Portraits and Miniatures(50)

Then, again, there is his exhortation, in Discourse VI, against losing one’s way in detail and specialization. He starts with a little text: ‘A great memory does not make a philosopher, any more than a dictionary can be called a grammar.’ Soon afterwards he goes into a fine passage which expands the need to command facts from a hillock, a sort of ‘Wellington at Waterloo’ theory of knowledge.


I say then, if we would improve the intellect, we must ascend … It matters not whether our field of operation be wide or limited; in every case, to command it, is to mount above it. Who has not felt the irritation of mind and impatience created by a deep rich country, visited for the first time, with winding lanes and high hedges, and green steeps, and tangled woods, and every thing smiling indeed, but in a maze? The same feeling comes upon us in a strange city, when we have no map of its streets. Have you not heard of practised travellers, when they come first into a place, mounting some high hill or church tower, by way of reconnoitring its neighbourhood. In like manner you must be above your knowledge, not under it, or it will oppress you; and the more you have of it, the greater will be the load.

So Newman could have been expected to be pretty strong on all the main issues that beset universities today. He would have been against contract funding, he would have supported tenure and academic freedom, certainly against any depredations from the state and probably instinctively against any from Archbishop Cullen, although he would have found it more difficult to speak unequivocally about this. Student loans, I think, he would have found difficult to engage with, although he would not have been in favour of encouraging the pursuit of careers of mammon in order to repay. I am not sure that he told us much about how to strike the balance between research and the teaching of the young, although his emphasis was all on the latter. He respected science, but I do not think that he regarded the advancement of the frontiers of knowledge as the most important form of human activity, any more than he did the pursuit of wealth. And there can be no doubt that he would have been on the restrictive side in recent controversies about experiments on the embryo.

I agree with the view of Professor Owen Chadwick (in his little book in the Past Masters series) that although Newman professed himself to have spent his life fighting liberalism, this was only true on his own very special and religious definition of liberalism, which almost equated it with intellectual brashness, and that some of his work had a considerable liberalizing influence. Yet, from the High Toryism of his outraged opposition to Catholic emancipation when he was a young Fellow of Oriel to his view when he was a very old man that issues should not be pursued when the results of the enquiry might unsettle ‘simple people’, his respect for ecclesiastical authority necessarily set limits to seeing him as the patron saint of universities as republics of ideas, as unfettered as they are broad-based.

I have talked more about Newman and less about universities than you might have expected me to do. That is partly because I have many more opportunities to talk about universities than I do to talk about Newman, and partly because I have found him a wholly absorbing even if sometimes provoking a subject.





Changing Patterns of Leadership: From Asquith via Baldwin and Attlee to Margaret Thatcher



This essay started life as a lecture given to the Institute of Contemporary British History at the London School of Economics in November 1987. It has been brought up to date mainly by the changing of tenses.





A Squith Became Prime Minister eighty-five years ago and held office for eight years, two hundred and forty-one days, which was then the longest continuous period since Lord Liverpool, the only Prime Minister to have made a reputation out of longevity. Walpole and the younger Pitt were both longer in office but their fame had other less arithmetical components. Mrs Thatcher overtook Asquith’s record on 3 January 1988. I am convinced that it is essential to have a cumulative period in office of at least five years in order to rank as a Prime Minister of major impact. No one of the last one hundred years who does not fulfil this criterion has achieved the front rank. Not Rosebery, not Balfour (although, despite the electoral ignominy of his fall, he comes nearest to being the exception), not Campbell-Bannerman, not Neville Chamberlain, not Eden, not Home, not Heath, not Callaghan. That leaves three Prime Ministers who served over five years in peacetime within my eighty-five-year span and are not mentioned in my title: MacDonald, Macmillan, Wilson. I left them out partly because I have not written books about them. But nor have I about Mrs Thatcher. She however was there for so long and provided such an idiosyncratic style of government that she demands inclusion.