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by J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.
And in New York
by E.P. Dutton & Co.
"No autobiography in the English language has been more read; tothe nineteenth century it bears a relation not less characteristicthan Boswell's 'Johnson' to the eighteenth."
Rev. Wm. Barry, D.D.
Newman was already a recognised spiritual leader of over thirtyyear's standing, but not yet a Cardinal, when in 1864 he wrote theApologia. He was London born, and he had, as many Londoners havehad, a foreign strain in him. His father came of Dutch stock; hismother was a Fourdrinier, daughter of an old French Huguenot familysettled in this country. The date of his birth, 21st of February1801, relates him to many famous contemporaries, from Heine to Renan,from Carlyle to Pusey. Sent to school at Ealing—an imaginativeseven-year-old schoolboy, he was described even then as being fond ofbooks and seriously minded. It is certain he was deeply read in theEnglish Bible, thanks to his mother's care, before he began Latin andGreek. Another lifelong influence—as we may be prepared to find by asignal reference in the following autobiography, was Sir WalterScott; and in a later page he speaks of reading in bed Waverley andGuy Mannering when they first came out—"in the early summermornings," and of his delight in hearing The Lay of the LastMinstrel read aloud. Like Ruskin, another nineteenth-century masterof English prose, he was finely affected by these two powerfulinductors. They worked alike upon his piety and his imagination whichwas its true servant, and they helped to foster his seeminglyinstinctive style and his feeling for the English tongue.
In 1816 he went to Oxford—to Trinity College—and two years latergained a scholarship there. His father's idea was that he should readfor the bar, and he kept a few terms at Lincoln's Inn; but in the endOxford, which had, about the year of his birth, experienced a rebirthof ideas, thanks to the widening impulse of the French Revolution,held him, and Oriel College—the centre of the "Noetics," as oldOxford called the Liberal set in contempt—made him a fellow. Hisassociation there with Pusey and Keble is a matter of history; andthe Oxford Movement, in which the three worked together, was thedirect result, according to Dean Church, of their "searchings ofheart and communing" for seven years, from 1826 to 1833. A word mightbe said of Whately too, whose Logic Newman helped to beat intofinal form in these Oxford experiences. Not since the days of Coletand Erasmus had the University experienced such a shaking of thebranches. However, there is no need to do more than allude to theseintimately dealt with in the Apologia itself.
There, indeed, the stages of Newman's pilgrimage are related with agrace and sincerity of style that have hardly been equalled inEnglish or in any northern tongue. It ranges from the simplest factsto the most complicated polemical issues and is always easily inaccord with its changing theme. So much so, that the criticsthemselves have not known whether to admire more the spiritual logicor the literary art of the writer and self-confessor. We may take, astwo instances of Newman's power, the delightful account in Part III.of his childhood and the first growth of his religious belief; andthe remarkable opening to Part IV., where he uses the figure of thedeath-bed with that finer reality which is born of the creativecommunion of thought and word in a poet's brain. Something of thispower was felt, it is clear, in his sermons at Oxford. Dr. Barrydescribes the effect that Newman made at the time of h