Portraits and Miniatures (18 page)

To what extent was Newman irrevocably Oxford-conditioned, even when he had spread a trail of intellectual and liturgical upheaval in that university and spent long years as exiled from the city as was the Scholar Gipsy? It was my predecessor in this series, A. N. Wilson, who, without himself uttering so obvious a thought, aroused in my mind the Scholar Gipsy comparison with his evocative television portrait last autumn, which left me with the loose impression of Newman haunting the Cumnor Hills and looking down with ineffable sadness at a Turneresque view of the Oxford skyline.

On the other hand, I. T. Ker, Newman's 1988 biographer, wrote that it was ‘leaving Littlemore, unlike leaving Oxford or St Mary's, [that was] very painful for Newman'. It was part of Newman's fascination that he was frequently capable of unexpected judgements about places, as about people. He would be as good an example as one could possibly imagine of a figure who was quintessentially Oxonian rather than Cantabrigian. Yet, when he first saw Cambridge, at the surprisingly late age of thirty-one, he wrote, ‘I do really think the place finer than Oxford'. And when in 1846 he was on the most symbolically important journey to the Eternal City of any nineteenth-century person from England he perversely decided that Milan was ‘a most wonderful place - to me more striking than Rome'. He
appears to have rated Milan Cathedral together with the chapel of Trinity College, Oxford - an unusual pair - as almost his favourite ecclesiastical buildings.

Yet, despite some unwillingness to worship at predictable shrines, I think Newman did carry a half-visible Oxford canopy around with him for the forty-five years of his Roman Catholic life. In the seventh Dublin Discourse, for example, there is the panegyric of Oriel. It is worth citing at length for it is a typical, although by no means the most brilliant, example of Newman's cumulative style, by which he uses cascades of words to build up an idea like a range of hills with each summit rising a little higher than the previous one, but also steers through this mountain chain in order to get into position for the next axis of aggressive advance. I say ‘aggressive' for I find it beyond dispute that John Henry Newman, for all his portrait of that ‘parfit gentil knight' which was his ideal of a gentleman, was a polemicist of an elegant deadliness that is met only once in a generation. The only comparable figure in this respect that I have encountered in our recent University is Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, who deserves his nobility as Lord Dacre even more for his sword than for his robe.

Newman's quarry in this early part of Discourse VII was no less a figure than John Locke. Newman had perhaps a keener sense of intellectual than of ecclesiastical hierarchy, and he knew that Locke was too strong a fortress to be attacked without a considerable preliminary investment. Lesser (although by no means negligible) figures like former Lord Chancellor Brougham or Bishop Mattly of Durham he would engage more directly. Even in these lesser cases, however, there is an aesthetic pleasure in watching Newman get into position for the attack. His old adversary Dr Arnold of Rugby could hardly have prepared for a flogging with more loving care than Newman does for an intellectual joust. Just as Arnold, while rolling up his sleeves, might have referred to the eminence of the boy's parents and the promise with which he came to the school, so Newman pays preliminary tribute to the general respect in which the right reverend prelate or the most learned lord is held and the lucidity with which he expresses his ideas; perhaps even (although not I think in the case
of Brougham) to the probity of his personal life. Then comes the thrust, delivered like a matador's deadly lunge.

But Locke, who although not well-treated by Christ Church at the time, had become almost as great a talisman for seventeenth-century Oxford as Newton had for the same period in Cambridge, could only be assaulted after a more elaborate approach march. So we have a eulogy of the recently dead Dr Copleston, Provost of Oriel in Newman's early days and later Bishop of Llandaff, and with him of John Davison, another member of the Oriel galaxy whose devastating attack on R. L. Edgeworth's fallacies on
Professional Education
was really, Newman says, an attack on the luminaries of the
Edinburgh Review
and behind them ‘an a far greater author … who in a past age had argued on the same side'. So the siege gun was at last in position for the engagement with Locke.

But in introducing his Irish and Catholic audience to ‘the Protestant Bishop of Llandaff' Newman felt that he had a peg on which he could hang some of his feelings about Oriel, which had nurtured him for a quarter of a century but which in 1852 he had not seen for nearly a decade. As a further convolution he does so sufficiently archly that the name of Oriel, as though it were that of a modest mistress, is never mentioned, and I was indeed far into the passage before I was certain which college he was talking about:

In the heart of Oxford there is a small plot of ground, hemmed in by public thoroughfares, which has been in the possession of and the house of one Society for about 500 years. In the old time of Boniface VIII and John XXII, in the age of Scotus and Occam and Dante, before Wyclif or Huss had kindled those miserable fires which are still raging to the ruin of the highest interests of man, an unfortunate King of England, Edward II, flying from the field of Bannockburn, is said to have made a vow to the Blessed Virgin to found a religious house in her honour…

The visitor, whose curiosity has been excited by its present fame, gazes perhaps with something of disappointment on a
collection of buildings which have with them so few of the circumstances of dignity or wealth. Broad quadrangles, high halls and chambers, ornamental cloisters, stately walls, or umbrageous gardens, a throng of students, ample reserves or a glorious history, none of these things were the portion of that old Catholic foundation; nothing in short which to the common eye sixty years ago would have given tokens of what it was to be. But it had at that time a spirit working within it, which enabled its inmates to do, amid its seeming insignificance, what no other body in the place could equal …

One of the things it did was to elect fellows solely on the basis of what Newman rather oddly described as ‘public and patriotic grounds', and without regard not only to connection but also to university class lists. The result was that Newman's disastrous schools results of 1820 were compensated for by his being elected a fellow of Oriel sixteen months later. For this he remained grateful, but his feelings towards that college, in spite of some fluctuations in his years of crisis, were I think based on a more lively emotion than that of gratitude. Oriel's diversity of intellects and religious positions, as well as his memory of other colleges with broader quadrangles and more umbrageous gardens, infused much of his unrealistic hopes for what he might create in Dublin.

The Oriel passage I have dealt with at length not only to illustrate Newman's attitude to Oxford but also to exemplify both the circumlocutory and the rhetorical nature of his style. He was a great rhetorician. He was so in both the favourable and the less favourable sense of the word. He was certainly a persuasive and impressive speaker. But he was also given to the use of words more for ornamentation than for meaning. Disraeli's jibe about Gladstone, ‘a sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity', could, with the word sophistical, which is not appropriate, left out, be applied just as well to Newman. His style is less portentous than Gladstone's. It reminds me more of Chrisopher Fry out of whose plays in the 1940s and 1950s felicitous words tumbled like stars from a magnificent
firework. Newman was moderately austere in the physical surroundings of life, but not in his use of words or imagery, where he was luxuriantly self-indulgent. He was as addicted to never using one word where ten words would do as Mr Kinnock is accused of being, although his phrases were substantially better chosen.

An outstanding example is provided in Discourse I of
The Idea,
where Newman has to deal with the awkward fact that the Pope had laid it down that there must be a purely Catholic university. Newman makes no attempt to pretend that it is not awkward: ‘It is the decision of the Holy See. St Peter has spoken, it is he who has enjoined that which seems to us so unpromising.' He does not attempt to argue for this decision on its merits. Instead he asks for it to be accepted on the basis of the proven record of the Papacy over 1800 years: ‘He has spoken, and has a claim on us to trust him.' Newman then a little implausibly says, ‘These are not the words of rhetoric, Gentlemen, but of history'; and then proceeds to sweep into a prose-poem of quasi-historical rhetoric that uses every possible evocative name and image not only to extol the early Christian cause but to bind England and Ireland together in a tradition of civilizing holiness.

… the two islands, in a dark and dreary age, were the two lights of Christendom. O memorable time, when St Aidan and the Irish monks went up to Lindisfarne and Melrose, and taught the Saxon youth, and when a St Cuthbert and a St Eata repaid their charitable toil!

And so he continues for several hundreds of words, through the Christian exploits of Mailduf and St Aldheim and St Egbert and St Willibrod and ‘the two noble Ewalds' to Alcuin, ‘the pupil of both the English and the Irish schools' who was sent for by Charlemagne to ‘revive science and letters in France'. ‘Such was the foundation of the school of Paris, from which, over the course of centuries, sprang the famous University [which was] the glory of the middle ages.'

So the awkward decision was dissolved in this paean to Anglo-Irish
partnership which elided encouragingly into the suggestion that it had led to the foundation of the great University of the Sorbonne. And the lecture concluded by saying that England and Ireland had changed but ‘Rome is where it was, and St Peter is the same … And now surely he is giving us a like mission, and we shall become one again, while we zealously and lovingly fulfil it.' If that is not rhetoric, I do not know what is.

Equally, at the end of Discourse IX, entitled the
Duties of the Church Towards Knowledge,
he ends with the most tremendous
tour de force
that owes more to oratory than to relevance. He is attempting first to sum up what he has previously said, which he is rarely good at, for his thoughts live in his phrases and fade when they are reduced to summary form. Second, he is attempting to reconcile his strong shafts of instinctive tolerance with his respect for the authority of the Church, and gets himself, perhaps only to my inadequately spiritual mind, into a very great muddle. He has just proclaimed a firm libertarian doctrine on literature: ‘I say, from the nature of the case, if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of sinful man.' And he adds, ‘we would be shrinking from our plain duty, Gentlemen, did we leave out Literature from Education.' The university, he adds, is not to be a convent or even a seminary. ‘It is a place to fit men of the world for the world.'

But how is this to be reconciled with the authority of the Church over every aspect of this university? Is he advocating and defending such pervasive authority? In Discourse II he seems to be taking up a much more modest position in regard to Catholic authority: ‘As to the range of University teaching certainly the very name of University is inconsistent with restrictions of any kind.' In this Discourse he proceeds from this only to the limited claim that as theology is part of knowledge it cannot be excluded from the subjects taught at a true university. It is at least entitled to a chair (or chairs) amongst many. From there he advances to an intermediate position of refuting that which he calls the Lutheran advocacy of the complete separation of science and religion. He
postulates a modern philosopher of science, asking him, ‘Why cannot you go your way and let us go ours?' and says, ‘I answer, in the name of the Science of Religion, when Newton can dispense with the metaphysicians, then may you dispense with us.' But he is still confining himself to an argument for the wholeness of knowledge and to religion's claim to a place in it.

Then in Discourse IX, quite close to the liberal passage on literature, he suddenly goes much further: ‘If the Catholic faith is true, a University cannot exist externally to the Catholic pale, for it cannot teach Universal Knowledge if it does not teach Catholic theology. That is certain, but still, though it had ever so many theological Chairs, that would not suffice to make it a Catholic University; for theology would be included in its teaching only as a branch of knowledge, only as one of many constituent portions, however important a one, of what I have called Philosophy. Hence a direct and active jurisdiction of the Church over it and in it is necessary, lest it should become the rival of the Church with the community at large in those theological matters which to the Church are exclusively committed …'

Much of the rest of this final Discourse, with the exception of the passage on literature, is Newman at his uneasiest. His words do not flow with their usual spontaneity. There are a great number of ‘Gentlemens' and ‘that is certains', the latter in fact a certain sign of Newman's uncertainty. And then suddenly he escapes from this viscosity by hitting on the idea of bringing the whole thing to an end by throwing everything into a panegyric of St Philip Neri - ‘my own special Father and Patron' as he refers to him. It is like the finale of an open-air concert I once attended, which brought the 1812 Overture to a conclusion with cymbals banging, cannons pounding, fireworks exploding and the conductor exhausting himself with enthusiasm:

Nay, people came to him, not only from all parts of Italy, but from France, Spain, Germany and all Christendom, and even the infidels and Jews, who had ever any communication with him, revered him as a holy man. The first families of Rome, the Massimi, the Aldobrandini, the Colonnas, the Altieri, the
Vitelleschi, were his friends and his penitents. Nobles of Poland, Grandees of Spain, Knights of Malta could not leave Rome without coming to him. Cardinals, Archbishops and Bishops were his intimates, Frederigo Borromeo haunted his room and got the name of Father Philip's soul. The Cardinal-Archbishops of Verona and Bologna wrote books in his honour. Pope Pius IV died in his arms. Lawyers, painters, musicians, physicians, it was the same with them. Baronius, Zazzara, Ricci, left the law at his bidding, and joined his congregation to do its work, to write the annals of the Church, and to die in the odour of sanctity. Palestrina had Father Philip's ministrations in his last moments. Anninuccia hung about him during life, sent him a message after death, and was conducted by him through Purgatory to Heaven. And who was he, I say all the while, but a humble priest, a stranger in Rome, with no distinction of family or letters, no claim of station or of office, great simply in the attraction with which a Divine Power had gifted him? And yet thus humble, thus unennobled, thus empty-handed, he has achieved the glorious title of Apostle of Rome.