dome of the temple, so great and glorious it looks like heaven almost, and as if the words were written in stars, it proclaims to all the world that this is Peter, and on this rock the Church shall be built, against which Hell shall not prevail. Under the bronze canopy his throne is lit with lights that have been burning before it for ages. Round this stupendous chamber are ranged the grandees of his court. Faith seems to be realized in their marble figures. Some of them were alive but yesterday; others, to be as blessed as they, walk the world even now doubtless; and the commissioners of heaven, here holding their court a hundred years hence, shall authoritatively announce their beatification. The signs of their power shall not be wanting. They heal the sick, open the eyes of the blind, cause the lame to walk to-day as they did eighteen centuries ago.” Here, Thackeray had Clive echo that famous passage in Macaulay’s review of Ranke’s History of the Popes, in which the Whig historian wrote of the perdurability of the Church with undisguised admiration: “She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.” Yet Thackeray has Clive end his paean to Rome on a note that is almost rueful. “Come, friend, let us acknowledge this, and go and kiss the toe of St. Peter. Alas! there’s the Channel always between us … So, you see, at those grand ceremonies which the Roman Church exhibits at Christmas, I looked on as a Protestant. Holy Father on his throne or in his palanquin, cardinals with their tails and their train-bearers, mitred bishops and abbots, regiments of friars and clergy, relics exposed for adoration, columns draped, altars illuminated, incense smoking, organs pealing, and boxes of piping soprani, Swiss guards with slashed breeches and fringed halberts—between us and all this splendour of old-world ceremony, there’s an ocean flowing …”111

  Despite his fascination with Catholicism, Thackeray wished to be at once the level-headed man of the world for whom religion was a harmless convention and the “truth-impelled” bohemian for whom it was an unknowable mystery. Bagehot recognized that in failing to become either, Thackeray found his fictional niche: “He is great in minute anatomy. The subsoil of life—not the very surface, but just the next layer, which one little painful scratch will bring up—this is his region, and it is an immense one.”112 And in this very immensity, Thackeray found a terrible solitude, one might almost say desolation, as he showed in Pendennis:

  Thus, oh friendly readers, we see how every man in the world, has his own private griefs and business, by which he is more cast down or occupied than by the affairs or sorrows of any other person. While Mrs. Pendennis is disquieting herself about losing her son, and that anxious hold she has had of him, as long as he has remained in the mother’s nest, whence he is about to take flight into the great
world beyond—while the Major’s great soul chafes and frets, inwardly vexed as he thinks what great parties are going on in London, and that he might be sunning himself in the glances of Dukes and Duchesses, but for those cursed affairs which keep him in a wretched little country hole—while Pen is tossing between his passion and a more agreeable sensation, unacknowledged yet, but swaying him considerably, namely, his longing to see the world—Mr. Smirke has a private care watching at his bed-side, and sitting behind him on his pony; and is no more satisfied than the rest of us. How lonely we are in the world! how selfish and secret, everybody! You and your wife have pressed the same pillow for forty years and fancy yourselves united. — Psha, does she cry out when you have the gout, or do you lie awake when she has the tooth-ache? Your artless daughter, seemingly all innocence and devoted to her mamma and her piano-lesson, is thinking of neither, but of the young Lieutenant with whom she danced at the last ball—the honest frank boy just returned from school is secretly speculating upon the money you will give him, and the debts he owes the tart-man. The old grandmother crooning in the corner and bound to another world within a few months, has some business or cares which are quite private and her own—very likely she is thinking of fifty years back, and that night when she made such an impression, and danced a cotillion with the Captain before your father proposed for her: or, what a silly little over-rated creature your wife is, and how absurdly you are infatuated about her—and, as for your wife—O philosophic reader, answer and say, — Do you tell her all? Ah, sir—a distinct universe walks about under your hat and under mine—all things in nature are different to each—the woman we look at has not, the same features, the dish we eat from has not the same taste to the one and the other—you and I are but a pair of infinite isolations, with some fellow-islands a little more or less near to us.113

  This should be contrasted with something Newman wrote to Miss Holmes after she shared with him some of her family history. “You were right in thinking that your family reminiscences would interest me,” he wrote. “I think nothing more interesting, and it is strange to think how evanescent, how apparently barren and result-less, are the ten thousand little details and complications of daily life and family history. Is there any record of them preserved any where, any more than of the fall of the leaves in Autumn? or are they themselves some reflexion, as in an earthly mirror, of some greater truths above? So I think of musical sounds and their combinations – they are momentary – but is it not some momentary opening and closing of the Veil which hangs between the worlds of spirit and sense?”114 Here, Newman acknowledges the grounds for skepticism that Thackeray saw, but only to show how the reality of the unseen proves them specious.

  Four years after writing this, in 1854, Thackeray was in Rome revisiting questions broached by Newman in his William Street lectures. “The most interesting man I have met with here is a convert, Mr. Pollen, whom Doyle sent with a letter …115 I try and understand from him what can be the secret of the religion for which he has given up rank chances and all good things of this life.”116 It is unfortunate that this meeting went nowhere because Pollen could have explained a good deal to Thackeray not only about Catholicism but about Newman, whose true practical qualities he recognized more clearly than many of his contemporaries. Educated at Eton and Christ Church, John Hungerford Pollen (1820–1902) was the nephew of Charles Robert Cockerell, the Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy and architect of the Ashmolean Museum, against whom Pugin railed with such mad venom. For the disciple of true Gothic, the Ashmolean was an “unsightly pile of pagan details.”117 In 1842, Pollen became a Fellow of Merton College, the ceiling of which he adorned with figures boldly modeled after his family and friends. In 1846, after traveling throughout the Middle East, he was ordained priest. In 1847, he traveled to France, Italy and Germany to study church architecture. On his return he joined Edward Pusey and Charles Marriot at the Tractarian seminary of St. Saviour’s, Leeds, where he became pro-vicar, while maintaining his fellowship at Merton.118 After the Bishop of Ripon protested against the Tractarians praying to the saints, Pollen’s Tractarian friends began trooping off to Rome. He did not join their ranks until 1852, after a solitary tour of Ireland. Resigning his fellowship at Merton, he went to Rome, where he met Thackeray. In 1854, Newman offered Pollen the professorship of fine arts at the Catholic University and he gladly accepted. Later he designed the University Church, St. Stephen’s Green, in the then-rarely-deployed Byzantine style, because, as he told Newman, the British Isles had had enough of Pugin’s Gothic. Newman agreed. “If Mr. Pugin persists … in loading with bad names the admirers of Italian architecture,” Newman told Ambrose Philipps de Lisle (1809–1878), the indefatigable ecumenist, “he is going the very way to increase their number. He will not be put down without authority which is infallible. And if we go to authority, I suppose Popes have given a greater sanction to Italian than to Gothic.” Newman had very decided views on architecture, telling Lady Shrewsbury in 1848, before he set to building the Birmingham Oratory, “… the Gothic aisle is unsuited to an Oratorian Church … I for one was converted to the Church, not by the medieval age, but by the primitive centuries—and it is natural that I should wish to renew the ecclesiastical structures of St. Ambrose and St. Leo. If the Catholic Church is large enough for different vocations and different orders … it is large enough, without mutual jealousies, for different styles of architecture. If I can admire the Cisterian architecture, others ought to allow themselves to admire the Gregorian and the Oratorian.”119 In later life, Pollen worked with and befriended the Pre-Raphaelite painters Millais, Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. At the Tate one can see Pollen’s beautiful daughter Anne (he eventually had ten children) in the girl in Burne-Jones’s King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. In 1863, at Thackeray’s recommendation, Pollen was made the assistant keeper of the South Kensington Museum, later the Victoria & Albert, which might have been something of an act of atonement on Thackeray’s part for his claiming in The Paris Sketch Book (1840), that Catholic art was an “absurd humbug.”120 Apropos William Thomas Roden’s portrait of Newman, Pollen made some acute observations about caricature and reality, which might have profited both the satirist and the would-be Christian in Thackeray.

  I want to relieve my mind of one or two reflections which crossed it on seeing the very clever picture of Fr Newman by Mr Roden. I think it shows great talent and but for certain accidental features I should … be able to speak highly of it to Watts, Leighton and other painters who will be interested in hearing that some measure of justice has been given to any portrait of such a personage. The curious feature in it that continues to strike my remembrance is the expression not of seriousness but despair particularly expressed by some uncertain movements between those of tears and laughter (hysteria in fact) about the lines of the mouth. Now as I have long known and observed that organ I am well acquainted with the peculiar firmness, occasionally perhaps the sternness of its expression … How comes it so changed and enfeebled in this otherwise serious portrait? It would seem as if the original were represented as despairing of some great issue, the salvation of the Catholics, e.g. (since he is a priest) or of the Protestants he once belonged to. But would such a man as we know him to be be ever in such a plight? … Strong men have to undergo sorrow often and the person represented in the portrait has had an ample share of it and gone through great adversities. But would it not be a libel on any religion to represent the presence or remembrance of these things as causing despair? or a feeble inability to accept with confidence the dispensations of Providence. I should be surprised if a great painter represented the prophet and King David with any intimation of feebleness even under the tremendous inflictions we know of from history. A weak or a lugubrious look in a man who can give a rash opponent such sore bones when he leasts expects it and whose characteristic is a brightness and elasticity that “answers the whip” at all times seems to the artist world a needless element of failure.121

  Newman bristled w
henever attempts were made to caricature him as over-sensitive—this, after all, was what Pusey did after Newman converted. When an unknown female correspondent asked after the Roden portrait, Newman replied: “My dear Madam, If you saw me and talked with me you never would consider me sad or distressed – though the advance of years and the loss of friends of course have a depressing effect on mind and body. My painter, a man of genius, made, like men of genius, a great mistake. He acted on a theory. He caught at some passage of my Apologia, in which I speak of my sorrow at my loss of my Oxford friends and determined to represent me as mourning for them. My friends here were very much hurt at his acting on such a view, and from the first up to this time are not reconciled to what they consider a mistake.”122

  In addressing the misconceptions about Newman that found their way into Roden’s portrait, Pollen recalled the larger misconceptions that Newman wrote the Apologia to expose. After Kingsley attempted to make his caricatures representative of the real man, Newman, as he said, “recognised what I had to do, though I shrank from both the task and the exposure which it would entail. I must, I said, give the true key to my whole life; I must show what I am, that it may be seen what I am not, and that the phantom may be extinguished which gibbers instead of me. I wish to be known as a living man, and not as a scarecrow which is dressed up in my clothes.”123 And in attempting to get his own portrait right, Newman knew that he would come in for criticism. “I may be accused of laying stress on little things, of being beside the mark, of going into impertinent or ridiculous details, of sounding my own praise, of giving scandal; but this is a case above all others, in which I am bound to follow my own lights and to speak out my own heart. It is not at all pleasant for me to be egotistical; nor to be criticized for being so. It is not pleasant to reveal to high and low, young and old, what has gone on within me from my early years. It is not pleasant to be giving to every shallow or flippant disputant the advantage over me of knowing my most private thoughts, I might even say the intercourse between myself and my Maker. But I do not like to be called to my face a liar and a knave; nor should I be doing my duty to my faith or to my name, if I were to suffer it. I know I have done nothing to deserve such an insult, and if I prove this, as I hope to do, I must not care for such incidental annoyances as are involved in the process.”124