elf,
and while conscious of his force, he was fully alive to the drawbacks,
moral and intellectual, which wait on the highest powers. When attacks
were made on him by authorities, as in the case of the Tract No. 90, his
more eager friends thought him too submissive; they would have liked a
more combative temper and would not accept his view that confidence in
him was lost, because it might be shaken.[63] But if he bent before
official authority the disapproval of friends was a severer trouble.
Most tender in his affections, most trustful in his confidence, craving
for sympathy, it came like a shock and chill when things did not go
right between himself and his friends. He was too sensitive under such
disapproval for a successful party chief. The true party leader takes
these things as part of that tiresome human stupidity and perverseness
with which he must make his account. Perhaps they sting for the moment,
but he brushes them away and goes forward, soon forgetting them. But
with Mr. Newman, his cause was identified with his friendships and even
his family affections. And as a leader, he was embarrassed by the
keenness with which he sympathised with the doubts and fears of friends;
want of sympathy and signs of distrust darkened the prospect of the
future; they fell like a blight on his stores of hope, never
over-abundant; they tempted him, not to assert himself, but to throw up
the game as convicted of unfitness, and retire for good and all to his
books and silence. "Let them," he seemed to say, "have their way, as
they will not let me have mine; they have the right to take theirs, only
not to make me take it." In spite of his enthusiasm and energy, his
unceasing work, his occasional bursts of severe punishment inflicted on
those who provoked him, there was always present this keen
sensitiveness, the source of so much joy and so much pain. He would not
have been himself without it. But he would have been a much more
powerful and much more formidable combatant if he had cared less for
what his friends felt, and followed more unhesitatingly his own line and
judgment. This keen sensitiveness made him more quickly alive than other
people to all that lay round him and before; it made him quicker to
discern danger and disaster; it led him to give up hope and to retire
from the contest long before he had a right to do so. The experience of
later years shows that he had despaired too soon. Such delicate
sensitiveness, leading