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Newman and the Oriel Fellowship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Martin J. Svaglic
Martin J. Svaglic*
Affiliation:
Loyola University, Chicago 26, Ill.
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Extract

What has made john henry newman so much more interesting to students of literature than most of his religious contemporaries is the rare blend in him of the artist, the intellectual, and the gentleman with the profoundly religious temper which judges the ultimate value of all activity in its movement towards or away from God. Whether it be called Christian humanism or some other name, it was a difficult balance that he sought to keep; and he has left us in his private papers a frank record of his struggles. The rich integration he eventually did achieve was the great source of his attraction for so different a contemporary in some respects as Matthew Arnold, for example, who ranked Newman with Goethe, Wordsworth, and Sainte-Beuve among the principal influences on his own development. At the outset of his career, however, Newman was being torn and pulled in opposite directions; and it is more than doubtful that he could ever have gained his equilibrium if he had not been elected a Fellow of Oriel College on 12 April 1822: “the turning point of his life,” as he would one day rightly call it, “and of all days most memorable.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 70 , Issue 5 , December 1955 , pp. 1014 - 1032
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1955

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References

page 1014 note 1 Letters and Correspondence, ed. Anne Mozley, 2 vols. (London, 1891), i, 73.

page 1014 note 2 Unless otherwise noted, the material in this essay is based on and the quotations are taken with permission directly from Newman's Private Journal and the volumes called “Personal and Family Letters” in the Birmingham Oratory. Most of the material in the collection at the Oratory is now available on microfilm at the Yale Library. Cf. A. Dwight Culler, “Newman: The Remembrance of Things Past,” in A Newman Symposium, ed. V. R. Yanitelli, S.J. (New York, 1952), pp. 59–70.

page 1014 note 3 From an essay preserved in Newman's “Autographic Remains” and taken from the 21 May 1816 number of The Beholder, an Addisonian periodical which Newman conducted between 21 Feb. and 4 June of that year. It ran to 40 numbers of 4 closely written octavo pages each, all by Newman. Most of it, unfortunately, he destroyed as not “worth keeping.”

page 1014 note 4 Cf. Letters and Correspondence, i, 42.

page 1014 note 5 Quoted by C. E. Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, 3 vols. (New York, 1928), iii, 165. For the new reforms, cf. esp. pp. 160–170; Mark Pattison, Memoirs (London, 1885), pp. 66–81; and Elie Halévy, A History of the English People in 1815 (London, 1924), pp. 473–480.

page 1014 note 6 Letters and Correspondence, i, 45.

page 1014 note 7 But cf. tie opinion of his brother Francis: “I have often heard the remark, that if he had become a barrister, whether in Common Law or Chancery, he would have been eminent among the few. This exactly strikes off my belief. His fine taste and ‘subtlety’ would have suited Chancery, and from Cicero he had learned the art of pommelling broadly enough for any Jury. He urgently needed a thesis to attack or defend, some authority as the goal of his eloquence, or concessions made by another: then he had a start. In his conversation as soon as he had extracted adequate concessions, he was a powerful reasoner, entangling, like Socrates, the unwary disputant” (Contributions, Chiefly to the Early History of the Late Cardinal Newman, London, 1891, p. 44). It is only fair to add that Francis was writing with the avowed purpose of defending what he meant by Protestantism, an object he thought to achieve by deflating his brother's reputation.

page 1014 note 8 Thus Maisie Ward remarks that Newman's self-condemnation is so wholesale “I have given up as impossible the effort I at first made to take it seriously as self-revelation” (Young Mr. Neivman, New York, 1948, p. 59). But as Miss Ward knows, Newman's Journal as we have it is an abridged version, copied later by Newman from his original MS. It is clear that he preserved only what he thought significant—to that extent he wished to guide and not merely to be the creature of his future biographers. And it is incredible that he would have devoted so much space to an account of his failings if he had felt that it should not be taken seriously.

page 1014 note 9 Letters and Correspondence, i, 47–48. A glaring example of Newman's genteel reticence in the matter of family history is his failure to mention in the Memoir anything about his father's troubles, important as they were in his own life.

page 1014 note 10 H. P. Liddon, Life of Edward Bouverie P-Usey, 4 vols. (London, 1894), i, 58.

page 1014 note 11 Letters and Correspondence, i, 64.

page 1014 note 12 Quoted by Newman, Letters, i, 65. The article would have seemed far less damaging if it had been known at the time that the author was the candidate passed over in 1821.

page 1014 note 13 Quoted by Newman from memory in his Private Journal, entry of 6 Jan, 1822.

page 1014 note 14 Quoted in John Scott, Life of The Rev. Thomas Scott, D.D. (New York, 1828), pp. 203 and 207.

page 1014 note 15 From the notes to Scott's ed. of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (Hallowell, 1817), p. 116. 16 Letters and Correspondence, i, 59.

page 1014 note 17 In Liddon, i, 56.

page 1014 note 18 See his letter in Liddon, i, 66–69, from which the quotations following are taken.

page 1014 note 19 “It used to be said that when James Mozley was in for the Fellowship he kept on till the last, and when it got dark lay down by the fire and wrote by the firelight, and produced an English essay of about ten lines. But the ten lines were such as no other man in [Oxford] could have written.”

page 1014 note 20 On 1 August 1856 Newman added the following comment on this entry: “It was the same nervous affection which tormented me in 1833, at the commencement of my fever at Leonforte in Sicily. Then I was obliged to occupy myself in counting the figures on the pattern of the room-paper.”

page 1014 note 21 No doubt because his tutor at Trinity, Mr. Short, knowing that something was up, had the night before given him a kind of discreet pep talk—and fed him lamb chops. (Cf. Letters and Correspondence, i, 70–71.)

page 1014 note 22 Cf. Newman's remarks in a letter of 15 March to his father, who feared that he was too despondent about his chances at Oriel: “I assure you that they know very little of me who think I do not put a value on myself relatively to others. I think (since I am forced to speak boastfully) few have attained the facility of comprehension which I have arrived at from the regularity and constancy of my reading, and the laborious and nerve-bracing and fancy-repressing study of mathematics, which has been my principal subject” (Letters and Correspondence, i, 69).

page 1014 note 23 Letters and Correspondence, i, 117.