This is the Abbé Jager, the Rev. Benjamin Harrison’s Parisian friend, a lively, learned, and apparently provoking controversialist, author of Le Protestantisme aux Prises avec la Doctrine Catholique. Newman received his reply promptly from Paignton, though he put off the visit. ‘Frater desiderate,’ says Hurrell, ‘speak not of finances, since all the people here are ready to subscribe for you; as for the Abbé, you can work him here as well as anywhere. It is exquisitely pleasant here: a hot sun with a fresh air is a luxury to which I have long been a stranger. If you were to stay here a fortnight, you might get on with your controversy, and be inspired for the novel! I give out in all directions that you mean to write it, and divulge the plot.’
Miss Mozley thus comments on this inciting of a new literary activity in Newman. ‘There is nothing in the papers before [me] to show that any ground whatever, in fact, existed for the novel Froude here talks of. In the Postscript to Callista, the author speaks of being stopped at the fifth chapter “from sheer inability to devise personages or incidents.” Was the attempt to express the feelings and mutual relations of Christians and heathens in early Christian times already an idea in the author’s mind?’ The intrinsic evidence is certainly strong against the likelihood of Newman’s earlier story, Loss and Gain, or anything remotely resembling it in subject or framework, being contemplated in 1835. Attentive readers of that very Oxonian book will recall, incidentally, that Devonshire becomes the home of the Redings, and may even, without being too fantastic, detect some faint irregular adumbration of Hurrell Froude, Froude deduced as Newman would fain have him, in the phantom figure, so illusive and
attractive, of Willis.[242] Perhaps ‘the novel,’ the plot of which Froude was so pleased to divulge, was but an original inspiration of his own. He had long before formed a critical, if rather despiteful interest in fiction, as the unwelcome supplanter of poetry in a decadent age; and perhaps he had invited Newman to write a story as Newman had invited him to dream of the Indian Bishopric: all ad majorem Dei gloriam. At any rate, five weeks before, Froude had mentioned what is apparently the same ‘novel’ as his own affair, in a letter to Newman printed in the Remains but not in the Newman Correspondence. ‘My ideas about the novel,’ he says, ‘are but cloudy, as I have no books of reference to get details out of. Would that the stars may let me return to Oxford before long, to work at things,[243] and rub up my intellects!’ It would be pleasant, were there any sure grounds for it, to associate the profound spiritual passion, as Mr. R. H. Hutton calls it, of Callista, with the emulating and holy friendship of John Henry Newman and Hurrell Froude.
Newman had been bringing forward in print something very dear to both: the monastic ideal. With his usual scrupulousness, he had begun to fear that he was laying too great a burden upon his well-wishers in leaving them to accept and defend a thesis so inexpedient, because so hostile to the spirit of the time; and Hurrell strikes out against the expressed misgiving before ending the letter of July 31 just quoted. His father, as ever, was his standard of wise moderation.
‘… As to your Monasticism articles in The British Magazine,[244] my father read the offensive part in the June
one, and could see nothing in it that any reasonable person could object to; and some persons I know have been struck by them. I cannot see the harm of losing influence with people when you can only retain it by sinking the points on which you differ with them. Surely that would be Propter vitam vivendi, etc.? What is the good of influence except to influence people?’ To Mr. Keble, at the same time, Froude expresses a generous envy of Newman’s ‘taking’ utterance (what Newman himself calls his ‘mere rhetorical or histrionic power’), and admits again the difficulty of winning any such command over souls in England, with his own very elliptical genius. ‘I find myself so ignorant of the way to get at people, that I never know what to assume and what to prove!’ Froude’s straightforward case was Jeremy Taylor’s of old, of whom Chillingworth regretfully said: ‘Hee wants much of the ethickall part of a Discourser, and slights too much, many times, the Arguments of those hee discourses with.’
Newman tells his dear sister Jemima, on August 9: ‘I think I shall go down to Froude for ten days. I am very unwilling to do it; but it is so uncertain whether he will be able to come to Oxford at all, that I think I ought to secure seeing him before he goes abroad.’ And again, to the absent comrade, a fortnight after: ‘I am sick of expecting a letter; for the last week I have every day made sure of one, and been disappointed. I cannot help fearing you are not well…. I must (so be it!) come down to you before Vacation ends, to get some light struck out by collision.’ For Newman had been trying to work out alone ‘whether Tradition is ever considered by the Fathers, in matters of faith, more than interpretative of Scripture.’ To Mr. Rogers, at the same time, he speaks of the contemplated move. ‘I have little to show, this Vacation, in point of work done. The time seems to have slipped away in a dream. Perhaps it would be as well to go down to Froude, were it only to adjust my notions to his. Dear fellow! long as I have anticipated what I suppose must come, I feel quite raw and unprepared. I suppose one ought to get as much as one can from him, dum licet.’
Newman himself was again over-busied and ailing. No reader can fail to notice the deepening tenderness of the
correspondence between the two during these last months, where yet sportiveness and candour, and a certain mutual deference, keep their old due order. Words go quickly and lightly, without emphasis or strain, as if driven willingly on the rising wind which is the eternal silence.
‘My dearest Newman,’ opens the awaited missive of Sept. 3, ‘I am afraid you will have been grumbling in your heart at me…. But really, I am not to blame, as I have not put pen to paper for a fortnight, except yesterday, when I began a letter to you upside down. I cannot explain what has been the matter with me; but I am sure that the apothecary into whose hands I fell made a fool of himself…. As to our controversies, you are now taking fresh ground, without owning, as you ought, that on our first basis I dished you! Of course, if the Fathers maintain that “nothing not deducible from Scripture ought to be insisted on as terms of communion,” I have nothing more to say. But again, if you allow Tradition an interpretative authority, I cannot see what is gained. For surely the doctrines of the Priesthood and the Eucharist may be proved from Scripture interpreted by Tradition; and if so, what is to hinder our insisting on them as terms of communion? I don’t mean, of course, that this will bear out the Romanists (which is perhaps your only point?), but it certainly would bear out our party in excommunicating Protestants…. You lug in the Apostles’ Creed, and talk about expansions. What is the end of expansions? Will not the Romanists say that their whole system is an expansion of the Holy Catholic Church and the Communion of Saints?’