The tests sound as though they would leave most of us to fall by the wayside. In Discourse V, however, he gives a more succinct account of the relation of gentlemanliness both to a liberal education and to religion:
Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life; - these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a University; I am advocating, I shall illustrate and insist upon them; but still they are no guarantee for sanctity or even for conscientiousness, they may attach to the man of the world, to the profligate, to the heartless …
Yet for all Newman’s stress on self-effacement and his insistence that refinement is not saintliness (although it ‘may set off and recommend an interior holiness just as the gift of eloquence sets off logical argument’), he leaves us in no doubt that it is not rough diamonds with hearts of gold or ‘nature’s gentlemen’ that he is talking about. It is those who have acquired their urbanity through the traditional processes of a privileged liberal education. In 1856 he put it even more sharply when he wrote that he had gone to Dublin because ‘the Holy See had decided that Dublin was to be the place for Catholic education of the upper classes in these Islands …’
So the conflicts between the desires of the different sponsors, and between aspiration and what was realistically possible, pile up. Newman wanted an idealized version of collegiate life under the dreaming spires, undefiled by the Reformation, trans-shipped to Leinster. And he wanted it to be filled with devoutly Catholic young men who combined the Whig virtues of an easy-going and cultured tolerance with the Tory virtues of a natural acceptance of authority and revealed truth. But neither economically nor sociologically was there room for a Christ Church on St Stephen’s Green, within a quarter of a mile of Trinity moreover, and Archbishop Cullen would not have dreamt of letting him have it even had it been practicable. And to compound the contradictions much of Newman’s thought was conditioned by the pluralism of Oxford, while the minds of others and the constitution with which he had to work were much more influenced by the model of the centralized and professorially controlled Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.
In the circumstances, what seems to me remarkable are not the considerable disappointments but that the scheme was not a more dramatic failure than it was. Newman survived in Dublin for six and a half years from the date of his 1852 lectures. For only four of them was he formally Rector, and there were frequent absences in Birmingham because he gave at least an equal priority to the affairs of the Oratory, which was another cause of dissension with Cullen. He established a house with about ninety students in the heart of Dublin, and indeed a University Church, with the somewhat disproportionate capacity of 1200. And the Catholic University as such survived until 1882, and then left substantial educational legacies, of which perhaps the most considerable has been the medical school, which could be regarded as ironical in view of the secondary role to which Newman relegated vocational education.
To what extent was Newman irrevocably Oxford-conditioned, even when he had spread a trail of intellectual and liturgical upheaval in that university and spent long years as exiled from the city as was the Scholar Gipsy? It was my predecessor in this series, A. N. Wilson, who, without himself uttering so obvious a thought, aroused in my mind the Scholar Gipsy comparison with his evocative television portrait last autumn, which left me with the loose impression of Newman haunting the Cumnor Hills and looking down with ineffable sadness at a Turneresque view of the Oxford skyline.
On the other hand, I. T. Ker, Newman’s 1988 biographer, wrote that it was ‘leaving Littlemore, unlike leaving Oxford or St Mary’s, [that was] very painful for Newman’. It was part of Newman’s fascination that he was frequently capable of unexpected judgements about places, as about people. He would be as good an example as one could possibly imagine of a figure who was quintessentially Oxonian rather than Cantabrigian. Yet, when he first saw Cambridge, at the surprisingly late age of thirty-one, he wrote, ‘I do really think the place finer than Oxford’. And when in 1846 he was on the most symbolically important journey to the Eternal City of any nineteenth-century person from England he perversely decided that Milan was ‘a most wonderful place - to me more striking than Rome’. He appears to have rated Milan Cathedral together with the chapel of Trinity College, Oxford - an unusual pair - as almost his favourite ecclesiastical buildings.