BOOKS.

CARDINAL NEWMAN'S ANGLICAN LETTERS.*. [CONCLUDING NOTICE.]

.SOME day we hope that Miss Mozley will give us a selection from her own volumes, leaving out of it all those letters the chief interest of which is confined to those who remember the College disputes and the various controversies and negotia- tions in which the Oxford movement involved Newman, and retaining only those that are full of personal and human interest as displaying the character of the man, his frankness., his reserve, his simplicity, his subtlety, his tenderness, his great craving for sympathy, his curious independence of it, and that unique interest in himself which had no connection either with egotism or vanity. A selection of this kind might

be made in a single octavo volume which would do -a great deal more to fix Newman's character in the minds and hearti of those who never knew him personally than this too miscel- laneous correspondence. The autobiographical fragment, the early letters, almost all the domestic letters, the letters against Sir Robert Peel's re-election for the University of Oxford,.

the letters from the Mediterranean, the reminiscences of his Sicilian illness, the letter to Archbishop Whately on the partial estrangement between the two friends, the letters on Hurrell Froude's and Bowden's deaths, the letters to Rogers,. to Miss H— and Miss Giberne, the letters to his sister on his approaching conversion to Roman Catholicism, and the letter on his meeting with Dr. Arnold a few months. before the latter's 'death, would together make a volume of singular interest, of which it would not be easy to omit a page without losing something fresh, or tender, or humorous, or fascinating. Our own impression is, that no one ever wrote- so well about himself as Cardinal Newman, because no one- ever before or since was so deeply interested in the- phases of his own character, without being in the least.

degree either selfish or self-occupied. Newman had the art. of watching himself without either admiring or depre- ciating what he saw. Take, for instance, these short. passages from the postcript to his reminiscences of his Sicilian illness, written nearly seven years after the illness, had occurred, when Newman was just thirty-nine, and at the- culminating point of his influence as a Tractarian. It is not easy to analyse the charm there is in them, and yet they seem to us to.

express a singularly innocent wonder as to what was to COMM- of him, and a keen feeling that there was something in him. likely to attract the tenderness of others for which he could not well account except by dwelling on his own yearning for it. The first passage relates to the request of his personal attendant. Gennaro, who served him so faithfully through his illness, that he would give him the old blue cloak which had been Newman's. most useful wrap during his journey and his illness :-

" When we parted, I fancy I gave him about .210 over and above. his wages and a character written. Before I had given him any- thing, ho began to spell for something ; but what ho thought of was an old blue cloak of mine which I had had since 1828; a little- thing for him to sot his services at—at the same time a great; thing for me to give, for I had an affection for it. It had nursed. me all through my illness; had ever been put on my bed, put on me when I rose to have my bed made, &c. I had nearly lost it at Corfu—it was stolen by a soldier, but recovered. I have it still. I have brought it up here to Littlemore, and on some cold" nights I have had it on my bed. I have so few things to sympathise with me that I take to cloaks The thought keeps pressing on me while I write this, what am I writing it for ? For myself I may look at it once or twice in my life, and what sympathy is there in my looking at it ?"—[Littlemore, March 25, 1840.] The second passsage is a general criticism on himself for * Litters and Correepondonee of John Henry Newman olnritti liii Life in the English Church. With a brief Autobiography. Edited,, at cardinal. Nowinatea request, by Anne Moseley. 2 vols. London: Longman, awl Oh&

taking so much interest in reviving and recording his recol- lections on his illness :-

" Who will care to be told such details as I have put down above ? Shall I ever have in my old age spiritual children who will take an interest ? How time is getting on ! I seem to be reconciling myself to the idea of being old. It seems but yesterday that the Whigs came into power; another such to-morrow will make me almost fifty—an elderly man. What a dream is life ! I used to regret festival days going so quick. They are come and they aro gone ; but so it is. Time is nothing except as the seed of eternity."—[LiffIemore, March 25, 1840.] That tenderness for his old blue cloak, and that wistful craving for spiritual children who should enter into all the pangs and fears of his Sicilian illness, are expressed with a simplicity and perfect absence of rtauvaise honte, on the one hand, and of inward resentment at the neglect of the world, on the other, which make them singularly attractive. And we may

say the same of the delicate piece of delineation, in a letter to his sister, describing the way in which he played the part of host to Dr. Arnold, whose theological and political tendencies he had so often and so notoriously deplored and condemned :-

" Writing late in the autumn to his sister, in reply to a question from her relating to a person always interesting to him, Mr. New- man indulges in an act of self-portraiture most unusual with him —of which, indeed, the letters and papers before the Editor offer no precedent ; but those who knew him best will, perhaps, be most struck with the truth of the image he raises.

REV. J. H. Newntee• TO MRS. J. M0ELEY. " October 31, 1844. "' I begin this letter for a not very complimentary reason, but from having a headache, a very unusual visitor, which hinders mo from working. You ask me about my meeting Arnold, and though there is nothing but what is commonplace to toll, I cannot tell it without introducing myself more than is pleasant. Indeed, the loss I have to say, the more I must bring in myself, if I am to say anything; but even then I have little enough. The second of February, as you know, is our great Gaudy of the year. The Provost dines in Hall at the top of the table; and in the Common- Room, to which the party adjourn, sits at the right hand of the Dean, as being the guest of the Fellows. Eden was Dean, and was taken ill, I think, when the news came that Arnold was coining with the Provost, and I, being Senior Fellow, must take the Dean's place. My first feeling was to shirk. " It is not my place," I said, "to take tho office upon me. It is nothing to me. I am not bound to entertain Arnold,' &c., &e. However, I thought it would be cowardly, so after all I went, knowing that both in Hall and Common-Room the trio at the top of the table would be Provost, Arnold, and I, and that in the Common-Room I should sit at the top between them as the entertainer. Tlie Provost came into Hall with Arnold and Baden-Powell (who made a fourth), I being already in my place at table, waiting for them. The Provost came up in a brisk, smart way, as if to cut through an awkward beginning, and said quickly, ' Arnold, I don't think you know Newman ; ' on which Arnold and I bowed, and I spoke. I was most absolutely cool, or rather calm and unconcerned, all through the meeting from beginning to end; but I don't know whether you have seen me enough in such situations to know (what I really believe is not any affectation at all on my part ; I am not at all conscious of any such thing, though people would think it) that I seem, if you will let me say it, to put on a very simple, innocent, and modest manner. I sometimes laugh at my- self, and at the absurdities which result from it ; but really I cannot help it, and I really do believe it to be genuine. On one occasion in the course of our conversation I actually blushed high at some mistake I made, and yet on the whole I am quite collected. Now, aro you not amused at all this ? or ought not I to blush now P I never said a word of all this about myself to anyone in my life before; though, perhaps, that does not mond the matter that I should say it now. However, to proceed. So when the Provost said, " I don't think, Arnold, you know Newman," I was sly enough to say, very gently and clearly, that I had before then had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Arnold, for I had disputed with him in the Divinity School before his B.D. degree, when he was appointed to Rugby. At which Baden-Powell laughed, and Arnold seemed a little awkward, and said, "Oh, I thought it had been Pusey." You must know that in the said disputation I was doing him a favour, for he could got no one to go in with him, when I volunteered ; though in the event it turned to my advantage, for I had not to dispute before Hampden when I actually took my • degree [in 1838]. We then sat down to table, and I thought of all the matters possible which it was safe to talk on. I recollected ho had travelled with William Churton, and that made one topic. Others equally felicitous I forget. But I recollect the productions of North Africa was a fruitful subject ; and I have some dream of having talked of a great tree, the name of which I now forget, as big as a hill, and which they bring as an argument for the in- definite duration of the presenfearth a parte ante. In the Common- Room I had to take a still more prominent part, and the contrast was very marked between Arnold and the Provost—the Provost so dry and unbending, and seeming to shrink from whatever I said, and Arnold who was natural and easy, at least to all appearance. I was told afterwards that on one occasion Baden-Powoll made some irreverent remark, and people were amused to see how both Arnold and myself in different ways, as far as manner was con- cerned, retired from it. At last the Provost and Arnold rose up to go, and I held out my hand, which he took, and we parted. I never saw him again ; he died the Juno [Juno 12th, 1812] after. He is a man whom I have always separated from the people he was with, always respected, often defended, though from an accident ho got a notion, I believe, that I was a firebrand, and particularly hostile to him. There is no doubt he was surprised and thrown out on finding I did not seem to be what he had fancied. He told Stanley that it would not do to meet me often. When Stanley tried to clench the remark, he drew back, and said he meant that it was not desirable to inset often persons one disagreed with, or something of the sort. This is what I heard, to the best of my recollection, after his death. For myself, I don't think I was desirous of pleasing him or not ; but was secretly amused from the idea that he certainly would be taken aback by coming across one tin propria persona ; at least so I think.' " His remark that people believe that in such circumstances he- puts on " a very simple, innocent, and modest manner," while he himself believes it to be perfectly genuine, though he does not venture to pronounce with any certainty upon it,—the remark on having blushed at one of his own mistakes, and the comment on the evident sympathy of feeling between Arnold and himself when Baden Powell made an irreverent observa- tion,—his evident conviction, moreover, that Arnold was personally attracted to him as he was to Arnold, in spite of the antagonism of creed and political bias,—present a picture of singular vivacity and interest.

But perhaps the most touching letters in the volumes are those on the death of his sister in 1828, and of his frienda Hurrell Fronde and J. W. Bowden in 1836 and 1844. The

first of these events is the death referred to in the Apologia as one which, coming after a sharp illness of his own in 1827, arrested him in his tendency to become preoccupied with merely intellectual culture, and restored him to his more natural phase of deep personal devotion. Miss Giberne's,

account of this very sudden bereavement is one of the most beautiful passages in these volumes (Vol. I., p. 177), and we will not injure it by any fragmentary quotation. But the letters in which Newman speaks of his loss in Froude and Bowden are more manageable, though marked by a tenderness and intensity not less profound ; and they depict Newman with a vividness with which hardly any one but Newman has been able to portray him. Here are the brief but intense sen- tences in which, writing to the older friend (Bowden), Newman describes the feeling with which he had regarded the younger (Hurrell Fronde) :-

"Yesterday morning brought me the news of Froude's death ; and if I could collect my thoughts at this moment, I would say something to you about him, but I scarcely can. He has been so very dear to me, that it is an effort to me to reflect on my own thoughts about him. I can never have a greater loss, looking on for the whole of my life ; for he was to me, and he was likely to be ever, in the same degree of continual familiarity which I enjoyed with yourself in our Undergraduate days ; so much ea that I was from time to time confusing him with you, and only calling him by his right name and recollecting what belonged ta him, what to you, by an act of memory."

In the Apologia, Newman tells us that in 1844, during the agony of his doubt as to whether he ought or ought not to join the Church of Rome, he sobbed bitterly over the coffin of a friend just dead, " to think that he had left me still dark as to what the way of truth was, and what I ought to do in order to please God and to fulfil his will." This friend was John William.

Bowden, his earliest Oxford intimate, of whose death he writes. in the following touching letter to Keble

" September 14,1844.— One forgets past feelings, else I should say that I never have had pain before like the present. I thought so yesterday and said so, but I suppose it is not so. Yet I am in very groat distress, and do trust I shall be kept from gloom and ill-temper. I have given him up since October last, yet have not realised his loss till now, if now. He is my oldest friend ; I have been most intimate with him for above twenty- seven years. He was sent to call on me the day after I came into residence ; he introduced me to college and University ; he is the link between me and Oxford. I have ever known Oxford in him. In losing him I seem to lose Oxford. We used to live in each other's rooms as undergraduates, and men used to mistake our names and call us by each other's. When ho married he used to make a like mistake himself,' and call me Elizabeth and her. Newman. And now for several years past, though loving him with all my heart, I have shrunk from him, feeling that I had

opinions

" Mr. Newman continues the letter three days after :

"' Grosvenor Place, September 17.

"' It is a great comfort to all parties that he is here and not at.

Clifton He died and lies in a room I have known these. twenty-four years And there lies now my oldest friend,.

so dear to me—and I, with so little faith or hope, as dead as a stone, and detesting myself.'"

Of course the reluctance he felt to shock Bowden by telling him of his approaching conversion to Roman Catholicism was the cause of that shrinking from him here recorded.

Newman's dread of unsettling others was no doubt the main secret of the extreme suffering which his conversion gave him. In a letter to his sister, he thus dwells on it, and on the other elements of trouble involved in his change :— " Besides the pain of unsettling people, of course I feel the loss I am undergoing in the good opinion of my friends and well-wishers, though I can't tell how much I feel this. It is the shock, surprise, terror, forlornness, disgust, scepticism to which I am giving rise ; the differences of opinion, division of families—all this it is that makes my heart ache." Those who know Newman's writings and his correspondence well, will be disposed to ask what " light " he was really waiting for between 1843, when he resigned St. Mary's, and 1845, when the actually joined the Church of Rome, for his creed seemed very nearly, if not quite, as heartily Roman Catholic in 1843 as it was in 1815. Perhaps this letter to Miss H— best explains the kind of conviction for which during these two years he was looking, and which had not, till October, 1845, absolutely come :— "Littlemore, March 9, 1813.—Religious truth is reached, not by 'reasoning, but by an inward perception. Anyone can reason ; only disciplined, educated, formed minds can perceive. Nothing, then, is more important to you than habits of self-command, as you say yourself. You are overflowing with feeling and impulse; all these must be restrained, ruled, brought under, converted into principles and habits or elements of character. Consider that you have this groat work to do, to change yourself; and you cannot doubt that, whatever be the imperfections of the English Church, and whatever the advantages of the Roman, there are gifts and aids in the former abundantly enough to carry you through this necessary work."

In other words, Newman felt even in 1843 that all the lines of reasoning on which he most relied led him to one conclusion, but, nevertheless, that conclusion itself did not look natural to him; be felt as if he were being forced into it by some sort of intellectual compulsion, and what he was waiting for was a clear vision that he was not parting with himself, as it were, in becoming a Roman Catholic.

Miss Mosley concludes her Life with words of Newman's, written in 1884, which very few men on earth probably could liave honestly uttered. Indeed, no one would have been readier than the Cardinal to admit that there were times in his life,—the time of his Sicilian illness, for example, and again the last two years of his life at Littlemore,—to which these words would hardly apply, though he ultimately found them all the more true on account of these signal and painful exceptions :— . .

"For myself, now, at the end of a long life, I say from a full heart that God has never failed me, never disappointed me, has ever turned evil into good for me. When I was young I used to say (and 1 trust it was not presumptuous to say it) that our Lord ,ever answered my prayers. And what He has been to me, who have deserved His love so little, such will He be, I believe and know to every one who does not repel Him and turn from His pleading."

What we have missed chiefly in these volumes is any notice in his correspondence of the development of that disposition to lean absolutely on a Church, as representing the mind and voice of Christ, which is really the implicit assumption rather than the inference or conclusion of all his theological writings. Yet this is the one central point on which we find the utmost difficulty in either accepting or so much as clearly under- ,standing Newman's position.