Although more than one of his contemporaries achieved the distinction, Newman has never been accounted a great letter writer. Thackeray, Carlyle, Edward Fitzgerald, Stevenson—these admit you to the sanctuary of intimacy, there to see them at their ease, and to share with them their slippered leisure and their unguarded moments. Their correspondence is filled with sidelights on their contemporaries, discussions on literature, the progress of their personal affairs, a dinner-party, a reconciliation, a projected new book, the spice of gossip and anecdote, and those intimate portraits of friends and foes, appareled to the life, that make dead yesterdays live. 

But with Newman it is different. It is not that he cannot unbend, for he can do that delightfully when he wishes; it is not that he is lacking in humor, for his rare smile is a joy to see. But the fact is, that this man, who in his teens walked with God and felt him-self ever in His presence, found that the serious business of life pressed constantly on his attention, and left little time for purely social interests. His correspondence was enormous, but it was largely with men and women who had moral problems to solve, or doubts or besetting difficulties, or who were allies or foes in some of the momentous matters with which his life was concerned—the Tractarian Movement, his conversion, the Irish University, the Rambler, the establishment of a branch of the Oratory at Oxford, the Kingsley affair, the definition of infallibility. 

Newman never “jumped with the crowd”; he was too completely the individualist for that, with an awareness of himself and of God such as few men have ever equaled or even understood. To him the longest life seemed short, because there is so much that He exacts of us and the night cometh swiftly. And always the world of shadows in which we live snares us within its petty round of irritating concerns and duties, and we ignore that other world, the realities of which should be the object of our dear desires. 

With such an insistent sense of the preciousness of time, it is no wonder that Newman is not a great letter-writer in the same way as Horace Walpole, the gossip; Gray, the pensive portrayer of minor doings; the whimsical Lamb, the dynamic Carlyle, the ebullient Thackeray, the intimate Fitzgerald. They are in the world and of the world; and their relations to one another, despite differences of time, place, and personality, are infinitely closer than they could ever be to John Henry Newman. His letters, unlike theirs, rarely mirror the details of his confined circle or portray the celebrities who enter it; for they are too busy with those things that escape the eye. 

All this, however, is not to say that Newman was hardly a great letter-writer. The distinction of a perfect style and the genius of a spiritual leader—great qualities, indeed—brighten his notes to others; and the fact that they are saturated, like the Apologia, with the personality of Newman, makes them peculiarly precious. It is not that he wears his heart upon his sleeve, for, except in the rarest instances, he restrains his moods, checks the expression of his emotions, and yields his ultimate confidences only to his own soul. But, none the less, he is pervadingly present, tender, thoughtful, patient, gracious, tactful, keen, eager to serve, mentally inexhaustible, and on occasion, when meekness has ceased to be a virtue, accusive, ironic, crushingly frank. These letters do really trace a priceless picture of the mind and heart of a man so many-sided, so endowed with spiritual vision, so abidingly conscious of that Other Presence, that he belongs to the high company of the rarest souls in all time. 

Gifted with the keenest intuitive judgment of character, Newman never failed to sense his correspondent’s thought or appreciate his type of mind; and his letters vary widely in tone as he writes, now to a nun who has lost her beloved superior; now to a man of the world who is groping for religious light; now to an old friend who seeks literary guidance; now to a child; now to one of those fortunate few, dear as life itself, to whom he could pay such exquisite tribute, in prose like music, as brought the Apologia to a close. Sympathetic and deeply sincere as he was, never once in all his long years, and through the mazes of a huge correspondence with men and women of every variety of mind, did he strike a false note. “You always understand everything,” his sister had said to him when, in childhood, he had dried her tears; and that judgment has been reechoed many times since by innumerable voices. 

His skill in varying his tone could be made to suit his own inclination no less than his correspondent’s type of mind. When in 1857 he resolved to resign the rectorship of the University at Dublin he wrote letters to the members of the hierarchy of Ireland “carefully graduated in cordiality of expres$ion,” and to read them is to see Newman from many angles, his punctilious courtesy, his appreciation of kindness, and his abiding respect for his superiors even when resentment of their failure to support his policies seemed warranted. 

Newman’s interest in seekers for religious truth did not end with his Lectures to Anglicans. Doubts or difficulties had only to be honest to touch his heart, and in the voluminous correspondence he carried on with men and women who sought his guidance, insight, patience, and tenderness were mingled with an exquisite tact. For years one of his highest hopes centered in the conversion of Henry Wilberforce, to whom he wrote some of his most insistent letters on the claims of the Catholic Church. In the autumn of 1849 rumor had it that Wilberforce was on the threshold of conversion. Newman wrote: “Carissime:— I have heard something about you this morning, which makes me say: ‘Send for me and I will come to you at once—by return of post. Do not let anything stand between conviction and its legitimate consequence.’ Carissime, you must die some day or other.” 

Two days later he wrote again: “Carissime:— This may cross one of yours; but I can’t help writing. How can you delay? O my dearest H. W., may not this be a crisis in your eternal destiny?” 

But the change did not come for months. Newman continues to be insistent: “There is no alternative between Catholicism and infidelity to the clear thinker—flee Babylon while you can.” Again, when conversion appears to be merely a matter of time: “O, the joy it will be to me to see you and embrace you as the patriarch turned himself with yearning to his lost son!” That joy was not delayed much longer, and early in 1850 Henry Wilberforce and his wife were received into the Church. 

Among the eminent Victorians whose association with Newman was slight but who felt, afar off, the spell of his personality, none inspired a more affectionate confidence than Richard Holt Hutton. Intellect, character, and the editorship of The Spectator united to give him a commanding position, and in the early days of the Kingsley-Newman duel, when public opinion trembled in the balance, it was the weight of his influence which inclined it to Newman. The Oratorian wrote to express his gratitude, and a friendship followed marked by mutual appreciation, both personal and intellectual, and a delicate candor that spoke eloquently for both men. Hutton never entered the Church, but he did not lose Newman’s esteem any more than Keble, Copeland, Dean Church, or Lord Blachford, those beloved friends of Oxford days who remained in the Anglican communion. Here is a Christmas letter written when Newman was seventy- one: 

My dear Mr. Hutton:—I have nothing to write to you about, but I am led at this season to send you the religious greetings and good wishes which it suggests, to assure you that, though I seem to be careless about those who desire truths, yet I do really sympathize with them very much, and ever have them in mind. 

 

I know how honestly you try to approve yourself to God, and this is a claim on the reverence of anyone who knows or reads you. There are many things as to which I most seriously differ from you, but I believe you to be one of those to whom the angels on Christmas night send greetings as “hominibus bonae voluntatis,” and it is a pleasure and a duty for all who would be their companions hereafter to follow their pattern of comprehensive charity here. I cannot feel so hopefully and tenderly to many of those whom you defend or patronize as I do to you—and what you write perplexes me often—but when a man is really and truly seeking the pearl of great price, how can one help joining oneself in heart and spirit with him? 

 

Most truly yours, John H. Newman. 

Newman cherished anniversaries with a kind of pas- sion which deepened with the years. Every day had a significance of its own which he recorded faithfully in his letters—his Oriel fellowship, his conversion, the beginning of the Oxford Movement, a friend’s birth- day, the death of Walter Scott, and countless others. Death did not terrify him; rather, he thought of it with a certain awe, as of a veil behind which lies the answer to great mysteries. 

Among Newman’s dearest friends of Oxford days was W. J. Copeland, his curate at Littlemore, and the editor of his sermons. After an interval of seventeen years they chanced to meet and at once the memories of the wonder-time when all Oxford was at Newman’s feet and the friendships of the Tractarian brotherhood glowed with the ardor of their great crusade, awakened to poignant life again. Copeland must come to see him at the Oratory! But when the promised visit was put off Newman wrote in remonstrance and the eager insistence of his letter betrays how deeply his emotions were stirred: 

Now you are not going to disappoint me. Except Ambrose Saint John, I have not spoken to anyone so near to my heart and memory as you are for nearly seventeen years—and you are going to deny me what you promised! … 

 

How do I know that I shall ever see you again, if you don’t come now? People are carried off so unexpectedly. There was Sir Robert Throckmorton last week, a hearty- looking man, younger than I—and he is gone. Men drop as on a battlefield. 

Few things show Newman’s keenness for the past, his pathetic cherishing of old memories, his abiding love of his friends, and his craving for affection as strikingly as his letters to Copeland at this period. “You could not be kinder to me,” he writes, “than you are in telling me that persons whom I love have not forgotten me.” When he fears that Copeland is not careful enough of his health he chides him gently, adding: “I want you to live many years, and never, never again to be so cruel to me as you were for nearly seventeen long years.” Verily, this is the voice of Newman, not Newman the controversialist, the educator, the guide of perplexed souls, the spiritual prophet, the great writer, but Newman the man, whose capacity for friendship was boundless, who could be as tender as a woman, and who often sought in memory and the affection of friends a sanctuary from such misunderstanding and loneliness as are the portion of Eve’s noblest children.