Father Payne by A.C. Benson

I was walking one day with Father Payne; he said to me, "I have been reading Newman's _Apologia_ over again -- I must have read it a dozen times! It is surely one of the most beautiful and singular books in the whole world? -- and I think that the strangest sentence in it is this, -- 'Who would ever dream of making the world his confidant?' Did Newman, do you suppose, not realise that he had done that? And what is stranger still, did he not know that he had told the world, not the trivial things, the little tastes and fancies which anyone might hear, but the most intimate and sacred things, which a man would hardly dare to say to God upon his knees.

Newman seems to me in that book to have torn out his beating and palpitating heart, and set it in a crystal phial for all the world to gaze upon. And further, did Newman really not know that this was what he always desired to do and mostly did -- to confide in the world, to tell his story as a child might tell it to a mother? It is clear to me that Newman was a man who did not only desire to be loved by a few friends, but wished everybody to love him. I will not say that he was never happy till he had told his tale, and I will not say that artist-like he loved applause: but he did _not_ wish to be hidden, and he earnestly desired to be approved. He craved to be allowed to say what he thought -- it is pathetic to hear him say so often how 'fierce' he was -- and yet he hated suspicion and hostility and misunderstanding: and though he loved a refined sort of quiet, he even more loved, I think, to be the centre of a fuss!