SIR WALTER SCOTT AND JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

Remarks by Patrick Killough
to the 2007 Convention
of the Venerable John Henry Newman Association
Pittsburgh Holiday Inn

Friday August 10   8:30 - 9:20 a. m.

FOOTNOTE # 09

(9) What Newman read.

In a very short time while preparing these remarks I easily found a dozen or so uses of Scott by Newman. There may be hundreds more. Perhaps Newman scholars have run them down, either in Newman's own works or in the memoirs or correspondence of people who observed either or both men.

A. N. Wilson's LAIRD OF ABBOTSFORD has an arresting slant or two that helps link the men. Thus in Chapter Five, "Scott's Religion: THE MONASTERY and THE ABBOT," Scott is shown to have disliked ranting and enthusiasm in Protestantism. According to Lockhart, Sir Walter converted to Scottish Episcopalianism, a church

"whose system of government and discipline he believed to be the fairest copy of the primitive polity, and whose litanies and collects he reverenced as having been transmitted to us from an age immediately suceeding that of the Apostles." "Its historicity, in other words, was its truth."

Sound like Newman? (90). Any wonder then that Scott deserved a "place in the Tractarian mind?" (89)

Remember that Newman saw Scott's poetic "center" or leit motif as "chivalrous honour." Wilson sheds some light on that in Chapter Eight, "Scott's Medievalism."  To most scholars, Scott's most convincing novels are about Scotland and the border country with England and times no farther back than the Jacobite rising of 1715, a time for which young Scott could draw on recollections of participants in old battles. The reading public, by contrast, could not get enough of IVANHOE, THE TALISMAN and other tales set so far back in time that Scott had to get all his information from oral memories of ballads and written records.

Newman seems to cite from ready memory from what appear today the most obscure of Scott's works. Here is an example from Scott's last long poem, when he was ready to concede that he had met his match in Byron:

From Dessain, Letters and Diaries XXI, p. 457, Sugg (146) Newman writes to Emily Bowles. He compares Rome's view of the "peaceable" laity as "grossly ignorant and unintellectual" with the similar way the Bishop (misremembered as Abbot by Newman) of Durham around the year 1,000 converted Danish pagan, onetime church-destroying berserker Count Wittikind by giving him church lands. That is "peace making" Roman style! It also helped that Wittikind was growing too old to fight.

    "As he grew feebler, his wildness ceased,
    He made himself peace with prelate and priest."
            (HAROLD THE DAUNTLESS, Canto I, iv)