Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (53 page)

She was a very beautiful woman with a wild, passionate nature … Many men fell in love with her, and so did women. She seems to have responded with embarrassing violence, irrespective of their sex, and with an entirely naïve innocence. The passionate friendship with John Henry Newman lasted all her life.

Sieveking also states laconically of her conversion to Roman Catholicism: ‘She had fallen in love with John Henry Newman (later Cardinal), and this led

to her conversion.’
¹²
She was not the only woman attracted to Newman by a combination of romantic and religious sentiment. Newman, however, while responsive in terms of the affectionate professions between friends of the time, including his wide circle of women, was always guarded, especially when sentimental demands were put upon him by women.

In 1844, Mary Holmes, a frequent correspondent who had evidently become infatuated with him in the period before they both became Catholics, scolded him for his failure to write to her with feeling: ‘You are made of marble’, she complained. And again: ‘Cruel, hard-hearted Mr Newman, you would not even deign to tell me how you are … You keep me in the Church by a spell I cannot comprehend or break.’
¹³
A draft letter of rebuke from Newman, dated 4 February 1845, survives, in which he writes: ‘What is my great offence but this, that I have ever regarded you in a religious point of view, not in an earthly? that I have ever thought how I might profit you in spiritual things, and, when I could do this no more, have felt my work as done.’
14

Newman, however, was nevertheless capable of friendship with women that went well beyond purely spiritual profit. After the death of St John, Newman wrote to Maria Giberne, who had for many years been living as a nun in an enclosed convent in France under the religious name of Sister Maria Pia. The letter reveals a depth of sympathy that allows us to glimpse, albeit briefly, into Newman’s own emotional vulnerability. First he commiserates with her for her own loss of St John, remarking that ‘you have no partner nor confidant in your sorrow, and have no relief as having an outlet of it’. He adds a reflection about the oppressive ‘feeling of solitariness’ she must feel, before going on to describe the peculiarly receptive nature of his love for St John, and for her:

Since his death, I have been reproaching myself for not expressing to
him
how much I felt
his
love [Newman’s emphasis] – and I write this lest I should feel the same about you, should it be God’s will that I should outlive you.
15

He goes on to mention how she had helped him when he was involved in the Achilli libel trial in 1852, this being ‘only one specimen of the devotion, which by word and deed and prayer, you have been continually showing towards me most unworthy’. It seems to illustrate what the Abbé Brémond described as Newman’s
autocentrisme
, a benignly self-referential, egoistic view of his life in relation to others. Was this
autocentrisme
unrelieved? Writing to a woman friend on 3 June 1875 he refers to Ambrose’s death as a means of providential preparation for his own death, ‘whenever that may be, to follow and to regain one who was my earthly light’.
1
6
‘
My
earthly light.’ It is the closest expression I have found in the vast evidence of Newman’s writing of his own, outward-going, feelings for St John; and it is all the more powerful for its rarity.

NEWMAN, LOVE, AND THE CATHOLIC PRIESTHOOD

On the final page of the
Apologia
, Newman expressed gratitude to seven of his ‘dearest brothers of this House, the Priests of the Birmingham Oratory’. For his friend St John, however, he reserved a special note of affection:

And to you especially, dear AMBROSE ST. JOHN; whom God gave me, when He took every one else away; who are the link between my old life and my new; who have now for twenty-one years been so devoted to me, so patient, so zealous, so tender; who have let me lean so hard upon you; who have watched me so narrowly; who have never thought of yourself, if I was in question.
17

Reading that dedication George Eliot would write to a friend:

Pray mark that beautiful passage in which he thanks his friend Ambrose St. John. I know hardly anything that delights me more than such evidences of sweet brotherly love being a reality in the world.
18

Newman thanks St John in the
Apologia
as the embodiment of all those ‘affectionate companions and counsellors’ who had been his ‘daily solace and relief ’ in the early Oxford days, who showed ‘true attachment’ and who had ‘never been disloyal to me by thought or deed’.
1
9
Other confreres are mentioned including Edward Caswall. Ever generous with tokens of gratitude, Newman had already dedicated the
The Dream of Gerontius
(published in 1865) to Joseph Gordon.

In contrast to the devotion and loyalty of the many friends cited in the
Apologia
, especially those he had known and loved in the Anglican days, Newman had for some years experienced the disloyalty of four Catholic priests who had nevertheless made professions of friendship. While Joseph Gordon was travelling fruitlessly around Italy during the Achilli trial days, Cardinal Wiseman, who possessed crucial trial evidence, could not be bothered to search for the necessary documents to relieve Newman’s predicament. Wiseman even sent Gordon and Caswall on a futile journey to Naples to the wrong contacts. The same was true of Monsignor George Talbot, the Pope’s ‘Chamberlain’, who for no cogent reason, save for apparent meanness of spirit, failed to provide another set of important trial papers in his keeping. As for Father Faber, during much of the period of the Achilli trial he was holidaying in Italy, consolidating yet another lengthy convalescence after one of his many hypochondriacal illnesses. He corresponded with Newman on several occasions, to report on his travels, diet, and health, but never a word of interest, much less commiseration, for Newman’s trial; an omission Newman noted ruefully in a letter to St John. Meanwhile, Manning, as we saw in the matter of the
Rambler
article, was acting against him while offering bland tokens of friendship.

The relationship between Newman and Manning is of considerable interest since their scandalous quarrel resonates to our own day. Was Manning a cold, scheming autocrat who strove to undermine Newman as a result of their differences over papal authority and temporal power? Or is it possible that Newman himself was at least partly to blame for the antagonism between them? Was he, as Manning once alleged, ‘a great hater’?

The historian, Professor Sheridan Gilley, has analysed with subtlety and breadth of understanding the gulf that opened up between these two crucially important religious leaders of the Victorian Age, arguing that their antagonisms were the result of ‘different habits of mind’. Gilley claims that ‘Manning saw no reason why intellectual and practical differences should cloud a personal friendship, even though in pursuit of a policy he would use a friendship to his own end’. Gilley is surely right to add that ‘Newman gave unflinching loyalty to those who returned it, and where there had been a violation of that loyalty, no future friendship was possible’.
²⁰
Gilley sees Manning’s essential difference as his gift for politics in contrast to Newman’s unpolitical nature. Yet there had been a time when Manning and Newman had shared a friendship based on mutual suffering.

When Newman and Manning were in their thirties, they had corresponded over the mortal illness of Manning’s young wife of seven years. Newman wrote a characteristic letter of tenderness and consolation demonstrating not only his affection for Manning, but the profound nature of his understanding of love for those ‘nearest to us when in the flesh’. It is a remarkable, paradoxical, reflection on the spiritual dimension of companionship in and beyond death:

If in His great wisdom and love He take away the desire of your eyes, it will only be to bring her really nearer to you. For those we love are not nearest to us when in the flesh, but they come into our very hearts as being spiritual beings, when they are removed from us. Alas! It is hard to persuade oneself of this, when we have the presence and are without the experience of the absence of those we love; yet the absence is often more than the presence.
21

The conviction of this passage, as well as the compassion, reveals that New-man himself experienced such love, and very likely had in mind at that time the loss of his sister Mary and of Hurrell Froude. As he wrote in his ‘David and Jonathan’ poem: ‘He bides with us who dies, he is but lost who lives.’
22

After his wife’s death, Manning would sit by her grave writing his sermons. Had he remained an Anglican priest he would hardly have continued this practice for a life time. But on becoming a Catholic and a priest he appears to have cauterised his feelings and instantaneously and deliberately, as if she had never existed. He destroyed all her letters and never spoke of her again. When he was informed that her grave had fallen into neglect, he remarked: ‘It is best

so, let it be. Time effaces all things.’
2
3
On becoming a Catholic priest this purging of sentiment may well have energised his political capacities. The impression, reinforced by Lytton Strachey’s caricature, was that iron had entered his soul. And yet, this was not entirely so. As Manning lay dying he drew from under his pillow a book which he handed to Herbert Vaughan, his successor to be: ‘Into this little book my dearest Wife wrote her prayers and meditations’, he said. ‘Not a day has passed since her death on which I have not prayed and meditated from this book. All the good I may have done, all the good I may have been, I owe to her. Take precious care of it.’
²⁴
And yet, in common with the majority of conforming Catholic clergy Manning had not allowed another, or others, to take her place.

In 1848 we find Newman emphatically rejecting the isolation and inner reserve that went with the culture of Catholic clericalism. When he and Faber were together at St Wilfrid’s, Cotton, Faber had reproved him for his evident ‘special friendship’ with St John. Faber, albeit superficially extravagant and sanctimonious in his endearments and professions of affection, was endorsing the Tridentine ascetical discipline that characterized close companionship with an occasion of sin. Newman, as we have seen, responded: ‘I can do nothing to undo it, unless I actually did cease to love him as well as I do.’

It was perhaps unrealistic of Newman to think that he might have conducted a friendship with Manning such as he had experienced with Pusey, Keble, and others of his Anglican days. Experience had taught him that Manning, in com-mon with those other English leaders of the ultramontane group, were capable of bland and smooth surface professions (as extolled by Cardinal Barbarò) concealing a quite different behaviour. Hence it was not only an act of disloyalty that stood between Newman and Manning, it was Newman’s routine sense of not knowing where he stood with him. In August of 1867, four years on from the
Rambler
affair, Manning wrote to Newman suggesting a reconciliation: ‘it would give me a great consolation to know from you anything, in which you have thought me to be wanting towards you.’ Newman says it all in his reply:

I say frankly, then, and as a duty to friendship, that it is a distressing mistrust, which now for four years past I have been unable in prudence to dismiss from my mind, and which is but my own share of a general feeling (though men are slow to express it, especially to your immediate friends) that you are difficult to understand. I wish I could get myself to believe that the fault was my own, and that your words, your bearing, and your implications, ought, though they have not served, to prepare me for your acts.
25

Newman added: ‘I should rejoice indeed, if it were so easy to set matters right. It is only as time goes on, that new deeds can reverse the old. There is no short cut to a restoration of confidence, when confidence has been seriously damaged.’