Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (41 page)

While the idea for a Catholic college had been finally quashed, the arguments about the suitability of a Catholic ‘mission’ to serve the members of Oxford University under the direction of the Birmingham Oratory dragged on for three years. Ullathorne, in whose diocese Oxford lay, wrote to the Vatican urging the case for an Oratorian community in the university. Manning warned Talbot: ‘I think Propaganda can hardly know the effects of Dr Newman’s going to Oxford. The English national spirit is spreading among Catholics and we shall have dangers.’
⁶¹
At about this time Newman received the poet and Oxford scholar Gerard Manley Hopkins into the Church; precisely the sort of young man who might have benefited from Newman’s presence, or at least the auspices of the Oratory, in Oxford. But it appeared to Manning that the drawbacks were infinitely more dangerous than the advantages. Newman wrote to his friend Emily Bowles:

At present things are in appearance as effete, though in a different way, (thank God) as they were in the tenth century. We are sinking into Novationism, the heresy which the early Popes so strenuously resisted. Instead of aiming at being a worldwide power, we are shrinking into ourselves, narrowing the lines of communion, trembling at freedom of thought, and using the language of dismay and despair at the prospect before us, instead of, with the high spirit of the warrior, going out conquering and to conquer.
62

Eventually Rome gave permission for an Oratorian mission in Oxford, but there was a qualification that Ullathorne initially kept from Newman: that should he show a wish to reside in the city he should be ‘
blande suaviterique
’,
⁶³
blandly and smoothly, dissuaded. When the information about the ban on Newman residing in Oxford was leaked to the Catholic press, Newman was appalled. Surely, this was Manning once more: ‘who wanted to gain me over; now, he will break me, if he can.’
⁶⁴
Next came a letter from Barnabò at Propaganda, mentioning that the Pope had been ‘deeply saddened’ by the ‘recent unhappy perversion of a number of Catholic youths’
⁶⁵
at Oxford. In the end, it was made abundantly clear that Newman would not be allowed to take up

residence in Oxford. Now Newman himself put his foot down: ‘If I am a missioner at Oxford, I claim to be there, as much or as little as I please.’ Writing to St John, who was on his way to Rome, he expostulated that the Roman ‘blandness and sweetness are hollow’.
66

Newman had been treated badly and to his aid came a distinguished representation of great and good Catholics led by the Duke of Norfolk’s guardian, Lord Edward Fitzalan Howard:

We the undersigned, have been deeply pained at some anonymous attacks which have been made upon you … we feel that every blow that touches you inflicts a wound upon the Catholic Church in this country. We hope, therefore, that you will not think it presumptuous in us to express our gratitude for all we owe you, and to assure you how heartily we appreciate the services which, under God, you have been the means of rendering to our Holy Religion.
67

Manning remarked that the address of the Catholic lay group showed ‘the absence of Catholic instinct’, and was ‘directed and sustained by those who wish young Catholics to go to Oxford’. Monsignor Talbot was apoplectic, declaring it a ‘most offensive production’.
68

Talbot went on to warn Manning that if he did not ‘fight the battle of the Holy See against the detestable spirit growing up in England, [Pio Nono] will begin to regret Cardinal Wiseman, who knew how to keep the laity in order’.
⁶⁹
It was the same tactic that he had employed against Newman earlier, based on the assumption that the mere mention of the approval or displeasure of the Pope, whose ear he had, would galvanise the victim of his machinations.

In Newman’s view, Talbot, Manning and Barnabò had formed a toxic cabal to run the Church. ‘Such tyranny and terrorism as they exercise, please God, shall have no power over me, nor will I think myself disobedient to the Church because I utterly ignore them.’
7
0
Yet Newman realised that Manning was as much a victim of Romanism as a perpetrator. He wrote to Pusey in 1865: ‘Manning is under the lash as well as others. There are men who would remonstrate with him and complain of him at Rome, if he did not go to all lengths – and in his position he can’t afford to get into hot water, even tho’ he were sure to get out of it.’
71

In June of 1868, Newman and St John took a train from Birmingham to Abingdon, then went by fly to littletons, his old Oxford parish. There were tears, and meetings with old friends, twenty years on from his departure. It struck him as a ‘most strange vision – I could hardly believe it real’. Writing to friends, he declared: ‘I wanted to see it once before I died.’
⁷²
Yet he had more than twenty years to live; and he would be back.

CHAPTER 14
‌‌

The Dream of Gerontius

‘Heart speaks unto heart.’

NEWMAN’S MOTTO AS CARDINAL

In the early 1860s Newman had been working on a poem about death and the after-life, entitled
The Dream of Gerontius
. He said that he had no idea why he composed it, but ‘I wrote on till it was finished, on small bits of paper’.
¹
Published in 1865, it was well received and he was encouraged to collect and publish all his verse to date. To have written in the same year and in his prime an autobiography of enduring literary merit in a matter of weeks, as well as a substantial poem that would be set to music by Edward Elgar, reveals a formidable imaginative range and stamina. Supremely literary among English theologians of the nineteenth century, Newman had no aptitude for the abstractions of metaphysics, the severe disciplines of syllogistic logic, the arid prose of stock theological manuals. His preference across the entire corpus of his writing is for feeling, concrete language, irony, satire, the dynamism of metaphor. He belongs, to an extent, within a Romantic tradition that paid tribute to imagination as the source of human creativity and the means of aspiring to the sublime. Yet Newman had found it difficult over the years to capture imagination in the round. In 1868 he wrote in a notebook: ‘I have not defined quite what imagination is. I began by saying

“making images”.’
²
And there he stops abruptly.

Like his early seventeenth century predecessors he would have found no difficulty in associating prayer with religious imagination, of which George Herbert’s beautiful poem
Prayer
is the outstanding exemplar:

Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest, The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bels beyond the stares heard, the souls bloud, The land of spices; something understood.

But Newman belonged to a generation of writers influenced, directly or in-directly, by Bishop Robert Lowth’s famous 1740s ‘Lectures on Hebrew Poetry’. Lowth had subjected the Psalms and other biblical prophecies to detailed practical criticism, drawing attention to the underlying literary mechanisms, thereby revealing what Scripture shared with poetry of every genre. Lowth identified a

special kind of metaphor or symbol, which, rather than being arbitrary, partakes in that which it renders intelligible (bread is the staff of life). He showed how repetitions, and verse parallelisms, and the context of metaphors (natural forms – mountains, woods, plants, animals, simple rural communities and crafts), give rise to sublime poetry and thereby a literary sense of the prophetic. Lowth’s legacy influenced among many the work of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, who came to regard imagination as the principal faculty of the mind, and poetry as a source of prophecy and transcendence. Lowth’s Latin lectures, moreover, would be translated and read by German poets and philosophers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, creating a seminal influence on continental literature and aesthetics for generations to come. Ironically, in drawing an equivalence between literary and religious imagination, Lowth may well have encouraged theologians to eschew the siren call of imagination, resulting in what Professor Stephen Prickett has called ‘theology’s missing limb’.

Inseparable from this tribute to imagination’s primacy, was Romanticism’s emphasis on individual subjectivity: the self, the ‘egotistical sublime’. Not for nothing has Newman been compared with Wordsworth. Both had an early scepticism about the visible world, and a consequent sense of awe for interiority, the
self
. Both made it their life’s work to tell the story of the growth of their individual minds. Yet the contrasts between the two are instructive. In an early sermon on ‘The Individuality of the Soul’ Newman claims that the inner world of each human being is ‘an unfathomable, an infinite abyss of existence; and the scene in which he bears part for the moment is but like a gleam of sunshine on the surface’.
³
How different from Wordsworth’s sense of a reciprocal equivalence between inner and outer depths, the spiritual and the material, expressed in the description of the boy by the lake in ‘The Prelude’:

Then sometimes, in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise

Has carried far into his heart the voice

Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene Would unawares enter into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,

Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, receiv’d Into the bosom of the steady lake.
4

Not only does Wordsworth claim a parallel, rooted, equivalence between the inward domain of the mind and the outward world of nature, but he skilfully demonstrates the interaction poetically. Newman, however, merely asserts the infinite scope of the soul, with a rhetorical, unmediated gesture towards its surface sublimity. In another sermon, ‘the Invisible World’, preached in the 1830s, Newman reveals the distance between himself and Wordsworth when he claims nature’s sublimity as symptomatic of God’s presence beyond the veil of appear-

ances. The beauties of nature are merely catalogued in a series of surprisingly feeble epithets for such a painstakingly original writer, as if thereby reducing the status of natural beauty:

Bright as is the sun, and the sky, and the clouds; green as are the leaves and the fields; sweet as is the singing of the birds; we know that they are not all, and we will not take up with a part for the whole. They proceed from a centre of love and goodness, which is God himself; but they are not his fullness; they speak of heaven, but they are not heaven; they are but as stray beams and dim reflections of His Image; they are but crumbs from the table.
5

From early adulthood Newman’s appeal to natural forms is didactic rather than, as Wordsworth would put it – ‘felt in the blood, and felt along the heart’. When Newman invokes a wild landscape in ‘Lead Kindly Light’, it is to suggest, allegorically, a place of trial and moral danger: ‘Oe’r moor and fen, oe’r crag and torrent …’ The resolution is the arrival home, earthly or celestial, where he is greeted by those lost ‘angel faces’, suggestive of a Victorian familial fireside, or a Christianized-Platonic ambiance of unborn souls. When an old acquaintance enquired in 1879 what he meant by those angel faces, Newman retorted: