I was walking one day with Father Payne; he said to me, "I have been
reading Newman's _Apologia_ over again--I must have read it a dozen
times! It is surely one of the most beautiful and singular books in the
whole world?--and I think that the strangest sentence in it is this,--'Who
would ever dream of making the world his confidant?' Did Newman, do you
suppose, not realise that he had done that? And what is stranger still, did
he not know that he had told the world, not the trivial things, the little
tastes and fancies which anyone might hear, but the most intimate and
sacred things, which a man would hardly dare to say to God upon his knees.
Newman seems to me in that book to have torn out his beating and
palpitating heart, and set it in a crystal phial for all the world to gaze
upon. And further, did Newman really not know that this was what he always
desired to do and mostly did--to confide in the world, to tell his story as
a child might tell it to a mother? It is clear to me that Newman was a man
who did not only desire to be loved by a few friends, but wished everybody
to love him. I will not say that he was never happy till he had told his
tale, and I will not say that artist-like he loved applause: but he did
_not_ wish to be hidden, and he earnestly desired to be approved. He
craved to be allowed to say what he thought--it is pathetic to hear him say
so often how 'fierce' he was--and yet he hated suspicion and hostility and
misunderstanding: and though he loved a refined sort of quiet, he even more
loved, I think, to be the centre of a fuss! I feel little doubt in my own
mind that, even when he was living most retired, he wished people to be
curious about what he was doing. He was one of those men who felt he had a
special mission, a prophetical function. He was a dramatic creature, a
performer, you know. He read the lessons like an actor: he preached like an
actor; he was intensely self-conscious. Naturally enough! If you feel like
a prophet, the one sign of failure is that your audience melts away."
Father Payne paused a moment, lost in thought.
"But," I said, "do you mean that Newman calculated all his effects?"
"Oh, not deliberately," said Father Payne, "but he was an artist pure and
simple--he was never less by himself than when he was alone, as the old
Provost of Oriel said of him. He lived dramatically by a kind of instinct.
The unselfconscious man goes his own way, and does not bother his head
about other people: but Newman was not like that. When he was reading, it
was always like the portrait of a student reading. That's the artist's
way--he is always living in a sort of picture-frame. Why, you can see from
the _Apologia_, which he wrote in a few weeks, and often, as he once
said, in tears, how tenderly and eagerly he remembered all he had ever done
or thought. His descriptions of himself are always romantic: he lived in
memories, like all poets."
"But that gives one a disagreeable sense of unreality--of pose," I said.
"Ah, but that's very short-sighted," said Father Payne. "Newman's was a
beautiful spirit--wonderfully tender-hearted, self-restrained, gentle,
sensitive, beauty-loving. He loved beauty as much as any man who ever
lived--beautiful conduct, beautiful life--and then his gift of expression!
There's a marvellous thing. It's pure poetry, most of the _Apologia_:
look at the way he flashes into metaphor, at his exquisite pictures of
persons, at his irony, his courtesy, his humour, his pathos. He and Ruskin
knew exactly how to confide in the world, how to humiliate themselves
gracefully in public, how to laugh at themselves, how to be gay--it's all
so well-bred, so delicate! Depend upon it, that's the way to make the world
love you--to tell it all about yourself like a charming child, without any
boasting or bragging. The world is awfully stupid! It adores well-bred
egotism. We are all deeply inquisitive about _people_; and if you can
reveal yourself without vanity, and are a lovable creature, the world will
overwhelm you with love. You can't pay the world a greater compliment than
to open your heart to it. You must not bore it, of course, nor must you
seem to be demanding its applause. You must just seem to be in need of
sympathy and comfort. You must be a little sad, a little tired, a little
bewildered. I don't say that is easy to do, and a man must not set out to
do it. But if a man has got something childlike and innocent about him, and
a naïve way with him, the world will take him to its heart. The world loves
to pity, to compassionate, to sympathise, much more than it loves to
admire."
"But what about the religious side of it all?" I said.
"Ah," said Father Payne, "I think that is more touching still. The people
who change their religion, as it is called,--there is something extremely
captivating about them as a rule. To want to change your form of religion
simply means that you are unhappy and uneasy. You want more beauty, or more
assurance, or more sympathy, or more antiquity. Have you never noticed how
all converts personify their new Church in feminine terms? She becomes a
Madonna, something at once motherly and young. It is the passion with which
the child turns away from what is male and rough, to the mother, the nurse,
the elder sister. The convert isn't really in search of dogmas and
doctrines: he is in love with a presence, a shape, something which can
clasp and embrace and love him. I don't feel any real doubt of that. The
man who turns away to some other form of faith wants a home. He sees the
ugliness, the spite, the malice, the contentiousness of his own Church. He
loathes the hardness and uncharitableness of it; he is like a boy at school
sick for home. To me Newman's logic is like the effort of a man desperately
constructing a bridge to escape to the other side of the river. The land
beyond is like a landscape seen from a hill, a scene of woods and waters,
of fields and hamlets--everything seems peaceful and idyllic there. He
wants the wings of a dove, to flee away and be at rest. It is the same
feeling which makes people wish to travel. When you travel, the new land is
a spectacular thing--it is all a picture. It is not that you crave to live
in a foreign land: you merely want the luxury of seeing life without living
life. No ordinary person goes to live in Italy because he has studied the
political constitution and organisation of Italy, and prefers it to that of
England. So, too, the charm of a religious conversion is that it doesn't
seem unpatriotic to do it--but you get the feel of a new country without
having to quit your own. And the essence of it is a flight from conditions
which you dread and dislike. Of course Newman does not describe it so--that
is all a part of his guilelessness--he speaks of the shadow of a hand upon
the wall: but I don't doubt that his subconscious mind thrilled with the
sense of a possible escape that way. His heart was converted long before
his mind. What he hated in the English Church was having to decide for
himself--he wanted to lean on something, to put himself inside a
stronghold: he wanted to obey. Some people dislike the way in which he made
himself obey,--the way he argued himself into holding things which were
frankly irrational. But I don't mind that! It is the pleasure of the child
in being told what to do instead of having to amuse itself."
He was silent for a little, and then he said: "I see it all so clearly, and
yet of course it is in a sense inconceivable to me, because to my mind all
the Churches have got a burden of belief which they can't carry. The Gospel
is simple enough, and it is as much as I can do to live on those lines.
Besides, I don't want to obey--I want to obey as little as I can! The
ecclesiastical and the theological tradition is all a world of shadows to
me. I can't be bound by the pious fancies of men who knew no science, and
very little about evidence of any kind. What I want is just a simple and
beautiful principle of living, such as I feel thrills through the words of
Christ. The Prodigal Son--that's almost enough for me! It is simplification
that I want, and independence. Of course I see that if that isn't what a
man wants, if he requires that something or someone should be infallible,
then he does require a good deal of argument and information and history.
But though I don't object to people who want all that, it isn't what I am
in search of. I want as much strong emotion and as little system as I can
get. By emotion I don't mean sentiment, but real motives for acting or not
acting. I want to hear someone saying, 'Come up hither,' and to see
something in his face which makes me believe he sees something that I don't
see and that I wish to see. I don't feel that with Newman! He is fifty
times better than myself, but I couldn't do the thing in his way, though I
love him with all my heart: it's a quiet sort of brotherhood that I want,
and not too many rules. In fact, it is _laws_ I want, and not
_rules_, and to feel the laws rather than to know them, I can't help
feeling that Newman spent too much of his time in the law-court, pleading
and arguing: and it's stuffy in there! But he will remain for ever one of
those figures whom the world will love, because it can pity him as well as
admire him. Newman goes to one's head, you know, or to one's heart! And I
expect that it was exactly what he wanted to do all the time!"