John Henry Newman read, studied and imitated Samuel Johnson’s style as one of the foundational influences on his own prose style. Attentive also to the Romantic poets, especially Southey and Wordsworth, his intellectual and literary roots were firmly planted in the English Augustan tradition of the eighteenth century of which Johnson was the titan. Included also were Edward Gibbon and Joseph Addison.
Johnson’s influence is evident in Newman’s balanced sentences, moral gravity and precise diction. Though he eventually moved toward a more fluid style, the structural discipline he learned from Johnson (1709-1784) remained the backbone of his prose style. The rules of Johnsonian balance had to be mastered before he could allow himself the freedom of modern prose and the distinctiveness of his own voice.
In The Idea of a University (1873), Newman claimed for the Augustans a superiority of English style sufficient to their account of the human condition. They were essential reading for the refined mind. Newman shared Johnson’s scepticism of easy progress and shallow optimism in favour of a sombre, duteous view of the world. Frequently citing Johnson in his letters and diaries, he recommended his works, especially Rasselas (1759) and the Lives of the Poets (1781) as models of clear thinking and succinct use of English. The precision of definitions found in Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) ensured that exposition was rooted in the accuracy of diction Johnson championed.
In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) Newman declared that as a young man at Oxford, he consciously set out to master English style by imitating the Augustan greats.
I at various times in my life have taken great pains with my style… I write, I burn, I write again. At one time, I think, I copied Johnson; at another, Gibbon; at another, Addison.
More than casual reading, this meant a rigorous observation of how Johnson built sentences. Johnsonian structure is evident in Newman’s early sermons, which use the triads (groups of three phrases) and antitheses (balancing two opposing ideas) that were Johnson’s trademarks. In his lectures on literature included in The Idea of a University, Newman presents Johnson as a primary example of a writer able to capture the nuances of human experience. A nation’s literature is formed by its great masters. Johnson is grouped with Shakespeare and Milton as the architects of the intelligent English mind. In the author of Rasselas he saw a fellow anti-idealist who understood that life is often a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed. Newman was moved by Johnson’s personal piety, to him proof that a man could be a literary genius and a humble Christian simultaneously.
Johnson was skilled in the deploying of the devices of parallelism and antithesis, the art of balancing two opposing ideas in a single sentence to create a sense of persuasive logic. In this passage from The Rambler (1750) Johnson examines the nature of hope and memory in heavy, rhythmic, seesaw of sentence structure:
The past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes invisible and imperceptible while we are yet pronouncing it.
Here he uses a triad of past, future, present and balances each with a definitive statement. It has the confidence of wisdom.
Newman uses the same structural skeleton in The Idea of a University, but softens the edges to in a new psychological fluency:
To pass from shadows and images to the truth is a serious thing; to pass from the truth to shadows and images is a fearful thing.
Like Johnson, Newman uses a constructed symmetry. He mirrors the first half of the sentence in the second half. This balanced style was the only way to express the evolving apprehension of complex human experience. Life is not one thing only, it is a tension between two things, faith and doubt, authority and liberty. Balanced sentences can hold two opposing ideas at the same time. But there is a difference between them: while Johnson’s sentence has the weight of a heavy bronze statue, Newman’s feels like a moving stream.
Newman revered Johnson the writer and he admired Johnson the man beset by debilitating illness, mental depression and physical ailments, anatomical peculiarities from birth. He was large and ungainly. Newman too had to contend with personal setbacks. He struggled with his own sensitivities, a thin-skinned temperament that was easily offended and emotionally vulnerable. In Johnson he found a model of how to be an intellectual often misunderstood or even ostracised, while remaining a suffering, resilient Christian. In his diaries and private correspondence, Newman reveals an emotional connection with Johnson’s spiritual life, illustrated vividly in what is known as the “Uttoxeter Market” incident. In 1781, as an old and famous man, Johnson stood bareheaded in the rain in the Uttoxeter market for several hours, in an act of public penance, to atone for having been disobedient to his father fifty years earlier. Newman was haunted and inspired by this event, causing him to reflect on the nature and necessity of penitence in his own life. Johnson was a an inspiring “trembling” soul:
He is one of those who, with all his faults, had a deep sense of the invisible world.
Newman frequently read Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations, a diary published in 1785, after Johnson’s death. It reveals a profound, “awful” reverence for the judgment of God. Many nineteenth-century critics found the book embarrassing because it showed Johnson’s fear of death and his struggles with what he saw as his own laziness. For Newman it showed the quality of Johnson’s humility. Johnson records his overwhelming bouts of anxiety about his moral failures. To many stoic Victorians this as a revelation of weakness, but to Newman Johnson’s over-worrying about his sins made him an authentic Christian. To him, Johnson had a “Catholic” temperament. His regard for tradition, his respect for authority, his belief in the power of intercessory prayer, made him a “Catholic without knowing it”, proof that the Old English character was naturally inclined toward the gravity and ritual of the ancient Church. Newman essentially saw Johnson as a giant who walked the path before him, one who proved that a man could be the greatest mind of his age while still kneeling in the dust of humble prayer.
Newman’s personal library at the Birmingham Oratory is a record of his intellectual life. It contains about 20,000 volumes. His collection of Johnsoniana is substantial, reflecting his lifelong habit of returning to the “Great Cham” for both stylistic inspiration and spiritual comfort. Central to Newman’s collection are The Works of Samuel Johnson LL.D (multi-volume sets). Newman owned several comprehensive editions of Johnson’s output, including the Philological Tracts and the Political Tracts.
The Rambler, The Idler, and The Adventurer were the journal-textbooks Newman used to study Johnson’s prose style. He kept these close at hand, prizing them as the peak of English essay writing. The Dictionary was there to satisfy Newman’s commitment to the precise use of words and the history of their evolution through literary quotes. This was how a language maintained its continuing integrity. There was Johnson’s novel, Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, subtitled “The Choice of Life”, with its sombre conclusion that human reason, on its own, cannot find ultimate happiness without divine aid. There was The Lives of the Poets, a model for Newman’s own literary criticism in his adopting Johnson’s method of biographical criticism, based on the principle that you cannot fully understand a poem without understanding the moral character of the person who wrote it. Boswell’s Life of Johnson LL. D (1791) is a sine qua non for any Johnson enthusiast such as Newman was, a model for his own life of deep friendships replete with conversation and debate. Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations count as the spiritual heart of the collection.
These books are housed still in the same room where Newman spent his final decades. He arranged his books not by subject, but by their importance to his “formation.” Johnson sits firmly in the section dedicated to English Classics, the bridge between Newman’s education in the classical languages and his modern English identity.
During the Oxford Movement years, when he was defending the Anglican Church as a via media between the Roman Catholic Church and the churches of the continental Reformation of the sixteenth century, Newman used a classic Johnsonian tactic. He believed that most theological arguments were actually verbal disputes caused by people using words loosely. To fix this, he reached for Johnson’s Dictionary. What is a Church? In his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837), Newman had to define what makes a church “visible” as distinct from “invisible”. His opponents argued that the “True Church” was simply a collection of holy individuals invisibly scattered across the world, in response to which Newman applied the Johnsonian solution of logic of definitions: a word like “Church,” by its etymology and historical usage, implies an ordered assembly or a corporation. A thing must be what it must be to remain itself:
A ‘Visible Church’ is not a mere ‘idea’ or a ‘feeling’; it is a body politic. To call a disorganized group of individuals a ‘Church’ is as much a violence to language as to call a scattered pile of bricks a ‘House’.
Newman does three things here that he learned directly from studying the Dictionary. As Johnson defines “network” as “anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections”, for example, Newman uses the bricks/ house analogy to make an abstract spiritual concept feel physical and undeniable. Johnson hated “cant”, pretentious or empty talk. Newman uses this same no-nonsense tone to shut down his opponents, effectively saying “use your words correctly or don’t use them at all.” And he employs the “is/is not” structure. It carries the weight of a judge passing a sentence, the hallmark of Johnson’s magisterial tone.
By using this taut Johnsonian discipline of defining his terms at the start of an argument, Newman made his later, more poetic “Catholic” arguments harder to dismantle. He built his house on a foundation of Augustan logic before he painted the walls. When Newman faced the greatest crisis of his life, the decision to leave the Church of England for Rome, he reached for the stark, rhythmic, simple style of Dr Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations. In 1845, while living in semi-monastic seclusion just outside Oxford at Littlemore, Newman wrote a prayer that captures the Johnsonian spirit of duty, moral seriousness and the fear of God’s judgement. It has balanced clauses and a heavy, monosyllabic weight:
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 last.
Newman builds momentum by grouping things in threes, safe lodging, holy rest, peace at the last, creating a sense of authority and finality. There are no fancy adjectives, only “busy world,” “safe lodging,” “holy rest.” There is not cant.
Johnson and Newman were determined to “redeem the time”. Johnson’s greatest fear was idleness; Newman’s constant prayer was that his work would be done before the night fell. Johnson’s prayers focus on the physical realities of aging and the “gloom” of the mind, Newman’s prayer acknowledges the “fever of life.” Life is a struggle that requires “support all the day long.” For Newman a man’s style is “a thinking out into language.” By choosing to think in the style of Samuel Johnson, Newman ensured that his own religious journey remained grounded in logic, history, common sense, even when dealing with the most mystical subjects. In the final decade of his life, as a Cardinal, Newman withdrew into the quiet of his library at the Birmingham Oratory, where Samuel Johnson remained a steady, comforting presence, by then less a stylistic model than a companion in old age. In his eighties, Newman could be found re-reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson. In his final years, he linked the “evening” of life to the “gloom” with which Johnson had battled, comforted by the fact that even a man as brilliant and “melancholy” as Johnson was had found peace at the end. As his own memory began to fade, Johnson’s solid and unmovable character provided a sense of stability for the old Oratorian. He commented to a friend:
One never tires of Johnson; he is so real. There is no ‘sham’ in him.
For Newman, Johnson represented a life that was humble before God, arrogant before nonsense, faithful to tradition. Although he wrote the Littlemore prayer in 1845, he continued to use it and give it to others until his death in 1890. On his deathbed in August 1890, Newman’s final days matched the “good death” he had admired in Johnson. Like Johnson, he shrank from any presumption about his salvation, stipulating for his epitaph Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem, “Out of shadows and images into the truth”, a final Johnsonian distillation, short, balanced, Latinate, focused entirely on the transition from the “fever of life” to the reality of the next world.
Reading Hour 