Books: Road to Rome

Road to Rome

CARDINAL NEWMAN—J. Lewis May—Dial ($3.50).

John Henry Cardinal Newman, onetime hope of the Anglicans, then convert to Roman Catholicism, finally acknowledged prince of his adopted church, author of the “immortal” Apologia pro vita sua, is now little more than a dusty document, even, at Oxford University where his fame was brightest. Author May, sympathetic archivist, here takes out the dossier and with reverent breath blows off some of the dust.

John Henry Newman was born in London in 1801, of well-to-do and cultured parents. He was destined to intellectual struggle and religious leadership. Even as a schoolboy at Dr. Nicholas’s Academy for Young Gentlemen, at Ealing, he was considered an impressive speaker, and “was selected to deliver a speech before the Duke of Kent. The boy’s voice had just then begun to break, and though he persevered with his speech, it was more like a yodelling performance than a sober oration. The Doctor in some embarrassment . . . explained apologetically, ‘His voice is breaking.’ ‘Ah,’ replied the Duke, ‘but the action was good.’ ” At 15, Newman became an undergraduate of Trinity College, Oxford, and disappointed everybody by breaking down in his examinations. He had overworked; for 20 weeks before the “schools” (finals) he had crammed an average of 20 hours a day. Later he became Fellow of Oriel, then one of Oxford’s most coveted honors; was ordained deacon at 23, eventually became University Preacher.

By 1840 the Church of England was quite evidently a house divided against itself. Some of Oxford’s young intellectual lights (John Keble, E. B. Pusey, John Henry Newman) had started the Oxford Movement, which aimed to lead the Church back to its Catholic traditions. By preaching and by pamphlets (the famed “Tracts for the Times”) they spread their propaganda, Newman became so extreme an Anglo-Catholic that it was not long before he went the whole way and entered the Roman Catholic Church. He took many followers with him, but some balked. Said he: “A person in Devonshire is all but made up—he sticks at St. Cyprian. . . .” Newman’s reception was chilly, to say the least; the Pope sent him congratulations on recovering from a wretched heresy. For years he was looked upon with suspicion by his new superiors, his suggestions ignored, his plans thwarted. In 1848 he was put in charge of a mission in Birmingham.

The convert had a hard row to hoe. He tried to found a Catholic university in Dublin, and was thwarted; was promised a bishopric, which never came; was asked to make a translation of the Bible, and the plans fell through. But when Charles Kingsley, famed author of Westward Ho!, attacked him, calling him Jesuitical, Newman’s series of replies (the Apologia pro vita sua) not only demolished Kingsley but reestablished Newman’s reputation as the most important religious figure in England. He wrote the Apologia in seven weeks, sometimes working for 22 hours at a stretch. Says Biographer May: “It has been proclaimed a classic—which means that it is one of those books’ which people say they must read some time, and never read at all.” No poet, Newman wrote (while still an Anglican) one of the most famed of English hymns, “Lead, Kindly Light.” His prose was praised by Purist Walter Pater. One of his sermons Thomas Babington Macaulay knew by heart, and George Eliot could not quote it without tears.

Newman was gentle, but he was not weak, as one Monsignor learned to his cost when he wrote him a condescending invitation to come to Rome and better himself. Said Newman: “I have received your letter, inviting me to preach next Lent in your church at Rome to ‘an audience of Protestants more educated than could ever be the case in England.’ However, Birmingham people have souls; and I have neither taste nor talent for the sort of work which you cut out for me. And I beg to decline your offer.”

Finally Newman’s day came. Pio Nono (Pius IX) died; his successor raised Newman, at 80, to the Cardinalate. Ten years later (1890) Death came for him, who had lived to see his wheel of fortune come full circle. A gentleman and a scholar, he had his reward.

The Biographer. J. Lewis May was born in London (1873) and lives there, but his family still consider themselves natives of Devonshire. After a number of years in France he became literary advisor and reader for Publishers John Lane and Elkin Mathews; was made general editor of Lane’s English edition of the works of Anatole France, of whom he wrote a biography. Lane knew agnostic Author France and admired him, but not nearly so much as he does Newman. He married young, has one son, one daughter. His literary tastes are conservative; he also likes detective stories, loafing, smoking a pipe. Says he: “I read very little new stuff. When a new book comes out, I take down an old one. . . . Writing I like as a sailor likes the sea—mighty glad to be done with it, and then very soon itching to get back to it again.”