In the previous posting on this subject, we found that the
Reverend Charles Kingsley, who had accused John Henry Newman in print of being
a liar, actually admitted in the course of preparing his final blast at Newman that
his original accusation was false.
Despite that, Kingsley informed a friend of his that he was going to
continue making new accusations until he had taken revenge on Newman for some
undisclosed transgression Newman had allegedly committed against Kingsley
twenty years before.
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| Pope Leo XIII |
What makes the situation even more peculiar, not to say
bizarre, is the fact that James Anthony Froude, the author of the book Kingsley had reviewed when he
made his gratuitous attack on Newman, was actually acquainted
with Newman. Froude was far from
exhibiting the kind of hostility toward Newman that Kingsley did, who had never
met him.
To confuse the picture even more, to the end of his life,
the anti-Catholic and anti-Irish Froude was something of an “Irish atheist” —
someone who goes about praying to God wishing he could believe in God. Soon after Pope Leo XIII named Newman a
cardinal, for example, Froude composed a long and very touching letter to the
Duke of Norfolk asking permission to come to “the Little Oratory” to hear
Newman preach. As he wrote, “Since I
last heard that musical voice, my faith is all but shattered. Perhaps if I might hear him again I would at
least awaken in me some echoes of those old days.” (Ibid., 315-316.) Despite
this, Froude never did anything to realize the hope over which he sighed and
lamented.
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| James Anthony Froude |
The plot thickens still further when we discover that Kingsley’s
and Froude’s wives were sisters; Kingsley’s review of Froude’s book takes on
the character of a favor for an in-law — a good review is, after all, money in
the bank. Was the comment about Newman
originally intended as nothing more than a humorous dig at a connection who,
while professing a loathing for everything Catholic, still claimed to admire
Newman and hold him in affection?
Were that the case, Kingsley might have been taken completely
by surprise and deeply offended by Newman’s reaction to his offhand comment,
for he (Kingsley) might genuinely have meant it as nothing more than a way of
twitting Froude. Kingsley might have
done the same sort of thing many people today attempt to dismiss as “just
kidding” when they give particularly egregious offense and are themselves outraged
at others’ inability to “take a joke” when they get caught at such stunts. He might initially not even have considered
that anything he said was offensive in any way to Catholics in general or
Newman in particular.
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| Charles Kingsley |
Kingsley was, after all, accounted a very kindly man . . .
if rather thoughtless and impulsive. As Philip
Hughes noted of Kingsley in his introduction to the Doubleday edition of
Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua,
Friends who knew him well have left the picture of a man who
“had a courteous deference to the opinions of the most insignificant person; .
. never superficial . . . (in his
conversation) and always ready to admit when he did not know; . . artistic and
impulsive . .”, with senses “acute to an almost painful degree”. He was “restless and excitable”, a man to
whom “constant movement was a relief”, and despite his intense self-control,
afflicted with “a certain impatience of trifles, an inaccuracy about details, a
haste in drawing conclusions . . . a forgetfulness of . . . words lightly
spoken or written”. It is also said that
he was a man of “impulsive and almost reckless generosity and fear of giving
pain”. (Philip Hughes, “Introduction,” John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita
Sua. New York: Doubleday and Co.,
1956, 26.)
Was it literary jealousy, as some Newman scholars have
suggested? It is certainly
possible. Kingsley’s Hypatia, or, New Foes with an Old Face
(1853) was considered one of his best novels, despite — or maybe because of —
its racism, bigotry, and anti-Catholicism.
Its highly fictionalized account of the murder by Christian monks of
Hypatia, a Neoplatonic pagan philosopher of the late fourth and early fifth
century, is told through the story of Philammon, a monk, who goes to Alexandria
and becomes embroiled in the religious and political controversies of the
fourth century.
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| Nicolas Cardinal Wiseman |
The real Hypatia was killed by a mob because she, a pagan,
was accused of preventing a reconciliation between rival Christian leaders;
Alexandrians were notorious in the ancient world for rioting about anything and
everything, religion being just one more excuse. One particularly violent outbreak was allegedly
occasioned by a quarrel over a sandal.
In any event, one of Newman’s first publications was The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833),
which established him as a scholar of the first rank and an authority on early
Christianity. The book’s objectivity was
such that, even though Newman was anti-Catholic when he wrote it, it needed
almost no revision when he republished it following his conversion to
Catholicism. The removal of one or two offensive
sentences sufficed.
That was bad enough to someone with Kingsley’s ego, but
Newman also published two novels, the second of which, Callista: A Tale of the Third Century, was published in 1855,
although it had been written several years earlier. Newman dusted it off and published it at the
behest of Nicolas Cardinal Wiseman as part of a projected series of novels
presenting the Catholic view of Church history.
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| Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
Wiseman’s own Fabiola,
or, The Church of the Catacombs, had come out in 1854, with the idea of
countering such productions as those of Kingsley and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), that enjoyed a virtual monopoly on
the Early Christian Romance genre, although in many cases taking extreme
liberties with the facts. Bulwer-Lytton,
by the way, is best remembered today for the opening line of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford, “It was a dark and stormy
night.”
Wiseman’s novel was patently the work of a talented
amateur and, despite the usual amateur’s mistakes (e.g., slipping briefly into pedantic lecturing, signaling plot
twists intended as surprising revelations well in advance, changing the point
of view, breaking through the “screen of print,” and so on) is competently
written and has held its own down to the present day, with a number of screen
adaptations being made. It did not
really compete with the slick productions of Kingsley, however, whose publication
of Hypatia was obviously the occasion
for the Catholic literary counterattack — a project that, like many that
anticipated Wiseman’s abortive vision of a Catholic renaissance in England
(Newman’s prediction of a “Second Spring”), was never completed.
As might be expected, Callista,
Newman’s entry into the field of Early Christian Romance, was a much more
literary production, although in common with Wiseman’s Fabiola was fictionalized history instead of Froude’s and
Kingsley’s fictional history. Newman’s
novel was obviously better written than Kingsley’s and did not take any
liberties with historical fact; strict accuracy being something Wiseman
absolutely insisted on. In consequence,
the opinion of some scholars today is that Kingsley was motivated by
professional jealousy of Newman since Newman had entered the lists of religious
novelists and beaten Kingsley on his own ground.
Even that, however, seems a weak justification for Kingsley’s
reaction — and is repudiated by Kingsley’s own words that he was taking revenge
for something (unspecified) that happened not a decade previously, but twenty
years before. Professional jealousy
might very well have contributed to Kingsley’s outrage (and probably did) but
is not sufficient to explain it.
So, what might be sufficient to explain Kingsley’s odd
behavior?
#30#
