Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (37 page)

I should not dream of expostulating [he goes on] with the writer of such a passage, nor with the editor who could insert it without appending evidence in proof of its allegations. Nor do I want any reparation from either of them. I neither complain of them for their act, nor should I thank them if they reversed it. Nor do I even write to you with any desire of troubling you to send me an answer. I do but wish to draw the attention of yourselves, as gentlemen, to a grave and gratuitous slander, with which I

feel confident you will be sorry to find associated a name so eminent as yours.
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Newman might well have assumed that this letter of superb condescension would reach not only the author and the editor but the book’s author, J. A. Froude. It gainsaid the intention of virtually every sentence. Despite the dis-claimers, Newman was spoiling for a fight. On 6 January, from his rectory at Eversley, Charles Kingsley wrote to Newman owning authorship of the review. By 1863 Charles Kingsley, aged 44, was riding high. He had published
West-wood Ho!
and in the previous year his best selling
The Water-Babies
– a moral fable for children which had originally appeared in serial form in
Macmillan’s
through 1862–63. Extrapolating a social conscience from the gospels, and a ‘Do-as-you-would-be-done-by’ ethic, Kingsley, from the late 1840s to the early 1860s, had agitated for amelioration of the poor, the abolition of child labour, and the institution of sanitary legislation. He had contributed as ‘Parson Lot’ to numbers of the
Politics for the People
and to the
Christian Socialist
. On questions of the relationship between social responsibility and the Gospel, Kingsley would have seen himself as morally superior to Newman. But his animus towards Newman, as we have seen in the first chapter, went further back. In the late 1830s, Kingsley had fallen under Newman’s spell, only to spurn it. Writing in 1851 of Newman and his group’s influence, Kingsley, as we have seen, had cast aspersions on their ‘foppery’ and their ‘maundering die-away effeminacy, which is mistaken for purity and refinement’. He believed he had purged himself of Newman’s unmanly influence by marriage, although his subsequent extrovert, ‘muscular’ Christianity concealed some strange proclivities. His hymn in celebration of the martyrdom of Saint Maura luridly depicts the woman saint

blinded and crowned with thorns; and he had drafted a sketch of himself and his wife crucified.

Alexander Macmillan now wrote to Newman: ‘Your letter convinces me that there was injustice, in Mr Kingsley’s charge against you personally.’ He conceded that because of his limited ‘intercourse with members of the Church that holds us heretics’, he had endorsed Kingsley’s view, and he regretted that ‘I may have allowed the heats of controversy to blind myself ’.
³
He could assure Newman that Kingsley would write an apology in the next issue. Yet Macmillan had come down privately at least on Kingsley’s side in the matter. Writing to J. A. Froude in February, he declared:

The old Saying attributed to Tallyrand [
sic
] that the use of words is to conceal thought might be extended in certain cases to intellects which would then be described as the power of perplexing truth. In this art apparently Newman is a master, and thank God

C.K. is not even a learner.
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In the meantime Kingsley had sent Newman a draft apology that only served to exacerbate the original injury:

No man knows the use of words better than Dr Newman. No man, therefore, has a better right to define what he does, or does not, mean by them.

It only remains, therefore, for me to express my hearty regret at having so seriously mistaken him; and my hearty pleasure at finding him on the side of Truth, in this, or any other matter.
5

The correspondence continued, with Newman paraphrasing Kingsley’s apology back to him in withering parody. The elegant ‘silverveined’ cadences give way to spontaneous, colloquial, speech rhythms: like a bar-room advocate, dramatising both sides of the argument, you can almost hear the voice – witty, biting, sarcastic:

Mr Kingsley begins then by exclaiming, ‘O the chicanery, the wholesale fraud, the vile hypocrisy, the conscience-killing tyranny of Rome! We have not far to seek for an evidence of it. There’s Father Newman to wit: one living specimen is worth a hundred dead ones. He, a Priest writing of Priests, tells us that lying is never any harm.’

I interpose: ‘You are taking a most extraordinary liberty with my name. If I have said this, tell me when and where.’

Mr Kingsley replies: ‘You said it, Reverend Sir, in a Sermon which you preached, when a Protestant, as Vicar of St Mary’s, and published in 1844; and I could read you a very salutary lecture on the effects which that Sermon had at the time on my own opinion of you …’

I make answer: ‘Oh …
Not
, it seems, as a Priest speaking of Priests; – but let us have the passage.’

Mr Kingsley relaxes: ‘Do you know, I like your
tone
. From your
tone
I rejoice, greatly rejoice, to be able to believe that you did not mean what you said.’

I rejoin: ‘
Mean
it! I maintain I never
said
it, whether as a Protestant or as a Catholic.’ Mr Kingsley replies: ‘I waive that point.’‌

I object: ‘Is it possible! What? waive the main question! I either said it or I didn’t. You have made a monstrous charge against me; direct, distinct, public. You are bound to prove it as directly, as distinctly, as publicly; – or to own you can’t.’

‘Well’, says Mr. Kingsley, ‘if you are quite sure you did not say it, I’ll take your word for it; I really will.’

My
word
! I am dumb. Somehow I thought that it was my
word
that happened to be on trial …
6

A shortened form of Kingsley’s draft apology was published in the February edition of
Macmillan’s
, which led to Newman’s decision to go public. He told Macmillan: ‘Any letter addressed to me by Mr. Kingsley, I account public property.’
⁷
In a pamphlet entitled
Mr Kingsley and Mr Newman
he now published the correspondence to date, including the imaginary dialogue above. It was eagerly purchased and circulated, especially in the London gentlemen’s clubs. The reading public had a taste for such literary spats, and Newman was on superb form. The critic Richard Holt Hutton would write that he was ‘not only one of the greatest of English writers, but, perhaps, the very greatest master of … sarcasm in the English language’.
⁸
Writing later to Alexander Macmillan , Kingsley would betray how thoroughly chastised he was by the exchange. He compared Newman to ‘a treacherous ape’ who ‘lifts to you meek and suppliant eyes, till he thinks he has you within his reach, and then springs, gibbering and biting, at your face’.
9

Kingsley now responded with
What then does Dr Newman Mean?
– a 48-page pamphlet in which he cites passages from Newman’s works as evidence that Newman indeed held that truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue among the Catholic clergy. From
Sermon on Wisdom and Innocence
[1844] he argued that Newman endorsed cunning among Christians, and that Newman implied that monks and nuns were the only authentic Bible Christians. From
Sermon on the Apostolical Christian
[1844] Kingsley concluded that Newman was teaching Catholic doctrines while still nominally an Anglican, indicating his dishonesty. From
Sermon on Developments in Religious Doctrine
[1843] Kingsley alleged that Newman played fast and loose with truth in order to encourage credulity, while excusing economy of truth. He further charged that Newman’s lectures on saints and miracles advocated credulity, and that his
Lectures on Anglican Difficulties
[1850] contained scandalous passages about the social backwardness of Catholic countries. He complained that Newman’s imaginary dialogue, quoted above, misrepresented both what he, Kingsley, had written, and what Newman himself had written. Finally he asserted that on becoming a Catholic Newman had aligned himself with the views of ‘St Alfonso da Liguori [
sic
]’ and other Catholic casuists, well-known masters of equivocation.

Up to a point, Kingsley had a case; but the men were now arguing about the gulf between intentions and impressions: about words written or said, and what the speaker or author had originally meant by those words. Kingsley had attempted to make his exit from the quarrel by conceding that if Newman’s intentions were innocent of the meaning that could be inferred from his words then he was satisfied. But he now made a graver charge, suggesting that Newman had pretended to be an Anglican while being a Catholic in secret. Here was the insupportable allegation that tipped the scales. Newman wrote to W. J. Copeland on 31 March that the salient point in the popular mind ‘lies in the antecedent prejudice that
I was a Papist while I was an Anglican
. Mr K
implies this
. The only way in which I can destroy this, is to give my history, and the history of my mind, from 1822 or earlier, down to 1845. I wish I had my papers properly about me.’
¹⁰
The
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
, however, would develop into a work of much greater consequence than his response to Kingsley’s charges. For the question as to whether there is a gulf between intentions and the words and expressions of the tongue and face had provided Newman’s literary genius with potential for a highly original autobiography. Thus, on 10 April 1864, he embarked on the

‘hard work’ of the
Apologia
.

For years Newman had been sifting and reorganising his vast correspondence. Just a year earlier he had written to his sister Jemima: ‘When I have a little leisure, I recur to my pigeon-hole of letters, where they stand year by year from 1836 down to this date. I have digested them up to the former year. Thus from time to time I do a little work in the way of sifting, sorting, preserving, or burning.’
¹¹
While exploiting his own letters, journals, and memoranda, he wrote to old friends requesting that they should return letters, or check certain facts.

According to the fashion of the time, the publisher wanted advance sections of the book to appear week by week in serial form. The first appeared on Thursday 21 April, just ten days after he plunged into the task, followed by an issue every Thursday for the next seven weeks, with a final appendix after a gap of two weeks. The entire work, ‘one of the most terrible trials that I have had’,
1
2
came to five hundred published pages, which he completed in under eleven weeks. He wrote from early morning to late at night while standing up. On one occasion he wrote non-stop for 22 hours. He wept over the pages, ‘I wrote the greater part of it,
crying
all the time’, he told a friend.
¹³
He barely found time to eat, and the labour was all the more intense as he frequently drafted and redrafted in order to compress. He was obliged, he recorded, to reject ruthlessly whole swathes of his manuscript with the next deadline ‘yawning close upon me’. He describes in vivid metaphors how he had to cope with the current manuscript for the printer while correcting the proofs of the last so that ‘manuscript and proof got jammed together, as in a stoppage in the streets of London – and the proof almost got ahead of the manuscript, if that can be’.
1
4
He felt as if he was