Peter Costello
John Henry Newman: A Portrait in Letters
edited by Roderick Strange (Oxford University Press, £30.00)
Over the centuries biography has changed. When James Boswell published in 1791 his landmark life of Dr Samuel Johnson, he revealed that he had adapted the new method of Rev. William Mason in his life of Gray, in allowing the book to be largely composed of the subject’s own words. One contemporary thought the method, “the most perfect model of biography”.
Before that biographers had largely used their own words. But to do what Boswell so triumphantly did in allowing Johnson to speak for himself he had to have a huge archive of notes, letters, and other memoranda, as well as recollections. In the following century the ‘life and letters’ model was done to death by the Victorians.
Biographies
It was overthrown by the ‘literary biography’ of Lytton Strachey and his followers. And that model was followed by more earnest works that applied the insights of the new psychology. Increasingly recent biographies have returned to the older way, where once again the words of the author dominate the subject.
Now, however, comes a book where we get the life of an important and influential person, John Henry Newman, related entirely through his own letters. This book is only possible, of course, because of the great hoard of materials in the Newman archive at the Birmingham Oratory and the long loving labour of such scholars as the late Charles Stephen Dessain.
The scholarly edition of the letters and diaries of Newman is planned to run to 32 large volumes and are unlikely to be encompassed by a reader who is not a specialist. What all those interested in Newman need is something handier to read, but which is by Newman himself.
Hence the immediate appeal of Fr Strange’s book, which still runs to 600 pages. To these the editor has provided an excellent introduction and linking passages. It is a long book, certainly, but few will want it shorter.
The dominant tone is that of Newman himself from the age of seven writing in 1808 to his mother about his upcoming school vacation to a last letter to his niece Grace Langford written a little over a week before he died. The last words are “I am sometimes engaged with the doctor”. She visited him on August 9, 1890 – two days later he was dead.
These two letters capture the essential tone of this book, which is very personal at some moments. Yet by turn it is also deeply penetrating, business-like, perplexed by either events or persons. Every stage of Newman’s long pilgrimage towards truth, as he saw it, is discussed and defended. In all the agony of debate, doubt, faith and resignation, the man is never silent.
Newman is of ever increasing interest to all kinds of readers. Not only is he of importance to Anglicans, and to Catholics, and indeed to all Christians, he is also one of the great writers of the Victorian era, a literary figure of major importance.
To some, engaged on sounding Newman’s opinions and his beliefs, this may seem a secondary matter. But it was not to Newman himself. He did not write for effect, he wrote to inform and explain.
Many years ago, Geoffrey Tillotson, in his preface to one of the best anthologies of Newman’s selected writings, commented on the nature of Newman’s readers, remarking that many of them seemed to go to him from an ecclesiastical interest, either Catholic or Anglican.
But, he pointed out, Newman, while being as theological as Pusey and W. G. Ward, could also be as witty as Henry James and Oscar Wilde. He had admirers (from very different positions) in George Eliot and Walter Pater.
Writing to Keble in his Anglican years Newman remarked, “My great fault is doing things in a mere literary way from the love of the work, without thought of God’s glory”. But his literary skill was at the service of that glory too. He worked hard to form the best expression for his thoughts. He defined style as “a thinking out into language”. Elsewhere he remarks, again to Keble, that “besides re-writing, every part has to be worked out and defined as in moulding a statue.”
The reader of this volume will be able to hear both the formal and the informal writer, but also other aspects of the man. I would think that this book, read in conjunction with the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, to which it is a companion and a continuation, provides the ideal introduction to both Newman the ecclesiastic and to Newman the writer.
Truth
The essential truth, well-documented by this excellent book, is that Newman was, and is, an effective apostle only because he was, and is, a very great writer.
It is to be hoped that in due course Oxford University Press will issue this book in a paperback edition for the use of a wider audience, not only of students or the religious, but of all those who enjoy great writing, in all its forms.
Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, giving a history of the development of his religious opinions, edited with an introduction and notes by Ian Ker, the world’s leading authority on Newman, is available from Penguin Classics, at £12.99.