[In the following essay, Hill comments on the artistic aims and successes of Newman's Loss and Gain and Callista.]

‘Newman a novelist?’ One can imagine the chorus of disbelief that at one time would have greeted such a claim. Literary critics find it hard to accept that one whose priorities were ordered so differently from their own could treat the genre seriously, while churchmen have naturally sought his larger achievement elsewhere. In the cultural divide which Newman himself predicted in The Idea of a University, a unified response to his varied achievements as a writer becomes increasingly difficult. And yet the originality of both his novels, and his sustained engagement with the form over many years, are now surely less in doubt. In his approach to the novel, as in so much else, he was ahead of his time.

Newman was destined by outlook and circumstances to take up the form just as the parameters of nineteenth-century realism were beginning to emerge. His openness to the passing shows of the world was indeed part of his empiricist inheritance, and it showed itself as soon as he began to respond to his Oxford surroundings. He even had ambitions as a periodical commentator on University life, in the manner of the Spectator. Long before he thought of writing a novel himself, his letters reveal the novelist's penchant for graphic and humorous description and a sense of style that moved with ease between the colloquial and the elevated; and he was naturally attracted to the rising new form which had come of age in Scott's historical romances.

But as a poet himself, and a child of the Romantic movement, Newman was inspired most of all by other poets. As he wrote in his early essay on Aristotle's Poetics,

With Christians, a poetical view of things is a duty,—we are bid to colour all things with hues of faith, to see a Divine meaning in every event, and a superhuman tendency.¹

His imagination was haunted by a sense of mystery and romance. Like Aeschylus, he marked the ironies in human affairs and the inscrutable purposes of Providence, and he was captivated by the metrical tales of his own day, Southey's in particular. Their quests and journeys, their relentless movement through time, and their vision of the life of dedication and faith, seemed to offer a foretaste of his own spiritual pilgrimage. His first narrative St. Bartholomew's Eve, a collaboration with J. W. Bowden, was predictably a verse tale after Sir Walter Scott. But he was quick to assimilate other Romantic influences as well, when they echoed his own intuitions, and Wordsworth and Byron in their separate ways urged the need for individual decision and commitment in the face of ‘the unimaginable touch of Time’.

All these influences mingled with the Poetics, his beloved Terence, and Shakespeare's guiding presence within the scenic art of Jane Austen and Scott, to shape Newman's sense of dramatic narrative. Together, they suggested a novel more suited to the ideals of the younger generation than the fashionable society fiction of the day, and a more dynamic role for the hero. Novel-reading, he implied in an early Tractarian sermon,² must not become a form of self-indulgence or escapism, which had no practical effect on behaviour. The novelist must confront the real challenges of life and carry the reader with him. Autobiography and fiction were now to come together within the purlieu of the realistic novel, where the aspirations of the individual are tested in the rough and tumble of the real world. The first hint of this in Newman occurs perhaps in his confessional letters from the Mediterranean in 1833, which blend poetic self-searching and vivid documentary within a single journey of discovery through pagan and Christian landscapes; and had he completed his first novel in 1835, as planned,³ he would have shown how far he had preceded Dickens and Thackeray along the path of early Victorian realism. But the moment for a popular treatment of the Anglican via media, either in a ‘period’ or a university setting, passed him by: and fortunately, as it turned out. The drama of his own life had to develop fully towards crisis and resolution before it could be transformed through a ‘representative’ hero into a fictional paradigm of the age. He had to know himself first.

But in the meantime the potential of the novel could be explored in the work of others. Jane Austen, hitherto a firm favourite in the family circle, began to pall. ‘There is a want of body to the story of Emma,’ he complained. ‘The action is frittered away in over-little things.’ She also lacked ‘romance’ and idealism. ‘What vile creatures her parsons are!’⁴ Scott's plots (he thought) had not always been properly developed, and now that novelist's neutral stance in matters of belief was also coming under scrutiny. Newman recognized greater commitment among his followers, praising I promessi sposi for its truth to ‘Nature’ and ‘depth of religious feeling’.⁵ As Bagehot noted later on, the passion for intellectual and religious enquiry was one of the strongest impulses of this period, and could not be omitted from any true delineation of it.⁶

Newman also made his début as a fiction reviewer for the British Critic with a devastating exposé of Geraldine: A Tale of Conscience,⁷ one of those ‘silly novels by lady novelists’ which George Eliot was to ridicule in the Westminster Review. It was ‘an attempt at a tale which is left unravelled.’ There was ‘little incident and no ending’, and the heroine's psychology and her final submission to Rome were equally improbable:

Surely there is something most unbecoming in youth and beauty and fashion and the rest of it being represented as mounted aloft on a library stair, and labouring under the weight of books which she was to make subservient to the settlement of her religious sentiments. … And there is something quite ludicrous in fancying that truth could be attained by such child's play.

Religious certitude, he implies, develops in testing situations, not libraries, and (a recurrent theme) the human mind must have elbow-room to grow by natural stages towards it:

The human intellect needs some play, as it may be called, and Providence has mercifully consulted this peculiarity, whether we call it a weakness or not. He has given us an innocent outlet for its busy and restless activity. We might have been told peremptorily not to let our minds expatiate at all beyond what is positively revealed; but we are not so told; and the consequence of forbidding what God has not forbidden, will be like stopping a safety-valve. The mind obstructed in its lawful avenues of thought, will be under the strong temptation to employ itself on subjects where thought is precluded, the sacred and fundamental articles of faith. The irritation of the reason being denied its natural course, will strike inwards, and fall upon vital parts …

The argument was not without its hidden ironies, as Newman strove to defend the Anglican via media. He could not have foreseen that, some ten years later, he would have to justify his own conversion in Loss and Gain. But he was already suggesting how such a venture of faith might be made more credible.

But above all at this time, he was trying to promote novel-writing within his own circle. ‘It is so very desirable’, he told his sister Jemima, ‘that you should, if possible, all pull together.’⁸ Their tales could undermine the efforts of Evangelicals like Mrs Sherwood by showing principles in action and realized in credible characters, thereby instilling a higher ethos altogether. Under his direction, Maria Giberne's Little Mary was abridged and reshaped, and published by Rivington's in 1841 with a Preface by Newman himself.⁹ According to his sister Harriett, the story had been ‘transformed’ by his ‘magic touch’. Harriett's own talents were also given every encouragement, and Newman's influence can be traced in The Fairy Bower and more markedly in Louisa, an imitation of Jane Austen and her only adult novel. True to his Aristotelian principles, Newman was quick to note weaknesses of structure or development: ‘I have been reading your Louisa with great satisfaction. The only fault is in its shortness, else it would be perfect … it does not fill the eye of the mind or the just expectation of the reader.’¹⁰ Did it go far enough in developing towards an appropriate denouement that would bring out the significance of the whole?

Any further engagement with the novel, however, ended with Newman's retirement to Littlemore and the weakening of family ties as his conversion became more likely. Until that event, he had no secure viewpoint; and afterwards he had to await a fresh opportunity for writing. Only after his own discovery of the truth and reversal of fortune (in the worldly sense, at any rate) could he bring a truly human response to issues that might otherwise have seemed sectarian or remote, and strike the final balance of ‘loss and gain’. The phrase itself recurs throughout his writings, but he may have been reminded of it by lines from Wordsworth's Excursion included in his sister-in-law Anne's anthology Days and Seasons; Or Church Poetry for the Year, and published just before his conversion:

O blest seclusion! when the mind admits
The law of duty; and can therefore move
Through each vicissitude of loss and gain,
Linked in entire complacence with her choice(11)

Meanwhile, new literary stars were in the ascendant (the family had been ‘ensnared’ by Nicholas Nickleby), and there were fresh sources of inspiration to reckon with. Dickens had already shown in Pickwick how Newman might turn his own satirical bent against Evangelical targets, and now, as his hopes for the High-Church movement were finally extinguished, its faddishness and gentility were being exposed by Thackeray in the pages of Punch.¹²The Book of Snobs, published in volume form (1848) the same year as Loss and Gain, gave more earnest attention to the same issues, and acclimatized a new term in the English language. As Newman began at last to write his first novel in Rome in the summer of 1847, when the early parts of Dombey and Vanity Fair were appearing in London, he instinctively aligned himself with those who were exploring new settings and character-types and extending the linguistic range and expressiveness of fiction. The English novel was not exempt from the far-reaching changes that were overtaking every facet of national life in the age of the Railway Kings and the Chartists.

A general appreciation of Loss and Gain and its Tractarian background has been given elsewhere,¹³ and need not be repeated here. But the realism of its idiom and setting, and the complex treatment of the hero, deserve more extended discussion. Newman was (it will be recalled) ‘answering’ an anonymous work entitled From Oxford to Rome: And how it fared with some who lately made the Journey, which accused the Roman Catholic converts of 1845, Newman included, of backsliding. He confronted the challenge, not by detailed refutation, but by writing a much more lively and entertaining novel which showed how an individual mind of the time might arrive at religious certitude in the trials and tribulations of university life. He substituted a dramatic picture for abstract argument.

The success of his riposte turned on showing that the converts were not bizarre adherents of some foreign creed, but more truly ‘English’ than their opponents and with better credentials to speak as Oxford men. His ‘answer’, he claimed in the Advertisement to the sixth edition (1874), was ‘drawn up with a stricter regard to truth and probability and with at least some personal knowledge of Oxford’. It was also couched in real English. The turgidities of From Oxford to Rome, which had been overlooked by Gladstone in an unguarded moment,¹⁴ were an affront to Newman's sense of style and could not be ignored:

Especially was he desirous of dissipating the fog of pomposity and solemn pretence, which the writer had thrown around the personages introduced into it, by showing, as in a specimen, that those who were smitten with love of the Catholic Church, were nevertheless as able to write common-sense prose as other men.

‘Common-sense prose’ is perhaps an inadequate description for the resourcefulness and gusto of Newman's colloquial style, but it does at least emphasize the down-to-earth realism of the whole exercise.

In his own novel, the Oxford setting is as up to date and factually accurate as the extension of the railway from Didcot can make it. The characters speak in the idiom of their time and place, their discussions are natural and uncontrived, and the voice of the narrator, unquestionably an Oxford man himself is flexible enough to alternate the light-hearted with the serious and allow for the free play of humour and irony over the developing action. Writing from a distance, Newman could look back on Oxford as a complete world in itself. Its sights and sounds flowed back to him like echoes from a past which he had apparently put behind him for ever.

Loss and Gain creates an idyllic picture of unreformed Oxford from the inside—its landscapes and lifestyle, and the ‘feel’ of the place at different seasons of the year, matching the hero's mood in the manner of Jane Eyre (1847)—though Newman cannot have seen Charlotte Brontë's novel before he began writing his own. The university was largely unexplored territory for the novelist,¹⁵ as the ‘documentary’ digressions on staircase life and Oxford bores (to take just two examples) suggest. But it is a refined picture. There is no sign of the cruder side of university life hinted at in ‘Cuthbert Bede's’ Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green (1853) or Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown at Oxford (1861). Newman uses the private language and slang of the place to create the sense of a very special community with its own customs, institutions, and ethos. Normal Oxford terminology apart (freshmen, bachelors, masters, dons, scouts, bulldogs, the Schools, the House, the Clarendon, the Long, the Latin Verse, etc.), he deliberately uses unfamiliar colloquialisms to define his speakers and their milieu. Though largely unrecorded in the Oxford English Dictionary (not to mention Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang), Loss and Gain seems to mark the first appearance in fiction—and in some cases, anywhere—of a whole range of Oxford words, including the following:

pp. 8, 124: lecture (audience or class attending a lecture), cf. in lecture, p. 26, and an Article lecture (a class on the Thirty-Nine Articles), pp. 129, 138, 219, 232, 252;

p. 8: a beaver walk (a walk in mufti or non-academic dress), cf. in beaver, p. 89;

pp. 9, 100: the pokers (bedels who carry the mace before the Vice-Chancellor;

p. 18: the Pro (the Pro-proctor);

p. 28: lionesses (lady visitors);

pp. 33, 76: plucked in the schools (failed in the examination schools);

p. 67: shutting his oak (outer door of college rooms);

p. 73: crammed in Greek plays;

p. 76: smalls (Responsions or ‘Littlego’);

p. 79: dinner paper (menu);

p. 115: battel paper (account);

p. 230: a rowing set;

p. 235: Mr. Vice (Vice-Principal, normally used of the Vice-Chancellor);

p. 355: aeger dinners (dinners delivered to rooms of sick members of college).

Newman makes one or two concessions to the uninitiated by way of explanation (‘“I was kept here by these confounded smalls.” “Your Responsiones”, answered the tutor in a tone of rebuke.’); otherwise, he deliberately exploits the ‘in’ language of Oxford to establish the reality of his picture and his own authority as a commentator on it. Occasionally he risks obscurity. Or is he addressing his work primarily to his old Tractarian friends?

To be an occasional writer like Newman meant responding to the world of contingent events or ‘facts’, intervening at a particular moment in the process and detecting the providential purpose behind the veil of sense. His portrait of Oxford had to be true to the ever-changing details of his own life there.

This is a place of fashions [says Mr Malcolm]; there have been many fashions in my time. The greater part of the residents, that is, the boys, change once in three years; the fellows and tutors, perhaps in half a dozen; and every generation has its own fashion. There is no principle of stability in Oxford

(p. 30)

If Newman did not stick to the exact particulars of place and time, would not his accuracy in more fundamental matters be called into question? Perhaps the most extraordinary example of this in the novel is the casual (and unexplained) reference (p. 87) to the Dio-astro-doxon and its exhibition near Folly Bridge. Unknown as it is to the Oxford English Dictionary, this turns out to be a giant illuminated orrery which an itinerant lecturer named Lloyd regularly demonstrated in Oxford during Newman's undergraduate years at Oriel by way of illustration to a course of lectures on astronomy, the mysterious processes of which had always fascinated Newman. The apparatus was almost as ephemeral as the form of entertainment it provided and was soon forgotten, but not before it had inspired a poem on ‘The Terrestrial Year: On her Progress thro’ the Signs of the Zodiac’, by Scott's friend Anna Seward, the ‘Swan of Lichfield’, and made this fleeting appearance in Loss and Gain.¹⁶ Why did Newman dwell on such bizarre curiosities, if it was not that his fiction had to be continuous with real life in all its richness of specification?

Within this authentic Oxford setting, the dialogues dramatize the workings of Charles Reding's mind as step by step he pursues his quest for certainty, and finds his destined home in the Catholic Church. ‘It is impossible to stop the growth of the mind.’ The other characters, comic and serious, represent the various options open to him, but are not intended to be living portraits of contemporaries. All are themselves developing, in different directions. ‘We are in the time of life to change’, says Charles, ‘we have changed already, and shall change still.’ No one has the monopoly of wisdom, and the truth emerges through different speakers who press the argument forward in an ideal tutorial (or Platonic) situation. Each has his own idiom and tone of voice. No reader could mistake Sheffield, a rationalist with a dislike of ‘fudge’ and ‘shams’, for Fairborn the Evangelical, or Bateman and White with their spate of ecclesiological jargon, or Vincent, the non-party man, a superb verbal performer in the Dickensian mould, who affects a trendy scientific vocabulary. Newman can mimic the tones of all of them, with devastating effect.

The tone of debate is remarkably relaxed and colloquial by the standards of contemporary controversy. It bristles with new words and up-to-date usages which are distributed between the narrator, the hero (who has by far the most), and the undergraduate characters. Only Willis, whose religious vocation takes him out of the world, has very few, and to his urgent voice is given the most elevated passage of rhetoric in the novel, the well-known panegyric on the Mass. The older generation, and dons like Carlton, the Keble-like exponent of the via media, and Campbell, the dependable Anglican rector who marries Charles's sister, speak more formally as befits their seniority. The unusual contemporaneity of Newman's language can be tested from the French and Italian translations of Loss and Gain, which appeared around 1855. Both translators were stumped by much of the university slang, and toned down many of the colloquialisms listed below, thereby losing their unique flavour. In some cases they miss Newman's meaning altogether.¹⁷

Only a full analysis of the text, and more research into the usages current at the time, could bring out the linguistic uniqueness of Loss and Gain. What follows is a random sample of words and usages which would deserve fuller investigation, some of them more or less current in the colloquial language of the time, others rare or unrecorded for so early a date:

p. 8: donnish. First recorded here, according to OED. Cf. donnishness in Newman's Letters (1835).

p. 8:‘regular prose and unreal’ (dull). Newman's usage, also in Letters (1840).

p. 9: ‘the most approved Oxford bandbox-cut of trimness’. Cf. Thackeray (1844), ‘spick and span bandbox churches’.

p. 9: ‘University dresses are great fudge’ (nonsense). Cf. p. 22, ‘fudge and humbug’, p. 416, fudge!

p. 10: ‘a pompous and up-and-down tone’. Also in Byron (1812).

pp. 16, 19, 163: viewy (holding views). First recorded here, but the context implies current Oxford usage.

p. 24: ungentlemanlikness. Newman's word, unrecorded elsewhere.

pp. 32, 219: a new broom (fig.). OED cites 1621, then Dickens, Little Dorrit (1855).

p. 35: ‘professed to be aesthetic’ (appreciating beauty). Earliest quotations in OED are Darwin (1871) and W. S. Gilbert (1880). The context here implies that the term was already current in Oxford.

p. 38: ‘who thought it a bore’. OED cites 1807 and Whately (1831).

p. 53: ‘a good kind-hearted old fogie’. Early 19th-cent. Scots usage, before Thackeray, Book of Snobs (1848).

p. 53: ‘an awful evangelical’. Cf. p. 176, ‘their images are awful’, and p. 180, ‘affected me awfully’. Slang of the 1830s and 1840s, perhaps American in origin.

p. 59: ‘the Duke's a queer hand’. 19th-cent. colloquial.

p. 68: ‘straight macadamised roads’. OED cites 1827.

p. 72: philosophism. OED cites Coleridge (1799), Carlyle (1843), and Loss and Gain. Also in Newman's Letters (1829).

p. 76: ‘The conversation, or rather mono-polylogue, as some great performer calls it’. Term associated with the actor Charles Mathews, from 1824.

p. 77: ‘I am rather choice in my tea’ (fastidious). Obs. (e.g. Jeremy Taylor), or possibly Berks., dialect?

p. 79: ‘it is not my habitat out of term-time’. Scientific term, here (and in Newman's Letters) used more generally of ‘dwelling place’ and pre-dating OED reference to Lowell (1854).

p. 83: ‘Our great divines … were so racy’ (vigorous writers). OED cites Dryden, then Charlotte Brontë (1849), and Miss Mitford (1852).

p. 89: ‘Where did you find that get-off?’ Unrecorded as noun.

p. 93: ‘its low nunting table’ (ungainly). Northampton dialect, rare; appropriate for the Redings's Midland domicile. Did Newman hear the word at the Mozleys?

p. 97: ‘She calls a bonnet ‘a sweet’ one year’. Apparently unrecorded.

p. 97: which makes her ‘a perfect fright the next’. 19th-cent. colloquial, as in Don Juan.

p. 117: ‘a … nice-looking fellow’. OED cites Jane Austen (1807) and Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838).

p. 117: ‘What's the upshot? Obs. (16th-cent.), but colloquial from c. 1830. Also in Callista.

p. 118: ‘But the Catholic Church isn't St. Paul, I guess’. Americanism, cited as such from Byron and Scott onwards.

p. 125: a toss-up (an even chance). OED cites Malkin (1809) and Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (1844).

p. 163: ‘He gave us capital feeds’ (meals). Colloquial from c. 1830, originally used for horses.

p. 164: ‘the animus of party’. OED cites Thackeray (1840).

p. 170: ‘whose wife, what is called did for his lodgers’. First recorded here.

p. 171: ‘we were sporting … a great paradox’. Colloquial from late 18th cent.

p. 171: ‘I mean pretty much what he says’. OED cites Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford (1861).

p. 176: ‘he would make trial himself, and he has caught it’. OED cites Marryat (1835) and Mrs Gaskell (1848).

p. 180: ‘sugar should not be a substantive ingredient in tea but an adjective’. Unrecorded in this combination.

p. 183: ‘by the rail’. (railway). Cf. p. 362, ‘our rail’. OED cites Sydney Smith (1843).

p. 189: ‘some ultra-book or other’ (extreme). Unrecorded. Cf.

p. 278: Ultra-Protestants; a word of the 1840s.

p. 200: ‘a make-up for sin’ (compensation). Rare—first reference in OED is 1859.

p. 212: ‘some impudent non-protectionist’. Unrecorded. OED cites Protectionist, 1844.

p. 215: ‘the theology or no-theology of the day’. Unrecorded.

p. 225: ‘helpless and do-nothing’ (adj.). OED cites Washington Irving (1832) and Carlyle, Chartism (1839). Also in Newman's Letters.

p. 230: ‘a large proportion of snobs’. The new sense propagated by Thackeray in the 1840s in his papers in Punch, and in the Book of Snobs. Also in Callista.

p. 231: ‘a system of espionage’ (fig.). Rare.

p. 233: ‘a kill-or-cure remedy’. Unrecorded as adj. until Jowett (1875).

p. 240: jesuitries. OED cites Coleridge, and Carlyle, French Revolution (1837).

pp. 243, 252: to get up (learn). OED cites Dean Alford (1828).

p. 251: ‘You have no notion how strong the old Principal was’ (vehement).

p. 256: ‘my uncongeniality … with things as they are’. OED cites 1805, then Dickens, Dombey and Son (1847-8).

p. 261: ‘I've make a hash of it’ (fig.). Apparently Newman's own usage, as in his Letters (1833).

p. 271: ‘trotted out for the amusement of the ladies’. OED cites Lytton (1838), and Thackeray, Book of Snobs.

p. 305: ‘They are in a fix’ (tight corner). Americanism—OED cites Marryat (1839).

p. 308: an Anglo-Catholic. The noun here pre-dates Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849), the OED example. Also in Newman's Essays Critical and Historical (1840).

p. 308: ‘so positive, so knock-me-down’. OED cites 1760, then Loss and Gain.

p. 310: ‘determined to make a field-day of it’ (fig.). OED cites Thackeray, Book of Snobs.

p. 313: armistice (fig.). OED cites 1841 only.

p. 320: ‘to oh-oh it’ (cast doubt on). Apparently Hurrell Froude's usage (1833), here used by Willis.

p. 325: ‘one ought to be up to their dodges’. Colloquial in 1840s, e.g. Thackeray, Pendennis (1849). Also in Callista.

p. 329: ‘shaky, in your adherence to Romanism’ (unsettled). OED cites Lytton (1853).

p. 330: ‘he's a brick, a regular brick’. Originally, perhaps university slang: Steerforth's word in Dickens, David Copperfield (1849-50).

p. 335: untenableness. OED cites G. S. Faber (1833) and Lewes (1846).

p. 341: ‘I have exhausted it, I have drunk it out’. Obs., in Scott.

pp. 353, 403: ‘all-momentous errand’. Unrecorded.

p. 356: ‘He chose a bedroom … inducting himself into it’ (fig.). In Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1840).

p. 376: ‘a first class of the Great Western’ (carriage). OED cites 1846 for the adj.

p. 390: ‘we have given up Tongue’ (prophesying). Unrecorded—Irvingite or Pentecostalist usage?

p. 418: ‘You must have your hobby’ (hobby-horse). Obs., Scott's word, also in Callista and Letters (1863).

p. 426: ‘one vast instrument or Panharmonicon’ (mechanical musical instrument). OED cites Loss and Gain.

One final example will serve to emphasize Newman's idiosyncratic idiom. At the end of chapter 15 of part ii, the dialogue on the merits and shortcomings of Romanism is brought to an abrupt end by a remark of Bateman's, which (Newman says) ‘put a corona on the discussion’ for the rest of dinner (p. 281). What does he mean? Surely that Bateman put a stopper on the discussion, not a crown (whatever that might mean)? The Oxford English Dictionary is unhelpful; the translators make no sense of the passage, and the word presents an insoluble puzzle while it is spelt in Newman's way. On the assumption, however, that he meant coroner, an intriguing possibility is opened up at once; for according to Partridge, coroner was a slang term used around 1870 for ‘a heavy fall’, i.e. an abrupt end likely to lead to an inquest. Was Newman drawing here on a long-standing colloquialism that had never surfaced in the written language—misspelling the word, and confusing his readers, because he had always heard it and never seen it in print? The solution is attractive; but whatever the explanation, the fact remains that his penchant for racy language clearly led him into trouble on at least one occasion.

Newman's racy expression is matched by the psychological realism he brings to Charles Reding's mental life, and the wider ties of sympathy and duty which bind him to his family and friends. But this does not preclude some mystification at the expense of the reader.¹⁸ How could it be otherwise when Newman had occupied such a prominent place on the Oxford scene in propria persona?

Though he put a lot of himself into the psychological and emotional life of his hero, the novel is not really autobiographical. Reding is not Newman's alter ego, but a typical undergraduate of the younger generation and at a different stage of development from Newman in 1840. But Newman could hardly leave himself out altogether from a picture of university life that purported to be factually accurate; and he gets round the difficulty by adopting the persona of ‘Smith’, a shadowy clerical éminence ‘who never speaks decidedly in difficult questions’, and who is reputedly ‘a sceptic at bottom’. With such self-mockery Newman contrives to acknowledge the shakiness of his previous Anglican stance. As the novel progresses, ‘Smith's’ sermons at St Mary's become allegedly ‘injudicious’, a change of allegiance is on the cards, and after the wave of conversions in 1845, ‘Smith’ seems to drop out of the novel altogether.

But does he? When Reding joins the London train after his poignant farewell to Oxford, one of the most graphic and moving scenes in the novel, he falls in with a Roman Catholic priest, whose face seems vaguely familiar to him. Though he cannot identify his companion, the encounter is crucial in settling any remaining doubts he has about the true religion. Who is this mysterious stranger who makes such a powerful impression on Reding? He is carefully visualized, and bears a curious resemblance to Newman himself at this period, ‘passing or past the middle age’, worn-looking, and easily taken for a Frenchman (which Reding mistakes him for at first): clearly a convert who has sadly put Oxford behind him and is anxious for news of his Alma Mater. Is this not perhaps intended to be a self-portrait of Newman himself, alias Smith, now home and dry in the Catholic Church and suffering for his convictions? If Reding embodies vital aspects of Newman's former Anglican self, the stranger surely represents his present and future role as a newly ordained Catholic priest, soon to return as an alien in his own land and only to enjoy the distant spires of Oxford from the railway line (as he was poignantly to recall in retrospect in the Apologia). Whatever Newman meant by this enigmatic culmination however, he surely succeeds in combining mirror-images of past and future, loss and gain, in a final unflinching moment of truth.

The freshness and subtlety of Loss and Gain were largely lost on its early readers who divided, for and against, on predictably denominational lines. The Athenaeum found it ‘flippant and farcical’, the Rambler ‘life-like’; and Wiseman, while noting ‘the raciness and thorough English’ of the language, questioned whether the work was really a novel at all.¹⁹ From the Broad Church side, Sara Coleridge (perhaps with the Gothic scene of the flagellant before the Cross in mind) found it utterly repugnant:

It is clever—but, as I think, very unworthy. The style is excellent—the dialogue runs well—and there is a good deal of humour in the sketches of character. Still it is in many respects—as most readers feel—an odious book in point of feeling—and in argument nothing at all. What will Newman sink to as a reasoner? Is there a lower depth to which he can yet fall?²⁰

Frederick Oakeley sprang to Newman's defence a few years later, but to little avail.²¹ The treatment of the psychology of belief, here and in Callista, had to await fuller elucidation in the Grammar of Assent (1870), and his modest, but not unimportant, role in the development of the nineteenth-century novel could only be appreciated much later when the masterpieces of Victorian fiction began to appear. It was left to an ex-Unitarian admirer, R. H. Hutton, to confess to the author that Loss and Gain had marked in some sense ‘an era’ in his life.²² But he, more than any other critic of the time, had recognized the importance of the novel as a neutral forum for dramatizing moral and religious issues at a time when the official Churches were beginning to lose their authority.

Perhaps the initial mistake was to treat the novel as didactic, or prescriptive. Newman could hardly avoid having designs on his readers, but his overriding purpose was to defend the converts of 1845, not to lay down the law for others. In fact, the novel is remarkably genial and magnanimous. Faith is a ‘venture’ which some will embark on when confronted with the ‘right’ arguments or circumstances, and others, equally sincerely, will not. All his characters have free will, and they will fulfil their destinies, come what may. The ways of Providence are in the last resort inexplicable. Only the cranks and charlatans who invade the hero's peace and quiet at the end, like a farcical procession of ‘tempters’, are laughed off the scene before he is ready for the final service of Benediction at the close. Those who read the book with the attention it deserves will find that Newman's instincts as a novelist are entirely at one with his deepest-held religious convictions.

The secret of his success in Loss and Gain—as in Callista—lay in bringing quite new perspectives to time-honoured formulas. Reding finds his true identity through suffering, like a tragic hero, and every step in his progress is dogged by hidden ironies. Yet the school of experience is not without its compensations. In the rural interludes of family life which punctuate the more feverish round of parties and discussions at Oxford, the keynote is struck early on by reminiscences of As You Like It. ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity’ would be a not inappropriate motto for Loss and Gain and its picture of ‘this working-day world’, as it became much later on for George Eliot's sense of life's lessons.

As a reflection of Newman's career so far, before it moved into a new phase, Loss and Gain was a tour de force that could not be repeated. His second novel Callista (1856) is very different in tone and substance, more exploratory in its handling of some of Newman's later concerns, and though ‘a tale of the third century’ intended, apparently, as a dark parable for his own time, although there is little or no hint of this in his original proposal to Burns the publisher.

What I should like, would be to bring out the ηθοs of the heathen from St. Paul's day down to St. Gregory, when under the process, or in sight of the phenomenon, of conversion; what conversion was in those times, what the position of the Christian in that world of sin, what the sophistries of philosophy viewed as realities influencing men.²³

The original germ lay dormant in his mind for years, awaiting the right moment for development. Preliminary sketches of the Juba sections were completed before he left Rome in 1848, but laid aside on his return to more pressing duties in Birmingham, and then Dublin, and they were only followed up years later when other writers had provided a pretext for a contribution of his own. Whether he was deliberately ‘answering’ Charles Kingsley's Hypatia (1853),²⁴ or merely responding on his own terms to Wiseman's request for a sequel to Fabiola (1854), the final result was a highly individual work that offers unique insights into Newman's own personality. No other of his works creates such a vivid picture of Christian commitment and its overriding claims on the individual, or embodies such a nightmarish vision of unregenerate Man. As a cautionary tale for the modern world ‘from a Catholic point of view’, Callista is, to say the least, disconcerting, and in ways that Newman may barely have been aware of himself.

In previous romances about the early Church on Scott's model, like Lockhart's Valerius or Sismondi's Julia Severa,²⁵ the marriage of hero and heroine, following the timely conversion of the non-Christian partner, had resolved the conflict of allegiances and set the seal on their withdrawal from public view into unstrenuous domesticity. In Newman's eyes, however, the priorities were quite different. The Christian must put faith and duty before every other claim on his loyalty, even at the price of martyrdom. There could be no compromise with pagan ideals, though they were decked out in all the colours of ancient civilization and philosophy. The Christian Agellius, urged on by his uncle Jucundus, a wordly-wise old pagan, seeks the hand of the Greek image-painter Callista in what looks like a typical courtship situation from Roman comedy. But the drama takes an unexpected turn in perhaps the most extraordinary rejection scene in the English novel, as Callista recognizes the confusion of motives which, to her dismay, he has fallen into, and which lowers him in her eyes. It marks the beginning of her own quest for the truth, and both eventually find their true destinies apart, as martyrs. Like the two lovers in Southey's Thalaba, ‘the most sublime of English poems’,²⁶ they are only reunited after death. Callista's venture of faith, the central theme of the novel which engaged Newman's sympathies at the deepest level, is not a sudden turn-about, but a gradual development which fulfils the needs of every side of her personality. But how was he to envisage circumstances of time and place appropriate to such a private and intimate process? As his proposal to Burns concluded:

I don't think I could do it from history. I despair of finding facts enough—as if an imaginary tale could alone embody the conclusions to which existing facts lead.

What would be the natural ‘facts’ in this case, where success depended on balancing the ‘inner’ life of the individual with the historical world of pagan Rome, and choice of period and setting was all-important?

Callista is deliberately set outside mainstream history in an ordinary provincial city in proconsular North Africa before and during the Christian persecutions under Decius. All over the Roman Empire there were prosperous backwaters like Sicca: ‘their historical distinction was that they were ordinary’, as Sir Mortimer Wheeler once remarked. It offered Newman therefore an ideal focus for depicting the natural history of provincial life at this obscure period, and what he called ‘the feelings and mutual relations of Christians and heathens’. The novel is neither a costume piece nor an antiquarian reconstruction of the life and times of Cyprian of Carthage. It is the spirit of the pagan Empire, embodied in its legal and religious forms and usages, which count for most in Newman's presentation of the ‘facts’. Otherwise, the work is almost entirely fiction. The shadowy historical personages merge easily into their background; the celebration of Roman might at Jucundus' banquet serves only to bring out the momentous choices facing individuals; and Agellius' own dilemma is comically pointed up in his uncle's interminable discussion of Roman marriage customs. Newman did a good deal of research on what he called the ‘locale’ of the novel,²⁷ but his own memories of Sicily were just as useful in helping him to visualize a historical landscape which seems reassuringly familiar in his homely ‘rural’ vocabulary. Sicca presents a smiling face to the world. But the natural setting is at odds with the horrifying practices that go on there—more like, perhaps, a glimpse into Conrad's ‘heart of darkness’ than the cosy paganism of other novelists and genre painters of the Victorian period.

‘How is this vast, this solid establishment of error, this incubus of many thousand years, ever to have an end?’ asks Agellius at the beginning of the novel. The extraordinary chain of events in Callista suggests the nature of Newman's answer, as he shows the mysteries of the divine dispensation in action, in the lives of communities and individuals. When the novel opens, the people of Sicca, pagans and Christians alike, are sunk in worldliness. As Juba taunts his brother in a characteristically colloquial outburst:

I despise you … you have not the pluck to be a Christian. Be consistent and fizz upon a stake; but you're not made of that stuff. … I despise you, and the whole kit of you. … You are all of you as fond of the world, as set upon gain, as chary of reputation, as ambitious of power, as the jolly old heathen, who, you say, is going the way of the pit.

(p. 35)

But retribution comes inexorably with the invasion of the locusts, ‘an instrument of divine power’, and one disaster follows another in a seemingly endless chain of calamities. Famine and disease are followed by a popular uprising in which the rioters attack the Christians, and then persecutors in turn become victims and the grim catalogue of violence and carnage is only brought to a halt by the brutal efficiency of the Roman soldiery. And yet by some mysterious process, the lives of those caught up in these almost sensational events are transformed and redirected. Deliverance, as always with Newman, is the work of individuals, not groups. Agellius' unsuccessful suit to Callista starts her on her journey from shadows into realities (the words Charles Reding uses about his own quest in Newman's previous novel²⁸), and Agellius is recalled to his own true purpose, the revival of the Church at Sicca. The followers of the old order are unable, or unwilling, to change: ‘better stay where I am,’ says the sceptical Arnobius, ‘I may go further, and gain a loss for my pains’. Jucundus will continue to trade in false images, and Polemo to believe that Rome is ‘the last, the perfect state of human society’. But unwittingly, they all promote the purposes they seek to frustrate. Even Juba, bewitched and driven crazy by his mother in one of the most sensational scenes in the novel, has his part to play in the ironic pattern of events. The reader is left with Newman's wonderment at ‘this mystery of life’,

Where good and ill, together blent,
          Wage an undying strife,

(p. 379)

a theme to which he was to return memorably at the climax of the Apologia.

Callista is remarkable for its great descriptive set pieces, its grasp of Terentian scenic method for dramatic confrontations and contrasts, and above all, perhaps, for its psychological realism. Where else in a novel of this date could be found a subtler or more economically worded piece of Jamesian interior analysis than the following?

She might, indeed, have been able afterwards, on looking back, to say many things of herself; and she would have recognised that while she was continually differing from herself, in that she was changing, yet it was not a change which involved contrariety, but one which expanded itself in (as it were) concentric circles, and only fulfilled, as time went on, the promise of its beginning. Every day, as it came, was, so to say, the child of the preceding, the parent of that which followed; and the end to which she tended could not get beyond the aim with which she set out. Yet, had she been asked, at the time of which we speak, where was her principle and her consistency, what was her logic, or whether she acted on reason, or on impulse, or on feeling, or in fancy, or in passion, she would have been reduced to silence. What did she know about herself, but that, to her surprise, the more she thought over what she heard of Christianity, the more she was drawn to it, and the more it approved itself to her whole soul, and the more it seemed to respond to all her needs and aspirations, and the more intimate was her presentiment that it was true?

(pp. 291-2)

Less obvious, perhaps, but equally striking for Newman's day, is the bluntness with which he brings out the seamier ‘facts’ of pagan life, urged on, no doubt, by lurid details in the early Christian Fathers. The fate of the Christian children in the riot, for example, who are to become either temple prostitutes or eunuch priests, is openly implied, without any deference to Victorian proprieties:

The whole five were carried off in triumph; it was the greatest success of the day. There was some hesitation how to dispose of them; at last the girls were handed over to the priestesses of Astarte, and the boys to the loathsome votaries of Cybele.

(pp. 194-5)²⁹

And while Callista finds her true love on the rack, her brother Aristo, frustrated in his efforts to secure her release, is shown seeking solace among the prostitutes at the Thermae. Juba's catchy little song (‘The little black moor is the chap for me’) is another instance of this down-to-earth quality in Newman. Unlike Callista's Byronic complaint ‘Where are the Islands of the Blest?’, it was omitted from his Verses on Various Occasions (1867),³⁰ and is little known today. Yet in its colloquial, jaunty ballad rhythms it looks back to some of Newman's earliest experiments in verse, and forward to the devils' chorus in Gerontius.

No further opportunities for novel-writing came Newman's way after Callista. But he remained a keen and discriminating reader of fiction for the rest of his life (Trollope was a special favourite), and he continued to revise his two novels and ponder their significance for himself and his readers, as every new edition was called for.³¹ His practice of the novel at an important juncture in its history had helped him to find his own bearings, opening up some of the larger preoccupations of his career and widening the range and expressiveness of his prose writing. The two works that achieved all this and, in addition, carried such mysterious intimations of the author's own personality, cannot be treated simply as by-products of his other concerns. Newman was doubtless conscious of this himself when he gave them an honoured place among his collected works.

Notes

1. Ess. i. 23. The essay originally appeared in the London Review for 1829.

2. ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’, PS ii. 371.

3. See R. H. Froude's letter to Newman, 6 Aug. 1835 (LD v. 118), from which it is clear that Newman had the plot worked out in his own mind.

4. LD vi. 16.

5. LD vi. 150.

6. See Bagehot, Collected Works, ed. N. St John Stevas (London, 1965-), ii. 67-8.

7. British Critics, 24 (1838), 61-82: not reprinted subsequently. The author of the anonymous novel (London, 1837) published under the initials E. C. A. was Eleanor C. Agnew, a Roman Catholic convert.

8. LD v. 387-88.

9. Newman Family Letters, ed. D. Mozley (London, 1962), 94-5. I am grateful to Professor Kathleen Tillotson for further information on this point. Newman's Preface is unrecorded by V. F. Blehl, John Henry Newman: A Bibliographical Catalogue of His Writings (Charlottesville, Va., 1978), and a copy of the book has not been traced.

10. Newman Family Letters, ed. D. Mozley, p. 120.

11. Wordsworth, Excursion, iv. 1035-8.

12. See ‘Lines upon my Sister's Portrait by the Lord Southdown’ and ‘The Diary of C. Jeames de la Pluche, Esq., with his Letters’, Ballads and Contributions to Punch 1842-50 (Oxford, 1908), 35-7, 355-437.

13. Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert, ed. A. G. Hill (Oxford, 1986).

14. Quarterly Review, 81 (1847), 131-66: ‘it has just claims to notice for its qualities as a work of art’.

15. Loss and Gain is probably the first example of a novel devoted entirely to a university setting. J. G. Lockhart's Reginald Dalton (London, 1823) is only partly set in Oxford.

16. See Poetical Works of Anna Seward, ed. W. Scott, iii (Edinburgh, 1810), 319. I am grateful to Mr F. R. Maddison and Mr A. V. Simcock of the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, for information about Lloyd and his activities. See also H. C. King, Geared to the Stars (Bristol and Toronto, 1978), 314-15.

17. The translator of the French edition was L'Abbé Segondy of Montpellier, and his preface is dated Nov. 1855. Segondy sent Newman an inscribed copy of the second edition of Perte et gain (Paris, 1859), and Newman also received the Italian edition of Perdita e guadagno (Milan, 1857) from its anonymous translator. Both volumes are in the Birmingham Oratory Library. The two translators were very conscious of the versatility of Newman's text and the difficulty of their task.

18. This mystification extended to Newman's extraordinarily involved account of the novel in his ‘Answer in Detail to Mr. Kingsley's Accusations’, Apo., pp. 422-3.

19. Wiseman, Dublin Review, 24 (1848), 218-26.

20. MS letter of c.18 July 1848 to Mrs Derwent Coleridge (University of Texas MSS).

21. F. Oakeley, Personal Reminiscences of the Oxford Movement with Illustrations from Dr. Newman's ‘Loss and Gain’ (London, 1855).

22. LD xxi. 60. See also R. H. Hutton, Cardinal Newman (London, 1891), 194-7.

23. LD xiii. 69.

24. See S. Dorman, ‘Hypatia and Callista: The Initial Skirmish between Kingsley and Newman’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 34 (1979), 173-93, which brings out the fundamental differences between the two writers.

25. J. G. Lockhart, Valerius (Edinburgh, 1821); L. S. de Sismondi, Julia Severa (Paris and London, 1822). Newman had read both. He may also have known Chateaubriand's Les Martyrs ou le triomphe de la religion chrétienne (Paris, 1809; English trans. 1812).

26. LD xiii. 449.

27. See LD xiv. 343. The MS of the novel, and Newman's working notes on the geography, Roman administration, and religions of proconsular Africa, are preserved at the Birmingham Oratory.

28. An echo of the words which Newman eventually had engraved on his memorial at Rednal: ‘Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem’.

29. I am grateful to Mr Simon Pembroke for help in elucidating this passage, which probably draws on Eusebius or Athanasius.

30. It was reprinted in The Poems of John Henry Newman, ed. F. Chapman (London, [1913]), 342-4, along with Callista's other song ‘I wander by that River's Brink’, which was also omitted from Verses on Various Occasions.

31. Loss and Gain and Callista both went through at least nine English editions in Newman's lifetime.