Abstract
Not a Victorian-style ‘Life in Letters’, insists the former rector of the Pontifical Beda College, Rome, but a ‘Portrait in Letters’, a selection from a lifetime’s correspondence which aims to present a rounded picture of Newman as he really was. Roderick Strange proves to be an excellent editor. Here are letters to and from Newman’s family and friends, colleagues and opponents; hilarious accounts of seasickness and of a visit to Cambridge; intense letters on the brink of departure to the Roman fold; fatherly letters to younger converts such as Gerard Manley Hopkins; confessional letters which reveal depression when under stress and sometimes a sense of insecurity. Deeply introverted, Newman carefully stored the most significant letters that he received, pigeonholing and annotating them after replying with the quill pen that he preferred all his life, iron being too heavy in the hand. Strange gives us a lively account of Newman as a diligent and sympathetic correspondent in the lucid introductions to each section of the book. Anglicans may feel that there could have been more letters before 1845; and OUP have provided a handsome binding in cardinal red. But then for some years now Newman has been claimed by the Roman Catholic Church as its own.
Selection is always difficult, even when the scope is as generous as this. One benefit, however, of having a single novel-length text is that patterns can be discerned over time. Particularly striking is Newman’s use of words associated with ‘feeling’, such as ‘love’, ‘affection’, ‘heart’ (his motto was Cor ad cor loquitur) and ‘tears’. Academics often speak of what they ‘feel’ about a subject, when they really mean ‘think’ about it. This was not true of Newman, whose careful choice of words describing his inner life reminds us that Romanticism was an important element of his emotional and intellectual formation. For Newman feeling, belief and affiliation were intimately linked. ‘I love our Church’, he writes to Hugh James Rose in 1836, ‘as a portion and a realizing of the Church Catholic among us’; but ‘I cannot love the ‘Church of England’ commonly so designated’ (p. 98). ‘I am very far more sure’, he writes to John Keble seven years later, ‘that England is in schism, than that the Roman additions to the Primitive Creed may not be developments’: ‘All this is so shocking to say, that I do not know whether to wish that I am exaggerating to you my feelings or not’ (p. 153).
Perhaps the most telling words associated with feeling in the Newman lexicon were ‘friend’ and ‘friendship’. Writing in 1865 to Ambrose St John, the close friend and fellow convert with whom he was to be buried, Newman described his reunion with Keble at Hursley in Hampshire, and comments, ‘How mysterious that first sight of friends is! for when I came to contemplate him, it was the old face and manner, but the first effect and impression was different’ (p. 395). Such passages remind us that Newman also wrote novels.
While providing an excellent introduction to Newman, this selection of letters also presents the more advanced reader with some material that is seldom if ever quoted in biographies. Over a lifetime that spanned most of the nineteenth century, this great controversialist recorded his heartfelt responses to Liberalism, to Darwin, to Essays and Reviews and to the ‘Infallibilists’ of the Vatican Council. Always the quintessential Newman, and always holding a quill pen.