SOURCE: “Venture and Response: The Dialogical Strategy of John Henry Newman's Loss and Gain,” in Critical Essays on John Henry Newman, edited by Ed Block, Jr., 1992, pp. 23-38.

[In the following essay, Block argues that Loss and Gain should be viewed as fiction—rather than as a satirical or autobiographical work—and describes the novel's dialogical structure.]

Critics generally see Loss and Gain, John Henry Newman's first novel, published in 1847, as either a satiric, Catholic polemic or a somewhat unfeeling portrayal of his reasons for converting from Anglicanism to Catholicism two years earlier.¹ Other than Kathleen Tillotson's praise—which is illusively scattered (Tillotson 133 et. al.)—there is no thorough-going study of the novel's surprisingly modern dialogical structure.² Undoubtedly Wilfrid Ward's story of a friend hearing Newman “laughing to himself” while writing the novel in Rome in the winter of 1847 (Ward 191) has affected subsequent readings of the novel. Nevertheless, to gain a fuller understanding of the novel's dialogism, it is first necessary to examine some of the multiple purposes that the novel serves.³

A first step is to realize that in Loss and Gain Newman is celebrating, for the first but not the last time, the college and university life he loved. A few years later, in The Idea of a University, he would say:

When a multitude of young men, keen, open-hearted, sympathetic, and observant, as young men are, come together and freely mix with each other, they are sure to learn from one another … the conversation of all is a series of lectures to each, and they gain for themselves new ideas and views, fresh matter for thought, and distinct principles for judging and acting, day by day.

(Idea 110)

Loss and Gain is a first, reminiscent picture of that life and that experience of intellectual growth and development. As readers we experience that growth in the conversations and theological discussions held on all the walks, at all the breakfasts and tea-parties, and in all the visits that Charles Reding and his friends make to each other's rooms, and which constitute almost the only “actions” of the novel.

To clarify further the novel's multiple purposes, it is also useful to reflect on the genre of Loss and Gain. Calling it a “novel of conversion” does little more than highlight some resemblances to a number of classic texts of that genre. Considered as a bildungsroman, however, its more thoughtful, philosophical concerns become prominent and its lack of ordinary “novelistic” actions less significant. In its root meaning, Bildung derives from Bild or image, which implies shaping and forming—and, in some of its other cognates, imagining. Such a generic perspective enables us to see that Loss and Gain is as much about the shaping and forming of Charles Reding's mind, heart, and will, as it is about the outcome of that shaping: that is, his conversion to Catholicism. With this distinction in mind, the novel becomes significantly more than a “polemic” for a specific, sectarian conversion.

A sustained view of the novel as bildung will ultimately make it appear less closed and less intolerant than unsympathetic critics (Baker 66; Levine 231; Wright 7) would have it seem. Choosing the mode of fiction rather than autobiography, Newman was able to universalize as he explored the dynamics of personal transformation and development with greater liberty and consequently greater psychological complexity than had he begun a work like the Apologia. Not only is the novel's theological give and take illuminating, but the overall dialogical structure, its allusive texture, its freedom of figuration, its emphasis on personal influence, and its reflexive awareness of the convert's psychological turmoil all show that the novel has yet to receive proper appreciation.

As a first step in this re-evaluation, I would focus on the novel's dialogical structure, which allows us to experience the advance and retreat, the vision and re-vision, the give and take that is involved in becoming educated, learning one's own mind, and professing one's belief. In chapter eight of his one thoroughly philosophical work, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, published in 1871, Newman describes the need for precision in the use of words. The explanation comes in a chapter on “Formal Inference” where the goal, he says, is “to make them [words], as much as possible, the calculi of notions, which are in our absolute power, as meaning just what we choose them to mean.” By way of warning he adds that such words should be

as little as possible the tokens of real things, which are outside of us, and which mean we do not know how much, but so much certainly as (in proportion as we enter into them) may run away with us beyond the range of scientific measurement.

(Grammar 214)

Even as he cautions readers intent on perfecting their use of formal inference, Newman points to what makes the opposite of inference—i.e. real apprehension and assent—so powerful: namely, the degree to which each individual can “enter into” a word or expression, filling it with his or her own understanding and experience (“Development,” Fifteen Sermons 334, and Grammar). For genuine, personal understanding, such experience, such “entering into” the meaning of words, letting the words and things to which they refer have power over us and master us, is precisely the way to the highest achievement described in the Grammar, the experience of real assent.

Loss and Gain falls chronologically between Newman's “University Sermons” (where he had first formulated his ideas on assent and “entering into” ideas) and the Grammar of Assent. In its fascination with the words and experiences of the individual speakers, Sheffield, Freeborn, Vincent, Carlton, and others, the novel allows Newman and the reader to “enter into” those arguments and participate in a genuine “dialogue.”

Just as Plato's dialogues frequently turn on the correct understanding of a word's meaning or a concept's extension, so the conversations of Loss and Gain frequently turn on the definition of terms like “faith,” “grace,” and “apprehension.” Plato's Republic reaches something like a climax with the myth of the cave and its journey to enlightenment. It is no accident that in a later chapter of Loss and Gain Charles describes his journey of enlightenment—to that point—as “coming out of shadows into realities.”⁴ Newman's characters, it is said, lack depth and realism. Perhaps that is because, like the characters in Plato's dialogues, the characters of Loss and Gain represent not only the people in Charles Reding's life but “typical” attitudes, intellectual positions, and ways of life. We shall see that even in making them types, Newman does not stereotype them, and in fact finds in them a reflection of his own earlier opinions and attitudes.⁵ As it does in Plato, this dialogical structure deepens both the humor and the seriousness of the novel's play with ideas. It even has a dialectical rhythm, the rhythm of advance and retreat, excursion and return. This rhythm is enacted in the plot movements of separation and re-integration as well as in the word play on the novel's title (200, 243, 297).

The first dialogue which bears upon Charles's formation comes shortly after Charles's arrival at Oxford and his meeting with Sheffield, a classmate who lives on the same stairs. Charles had come to Oxford with the openness of an idealistic young person. As the narrator says,

He came there with an enthusiasm so simple and warm as to be almost childish … he was in the season of poetry. … Novelty was beauty to a heart so open and cheerful as his; not only because it was novelty, and had its proper charm as such, but because when we first see things, we see them in a “gay confusion,” which is a principal element of the poetical.

(17)

This description curiously anticipates the opening of “Elementary Studies,” a lecture given during Newman's years as Rector of the Catholic University in Ireland, where he says that “when the eyes of the infant first open upon the world, the reflected rays of light which strike them … present to him no image, but a medley of colours and shadows” (Idea 247). Charles, at the opening of Loss and Gain, is an unformed child, with no image of what to believe.

Charles wants to see the best and accept only what is the best in everyone. He says: “I am for taking every one for what he is, and not for what he is not: one has this excellence, another that” (9). In contrast to his friend Sheffield, Charles has no views. That is, he has no set opinions or perspective from which to understand things. Charles only has the pre-disposition to think and speak well of others. Critics of the novel have disagreed about this attitude, but it is—at least at this stage of Charles's formation—a positive pre-disposition. Newman himself, in the “University Sermon” on “Justice as a Principle of Divine Governance” had counseled a wisdom “to take things as we find them” and “not to attempt a theory where we must reason without data” (Fifteen Sermons 109-110). As good as such an attitude may be, however, the novel shows how that predisposition must be transformed, so that discrimination—in the good sense, as judging, evaluating, choosing—can develop. To realize his own beliefs, Charles must first learn to be a discriminating judge of others.

After Charles and Sheffield visit a chapel being renovated by an Anglo-Catholic tutor named Bateman, a conversation develops on the relation of symbols, habits, and the acquisition of virtue. Sheffield is against “externals,” “shams,” and “unreal” shows. Charles criticizes Sheffield, using a daring comparison of external symbols to music: “You are like the man in one of Miss Edgeworth's novels, who shuts his ears to the music that he might laugh at the dancers.” Charles tries to argue that external symbols may be a necessary accompaniment to real devotion. When Sheffield asks what “music” he is not listening to, Charles refers “to the meaning of those various acts … the pious feeling which accompanies the sight of the image” (19). This peripatetic debate ends with Charles realizing for himself the relation of symbols, signs, and habits. It is the recollection of a classmate's comment on Aristotle that Charles “enters into,” and which helps form his thinking. Defending the use of symbols and rituals, Charles asserts that “habits are created by those very acts in which they manifest themselves when created … we learn to swim well by trying to swim” (21). Without knowing the full implications of what he says, Charles articulates the profound truth that action and participation precede and anticipate belief. There is an intimate relationship between what we do and what we say we believe. Action issues from a complex “ethos,” a spirit of community, that we inhabit and by which we are inhabited.⁶

At a breakfast given by the same tutor, a young Evangelical tutor named Freeborn is the most prominent contributor to a dialogue which demonstrates how far Charles has yet to go in understanding himself and his relation to his faith. In this scene Newman also shows an ability, which few critics recognize, to “enter into” the views of characters other than Charles. There is, in fact, evidence that the other “voices” of the novel may constitute parts of Newman's own argument with himself through his Anglican years. Freeborn launches into a defense of “the vital truths of religion” as against “metaphysical distinctions or outward observances” (30). He concludes that “Creeds are useful in their place, so is the Church; but neither Creed nor Church is religion” (31). Freeborn's views obviously contradict Charles's attitude toward externals. Yet though Freeborn represents an Evangelical position Newman had abandoned long before, there is in his words an echo of Newman's own mature beliefs. The distinction Freeborn makes is one defended in the “University Sermons” and later in the Grammar.

Newman also defended in those same texts a nuanced version of the principle which Freeborn enunciates a little later. “Religion, he said, was a matter of the heart; no one could interpret Scripture rightly whose heart was not right” (32). Newman clearly enters into the Evangelical's position, discovering there, as it were, an aspect of his own early sympathy with Evangelical principles. In “University Sermon X,” “Faith and Reason Contrasted as Habits of Mind” (Fifteen Sermons 191), Newman argues that the right pre-disposition is necessary for understanding not only Scripture but the natural “evidences” of religion as well. Faith, genuine religiosity, comes partly as a result of such pre-dispositions. As readers, we may also find the origin of such pre-dispositions in the very habits, the ethos, that Sheffield and Charles had discussed a few pages earlier. In this relation of symbols and habits, and habits with religion, we are suddenly able to see the significance in experiences of which Charles is as yet perhaps only dimly aware. In this way the novel is not only forming Charles; it is—if we let it—already forming us.

Charles's position in this breakfast dialogue is instructive. He defends a somewhat rigidly rationalist position against Freeborn's Evangelicalism. “‘I have always thought,’ said Reading, ‘that reason was a general gift, though faith is a special and personal one. If faith is really rational, all ought to see that it is rational; else from the nature of the case, it is not rational’” (32). True, faith is a special gift, and (as he argues in “University Sermon X,” “XI,” and “XII”) rational, but the conclusion that “all ought to see that it is rational” is somewhat naive and immature. The very “conditional” form of Charles's comment implies that Charles is speaking inferentially. He is theorizing; he is not being “real” in Newman's sense of that word (Grammar 52, 209ff). It is another undergraduate, the Catholic-leaning White, who defends a more clearly Newmanian position when he says: “It would be a dull world … if men went by reason; they may think they do, but they don't. Really they are led by their feelings, their affections, by the sense of the beautiful” (33). Though the narrator had earlier satirized White as “a sharp but not very wise freshman, who … professed to be aesthetic” (27), his insight into human motivation resembles Newman's analogizing of aesthetic judgment and religious imagination in “University Sermon X.” But lest we think that White is Newman's mouthpiece, he quickly runs to excess in a Romantic-aesthetic vein, saying “the clouds, sun, and sky, the fields and the woods, are religious” (33). And when he praises Catholic worship, describing “the choir singing out the Kyrie, and the priest and his assistants bowing low, and saying the Confiteor to each other” (33), he manifests the limitations of a merely aesthetic response to religion, “uninformed” by more rational considerations.

The discussion at Bateman's breakfast demonstrates a number of things about the dialogical character of Newman's novel. First, it should be clear that none of the characters is merely a mouthpiece for Newman's views, nor are they merely straw men for satire and ridicule. Freeborn is at once an aspect of Newman's self and a sign of otherness. He is a little like the characters of Plato's dialogues, genuine voices and points of view capable of awakening a deep personal response. Freeborn's arguments awaken a need to question, to probe, and to understand the partial truth, or better, the struggle toward one truth, which Freeborn's argument and Charles's and White's rejoinders imply.

Another evidence of the novel's dialogical structure resides in its rich allusive texture. Though a full investigation is out of place here, a few illustrations may serve to show that types of allusions, humorous use of allusion, the dominance of particular classes of allusion, and the dialectical play of allusion, constitute another aspect of the novel's intellectual give and take.

The novel's concern with the theological grounds of conversion make the allusions to Anglican and Protestant theologians most prominent. In Part I, for instance, Bateman seeks to explain whence derives the authority of the Church of England. Listing the many divines whose interpretations have formed that church, he points out that not one is authoritative. By means of such allusions, Newman accurately re-creates a sense of the dialectical struggle of the early Oxford Movement. Satiric and humorous use of allusion is found most notably in the report of the sermons of Dr. Brownside—conjecturally R. D. Hampton (51-52)—and in Vincent's listing of his own favorite Anglican divines.

The pervasiveness of particular kinds of allusion constitutes a problematic evidence of the novel's dialogism. The texts which cast the longest shadows are those of Newman's favorite authors. John Keble's Christian Year is a subtle leitmotif to Charles's growing piety (70, 194), as it was indeed for Newman and the whole Oxford Movement. The romantic and medieval novels of Alessandro Manzoni (119), Sir Walter Scott (249), and Baron Fouque (257) provide another typical, and at the same time personal, dimension of allusions. Among the most influential intellectual sources we find references to Francis Bacon's Novum Organum, Thomas Scott's Commentary, Joseph Butler's Analogy of Religion, and John Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity. Perhaps the most shadowy influence, but at the same time the most pervasive, is that of Aristotle's Ethics. Although the only obvious allusions are to the concept of habits (referred to above) and “supplying the defects of law” (119), it would make an important contribution to study of the novel to trace the deep Aristotelianism of Charles's formation in prudential judgment.

The dialectical play of allusions is first visible when, early in the novel, Aristotle (21) and Bentham (23) are set at odds, and at the ends of chapters nine and twelve when Alexander Pope's “Universal Prayer” (see the end of “Essay on Man”) and lines from William Cowper's “The Task” (896-906) are contrasted as “shallow” philosophical vs. deeply religious perspectives on belief. That the lines from Cowper's poem further insinuate the theme of providential loss and gain through their emphasis on “give and take” only serves to reinforce the conviction that allusive structure is a significant aspect of the novel. A climactic instance of allusive dialogism comes in Part II, when Mary, Charles's sister, notes the change in her brother and tries to remind him of his former cheerfulness, quoting lines from Keble's Christian Year. Mary refers to his earlier self as, in Keble's words, “making all things bright with her own magic smile.” Here, however, it is Charles, and not another authority, who contradicts Keble. “I suppose it is coming out of shadows into realities” (178).

Allusion, then, forms another voice, or chorus of voices, reflecting the intellectual and devotional give and take within which Charles has to find his own voice, and open his own way. From the appropriation of and sifting of these additional voices' opinions, commentaries, and intimations, he comes to articulate a unique and personal confession of faith.

Another encounter significant for Charles's formation takes place when Charles learns of the sudden conversion of another classmate, Willis. This dialogue suggests not only how “true to life” Newman's picture of youth growing and shaping itself is, but how Newman's freedom of figuration adds depth and complexity to the dialogues. In response to a letter from Willis, Charles stops in London to see him. When Charles learns that Willis has converted, and that the man with him, Morley, is a co-religionist, Charles wants to leave. Before he does, however, an argument ensues. Willis tactlessly urges Charles to convert. Charles accuses Willis of going to Rome

not as a child to a mother, but in a wayward, roving way, as a matter of fancy or liking, or (excuse me) as a greedy boy to something nice; and you pursued your object by disobeying the authorities set over you.

(78)

In these contradictory figures we find an echo of Newman's own dividedness and apprehension during the years preceding his conversion. Charles endorses first a familial and then an authoritarian way to Faith. Modifying slightly a favorite image from Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam,⁷ he first implies that Faith should be an act of filial love and relation. At the end it has become a matter of obedience. Willis's actions he caricatures as fanciful, willful, and selfish. In other words, he scorns a selfish pursuit of Faith. Yet throughout the “University Sermons” and the Grammar of Assent, it is precisely the desire for God which Newman calls the deepest and most proper motive of religion (“The Nature of Faith in Relation to Reason,” Fifteen Sermons 215-220 and “Belief in One God,” Grammar 106-107).

This encounter judges Charles and his ambiguous accusation, for Morley points out (Newman's narrator praises his good taste in doing so) that Charles is judging “of things you do not know” (79). Charles has been guilty of the same “unreality” that Sheffield had castigated, and for which Charles had himself reproved others. He has not yet “realized” Newman's mature insight that Faith is an individual matter and cannot be forced.

The London meeting with Willis and Morley is a testing of character. That the encounter is an important moment of shaping and forming, and typical of similar real-life arguments comes clear when, after leaving the two, Charles ponders the words he would have liked to speak. Like many of us, he only thinks of the right response after the argument is over. Yet what Charles recognizes, or literally re-cognizes, almost as if, in Platonic fashion, he had known it all along, is

the very difference between Protestants and Catholics. Catholics begin with Faith, Protestants with inquiry, and he ought to have said this to Willis. He was provoked he had not said it; it would have simplified the question, and shown how far he was from being unsettled. Unsettled!—It was most extravagant.

(83)

Charles has reached a milestone on his journey. It is from this rather firm vantage point that he can continue. We also see, however, in the narrator's gently ironic comment on Charles's “settledness,” how well Newman distinguishes himself from his youthful character. Like George Eliot's narrators (I am thinking of The Mill on the Floss), Newman's can editorialize sententiously and aphoristically about characters. But unlike Eliot's more generally monological and moralistic narrators, Newman's can be almost mercurial, impatient of error at one time and gently satiric—as in this case—at another. Such a narrative perspective is further evidence of the novel's complex dialogism.

Complexity of figuration occurs in a second dialogue between Charles and Freeborn. Significantly, it occurs in a place and at a time which, in good Platonic fashion, reflects the nature of the interchange. It is nearly sunset, and Freeborn, who prefers such one-on-one meetings to the kind of pitched battle he fought at Bateman's breakfast, appears and begins a discussion of Faith. In the give and take which follows, Charles seeks a clear definition. Freeborn, varying another central image of In Memoriam, says it “is like a hand appropriating personally the merits of Christ.” He says it is “the seizing and clinging which a beggar might venture on when a king has passed by.” Changing the image, he says it is bread: “I do not know what bread is, but I eat it … and I feel the good effects afterwards. And so let us be content to know, not what faith is, but what it does” (98). He concludes this string of powerful images with one of Newman's favorites, accompanied by a tone which echoes its occurrence in Newman's “Development” sermon, the analogy of blindness and sight (see Fifteen Sermons 349):

“If you really once experienced the power of faith—how it changes the heart, enlightens the eyes, gives a new spiritual taste, a new sense to the soul; if you once knew what it was to be blind, and then to see, you would not ask for definitions.”

(101)

At first Charles seems somewhat obstinate and proud—a point on which the narrator and Freeborn agree. Then he almost comes to see the point.

“If I understand you … faith carries its own evidence with it. Just as I eat my bread at breakfast without hesitation about its wholesomeness, so, when I have really faith, I know it beyond mistake, and need not look out for tests of it.”

(102)

Charles very nearly reaches an understanding of faith, but after a few more turns of the argument he becomes frustrated. The chapter ends by symbolically calling attention to the place and time of the dialogue. “They walked awhile in silence; then, as the day was now closing in, they turned homewards, and parted company when they came to the Clarendon” (104). A dialogue begun in the promise of a vivid sunset ends in darkness, subtly suggesting the state of Charles's mind, and reminding us of earlier walks in the countryside when—in Romantic, but also Platonic fashion—place and time “enter into” or reflect upon the thoughts, words, and conclusions of the participants.

From the analysis of these two dialogues, two things should be clear. First: Charles is now decidedly a seeker. He is trying to inform himself about the relation of authority and faith. While clearly the focus of the narrator's attention, however, he is not merely Newman's self-image as a young man. Charles remains incomplete and imperfect. Second: many times, as in the case of Freeborn's vivid figures, Newman gives Charles's antagonists credit for greater perceptiveness and eloquence than the protagonist. It is as if for the creator of Loss and Gain imagination knows no distinctions of creed. The antagonists often possess important parts of the whole truth Charles is seeking, and they are able to convey these partial truths in figures that arrest not only Charles but the reader as well. It is only in retrospect, however, that we see the part for what it is, and the whole of which it should be an integral element.

By Book II of the novel, Charles realizes that neither the Anglican Church nor individual Anglicans he knows and discusses his problems with can answer his questions about faith, authority, and dogma. From one perspective this part of the novel is, as critics have noted, an often satiric criticism of Anglicanism (Wright 9, and Ker's “Newman as Satirist” in Newman After a Hundred Years). But seen in the light of “University Sermons” and the Grammar of Assent, we may also see Charles's journey to faith as the necessarily individual path one must take to know oneself and one's own, individual beliefs.

Rusticated—or sent home from residence at Oxford because he is suspected of being a kind of “closet Catholic”—Charles spends much of his time talking with now Anglican clergyman Bateman, and another clergyman friend Campbell, trying to settle his mind. I cannot dwell on all of the—often humorous—discussions that Charles has with Bateman and Campbell, but a look at one crucial dialogue will demonstrate the power of personal influence in the further formation of Charles's mind and heart.

At one of his many dinners with Bateman and Campbell, Charles learns that the convert, Willis, has returned from the continent and has taken up residence in Bateman's parish. At a series of further dinners to which Bateman invites Willis and Reding, the purpose is to win Willis back to Anglicanism.⁸ By far the most important part of the various dialogues which ensure at these dinners, from the point of view of formation through personal influence, is Willis's attempt to explain the Mass. He says:

“To me nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming, as the Mass, said as it is among us. I could attend Masses for ever, and not be tired. It is not a mere form of words,—it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is, not the invocation merely, but, I dare use the word, the evocation of the Eternal.”

(226)

R. H. Hutton, the Anglican journalist, critic, and long-time friend of Newman, acknowledged the contemporary power of Willis's description (Woodfield 58). It also represents the kind of experience for Charles that Newman had spoken of in letter six of The Tamworth Reading Room. In that letter he had said: “Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds enflame us” (Essays and Sketches 204). Willis's is a personal testimony, an expression of personal experience that has the weight of authenticity and, as a result, makes a correspondingly strong claim upon Charles.

Willis also distinguishes (225) between the way things—like the Mass—appear from inside a belief system, and from outside that system. The implicit argument, that a way of life or ethos supports and makes possible continued belief, is not only hermeneutically accurate, but also true to Newman's own position expressed in the “University Sermons.”

On parting from the group, Willis prays for Charles to receive faith and kisses him. Charles is powerfully affected.

He felt possessed, he knew not how, by a high superhuman power, which seemed able to push through mountains, and to walk the sea. With winter around him, he felt within like the springtide, when all is new and bright. He perceived that he had found, what indeed he had never sought, because he had never known what it was, but what he had ever wanted,—a soul sympathetic with his own. He felt he was no longer alone in the world, though he was losing that true congenial mind the very moment he found him.

(229)

This is a dense and problematic passage. Hostile critics could use it for a variety of purposes,⁹ but within the context of the novel's dialogues it represents something like the climax of the novel. Charles has felt the personal influence of the believer, and in the discovery of “a soul sympathetic to his own” I believe he has felt the intimation of the presence of God. From “University Sermons” like “Personal Influence: the Means of Propagating the Truth” and “The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine”—not to mention the Grammar of Assent,—it is clear that Newman affirmed the analogical way in which human beings come to know God. To know God means coming to recognize a person, one's Creator and Judge to be sure, but a person. And as we recall, Newman, in the Apologia, had also confessed that he felt this personal reality of God from a very early age. The feeling of “possession”—or loss of “self-possession”—which Charles experiences is also an important part of formation. We might compare it to the idea of being “inhabited” by an idea, referred to earlier.

Such, I believe, is Charles's experience with Willis. There is a strong element of self-surrender to the influence of the somewhat exaggeratedly devout convert. Having been “overtaken” by Willis's view of Catholicism, Charles must now struggle to appropriate it for himself. Like the give and take in the other dialogues, we now find a similar surrender and appropriation process being enacted on the level of Charles's personal experience, in the depths of his spirit, emotions, and will. This process is yet another dimension of the formation and shaping which Charles has to undergo, and which the novel faithfully portrays.¹⁰

Book II ends with Charles taking a somewhat disappointing second in his examinations. Rather than face the problem of signing the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles to receive his degree, however, Charles decides to “go down,” leaving Oxford to read Anglican theology with Campbell, hoping to settle his mind on the matter of his belief. For biographically inclined critics, the two years which he eventually spends, and which the novel quickly passes over, resemble Newman's years from 1843 to 1845. They realistically imply a time of personal appropriation, after the enthusiastic intimation felt with Willis. Part III picks up at the end of that two years, with Charles all but certain. “My belief in the Church of Rome is part of myself,” he says. “I cannot act against it without acting against God” (236). He calls Faith a venture, and his grounds at best imperfect (237), recalling Newman's claim in the “University Sermons” (Fifteen Sermons 215, 219). But even here Newman's artistry prevents him from falsifying the situation. Evidence abounds that for Charles the conversion experience has a human as well as a spiritual dimension. Charles's arguments (really mini-dialogues) with his mother, his sister, and Carlton, manifest the fact that Charles is a proud, even headstrong young man seeking to find his own way, as well as to find God's way with him.

Quite clearly, Charles is in a final phase of excursion. His “going out” takes the specific form of separation from family, Oxford, and friends. He is again venturing out upon untried ways of thought and life. It is tempting, in this context, to see a parallel in Charles's farewell from Carlton and his meeting with the priest on the train trip down to London, where he is to be received into the Church. Carlton makes a last attempt to persuade Charles to remain an Anglican. After the meeting is over, we see that it has caused Charles to hesitate (258). He clearly needs a guide; the meeting with the priest is an almost miraculous visitation by just such a guide.

The guide appears (258) in the form of “a grave person” with a “hesitating, saddish voice” who possesses, however, extraordinary powers of observation. Showing by his questions that he knows Charles to be an Oxonian, the man makes Charles so curious that he finally asks: “How came you to suppose I was of Oxford?” (260). The priest's answer is a moment of revelation, and arguably the key to Charles's placing his trust in the rest of what the priest says. It is also, no doubt, another significant example of personal influence.¹¹ Like a Sherlock Holmes avant la lettre, the priest says that “every class has its external indications to those who can read them” (260). Charles's response manifests the depth to which he is stirred. “It is a fearful thought,” he says, “that we, as it were, exhale ourselves every breath we draw” (260). To this the priest responds: “A man's moral self … is concentrated in each moment of his life; it lives in the tips of his fingers, and the spring of his insteps. A very little thing tries what a man is made of” (260). This statement, made with the authority of the man's ability to perceive so much more than Charles can, elicits an almost Petrine acknowledgment or affirmation. “‘I think I must be speaking to a Catholic priest,’ said Charles” (260).

The priest's response is a fearful thought, but one which reflects the whole of Newman's thinking. The priest's statement assumes the integrity of human temperament, character, and behavior. As Newman had said in the Apologia, “the whole man moves” (264). Every gesture, every act, every judgment in some way forms, and then informs on, character. The priest's statement is really an endorsement of total consciousness.

Analysis of the “formative” dialogism in Loss and Gain properly ends with Charles's being guided by the priest to his final reception into the Church. Readers too sensitive to the novel's satire may think of the novel as ending with the visits made to Charles before his reception by representatives of numerous splinter sects, yet a final step in the give and take occurs afterwards when Charles, now a member of the communion, meets Willis once more. This brief scene also rounds out the pattern of excursion and return to a satisfying, if somewhat ambiguous, sense of closure. In their encounter Charles admits that “you [Willis] have taken the better part betimes, while I have loitered” (296, 297). Willis returns, “If you speak of delay, must not I of rashness” (297). If the speakers do not, at least the reader can recognize the different temperaments which have now found shelter within the same Church. Though each will go his separate way, developing further within that Church, the reconciliation of opposites implied in this meeting provides a fitting denouement.

Willis has represented impulse and a kind of eccentricity; Charles reason and reserve. Both reflect aspects of Newman himself. Brought together in the Church, these two characters symbolize something of the peace which Newman had achieved, as they imply a sense of wholeness compounded of diversity, which is characteristic of Newman's thought. The dialogism of Loss and Gain is Newman's first strategic effort to fashion a tangible expression of that sense from within his newfound religious home. Awareness of such dialogism should provide further stimulus to investigate the ways in which Newman's other work may yield to such dialogic readings. Of course, Difficulties of Anglicans and Present Positions of Catholics offer only the first, most proximate options, while The Idea of a University, along with its appended “University Subjects,” offers yet another rich source for the investigation of Newman's dialogism.

Notes

1. Almost the only criticism of the novel is that of Baker, Levine, Wright, and Wolff. Wright, following Levine, refers to “a tension between the propagandist and the artist” (7).

2. Baker (62) calls the dialogue “undramatic”: Wolff (50) refers to but does not stress what he calls the “debates.” I exclude Alan G. Hill's worthwhile introduction to the Oxford University Press “World Classics” edition as, perhaps, too biased, though, like Tillotson, he acknowledges something of the play of mind if not voice.

3. Another obvious classification of the novel as a “campus novel” might yield additional—but I think generally more superficial and limiting—resemblances. Levine's classification of it as a “novel of manners” (220) is only slightly more instructive but no less rich in potential for comprehensiveness.

4. The phrase, loosely translated into Latin as ex umbra et imaginibus in veritatem—from shadows and images into truth—Newman had inscribed on his memorial.

5. In “Elementary Studies” (Idea 260, 261), Newman noted the pedagogical value of caricature in ways that also explain the exaggeration of certain individuals and “types” in Loss and Gain.

6. In “On the Development of Religious Ideas” (Fifteen Sermons 334) Newman speaks of propositions which are inhabited by a full understanding of the ideas to which they refer. It is within a community sharing a particular “ethos” that such full understanding occurs.

7. In what is perhaps the most well-known of the instances (# 124), Tennyson, referring to the experience of Faith, says:

   No, like a child in doubt and fear:
                       But that blind clamor made me wise:
                       Then was I as a child that cries,
   But, crying, knows his father near.

8. In his introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of the novel, Alan G. Hill discusses From Oxford to Rome and its theme of re-conversion as a potential stimulus to Newman for writing his novel.

9. Wolff (46, 47) refers to the possible homosexual interpretations of this scene but counters that Newman would have been unconscious of such possibilities.

10. In his essay, “On the Problem of Self-Understanding” (Philosophical Hermeneutics 54-55), Hans-Georg Gadamer analyzes such loss of self-possession from a similarly religious perspective.

11. I realize that this interpretation of the priest's conversation differs from Wright's view, that the priest is urging a faith which is merely subjective (Wright 16), but Wright's interest in Newman's Romanticism prevents him from seeing the priest in any but his own chosen perspective.

Works Cited

Baker, Joseph Ellis. The Novel and the Oxford Movement. London: Russell and Russel, 1965.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1976.

Harris, Elizabeth Furlong Shipton. From Oxford to Rome. New York: Garland, 1975 rpt. 1847.

Levine, George. The Boundaries of Fiction. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1968.

Newman, John Henry. Apologia Pro Vita Sua. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968.

———. An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. Notre Dame: Notre Dame U P, 1979.

———. Idea of a University. Notre Dame: Notre Dame U P, 1982.

———. Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert. Edited with an Introduction by Alan G. Hill. New York: Oxford U P, 1986.

———. The Tamworth Reading Room. In Essays and Sketches II. Ed. Charles Frederick Harrold. New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1949.

———. Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford. In The Works of Cardinal Newman III. Westminster, MA: Christian Classics, 1966.

Newman After a Hundred Years. Ed. Ian Ker and Alan G. Hill. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1990.

Tillotson, Kathleen. Novels of the Eighteen-Forties. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1954.

Ward, Wilfrid. The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman I. New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1912.

Wolff, Robert Lee. Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England. New York: Garland, 1977.

Woodfield, Malcolm. R. H. Hutton: Critic and Theologian. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1986.

John Henry Newman: A Man for Our Time. Ed. Terence R. Wright. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Grevatt and Grevatt, 1983.