The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses

CHAPTER THREE The Charismatic Don – John Henry Newman

In the first decades of the nineteenth century there were among the Oxford colleges two centres of learning in particular: Christ Church and Oriel. Christ Church was wealthy, large and in Dean Cyril Jackson’s time selected as many of its undergraduates as possible by merit. Oriel was far smaller, but Provost Eveleigh broke ranks by selecting its fellows not solely by patronage or performance in examination. He asked: did this man show intellectual sparkle? His successor, Copleston, carried on this tradition, and Oriel became known as a society of liberal intellectuals – Noetics, as they were called – who enjoyed dialectical dispute so much so that fellows of other colleges complained that the Oriel common room stank of logic. Thomas Arnold was one of this band until he left, later to become headmaster of Rugby. John Keble, the saintly churchman, whose hymns became part of Anglican worship, was another. The undergraduates, too, benefited from the good teaching of their tutors. When Copleston was Provost Oriel won twenty-seven first-class honours in examinations, though the far larger Christ Church won eighty-two.

Many college tutors taught the Latin and Greek texts in a perfunctory way, sometimes as baffled by their intricacies as their pupils. Some years later Leslie Stephen* at Cambridge gave a satirical account of a tutor, more renowned as the coach of his college boat than as a scholar, construing a Latin text with his class: ‘Easy all. Hard word here. What does it mean? Don’t know? No more don’t I. Paddle on all.’ But the Oriel tutors were different. Among them was a rough-tongued, ill-dressed, unconventional logician, Richard Whately, who took his pupils for early morning walks and regarded them as an anvil on which to hammer out his ideas. When a shy young man from Trinity was elected a fellow of Oriel, so tongue-tied that he could not bring himself to speak to his hero Keble and the others, Copleston told Whately to take him under his wing and draw him out. He did so to such effect that four years later, in 1826, John Henry Newman was appointed a tutor at Oriel and considered to be a fine addition to the college’s liberal tradition. But he was not. He spent his days discussing theology, patristics and doctrine with a group of newly elected fellows: Edward Pusey, Robert Wilberforce and above all with Hurrell Froude, a militant High Churchman. It was Froude who sowed in Newman’s mind the seeds of a hatred of Protestantism. The Oxford Movement was forming and it was to change the face of Oxford.

The first sign of this moral intensity soon appeared. In the Oriel tradition a tutor should help his men to construe Greek and Latin texts: it was up to them to make something of what they read, not for him to tell them what they should believe. But this was what Newman thought it was his duty to do. More than that, he held himself responsible for his students’ conduct. He was unique in treating them as friends, and those who responded hung on his every word. On the other hand the well-born fellow commoners who took the sacrament at Holy Communion and chased it with a champagne breakfast were anathema to Newman. He and his fellow tutors reduced the numbers of these aristocratic sprigs by half, and turned away stupid candidates. They next proposed that undergraduates should be divided into the clever and diligent and the thick and idle. Each group would follow a course of lectures appropriate to their talents. At this point the new Provost, Edward Hawkins, took fright. Were all men of good family to be turned away? Was it not the duty of tutors to give as much attention to less able students as to the high-fliers? Hawkins was disturbed to hear that Newman proselytised his pupils, and Copleston supported Hawkins. Oriel had always set its face against cramming for exams. The dispute rumbled on until Hawkins refused to allot any pupils to Newman or to Froude and Wilberforce. They resigned. Hawkins appointed safe men in their place – and the decline of Oriel as an intellectual power house began. Little did Hawkins realise that his own election as Provost had given Newman a position far more influential than a tutorship. For on his election he resigned as vicar of St Mary’s in the High Street, where the university sermon was preached each Sunday – a living in the gift of Oriel – and Newman was appointed in his place.

No don has ever captivated Oxford as John Henry Newman did. For ten years or more every pronouncement he made, every direction towards which he seemed to be veering was scrutinised, interpreted and criticised and those luminous eyes scanned to see if they expressed praise or censure. What was it on this day to make him petulant and on that honey-tongued and caressing?

Who could resist the charm [asked Matthew Arnold] of that spiritual apparition gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St Mary’s, rising into the pulpit, and then in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts – subtle, sweet, mournful? I seem to hear him still saying: ‘After the fever of life, after wearinesses and sicknesses, fightings and despondings, languor and fretfulness, struggling and succeeding; after all the changes and chances of this troubled, unhealthy state – at length comes death, at length the white throne of God, at length the beatific vision.’

There were other famous preachers in his time. At Cambridge Charles Simeon in Holy Trinity commanded a congregation as large as that of Newman and for longer. But Simeon was a moderate Evangelical and not in any sense an intellectual. Newman appealed to intellectuals and scholars as well as to devout religious enthusiasts. They were never sure what new interpretation would be put on the Scriptures, what doctrine would be reinterpreted to bring it into line with whatever position Newman in his spiritual pilgrimage had reached. When his readings of the Fathers revealed schisms and heresies in the early Church, Newman asked himself whether these depravities were not being repeated today in the Church of England. He spoke seemingly to every individual in his congregation because he reminded him he was a sinner. At the heart of his sermons, as much when he went over to Rome as before, was the overpowering sense of sin – and of its consequences. For Newman hell was a reality. The fear of the Lord, said the Psalmist, is the beginning of wisdom, and he strove to inculcate holy dread among his listeners. His voice was quiet and musical, with a ‘silver intonation’, as one contemporary put it. The pauses, the charm, the change of tone, all the arts of rhetoric were at his command. Long though it is, the passage below, imagining the horror of a soul that finds itself condemned to eternal punishment – taken from a sermon he preached when a Roman Catholic – illustrates his power.

‘Impossible,’ he cries, ‘I a lost soul. I separated from hope and from peace for ever. It is not I of whom the Judge so spake! There is a mistake somewhere; Christ, Saviour, hold thy hand – one minute to explain it. My name is Demos: I am but Demos, not Judas, or Nicolas, or Alexander, or Philetus, or Diotrephes. What? hopeless pain! for me! Impossible, it shall not be.’ And the poor soul struggles and wrestles in the grasp of the mighty demon which has hold of it, and whose very touch is torment. ‘Oh, atrocious,’ it shrieks in agony, and in anger, too, as if the very keenness of the affliction were a proof of its injustice. ‘A second! and a third! I can bear no more! stop, horrible fiend, give over; I am a man and not such as thou! I am not food for thee, or sport for thee! I never was in hell as thou, I have not on me the smell or taint of the charnel-house. I know what human feelings are; I have been taught religion; I have had a conscience; I have a cultivated mind; I am well versed in science and art; I have been refined by literature; I have had an eye for the beauties of nature; I am a philosopher or a poet, or a shrewd observer of men, or a hero, or a statesman or an orator, or a man of wit and humour. Nay – I am a Catholic; I am not an unregenerate Protestant; I have received the grace of the Redeemer; I have attended the Sacraments for years; I have been a Catholic from a child; I am a son of the Martyrs; I died in communion with the Church; nothing, nothing which I have ever seen, bears any resemblance to thee, and to the fame and stench which exhale from thee; so I defy thee and abjure thee, O enemy of man!’

Alas! poor soul, and whilst it there fights with that destiny which it has brought upon itself, and with those companions whom it has chosen, the man’s name, perhaps, is solemnly chanted forth, and his memory decently cherished among his friends on earth. His readiness in speech, his fertility in thought, his sagacity, or his wisdom are not forgotten. Men talk of him from time to time, they appeal to his authority; they quote his words; perhaps they even raise a monument to his name, or write his history. ‘So comprehensive a mind! Such a power of throwing light on a perplexed subject, and bringing conflicting ideas or facts into harmony!’ ‘Such a speech it was he made on such and such an occasion; I happened to be present, and never shall forget it,’ or ‘It was the saying of a very sensible man’ or ‘A great personage, whom some of us knew’ or ‘It was a rule of mine, now no more’ or ‘Never was his equal in society, so just in his remarks, so versatile, so unobtrusive’, or ‘I was fortunate to see him once when I was a boy’ or ‘So great a benefactor to his country and his kind!’ ‘His discoveries so great’ or, ‘His philosophy so profound’. O vanity! vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profiteth it? His soul is in hell … Vanity of vanities, misery of miseries! They will not attend to us, they will not believe us. We are but few in number and they are many, and the many will not give credit to the few … Thousands are dying daily; they are waking up into God’s everlasting wrath.

That passage, so profuse in examples, so exquisite in variations of pace, so dramatic in the change of tone from the condemned’s protestations to the pitying dispassionate observer who retails how worldly judgements of a man’s worth are trivial and absurd when set against eternal judgement, plays upon the mind. And then comes the end, so bitter and characteristic of Newman’s self-pity and anger that he and his minority of believers are scorned by the great and the good and by the multitude who, regardless of his warning, are, perhaps, destined themselves to eternal torment.

Newman came by his sense of sin honestly. He was brought up an Evangelical, and the Evangelical party in the Church more than any other explained how that terrible sense of sin can be assuaged and the sinner find comfort provided that he throws himself on Christ’s mercy, repents and finds grace in his new-found faith. The drama of Newman’s spiritual pilgrimage from Evangelicalism to the Church of Rome is all the more ironic since his first break with the culture of the Oriel Noetics came over the issue of Catholic Emancipation. He opposed it.

For centuries Roman Catholics had been subject to disabilities. They were not permitted, for instance, to sit in Parliament. In the seventeenth century they were regarded as a fifth column in the service of England’s enemies, Spain and France. James II, a Catholic king, had been deposed. Nor had opinion changed after the Napoleonic Wars. England remained solidly Protestant. But Ireland was another matter. For years Roman Catholic Ireland had been regarded as England’s Achilles’ heel – a country in which the French might consider they could successfully land and strangle British trade. Yet here was a country whose population was largely Roman Catholic, who were compelled to finance the established Protestant Church of Ireland and whose political leaders were debarred from sitting in Parliament. Agitation to repeal the anti-Catholic laws met obdurate resistance, not least from the King. What changed the minds of the Tory ministers was the state of public opinion in Ireland, which by 1829 seemed likely to burst into open rebellion. The Duke of Wellington and Robert Peel, who had both opposed Catholic Emancipation, now caved in; and they forced George IV, slobbering in tears, to give his assent.

Peel was the member of Parliament for Oxford University and, in view of his U-turn, scrupulously resigned his seat and stood for re-election. He was defeated, had to find another constituency, was denounced as a traitor and apostate. His defeat as the university’s burgess was brought about by a coalition of outraged Evangelicals and the old High and Dry party of the Established Church, composed of heads of houses and clergy united by the slogan of ‘No Popery’. Prominent in this coalition was Newman. He even carried the majority of the younger fellows of Oriel with him, leaving the Provost, Hawkins, isolated and his old mentor Whately fuming. Whately realised that Newman had broken with the liberal party for ever and with delicate malice saw to it that at a dinner he was placed between the most obtuse, port-swilling High Churchman and the most violent Evangelical: he asked him how he liked his new allies.

Meanwhile the government had been trying to lighten the burden of Church rates and taxes upon the Irish peasantry. How could this, in part, be financed? The Established Church of Ireland was sustained by four archbishops and eighteen bishops, somewhat excessive for the number of Irish Protestants. Why not therefore suppress ten bishoprics? It was Whately who had taught Newman to deplore Erastianism – the acceptance that the Church was a dependency of the State, a ministry of morals, whose bishops were appointed under Crown patronage by the Prime Minister. Even more questionable was the Prime Minister’s practice of choosing clergymen who would vote for his party in the House of Lords. By singular irony Whately had become Archbishop of Dublin and the opportunity was too good to miss. Newman wrote a devastating snub to his old teacher.

At this time Newman’s stock was high among the Oxford dons. Like the vast majority of the bishops he opposed the introduction of the Reform Bill, which was finally passed in 1832. The Whig reforms generated a new wave of opposition. The reforms in Ireland beggared the Protestant parish clergymen, and did not do all that much for the Roman Catholic peasantry. Nor, in the opinion of Oxford, were the reforms to lighten the burden of Church rates and other disabilities on the Dissenters any better. Yet it was at this moment that another attempt was made to enable Dissenters – Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers and the like – to enter Oxford and Cambridge. If Roman Catholics and Dissenters could now sit in Parliament, why should they not be permitted to become students at Oxford and Cambridge? This was the view which Provost Hawkins and other fellows of Oriel held. Among them was Renn Dickson Hampden. He had been appointed professor of moral philosophy when Newman himself had hopes of being elected, and had written a pamphlet supporting the proposal to relax the rule requiring undergraduates to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Pamphlets flew about. Once again Newman triumphed when the proposal was voted down.

Worse was to follow. In 1836 the Regius professor of divinity died and the Whigs were still in power in London. Melbourne naturally consulted the Archbishop of Canterbury but he sent the Archbishop’s list of eight names to Whately and Copleston for comment. They advised him to reject all eight names and appoint the new professor of moral philosophy, Hampden. Newman and the young professor of Hebrew, Edward Pusey, petitioned the Hebdomadal Council (composed of the heads of the colleges) to appoint a committee to examine Hampden’s writings – in particular the Bampton Lectures he had delivered a few years previously. Were they or were they not heretical? The committee found Hampden guilty of rationalism. Amid growing excitement, with one set of proctors vetoing a vote, and their successors permitting it, various indignities and prohibitions were heaped on Hampden. The virulence of the language used infected the undergraduates, who at one point stormed the Sheldonian Theatre denouncing Hampden.

Newman had now become a different kind of don. He had become a university politician. But he remained a puzzle, because he was not playing politics along the recognised party lines. Not for him the reform of the curriculum or the structure of university committees. His concern was the orientation of the Church of England; and since nearly all dons were clergymen in holy orders, what he said concerned them. By now he had turned against science and political economy as subjects fit for Oxford. He deplored the decision to hold the British Association meeting in the university. The aim of Oxford should be to guide and purify the Church. Using all his gifts of charisma and rhetoric Newman provoked an era of controversy, bitterness and intolerance which hung like a cloud over Oxford for the next thirty years. Religion – doctrine, theology, the interpretation of the Bible, the liturgy, fasting, celibacy, the sacraments – became topics of unbridled dispute. Newman had come to regard Evangelicalism as a faith that fostered spiritual pride, a faith that was vulgar and hostile to the intellect, too liable to foster sects that broke away from the Anglican Church, too sympathetic towards those enemies of the Church, the Dissenters, and above all too self-confident that all that a soul needed to be saved was to experience conversion. Evangelicals regarded the Church of England as less important than the Invisible Church to which the elect of all sects belonged. But Newman argued that a good Christian should not consider that one single experience – his conversion – absolved him. Newman preached holiness, not conversion. Holiness was a state of mind in which day by day you sought to live a better life, a more disciplined life, under the Church’s guidance. Evangelicals were content to convert individuals but Newman wanted to convert the nation.

To Newman the independence of the Church was more important than anything else in the world. The Church – did not the Apostles’ Creed say so? – was a Catholic church, a reformed, not a Protestant church: Roman abuses had been reformed, but not the Church itself. No government, no sovereign, no Parliament, could reform God’s Church, and Erastianism – the Prime Minister exercising ecclesiastical patronage – was as evil as Protestantism. To disestablish bishoprics in Ireland was sacrilege: whether the Irish were or were not Anglicans was irrelevant. The word of God required authoritative interpretation and priests alone could interpret it because they were directly descended from the Apostles by the laying-on of hands at ordination. The Church interprets the Bible and the rubrics of the Prayer Book and looks to the Early Fathers for guidance. The old High and Dry party, centred on Christ Church, supported the Established Church. But for Newman the Church was not established by the State. It was sanctified because the Church was a holy body descended from the twelve Apostles.

These were the tenets of the Oxford Movement and Newman was its leader. Among his allies was his senior, John Keble, who preached a sermon on National Apostasy denouncing the proposal to suppress the Irish bishoprics. More influential was the young Edward Bouverie Pusey, appointed in his twenties to the Regius professorship of Hebrew by Wellington on the advice of the Dean of Christ Church. (The Duke’s supporters were mightily offended: the Bouverie family had made bitter speeches against the government; but the Duke replied against the grain of the times: ‘How could I help it when they told me he was the best man?’) Pusey’s prestige as a scholar, an Eton and Christ Church man, his aristocratic connections, gave weight to the cause. Young disciples, such as Robert Wilberforce (son of the great Evangelical opponent of the slave trade), Frederick Faber, Henry Manning, joined Newman; but one man in particular captivated Newman. That was Hurrell Froude.

Froude was a handsome, dashing young man of a well-born Devon family and Newman fell in love with him. There are always some dons who like to shock and Froude was one of them. He was a fanatic. Coming from a High Church family, he hated Protestantism, detested the Reformation and ridiculed the Thirty-Nine Articles. So did Newman’s brother-in-law Tom Mozley, who declared that the Catechism was like a millstone round the neck of the Church. The Puseyites, as they began to be called, spread their teaching through pamphlets they called ‘Tracts for the Times’ – tracts which later became learned treatises. Many of the tracts were designed to show how many medieval practices, long since abandoned, should be revived. The first tract Pusey wrote was on the spiritual benefits of fasting.

In 1836 Froude died of tuberculosis and Newman wrote a preface to his Remains, in great part a transcription of his diaries. No young man who is earnest and has a mission in life should allow his diaries to be published. Froude’s descriptions of his ascetic practices, and his self-examination of his deeds, his thoughts, his motives, revealed him to be a prig; but far more damaging were his praise of clerical celibacy, his devotion to the Virgin Mary, his contempt for the heroes of the English Reformation – Froude once said that the best thing about Cranmer was that he burned well. Before the year (1838) was out, the irrepressible champion of Protestantism, Charles ‘Golly’ Golightly, got up a subscription to raise a memorial in Oxford to the Protestant Martyrs, and impaled Newman and Pusey upon a dilemma: to contribute or not to contribute? They havered; and then withdrew. From then on they were suspect.

Dons are apt to give way to a temptation that afflicts many of us. They cannot resist ridiculing their opponents. Newman pulverised his. When a professor preached against Froude, and went on to doubt whether Newman and Keble were sound men, Newman sat up all night fashioning a reply that twitted the professor from pillar to post. He was to do the same years later when, in the first chapter of his Apologia, he turned Charles Kingsley into a figure of fun. But dons who possess the gift of writing devastating reviews of other scholars are often sullen and prickly when they themselves are attacked. Newman wrote indignant letters to his adversaries and to old friends.

The habit of rebuking those whom he considered were betraying the Church grew on him. What others called intolerance he called adherence to principles. He was jeered when he refused to conduct the marriage of a parishioner called Jubber because she was the daughter of a Baptist pastry-cook and had not been baptised according to the rites of the Church of England. Arnold, by now headmaster of Rugby, was a special target for his jokes – Arnold had once published an ill-judged book on reform of the Church so that Dissenters (but not Quakers, Unitarians or Roman Catholics) might be deemed to be in communion with Anglicans. Newman was reported as saying – his throwaway lines were quoted everywhere – ‘But is Arnold a Christian?’ He had not in fact quite said that. Someone had said of a German theologian who the Tractarians suspected was unorthodox, ‘Arnold said he was a Christian’: to which Newman replied with a laugh, ‘Arnold must first show that he is a Christian himself.’ After Newman’s campaign against Hampden an article came from the School house at Rugby. It was titled ‘The Oxford Malignants’, and it stigmatised Newman and his followers as persecutors.