Newman on Art, Imagination, and the Classics: Callista Revisited

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Despite its popular success during his lifetime, Newman's historical novel Callista (1855) gradually fell out of fashion and is nowadays among one of his most neglected works. Even critics who are sympathetic to Callista cannot help but betray the feeling that the merits (if any) of Newman's second novel are pastoral or apologetic, rather than literary, and that its place in Newman's opus is minor at best. This essay will argue that Callista has been both undeservedly neglected and significantly misunderstood. Callista is an important work, possessing notable aesthetic merits and highlighting Newman's remarkable breadth of literary appreciation. The novel weaves an impressive web of literary intertexts and exhibits a sensitive and informed cross-fertilization between early Christian apologetics, martyr narratives and the Romantic historical novel. Above all else, Callista is a text with a strong meta-artistic dimension. Meaning, it is in the very act of writing the novel that Newman addressed to the issue whether, as a recent convert to Roman Catholicism, he could reconcile or negotiate the classical (pagan) tradition with Christianity. This essay will show the degree to which Callista tracks Newman's developing views on art and imagination, in the early period of his conversion. An attendant hope of this essay is that it can also supply a redressive response to Newman's late complaint that, when it came to Callista , "Catholics have [n]ever done justice to [it]."