Stuffing birds or playing stringed instruments is an elegant pastime, and a resource to the idle, but it is not education.
CARDINAL NEWMAN: The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated (1873)
The eldest child of a London banker, John Henry Newman was elected a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, in 1822, and six years later, having taken Anglican orders, was appointed vicar of the Oxford University Church of St Mary, where he became celebrated as a preacher. In 1833, while travelling in the Mediterranean, he was felled by a fever that nearly killed him. ‘The pillar of the cloud’, which has inspired four popular hymns by Harris, Dykes, Purday and Sullivan, was written by Newman at sea, as he returned from Sicily and nearly died of typhoid fever. His ship was becalmed in the Straits of Bonifacio between Corsica and Sardinia, and it was while waiting in the stifling heat on deck for a breeze to spring up that he wrote the words (‘Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom’) of what has become one of the most popular of all hymns. It was first published in the British Magazine in 1834. Newman became a key figure in the Tractarian Movement, which stressed the Catholic aspects of the Church of England’s inheritance. The Movement’s Tract 90, which sought to reconcile the Anglican Church’s 39 Articles with Catholic teaching, caused an uproar and was rejected by the Oxford Heads of Houses. In 1842 he retired to the parish of Littlemore (see Pärt), a small village close to Oxford, to reflect on the seeming impossibility of finding a middle way between the Catholic Church and Protestantism. Eventually, he resigned his living of St Mary in 1843, and his Oriel fellowship in 1845, and was received into the Catholic Church. In 1848 he founded the Birmingham Oratory, where he lived for the rest of his life. He also founded the Oratory School in 1859. He was elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, in 1877, and became a cardinal of the Catholic Church in 1879. Newman’s important publications include: Parochial and Plain Sermons (1837), An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), in which he defended his religious opinions against Charles Kingsley’s attack, and The Dream of Gerontius (1865). He also wrote two novels: Loss and Gain (1848) and Callista (1855).
Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home –
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene – one step enough for me.
I was not ever thus, nor pray’d that Thou
Shouldst lead me on.
I loved to choose and see my path, but now
Lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.
So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on,
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone;
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.3
(Evans, Harris, Harwood, Lehmann, Purday, Sullivan, Tavener)
The Dream of Gerontius has occasionally polarized critical opinion. Neville Cardus, writing in the Manchester Guardian (1939), said: ‘If a German or an Austrian, a Czech or a Bashibazouk, had composed Gerontius, the whole world would have by now admitted its qualities.’ Delius, on the other hand, said to Eric Fenby (Delius As I Knew Him, 1936): ‘Elgar […] might have been a great composer if he had thrown all that religious paraphernalia overboard. Gerontius is a nauseating work […].’ Pope Pius XII confided to Sir John Barbirolli (quoted in Kennedy, Barbirolli, Conductor Laureate, 1971): ‘My son, that is a sublime masterpiece.’ At the head of the score stand the initials AMDG (Ad maiorem Dei gloriam) – ‘To the greater glory of God’ – that had been so often used by Bach; and after the final bar Elgar wrote: ‘This is the best of me.’ The figure of Gerontius fascinated Elgar, who wrote that he was ‘a man like us […] a sinner, a repentant one of course, but still no end of a worldly man in his life, and now brought to book. Therefore I’ve not filled his part with church tunes and rubbish but a good, healthy, full blooded romantic, remembered worldliness, so to speak. It is, I imagine, much more difficult to tear oneself away from a well-to-do world than from a cloister.’
Gerontius
Jesu, Maria – I am near to death,
And Thou art calling me; I know it now.
Not by the token of this faltering breath,
This chill at heart, this dampness on my brow,–
(Jesu, have mercy! Mary, pray for me!)
’Tis this new feeling, never felt before,
(Be with me, Lord, in my extremity!)
That I am going, that I am no more.
’Tis this strange innermost abandonment,
(Lover of Souls! great God! I look to Thee,)
This emptying out of each constituent
And natural force, by which I come to be.
Pray for me, O my friends; a visitant
Is knocking his dire summons at my door,
The like of whom, to scare me and to daunt,
Has never, never come to me before.
[’Tis death, – O loving friends, your prayers! –’tis he! …
As though my very being had given way,
As though I was no more a substance now,
And could fall back on nought to be my stay,
(Help, loving Lord! Thou my sole Refuge, Thou,)
And turn no whither, but must needs decay
And drop from out the universal frame
Into that shapeless, scopeless, blank abyss,
That utter nothingness, of which I came:
This is it that has come to pass in me;
Oh, horror! this it is, my dearest, this;]
So pray for me, my friends, who have not strength to pray.
Angel
Softly and gently, dearly-ransom’d soul,
In my most loving arms I now enfold thee,
And, o’er the penal waters, as they roll,
I poise thee, and I lower thee, and hold thee.
And carefully I dip thee in the lake,
And thou, without a sob or a resistance,
Dost through the flood thy rapid passage take,
Sinking deep, deeper, into the dim distance.
Angels, to whom the willing task is given,
Shall tend, and nurse, and lull thee, as thou liest;
And Masses on the earth, and prayers in heaven,
Shall aid thee at the Throne of the Most Highest.
Farewell, but not for ever! brother dear,
Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow;
Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here,
And I will come and wake thee on the morrow.
May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done! Then in His mercy may He give us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last1.