and has an exquisite ear."[15] "I have only one sister alive
now," he said sadly in September, 1875, "and she is old, but plays
Beethoven very well.[16] She has an old-fashioned, energetic style of
playing; but one person, I remember, played Beethoven as no one else,
Blanco White. I don't know how he learned the violin, but he would
seem to have inherited a tradition as to the method of playing him."
"Both were violinists," writes Mr. T. Mozley of Blanco White and Mr.
Newman, "but with different instruments. Blanco White's was very
small.... Poor gentleman! Night after night anyone walking in the
silence of Merton Lane might hear his continual attempts to surmount
some little difficulty, returning to it again and again like Philomel
to her vain regrets.[17] With Reinagle ... Newman and Blanco White had
frequent (trios) at the latter's lodgings, where I was all the
audience.... Most interesting was it to contrast Blanco White's
excited and indeed agitated countenance with Newman's sphinx-like
immobility, as the latter drew long rich notes with a steady
hand."[18] Dr. Newman was still "bowing" forty years later, by which
time the alleged "sphinx-like immobility" had made way for an
ever-varying expression upon his face as strains alternated between
grave and gay. Producing his violin from an old green baize bag,[19]
bending forward, and holding his violin against his chest, instead of
under the chin in the modern fashion, most particular about his
instrument being in perfect tune, in execution awkward yet vigorous,
painstaking rather than brilliant, he would often attend at the
Oratory School Sunday practices between two and four of an afternoon,
Father Ryder and Father Norris sometimes coming to play also. For many
years Dr. Newman had given up the violin,[20] but finding some of the
school taking to the strings, he took it up again by way of
encouraging them to persevere in what he deemed to be so good a thing
for his boys. And he quietly inculcated a lesson in self-effacement
too, for albeit he had begun the violin very long before our time, he
invariably took second fiddle. He had no high opinion of his own
performances. Answering the Liverpool anti-Popery spouter's summons to
battle, he relied rather on his friends' estimate of his powers than
upon his own. "Canon M'Neill's well-known talents as a finished orator
would make such a public controversy an unfair trial of strength
between them, because he himself was no