Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (11 page)

Froude was at one with Newman not only on the importance of fasting but the necessity of virginity and celibacy. Newman’s decision, for a second time,

never to marry, as he tells us in the
Apologia
, dates from the period when his intimacy with Froude deepened. There can be no doubt that of all Newman’s male friendships, his attachment to Froude found him more loving than loved. With Froude, who nevertheless routinely addressed Newman as ‘Dulcissime’ (sweetest), it was the other way about. Newman, with Froude’s illness in mind, would pen these lines:

And when thine eye surveys, With fond adoring gaze,

And yearning heart, thy friend – Love to its grave doth tend.
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Meanwhile Froude’s intellectual and spiritual influence proved profound. He expounded High Church convictions which encouraged Newman to re-exam- ine his disdain for Rome and the Pope as Anti-Christ. He urged Newman, moreover, to consider the importance of early Church tradition as opposed to the primacy of scripture. Froude’s earliest doctrinal influence involved apostolic succession – the unbroken link of Church authority, through the succession of its bishops, from the apostles.

Apart from the Evangelicals, the enemies of Froude’s vision of the apostolic Church in England were the ‘liberals’ – a term with many connotations. There was the liberalism prompted by the French Revolution, which encouraged rationalism, utilitarianism, democracy; there was the liberalism of a loose interpretation of Scripture; and the liberalism that welcomed Catholics and Dissenters into the public life and the universities. But liberalism in Newman’s time in Oxford, especially among Oriel’s senior dons, involved a tendency to treat the supernatural and God’s direct intervention in the world, as in miracles, with a degree of mild scepticism. Oxford’s liberalism took a prosaic view of sacred symbolism, with implications for the reverence due to the sacraments, and the Eucharist in particular. For a time Newman saw in this form of liberalism an attractive alternative to Evangelicalism. The influence of Froude, and his reading of the Early Fathers, the writers, saints and theologians of early Christian antiquity, were to provide an antidote.

We have seen how Newman made his first acquaintance with the Early Fathers when he read Joseph Milner’s
Church History
as a boy. Newman now found himself drawn increasingly to these texts. When Pusey set off on a trip to Germany, Newman asked would he buy copies for him. Through the early nineteenth century many abandoned editions had been made available following the break up of libraries after the French Revolution. Newman’s huge collection of the Fathers, he used to boast, cost him no more than a shilling a volume. He started with Ignatius and Justin, reading them from a Protestant perspective to begin with; which led him, he later admitted, to misconstrue their true signifi-

cance. But the inevitable and crucial question forming in his mind was this: could one cite the Fathers and the early Christian Councils in support of the claim that the Church of England was solidly within the Church, as described in the Creeds as ‘Catholic’, or did they not?

By the autumn of 1827 his regime of reading had become so hard and lengthy that his health was suffering. He took a brief break to accompany Robert Wilberforce on a visit to friends in Kent. While there he wrote the poem ‘Snapdragon. A Riddle’, comparing his bachelor life to the climbing flower on the walls of Trinity:

Nature’s vast and varied field Braver flowers than me will yield, Bold in form and rich in hue, Children of a purer dew;

Smiling lips and winning eyes Meet for earthly paradise … May it be! Then well might I

In College cloister live and die.
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As the weeks passed he found himself in a ‘low fever’, not helped by his exertions to rescue his aunt Elizabeth from financial ruin. While conducting inter-views and invigilating at Oxford’s examination schools, he suffered a mild nervous breakdown. His own disastrous final examinations combined with the news that Copleston was to depart from Oriel to become Bishop of Llandaff, resulted in a sequence of nightmares. One Sunday in November he ‘drooped’ and felt ‘the blood collect in my head’. The next day, he wrote, ‘[I] found my memory and mind gone, when examining a candidate for the first class … and was obliged to leave the Schools in the middle of the day.’ Leeches were placed on his temples . He had a ‘twisting of the brain, of the eyes. I felt my head inside was made up of parts. I could write verses pretty well, but I could not
count
’.
⁴¹
He did not return to the examination rooms, but his trials were far from over.

DEATH OF SISTER MARY

In the New Year of 1828 Newman’s youngest sister, Mary, aged nineteen, died suddenly, probably of appendicitis. Pious, yet vivacious, she had been learning by heart the poems in Keble’s
The Christian Year
. Newman wrote in his journal: ‘O my dearest sister Mary, O my sister, my sister, I do feel from the bottom of my heart that it is all right – I see, I know it to be, in God’s good Providence, the best thing for all of us; I do not, I have not, in the least repined – I would not have it otherwise – but I feel sick, I must cease writing.’
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As the weeks passed he wrote to Jemima that it would ‘be desirable to write down some memoranda generally concerning [Mary] … Alas, memory does not remain vivid.’ He adds: ‘To talk of her thus in the third person, and in all the common business and conversation of life to allude to her as now out of the way and insensible to what we are doing (as is indeed the case) is to me the most distressing circumstance perhaps attending our loss.’
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Here we find Newman, a man of deep and refined sentiment, yet always the writer, struggling to put experience, memory, the loved one into words. Five months on, still grieving, he would write of riding out to the village of Cuddes-don near Oxford, thinking of Mary:

I wish it were possible for words to put down those indefinite vague and withal subtle feelings which quite pierce the soul and make it sick. Dear Mary seems embodied in every tree and behind every hill. What a veil and curtain this world of sense is! beautiful but still a veil.

He wrote a poem for Jemima, which he sent on that day: ‘would they came up to my feelings’, he remarked:

This is the room, and this the bed, Whence at the awful word

Of high command once upward sped A saint to meet her Lord.

These curtains closing round her death Last met her failing eye

This pillow laid my head beneath Heard her last gentle sigh.
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The final verses would find their echo in a poem he would write near forty years hence: ‘The Dream of Gerontius.’ There are allusions, moreover, to a Catholic sense of faith in angels and sainthood:

Till that new world’s first dawning bright When faith shall have its end,

Heaven’s angel ladder beam in light And saints to heaven ascend.

Meanwhile, where last on earth she trod, This grace to faith is given,

There to discern the house of God There find the gate of heaven.
45

He would grieve for her all his life. Aged 76 he would write: ‘I have as vivid feelings of love, tenderness, and sorrow, when I think of dear Mary , as ever I had since her death JHN.’
⁴⁶
Even aged eighty the very thought of her would bring tears to his eyes.

As with many of his relationships, within and outside of the family, he had betrayed hints of self-reference in his professed fraternal love. On her previous birthday he had sent his good wishes not to Mary direct, but via Harriet: ‘I love her very much; but I will not say (as she once said to me) I love her better than she loves me.’
⁴⁷
He may well have remembered that comment and felt remorse for it. Following her death he had sent a pedestrian poem about her to Harriet, with a self-referential reflection that was not uncharacteristic: ‘It goes to my heart to think that dear Mary herself, in her enthusiastic love of me, would so like them, could she see them, because they are mine. May I be patient. It is so difficult to realize what one believes, and to make these trials, as they are intended, real blessings.’
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ROLE OF COLLEGE TUTOR

If the fellows of Oriel were famous for their intellectualism, many of the high-born students were notorious for their dissolute behaviour. In addition to getting drunk nightly, riding to hounds, and gambling, Oriel students were keen boxers and wrestlers; not at all sports that Newman would have relished. Matches were held several nights a week in college rooms under the supervision of a prize fighter, known as ‘the Flying Tailor’. One undergraduate, James Howard Harris, who became the Earl of Malmsbury and Lord Privy Seal, has left an impression of Newman’s trials in the classroom with these sons of the gentry: ‘He used to allow his class to torment him with the most helpless resignation; every kind of mischievous trick was, to our shame, played upon him – such as cutting his bell-rope, and at lectures making the table advance gradually till he was jammed into a corner. He remained quite impassive, and painfully tolerant.’
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With Hurrell Froude, and another fellow tutor, Robert Wilberforce (son of the famous anti-slave trade campaigner Samuel Wilberforce) Newman sought to improve the educational and spiritual tone of the college. He aimed to reor-ganize the tutorial relationship so as to make it more personal, and pastoral. According to Thomas Mozley, ‘The tuition revolutionized an exacter regard to the character and special gifts of each undergraduate, and closer relation between him and his tutor’. No doubt with thoughts of his own wayward brother in mind, Newman insisted that the ideal tutor would stand ‘in the place of a fa-ther, or an elder and affectionate brother’.
5
0
Tutors, according to Newman’s policy, would spend their time teaching serious students, and caring for their moral and religious direction, in small groups or one to one; whereas the young grandee socialites would receive their education in large, occasional lecture groups.

One such aristo, Sir Charles Murray, was to leave a reminiscence that tells us as much about Murray and his Gentleman Commoner cronies as about Newman,

while giving further evidence of the behaviour of the young Oriel gentlemen of class:

We were a merry set of youngsters, fond of singing late into the night over suppers. The songs were not classical, but, I am ashamed to say, generally very noisy. They disturbed Newman, who liked quiet; but instead of coming himself and asking us to be earlier and quieter, he sent a porter, whom we sent to the devil.
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Newman no doubt sensibly realized that had he tried to discipline them he would have been sent to the devil too.

It would be anachronistic to view Newman’s reform of tutorials as the policy of a sanctimonious martinet. The colleges were religious foundations, and most of the tutors were clergymen. When he was offered the position of tutor in 1826, he resigned his curacy at St Clement’s and his role at Alban Hall. He saw his tutorial role as in part at least the fulfilment of his ordination vow: as a ‘species of pastoral care’, as ‘a great undertaking’, and with the risk of certain temptations. He wrote to his sister Harriet: ‘There is always the danger of the love of literary pursuits assuming too prominent a place in the thoughts of a College Tutor, or his viewing his situation merely as a secular office, a means of a future provision when he leaves College’.
5
2
Four weeks into the job he wrote a memorandum: ‘
Unless
I find that opportunities occur of doing spiritual good to those over whom I am placed, it will become a grave question whether I
ought
to continue in the Tuition.’
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