Literary Giants Literary Catholics (20 page)

Benson, however, achieved in his fiction what Belloc was striving to achieve in his nonfiction. In
Come Rack! Come Rope
!, possibly the finest of Benson’s historical novels, the whole period of the Reformation is brought to blood-curdling life. With a meticulous approach to period detail,
Come Rack! Come Rope
! leaps from the page with historical realism. The reader is transported to the time of persecution in England when priests were put to a slow and tortuous death. The terror and tension of the tale grips the reader as tightly as it grips the leading characters, who courageously witness to their faith in a hostile and deadly environment. Few novels have so successfully brought the past so potently to life. This is not to say that the work is flawless. Far from it. Belloc, who for the most part was a great admirer of Benson’s historical novels, complained that the description of daily life in
Come Rack! Come Rope
! was inaccurate, resembling life in the eighteenth, not the sixteenth, century.

Perhaps the clearest evidence of Benson’s genius is to be found in the ease with which he crossed literary genres. Aside from his historical romances, he was equally at home with novels with a contemporary setting, such as
The Necromancers
, a cautionary tale about the dangers of spiritualism, or with futuristic fantasies, such as
Lord of the World
. The latter novel is truly remarkable and deserves to stand beside Huxley’s
Brave New World
and Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
as a classic of dystopian fiction. In fact, though Huxley’s and Orwell’s modern masterpieces may merit equal praise as works of literature, they are clearly inferior works of prophecy. The political dictatorships that gave Orwell’s novel-nightmare an ominous potency have had their day. Today his cautionary fable serves merely as a timely reminder of what has been and what may be again if the warnings of history are not heeded. Benson’s novel-nightmare, on the other hand, is coming true before our very eyes.

The world depicted in
Lord of the World
is one where creeping secularism and godless humanism have triumphed over religion and traditional morality. It is a world where philosophical relativism has triumphed over objectivity; a world where, in the name of tolerance, religious doctrine is not tolerated. It is a world where euthanasia is practiced widely and religion hardly practiced at all. The lord of this nightmare world is a benign-looking politician intent on power in the name of “peace”, and intent on the destruction of religion in the name of “truth”. In such a world, only a small and shrinking Church stands resolutely against the demonic “Lord of the World”.

If Benson’s literary output encompassed multifarious fictional themes—historical, contemporary and futuristic—he also strayed into other areas with consummate ease. His
Poems
, published posthumously, displayed a deep and dry spirituality, expressed formally in a firmly rooted, if sometimes desiccate, faith. The same deep and dry spirituality was evident in
Spiritual Letters to One of His Converts
, also published posthumously, which offers a tantalizing insight into a profound intellect. A series of sermons, preached in Rome at Easter 1913 and later published as
The Paradoxes of Catholicism
, illustrates why Benson was so popular as a public preacher, attracting large audiences wherever he spoke. Particularly remarkable is Benson’s masterly
Confessions of a Convert
, which stands beside John Henry Newman’s
Apologia pro Vita Sua
and Ronald Knox’
A Spiritual Aeneid
as a timeless classic in the literature of conversion.

In
A Spiritual Aeneid
, Knox confessed candidly that Benson’s influence was crucial to his own conversion: “I always looked on him as the guide who had led me to Catholic truth—I did not know then that he used to pray for my conversion.” The other great influence on Knox’ conversion was G. K. Chesterton, and it is perhaps no surprise that Benson was a great admirer of Chesterton. Benson’s biographer, the Jesuit C. C. Martindale, who was himself a convert, wrote that Benson’s
Papers of a Pariah
were “noticeable” for their “Chestertonian quality”: “Mr. G. K. Chesterton is never tired of telling us that we do not see what we look at—the one undiscovered planet is our Earth. . . . And Benson read much of Mr. Chesterton and liked him in a qualified way.”

Further evidence of Chesterton’s influence on Benson is provided by Benson’s admiration of Chesterton’s
Heretics
. “Have you read”, he inquired of a correspondent in 1905, “a book by G. K. Chesterton called
Heretics
? If not, do see what you think of it. It seems to me that the spirit underneath it is splendid. He is not a Catholic, but he has the spirit. . . . I have not been so much moved for a long time. . . He is a real mystic of an odd kind.” Chesterton was not a Catholic in 1905, but
Heretics
was a first evidence that, as Benson put it, he “had the spirit”.

If links of affinity with Chesterton are less than surprising, Martindale’s assertion that there is a “disconcerting affinity” between Benson’s
Papers of a Pariah
and Wilde’s
De Profundis
are more intriguing.

Benson had, and Wilde was resolving, so he thought, to get, that direct eye for colour, line, and texture that the Greeks possessed. . . . In his direct extraction of natural emotion from simple and beautiful elements, like fire and wax, as in his description of the Easter ceremonies, [Benson] reaches, sometimes, an almost word-for-word identity with Wilde.

A further affinity with Wilde could be detected in Benson’s love for the theater. He was a keen theater-goer and had lectured on the theme of the Church and the stage. In 1914 he became particularly fascinated by Chesterton’s
Magic
, which was being staged on both sides of the Atlantic. During a visit to the United States, he was regularly to be found behind the scenes at rehearsals of the play. Benson appeared to be at the very height of his power and popularity, and one might have expected that he would have enjoyed considerable success as a playwright were he to have turned his creative talents in that direction. It was not to be. Before the end of the year, his life would come to an abrupt and unexpected end. The cause of death was pneumonia. He was only forty-three years old.

On 20 October 1914, the morning after his death,
The Times
carried the following tribute:

Well known as a preacher, he had a yet larger following as a novelist. His first book,
The Light Invisible
, was recognised at once by good judges as remarkable for a peculiar charm of mind and manner. . . . Considering the number of novels that he wrote, the wonder is that they should be as good as they are. . . . Undoubtedly he had great gifts.

Why, one wonders, has a writer of Benson’s popularity become so eclipsed by posterity? Why has a writer possessed with such “great gifts” failed to hold his own in the presence of lesser talent? The answer, perhaps, can be found in his militant and uncompromising defense of the Faith, a militancy and a lack of compromise that became strangely suspect in the age of “ecumenism”. In the decades after his death, Benson was attacked for exhibiting “triumphalism” (as if the Church Militant was not always mystically united to the Church Triumphant). Even among Catholics, his energetic proselytizing and uncompromising zeal led to criticism. “Most ‘cradle Catholics’ and many converts dislike those jibes at Anglicans”, opined the Catholic publisher and biographer Maisie Ward. “Moreover, along with the jibes at Anglicanism were attacks upon Catholic complacency.” Why, one is tempted to ask, is it reprehensible to criticize the complacency of the faithful—or, more correctly, the not-so-faithful—in the context of the Great Commandment of Christ that we should love God with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our mind? And as for the alleged “jibes at Anglicanism”, his attitude was expressed in his autobiographical
Confessions of a Convert
, published in 1913. Toward the end of the book, Benson asserted “that to return from the Catholic Church to the Anglican would be the exchange of certitude for doubt, of faith for agnosticism, of substance for shadow, of brilliant light for sombre gloom, of historical, worldwide fact for unhistorical, provincial theory”. This is certainly strong language, especially from the pen of a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but does it constitute a gibe? At worst, it could be said to display a tactless candor; at best, it shows a refreshingly sincere statement of belief. “I do not know how to express myself more mildly than that,” Benson continued, “though even this, no doubt, will appear a monstrous extravagance, at the least, to the sincere and whole-hearted members of the Anglican communion”.

The harshness, or “triumphalism”, of Benson’s words is best judged within the context of his belief in the objective truth and rectitude of the teaching of the Catholic Church. This belief was expounded with eloquence in an essay on the future of Catholicism published in 1910:

The modern thinkers take their rise, practically, from the religious upheaval of the sixteenth century. . . . Little by little there came into existence the view that “true religion” was that system of belief which each individual thought out for himself; and, since these individuals were not found to agree together, “Truth” finally became more and more subjective; until there was established the most characteristically modern form of thought—namely that Truth was not absolute at all, and that what was true and imperative for one was not true and imperative for another.

To illustrate his belief in the ultimate insanity of subjectivism, Benson quoted Chesterton that “the man who believes in himself most consistently, to the exclusion of cold facts, must be sought in a lunatic asylum”. Benson had no doubt that this subjectivism was an anarchy of antitheses, a
reductio ad absurdum
to which the objective authority of the Church was the only solution: “To the Catholic it appears . . . certain that the crumbling of all systematic authority down to that of the individual . . . is the death sentence of every attempt to find religious Truth outside that infallible authority to whose charge, he believes, truth has been committed.”

Are such words the product of “harshness”? Do they constitute a “jibe” against non-Catholics? Or are they, rather, the words of one who retains a refreshing sense of intellectual honesty? Are they, to echo Chesterton, the words of one who knows the difference between an argument and a quarrel? An argument, as Chesterton and Benson knew from their possession of more than a modicum of Latin, was a positive force for good, a
polishing
of perception. A quarrel, on the other hand, is a dispute that, lacking charity, can produce only enmity and, in consequence, a negation of perception. Arguments,
ipso facto
, are good and should be pursued with diligence; quarrels,
ipso facto
, are bad and are to be avoided wherever possible. And herein lies the secret of Benson’s falling from favor in the age of “ecumenism”. It was simply his misfortune to know the difference between an argument and a quarrel in an age that was blinded by the belief that they were synonymous.

Take “ecumenism”, for instance. Benson subscribed to the view that ecumenism, ultimately, should be translated as “you-come-in-ism”. Is this triumphalism? Perhaps so; but only in the sense that he desired that everyone should triumph over sin and death by entering into the fullness of Truth that Catholicism offered. Is it wrong to want what is best for others—even if it necessitates argument? Benson thought not. Perhaps, indeed, he was, and is, correct. The preference for dilution, as opposed to dilation, of the Truth has had harmful consequences. It is, in fact, only a short and dangerous step from dilution to delusion. It was, at least, a step that Benson could never be accused of taking.

15

_____

Concealed with a Kiss

The truth is that the modern world has a mental breakdown; much more than a moral breakdown. Things are being settled by mere associations because there is a reluctance to settle them by arguments.

G. K. Chesterton,
The Thing

T
HERE ARE SEVERAL WAYS
of approaching the writing of someone else’s life. The most commendable approach, and the approach that is so rarely achieved even when attempted, is to seek for perfect empathy in the pursuit of objective truth. This involves the subjugation of the self in the service of the subject and the quashing of any temptation to squeeze the subject into the ill-fitting clothes of one’s own prejudices and preconceptions. In short, the biographer must be subject to his subject and not make his subject subject to him. This is far easier said than done.

If a biographer succumbs to the temptation to make his subject dance to his own tune, or to the tune of the times in which he is living, he is in danger of presenting only a marionette to the reader. His desire to control his subject becomes a barrier to the truth. At one extreme, the desire to present one’s subject in the best possible light leads to hagiography, in which the biographer plays the role of a disciple paying homage to his master; at the other extreme, the desire to present one’s subject in the worst possible light leads to hackiography, or the hatchet-job, in which the biographer plays the role of the supercilious high priest demanding crucifixion. There is, however, another approach, which is motivated by the desire to paint one’s subject in one’s own image, or in the image of the latest prevailing fad to which one currently subscribes. In this case, the biographer plays the role of Judas, betraying his subject with a kiss. None of these approaches is satisfactory. In each case, the desire of the biographer has distorted the subject. Desire has become destroyer.