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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. 16 ENDNOTES (1) INTRODUCTION. On praying for dying Scott, Newman to James Robert Hope 10/29/1852, Ornsby, 2007, p. 104 On tears for and Catholicity of Scott: Newman to J. Keble 12 Sept 1842 Ker, 1990, p. 252. . Newman recalled his first experience with Scott as having been around age eight -- in 1809, therefore, during his second year at Ealing School. It is more likely that he had first heard Scott three or four years earlier. For "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" appeared in 1805, the year before John Henry's father sent him a letter which he knew his son was able to read. If Newman, however, was as old as eight, I suspect that he was also given the text to read for himself. He would in any event have heard his mother and her sister-in-law read and relish such lines as those about the ruined Cistercian abbey near Abbotsford which Father Newman would visit with the Hope-Scotts in bitterly cold January 1853: "If
thou wouldst view fair Melrose aright,
Go visit it by the pale moonlight; For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild but to flout the ruins gray." (Canto II, 1) From his mother and Aunt Betsy young John Henry also heard the medieval hymn that precedes the conclusion of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel": "DIES
IRAE, DIES ILLA,
SOLVET SAECLUM IN FAVILLA (Canto VI, xxx) On July 13, 1852 at St. Mary's, Oscott during the first Provincial Synod of Westminster, Newman preached 'The Second Spring,' celebrating the re-establishment of a Roman Catholic hierarchy in England. See also http://www.newmanreader.org/biography/ward/volume1/chapter10.html (2) In 1871 James Hope-Scott sent Newman a copy of the edition he had personally edited of the already classic ten-volume life of Sir Walter Scott by Charlotte's father, John Gibson Lockhart. Newman's letter in reply allows an easy transition from Scott's descendants into the works Father Newman had read by Scott and their influence on him. Newman thanked Hope-Scott for a gift that he found especially apt:
My dear Hope−Scott,−−Thank you for your
book.
In one sense I deserve it; I have ever had such a devotion, I may call it, to Walter Scott. As a boy, in the early summer mornings I read 'Waverley' and 'Guy Mannering' in bed, when they first came out, before it was time to get up; and long before that, I think, when I was eight years old, I listened eagerly to the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel,' which my mother and aunt were reading aloud. When he was dying I was continually thinking of him, with Keble's words−−'If ever floating from faint earthly lyre,' &c. (Sixth after Trin.). ... It has been a trouble to me that his works seemed to be so forgotten now. Our boys know very little about them. I think F. Ambrose had to give a prize for getting up 'Kenilworth.' Your letter to Gladstone sadly confirms it. I wonder whether there will ever be a crisis and correction of the evil? It arises from the facilities of publication. Every season bears its own crop of books, and every fresh season ousts the foregoing. Books are all annuals; and, to revive Scott, you must annihilate the existing generation of writers, which is legion. If it so fares with Scott, still more does it so fare with Johnson, Addison, Pope, and Shakespeare. ... Ever yours affectionately, JOHN H. NEWMAN Memoirs of James Robert Hope−Scott, Volume 2 http://www.silkpagoda.com/dvdlist/acromax/7mjrh. (3) Scotland. Scottish Enlightenment. James BUCHAN. CROWDED WITH GENIUS: THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT: EDINBURGH'S MOMENT OF THE MIND. 2003. "For a period of nearly half a century ... the small city of Edinburgh ruled the Western intellect" (Prologue, p. 1). (4) Death of Sir Walter Scott. When he was dying I was saying prayers ...
for him
continually, thinking of Keble's words, 'Think on the minstrel as ye kneel.' Ornsby: Hope-Scott (2007), p. 104. During his last illness, Scott asked Lockhart to read to him; 'and when I asked from what book, he said, ---"Need you ask? There is but one.'" Lockhart read from the fourteenth chapter of St. John. As he sank into death he uttered passages from the Bible, or some of the magnificent hymns of the Romish ritual, in which he had always delighted. We very often heard distinctly the cadence of the Dies Irae, and I think the very last stanza that we could make out, was the first of a still greater favourite: Stabat mater dolorosa Juxta crucem lachrymosa, Dum pendebat Filius. ... [A.N. Wilson (1980), p. 92 f, citing J.G. Lockhart, LIFE OF SCOTT (1838), iii 128.] (5) Maisie Ward, YOUNG MR. NEWMAN, 1948, p. 157. Quoting from letter to sister Harriet. (6) On Mary Monica ("Mamo") Hope-Scott. For Newman's "distinct following with little girls and growing girls," see Sugg, 1996, p. 110. "Letters to Hope-Scott always sent affectionate messages to her." For Mamo's later life, ibid., p. 272. "Mamo
Hope-Scott, the heir to Scott's house, Abbotsford, had been
presented at court, enjoyed a London season and then came home to be
with her sick father. She accompanied him abroad, stayed with him as he
weakened, wrote faithfully to Newman to report the ups and downs of his
illnesss. After a mourning period for him she married the Hon. Joseph
[Constable-] Maxwell and became Mrs. Maxwell-Scott. She joined the band
of writing ladies with some Catholic biographies and two books about
Abbotsford and kept in touch with Newman at all times."
(7) On James Robert Hope-Scott see Robert Ornsby, 2007, MEMOIRS, passim. In London on April 6, 1851, Passion Sunday, both former Archdeacon Henry Edward Manning and his friend James Hope were received into the Catholic Faith by Jesuit Father J. Brownhill, Manning at the 9:30 high mass, Hope at 3:00 p.m. Only ten weeks later, on Trinity Sunday, Cardinal Wiseman ordained Manning a Roman Catholic priest. Charlotte Scott-Hope within weeks accepted her husband's religion. (8) On Newman's two visits to Abbotsford. More on Scott's descendants. Scott's country estate is being steadily re-evaluated upwards both for powerfully, perhaps ruinously, motivating Scott to earn money through writing and as neo-Gothic architecture much copied throughout Europe, including Tsarist Russia. For the latest scholarship see Iain G. BROWN (ed.) ABBOTSFORD AND SIR WALTER SCOTT: THE IMAGE AND THE INFLUENCE. Father Newman twice, at twenty year intervals, was house guest and celebrated mass in the chapel at Walter Scott's Abbotsford estate, less than fifty miles southeast of Edinburgh. The first time his host and hostess were James and Charlotte Hope. The second and last time was hosted by twice widowed James Hope-Scott. In 1852 Hope and his first wife, Charlotte, Walter Scott's granddaughter and soon-to-be heiress, were living at Abbotsford as tenants of her brother, a soldier in India. After Newman had lost the Achilli case but before sentencing, the couple invited him to spend Christmas 1852 - 3 with them at Abbotsford. Newman spent a six week holiday in Scotland at Abbotsford as one of several house guests. This was after losing in the Achilli libel trial but before final disposition of the case. Exhausted and recovering from a bout of influenza, Newman arrived in Sir Walter's "Conundrum Castle," with its surprisingly cramped, dark corridors and wind-swept bedrooms. These visits are particularly well covered by Meriol Trevor: the 1852-3 one (1962) pp. 615 - 619 and that of 1872 in (1963), p. 506f. See also the Hope-Scott MEMOIRS (Ornsby 2007). The Hopes had a private chapel. In 1852 - 183 The local bishop allowed Newman to celebrate Mass there and be responsible for local Catholics over Christmas. But Father Newman was so weak that he begged off sick calls [Trevor (1962), p. 618]. The weather was terrible, permitting Newman only two days walking by December 27. The wind whistled through a house bursting with noble guests, including Arundels. All were in chapel frequently. Students of Abbotsford have made much of Newman's descriptions of living conditions at Abbotsford: Its passages so narrow that "I could shake hands with the nursery
maids
in the rooms opposite me, without leaving my own room -- and sometimes
of a morning or evening in going down stairs, seeing nothing, I hear a
step approaching, and am obliged to stand still where I am, for fear of
consequences, and then a little light figure shoots past me on the
right or left. ... Once there was an awful moral stoppage, neither
daring to move.' " [Ian Ker, 1990, p. 398, citing Dessain,
LD 247]
And whom did those nursery maids who shook hands with the good Father take care of? Mary Monica Hope-Scott, born 10/02/1852, only 2 1/2 months before Newman's arrival. In 1853, on the death of her childless brother, a soldier serving in India, Charlotte Scott Hope inherited Abbotsford. Title passed immediately to her husband, voluntarily renamed for the purpose James Robert Scott-Hope. A flourishing lawyer and major Anglican and Catholic philantropist, Scott-Hope advised Newman during during the Achilli libel trial and later mediated between Newman, the Irish bishops and certain parties in Rome. In July 1872 Newman paid a second visit to Abbotsford. Newman was annoyed by the surge of tourist visits to Abbotsford since 1852-53. NOTE: Abbotsford had been opened to tourists five months after the Laird's death -- to raise money to pay his remaining debts.] They were poking their heads in the windows before 6:00 a.m. [Ker,1990, p. 672, citing LD 140]. Newman's twice widowed friend James Hope-Scott was in very poor health and the two friends were never to meet again. Newman was likely the last house guest Hope-Scott personally received at Abbotsford. Hope-Scott then went into decline and died in London April 29, 1873. A shaken Newman preached and was near tears over Hope-Scott's coffin May 5, 1873 at a requiem Mass in London. For the lengthy text see Ornsby (2007), Appendix I. For the flavor of the cordial relations between Hope and Newman see: _J. R. Hope, Esq., Q.C. to the Very Rev. Dr. Newman._ 5 Calverly Terrace, Tunbridge Wells: October 23, '52. Dear
Newman,--I am much grieved by the account of your health which you
send. Do, I entreat you, take rest at once--and by rest I
understand, and I suspect from Dr. Murray (?), total removal from work and change of scene. We hope to go to Abbotsford early next month. We have a chapel in the house, but no chaplain. You would confer on us the GREATEST pleasure, and would at the same time secure your doctor's object, if you would come down there and spend with us the three or four months which will elapse before our return to town. You can say mass at your own hour, observe your own ways in everything, and feel all the time, I hope, perfectly at home. Do, pray, seriously think of this. ... Wife and child well. Yrs affly, JAMES R. HOPE. I subjoin a few lines from Dr. Newman's answer to this invitation (which at first he was unable to accept):-- It
would be a great pleasure to spend some time with you, and then I
have ever had the extremest sympathy for Walter Scott, that it would
delight me to see his place. When he was dying I was saying prayers
(whatever they were worth) for him continually, thinking of Keble's
words, 'Think on the minstrel as ye kneel.'
(Dr. Newman to J. R. H. from Edgbaston, Birmingham, Oct. 29, '52.) Not less interesting is a letter in which he recalls this visit, years after. Writing to Mr. Hope-Scott on Christmas Eve, 1857 [compare p. 131], Dr. Newman says:-- I am glad to call to mind and commemorate
by a letter the pleasant days
I
passed in the North this time five years. Five years has a melancholy sound to me now, for it is like a passing-bell, knolling away time. I hope it is not wrong to say that the passage of time is now sad to me as well as awful, because it brings before me how much I ought to have done, how much I have to do, and how little time I have to do it in.... Ornsby, Hope-Scott, 2007, p. 103f see on-line http://www.dominiopublico.gov.br/download/texto/gu007975.PDF For the end of the Scott family line consult http://www.thepeerage.com/p4690.htm#i46900 (9) What Newman read. In a very short time I found a dozen or so uses of Scott by Newman. There may be hundreds. Perhaps Newman scholars have run them down, either in Newman's own works or in the works 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 Lockart [Ornsby, 2007] , 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 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 many scholars, Scott's most convincing novels are about Scotland and the border country with England and times no farther back than 1715, a time for which young Scott could draw on recollections of participants in various 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 either oral memories of ballads and written records. Newman seems to cite from ready memory from 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 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) (10) For Newman's initial reaction to IVANHOE, see Ian Ker, 1990, p. 11, citing LD Volume One, 72 (11) Newman on Scott in "Poetry with Reference to Aristotle's Poetics" (1829). passim. (12) Newman on Scott in THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY (1852) For the paucity of Classic English writers who are Catholic, see Svaglic, 1982, p. 229. For Walter Scott as part of the English vernacular, see, p. 234. For Scott's style as non-ornamental: Svaglic, 1982, p. 210. For Scott on examiners who ask unfair questions: ibid., p. 269. (13) Newman on Scott in APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA (1864) William Odie, editor, JHN, APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA, 1993, "A Correspondence" XII, p. 17f. Citing Scott, THE FORTUNES OF NIGEL, Chapter 32. (14) Newman on Scott in AN ESSAY IN AID OF A GRAMMAR OF ASSENT (1870) Using GRAMMAR (Inroduction by Lash, 1992), for the imagining of King James I as sketched in THE FORTUNES OF NIGEL: see Chapter III, p. 42. On PEVERIL OF THE PEAK, Chapter VIII, p. 263f. (15) Scott as prelude to re-Catholicized Britain For Scott's lifelong wrestling with the Gothic in literature see Fiona Robertson, 1994, passim. On Scott's religion see A. N. Wilson, THE LAIRD OF ABBOTSFORD, 1989, chapter five. This chapter focuses on the two novels of how the Reformation came to Scotland, THE MONASTERY and THE ABBOT. --
"Yet there can be no doubt from THE MONASTERY and its sequel that he
believed the Reformation to be divinely inspired." p.
95
-- "Religion, in Scott's pages, is more often a source of division and pain than of solace and peace." p. 96 Scott felt that a danger of Papism is that it makes men passive, quietist. 98f. See also Michael E. SCHIEFELBEIN, 2001, '"Unguarded Gaiety": Catholicism in Walter Scott's The Monastery and The Abbot', pp. 15 - 55. For the impact of IVANHOE and Scott's other "medieval" romances, see ibid., chapter eight. On Scott preparing Britain for Catholicism: Ian Ker, 990, p. 173, citing Newman, Prospects of the Anglican Church [British Critic, April 1839]. For the text and context on-line see http://www.newmanreader.org/works/essays/volume1/prospects.html p. 268. (16)There is much support for Abbotsford in the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club http://www.eswsc.com/ which provided the link below: http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4740408.stm £10m target to save Scott's home
By Giancarlo Rinaldi BBC Scotland news website South of Scotland reporter The historic home of Sir Walter Scott in the Borders has been set a £10m target in order to survive. Failure to raise the sum could see Abbotsford House - near Melrose - close to visitors within four to five years. Executors of the estate of Dame Jean Maxwell-Scott, the National Trust and Faculty of Advocates, have drawn up a strategy to raise the funds. Half the money would be used to improve facilities, with the rest put in an endowment fund to cover trading losses. Abbotsford administrator Jacquie Wright said the loss of the house - where Scott wrote the Waverley novels - would hit the area hard. "It is a major visitor attraction in the Borders without a doubt," she said. "He was the world's first best-selling author. "In the UK, sad to say, he is not fashionable but he is still fashionable in Russia, the Baltic countries and United States. "We get around 31,000 to 35,000 visitors a year and 35% to 40% of them are foreign. "It's a sort of place of pilgrimage for many people." Ms Wright has ambitious plans to boost the house as an attraction, currently open from March until October, and continue the good work done in preserving it by Patricia and Jean Maxwell-Scott. Without the £10m funding package required, however, Ms Wright said the house could be living on borrowed time. "It is difficult to say how long it will last," she said. "There is an annual deficit because most of these houses have an annual deficit - it might be four or five years." Executors of the estate of the last family member to live in the house, Dame Jean Maxwell-Scott, have also expressed concerns that plans for housing nearby could hamper their fund-raising. They have written to Scottish Borders Council objecting to the inclusion of plans for housing nearby in its finalised local plans. ....................... They say that it could put off potential donors to the £10m target. The council's development control manager Alistair Lorimer confirmed that a continued application for about 70 houses opposite Abbotsford was expected to come up for consideration later this year. He added that this could be decided before the public inquiry into their local plan because of supplementary guidance on housing developments. The authority has previously stated that the preservation of trees and new planting could minimise any adverse effects on Abbotsford. Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/scotland/4740408.stm Published: 2006/02/23 10:18:10 GMT © BBC MMVII revisited 01/13/2008 Dallas, Texas |