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Newman and the Oriel Fellowship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Martin J. Svaglic*
Affiliation:
Loyola University, Chicago 26, Ill.

Extract

What has made john henry newman so much more interesting to students of literature than most of his religious contemporaries is the rare blend in him of the artist, the intellectual, and the gentleman with the profoundly religious temper which judges the ultimate value of all activity in its movement towards or away from God. Whether it be called Christian humanism or some other name, it was a difficult balance that he sought to keep; and he has left us in his private papers a frank record of his struggles. The rich integration he eventually did achieve was the great source of his attraction for so different a contemporary in some respects as Matthew Arnold, for example, who ranked Newman with Goethe, Wordsworth, and Sainte-Beuve among the principal influences on his own development. At the outset of his career, however, Newman was being torn and pulled in opposite directions; and it is more than doubtful that he could ever have gained his equilibrium if he had not been elected a Fellow of Oriel College on 12 April 1822: “the turning point of his life,” as he would one day rightly call it, “and of all days most memorable.”

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 70 , Issue 5 , December 1955, pp. 1014 - 1032
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1955

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