Yet, despite some unwillingness to worship at predictable shrines, I think Newman did carry a half-visible Oxford canopy around with him for the forty-five years of his Roman Catholic life. In the seventh Dublin Discourse, for example, there is the panegyric of Oriel. It is worth citing at length for it is a typical, although by no means the most brilliant, example of Newman’s cumulative style, by which he uses cascades of words to build up an idea like a range of hills with each summit rising a little higher than the previous one, but also steers through this mountain chain in order to get into position for the next axis of aggressive advance. I say ‘aggressive’ for I find it beyond dispute that John Henry Newman, for all his portrait of that ‘parfit gentil knight’ which was his ideal of a gentleman, was a polemicist of an elegant deadliness that is met only once in a generation. The only comparable figure in this respect that I have encountered in our recent University is Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, who deserves his nobility as Lord Dacre even more for his sword than for his robe.
Newman’s quarry in this early part of Discourse VII was no less a figure than John Locke. Newman had perhaps a keener sense of intellectual than of ecclesiastical hierarchy, and he knew that Locke was too strong a fortress to be attacked without a considerable preliminary investment. Lesser (although by no means negligible) figures like former Lord Chancellor Brougham or Bishop Mattly of Durham he would engage more directly. Even in these lesser cases, however, there is an aesthetic pleasure in watching Newman get into position for the attack. His old adversary Dr Arnold of Rugby could hardly have prepared for a flogging with more loving care than Newman does for an intellectual joust. Just as Arnold, while rolling up his sleeves, might have referred to the eminence of the boy’s parents and the promise with which he came to the school, so Newman pays preliminary tribute to the general respect in which the right reverend prelate or the most learned lord is held and the lucidity with which he expresses his ideas; perhaps even (although not I think in the case of Brougham) to the probity of his personal life. Then comes the thrust, delivered like a matador’s deadly lunge.
But Locke, who although not well-treated by Christ Church at the time, had become almost as great a talisman for seventeenth-century Oxford as Newton had for the same period in Cambridge, could only be assaulted after a more elaborate approach march. So we have a eulogy of the recently dead Dr Copleston, Provost of Oriel in Newman’s early days and later Bishop of Llandaff, and with him of John Davison, another member of the Oriel galaxy whose devastating attack on R. L. Edgeworth’s fallacies on Professional Education was really, Newman says, an attack on the luminaries of the Edinburgh Review and behind them ‘an a far greater author … who in a past age had argued on the same side’. So the siege gun was at last in position for the engagement with Locke.
But in introducing his Irish and Catholic audience to ‘the Protestant Bishop of Llandaff’ Newman felt that he had a peg on which he could hang some of his feelings about Oriel, which had nurtured him for a quarter of a century but which in 1852 he had not seen for nearly a decade. As a further convolution he does so sufficiently archly that the name of Oriel, as though it were that of a modest mistress, is never mentioned, and I was indeed far into the passage before I was certain which college he was talking about:
In the heart of Oxford there is a small plot of ground, hemmed in by public thoroughfares, which has been in the possession of and the house of one Society for about 500 years. In the old time of Boniface VIII and John XXII, in the age of Scotus and Occam and Dante, before Wyclif or Huss had kindled those miserable fires which are still raging to the ruin of the highest interests of man, an unfortunate King of England, Edward II, flying from the field of Bannockburn, is said to have made a vow to the Blessed Virgin to found a religious house in her honour…
The visitor, whose curiosity has been excited by its present fame, gazes perhaps with something of disappointment on a collection of buildings which have with them so few of the circumstances of dignity or wealth. Broad quadrangles, high halls and chambers, ornamental cloisters, stately walls, or umbrageous gardens, a throng of students, ample reserves or a glorious history, none of these things were the portion of that old Catholic foundation; nothing in short which to the common eye sixty years ago would have given tokens of what it was to be. But it had at that time a spirit working within it, which enabled its inmates to do, amid its seeming insignificance, what no other body in the place could equal …
One of the things it did was to elect fellows solely on the basis of what Newman rather oddly described as ‘public and patriotic grounds’, and without regard not only to connection but also to university class lists. The result was that Newman’s disastrous schools results of 1820 were compensated for by his being elected a fellow of Oriel sixteen months later. For this he remained grateful, but his feelings towards that college, in spite of some fluctuations in his years of crisis, were I think based on a more lively emotion than that of gratitude. Oriel’s diversity of intellects and religious positions, as well as his memory of other colleges with broader quadrangles and more umbrageous gardens, infused much of his unrealistic hopes for what he might create in Dublin.