Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  34 LD, 30:319, JHN to St. George Jackson Mivart (6 March 1884).

  35 Apologia, p. 78.

  36 LD, 9:63, JHN to Maria Giberne (12 August 1842).

  37 See E. I. Watkin. Roman Catholicism in England: From the Reformation to 1950 (Oxford, 1958), pp. 186–7.

  38 The Present Position of Catholics in England, pp. 61–62.

  39 LD, 9:520.

  40 Apologia, p. 245.

  41 LD, 9:491, A Lady to Jemima Newman (30 August 1843).

  42 See LD, 9: 336, note 1.

  43 See LD, 9:560.

  44 Meriol Trevor, John Henry Newman: The Pillar of the Cloud (London, 1962), pp. 358–59.

  45 LD, 12:62, JHN to Dominic Barberi (14 March 1847).

  46 Father Dominic quoted in Meriol Trevor, Newman: The Pillar of the Cloud, p. 360.

  47 Frederick Maurice, The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice (London, 1885), Vol. 2, p. 476.

  48 Thomas Huxley, Science and Christian Tradition: Essays (New York, 1897), Vol. 5, p. 343.

  49 H. P. Liddon, The Life of E.P. Pusey (London, 1893), Vol. II, pp. 101–02.

  50 In 1847, Bishop Phillpots of Exeter refused to install Charles Gorham to the living of Exeter because he would not accept the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. When Gorham appealed the ruling, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council overruled the bishop, and Gorham was installed to the living after all, which outraged High Churchmen and led to William Ewart Gladstone’s two closest friends, Henry Edward Manning and James Hope, seceding to Rome. Although Gladstone deeply regretted these defections, he nonetheless recognized that the Judgment went “to the very root of all life and all teaching in the Church of England” by not only undermining the doctrine of baptismal regeneration but allowing the English State to overrule the Church on doctrinal matters.

  51 Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott of Abbotsford (London, 1884), Vol. II, pp. 201–02.

  52 See Positio for Newman’s Canonization (Rome, 1989), p. 415.

  53 Paraclita Reilly, Aubrey de Vere: Victorian Observer (Dublin, 1956), p. 91.

  54 Aubrey de Vere, quoted in Reilly, p. 30.

  55 Ibid., p. 92.

  56 Ibid., p. 32.

  57 See Robert Welch’s entry on de Vere in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  58 It is an amusing irony that the man whom the Republic of Ireland now regards as one of its cultural heroes never surrendered his British passport.

  59 Ibid., p. 30.

  60 Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins including his correspondence with Coventry Patmore, ed. Claude Abbott (London, 1956), p. 58.

  61 LD, 30:191, JHN to Gerard Manley Hopkins (27 February 1883).

  62 LD, 9:212, JHN to E. B. Pusey (30 January 1843).

  63 LD, 9:189, JHN to J. W. Bowden (29 December 1842).

  64 See Wilfrid Ward, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman (London, 1912), p. 385.

  65 See William Clifford, Bishop of Clifton, Sermon preached at the funeral of His Eminence John Henry Newman Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church (London, 1890), pp. 4, 13–14.

  66 From Cardinal Newman: Words spoken by the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster at the Solemn Requiem at the Oratory, South Kensington August 20th, 1890 (London, 1890), pp. 5, 7–8.

  67 LD, 9:270, JHN to Samuel Rickards (7 March 1843).

  68 LD, 9:463, JHN to John Keble (20 August 1843).

  69 LD, 9:344, JHN to Henry Wilberforce (11 May 1843).

  70 LD, 11:294, JHN to Henry Wilberforce (13 December 1846).

  71 Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, ed. Lady Georgiana Burne-Jones (London, 1904), p. 59.

  72 LD, 25:440, Matthew Arnold to JHN (29 November 1871).

  73 Shairp, Studies in Poetry and Philosophy, p. 208.

  74 Frederic Rogers, quoted in Robert Dudley Middleton, Newman at Oxford (Oxford, 1950), p. 98.

  75 John Hungerford Pollen, quoted in Meriol Trevor, Newman: Light in Winter (London, 1962), p. 61.

  76 Mark Pattison, Memoirs of an Oxford Don (London, 1885), pp. 100–01.

  77 Mark Pattison, Review of Tom Mozley’s Reminiscences of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement, in The Academy, Issue 22 (July–December 1882).

  78 LD, 10:207–08, John Bramston to JHN (10 April 1844).

  79 LD, 10:208, JHN to John Bramston (12 April 1844).

  80 William Lockhart, quoted in Vincent Ferrer Blehl, Pilgrim Journey: John Henry Newman 1801–1945 (London, 2002), p. 201.

  81 A. M. Fairbairn, Catholicism Roman and Anglican (London, 1899), p. 215.

  82 Ibid., pp. 87–89.

  83 LD, 7:66, JHN to Mrs. John Mozley (23 April 1839).

  84 LD, 24:130, JHN to Henry Wilberforce (20 August 1868).

  85 LD, 24:77, JHN to J. Walker of Scarborough (22 May 1868).

  86 Fairbairn, Catholicism Roman and Anglican, pp. 92–93.

  87 Noel Annan, Our Age: English Intellectuals between the World Wars – A Group Portrait (London, 1989), pp. 157–70.

  88 Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York, 1988), p. 342.

  89 To argue that Newman’s work in the Oxford Movement was nothing more than an unconscious continuation of much that the eighteenth-century High Church had been doing requires one to imagine a very high level of unconsciousness in Newman, or ignorance. As it was, he was convinced that his purposes were otherwise, as he showed in a letter to Catherine Froude: “… the hollowness of High Churchism (or whatever it is called) is to me so very clear that it surprises me, (not that persons should not see it at once), but that any should not see it at last, and, alas, I must add that I do not think it safe for any one who does see it, not to act on his conviction of it at once.” (LD, 12:223, JHN to Mrs. Froude (16 June 1848))

  90 Frederick Meyrick, Memories of Life at Oxford, p. 27.

  91 LD, 20:443, JHN to Mrs. John Mozley (18 May 1863).

  92 LD, 31:125, A. M. Fairbairn to JHN (11 March 1886).

  93 LD, 31:126, JHN to A. M. Fairbairn (15 March 1886).

  94 See “Faith And Reason Contrasted its Habits of Mind” (1839) in Oxford University Sermons (1843), p. 201.

  Chapter 1 John Keble and the Crisis of Tractarianism

  1 The witty Oratorian Father Francis Bacchus quotes this observation of Charles Reading, the hero of Loss and Gain in his edition of Newman’s letters to Keble. See Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and others 1839–1845 (London, 1917), p. 359. I have used this edition of the Keble/Newman correspondence in certain cases because it includes letters from Keble to Newman that are not included in the Letters and Diaries. In addition, it is easier to see the drama of the correspondence when the Keble/Newman letters are presented separately. I have included dates of the letters for those who wish to locate the letters in the Letters and Diaries.

  2 R. W. Church, The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years 1833–1945 (Oxford, 1922), p. 385.

  3 LD, 8:161, JHN to Dr. Wiseman (6 April 1841).

  4 LD, 9:346–47, JHN to John Keble (18 May 1843).

  5 LD, 28:373, ‘Notice to Letters of 1843–1845’ (19 June 1878).

  6 Lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in submitting to the Catholic Church (1950), p. 3.

  7 Thomas Mozley, Reminiscences Chiefly of Oriel College and The Oxford Movement (London, 1882), Vol. 1, p. 219.

  8 Georgina Battiscombe, John Keble: A Study in Limitations (London, 1963), p. 6.

  9 Ibid., p. 37.

  10 Ibid., p. 11.

  11 Ibid., p. 11.

  12 John Keble, Sermons Academical and Occasional (Oxford, 1848), pp. i–ii.

  13 R. W. Church, The Oxford Movement, p. 24.

  14 Battiscombe, John Keble, p. 9.

  15 Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 220.

  16 A. J. Froude, “Oxford Counter Reformation,” in Short Studies on Great Subjects (London, 1907), p. 193.

  17 Owen Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement: Tractarian Essays (Cambridge, 1990), p. 62.

  18 Edward Pusey, quoted in Walter Lock, John Keble (London, 1895), p. 4.

  19
Battiscombe, John Keble, p. 37.

  20 R. W. Church, The Oxford Movement, p. 24.

  21 John Taylor Coleridge, A Memoir of the Rev. John Keble (London, 1870), p. 70.

  22 Thomas Mozley, Reminiscences Chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement (London, 1882), Vol. 1, p. 37.

  23 See “Newman and Roman Catholicism,” by Ronald Knox, in Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians: A Historic Revaluation of the Victorian Age (New York, 1966), p. 127.

  24 R. W. Church, The Oxford Movement, p. 51.

  25 Keble, quoted in Piers Brendon, Hurrell Froude and the Oxford Movement (London, 1974), p. 47.

  26 Ibid., p. 47.

  27 Ibid., p. 56.

  28 Ibid., p. 47.

  29 Apologia, p. 34.

  30 Froude quoted in Church, The Oxford Movement, p. 54.

  31 Remains, Vol. 1, pp. 370–71.

  32 Mark Pattison, Memoirs of an Oxford Don (London, 1885), pp. 53–54.

  33 Piers Brendon, Hurrell Froude and the Oxford Movement (London, 1974), p. 82.

  34 LD, 2:45 JHN to Pusey (29 June 1882). For Pusey, were “personal excellence, high talents, a pure and beautiful mind, alone necessary,” Keble might have been the better choice; but the Provostship demanded “a great knowledge of human nature, and a general practical turn of mind,” which Keble did not possess. Later, in 1876, at the consecration of Keble College Chapel, Pusey regretted the choice, saying that “The whole of the later history of our Church might have been changed had we been wiser … To us it became a sorrow of our lives” (Liddon, Pusey, Vol. I, pp. 136–37). Newman’s assessment took in the longer view: “I recollect making Jenkyns laugh by saying in defence of my vote: ‘You know we are not electing an Angel, but a Provost. If we were electing an Angel, I should, of course vote for Keble, but the case is different.’ I voted, however, for Hawkins from my great affection for, and admiration of him. I have never ceased to love him to this day. I certainly was sorry I had helped in electing Hawkins – but I can’t say I ever wished the election undone. Without it, there would have been no movement, no Tracts, no Library of the Fathers.” – Letter of 29 June 1882 to Pusey; cf. letter of 9 August 1866 to Henry James Coleridge.

  35 Remains of the Late Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude: Fellow of Oriel College Oxford (London, 1838), Vol. I, p. 438.

  36 Battiscombe, John Keble, pp. 139–40.

  37 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays, enlarged edition (London, 1951), p. 21.

  38 Thomas Hardy paid close attention to Keble. Robert Gittings, Hardy’s biographer, noted how “Hardy’s debt to Keble in his own later poems is not only in verbal half-memories, like the ‘bright hair flapping free’ of his lyric to his first wife; it is also in his ceaseless lyric invention.” See Robert Gittings, Young Thomas Hardy (London, 1975), p. 50.

  39 See Anne Ridler’s comments regarding her poem “Villanelle for the Middle Way,” from Collected Poems (London, 1997) at http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=1720.

  40 Eliot, quoted in Lyndall Gordon, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New York, 1998), p. 147. Eliot referred to The Waste Land as “the relief of a personal … grouse against life.”

  41 Basil Willey, Nineteenth Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold (London, 1949), p. 77.

  42 Charlotte M. Yonge, John Keble’s Parishes: A History of Hursley and Otterbourne (London, 1898), p. 75.

  43 Battiscombe, John Keble, p. 55.

  44 Ibid., p. 165.

  45 Hurrell Froude to JHN (9 August 1835), in John Henry Newman and Abbé Jager, ed. Louis Allen (Oxford, 1975), p. 179.

  46 Coleridge, Vol. 1, p. 271.

  47 Battiscombe, John Keble, p. 165.

  48 Ibid., p. 338.

  49 Edinburgh Review, Vol. 63 (April–July 1836), p. 238.

  50 Battiscombe, John Keble, p. 191.

  51 Arthur Penryn Stanley, Life of Thomas Arnold, D.D. Head-Master of Rugby (London, 1904), p. 399.

  52 Letters of Frederic Lord Blachford, ed. George Eden Marindin (London, 1896), p. 158.

  53 LD, 5:251, JHN to Simeon Lloyd Pope (3 March 1836). For a less polemical view of Hampden, see Richard Brent’s excellent article on him in the ODNB, Vol. 24, pp. 987–90.

  54 Battiscombe, John Keble, p. 226.

  55 About Peter Young’s selflessness, Charlotte Keble once remarked: “he is the sort of person who must be made to think about himself or he would quite forget.” See Battiscombe, John Keble, p. 223.

  56 Church, The Oxford Movement, pp. 334–35.

  57 LD, 9:375.

  58 Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. X, p. 1180.

  59 Ibid., p. 257.

  60 See “Preface on the Present Position of English Churchmen,” from John Keble, Sermons Academical and Occasional (London, 1848), pp. xxiv–xxv.

  61 Anglican Difficulties, p. 72.

  62 Ibid., pp. 47–48.

  63 W. J. Copeland, quoted in Piers Brendon, Hurrell Froude and the Oxford Movement (London, 1974), p. 50.

  64 Apologia, p. 28.

  65 Wilfrid Ward, William George Ward and the Oxford Movement (London, 1889), p. 318.

  66 Apologia, pp. 28–29.

  67 Hurrell Froude, quoted in Brendon, p. 73.

  68 Archdeacon Froude, quoted in Brendon, p. 84.

  69 R. W. Church, The Oxford Movement, pp. 26–27.

  70 Ibid., pp. 31–32.

  71 The Autobiography of Isaac Williams, ed. George Prevost (London, 1893), p. 19.

  72 Ibid., p. 19.

  73 In 1830, Keble wrote Perceval, “the Press is the real mischief.” See Battiscombe, John Keble, p. 136. Newman devoted as much time as he did to the British Critic and to the Rambler because he recognized that it was important to give first Tractarian and then Roman Catholic views some popular dissemination. Of course, there were many others who saw Newman’s own periodical efforts—particularly with respect to the Tracts of the Times—as themselves mischievous. In May, 1838, Newman wrote Pusey: “Fausett to-day fired off a sermon against us, as leading to Popery …” Godfrey Faussett, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, complained that, “when … the marks of deliberation and design, the evidence of numbers and of combination … find their way into the periodical and popular and most widely disseminated literature of the day; – when the wild and visionary sentiments of an enthusiastic mind, involving in their unguarded expression an undisguised preference for a portion at least of Papal superstition, and occasionally even a wanton outrage on the cherished feelings of the sincere Protestant … and this too under circumstances which imply the concurrence and approval, and responsibility too, of an indefinite and apparently numerous body of friends and correspondents and editors and reviewers; – who shall any longer deny the imperative necessity which exists for the most decisive language …” The Revival of Popery, Oxford, 1838, pp. 13–15; see also LD, 6:247

  74 Apologia, p. 200.

  75 Autobiographical Writings, pp. 200–01.

  76 Battiscombe, John Keble, p. 40.

  77 LD:20:450, JHN to Mrs. Edward Bellasis (21 May 1863).

  78 See Newman’s sermon, “Obedience Without Love, As Instanced in the Character of Balaam,” 2 April 1837.

  79 See John Lock, John Keble (London, 1895), p. 15.

  80 “Father Dominic the Passionist is passing this way, on his way from Aston in Staffordshire to Belgium … He is to come to Littlemore for a night as a guest of one of us whom he has admitted at Aston. He does not know of my intentions, but I shall ask of him admission into the one true Fold of the Redeemer.” See LD, 11:3, JHN to Henry Wilberforce (7 October 1845).

  81 A. J. P. Taylor, From Napoleon to the Second International: Essays on 19th Century Europe (London, 1993), p. 122.

  82 LD, 2:125, JHN to Mrs. Jemima Newman (1 March 1829).

  83 LD, 2:119, JHN to Samuel Rickards (6 February 1829).

  84 Lord Wellington, quoted in J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832 (London, 1985), p. 413.

  85 Ibid., p. 413
.

  86 Lord Melbourne, quoted in David Cecil, Melbourne (London, 1955), p. 245.

  87 LD, 2:130, JHN to Mrs. Jemima Newman (13 March 1829).

  88 Apologia, pp. 257–58.

  89 Keble to John Cornish, quoted in Battiscombe, John Keble, p. 130.

  90 R. W. Church, The Oxford Movement, p. 26.

  91 See Keble’s assize sermon “On National Apostasy”, in Documents of the Christian Church, ed. Henry Bettenson (London, 1967), p. 316.

  92 LD, 8:118.

  93 For more about the background of Tract 90, see LD, 8:xvi, on which my own précis is based.

  94 In a letter to The Times (24 October 1863) F. D. Maurice wrote: “Dr. Newman distinctly maintained that the Protestant writers of the Articles had framed them so as to entrap ‘the Catholics,’ and that ‘the Catholics’ were at liberty to put a sense upon them which was different from that obviously intended by their Protestant writers. This seemed to the readers of the Tract a ‘non-natural’ sense.” See LD, 20:414.

  95 See VM, II, 347–48; also see Newman’s Letter to the Editor of The Times (24 February 1863), LD, 20:413–15 in which he quotes this brilliant passage in a response to aforementioned Maurice’s letter to The Times.