he knew,' and a year or two later he is styled by Blanco White my Oxford Plato.' He is invited to join the Athenæum at 23, is requested as a Deacon to preach a University sermon, and at 27 is appointed Preacher at Whitehall. But we need not pursue the story: enough has been said to show that thus early he was known as a coming man.

Indeed it would be hard to praise too highly his splendid talents. His intellect was of the first order, strong and penetrating, remorselessly clear and cool; and in youth he exercised it on many fields. He took, as far as a man may, all forms of learning as his province. He was interested not only in religion, but in philosophy, mathematics, politics, history, science: even abstruse subjects like anatomy and mineralogy were not altogether unknown to him. His mind was as wide as it was powerful.

But he excelled also on the side of feeling and imagination. His emotions were strong and warm. He loved poetry and was no mean poet himself; perhaps he might have been a great one, had he devoted himself to it. His prose style is one of the finest in the language, possessing a singular force and richness. He was devoted to music, sometimes crying out with the pleasure of it; and as a player on the violin he believed that with regular practice he could do what he pleased.' The beauties of nature were an unfailing source of delight; he loved the trees and the green fields, the streams and hills, the birds and clouds and sunshine, and regretted the loss of these glories at Oxford. He could not find adjectives to describe the 'exquisite beauty' of the Isle of Wight, and he sent home glowing accounts of the wonders of his Mediterranean tour.

But if Newman was a thinker and an artist, he was before all a man. He was no Kant, dwelling apart with his philosophy; he was no Wordsworth, content to commune with nature. He might have taken as his motto the old saying in Terence, that he accounted nothing that is human as alien to him. He had very warm affections and sympathies. The death of those whom he loved wrung from him bitter tears and sometimes broke him down. And his friends repaid him with a passionate attachment. W. G. Ward, who was not very Vol. 246.-No. 487.

F

intimate, used to say that his heart began to beat when he heard Newman's step on the staircase, and Church's eyes in old age would light up at the mention of his name. And with this sympathy went a remarkable insight into the human heart. Even as a small boy, his sister had said that he always understood everything,' and this secret he never lost. This it was that made no small part of the power of his Oxford sermons: his hearers felt that he was opening to them their very hearts, and that he knew them better than they knew themselves.

Now to these gifts, great as they were, was added yet another, as the crown and coping-stone of the whole. Newman had the power of leadership and an extraordinary personal ascendancy over others. It was not merely that he was abler than other men, but he had the natural force of character, the bold and fearless temper, the strong will, the power of awaking loyalty and inspiring fear, which mark the born ruler. He was a leader in the sense that St Paul or Bonaparte or Wesley were leaders; responsibility was his natural element; he was eminently fitted to stand alone and to create good out of evil. Froude's striking words have already been quoted, and the facts themselves speak the same way. Late in life Newman stated that he had 'generally got on well with juniors, but not with superiors' a frequent sign of the commanding mind. At school, though he plays no games, he comes to the front: he is often chosen as arbitrator in disputes; he starts and directs magazines and is possessed by a fever for writing; he composes a mock drama and an opera; he founds clubs and societies, of which he is the leading spirit. Doubtless it was all very boyish and raw, but fit shows the bent of his mind. When he has grown to manhood and is becoming more and more conscious of his great powers, this capacity of leadership is more manifest. At about the age of 27 he begins to become, as Ward says, 'a spiritual father' to many; and the feeling that he has a mission to fulfil takes possession of his mind. He cries for an Athanasius or Basil to rise up and meet the evils of the time, and no doubt

* Ward, 1, 43.

Ward is right in suggesting that at the back of his mind was the idea that he might play the part himself. Every one knows how in Sicily in 1833 he burst into tears and sat on his bed repeating the words, 'I have a work to do in England.' When the Movement commences, he quickly takes the lead and out-distances the others. He was, says Shairp, the centre and soul'; the rest, says Froude, in comparison were 'ciphers. 'Mr Newman,' writes Dean Church, had drawn ahead and was now in front. Unsought for, the position of leader came to him, because it must come. . . . It was the force of genius, and a lofty character and the statesman's eye, taking in and judging accurately the whole of a complicated scene, which conferred the gifts and imposed inevitably and without dispute the obligations and responsibilities of leadership.' 'Was there ever,' said W. G. Ward, 'anything in history like Newman's power over us at Oxford?' and his son, Newman's biographer, speaks of his position of 'kingship' and of the reputation as a prophet which he had acquired. Affectionate and in some ways easygoing as Newman was to his followers, there was no question whose was the master mind. He was (writes Church) exacting and even austere'; he could scold them and put them in fear; sometimes they dared not approach him; they regarded him with 'awe' and 'veneration.' Pattison, long after he had broken with him and when he was himself a distinguished man, meeting him by chance on the train, was in terror of his disapproval, and on his death-bed still addressed him as 'My Master.' In the direction of the Movement, Newman stands in the middle of things; he writes instructions, he claims that he sees everything that is done, said, or written. Even when he begins to waver and to be troubled by the thought of secession, he knows that the key to the situation lies in himself. If I can trust myself,' he wrote, 'I can trust others.' † And when the blow fell, it was described as an 'overpowering event,' or a 'thunderbolt,' or, in his own words, as an earthquake.' The notion which Newman more and more fostered, that he was not cut out for a leader and that the first place

6

* Ward, 1, 47, 51, 61.

†A. Mozley, II, 319.

fell to him at Oxford without any special fitness or merits of his own, is the opposite of the truth. A man does not, amid the acclamation of all, spring into the captain's place unless he can play the part. No doubt, as Ward says, he 'shrank from recognising the greatness of his position,' but that does not alter the fact. My pyov,' wrote Newman in 1845, 'seems to be the direction or oversight of young men,' and he deliberately set himself to mould the youths under his charge and to spread 'Apostolical' principles. Though he was no vulgar or reckless proselytiser, yet, as Thomas Mozley says, 'it never was possible to be even a quarter of an hour in his company without a man feeling himself incited to take an onward step.' He pursued his aim with 'fierceness and with a 'supreme confidence' (the phrases are his own), rejoicing in the discomfiture of his adversaries. 'One gains nothing by sitting still. I am sure the Apostles did not sit still'; 'Men are made of glass; the sooner we break them and get it over, the better'; 'Let those laugh who win; I have gained my point'; 'We must let no one control us'; 'We shall be glad of your co-operation; but if not, we will march past you': such is his tone in the early days. In 1843 a female disciple, hearing that her master was weakening, complained bitterly that he had no right to go away and leave unshepherded those whom he had led and taught; for 'he has formed their minds, not accidentally; he has sought to do so, and he has succeeded.'†

But strong powers like these need sweep and room. A man cannot wield a broadsword when pent in a corner, and a world-wide mind demands a world-wide stage. This, however, was what Newman never obtained. His bold originality and fearless independence never rose to their full height, because his manner of life and thought was too narrow for his true nature.

Let us consider first his outward circumstances. After a few years at school, where he carried everything before him, he entered at the early age of 16 a society which was to be his home for nearly thirty years. Here he lived the academic life, apart from the world; he mixed mainly with intellectual and cultured persons,

* 1, 279.

with scholars and dons and clerics; he spent many long hours alone in his room, reading and writing. He formed a circle of his own and soon began to make a reputation; and before he was 35 this grew into a position of kingship, to which few parallels can be found. Such a life is never without its dangers. The intellectual man, living in a world of his own, shielded from direct contact with the rougher things of life, philosophising in his chamber or experimenting in his laboratory, constantly poring over learned books, having his boots cleaned, his meals cooked, his rubbish removed by other hands, may easily get out of touch with the common herd; he may forget that the needs of the sweep and the miner and the washerwoman have to be satisfied as well as of the professor. And be it remembered that the Oxford of those days was far narrower than it is now: it was conservative and passionately interested in the past, it suspected scientific studies, it was clerical, it was celibate and almost entirely excluded women, it was very much in a groove. To a man of Newman's warm heart and wide powers this atmosphere must have been in some ways profoundly unsatisfying; indeed there are signs that at heart he desired something wider. Much as he loved Oxford, yet he speaks of it as a duty to have no plans' beyond a college life,* and describes himself in a poem as a 'prisoner' in his Oxford 'cell.' A friend wrote in 1828, You want an outlet for your mind and heart, which are running over where there is no call for their riches. Tell the world at large what you feel and think.' Warm affections and vigorous energies need constant exercise on the widest possible scale; to shut them up is fatal. It may safely be said that if Newman had been alive to the danger, if he could have shaken himself free from Oxford and gone out into the great world, sharing the joys and sorrows of plain folk, arousing his spontaneous love and pity and indignation at first hand, rubbing shoulders on equal terms with men in market-places, preaching his Christian message direct to the labourer and the mill-hand, facing perhaps angry mobs, this direct contact with the hard and rough world would have left little room for the scruples and hesitations and