  It will be remembered that Francis Newman retired from his official duties at University College in 1863, with the title Emeritus Professor. As most of us are aware, this word "Emeritus" was originally given to Roman soldiers who had served out their term and been discharged, on the understanding of being given a settled sum of money which was practically the equivalent of our English half-pay. The term is now used to designate a professor who has been "honourably relieved" of his office, either because of physical disability or on account of a term of long service fulfilled. It is, in effect, a retiring pension. As will have been seen by letters from Newman which precede this chapter, he retired from the office of Professor, but in no sense from his work of writing, studying, and lecturing. The enormous number of books published will testify to this. His five volumes of Miscellanies, his Reminiscences of Two Exiles, Europe of the Near Future, translation of the Odes of Horace, [Footnote: Which did not meet with the approval of Matthew Arnold.] Handbook and Dictionary of Modern Arabic, Kabail Vocabulary, Libyan Vocabulary, Text of the Iguvine Inscriptions, Christian Commonwealth, History of the Hebrew Monarchy, Hebrew Theism, Early Life of Cardinal Newman, Anglo-Saxon Abolition of Negro Slavery, not to mention many others, alone show how writing largely filled his days and occupied his mind. Besides all this work, however, he was for ever interesting himself in any cause or society which applied to him for help, or seemed in any way to need a champion. Indeed, as Mr. Hornblower Gill says of him, "Scholar, translator, mathematician, historian, political economist, political philosopher, moralist, theologian, philanthropist, he was the most copious and various writer of his time." For a great many years before he died Newman lived at Weston-super-Mare. But two years before his death, in October, 1897, when he was ninety-two years of age, he found himself, partly owing to senile decay and partly owing to a bad fall he had had in the spring of the year, and also to loss of eyesight, unable to take part in public affairs any longer, nor yet to write as he had been used to do. The unpublished article on "Land Nationalization" (which is printed in Mr. Jameson, at the time of sending me the article, wrote me a letter from which I shall here quote those parts relating to his friendship with Newman. He says, speaking of their first meeting: "There was an instant fellowship that endears his memory to me. I was then about thirty-five, and he past eighty. There was a quiet dignity in his manner, but no suggestion of old age." One little anecdote may be of interest. "We left a rather stormy committee meeting together, over which Professor Newman had presided. The storm was due to one member who had a grievance against some others. Speaking of the pity of this, Professor Newman said to me, 'You know how very strongly my brother and myself differ in opinion; yet this has never created the slightest personal discord….'" Several years later. Professor Newman wrote Mr. Jameson a letter (on finding out that he was suffering from overwork and the fear of subsequent breakdown), saying these strong words of sympathy: "I charge you to give it up. Save yourself for the years to come." He went on to say that a friend of his own had kept working on for some cherished cause at the cost of much mental pressure, and had ended his days in a lunatic asylum. Mr. Jameson adds that Newman's words of counsel have often and often rung in his ears since they were first said to him, and he attributes to the fact that he obeyed them, his having been saved from a physical breakdown. "Save yourself for the years to come" is a counsel which we, who are workers, are so often in danger of forgetting. Except in extreme youth, most men and women live far more in the present and in the past than they do in the future which lies before them, so largely to be carved into shape by their Present. In April, 1887, Sir Samuel Walker Griffith, G.C.M.G., Chief Justice of Queensland since 1893, Secretary for Public Instruction, Attorney-General from 1874-8, 1890-3, Premier of Queensland from 1883-8, and 1890-3, was over in England, and Francis Newman was to have been introduced by Mrs. Bucknall (mother of Mrs. Bainsmith, the distinguished sculptor [Footnote: Mrs. Georgina Bainsmith, F.N.B.A., member of the Royal Society of Arts, and of the Honorary Council of the North British Academy.] to whom I am indebted for the photo in this book of her bust of Francis Newman, which now stands in University College, London) to Sir Samuel, at the latter's own special desire. Unfortunately, Newman was unable to go with Mrs. Bucknall to Sir Samuel Griffith's house, and this is his letter (kindly lent me, with Sir Samuel Griffith's reply, by Mrs. Bucknall). "Dear Mrs. Bucknall, "Since you tell me that time presses, I have no way but to give up to you my private copy of (my) Christian Commonwealth, which I now send you. Very sorry I am that I could not accompany you on Sunday to Sir Samuel Griffith's, but learning from you how graciously such a visitor from the Antipodes expressed his desire to meet me, I am really sorry that I was not able in person to attest my deep reverence and admiration as well as affection for Mrs. Butler, and my conviction that only moral and spiritual influences can quell the demon of impurity, while the despair which tries to keep it within limits by moderation and indulging it, is a folly and an infatuation, especially when coupled with police licenses and police espionage. Our ladies since 1869 have learned to detest the despotic police and the despotic doctor with an intensity which time ever increases. "They must conquer at last: the sole question is,—after how much more moral damage to young men and women, and how much mental agony to our Christian martyrs. "Our young men happily are joining this crusade. Alas, for those who mean to be Christian, and do not know the elements of Christian sentiment. [Footnote: See "Marriage Laws" (1867), "State Provision for Vice" (1869), and "Remedies for the Great Social Evil" (1869), in Vol. III of F. W. Newman's Miscellanies.] "I look to you to apologize for me to Sir S. G, for offering to him a book written by me… one which my pen has defaced…. "Most truly yours, "F. W. Newman. This is Sir Samuel Griffith's answer:— "Brown's Hotel, "Dover Street, W., "21st April, 1887. "Dear Mrs. Bucknall, "Accept my best thanks for Professor Newman's writings on the Christian Commonwealth and the New Crusade. I really feel ashamed to deprive you of the latter, and Professor Newman of the former, but it would be most ungracious of me to refuse to accept them. "Pray assure 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, "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 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 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, "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 association 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 cock-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 illustration 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 class and position count for nothing before the fact of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity and Religion. |
|
