MR. NEWMAN'S EARLY FRIENDS--ISAAC WILLIAMS
In the early days of the movement, among Mr. Newman's greatest friends,
and much in his confidence, were two Fellows of Trinity--a college
which never forgot that Newman had once belonged to it,--Isaac Williams
and William John Copeland. In mind and character very different, they
were close friends, with the affection which was characteristic of those
days; and for both of them Mr. Newman "had the love which passes that of
common relation."[27] Isaac Williams was born among the mountains of
Wales, and had the true poetic gift, though his power of expression was
often not equal to what he wanted to say. Copeland was a Londoner, bred
up in the strict school of Churchmanship represented by Mr. Norris of
Hackney, tempered by sympathies with the Non-jurors. At Oxford he lived,
along with Isaac Williams, in the very heart of the movement, which was
the interest of his life; but he lived, self-forgetting or
self-effacing, a wonderful mixture of tender and inexhaustible sympathy,
and of quick and keen wit, which yet, somehow or other, in that time of
exasperation and bitterness, made him few enemies. He knew more than
most men of the goings on of the movement, and he ought to have been its
chronicler. But he was fastidious and hard to satisfy, and he left his
task till it was too late.
Isaac Williams was born in Wales in 1802, a year after Newman, ten years
after John Keble. His early life was spent in London, but his affection
for Wales and its mountain scenery was great and undiminished to the end
of his life. At Harrow, where Henry Drury was his tutor, he made his
mark by his mastery of Latin composition and his devotion to Latin
language and literature. "I was so used to think in Latin that when I
had to write an English theme, which was but seldom, I had to translate
my ideas, which ran in Latin, into English";[28] and later in life he
complained of the Latin current which disturbed him when he had to write
English. He was also a great cricketer; and he describes himself as
coming up to Trinity, where he soon got a scholarship, an ambitious and
careless youth, who had never heard a word about Christianity, and to
whom religion, its aims and its restraints, were a mere name.
This was changed by what, in the language of devotional schools, would
have been called his conversion. It came about, as men speak, as the
result of accidents; but the whole course of his thoughts and life was
turned into a channel from which it nevermore diverged. An old Welsh
clergyman gave the undergraduate an introduction to John Keble, who then
held a place in Oxford almost unique. But the Trinity undergraduate and
the Oriel don saw little of one another till Isaac Williams won the
Latin prize poem, _Ars Geologica_. Keble then called on Isaac Williams
and offered his help in criticising the poem and polishing it for
printing. The two men plainly took to one another at first sight; and
that service was followed by a most unexpected invitation on Keble's
part. He had chanced to come to Williams's room, and on Williams saying
that he had no plan of reading for the approaching vacation, Keble said,
"I am going to leave Oxford for good. Suppose you come and read with me.
The Provost has asked me to take Wilberforce, and I declined; but if you
would come, you would be companions." Keble was going down to Southrop,
a little curacy near his father's; there Williams joined him, with two
more--Robert Wilberforce and R.H. Froude; and there the Long Vacation of
1823 was spent, and Isaac Williams's character and course determined.
"It was this very trivial accident, this short walk of a few yards, and
a few words spoken, which was the turning-point of my life. If a
merciful God had miraculously interposed to arrest my course, I could
not have had a stronger assurance of His presence than I always had in
looking back to that day." It determined Isaac Williams's character,
and it determined for good and all his theological position. He had
before him all day long in John Keble a spectacle which was absolutely
new to him. Ambitious as a rising and successful scholar at college, he
saw a man, looked up to and wondered at by every one, absolutely without
pride and without ambition. He saw the most distinguished academic of
his day, to whom every prospect was open, retiring from Oxford in the
height of his fame to bury himself with a few hundreds of
Gloucestershire peasants in a miserable curacy. He saw this man caring
for and respecting the ignorant and poor as much as others respected the
great and the learned. He saw this man, who had made what the world
would call so great a sacrifice, apparently unconscious that he had made
any sacrifice at all, gay, unceremonious, bright, full of play as a boy,
ready with his pupils for any exercise, mental or muscular--for a hard
ride, or a crabbed bit of Aeschylus, or a logic fence with disputatious
and paradoxical undergraduates, giving and taking on even ground. These
pupils saw one, the depth of whose religion none could doubt, "always
endeavouring to do them good as it were unknown to themselves and in
secret, and ever avoiding that his kindness should be felt and
acknowledged"; showing in the whole course of daily life the purity of
Christian love, and taking the utmost pains to make no profession or
show of it. This unostentatious and undemonstrative religion--so frank,
so generous in all its ways--was to Isaac Williams "quite a new world."
It turned his mind in upon itself in the deepest reverence, but also
with something of morbid despair of ever reaching such a standard. It
drove all dreams of ambition out of his mind. It made humility,
self-restraint, self-abasement, objects of unceasing, possibly not
always wise and healthy, effort. But the result was certainly a
character of great sweetness, tenderness, and lowly unselfishness,
pure, free from all worldliness, and deeply resigned to the will of God.
He caught from Mr. Keble, like Froude, two characteristic habits of
mind--a strong depreciation of mere intellect compared with the less
showy excellences of faithfulness to conscience and duty; and a horror
and hatred of everything that seemed like display or the desire of
applause or of immediate effect. Intellectual depreciators of intellect
may deceive themselves, and do not always escape the snare which they
fear; but in Isaac Williams there was a very genuine carrying out of the
Psalmist's words: "Surely I have behaved and quieted myself; I refrain
my soul and keep it low, as a child that is weaned from his mother."
This fear of display in a man of singularly delicate and fastidious
taste came to have something forced and morbid in it. It seemed
sometimes as if in preaching or talking he aimed at being dull and
clumsy. But in all that he did and wrote he aimed at being true at all
costs and in the very depths of his heart; and though, in his words, we
may wish sometimes for what we should feel to be more natural and
healthy in tone, we never can doubt that we are in the presence of one
who shrank from all conscious unreality like poison.
From Keble, or, it may be said, from the Kebles, he received his
theology. The Kebles were all of them men of the old-fashioned High
Church orthodoxy, of the Prayer Book and the Catechism--the orthodoxy
which was professed at Oxford, which was represented in London by Norris
of Hackney and Joshua Watson; which valued in religion sobriety,
reverence, and deference to authority, and in teaching, sound learning
and the wisdom of the great English divines; which vehemently disliked
the Evangelicals and Methodists for their poor and loose theology, their
love of excitement and display, their hunting after popularity. This
Church of England divinity was the theology of the old Vicar of Coln St.
Aldwyn's, a good scholar and a good parish priest, who had brought up
his two sons at home to be scholars; and had impressed his solid and
manly theology on them so strongly that amid all changes they remained
at bottom true to their paternal training. John Keble added to it great
attainments and brilliant gifts of imagination and poetry; but he never
lost the plain, downright, almost awkward ways of conversation and
manner of his simple home--ways which might have seemed abrupt and rough
but for the singular sweetness and charm of his nature. To those who
looked on the outside he was always the homely, rigidly orthodox country
clergyman. On Isaac Williams, with his ethical standard, John Keble also
impressed his ideas of religious truth; he made him an old-fashioned
High Churchman, suspicious of excitement and "effect," suspicious of the
loud-talking religious world, suspicious of its novelties and
shallowness, and clinging with his whole soul to ancient ways and sound
Church of England doctrine reflected in the Prayer Book. And from John
Keble's influence he passed under the influence of Thomas Keble, the
Vicar of Bisley, a man of sterner type than his brother, with strong and
definite opinions on all subjects; curt and keen in speech; intolerant
of all that seemed to threaten wholesome teaching and the interests of
the Church; and equally straightforward, equally simple, in manners and
life. Under him Isaac Williams began his career as a clergyman; he spent
two years of solitary and monotonous life in a small cure, seeking
comfort from solitude in poetical composition ("It was very calm and
subduing," he writes); and then he was recalled to Oxford as Fellow and
Tutor of his college, to meet a new and stronger influence, which it was
part of the work and trial of the rest of his life both to assimilate
and to resist.
For, with Newman, with whom he now came into contact, he did both. There
opened to him from intercourse with Newman a new world of thought; and
yet while feeling and answering to its charm, he never was quite at ease
with him. But Williams and Froude had always been great friends since
the reading party of 1823, in spite of Froude's audacities. Froude was
now residing in Oxford, and had become Newman's most intimate friend,
and he brought Newman and Williams together. "Living at that time," he
says, "so much with Froude, I was now in consequence for the first time
brought into intercourse with Newman. We almost daily walked and often
dined together." Newman and Froude had ceased to be tutors; their
thoughts were turned to theology and the condition of the Church. Newman
had definitely broken with the Evangelicals, to whom he had been
supposed to belong, and Whately's influence over him was waning, and
with Froude he looked up to Keble as the pattern of religious wisdom. He
had accepted the position of a Churchman as it was understood by Keble
and Froude; and thus there was nothing to hinder Williams's full
sympathy with him. But from the first there seems to have been an almost
impalpable bar between them, which is the more remarkable because
Williams appears to have seen with equanimity Froude's apparently more
violent and dangerous outbreaks of paradox and antipathy. Possibly,
after the catastrophe, he may, in looking back, have exaggerated his
early alarms. But from the first he says he saw in Newman what he had
learned to look upon as the gravest of dangers--the preponderance of
intellect among the elements of character and as the guide of life. "I
was greatly delighted and charmed with Newman, who was extremely kind to
me, but did not altogether trust his opinions; and though Froude was in
the habit of stating things in an extreme and paradoxical manner, yet
one always felt conscious of a ground of entire confidence and
agreement; but it was not so with Newman, even though one appeared more
in unison with his more moderate views."
But, in spite of all this, Newman offered and Isaac Williams accepted
the curacy of St. Mary's. "Things at Oxford [1830-32] at that time were
very dull." "Froude and I seemed entirely alone, with Newman only
secretly, as it were, beginning to sympathise. I became at once very
much attached to Newman, won by his kindness and delighted by his good
and wonderful qualities; and he proposed that I should be his curate at
St. Mary's.... I can remember a strong feeling of difference I first
felt on acting together with him from what I had been accustomed to:
that he was in the habit of looking for effect, and for what was
sensibly effective, which from the Bisley and Fairford School I had been
long habituated to avoid; but to do one's duty in faith and leave it to
God, and that all the more earnestly, because there were no sympathies
from without to answer. There was a felt but unexpressed difference of
this kind, but perhaps it became afterwards harmonised as we acted
together."[29]
Thus early, among those most closely united, there appeared the
beginnings of those different currents which became so divergent as time
went on. Isaac Williams, dear as he was to Newman, and returning to the
full Newman's affection, yet represented from the first the views of
what Williams spoke of as the "Bisley and Fairford School," which,
though sympathising and co-operating with the movement, was never quite
easy about it, and was not sparing of its criticism on the stir and
agitation of the Tracts.
Isaac Williams threw himself heartily into the early stages of the
movement; in his poetry into its imaginative and poetical side, and also
into its practical and self-denying side. But he would have been quite
content with its silent working, and its apparent want of visible
success. He would have been quite content with preaching simple homely
sermons on the obvious but hard duties of daily life, and not seeing
much come of them; with finding a slow abatement of the self-indulgent
habits of university life, with keeping Fridays, with less wine in
common room. The Bisley maxims bade men to be very stiff and
uncompromising in their witness and in their duties, but to make no show
and expect no recognition or immediate fruit, and to be silent under
misconstruction. But his was not a mind which realised great
possibilities of change in the inherited ways of the English Church. The
spirit of change, so keenly discerned by Newman, as being both certain
and capable of being turned to good account as well as bad, to him was
unintelligible or bad. More reality, more severity and consistency,
deeper habits of self-discipline on the accepted lines of English Church
orthodoxy, would have satisfied him as the aim of the movement, as it
undoubtedly was a large part of its aim; though with Froude and Newman
it also aimed at a widening of ideas, of interests and sympathies,
beyond what had been common in the English Church.
In the history of the movement Isaac Williams took a forward part in two
of its events, with one of which his connexion was most natural, with
the other grotesquely and ludicrously incongruous. The one was the plan
and starting of the series of _Plain Sermons_ in 1839, to which not only
the Kebles, Williams, and Copeland contributed their volumes, but also
Newman and Dr. Pusey. Isaac Williams has left the following account of
his share in the work.
"It seemed at this time (about 1838-39) as if Oxford, from the strength
of principle shown there (and an almost unanimous and concentrated
energy), was becoming a rallying point for the whole kingdom: but I
watched from the beginning and saw greater dangers among ourselves than
those from without; which I endeavoured to obviate by publishing the
_Plain Sermons_. [_Plain Sermons_, by contributors to the _Tracts for
the Times_, 1st Series, January 1839.] I attempted in vain to get the
Kebles to publish, in order to keep pace with Newman, and so maintain a
more practical turn in the movement. I remember C. Cornish (C.L.
Cornish, Fellow and Tutor of Exeter) coming to me and saying as we
walked in Trinity Gardens, 'People are a little afraid of being carried
away by Newman's brilliancy; they want more of the steady sobriety of
the Kebles infused into the movement to keep us safe; we have so much
sail and want ballast.' And the effect of the publication of the _Plain
Sermons_ was at the time very quieting. In first undertaking the _Plain
Sermons_, I had no encouragement from any one, not even from John Keble;
acquiescence was all that I could gain. But I have heard J.K. mention a
saying of Judge Coleridge, long before the _Tracts_ were thought of: 'If
you want to propagate your opinions you should lend your sermons; the
clergy would then preach them, and adopt your opinions.' Now this has
been the effect of the publication of the _Plain Sermons_."
Isaac Williams, if any man, represented in the movement the moderate and
unobtrusive way of religious teaching. But it was his curious fate to be
dragged into the front ranks of the fray, and to be singled out as
almost the most wicked and dangerous of the Tractarians. He had the
strange fortune to produce the first of the Tracts[30] which was by
itself held up to popular indignation as embodying all the mischief of
the series and the secret aims of the movement. The Tract had another
effect. It made Williams the object of the first great Tractarian battle
in the University, the contest for the Poetry Professorship: the first
decisive and open trial of strength, and the first Tractarian defeat.
The contest, even more than the result, distressed him greatly; and the
course of things in the movement itself aggravated his distress. His
general distrust of intellectual restlessness had now passed into the
special and too well grounded fear that the movement, in some of its
most prominent representatives, was going definitely in the direction of
Rome. A new generation was rising into influence, to whom the old Church
watchwords and maxims, the old Church habits of mind, the old Church
convictions, had completely lost their force, and were become almost
objects of dislike and scorn; and for this change Newman's approval and
countenance were freely and not very scrupulously quoted. Williams's
relation to him had long been a curious mixture of the most affectionate
attachment and intimacy with growing distrust and sense of divergence.
Newman was now giving more and more distinct warning that he was likely
to go where Williams could not follow him, and the pain on both sides
was growing. But things moved fast, and at length the strain broke.
The estrangement was inevitable; but both cherished the warmest feelings
of affection, even though such a friendship had been broken. But Oxford
became distasteful to Williams, and he soon afterwards left it for
Bisley and Stinchcombe, the living of his brother-in-law, Sir G.
Prevost. There he married (22d June 1842), and spent the remainder of
his life devoting himself to the preparation of those devotional
commentaries, which are still so well known. He suffered for the
greatest part of his life from a distressing and disabling chronic
asthma--from the time that he came back to Oxford as Fellow and
Tutor--and he died in 1865. The old friends met once more shortly before
Isaac Williams's death; Newman came to see him, and at his departure
Williams accompanied him to the station.
Isaac Williams wrote a great deal of poetry, first during his solitary
curacy at Windrush, and afterwards at Oxford. It was in a lower and
sadder key than the _Christian Year_, which no doubt first inspired it;
it wanted the elasticity and freshness and variety of Keble's verse, and
it was often careless in structure and wanting in concentration. But it
was the outpouring of a very beautiful mind, deeply impressed with the
realities of failure in the Church and religion, as well as in human
life, full of tenderness and pathetic sweetness, and seeking a vent for
its feelings, and relief for its trouble, in calling up before itself
the images of God's goodness and kingdom of which nature and the world
are full. His poetry is a witness to the depth and earnestness and
genuine delicacy of what seemed hard and narrow in the Bisley School;
there are passages in it which are not easily forgotten; but it was not
strong enough to arrest the excitement which soon set in, and with its
continual obscurity and its want of finish it never had the recognition
really due to its excellence. Newman thought it too soft. It certainly
wanted the fire and boldness and directness which he threw into his own
verse when he wrote; but serious earnestness and severity of tone it
certainly did not want.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] Mozley, _Reminiscences_, i. 18.
[28] I. Williams, _MS. Memoir_.
[29] I. Williams, _MS. Memoir_.
[30] The history of this famous Tract, No. 80, on _Reserve in
communicating Religious Knowledge_, belongs to a later stage of the
movement.