Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (4 page)

What follows is a portrait of man who continues to speak to us from beyond the grave; a man much larger in desire, imagination and literary genius, than the

simplistic mythologies that have clustered around his reputation. I set out to write a book that would answer the question – why should Newman be of interest to a readership beyond Catholics or nineteenth-century Church historians? My overarching purpose is to show that Newman’s unrelenting literary obsession was the story of his own life: he was the ultimate, self-absorbed autobiographer. He was increasingly absorbed in textual, literary self-referential preoccupation. Yet this was no narcissistic endeavour. Every detail of his story, his relationships, his feelings and insights, at every stage in his life, were noted, identified, and contemplated in the light of the mystery of God’s Creation, Revelation, and Redemption. Newman’s undying, ‘unforgotten’ voice, is nothing less than an insistent search for ultimate meaning, through the telling of the story of his own life.

CHAPTER 2
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Meeting Doctor Newman

‘I do not believe there has been anything like his influence in Oxford, when it was at its height, since Abelard lectured in Paris.’

WILLIAM GLADSTONE OF J. H. NEWMAN

What was it like to encounter John Henry Newman in his mid to late-thirties at the height of his influence as a university don and popular preacher at Oxford?

W. G. Ward, an enthusiastic member of Newman’s close group:

In Oriel Lane light-hearted undergraduates would drop their voices and whisper, ‘There’s Newman’, as with head thrust forward and gaze fixed as though at some vision seen only by himself, with swift, noiseless step he glided by. Awe fell on them for a moment almost as if it had been some apparition that had passed.
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Every Sunday young and old, men and women, gathered in the university church of Saint Mary the Virgin as if drawn by a mystic Pied Piper. One young woman in the congregation ‘wept with emotion’ at his very appearance – ‘impressive, powerful and a little forbidding’.
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Newman’s charisma was described as ‘mesmeric’, a ‘magnetic stream’. Gladstone wrote that he felt like shouting out loud on encountering Newman.
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That his influence was mysterious is confirmed by the church historian and contemporary, A. P. Stanley: ‘there was no contact with the hidden springs of action which controlled the movements of this inscrutable personage.’
⁴
Was it a hunger that he satisfied? Rain for famished lands? ‘He rooted in their hearts and minds’, said one, ‘a personal conviction of the living God.’
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Here he was, preaching on the Passion:

For a few moments there was a breathless silence. Then, in a low, clear voice, of which the faintest vibration was audible in the farthest corner of St Mary’s, he said, ‘Now I bid you recollect that He to whom these things were done was Almighty God’. It was as if an electric stroke had gone through the church, as if every person present understood for the first time the meaning of what he had all his life been saying.
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Yet his charisma had not always been so. For some it never was. Thomas Arnold Junior wrote of Newman’s preaching: ‘the delicacy and refinement of his style were less cognisable by me than by my brother [Matthew], and the multiplied quotations from Scripture, introduced by “And again” – “And again”, the intention of which I only half divined, confused and bewildered me.’
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For

others, like the writer Charles Kingsley, the charisma was felt – and later regretted, and despised. He charged Newman with magus-like duplicity and an insidious form of seduction of the young:

I know that men used to suspect Dr. Newman, – I have been inclined to do so myself, – of writing a whole Sermon, not for the sake of the text or of the matter, but for the sake of one single passing hint – one phrase, one epithet, one little barbed arrow, which, as he swept magnificently past on the stream of his calm eloquence, seemingly unconscious of all presences, save those unseen, he delivered unheeded, as with his finger-tip, to the very heart of an initiated hearer, never to be withdrawn again.
8

Others appeared not only immune, but decidedly repulsed. Sir Charles Murray, one of Newman’s students at Oxford, remembered Newman like this:

He never inspired me, or my fellow-undergraduates, with any interest, much less respect: on the contrary, we disliked, or rather distrusted, him. He walked with his head bent, abstracted, but every now and then looking out of the corners of his eyes quickly, as though suspicious.
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The awe felt by several generations of students developed only gradually, over a decade, from the late 1820s into the 1830s. As a disciplinarian he became a ‘master’, as his contemporary Frederick Rogers put it, ‘of formidable and speaking silence calculated to quell any ordinary impertinence’.
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Another pupil left this recollection: ‘“What did he say to you?” was asked of one who had been called up by Newman for some more or less serious matter. “I don’t know”, said the other, “but he looked at me”.’
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Newman likened spiritual charisma to a heady fragrance, symptomatic of metanoia – a deep, spiritual and intellectual alteration in a person’s life; religious conversion, or reconversion; an ineffable scent that would strike some and not others. In his first novel,
Loss and Gain
, written in the year following his reception into the Roman Catholic Church, he wrote of the character Charles Reding, his alter ego:

And even before that blessed hour, as an opening flower scatters sweets, so the strange unknown odour, pleasing to some, odious to others, went abroad from him upon the winds, and made them marvel what could be near them, and made them look curiously and anxiously at him, while he was unconscious of his own condition.
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But what did they
see
? He was not a man of impressive stature: five feet nine in height, slightly built, with a scholar’s stoop from youth. In one self-descrip- tion he wrote: ‘my eyesight is short; my voice is weak, my whole frame is very nervous; my constitution is very susceptible of cold.’
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He was so quietly spoken that people often strained to hear him. He spoke with emphatic enunciation. He had a prominent hooked nose out of proportion with his face, a high forehead;

his dark hair lank and unruly; but he was fastidious about personal cleanliness. He took daily cold baths.

Newman’s friend Charles Casartelli spoke of his ‘aristocratic mien’; yet he was not of the English nobility. His father was a member of the commercial middle-classes, a banker; his mother second generation Huguenot stock. Yet, as his spiritual influence developed in his thirties, he came to appear not quite of this earth: hence Matthew Arnold’s famous adulatory description of a ‘spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light’; his words ‘a religious music, – subtle, sweet, mournful’.
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That preaching voice, which Arnold had described in an early poem, ‘The Voice’, as ‘unforgotten … so sweet and still’ seems to have echoed in space and time to the susceptible, even to those who had not heard it, and never would. Matthew Arnold met Newman, but never actually attended his sermons as a student; only later in life. Newman’s manner of speaking was perhaps emulated, passed on, as sometimes happens with charismatic teachers. The critic, the late David J. DeLaura, speculated that Newman’s singular voice represented ‘an enduring myth of a lost generation, permanently caught between an irrecoverable past and the unspeakable future’.
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The comment lends significance to Evelyn Waugh’s description of Oxford in the immediate post-First World War era: ‘In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day.’ How would Waugh have known? While Newman could appear spectral, numinous, to his congregations, he could be physical and convivial. A visitor to Pusey’s house recorded how after dinner a child ‘climbed Newman’s knee and hugged him. Newman put his spectacles on him, and next on his sister, and great was the merriment of the Puseyan progeny.’
¹⁶
His sudden alteration from clerical
spirituel
to avuncular mortal could be disconcerting. Emily Bowles, a family friend, was overwhelmed by his ‘exquisite’ voice and demeanour at a Sunday service; when lunch was served after the ‘exalted experience’ she fell suddenly to earth when Newman uttered

the words: ‘Will you have some cold chicken?’

THE VEILED LADY

Aubrey Thomas de Vere, the Irish poet and essayist, had an impression of delicate health and gender ambivalence.

Early in the evening a singularly graceful figure in cap and gown glided into the room. The slight form and gracious address might have belonged either to a youthful ascetic of the middle ages or to a graceful high-bred lady of our own days. He was pale and thin almost to emaciation, swift of pace, but when not walking intensely still, with a voice sweet and pathetic, and so distinct that you could count each vowel and consonant in every word. When touching on subjects which interested him, he used gestures rapid and decisive, though not vehement.
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So Newman gives the impression of being chaste as an eternal monastic novice, yet refined as a ‘high-bred lady’: as if aristocracy were a guarantee of acceptable effeminacy. W. G. Ward told his son, Wilfrid Ward, that Newman’s ‘keen humour, his winning sweetness, his occasional wilfulness, his resentments and anger, all showed him intensely alive, and his friends loved his very faults as one may love those of a fascinating woman …’
¹⁸
The suggestion, so subtly raised, is of fickleness; a batsqueak of coquettishness. Ward tells how he dreamt that ‘he found himself at a dinner party next to a veiled lady, who charmed him more and more as they talked. At last he explained, “I have never felt such charm in any conversation since I used to talk with John Henry Newman, at Oxford”. “I am John Henry Newman”, the lady replied, and raising her veil showed the well-known face.’
¹⁹
This impression of capricious, unstable gender identity – at least, in the eyes of certain of his contemporaries – revealed itself in striking fashion after Newman’s intimate student friend, John Bowden, married. While staying with the couple, Newman noted that Bowden would constantly ‘call me Elizabeth and her Newman’.
²⁰
Charles Kingsley would reveal in retrospect a keen anxiety, and hence resentment, nursed against his perception of Newman’s effeminacy. Thirty years on from the Pied Piper Oxford days, Kingsley famously would assert that Newman had taught that ‘cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage’.
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He saw in Newman a species of ‘perversion’, when that word meant both religious apostasy and a violation of the laws of nature, that might include gender transgression and sexual repression, or excess. When the
British Quarterly
reviewed the
Apologia
, its critic observed that ‘the instances of perversion to the Romish faith which have come within our knowledge have been nearly all such as may be traced to a womanly weakness in the women, and to the want of manly courage in the men’. Kingsley, it seemed, could never forgive Newman for having once made him conscious of anxieties about his own gender status. Kingsley’s consequent rage was directed not only at Newman but at his entire Oxford circle. Writing in 1851, Kingsley opined: ‘In … all that school, there is an element of foppery