Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (7 page)

I am obliged to mention, though I do it with great reluctance, another deep imagination, which at this time, the autumn of 1816, took possession of me, – that there can be no mistake about the fact;
viz.
that it would be the will of God that I should lead a single life.
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Why he should mention this with ‘great reluctance’, he does not tell; although at the time of writing (in his sixty-third year) he had been involved in the contentious issue of clerical celibacy. The ‘deep imagination’ indicates that this was an emotional impulse based on his notion of what it would be like to be married, rather than a moral imperative deriving from a belief that celibacy was a holier state.

UNDERGRADUATE

Trinity College, Oxford, stands back from Oxford’s spacious street, known appropriately as the Broad. High railings and massive ornate gates, beyond which lie lawns and flower beds, lead up the impressive neoclassical chapel,

giving the impression of the vista of a grand English house rather than a college. In the first quad is a medieval building facing the panelled dining hall; then one enters a three-sided classical building, reinforcing the neoclassical impression, built in honey-coloured stone. This four-storey building looks out towards Wadham College.

In 1817 Newman, aged 16, went up to Trinity; his father had left it to the last moment before directing the carriage towards the city of dreaming spires rather than to the Fens. He was lodged on staircase VII, with a view on one side over Balliol and an inner court with climbing snapdragon, and on the other towards Wadham. He fell in love with Oxford from the first and was soon dreaming of settling there for the rest of his life. Referring to himself in the third person, he wrote in his journal: ‘He recollected with what awe and transport he had at first come to the University, as to some sacred shrine; and how from time to time hopes had come over him that some day or other he should have gained a title to residence on one of its old foundations.’ He goes on:

One night, in particular, came across his memory, how a friend and he had ascended to the top of one of its many towers with the purpose of making observations on the stars; and how, while his friend was busily engaged with the pointers, he, earthly-minded youth, had been looking down into the deep, gas-lit, dark-shadowed quadrangles, and wondering if he should ever be a Fellow of this or that College, which he singled out from the mass of academical buildings.
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While his friend prepares to lose himself in wonders of the night-sky, there is Newman lost, by his own admission, in thoughts about himself and the seductions of Oxford. It was Matthew Arnold who would write of Oxford’s allure during this period in the preface to his
Essays in Criticism
: ‘Beautiful city! So venerable, so lovely … so serene.… Steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age …’
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Newman showed immediate promise as a mathematician, but he was behind in Latin and Greek; although not for long. He won a much needed scholarship the following year. Academically ambitious, confident of his intellectual ability, he embarked on a severe regime of study in preparation for ‘Schools’, the Oxford
BA
honours examination. If he read for only nine hours on any one day, he would make up for it by reading fourteen hours the next. There is an impression of high seriousness, agonizing scrupulosity over whether to pray for academic success. He wrote to his brother Francis in Evangelical vein:

I read very much certainly, but I may say (I trust), without deceiving myself or losing sight of my unnumbered transgressions, that God sanctifies my studies by breathing into me all the while thoughts of Him, and enables me to praise Him with joyful lips, when I rise and when I lie down, and when I wake in the night.
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Newman was not athletic; indeed he had not ‘a grain’, he wrote, ‘in [my] composition of that temper … so natural to young men’.
2
6
Yet, while shy, sensitive, devout, and occasionally priggish, he reveals himself in his vivid correspondence as high-spirited. He had in his boyhood attended dancing lessons (with reluctance), swam, and rode ponies and horses. We see him making kites, being a spectator at sailing competitions, going to plays and concerts, feasting himself on almond cakes and barley sugar (small wonder his teeth decayed early); practicing the violin for half hour intervals between reading stints, and occasionally performing. ‘I was asked by a man yesterday to go to his room for a
little
Music at 7 o’clock’, he wrote as an undergraduate. ‘I went. An old Don, a very good natured man, but too fond of music – played Bass: and through his enthusiasm I was kept playing quartets on a heavy tenor from seven to twelve! Oh my poor arm and eyes and head and back.’
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Despite a later tendency to fast, especially during Lent, he had a hearty interest in food and drink. He describes with relish a typical meal served in Trinity hall: ‘… beautiful salmon, haunches of mutton, lamb etc and fine, very fine (to my taste) strong beer, served up on old pewter plates, and mis-shapen earthenware jugs … gooseberry, raspberry, and apricot pies … such a profusion that scarcely two ate of the same joint.’
²⁸
Then: ‘… the other day I had a nice dinner set before me of veal cutlets and peas, so much to myself that I could hear the noise I made in chewing through the empty hall.’
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Acutely self-conscious in his early days at Oxford, he was convinced that he dressed oddly and stood out from his fellows: ‘Whenever I go out I am stared at; and the other day there was a party of people laughing at my dress.’
³⁰
Then he complains in priggish vein to his father: ‘I am not noticed at all, except by being silently stared at. I am glad they do not wish to be acquainted with me, not because I wish to appear apart from them and illnatured, but because I really do not think I should gain the least advantage from their company.’
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On one occasion a group of students attempted to make him drink heavily while begging him to play his violin. He stood his ground and refused. On another occasion he was the butt of bullying. He records the episode with terse narrative skill. There is a hint, by his own admission, that he was suspected of effeminacy; Newman, however, is more interested in what it means to be a gentleman:

Is it gentlemanly conduct to rush into my room, and to strut up to the further end of it, and ask me in a laughing tone how I do; and then, after my remaining some time in silent wonder, to run and bolt the door, and say they are hiding from some one?

Then, to tell me they have come to invite me to wine, and, when I answer in the negative, to ask me why, pressing and pressing me to come, and asking me in a gay manner if I do not mean to take a first class, telling me I read too much, and overdo it, and then to turn from me suddenly and to hollow out ‘Let him alone, come along’, and to throw open the door?

I said such conduct was not the conduct of gentlemen – and ordered them to leave the room. One then said he would knock me down, if I were not too contemptible a fellow. (He was 6 feet 3 or 4 inches high, and stout in proportion.)
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The following day Newman confided to his journal: ‘The One has been here just now, and said he was very sorry for his conduct, that a sudden gust of passion had overset him – that I had acted very well, that he had seldom or never seen any one act more firmly.’ Newman told the young man ‘not to think more about it’. They shook hands.
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Dignified, courageous, he was nevertheless nervous, highly strung, and fastidious. He reports his queasiness on being assailed by a strong smell: ‘While I was out today, some men who are painting throughout the College have painted my windows, and I am nearly sick with the smell. I do not know how I shall sleep tonight for it.’
³⁴
In St Mary’s church during a service he had a sudden fainting fit: ‘A dizziness came over my eyes, I could see nothing, and, to my surprise, I found my head was on the shoulder of the gownsman who sat next to me.’
³⁵
The man took Newman out into the fresh air and brought him to his college rooms.

He complains of toothache, headaches, eye problems. He writes to his mother, setting out in detail advice he has been given: ‘Strain not your sight at distant objects; rather use a glass. When you read, have your neckcloth loose, your head erect, avoid every thing like a stooping posture. In bed, your head very high, your feet low … In your diet avoid any thing which may cause a sudden rush of blood to the head …’
³⁶
He was preoccupied with his own ailments and with news of indispositions in the family: his sister Jemima’s cough, Mary’s chilblains, his brother Charles’s softening gums.

He was fascinated by his dreams, and noted his dream life, especially when it featured religious themes. One night he dreamt of a spirit coming to him to talk of religious mysteries:

Among other things [the spirit] said that it was absolutely impossible for the reason of man to understand the mystery (I think) of the Holy Trinity, and in vain to argue about it; but that every thing in another world was so
very
,
very plain
, that there was not the slightest difficulty about it. I cannot put into any sufficiently strong form of words the ideas which were conveyed to me. I thought I instantly fell on my knees, overcome with gratitude to God for so kind a message … out of dreams often much good can be extracted.
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And all the while Oxford, the surrounding country and villages, and the atmosphere of the place was entering his soul. He describes his rooms for Jemima with a mix of pride and parody (‘though my feeble pen can ill describe the endless beauties with which it is adorned’):

The room is lofty, and lighted by two windows, from which are seen, the gardens of the college and the turrets of Wadham. Scarlet Morine curtains shed a rich glow over the apartment – On turning to the right a massy chimney-piece of marble discovers itself …
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Despite the daunting regime of study he could bask in the enchantment of Oxford’s bells on a Sunday evening. ‘Bells pealing. The pleasure of hearing them. It leads the mind to a longing after some thing I know not what. It does not bring past years to remembrance. It does not bring anything. What does it do? We have a kind of longing after something dear to us and well known to us … Such is my feeling at this minute, as I hear them.’
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THE APPRENTICE WRITER

He soon made friends with a fellow undergraduate, John William Bowden, and they became inseparable. Together they embarked on the writing of a romance based on the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and started a magazine called
The Undergraduate
; although Newman withdrew the moment he was identified as editor. In 1819 we find him devising a debating society, eleven years ahead of the founding of the Oxford Union. ‘The subjects of disputation should include the whole range of history, poetry and the fine arts.’ He was against the inclusion of ‘politics of the last 100 years’, showing a degree of guardedness against party political polemic. But ‘the members should be all undergraduates elected by the undergraduates’.
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He was reading, translating, composing in the styles of Homer, Aeschylus, Plato, Sophocles, Virgil, Cicero, Herodotus, among others. His modern reading included Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson, Gibbon, Crabbe, Southey, Scott. He shared his enthusiasms with his mother. Here he is, having read the new novel
Ivanhoe
:

The last chapter in it is horribly sublime. O what a poet! his words are not like a novelist

– O certainly a poet. I never really recollect reading any thing which so took away my breath with admiration as the last half of the second volume.
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