Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (5 page)

– even in dress and manner; a fastidious, maundering, die-away effeminacy, which is mistaken for purity and refinement; and I confess myself unable to cope with it, so alluring is it to the minds of an effeminate and luxurious aristocracy.’
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Yet for Newman a measure of effeminacy did indeed define, with a hint of irony perhaps, the reserve and self discipline of the Oxford scholar and gentleman:

[The gentleman] is a friend of religious toleration, and that, not only because his philosophy has taught him to look on all forms of faith with an impartial eye, but also from the gentleness and effeminacy of feeling, which is the attendant on civilization.
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It was, however, the impression of Newman’s charismatic mix of vulnerability and strength, his singular grace, and subtle, capacious intelligence, his evident piety, earnestness and eloquence, that would lend pathos, tragedy even, to his eventual fate: conversion, or ‘perversion’, aged 44, from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism.

How can one convey, in our own day, when one religion is deemed as good or as bad as any other, the Victorian reaction to Newman’s apostasy? To Newman’s Protestant contemporaries his ‘going over’ to Rome with all its perceived superstitions and corruptions was an act of treachery, sending shock waves through the nation and beyond. It was, to the scandalised, an act of moral and social turpitude. For those who never forgave him, it showed visibly in his face.

Newman was aware of the impression made by his altered physiognomy. ‘How am I changed even in look!’ he wrote. ‘I [once] had my mouth half open, and commonly a smile on my face – & from that time onwards my mouth has been closed and contracted, and the muscles are so set now, that I cannot but look grave and forbidding.’
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In that era he became, according to one acquaintance, ‘pale, careworn, and meditative … with … sunken cheeks … experience of ages imprinted on his thoughtful brow’.
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For those openly disgusted by his conversion, his worn features were outward signs of inward disgrace. One remarked of ‘the terrible lines deeply ploughed all over his face, and the craft that sat upon his retreating forehead and sunken eyes’.
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Craft. Cunning. Equivocation. But what might he have gained in the view of his critics? ‘How his eye glis-tened and his whole face glowed, as he turned round to the Altar …’, prompting a ‘thrill through the congregation’,
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wrote one with a Faustian flourish. There is a strange irony in this comparison of his own face over time, for he would contrast in his
Essay on Development
persistence and change in a person’s unique facial identity with the persistence and change in the living development of the Catholic Church down the ages.

He earned of course the respect, indeed adulation, of many Catholics, although by no means all, as we shall see. His personality among admirers was said to be ‘intense’, ‘wondrous’ even. ‘With those who enjoyed his intimacy’, wrote a friend, ‘his great attraction lay in what belonged to his personal being – the strange force of which often made itself felt almost at once, so entirely free was he from conventionality.’
²⁸
He continued to walk ‘with a swift, light step’. People still spoke of the ‘strange, sweet music of his voice’. Yet a younger generation of Catholic, with the licence perhaps of aristocratic privilege, could focus on his foibles with fond irreverence. Sir John Acton, for example, on bringing unwelcome news to ‘Old Noggs’ (as he referred to Newman) describes him moaning and rocking himself backwards and forwards over a fire, ‘like an old woman with a toothache’.
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Yet well into his seventies his beguiling voice (
douce et belle
, according to Maria Giberne), the gender ambivalence, the impression of tough frailty, still had the power to entrance. Scott Holland visited Newman when he was well into his seventies:

I turned at the sound of the soft quick speech, and there he was – white, frail and wist-ful, for all the ruggedness of the actual features. I remembered at once the words of Furse about him, ‘delicate as an old lady washed in milk’… So the urgent enquiries went on, in silvery whispers, keen and quick…. I had to fly for my train, and sped home tingling with the magic of a presence that seemed to me like the frail embodiment of a living voice. His soul was in his voice, as a bird is in its song.
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Throughout Newman’s long life there were abiding traits. He had learned to play the violin aged ten, and played into old age. He preferred Mozart and Beethoven to Brahms and Mendelssohn. ‘I never wrote more’, he told Richard Church, an Oriel friend; ‘I always sleep better after music. There must be some electric current passing from the strings through the fingers into the brain and down the spinal marrow. Perhaps thought is music.’
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He was quick to tears; but he would laugh out loud, especially at puns and malapropisms. He had the ‘gentlest apologetic smile’.
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He worried about his health to the point of hypochondria; he was plagued by bad teeth. He was anxiously curious about the ailments of others. He could be catty. ‘A most simple-minded conscientious fellow’, he commented of a young Oratorian, ‘but as little possessed of tact and commonsense as he is great in other departments.’
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Self-disciplined, ascetic, he beat himself weekly with a discipline until age forbade; the discipline was always in his luggage. He was prone to fasting, yet he enjoyed his food and wine. On a holiday in Ramsgate we find him whinging over the small size of a single lamb cutlet served up to him in a hotel dining room: a portion of ‘cutlets’ in the plu-ral, he pointed out, had been listed on the menu.

He had depended emotionally and practically on several intimate male friendships, in particular Ambrose St John. He had a wide circle of female correspondents, despite what one woman described as his ‘singular chivalrous courtesy mingled with an indescribable reserve’ towards the gentle sex.
³⁴
He was capable of endearments bordering on the extravagant, yet he was conscious of being limited in his ‘affections’. In middle age he wrote an examination of conscience in which he admitted: ‘I have this peculiarity, that in the matter of the affections, whether sacred or human, my natural powers cannot exceed certain limits.’
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He was not inclined to make small talk with those he did not love. Another of his younger Oratorian brethren received this letter from him: ‘Such is my fate just now and for some time, that, since I have nothing to say to you, I must either be silent or unseasonable … Many is the time I have stood over the fire at breakfast and looked at you at Recreation, hunting for some-

thing to talk about.’
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Newman’s brother Frank noted Newman’s reserve when they met after a long separation in their early thirties: ‘On first confronting my brother on our joint return from abroad, his dignity seemed as remarkable as his stiffness.’
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Newman’s charisma continued to exert its magic within the religious all-male community of his own creation, the Oratorians – whom Pugin unkindly described, even during their early days, as ‘old women of both sexes’.
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In some respects this Oratorian circle resembled the close friendships of his Oxford days. Only in a post-Freudian culture would questions, well beyond Pugin’s and indeed Kingsley’s species of innuendo, be raised. It was Geoffrey Faber, in his
Oxford Apostles
, published in 1933, who first attempted to explore the alleged homoerotic ambiance of Newman’s s Oxford circle in the 1820s and 1830s – how it related to the ‘homosexual’ practices of Ancient Greece; how it coincided with Newman and his friends’ conversion to Catholicism. Geoffrey Faber’s lengthy study of the group is fraught with innuendo and prejudice, combined with category confusions. Comparing Newman with his close friend Pusey at the time of the former’s becoming a Catholic, Geoffrey Faber states that Pusey ‘was, in fact, what Newman never was – a man’. Newman, Faber goes on, could succumb with his ‘escort of hermaphrodites’, to those ‘alien, imperious fascinations’ of Roman Catholicism, but, ‘[Pusey] would not believe it, until it had actually happened’.
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The attempt to disinter Newman from his grave has prompted more popular and explicit interest in his relationship with Ambrose St John as evidence of their homosexuality, prompting yet another version of his life and character, as unsubtle as the saccharine characterisations that threaten to cluster around the cult of his beatification. The former Oratorian Press Officer, Peter Jennings, wrote of his hope that on exhumation the coffin would be opened and that the onlookers (led by the Provost of the Birmingham Oratory) might be able to gaze on the face of Newman just as it was on the day that he was buried. The aspiration echoes Carlyle’s story of Abbot Samson of St Edmundsbury who gazed on the incorrupt body of the holy martyr Edmund seven hundred years after his death. The exhumation of Edmund had anticipated the translation and enshrining of his relics to a grander location in the Abbey. Newman, who almost certainly would have read Carlyle’s account, was determined to thwart any such exposure of his own remains by hastening their dissolution.

But now, Newman’s beatification raises questions about the fate of his reputation. His importance is long established, and the huge range of his works, correspondence and diaries are now available in print; but will the process of beatifying and canonizing him, trap and petrify his protean genius into a straightjacket of ‘approved’ Catholic orthodoxy? Or will the Catholic Church find itself energised and liberated by his wide-ranging literary and religious

imagination? Newman, by his own admission, was reluctant to be regarded a saint: perhaps because of his modesty; more likely because he feared the ossify-ing travesty it would make of his life and contribution.

CHAPTER 3
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Dreams and imagination

‘There is no telling what is in a boy’s heart … The heart is a secret with its Maker; no one on earth can hope to get at it or to touch it.’

CHARLES REDING’S CLERGYMAN FATHER:
LOSS AND GAIN
BY J. H. NEWMAN

‘I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true’, Newman wrote when he was sixty-three years of age. ‘My imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers, and talismans.’
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In his portrait of Cardinal Manning (
Eminent Victorians
), Lytton Strachey exploits this admission to create one of the more spiteful and best-known epigrams ever penned about Newman: ‘When Newman was a child he “wished that he could believe the Arabian Nights were true”. When he came to be a man, his wish seems to have been granted.’
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