Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (8 page)

Writing to his sisters, he enjoys showing off his parodies – from Johnsonian pomposity, to Addisonian urbanity, to mock-heroics in the style of Gibbon, then letting rip in energetic demotic. You can hear him speak:

Bishop Hobart of New York is in Oxford – I dined with him … he is an intelligent man

… he is however I fear dirty – so at least were his hands and neckcloth…. [Bowden’s] sister’s music master, brought Rossini to dine in Grosv. Place … Labouring indeed under a severe cold, he did not sing; but he accompanied two or three of his own songs etc in

the most brilliant manner, giving the Piano the effect of an Orchestra – no,
three
Orchestras … surrounded in a low dark room by 8 or 9 Italians, all talking as fast as possible, who, with the assistance of a great screaming
macaw
(o.th! [only think] and of Mad[ame] Colbran Rossini in a dirty gown and her hair in curl papers, made such a clamour …
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Yet writing to Walter Mayers, he echoes his Evangelical mentor’s moralizing animadversions:

It is sickening to see what I might call the apostasies of many. This year it was supposed there would have been no such merry making. A quarrel existed among us; the College was divided into two sets, and no proposition for the usual subscription for wine was set on foot. Unhappily a day or two before the time a reconciliation takes place, the wine party is agreed upon, and this wicked union to be sealed by drunkenness is profanely joked upon with allusions to one of the expressions in the Athanasian Creed.
43

He writes to Mayers: ‘I sincerely trust that my conscience, enlightened by the Bible, through the influence of the Holy Spirit, may prove a faithful and vigilant guardian of the principles of religion.’
4
4
In his journal he records in similar vein his struggles with belief and consciousness of sin:

… I have had anguish in my mind. Yes, and all owing to my former sins. My soul would have been light and cheerful, I could have rested in the lovingkindness of the lord, I should have been of good courage, but He seems to be threatening retribution, and my enemy takes occasion to exult over his prey.
45

In years to come he would write of style as ‘the faithful expression of [a literary genius’s] intense personality, attending on his own inward world of thought as its very shadow … It follows him about
as
his shadow’.
4
6
As an undergraduate he was revelling in his ability to write in a range of styles, and wrote to his sister Jemima showing off the secrets of stylistic mastery: ‘I dare say you find great entertainment from Pope’s Homer’, he writes. ‘You would find it a good exercise, after you have read so much as to accustom your ear to the modulation of the metre, to
translate
a paragraph into French prose, and, in a few days when you have forgotten the verses, to turn them back again.’
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He admires the gothic conceits in Aeschylus. He is ‘lost in astonishment’, ‘stupefied’, ‘out of breath’. ‘You may feed on metaphors in it for days together.’
⁴⁸
He found Sophocles ‘stiff and yet … majestic’. Then he is off on a literary per-ambulation: ‘A peculiarity of the styles of Johnson and Gibbon came into my head the other day while walking … two peculiarities one of Johnson, one of Gibbon which may be contrasted with each other.’

Newman the undergraduate had the instincts and disciplines of a writer-in- the-making by emulation.

EXAMINATION FAILURE AND SUCCESS

In the event, he suffered a breakdown during the examinations, and only managed a lower second class honours in classics, failing altogether in mathematics. He would write of his failure in the third person: ‘He had overread himself … he lost his head, utterly broke down, and after vain attempts for several days had to retire.’
⁴⁹
He wrote home reporting that he felt composed, less disappointed for himself than for his parents. He wrote to his father:

What I feel on my own account is indeed nothing at all, compared with the idea that I have disappointed you; and most willingly would I consent to a hundred times the sadness that now overshadows me if so doing would save my Mother and you from feeling vexation.
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His sensible mother replied:

Your Father and I write in the warmest affection to you, and beg you not to think we are disappointed or vexed at the contents of your letter. We are more than satisfied with your laudable endeavours; and, as I have said to you before in anticipation of what has occurred, you must wait patiently and cheerfully the time appointed for … your merit; and your very failure will increase the interest they feel for you.
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Supported by his scholarship, he remained at Trinity, and decided to attempt to reverse the disaster of his
BA
finals by entering for a college fellowship at Oriel, the Oxford college with the most prestigious reputation for scholarship and intellect in the university. It was a bold and responsible bid. The family fortunes were calamitous and he had two younger brothers to help support. He took on pupils, including his own brother Francis, to add to his scholarship bursary. His friend Bowden rented Newman and his brother a house he had occupied in Oxford with a restaurant attached. To pay debts, there was a house sale of virtually everything the Newmans owned, including John Henry’s music. He felt that his boyhood was over. He wrote to his mother: ‘I felt much affected, and quite shed tears to think I could not longer call myself a boy.’
52

Despite the financial pressures and the anxiety of preparing for another gruelling set of academic examinations, Newman embarked on a treatise on astronomy, a light and airy concerto for piano, and a huge circuit of reading in law, geology, philosophy, Hebrew. For a second time he went to the entertaining geology lectures of the Reverend William Buckland, who speculated that the ‘beginning’ in Genesis was an undefined period, and that there had been great extinctions in natural history. He was one of the earliest Christian scientists to attempt a reconciliation between the evidence of fossils and Genesis. He would challenge, for example, the popular notion that the bones of hyenas found in a cave in Yorkshire, and evidently gnawed on by tigers, had been washed

there after Noah’s flood. The young Newman, however, was not prepared to swallow Buckland whole, as he felt that geology was so in its infancy and that ‘that no regular system is formed’.
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In April 1822 Newman sat the Oriel fellowship examination in competition with ten rivals. He was required at the outset to translate into Latin part of a
Spectator
essay on Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, and to write an essay in English on the difference between self-confidence and arrogance. The Provost and several Fellows of Oriel were so impressed by Newman’s early efforts that three of them went over to Trinity to make discreet inquiries about his background. Newman, however, was so depressed about his performance that he told his tutor, Thomas Short, that he was thinking of retiring. Short wisely filled him with lamb cutlets and cheered him on. Papers followed papers: philosophy, more Latin, mathematics, logic. One day he sat for eight hours on the hard examination bench in Oriel’s dining hall and thought that his spine would burst. He was consoled by the motto in the stained glass above him (there to this day): ‘
Pie repone te
’ (‘repose with pious confidence’: the version of Oriel’s current chaplain, as of October 2009, is: ‘Chill out!’).

Newman was playing the violin in his rooms at Trinity, when a man arrived requesting him to report to the Provost of Oriel. He allowed the messenger to depart before throwing down the instrument and running all the way to his new college. The route would be no different today. He would have hared across the Broad and into the Turl, passing Jesus College on his right, Exeter and Lincoln on his left. Crossing the High Street he would have dashed along the two lanes that take you into Oriel Square to be greeted by the noble façade of Oriel. As he hurried along, the whole of Oxford appeared to be rejoicing. He was congratulated, he wrote, by strangers. Among his overjoyed and hilarious accounts of the day was this:

The news spread through Trinity with great rapidity. I had hardly been in Kinsey’s room a minute, when in rushed Ogle like one mad. I then proceeded to the President’s and in rushed Ogle again. I find that T. rushed to E’s room, and nearly kicked down the door to communicate the news. E. in turn ran down stairs. Th. heard a noise and my name mentioned, and rushed out also, and in the room opposed found E.W. and Ogle leaping up and down, backwards and forwards. Men rushed in all directions to Trinity to men they knew, to congratulate them of the success of their College. The Bells were set ringing from three different towers (I had to pay for it).
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A life of scholarship, teaching, Holy Orders, and pastoral activities both within the university and city of Oxford, lay ahead.

CHAPTER 4
‌‌

Fellow of Oriel

‘… I am more than ever imprest too with the importance of staying in Oxford many years – “I am rooted …” ’

J
.
H
.
NEWMAN LETTER TO JEMIMA NEWMAN, 17 MARCH 1829

The main gate and façade of Oriel College, with its distinctive Flemish style curved gables, faces out across a square to the classical back entrance of Christ Church and the Peckwater building. Founded in 1326, it is the fifth oldest college in the university, and steeped in royal history: its Visitor is the British monarch. On a recent visit, I was assured that Newman’s rooms, on the second floor of the third staircase in the first quadrangle, remain much as they were in the early nineteenth century. A perfectly proportioned sitting room, about fourteen by sixteen feet, with a fireplace (now boarded up), adjoins a smaller bedroom area which leads to a lobby, next to the chapel’s organ, which Newman used as an oratory. One set of windows looks out across a busy lane to the side of Corpus Christi College, the other looks into the front quadrangle of Oriel in the direction of the building that houses the Senior Common Room and Library.

In this relatively small college, Newman found an ideal home for his talents and tendencies. The routine of Oxford college life suited him: regular meals, servants, financial security; a serious and scholarly peer group; the round of religious services and opportunities for pastoral duties; the stimulation of student contact. It was a perfect balance between the structured life of the bachelor scholar and community life. He had now decided to take Holy Orders, and since Oxford colleges of those days were peopled with ordained men he would be surrounded by priests and fellow candidates for the priesthood.