To a man born after World War I, the autobiographical writings of John Henry Newman are in many ways incomprehensible. (John Henry Newman, Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Henry Tristram. Sheed and Ward. $4.50.) They belong to a Victorian genre as distant from the temper of our day as are the houses of the great Whig magistrates and the prose of Macaulay. The autobiographical remains in question could not have been written by a contemporary; therefore he cannot understand them from within. He can approach them only as a man might approach the Cordilleras from the sea, sighting them from a distance and through the mist, white, rising sharp like needles, their pointed crests lost in fog and the dusk of a declining day: incomprehensible, they are nonetheless there before him, factual, existent, and he “can do nothing more than take them as they are.” It is in the spirit of this last sentiment, taken from The Grammar of Assent, that we must approach these fragmentary confessions. 

That they are foreign to the age, that they are the work of a mind at once universal and provincial is apparent to anyone who will but leaf through the book with a half-critical eye. It is my firm conviction that they add a dimension to our knowledge of the great theologian and educator, a dimension which deepens rather than lifts the mystery that has ever surrounded him. Through the Victorian facade, beyond the quaint provincialism and stiff classicism of the older Oxford manner, looms a spirit who breathed an air common to Augustine and Pascal. The wind of crisis, decision, risk and doom, the saving grace of God rustle through these papers and lift them to a universal order of things. They belong, truly, with the classics of the Christian history of the soul.

There is no planned center to these writings. They would be lost to us if Newman had not carted his correspondence around England for half a century; if he had not fastidiously saved old notebooks, cardboard covers, faded envelopes; if he had not perpetually sorted and corrected the letters of almost seventy years, forever arranging anew the furniture of the past in the light of the judgment of the present. Newman’s sense of responsibility to his own past, shared in common with all the great Victorians, would be judged abnormal by many today. They would see here nothing but a mass of introspection and self-recrimination. 

Here we have the letters of the schoolboy, who emerges from their pages as something of a proper prig, exulting in the most trivial of academic distinctions and simultaneously warning himself against the pride latent therein. He was a child who disdained the company of his fellows as he damned Trinity in a letter to his mother as a place where the only “necessary…qualification…was Drink, drink, drink.” It could not have been easy for the mellowed old Cardinal who insisted on billiard tables for the students at the Catholic University of Ireland to admit that as a boy he never understood from within the comradeship and conviviality which are part of the youth of Catholic and pagan alike. It is far easier to confess to having been a rake than a prig. Yet Newman confesses the latter and such a confession, coming from a man sensitive almost to morbidity, is a sign of his heroism and sanctity. 

In this volume, we have, from the pen of the most fastidious master of English letters, the most fantastic document in English literature: a biography composed for his proposed memoirist as a model upon which she might proceed in the task he had laid upon her. Newman loathed the inflated and laudatory biography of the Victorian era. He abhorred chance references to himself and his family in the press. “I am,” he told Lord Blachford, “as if my skin was torn off.” Biography ought to be written around the letters of the subject in question, thought Newman; the style should be chaste and severely factual. Insisting that an Anglican should edit his pre-Catholic papers and chronicle his early years, he delegated the task to Anne Mosley. She pronounced his “Autobiographical Memoir” a work of absolute truth and fairness. The document was written in the third person. It was done in a severe and plain style, without any of the high rhetoric associated with the Apologia. The manner is reminiscent of the Arians of The Fourth Century, but altogether without the music that makes that book a masterpiece of historical and theological style. 

The work of his very old age, his memoir is a tour de force: while revealing nothing of the man himself in the exposition, it mercilessly gives him away in that the exposition merely illustrates his correspondence, which was the history of his soul. Newman intended both to reveal the configurations of his spirit and simultaneously mask them behind the proprieties of the age. Why he should have desired to do both is lost in the secret of that subtle and nervous sensibility which informed what was perhaps the most remarkable, what is certainly the most interesting, personality of the Victorian era. 

We are given Newman’s three early journals as well as the journal he composed between 1859 and 1879. They were written without stylistic pretense and were clearly a dialogue between Newman and his conscience, his conscience and God. The barbaric writing is a shock. The youthful Newman was not yet one of those rare masters of prose who writes with ease from the center of a sensibility formed once and forever by the ars scribendi. “The unpleasant style in which it is written arises from my habit from a boy to compose. I seldom wrote without an eye to style, and since my taste was bad, my style was bad. I wrote in style, as another might write in verse, or sing instead of speaking, or dance instead of walking. Also my Evangelical tone contributed to its bad taste.” The Evangelical tone is plainly there, filling all the intense introspection that troubles these pages. 

This introspection, so typical of nineteenth century Evangelicalism, was condemned by Newman himself early in his theological career at Oxford as tending to turn the mind from the God experienced in prayer to the experience of prayer itself. Yet he was for a time a young victim of the disease himself. The journals show us a youth desperately praying God for the grace of academic defeat lest he suffer pride and vainglory. They also show us a youth, full of intelligence and confident in his own powers, even shrewd enough to cushion possible failure by exalting his academic opposition in his letters to family and friends. The tension, perhaps overdeveloped by A. Dwight Culler in his The Imperial Intellect, was dissolved when Newman moved away from the Calvinist party within the Church of England. He rapidly seized on the crucial importance of the objective in religious truth and his Catholic journal shows us how far he had travelled from the dark religion of his youth. “O how light a Cross—think what the Crosses of others are! And think of the compensation, compensation even in this world.” And these words were written, Newman reminds us, before he was made a Cardinal. 

Newman’s curious adventure in Sicily, the only physical adventure in his life, ended in sickness, convalescence, and a return to health accompanied by a clear sense of destiny. Newman dated his mission from that time. He wrote down the story in a manuscript called “My Illness in Sicily.” Much later he intended it to form part of Miss Mosley’s memoir. The don on a holiday was a familiar figure in nineteenth century England, but the clerical don on a mule in the exotic wilderness of the Sicily of the Bourbons in 1834 was a Quixotic figure to say the least. 

Although a decent horseman—a fellow of Oriel was expected to ride—Newman’s abrupt desertion of the Froudes in Rome for the fortunes of Sicily on a mule seems altogether out of character. His own explanation, that he was led by “The Kindly Light” of God, is as satisfactory as any. The Latin conversations with his doctor, the sketch of the sick room, the minute descriptions of the twilight of consciousness were written by a man who wondered why he took such pains to record events that could interest no one but a wife or—we might add—a world that was to be moved by the mission given him upon his return to England. Yet, writing years later in 1874, his only regret seems trivial and factual: he had failed to detail with full precision his loss and slow recovery of memory. 

The Autobiographical Writings were collected by Father Henry Tristram of the Oratory. The introductions are his own. Fortunately, the papers were ready for publication when Father Tristram died in 1955. His work was completed by Stephen Dessain of the Oratory. Newman scholarship in the future must take these memoirs into consideration and all future judgments about Newman must be squared with them. A strong case in question is the theory that emerges from Dwight Culler’s The Imperial Intellect. Primarily interested in Newman as an educator, keenly aware of the tension that existed in Newman’s mind between religious and profane knowledge, Mr. Culler tended to reduce this conflict to an opposition between an evangelical sensibility and an educational liberalism, a conflict producing the five crushing illnesses at Oxford. The memoirs correct this theory and thus illustrate their use for future Newman scholarship. Culler’s contention that the Oxford illnesses were more important than the illness in Sicily will not stand up to the central importance Newman gave the latter in the lengthy essay discussed above.  

Professor Culler, despite the profound insights which make his study perhaps the finest on the subject yet written, tended to equate political, religious, and educational liberalism. Newman’s opposition to the first two could not be squared with his adherence to the third; therefore, maintained Culler, evangelical rejection clashed with intellectual acceptance. Thus The Idea of a University was a belated and uneasy balance, the result of a conscience disturbed by an unresolved intellectual dilemma. But the journals show Newman—not merely in theory but in sensibility—moving steadily away from all things evangelical shortly after his election to Oriel. As H. Francis Davis pointed out in Blackfriars in December, 1956, Newman was a Tory to the root of his soul. The lines were drawn more sharply when the Evangelical party joined the Whigs in proposing utilitarianism in education. “High and Dry” and “The Party of the Squires” were one piece with the insistence on classics and mathematics, the education proper to an English gentleman. 

Mr. Davis’s and my own reading of the issue is backed by an appendix to the first “Autobiographical Memoir,” a letter written for the University Gazette but later on suppressed by Newman. Of his education at Oxford, Newman pointed out that he came up to the University “with an active mind, and with no thought but that of hard reading.” He was considerably younger than the other undergraduates and he received “little tutorial assistance or guidance.” Left to his devices, he followed his own bent: the study of subjects rather than specific books. Seeking the relations between ideas, he was accustomed to move rapidly from the classics to modern literature; from modern literature to science; from science to theology; theology to philosophy; and thus back round the cycle again. When it was time for him to be examined, he found himself questioned on the contents of books rather than on content which happened to be found in books. As a result he went to pieces. The breakdowns followed on a tension between what he read and what he was supposed to have read, not between an evangelical piety and a liberal mind. 

Newman’s letter is not without interest to American Catholics today who are thinking through once again the goal of education. Imaginative scholars since Newman’s time have known his own experience. It is by no means uncommon in our American universities today. The theory prevalent at the Oxford of his day was a rather narrower but tougher and more substantial version of the theory propounded in our time by The Great Books Foundation. Newman, in the letter in question, urged more direction of a boy’s reading, lest he find himself lost by “dabbling in studies and occupations, good in themselves, but out of place.” We might wonder, however, if religion would have fared better had Newman been forced to toe the line. Even as a boy Newman could never have remained fixed in the study of a designated number of books which were supposed to enshrine the inheritance of Western civilization. The writer of The Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine demonstrated, once and for all, that an inheritance cannot be entombed in any book or number of books. “Ideas” grow in time and unfold gradually from the soil of history. They must be sought in that soil if they would be understood as they really are. Beyond history ideas are but the dust of abstractionism which is the cemetery of the intelligence. 

However a man apply the mind of Newman to the problems of the day, Newman himself will retain the allegiance of anyone who was once captured by the quiet splendor of his prose, the gentle reasonableness of his rhetoric, and the subtlety of his mind. The Autobiographical Writings will disappoint those who seek in it some univocal key to unlock the paradox of Newman’s mind. The paradox is deepened, not dissolved. The fact will shock only those who are unaware of the essentially paradoxical structure of Christian existence. 

There is a document, the shortest of them all, which holds up the paradox who was Newman, nor does the paradox dissolve under inspection. This document is the back cover of an ordinary school exercise book; the first and last two entries are in ink, the intervening four in pencil. Its composition extended over a period of seventy-two years, from 1812, when Newman was eleven years old, to 1884, when he was eighty-three. It is clearly the strangest biography ever written: seven entries, seven sentences, spread over a lifetime and across a century. Why it should have survived and why he should have written it is one with the mystery of Newman. The first entry reads, “John Newman wrote this just before he was going up to Greek on Tuesday, June 10th, 1812, when it only wanted 3 days to his going home, thinking of the time (at home) when looking at this he shall recollect when he did it…. At school now back again.” 

The last entry reads, “And now a Cardinal. March 2, 1884.”