For most of the nineteenth century – the age of the Brontës and Jane Austen, George Eliot and Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and Mrs Gaskell, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning and Lord Byron – the Catholic community of Great Britain was a literary desert in which Cardinal Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua and The Idea of a University and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins were the only oases. From time to time hopes were raised by what turned out to be a mirage. James Anthony Froude – a prominent, if somewhat eccentric, Newman disciple – published The Nemesis of Faith, a novel that, as well as costing him his Oxford Fellowship, was an overnight sensation. But, as is often the case with such phenomena, it was quickly dismissed by more discerning critics as melodramatic rubbish. It was not until the turn of the century that anything like a Catholic literary revival began.
Catholics – at the end of the First World War something like 5 per cent of the total British population of about thirty-six million – could not have been expected to produce as many literary geniuses as were born and bred in the Protestant communities. The denial of university education may also have contributed to the dearth of Catholic writers of distinction, though it did not hold back either Dickens or Eliot. Whatever the reason for the absence of Catholic poets, essayists and novelists, it was so complete that, in Catholic Literature in the English Tongue, Newman wrote that ‘English Literature is essentially Protestant Literature’1 and was forced to take refuge in the notion that Walter Scott, an aggressive Protestant, had contributed to the Catholic cause by turning ‘men’s eyes in the direction of the Middle Ages’.
The same claim could have been made, with more justification, for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Holman Hunt’s Shadow of Death, Christ and The Two Marys and The Light of the World would not look out of place on the walls of a Catholic church. But, although Pre-Raphaelites ranged in belief from Tractarian to atheist, there was not a Catholic among them. In the nineteenth century the religion that inspired the Renaissance could do no better than produce the pictures of martyrs and statues of saints which, on display in parish churches, confirmed the piety, if not the aesthetic judgement, of the congregations. There was, however, one spark of light in the literary gloom. Although John Henry Newman did not know it, there was a poet of great distinction among his most devoted followers. Gerard Manley Hopkins – who had begun to write poetry when he was a Highgate schoolboy – went up to Balliol in 1863 and immediately became a devoted member of the Oxford Movement. He continued to write. But in 1868, when he was received into the Catholic Church and determined to become a Jesuit priest, he symbolically burned all his poems as a sign that he had turned his back on the secular world. Fortunately for posterity, he took the precaution of sending copies to his friend, Robert Bridges. Many of them were published after Hopkins’ death.
It was eight years before Hopkins’ compulsion to write returned. Then he wrote ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. It was dedicated ‘to the happy memory of five Franciscan nuns exiled by the Falk Laws [and] drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th 1875’. Its message was as Catholic as its inspiration. So was ‘sprung rhythm’, the metric style that Hopkins employed in much of his verse and which, he contended, was used by old English poets in the golden days before the Reformation. The poem was rejected for publication by The Month, a Jesuit periodical, because it was thought to be too hard for its readers to understand:
I did say yes
O at lightning and lashed rod;
Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess
Thy terror, O Christ, O God.
From then on, all Hopkins’ verse was inspired by his faith. Even his ‘simpler’ poems – a small minority of his work – reflected his piety. ‘Glory be to God for dappled things / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow.’ Hopkins died of typhoid fever in March 1889 after unhappy years as a parish priest in Oxford, Chesterfield, Liverpool (where he was horrified by the vice and squalor) and London. Thanks to Bridges, within a couple of years of his death some of his shorter poems appeared in anthologies of contemporary work. But it was not until 1918 that his faithful friend felt able to present the great body of his work to publishers and public. Hopkins died without realising that he was not only a major poet, but also the only genuine Catholic poet that England had produced since the Reformation.
In The Catholic Revival in English Literature Ian Ker – a parish priest as well as an academic theologian – identifies a similarity between the rhythm of Hopkins’ poetry and the metre of the litany. He also describes some of the later poems as ‘pastoral’ – not in the sense that they are about country matters, but because they concern a priest’s duty of care. While he was working as a parish priest in Oxford in 1879, Hopkins had written to Bridges, ‘I find with my professional experience now, a good deal to write on.’2 In ‘Felix Randal’ he describes how a priest watches over a dying man. The priest in ‘The Handsome Heart’ speculates about what gift he should make to a particularly assiduous altar boy. In ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and in a second ‘disaster poem’, ‘The Loss of the Eurydice’, he expresses something approaching guilt that no priest was at hand to hear the dying men’s confessions. Hopkins was a priest who wrote poetry about the priestly vocation.
By the early years of the new century there were a number of writers – mostly of the middle rank – who subscribed to the Catholic faith. That does not, in any real sense of the term, make them ‘Catholic writers’. Ernest Dowson (like Hopkins, a poet and convert) wrote several ‘devotional works’, including ‘Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration’ and ‘Carthusians’, but he was more at home in the Café Royal than in Westminster Cathedral and the true spirit of his verse is best illustrated by the defining lines of his two most famous poems: ‘They are not long, the days of wine and roses’ and ‘I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion’. He was a friend of Aubrey Beardsley, the illustrator of genius, whose aesthetic, and mildly decadent, views he shared. Beardsley too was a Catholic convert. So was Coventry Patmore, whose work was said, scandalously, to confuse spiritual and pagan love. Had it not been for Presbyterian prejudice – even against a lapsed Papist – Arthur Conan Doyle would have become the Liberal Member of Parliament for Edinburgh. However, Sherlock Holmes – devoted to deduction based on tangible evidence and addiction to morphine – cannot be described as a character who carries any sort of Catholic message. Wilfred Scawen Blunt, whose sonnets were said to be Byronic in spirit and form, was baptised into the Catholic Church when he was a child, as a result of Cardinal Manning’s influence over his (originally Anglican) mother. Perhaps, therefore, he should not be regarded as a convert. Most of the turn of the century’s notable Catholic authors certainly were – even though many of them were ‘Catholics who happened to write’, rather than ‘Catholic writers’ in the full meaning of the term.
Although Lord Acton wrote that Catholicism was ‘dearer than life itself’, he would have vehemently denied that his interpretation of history was influenced by his faith – even though he described the Reformation as the ‘great modern apostasy’.3 Acton represents the dignified school of Catholic writers. The disreputable school was led by Frederick William Rolfe, alias Baron Corvo. Rolfe converted in 1886 and, shortly afterwards, entered the Scots College in Rome. He was dismissed within a year. Nearly twenty years later he retaliated by publishing Hadrian the Seventh, a fictitious autobiography in which the hero is elected Pope but deposed. Ronald Firbank – the Catholic convert author of Valmouth, the erotic exploits of a middle-aged masseuse – was no more a ‘Catholic writer’ in the full sense of the term than Oscar Wilde, who was admitted to the Church shortly before he died. Francis Thompson’s ‘The Hound of Heaven’ is both religious and mystical:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind;
But it is not an intrinsically Catholic poem. Siegfried Sassoon has been claimed for Rome. But he was a poet of the First World War who became a Catholic in 1955. He joined the remarkable number of twentieth-century writers – Catholic by either the loose or strict definition of the term – who were converts. The list includes Edith Sitwell, Compton Mackenzie, Muriel Spark, Christopher Hollis and Ford Maddox Ford. It is headed by Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, G K Chesterton and Ronald Knox.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was a ‘Catholic writer’ in every sense of the term. He was born in Campden Hill, London in 1874 and educated at St Paul’s School and the Slade, but soon turned from fine art to journalism. Thereafter he wrote anything and everything – history, poetry, belles-lettres, fiction (including the Father Brown detective stories) and, above all, polemics. He became both loved and admired for the expansive nature of his thought, his personality and his stature. Occasionally his enthusiasm would result in the espousal of absurdity. Chesterton did not care. Nor did his vast army of devotees.
Like so many Catholic intellectuals, he looked back on the Middle Ages with a sentimental reverence that was unrelated to the facts. In his Short History of England (published in 1917) he devotes a chapter to ‘The Meaning of Merry England’. It contains a justification of torture in that happy land which is breathtaking, not because of its inhumanity, but because of its inanity:
Torture, so far from being medieval, was copied from pagan Rome and its most rationalist political science; and its medieval application to others beside slaves was really part of the slow medieval extinction of slavery. Torture is, indeed, a logical thing common in states innocent of fanaticism as in the great agnostic empire of China.
Chesterton would not, knowingly, have tortured a fly. And the great British public who read his journalism knew it and laughed at his excesses.
As long as they laughed, Chesterton was happy. He believed in what he called ‘beatific buffoonery’ – an attribute that he claimed was all-pervasive in the Olde England of maypole-dancing, village fayres and universally respected holy days. ‘Greek heroes do not grin but gargoyles do – because they are Christian’ and reflect ‘the deep levity of the Middle Ages’.4 He believed that humour was God-given and – though it would have been sacrilegious to be certain – probably sanctified by Christ Himself. That is the view with which he concludes Orthodoxy:
There was something that He hid from all men when he went up the mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was something that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.
In his Autobiography, published in 1936, Chesterton announced, ‘I could not be a novelist because I really like to see ideas or notions wrestling naked, as it were, and not dressed up in a masquerade as men and women.’ But he was a novelist. The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday do not compare with the work of Dickens, Chesterton’s literary idol. They were, nevertheless, examples of workmanlike fiction that is diminished in the author’s mind by his preference for the literature of ideas. He completed the self-analysis with the assertion, ‘I could be a journalist because I could not help being a controversialist.’ It was an enthusiasm that led him into a number of bad habits. They included the construction of aphorisms and paradoxes that, on close examination, are exposed as meaningless. ‘All roads lead to Rome; which is one of the reasons why many people do not get there.’ But because of his love of reckless controversy, Chesterton has the ability to embed his ideas in readers’ minds to a depth that more cautious writers find beyond them:
Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete … When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion but at the cry from the cross: the cry that confessed that God was forsaken by God … [There is] only one religion in which God is seen, for a moment, to be an atheist.5
Chesterton, who wrote extensively about beef and beer, would not have objected to being called a whole-hogging sort of person. ‘As an apologist,’ he wrote, ‘I am the reverse of apologetic.’ He did ‘not want to be in a religion in which [he was] allowed to have a crucifix’, but although the Catholic Church was disappointingly feeble about crucifixes, it remained ‘the only creed that could not be satisfied with a truth but only with the Truth’.6 The inclination to total commitment, which made him admirable in the eyes of the Church, sounded less admirable when it was deployed in support of less worthy causes, one of which was the defence of his brother Cecil, the editor of an openly anti-Semitic magazine. From time to time, that loyalty caused him to assume the deeply unattractive character of a plain man who speaks his mind, whether or not his views are socially acceptable. ‘I said that a particular kind of Jew tended to be a tyrant and another particular kind of Jew happened to be a traitor. I say it again.’ That was not the real Chesterton. The real Chesterton was the man who imagined that ‘the countries of Europe which are still influenced by priests are exactly the countries where there is still singing and dancing and coloured dresses and art in the open air’. He was the apostle of magnificent nonsense.
George Bernard Shaw wrote, not always complimentarily, of a literary figure called ‘Chesterbelloc’. Although G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc were not as indistinguishable as the idea of a composite character suggests, the two men had much in common. In particular, they had a mutually eclectic passion for writing in every genre. But Belloc was far more disciplined than Chesterton. He served a term first as a Liberal, then as an Independent, Member of Parliament and was literary editor of the Morning Post – occupations which Chesterton would have found irksome. Both men wrote humorous verse, histories, essays, novels and theological polemics. But they were divided by the circumstances of their birth. Belloc was born a French Catholic and became British by naturalisation. Chesterton was converted to Catholicism and was – by birth, upbringing and inclination – quintessentially English.
Hilaire Belloc was born in France but brought up in England – though he was so determined to maintain his dual nationality that he returned to France in order to serve in the army rather than lose his French citizenship. His mother had been admitted into the Catholic Church by Cardinal Manning, who became a lasting influence on her son. Manning’s views became his views and, despite three years at Balliol which ended in the award of a First in history, he was profoundly antagonistic to all other intellectual authority. In Hills and the Sea – a collection of essays published in 1906 – he was gratuitously offensive about the relationship between religion and formal scholarship: ‘When I thought carefully where the nearest Don might be at the moment, I decided that he was at least twenty-three miles away and I was very glad. It permitted me to contemplate … with common sense and with Faith – which is Common Sense transfigured.’7 That was how he regarded the ‘profound thing’ that he had learned from Cardinal Manning. ‘All human conflict is ultimately theological.’
Cardinal Manning’s obiter dictum coloured Belloc’s view of the world in general and of Europe in particular. It led him to conclude, in Survivals and New Arrivals, that ‘religion is at the root of every culture’ and that the rise and fall of nations was certainly influenced, and probably determined, by changes in the religion of nationalities. European civilisation, he argued, was the achievement of Christianity: ‘The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.’ He enlarged on the idea in Europe and the Faith. Because of ‘the grievous and ugly wound of the Reformation … the united body of European civilization had been cut asunder’. Britain must take a major share of the blame for the five hundred years of disunity that followed. ‘The defection of Britain from the Faith of Europe’ made the Reformation permanent, and influenced secular as well as religious life for the next five centuries. The Reformation, he argued, taught that the object of religion was ‘the salvation of the individual soul’, whereas Catholicism ‘had a corporate quality’. Belloc had no doubt that the Reformation promoted the emergence of the nation state. Prussian militarism, and therefore the First Great War, was the result of the Reformation preventing the spread of enlightenment to ‘the barbaric, the ill tutored and the isolated places external to the old and deep-rooted Roman civilisation’. Fascism was the consequence of ‘making the nation an end in itself’. Protestant princes’ insistence ‘that their power was not responsible to Christendom or any of it offices, but independent of them’, combined with Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, encouraged a ‘devotion to material success’ and was at odds with ‘the mystic Catholic doctrine of equality’.
That was the point at which the two interpretations of history – Chesterton and Belloc – converged without quite coinciding. Belloc was not the man to espouse belief in the idealised and entirely fictitious ‘Merrie England’ of the Middle Ages. But he too imagined that the quality of life had deteriorated since the Reformation. Once upon a time, a fair ‘distributive system’ was safeguarded by ‘the existence of a cooperative system, binding men of the same craft or the same village together [and] guaranteeing the small proprietor against the loss of his independence’. That had been destroyed. So had ‘the old safeguards of the small man’s property’. Essential values had been swept away by the passion for competition and the toleration of usury. ‘Lands and accumulated wealth of the old monasteries were taken out of the hands of their possessor’, bringing to an end the happy days when ‘poor men might go where they willed’ secure in the knowledge that they would be welcome to stay in religious houses with monks who regarded ‘nourishing hundreds’ as their sacred duty.
At least he was right about the impetus behind the closure of the monasteries, even if he was wrong about the invariable charity of the monks who were evicted from them. Some monasteries were corrupt, but most were closed at the behest of a ‘small wealthy class which used the religious excitement of an active minority as an engine to obtain material advantage for themselves’. But Belloc could not resist overstating his case. Like Chesterton, he traded in excess – a more austere excess, but excess nevertheless. ‘The Iconoclasts of greed joined hands with the Iconoclasts of blindness and rage and with the Iconoclasts of academic pride’ to end the old order. Belloc’s history mixed fact with fantasy, but his view of the world was just as idiosyncratic as Chesterton’s and, in one particular, it was less progressive than Newman’s. Back in 1865, Newman had accepted that Darwin’s Origin of Species was not, necessarily, at odds with the Christian view of creation. In his very public argument with H G Wells – in which he had expended 100,000 words of polemics, most of which were published in A Companion to Mr H G Wells’s ‘Outline of History’ – Belloc argued that the notion of evolution by natural selection was clearly confounded by cold-water mammals’ obvious difficulty in mounting ice-floes during the breeding season. He also contended that Wells was guilty of the ‘grievous fault of being ignorant that he was ignorant’.
Like Chesterton, Belloc was devoted to food and drink. It was said that Chesterton had soup stains on his waistcoat, while Belloc had fish bones on his lapels. Both men took pleasure in alcohol. Chesterton philosophised about beer; Belloc wrote poems about wine. One, written for Easter Sunday and called ‘God the Wine-Giver’, began: ‘Though Man made wine, I think God made it too.’ But he was also an intellectual who wanted to apply his intellect to ideas that are not susceptible to logical or historical examination. That quality made him assert as obvious truths – perhaps even as a higher truth – contentions which he felt no obligation to support with evidence. Often the message they carried was devalued by the verbal tricks with which they were displayed ‘The Catholic Church was, from Her origins, a thing not a theory … She was a society informing individuals, not a mass of individuals forming a society.’8
Hilaire Belloc’s The Path to Rome is part biography and part the story of an expedition across Europe. But unlike most travel books, it is so concerned with religion – the faith of the author and the devotions of the men and women whom he meets along the way – that it is more the account of a pilgrimage than the description of journey. A N Wilson, Belloc’s biographer, believes – and justifies his belief from the text – that what he witnessed in the small alpine village of Undervelier had a profound effect on the rest of his life. The sight that so affected Belloc was what seemed to be the whole population of the village turning out to attend vespers. ‘Having always thought of the Faith as something fighting odds, and having seen unanimity only in places where some sham religion glossed over our tragedies and excused our sins’,9 he was deeply moved to see that unanimous devotion to a creed was blighted by none of those defects. ‘My whole mind was taken up and transfigured by this collective act and I saw for a moment the Catholic Church quite plain and I remembered Europe and the centuries.’10
The man who could be so moved by the piety of an alpine village and who believed devoutly in the sanctity of the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was also the author of books of ‘children’s verse’ which were really written to amuse adults. Sometimes they contained valuable advice: ‘And always keep a hold of Nurse / For fear of finding something worse.’ Sometimes, as in the case of Lord Finchley, who electrocuted himself while changing a light bulb, they were social satire: ‘And serve him right. / It is the business of the wealthy man / To give employment to the artisan.’ And sometimes they amused the reader, despite having no real meaning: ‘Like many of the upper class / He liked the sound of broken glass.’ Belloc’s literary reputation, like so many of his aphorisms, is a paradox. It is his ephemera that have lasted and are still read a century after they were written. It is Belloc as a Catholic who was also a writer who is remembered. Belloc the Catholic writer has been overtaken by authors who saw their faith as more demanding and less forgiving.
Belloc’s humorous poems, though hardly profound, were far more intellectually sophisticated than Chesterton’s ‘nonsense verse’, which was often meaningless: ‘James Hogg / Kept a dog / But, being a shepherd / He did not keep a leopard.’ Neither of them had the nerve – solemn Christians would call it the impertinence – to set out a complicated theological theorem in the form of a limerick. That literary exercise was left to Monsignor Ronald Knox, a Catholic convert from the Church of England and a celebrity in the early age of broadcasting and ‘popular culture:’
Oh God, for as much as without Thee
We are not enabled to doubt Thee,
Help us all by Thy grace
To convince the whole race
It knows nothing whatever about Thee.
Ronald Knox was born into the Church of England. Both his grandfathers were bishops. His father was successively vicar of Aston, in the city of Birmingham, Suffragan Bishop of Worcester – an appointment that gave him episcopal responsibility for the industrial West Midlands – and Bishop of Manchester. Knox’s upbringing was impeccably upper-middle-class – Eton and Oxford – and he seemed destined to follow the family tradition and enter Holy Orders. The assumption that he was ‘called’ to the Anglican ministry was encouraged by the piety of his behaviour when he was an undergraduate. But the services in Balliol College Chapel –‘a tradition of “superior” music, indefinite dogma and manly sentiment’11 – were not to his liking. He preferred the form of worship practised in Pusey House and by the five priests in the community of St Giles. Devotions at Pusey House and the Society of St John the Evangelist – where Knox took Communion twice a week – ‘conveyed a feeling … of catacombs, oubliettes, Jesuitry and encouraged the atmosphere of mystery that fascinated me’.
In the autumn of 1909, Knox visited the Benedictine community in Caldey Island off the Tenby coast in Wales. He was enthralled by what he believed to be a model of the medieval Church and by the community’s leader. He asked his father, a leader of the evangelical movement within the Church of England, for permission to make confession to the High Church priests of Pusey House. His father reluctantly agreed and confession became a regular part of Ronald Knox’s week. He had become a thoroughgoing Anglo-Catholic.
Knox’s undergraduate years were an unremitting triumph. He won the Hertford Scholarship, the Craven Scholarship, the Gaisford Prize, the Ireland Prize and the Chancellor’s Prize, as well as being awarded a First. He was offered a tutorship at Balliol and a Fellowship – together with the college chaplaincy – at Trinity. By then he had decided on his vocation: ‘I wanted with all my soul to enter the Anglican ministry.’12 So he chose Trinity as the direct route to his ordained destination. There was a moment of brief embarrassment during the term’s leave before he joined the college. His was discharged as tutor to the young Harold Macmillan for the offence of exposing his charge to the insidious influence of Anglo-Catholicism. But that did not prevent the Bishop of Oxford agreeing that he should take an informal route to ordination and travel at an usually swift speed.
The literary career of Ronald Knox began within months of his taking up the Trinity tutorship. He had become associated with a group of young dons who met together each Friday for theological discussion. Five of them broke ranks and combined in the authorship of a book that advanced a ‘progressive’ view of the Church of England. It was called Foundations – A Statement of Christian Belief in Terms of Modern Thought. Knox’s first attack was a poem written in the manner of Dryden and entitled ‘Absolute and Abitofhell’. It was followed by a serious argument in favour of traditional values and practices. But Knox could not resist a touch of satire. The response to Foundations was called Some Loose Stones.
Adult converts have a duty to agonise about their decision, and Ronald Knox had more need to agonise than most. The carnage of the First World War made him long for a faith about which he had no doubts, but the obligation he felt towards his father and family made him hesitate. The result was a pamphlet, The Essentials of Spiritual Unity, which he began to write as an Anglican in 1915 and finished, as a Catholic, three years later. He did not apply for the renewal of his Trinity Fellowship. Instead – with the true confidence of the Old Etonian – he sought and obtained an interview with Cardinal Bourne, the Archbishop of Westminster. Bourne, like Wiseman before him, recognised the value of ‘celebrity converts’. Knox was told to teach at St Edmund’s College while he was ‘fast-tracked’ towards ordination for the second time in his life.
Knox was a bigger catch than Bourne could possibly have realised. For his restless talents could never be – and never were – satisfied with the duties that the Church required of him. After his appointment as Catholic chaplain to Oxford University he performed his duties assiduously. But still he had time to write. And his writing, and the broadcasting that followed, became his great contribution to the growing acceptance of Catholics and Catholicism in Britain. Despite Knox’s undoubted intellectual distinction, Chesterton and Belloc were clearly better writers. Knox’s Spiritual Aeneid, written shortly after his admission to the Church, is only a poor shadow of Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua by which it was inspired. But it was his trivial novels about high society, not his serious examination of spiritual awakening, that made him such an asset to the Catholics and Catholicism. An obvious English gentleman, who was also a priest, wrote fiction about the trivial affairs of the upper classes. It all helped to integrate Catholicism into what ordinary people called ordinary life.
In Knox’s Memories of the Future, Opal, Lady Porstock looked back from 1988 on the events of her long life. Sanctions: A Frivolity is the account of a house party given by Sir William and Lady Denham. It does contain the occasional good line. One guest is described as being ‘educated out of his prejudices without being educated into any principles’. It also contains a defence of spiritualism which Knox, in effect, repudiated in Other Eyes than Ours – another account of a house party that includes another good line: ‘If you have been corresponding all this long time with the dead, how is it that the dead have said nothing that is worth saying?’ From the 1920s onwards, Knox wrote a novel most years. More often than not they included ‘Catholic characters’. He abandoned detective stories in 1937, after he heard that Lady Acton, while cruising in the Mediterranean, had read half of his Double Cross Purposes and then thrown it overboard.13
The following year Knox wrote what he regarded as incomparably his best work of fiction. Let Dons Delight is set in the fictitious Simon Magus College, Oxford, where the narrator falls asleep after dinner and dreams of eight conversations at high table that had taken place at fifty-year intervals between 1588 and 1938. In January 1939, Hilaire Belloc was sent the proofs and judged the work to be ‘a masterpiece’ by which he was ‘quite bowled over’.14 Despite that, it is not possible to come to a firm conclusion about whether or not Knox’s work was Catholic literature. He was certainly a Catholic, but his position in the pantheon of English writers is less secure.
Knox’s popularity, and his consequent importance in ‘humanising’ the Catholic Church, was increased by his aptitude and enthusiasm for performing on the radio – or ‘wireless’, as it was known in its nascent years. His first broadcast was made from Edinburgh on November 25th 1923, barely a year after the BBC – in process of changing from Company to Corporation – had been created. He wrote his own script and read it in an assumed voice in the manner of an extended news bulletin. The headline announced that a revolutionary mob had occupied Trafalgar Square, sacked the National Gallery and was marching on the Houses of Parliament. Many listeners – not accustomed to ‘tuning in’ – took the broadcast seriously. John Reith, managing director of the BBC, made a public apology, even though he had received ten times as many compliments as complaints. The Daily Express, Daily Mirror and Evening Standard all denounced Knox. But that did not prevent them from employing him as a columnist. In 1926 he earned about £1,300 from journalism – £15 a week from regular columns in the Evening Standard and The Universe.15
Knox thrived in the era of the ‘wireless’. Cardinal Bourne was naturally unwilling to have the Mass broadcast through a medium which, as name of the activity confirmed, might scatter the liturgy on stony ground. But he did agree to the Catholic Church contributing to the series of Sunday sermons. Knox was by far the most popular of the radio preachers – so popular that when the BBC discovered that he was to spend the Easter of 1938 in Dublin, it pioneered a link with the Irish Broadcasting Company rather than have another cleric speak on ‘What Happened on Easter Morning’. But most of his broadcasting was about ‘current affairs’ – alongside, or in debate with, Bernard Shaw, J B Priestley and Beverley Nichols, the fashionable controversialists of the day.
It says much for Knox’s energy and self-confidence that, immersed as he was in radio and print journalism, he volunteered to make a new translation of the Bible. English Catholics, who possessed bibles, were still using Richard Challoner’s eighteenth-century revision of the Rheims and Douai Testaments, which had been published in 1582 and 1609. Cardinal Hinsley, Cardinal Bourne’s successor as Archbishop of Westminster – undeterred by the fate of the proposed Newman version in 1855 – was determined to sponsor an English-language version of the Bible which was the work of an Englishman, and when Knox heard of Hinsley’s firm intention, he offered to fulfil the ambition that Newman had been denied. The Cardinal consulted his bishops and in November 1938 wrote to the volunteer, ‘We have confidence in you as the one man who can give an English text, readable and understood of the people.’
Knox completed his translation of the New Testament in five years. A limited edition was published in April 1944. At first, for reasons that were never clear, the bishops felt unable to give it their collective backing. But after a year of discussion – and uncharacteristic cries of pain from Knox – yet another new Archbishop, Cardinal Griffin, announced his endorsement and provided a preface that commended Knox’s ‘masterly command of the English language and limpid style’. Despite those qualities, the ‘Knox Bible’ was rarely used and is now largely forgotten. So what must have been Knox’s hope – that he would have a lasting effect on Catholics and Catholicism – was never realised. But he played a noble part in reconciling the people of Britain to the presence of Catholics among them. And posthumously he was rewarded by a literary accolade: the publication of his biography by one of the great Catholic writers of his era. The author was Evelyn Waugh.
Two of Waugh’s novels, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, were written before his conversion to Catholicism in 1932, the year in which he wrote Black Mischief. And, insomuch as Catholicism is mentioned at all in that early work, it is portrayed as a sinister and unattractive conspiracy. Father Rothschild, ‘a sly Jesuit’ in Vile Bodies, knows all about intrigue: ‘A lock does not prevent a spy from hearing us; but it does hinder us, inside, from catching the spy.’ It was not until after the war – in which he, improbably, served in the Royal Marines – that Waugh began to write seriously, though often satirically, about the Church of his adoption. It is not to doubt the sincerity of his belief to say that Waugh, like so many other truly Catholic writers, saw his faith as all that was left of a better age. He makes that claim directly in the Sword of Honour trilogy and by implication in Brideshead Revisited. The world of Guy Crouchback and Charles Ryder has been corrupted by the changes that were thought necessary to win the war. It is Captain Ryder who, driven to despair by Second Lieutenant Hooper, doubts the wisdom of promoting first-rate NCOs into second-rate officers. Evelyn Waugh, in print and in life, liked the world as it used to be.
Waugh’s early manhood was not one long and unmitigated triumph. He came down from Oxford without taking a degree, with the intention of enrolling in art school and becoming a printer of the elevated William Morris kind. He found himself, or was found, unsuited to the occupation. So he became an assistant master in a prep school, where he wrote his first novel. Showing it to his friend, the aesthete Harold Acton, was an error of judgement. Acton was so critical that Waugh burned the manuscript and contemplated suicide. After being sacked from a ‘crammer’ for harassing the matron during a drunken night out, he joined the Daily Express as a gossip columnist. At last he turned to writing – first a biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The novels followed. So did Waugh’s reception into the Church by Father Martin D’Arcy, a Farm Street Jesuit. In Brideshead Revisited, Rex Mottram (the Canadian adventure) is ‘instructed’ in preparation for admission by Father Mobray, also of Farm Street:
Then again I asked him; ‘supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said “It’s going to rain”, would that be bound to happen?’ ‘Oh, yes Father.’ ‘But supposing it didn’t?’ He thought for a moment and said, ‘I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.’
Waugh’s Catholicism is obvious enough in his biographies of Helena (the Christian convert mother of Constantine the Great) and Edmund Campion, the Jesuit martyr. But neither are great works of literature. The ‘Catholic novels’ undoubtedly are – not least because they concern the sort of unyielding Catholicism in which Waugh believed. To him, the Vatican Council of 1962 was a retrograde step back from the absolute rules laid down by the Council of Trent. His genius lies in the way in which he illustrates the good Catholic’s respect for the Church’s teaching – often without the reader noticing. In Unconditional Surrender – the third volume of the Sword of Honour trilogy – Guy Crouchback spends an evening with Virginia Troy, his much-remarried ex-wife. To Virginia’s surprise, the highly respectable Guy wants to make love. Then she realises that, in his Catholic eyes, they are still married. The louche Virginia – the Protestant partner in her mixed marriage to Guy – regards the idea as disgusting. But the reader smiles at Guy’s naivety and notes that he is a man who respects the rules of his Church. The rules – whatever heretics may think of them – are important to Waugh.
Virginia contemplates arranging the abortion of a baby conceived in a previous liaison but decides against, not because of moral scruples, but because of the bizarre squalor of the premises in which it is to be performed. Her vice is in contrast to Guy’s virtue. He agrees to remarry Virginia (a legal and social, if not a religious, necessity) and after her death in an air raid accepts responsibility for her child. In that he is acting in accordance with the obligations of chivalry, not the Rules of Rome. But the two imperatives are related. Guy finds inspiration in the memory of Roger of Waybrooke, a knight who intended to join the Second Crusade but was shipwrecked near Genoa and buried near the Crouchbacks’ house in Italy. Antiquity is important to Waugh. So is life’s habit – as demonstrated by Waybrooke’s failure to reach the Holy Land – of not quite meeting human hopes and expectations.
The thought that some values abide through time is even a comfort to Charles Ryder, the narrator and central character (though hardly the hero) of Brideshead Revisited. Back, as a soldier, at Brideshead – where he had loved and lost – Ryder is inspired by the sight of the sanctuary lamp in the dilapidated chapel and the thought that what it signified had survived the years:
A small red flame – a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old Knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers far from home, farther in heart than Acre or Jerusalem.
What is it about the small red flame that disturbs Ryder’s world-weary cynicism? He is not a Catholic, and as his friend – the doomed Sebastian Flyte – explains, Catholics are not like other people: ‘They have an entirely different outlook on life.’ The Reserved Sacrament, which the lamp signified, was meant to meet the needs of people like Cordelia, Sebastian’s sister. She liked ‘popping in [the chapel] at odd times’. There are two possible theological explanations of his experience. Ryder’s reaction is either the first stage of the long journey to conversion or evidence that God reaches out and touches even the heathen. Or the passage may appear for the thoroughly laudable literary reason that the author wanted to make his readers finish the book in hope rather than despair. Writers who are Catholics want good reviews on earth as well as in heaven.
The plot of Brideshead Revisited turns on a miracle, but the miracle is entirely in the eye of the beholder. Lord Marchmain – a Catholic convert of no strong conviction and the head of the Flyte family – has returned home from Venice to die. His last moments are spent in proper aristocratic fashion with his family and close friends assembled in his house. His wife, a ‘bogus saint’, is there. So is the mistress for whom he left her. Julia, his daughter – recently divorced from Rex Mottram – is there with Charles Ryder. They have been in love for years and have, at last, decided to marry. The family takes it in turns to discuss whether or not the priest, who is waiting outside the sick-room, should be asked to come in and perform the last rites. Will the shock of seeing a priest kill Lord Marchmain there and then? Is it right to impose the rituals of the Church on a nominal Catholic? Eventually Julia takes the decision. ‘Father Mackay, will you please come in and see my father now?’ The nurse gives the comforting assurance that he is still alive, but ‘past noticing anything’, and ‘the priest bent over Lord Marchmain and blessed him’. Then Father Mackay says the fateful words, ‘I know you are sorry for all the sins of your life, aren’t you? Make a sign if you can.’
Lord Marchmain makes the sign and Julia tells Charles, ‘I can’t marry you. I can’t be with you ever again.’ She is not moved to obey the rules that forbid remarriage after divorce from a Christian union. By sacrificing earthly happiness, Julia hopes to ingratiate herself with God. ‘If I give up this thing I want so much, however bad I am, he won’t quite despair of me in the end.’ Julia is not much of a theologian. Even if God possessed human attributes, despair would not be one of them.
The novels of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene have in common a preoccupation with despair. Major Scobie, the colonial policeman who is the central character and flawed hero of Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, remembers that the priests taught him that suicide is ‘the unforgivable sin’ because it is ‘the final expression of unrelenting despair’. It is not surprising that so many of Greene’s Catholics lose hope of peace in this world and redemption in the next. They all carry the burden which the priest in Brighton Rock describes: ‘A Catholic is more capable of sin than anyone … Because we believe in Him we are more in touch with the Devil than other people.’ Belief becomes a burden. As Major Scobie complains, ‘The trouble is, we know all the answers. We Catholics are damned by our knowledge.’
To Greene, sin comes in many different shapes and sizes. The ‘whisky priest’, in The Power and the Glory – unfrocked by his Church and indicted as an enemy of an atheist state – is a ‘holy sinner’. Although he knows it to be a mortal sin, he continues to act as though he were still in Holy Orders. The men and women whose confessions he hears and to whom he gives Communion take a step nearer to heaven as a result of him turning his back on salvation. It is a reflection of the sacrifice that is celebrated in the opening chant of the Easter Vigil: ‘O necessary sin of Adam … that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer.’
Greene’s conversion to Catholicism dated back to 1925. ‘I began to believe in heaven because I believed in hell, but for a long time it was only hell that I could picture with any intimacy.’ The ‘picture’ did not do much credit to the power of his imagination. It was of a place in which ‘everybody was never quiet at the same time’ and the ‘lavatories were without locks’. Hell was Berkhamstead School, where he was educated and his father was headmaster. It was his fiancée who persuaded him to become a Catholic. During the instruction that preceded his admission to the Church, Greene ‘became convinced of the probability of something we call God’, but he was ‘not emotionally moved, only intellectually’. Evelyn Waugh was also an ‘intellectual’ convert who welcomed the fact that Father D’Arcy at Farm Street ‘never spoke of experience or feeling’, but simply set out the required doctrinal beliefs. Father D’Arcy claimed that it was Waugh himself who rejected the ad hominem route to Rome. ‘He was one of the most satisfactory people to talk to about faith whom I have ever known. He was very different from one or two others I can think of, who kept saying “Yes I think that corresponds to my experience.”’16
In Ways of Escape, his second volume of autobiography, Greene wrote that he ‘discovered some sort of emotional belief’ in 1938 – a date about which he could be precise because of circumstances in which his Catholicism took on a new dimension. The previous year he had begun to contemplate using Catholic characters in his fiction. The changes of heart and mind had the same cause. The Catholic Church was being persecuted by the government in Mexico and the priests were being shot in Spain because of their support for General Franco’s ‘anti-Communist crusade’. Catholicism was becoming exciting. The immediate result was The Power and the Glory, based on Greene’s experience as a journalist in Mexico.
Greene always insisted that the ideas expressed by his Catholic characters were not necessarily his ideas – indeed, being true to life, they were not necessarily the true ideas of the characters by whom they are expressed. There is, however, an undeniable similarity between what he said about life and what he wrote in his novels. Shortly before his marriage, Greene – in the mistaken belief that he was an epileptic – asked if it was acceptable to use contraception to avoid the procreation of similarly afflicted children. He was ‘repulsed’ by the ‘hard answer’, but impressed by the ‘unyielding façade’ of the Church. ‘Façade’ – defined as outward appearance – is an interesting choice or words. But whether or not he meant to imply an element of deception, he was illustrating the conflict between the admiration for strict rules and disgust at their harsh application. He could accept that to ‘miss Mass on a Sunday was to be guilty of a mortal sin’ and had no doubt that dogma was necessary to avoid Catholicism becoming as ‘foggy as Anglicanism’.17 But he had immense sympathy both for those who break the rules and those who find them incomprehensible. In The Heart of the Matter, Helen complains that the Church will forgive Scobie for sleeping with her, but not for marrying her. And Scobie risks his immortal soul – by taking Communion without making the confession that would precede the absolution of his sins – as the price of ensuring the happiness of both his wife and his mistress. Scobie, too, is a holy sinner – a man who, despite his many shortcomings, excites the reader’s sympathy rather than contempt because there are moments when his nobility shines through the fog of his flaws.
The constant examination of the conflict between the love of God and the love of man makes it hard to understand how Graham Greene could write, in Ways of Escape, ‘many times since Brighton Rock I have been forced to declare myself not a Catholic writer but a writer who happens to be a Catholic’. Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter could not have been written by someone who did not feel for the faith. The same is probably true of The End the Affair, though it has some very un-Catholic ingredients. One is a miracle performed by Sarah, the ‘heroine’. She touches a child’s cheek and the strawberry mark disappears. Another is God’s apparent acceptance of an offer that Sarah makes to Him. She promises that if Maurice, her lover, is brought back to life from under the pile of air-raid rubble, their adultery will end. Does God make bargains with sinners? Or was Maurice unconscious rather than dead, and God’s reward for Sarah’s sacrifice just the product of a convent-educated imagination? Back at Brideshead, Julia Flyte makes God an unconditional offer. The success of her gamble with grace – forgiveness in return for acceptance of the Church’s rules – is beyond verification. In The End of the Affair the miracle happens – or so the heroine believes. In Brideshead Revisited she gambles on God’s benevolence.
Both The End of the Affair and Brideshead Revisited raise a question that rumbles under the surface of many of Greene’s, and Waugh’s, novels and sometimes seems to need an answer from the Catholic Church itself. Is God really so preoccupied with sex? Although in The Heart of the Matter sex is not the fundamental cause of Scobie’s destruction, it is the fuse that ignites the explosion. Scobie commits the mortal sin of taking Communion without first making a confession because he cannot promise that he will never sleep with Helen again, even though he longs for the peace that would come with the end of his furtive adultery. Helen needs him. So does his wife. Doing what he sees as his duty requires him to maintain the pretence that he is a loyal and dutiful husband – a loyal and dutiful Catholic husband. That obliges him to accompany his wife to Mass and to kneel next to her to receive the host. The horror with which Scobie awaits what amounts to the approach of damnation is described with painful brilliance. But what Greene regards as the real moral of Scobie’s situation is set out during the account of a conversation he has with his parish priest.
Father Rank complains that people in trouble are more likely to go to Scobie for help and comfort than they are to go to him. He then asks, ‘If you were in trouble where would you go?’ Scobie replies that, ‘being dull and middle aged … [he] is not the sort of man who gets into trouble’. But he is thinking of the futility of asking the priest to answer the question which tormented him before he decided to take Communion, without the absolution of his sins. ‘I know the answer as well as he does. One should look after one’s own soul at whatever cost to another and that’s what I can’t do.’ Greene’s is a hard, demanding God who is constantly in conflict with the human instinct. That is why so many of Greene’s characters – men and women with whom the reader is intended to sympathise – hate their God. In The End of the Affair, Maurice, the atheist, first cries into the darkness, ‘I hate you, God. I hate you as though you existed.’ By the end of the book he is a believer. But the bitterness remains: ‘Oh God, you’ve done enough. You’ve robbed me of enough … Leave me alone for ever.’
Broken-hearted lovers cannot be expected to share the Church’s view of fate and faith. That is best left to one of Graham Greene’s priests. Father Clay, taking Scobie to view a corpse, represents invincible orthodoxy. The man had committed suicide – the ultimate blasphemy, since it results from despair of God’s love. ‘Mightn’t there,’ he asks, ‘be a hope that it is murder?’ Father Rank is a more human figure. After Scobie’s death, he reproves his wife for using the phrase ‘bad Catholic … Don’t imagine that you – or I – know anything about God’s Mercy.’ Then he pronounces what reads like Greene’s valedictory judgement on Catholicism: ‘I know what the Church says. The Church knows all the rules. But it does not know what goes on in a single human heart.’ As Greene has reminded his readers, the opinions expressed by his characters should not be thought of as a contribution to Catholic theology. But his novels – fiction though they are – like the novels of Evelyn Waugh, have an effect on the judgements on Catholicism which are made by readers in the real world. Both men were writers of undoubted genius. But theirs is a bleak view of life; and their work, for all its undoubted literary merit, paints an equally bleak picture of the Catholic Church.