The interest is mainly personal and psychological.  Newman’s writings, and his life, are a ‘human document’ in a very peculiar degree.  Bremond is right in calling attention to the autocentrism of Newman.  ’Although (he says) the words “I” and “me” are relatively rare in Newman’s writings, whether as preacher, novelist, controversialist, philosopher, or poet, he always reveals and always describes himself.’  Even his historical portraits are reconstructed from his inner consciousness; hence their historical falsity—­all ages are mixed in his histories—­and their philosophical truth.  In a sense he was the most reserved of men.  We do not know whether he had any ordinary temptations; we do not know whether he ever fell in love.  But the texture of his mind and the growth of his opinions have been laid bare to us with the candour of a saint and the accuracy of a dissector or analyst.  He reminds us of De Quincey, who also could tell the story of his own life, but no other, and whose style, like his own, was modelled on the literary traditions of the eighteenth century.

He has left us, in the ‘Apologia,’ a picture of his precocious and dreamy boyhood, when he lived in a world of his own, peopled by angels and spirits, a world in which the supernatural was the only nature.  He was lonely and reserved, then as always.  It is not for nothing that in his sermons he expatiates so often on the impenetrability of the human soul.  A nature so self-centred has always something hard and inhuman about it; he was loved, but loved little in return.  And yet he craved for more affection than he could reciprocate.  ’I cannot ever realise to myself,’ he wrote once, ‘that anyone loves me.’  It is a common feeling in imaginative, withdrawn characters.  Deepseated in his nature was a reverence for the hidden springs of thought, action, and belief.  When he spoke of ‘conscience,’ as he did continually, he meant, not the faculty which decides ethical problems, but the undivided soul-nature which underlies the separate activities of thought, will, and feeling.  In this sense the epigrammatist was right who said that ’to Newman his own nature was a revelation which he called conscience.’  He ’followed the gleam,’ uncertain whither it would lead him.  The poem ’Lead, kindly Light’ is the most intimate self-revelation that he ever made.  This mental attitude, which he took early in life, became the foundation of his ‘personalist’ philosophy, and of the anti-intellectualism which was the negative side of it.  But this reliance on the inner light, which nearly made a mystic of him, was clouded by a haunting fear of God’s wrath, which imparts a gloomy tinge to his Anglican sermons, and which, while he was halting between the English Church and Rome, plied him with the very unmystical question ‘Where shall I be most safe?’ an argument which he had used repeatedly and without scruple in his parochial sermons.[82]