A WILD BEAST CAUGHT BY DR. WISEMAN: THE RHETORICAL PROBLEM OF CARDINAL WISEMAN IN CARDINAL NEWMAN'S AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

Wiseman further asserts in the prefaces and notes to his essays that his influence over Newman does not end with his intellectual defeat of Newman and Newman's subsequent conversion; he claims also to have set the direction of the rest of Newman's religious life. In a long footnote on his 1833 meeting with Newman in Rome, Wiseman relates that as a young man he had promised St. Philip de Neri

to introduce his beautiful Institute into England. But little could I foresee, when I received that most welcome visit, I was in company with its future founder . . . . [M]y early promise was not forgotten: and I record it, in gratitude and not for glory, that without violence or forwardness, my feelings respecting the modern 'Apostle of Rome,' led possibly to the first suggestion of what was soon spontaneously adopted, the introduction of the Oratory into England. ("Froude's Remains" 93-94).

This unity of mind between bishop and priest has, Wiseman insists, continued unabated ever since. Wiseman indignantly denies the reports of "Protestant writers and Protestant speakers" that "unkindnesses, or jealousies, or doubtfulness, had arisen between some converts and myself" as "a simple untruth" (Preface 2: x). In sum, Wiseman's writings, which were widely read, depict Newman as, under the Ultramontane thesis, he should have been: a man who finds the truth when he abandons his own false beliefs and accepts the teachings of a Catholic bishop, and then spends the rest of his life propagating the truth that he has found. Wiseman's writings thus both justify the charge of Catholic influence on Newman's conversion - upon which, as I have shown, the images of Newman-as-spy and Newman-as-intellectual slave depended - and themselves narrate a Newman who, following his intellectual defeat at Wiseman's hands, is now without individual initiative. The implications of Wiseman's work for Newman's literary authority are both clear and disastrous. In his Journal 1859-79, Newman explicitly examines this problem, analyzing the threat that Wiseman poses for his literary authority; in the Apologia itself, Newman attempts to rectify this problem by renarrating his relations with Wiseman.

Newman's anxieties about Wiseman's influence are discussed most openly in his Autobiographical Writings, particularly in the work known as The Journal, 1859-79, which Newman wrote and preserved for possible publication in anticipation of a posthumous attack on his reputation by the Ultramontanes (Tristam 24-25, 143-44, cf. Newman Journal 273-74). Newman wrote that if this situation should arise, a friendly biographer should defend him by publishing this "journal" - which is not so much a conventional journal as a series of retrospective autobiographical vignettes, written at erratic intervals - together with other autobiographical pieces and letters relevant to his Catholic life. Since Newman feared losing to biographers his authority to interpret his own life, the hypothetical biographer's role was to be restricted to writing the transitions needed to link Newman's words together; The Journal is thus more of a second autobiography than a diary.