Of this we may be quite sure. The life of one who had thought himself into Atheism, yet contemplated becoming a tutor, must have been a most uncomfortable one. The treatment he was likely to receive could not be calculated to evoke his better qualities. Finding everywhere his Atheism a bar to his advancement, whose is the fault if it resulted in a character of petulance and cynicism, and in—what it evidently did result in—a largely wasted life?
The Rev. Edward Venables, Precentor of Lincoln, speaks of him as having been, between 1834 and 1844, usher in a large school for farmers’ sons, kept by a Mr. Allfree at Windmill Hill, in the parish of Herstmonceaux, Sussex, where Julius Charles Hare, Archdeacon of Lewes, was rector, and John Sterling for a short while curate. Mr. Venables says Newman “interested Archdeacon Hare very much, and I have often heard him speak of the long conversations he had had with him on literary and philosophical subjects, and of the remarkable mental power he displayed. At that time the future Cardinal’s brother had entirely discarded the Christian faith, and declared himself an unbeliever in revelation.” There can be no doubt the tribute from Hare, a man of very superior culture, was deserved, though the archdeacon also expressed the opinion “there was a screw loose somewhere.”
The task of teaching the Sussex rustics was, as Precentor Venables remarks, intolerably irksome to a man of Newman’s high intellectual power. It was like chopping logs with a fine-edged razor. His relations with his principal became strained, and a tussle between the usher and his class led to his dismissal. At this time he was miserably poor. Precentor Venables says: “To Hare he lamented the narrow-mindedness of his brothers John and Francis, who, as he asserted, had entirely cast him off, and left him to fight his way in the world unaided, because of his professed infidelity, in which the younger of the two, then an ardent Evangelical, was before very long to follow him.” No reproach whatever is due to the younger brother on this account, and the elder is probably as little blameworthy. John Henry could not be expected to recommend as tutor one whose views upon faith and morals he considered unsound. Francis William had gone to Bagdad with the object of assisting in a Christian mission, and intercourse with Mohammedans and other studies were but gradually loosening his orthodoxy. After his return, and when his works and professorship at London University assured his position, he put himself into regular monthly communication with his brother. In the meantime he had been assisted by his sister Harriet’s husband. But the iron had already entered his soul; he was an Atheist and an outcast. Forced to receive the bounty of relatives who deplored his opinions, he seems to have resented their kindness as an attempt to bribe his intellectual conscience. The world rang with the fame—as theologian, historian, poet, and preacher—of the elder, whose creed he had outgrown and despised; while his convictions, to the full as honest, everywhere stood in his way, and were contemned as an offence against faith and morals. He had no contact with minds congenial to his own, and doomed himself to the life of a recluse.
Each of the brothers was of a retiring, meditative disposition. Reading the Apologia Pro Vita Sua of the eldest, one may see how this contributed towards his seeking a refuge in the Catholic Church. The same disposition of mind may be traced in the Phases of Faith of the youngest, equally impelling him from the evangelicalism of his surroundings and leading to the rejection of historic Christianity, and finally to the surrender of all belief in revelation. In Charles Robert Newman the same qualities were seen to excess, removing him from contact with his fellows to the life of a solitary thinker in a quiet Welsh watering-place. From about 1853, he had a room in a small cottage on the Marsh road, Tenby.
Mr. Thomas Purnell, who says he had for years “the inestimable privilege of enjoying his close intimacy,” remarks, “never before or since have I met a man endowed with as rare an intellectual equipment.” Mr. Purnell thus describes his own first visit to the recluse: “He stood at the top of the topmost stair. I cannot imagine a more distinguished head and face. There was a touch of Mephistopheles in him. There was also a touch of Jupiter Olympius. Although dressed in ill-fitting clothes, and with a sort of blanket over his shoulders, he appeared to me to be the ideal of courtly grace. He bowed me without a word into his apartments. This was in the roof of the building, and the only light came from a window which opened with a notched iron bar. The room was as meagrely furnished as Goethe’s study in Weimar. A bed, a chest of drawers, a table and two or three chairs, with a few books, constituted the whole goods and chattels.” Mr. Purnell says “his health, means and inclination made him averse to society. The rector called on him, but was not admitted; visitors to the town who had known his brothers would send in their cards, but they received no response; local medical men, when they heard he was ill, volunteered their services, but they were declined with courteous thanks conveyed by letter.”
It appears he but seldom left his house, and when he went out he did not often enter the town, but took his exercise in the road which led into the country. Dressed in a pea-jacket, with a shawl or a rug thrown across his shoulders, and with a sou’-wester over his head, he marched erect, looking neither to left nor right. He wore shoes, and, as his trousers were short, displayed an interval of white socks. The lads and lasses were apt to regard such a figure with derision.
It was through Mr. Purnell that he communicated the papers here reprinted to the Reasoner. Although but of the character of fragments, they bespeak an original mind. The secret of the Cardinal’s great influence and strength was that what he spoke and wrote came not from books, but forthright out of his own head and heart. The topics with which his brother deals were those only needing the mind, and his treatment shows they were viewed in the dry light of an original intellect. The Reasoner ceased soon after the appearance of these papers, and thus closed the one opening for his literary activity. Francis William Newman was, at least till the present year, unaware that his arguments for Theism were challenged by his own brother under the signature of “A Recluse.” He informs me that he had never heard that anyone would publish anything from his pen, and that he heard that at his death, in March, 1884, he left a box full of manuscripts, which were destroyed as useless. Whether this was done by order of his relatives, whether the landlady decided the question, or whether the vicar or neighbors were called in, will perhaps remain as unknown as the worth of the manuscripts. The following specimens are all by which the latter question can be judged.
Mr. Meynell says that two years before he died he had a short visit from his eldest brother. It must have been a strange meeting, and one worthy the brush of a great artist. Surely in all England there were not two men of eighty whose thoughts were so divergent or two brothers whose lives were so diversified. The one a saintly cardinal, called by the Pope the Light of England, who, by his rare urbanity, had gained the respect of all, replete with all that should accompany old age—as honor, love, obedience, troops of friends: the other, fallen, too, into the sere and yellow leaf, and without them all—poor, solitary, unknown and despised, a scorn and wonderment to his nearest neighbors. And all from following his own thought that had made him a purus putus Atheist.