Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman Part 32

"Pray a.s.sure him that the value of the copy of the _Christian Commonwealth_ is to be much enhanced by the fact that it bears his autograph notes, and that I feel deeply honoured by the terms in which he has been good enough to express himself in his note to you, which I have read with great interest and which I enclose. I shall always regret that I had not the honour and pleasure of meeting him at Weston, but my time was too short....

"Believe me, "Yours very faithfully,

"S. W. Griffith."

Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Pennington were great friends of Newman's, and he often stayed with them from time to time. By the kindness of Mrs.

Pennington I am able to quote from some letters written by him in 1881-90, and one much earlier, in 1875, in which he laments the death of Mrs.

Blackburn. Mrs. Blackburn was a sister of Mr. Pennington's, and one of the most munificent of contributors to the United Kingdom Alliance in its early days, who (I am told by Mrs. Pennington) often denied herself many luxuries in order to be able to make her contributions larger. She describes her as one of the best women she had ever known.

Newman, in his letter to Mr. Pennington in 1875, says of Mrs. Blackburn:--

"I have known her ever since Michaelmas 1869, when the revelation was first made to us of the Contagious Diseases Act; and at the Congress of Social Science at Bristol she was pleased to receive my hospitality. My esteem for her was great and ever increasing...."

He goes on to say that his dread of cold and chills makes him fear a long journey, "though it is mortifying to me not to meet you and Mrs.

Pennington, and many other earnest friends of this very important cause."

In 1881 Gladstone was Prime Minister, and stayed in office for five years.

For almost the whole of this time the country was hardly ever at peace.

The Transvaal rebellion was started in 1880 and later our own troops were defeated by the insurrectionists; whereupon the Government promptly surrendered the Transvaal.

About this time Newman writes to Mrs. Pennington:

"_I am not a member of Cambridge University, nor indeed of Oxford University since 1830. If I had kept my name on the book, I should have paid 6 a year, if I remember; that is, 300 in these fifty years; and as I never took my M.A. degree (because of the 39 Articles), I should even then have no vote.

"I now act on the fixed rule _not to take any long journey in the winter months_, except from real duty. Experience guides me, and I refuse even pressure from very friendly quarters.... I am melancholy about this Cabinet and Mr. Gladstone, and ashamed to be an Englishman. All comes to me like a domestic calamity. And Parliament is so overworked that _English_ misrule cannot be corrected. I look on _Ministers in the House_ as nearly our worst nuisance. But I must not begin on our defective and evil inst.i.tutions...."

Then in 1890 the letters begin more and more to show a change in his handwriting. He no longer wrote in his original firm, clear style, but in a crabbed, cramped manner. His words now were often difficult to decipher, and the letters of the words very shaky and undecided, bearing witness very plainly of the trembling hand of Age. After mentioning the immense number of letters which he had to answer, and how the trouble of replying was almost beyond his strength, he says, "The sister-like affection of my honoured friend Anna Swanwick has ... again and again won me to London;...

but the place seems never to agree with me. Partly the whirl by night and day, I suppose, is my bane; still more, the endless meeting of fresh and fresh small talk, with the fatigue of _listening_, and the impression on my brain of miscellaneous memories when I ought to sleep. In Oxford, from like causes, I became as it were 'daft,' and from forgetfulness of the right words could not complete an English sentence. A like affection came on me in London last summer, and I had to break away suddenly, to the disappointment of friends, because my own sense of _idiotcy_ was unbearable. Rest and sleep sufficed to restore me when I reached home. The inability to get out the right word, if (for instance) _suddenly_ asked 'to what station I am going,' is enough to make me seem insane or half asleep.... I am increasingly aware that my _brain_ is my weakest part....

On the whole I am healthy, and agile in all movement as are few men of my age (two doctors fancy that _all_ men of eighty-five have pulses as _disorderly_ as mine!)...."

[Ill.u.s.tration: CARDINAL NEWMAN FROM AN OIL PAINTING BY MISS DEANE, OF BATH.

PHOTO BY MESSRS. WEBSTER, CLAPHAM COMMON]

As regards the work on the _Early Life of the Cardinal_, which was published at this time, he says:--

"I am (_under a sense of duty_) writing concerning the late Cardinal quite a different side of his character from that which for fifty years the public have heard. I knew him as eminently generous as to money, but so fanatical as to embarra.s.s judgment of his character. Another weakness I confess and _lament_. I can write large. I begin everything with resolution so to write. But as soon as I think only of the substance, and forget the manner, my writing so dwindles that I can hardly read it myself. I suppose that weakness of the fingers is the cause. I see how deficient they are of flesh."

In September, 1890, he wrote the following letters to Rev. J. K. Tucker, Rector of Pettaugh, Suffolk, who was an old friend of Newman's, and to Mr.

John Henry Tucker, [Footnote: Which have been kindly lent me by Mr. John Warren.] from which I make quotations:--

"Ever since my brother's death (Cardinal J. H. N.) I am overwhelmed with letters, and now am writing more and longer every day than my fingers can well manage, for publishers eager for my MS."

And again in October of the same year:--

"I am about to send to my publishers my _painful_ contribution to the life of the late Cardinal, my brother. I am conscientiously bound to write it, because in his _fifty_ years' absence from the sight of the public a new generation has grown up ignorant of the facts, and the attempt is already begun to puff them off for their beauty of style..,. My age being eighty- five, I know the truths, and must tell them. I shall be howled at as _unbrotherly_. My immediate business now is to write to numbers of correspondents of whom you are one, whom I have necessarily neglected while engaged in the most anxious work I have ever undertaken...."

As regards this book to which he alludes, his _Early Life of Cardinal Newman_, everyone feels that in some sense it belittles the writer. For there was no real need of any sort that he should have written it. From one brother to another, such an "early history" was, from some points of view, a disloyalty--and a disloyalty not altogether free from embittered personal feeling.

Was there no personal feeling roused in the lives of the two men? For the younger was practically overshadowed by the elder. It was the elder one to whom the world kotow-ed. It was the elder who---though the younger was so strikingly intellectual, and so strong a social reformer in many ways-- carried the world's laurels, and who was finally given the "splendid funeral" to which Francis Newman takes exception. And there was another reason too, which I believe exercised a strong sway over his feelings to his brother in early youth, and brought into play, though perhaps unrecognized by himself, the quality of emulation, followed by keen disappointment, when failure, as regarded that incident, fell to his share. Be that as it may, it is impossible to justify Francis Newman's writing thus of his brother, in the "early history" to which I refer. Not even his keen desire for truth, which some declare to have been his motive power in the matter, accounted for it.

"I should vastly have preferred entire oblivion of him" (of the Cardinal), "and his writings of the first forty years, but that is impossible. In the cause of Protestants and Protestantism, I feel bound to write, however painful to myself, as simply as if my topic were an old Greek or Latin one." Later on he says, "I have _tried_ to cherish for him a sort of _filial_ sentiment," but "we seemed never to have an interest nor a wish in common." [Footnote: J. H. Newman once in speaking of his brother, said, "Much as we love each other, neither would like to be mistaken for the other." A sentence which seems to contain more meanings than one!] Perhaps no words could more absolutely convey the lack of sympathy between the brothers, than do these. "I have _tried_ to cherish for him a sort of filial sentiment!" showing as it does, only too evidently, that there was no spontaneity of affection between them. The only voice that called each to each was that of old childish a.s.sociation and duty. Francis Newman could not be accused of seeking personal distinction or fame for itself; witness his giving up a very promising career at home in order to go on his missionary journey to Syria. Witness also his open denunciation of many existing State abuses. Witness his unceasing crusades against the stronger party (whatever it might be), which, in his opinion, oppressed and wronged the weaker section of the community, unable of themselves to obtain justice and a hearing at the court of English public opinion.

All the more, then, is it difficult to explain away sentences such as these, which seem to proceed from such an absolutely different personality than was Frank Newman's; and yet the man who reads his memoirs of his brother finds them almost on every page, and cannot understand their presence there.

"The existing generation has seen him" (he is alluding to the Cardinal), "through a mist; and if my simple statement anywhere clears away that mist, they may almost resent my truth-speaking as an impiety." As indeed they did--and do. Some of his own friends, indeed, urged him not to publish the book, but he was obdurate.

"In my rising manhood I received inestimable benefits from this (my eldest) brother.... He supported me, not out of his abundance, but when he knew not whence weekly and daily funds were to come.... Yet a most painful breach ... broke in on me in my nineteenth year and _was unhealable_."

This was, of course, when Francis had been at college two years, for in those days men very often went at the age of sixteen, as he did.

But the entries of 1822 and 1823, which last would be for Francis his "nineteenth year," give no clue to the "painful breach" which "was _unhealable_"

Yet the fact that religious differences did begin between the two brothers very early in life has been proved beyond all question. Proved also is it that religious discussions were of constant occurrence between them, and that while J. H. Newman had always a strange leaning to Churchmanship, Frank Newman's religious tendencies drew him strongly towards dissent and Unitarianism.

I think the latter mentions in his _Phases of Faith_ that when he first came to college he found his brother had hung up a picture of Our Lady in his younger brother's room, which he at once removed, and refused to have on the walls.

The following letter is to Rev. J. K. Tucker; in it he describes himself as a "Conscious Christian" "at the age of fourteen." But he has often described himself as holding Christianity _without_ Christ:--

"I hold firmly in memory, that in Easter of 1836 I wished to conduct my _bride_ to Oxford, and introduce her there to my mother and two sisters-- in those Coaching days we came from Bristol and Cheltenham en route to Oxford. _I_ did not plan the thought of staying a night at your father's house, in which I suppose _you and your wife_ were living. No doubt the scheme was planned _by my wife_ to meet _her friend_. The winter of our marriage had been one of wild snow; and the following Easter was alike untimely. I just remember the fact of your kind hospitality fifty-four and a half years ago, and the snow around us. In that visit to my mother (the last time I saw her), my young wife caught inflammation of the lungs, which I did not perceive or understand--she was so cruelly bled and cupped, that I think she never recovered it.

"It is very kind of you to keep alive in your heart the friendship of the two ladies. I perhaps ought to state that about two and a half years after the death of that wife in 1876 I married her ... friend.... Else I must have given up housekeeping, and know not into what family I could have gone. My second wife is nineteen years my junior, yet in walking, not at all my equal, but in affectionate care of me inestimable."

In June, 1892, he writes to J. H. Tucker, Esq.:--"I have not heard whether your father, like me, is favoured by life continued, but I venture to send a copy of my hymns.... To-day I have received a letter and book in _Bengali_ from a believer in _Theosophy_, supposing me to be one of them!

Hence, I was not too early in telling my friends that since _at the age of fourteen_ I became a Conscious Christian, no unbelief has made my hymns less precious, _mutato saltem nomine_.... My change more than fifty years ago was on Historical arguments mainly."

To return to the subject of Newman's last years at Weston-super-Mare.

Perhaps the most graphic descriptions of him as an old man are those contributed as "Reminiscences" by Mrs. Kingsley-Tarpey and Mrs. Bainsmith.

We know him there as a man who, though hardly ever free from some discomfort or pain in those days, yet never failed in that old-world courtesy of which, alas! there is so poor a supply in the world at the present day.

We know him as a man who was always eager to help those who came to him in trouble or in any difficulty; nay, perhaps almost _too_ ready to believe a c.o.c.k-and-bull story of those who did not mind, for their own ends, practising on his credulity.

A lady, a relation of the Newmans', said that once on coming to stay with him and Mrs. Newman, she found a secretary in his study smelling strongly of brandy. When the secretary went out of the room, Frank Newman drew their guest aside and said, "Ah, yes, it's a sad case, poor fellow! He's getting away from the temptation of the public-houses."

But when later the secretary's rooms were searched, there were found numbers of brandy bottles hidden away, to prove that he evidently had _not_ "escaped from temptation"! This lady said also that when Newman was old people not infrequently deceived him thus, and traded on his temperance views, and that he had had _two_ secretaries who obtained their post on false pretences.

To conclude this chapter I should like to give one striking instance of his tender sympathy and respect for the poor and lonely. A poor charwoman had died at Weston-super-Mare who had, I believe, often worked in Newman's house. He found that she had no friends to follow her body to the grave, and so he himself, his wife and servants, walked to the funeral as mourners to show her a last respect. It is the Idea represented by his act which makes it serve as an unforgettable and very uncommon ill.u.s.tration of a championship of those unlucky ones who have few or none to champion them.

Could any act speak clearer of the unfailing respect and reverence for women which distinguished Francis Newman through life? Though all others should see the lonely funeral, there should be but the one Good Samaritan who crossed over the road of ordinary, usual, Conventionalities to show by his act that he recognized that cla.s.s and position count for nothing before the fact of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity and Religion.

CHAPTER XX

TOULMIN SMITH: AUTHOR, ANTIQUARIAN STUDENT, AND POLITICAL REFORMER

Among the names of those who have done most, by untiring, laborious search among old parish registers, etc., and dusty old records, to bring to light interesting social ordinances, details of ancient parish government, and gems of Norse literature and archaeological research, there have been none in the last century who have by patient work attained more knowledge of their country's inner history than Mr. Toulmin Smith.