"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 institutions…."
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!)…."
[Illustration: 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 embarrass 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.