The American scholar Sheldon Rothblatt* unravelled the subtlety of the qualification. The scholar or scientist, wrote Newman, should be ‘free, independent, unshackled in his movements’, untroubled by any threat that he was going too far or causing a scandal. But then no one surely could argue that a scientist would be shackled if he accepted that he would not use his science to contradict the dogmas of faith. Nor would such a scientist be unaware that among his students were those with immature minds; and he would naturally avoid scandal at all costs. The cultivation of the intellect is not enough. Without religion it is but a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. The filthiest Catholic beggar woman, if she be chaste and receives the sacraments, has a better chance of reaching heaven than the most upright gentleman if all he has to exhibit at St Peter’s gate are his virtues. Knowledge has to be guided by religion, Did not this qualification torpedo the lovely vessel he had built?
Newman loved to needle. ‘It would be a gain,’ he once said, ‘to the country were it vastly more superstitious.’ G. M. Young noted that Newman’s mind was forged and tempered in the schools of Oxford where Aristotle’s logic was practised: a mind ‘always skimming along the verge of a logical catastrophe and always relying on his dialectical agility to save himself from falling: always exposing what seems to be an unguarded spot, and always revealing a new line of defence when the unwary assailant has reached it’. Kingsley was the unwary assailant and his denunciation of Newman provoked Newman’s Apologia, a masterpiece of spiritual autobiography. Yet, Young adds,
If the public, or the modern reader, said ‘Never mind all that: what we want to know is, when Dr Newman or one of his pupils tells us a thing, can we believe it as we should believe it if the old-fashioned parson said it?’ I am afraid that the upshot of the Apologia and its appendices is No. What is one to make of a man, especially of a preacher, whose every sentence must be put under a logical microscope if its full sense is to be revealed?
Today it is no longer possible to define a university in terms of a single idea. British universities differ vastly. Some still pursue original enquiry and, unlike Newman’s utopia, engage in fundamental research. Others contain departments for specialist learning and act as a service centre for vocational, professional and technological demands made on them by government. Whether it was wise to call them all universities is another matter. Nevertheless Newman’s ideal was not all that far from the distinguished liberal arts colleges in America, and some new universities in Britain tried to set up separate colleges within the campus. For many years Newman’s Idea was cited as the justification of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges and of the special status of Oxbridge as distinct from other universities. To this day Oxford and Cambridge colleges scarcely doubt that, from whatever class their students come, they exist to educate Newman’s elite.
‘Credo in Newmanum’ was not an idle joke. His magnetism lasted long after he disappeared from Oxford. He haunted those who knew him in their dreams. His disciple W. G. Ward, who in turn had to resign from his lectureships at Balliol and then was degraded to the status of undergraduate for publishing The Ideal of a Christian Church, dreamt that he was talking to a veiled lady and telling her that her voice fascinated him as Newman’s once had done. ‘I am John Henry Newman,’ she said, throwing back her veil. Another dreamt he was travelling in a first-class carriage and talking to an elderly clergyman whom he suddenly recognised as Newman and who said to him in a tone of surpassing sweetness, ‘Will you not come and join me in my third-class carriage?’
Newman’s charisma was unmatched. As knowledge became more specialised and Oxford and Cambridge grew larger, no don could hope to appeal to the whole university as Newman was able to do. Some thought Ruskin might do so; and T. H. Green, who appeared as Mr Gray in Mrs Humphry Ward’s novel Robert Elsmere, intrigued so many students that Jowett feared he was indoctrinating them. But neither of them rivalled Newman. Although brilliant lecturers over the years bewitched their audience few could expect many students from faculties other than their own to attend. Scientists often regarded the head of the lab, ‘the prof’, with awe and affection; but no mass audience of undergraduates hung on the utterances of Rutherford or Florey. To see charisma at work in the twentieth century you had to go to a smaller institution such as the London School of Economics. There Laski* exerted a pervasive influence among generations of students, particularly those from India; though perhaps the truer charismatic figure was R. H. Tawney, the famous socialist historian, recognised by colleagues and students alike as something of a saint. Tawney held out hopes of a better world to come, and he possessed a quality that impressed all who met him: purity of heart. The Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore possessed this quality and so, in a fierce, uncompromising way, did Wittgenstein. But though everyone knows of Moore’s influence on Bloomsbury, the numbers these Cambridge philosophers spoke to, immured as they were in a tiny faculty that spoke to none other, were sparse. At Oxford it was different. Philosophy was integral to Greats (the second part of the degree in classics) and in Modern Greats (the degree in philosophy, politics and economics). In the midcentury Ryle, Ayer and Austin, the Robespierre of linguistic philosophy, held audiences agog. But no one thought of comparing any of them to Newman.
Perhaps the don in recent years who reminds one of Newman was F. R. Leavis in Cambridge. Leavis used some of Newman’s tactics to create a following. Like Newman he was proud to be both persecutor and persecuted. He accused his colleagues in the faculty of English of betraying the true principles of literary criticism, insinuated they were dullards or featherweights, and was aggrieved when those who were in fact excellent critics, but were not crusaders, were promoted and he was not. He was more successful than Newman in persuading a wider public that he had been ill-treated and embodied the true ethos of Cambridge. Each number of Scrutiny which he edited was a ‘Tract for the Times’. That he was an outstanding literary critic was beyond question. What is more he declared that criticism, not philosophy (let alone theology), was to be queen of the sciences. Leavis claimed to reveal not just the meaning of literature but the meaning of life. He told the young which values to praise and which to denounce and who, present as well as past, was to be despised.
That was why his disciples were as ardent as Newman’s. They admired his austerity and his unremitting seriousness. They were fortified when he toppled poets and novelists of long-established reputations – why waste time on them, he declared, when those whose vision of life was supremely important beckoned? Writing about Newman, Owen Chadwick* judged that the Oxford students flocked to hear him because he was a revolutionary. They admired him precisely because he enraged the heads of houses, the proctors, the tutors and other symbols of authority in the university. Leavis, too, made himself an outcast, embattled, friendly and helpful to those who accepted him and sat at his feet and correspondingly hostile to those who did not accept that there is in the end only one way to live and only a handful of great poets and novelists who teach one how to do so.
To regard Newman solely as a don would do him monstrous injustice. Newman changed the face of the Church of England. The Oxford Movement brought back the mystery of the sacraments, and the beauty of worship. He understood the romance of Oxford, the dignity of its buildings, its gardens and the flowers in them, whose genius loci cast a spell of lasting loyalty over its alumni. The university ceased to be merely a corporate body with endowments and privileges. It became, as Sheldon Rothblatt puts it, ‘a thrilling emotion-laden higher order conception of higher education’, and the colleges centres of aristocratic culture linked to certain schools, grammar as well as public schools, which fed them with pupils. Newman did not go quite as far as Pusey, who asserted that it was no part of a university to advance science, or make discoveries ‘or produce works in Medicine, Jurisprudence or even Theology’: though he agreed with Pusey that a university existed to ‘form minds religiously, morally, intellectually, which shall discharge aright whatever duties God, in his Providence, shall appoint to them’. Newman considered the university’s role was to teach