Literary Giants Literary Catholics (3 page)

     Oh, give us back the days of old! oh! give me back an hour!

     To make us feel that Holy Church o’er death hath might and power.

A similar vision was the inspiration for a young architect, Augustus Pugin, who converted to Roman Catholicism, probably in 1833, and set about promoting the hugely influential Gothic revival. The combined effect of the Oxford movement and the Gothic revival changed the metaphysical atmosphere considerably. As Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, the medievalist winds of change were sweeping across England.

The prophet of neomedievalism in the mid-nineteenth century was John Ruskin, whose influence on his contemporaries was gargantuan in its scope and impact. His art criticism developed into a spiritual history of Europe, epitomized by his famous essay “On the Nature of the Gothic”, and his love for the Italian Renaissance was infectious, introducing whole new generations to the art of the Church. For Ruskin, aestheticism and morality were inseparable. Thus, he argued, the beauty of early Renaissance art flowed freely from its creative source in the moral foundations of medieval Christendom. Consequently, aestheticism inevitably suffered when the humanism of the late Renaissance weakened the link with this Christian source. The more the Renaissance bloomed, he believed, the more it decayed.

Ruskin was an early champion of the Pre-Raphaelites, a brotherhood of artists who shared his aesthetic vision. Seeking a purer perspective untainted by the decay of the late Renaissance, the Pre-Raphaelites chose Catholic religious themes and scenes of mythic medieval chivalry as their subjects, painted in vivid color and detail. Their opposition to the fashionable conventions of Victorian modernism, both in art and morals, was itself a dissatisfaction with the drabness of the Victorian spirit and a quest for the purity and adventure of a healthier age. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, perhaps the greatest of the Pre-Raphaelites, chose Marian themes such as
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin
and
The Annunciation
, or Dantean allegories such as
Beata Beatri
, to convey a Catholic vision to a sceptical world. He also wrote fine religious verse, overflowing with medieval spirituality, akin to Coleridge’s earlier poetic quest for pre-Reformation purity. Yet Rossetti, unlike his sister, was not an orthodox believer. Neither was Ruskin, who spent several months in a monastic cell in Assisi, basking in the Franciscan spirit, before declaring that he had no need to convert since he was already more Catholic than the Church.

Ruskin’s vision, and that of the Pre-Raphaelites, was, at best, a baptism of desire into the Catholic spirit; at worst, their vision lacked any ultimate reality. It would take a remarkable man to unite the vision with the reality.

John Henry Newman’s conversion to Catholicism in 1845 sent shock waves through the Anglican establishment. Already well known as a leading protagonist of the Oxford movement, Newman’s reception into the Church was a courageously decisive act by a catalytically incisive mind. His act of conversion united the Catholic vision with the Catholic reality, the artistic word with the flesh of the Divine Artist, and the creative mind with the Body of the Church. In Newman, the convert and the authentic tradition became one.

Newman endeavored to explain the process of conversion in his first novel,
Loss and Gain
, a fictionalized semiautobiographical account of a young man’s quest for faith amid the scepticism and uncertainties of early-Victorian Oxford. It remains one of the classic Victorian novels. The novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward believed that it was one of the works to which “the future student of the nineteenth century will have to look for what is deepest, most intimate, and most real in its personal experience”. Newman also addressed the issue of conversion in his historical novel
Callista: A Sketch of the Third Century
. Although the setting had changed drastically, the same perennial questions confronted the characters of the third century as had beset Charles Reding, the youthful hero of
Loss and Gain
, sixteen hundred years later. A similar novel,
Fabiola: A Tale of the Catacombs
, had been published the previous year by Cardinal Wiseman, who was somewhat less subtle than Newman in his use of the fictional medium for propaganda purposes:

We need not remind our readers, that the office then performed was essentially, and in many details, the same as the daily witness at the catholic altar. Not only was it considered, as now, to be the Sacrifice of Our Lord’s Body and Blood, not only were the oblation, the consecration, the communion alike, but many of the prayers were identical; so that the Catholic hearing them recited, and still more the priest reciting them, in the same language as the Roman Church of the catacombs spoke, may feel himself in active and living communion with the martyrs who celebrated, and the martyrs who assisted at, those sublime mysteries.

Whereas
Fabiola
remains Cardinal Wiseman’s best-known work, much of Newman’s finest work was still to come. His
Apologia
, first published in 1865, remains probably the finest exposition of a religious conversion ever written in the English language. Its candor and clarity of vision won over many who had previously been hostile to Catholicism, and perhaps no book published since has been quite so instrumental in the popularizing of the Catholic faith in England.

In his
Sermons Addressed to Mixed Congregations
, published in 1849, Newman conveys with pyrotechnic profundity the fact that the modern world faces a stark choice between authentic tradition and the abyss of nihilism:

Turn away from the Catholic Church, and to whom will you go? it is your only chance of peace and assurance in this turbulent, changing world. There is nothing between it and scepticism, when men exert their reason freely. Private creeds, fancy religions, may be showy and imposing to the many in their day; national religions may lie huge and lifeless, and cumber the ground for centuries, and distract the intention or confuse the judgment of the learned; but on the long run it will be found that either the Catholic Religion is verily and indeed the coming in of the unseen world into this, or that there is nothing positive, nothing dogmatic, nothing real in any one of our notions as to whence we come and whither we are going. Unlearn Catholicism, and you become Protestant, Unitarian, Deist, Pantheist, Sceptic, in a dreadful, but infallible succession.

Newman’s message to his contemporaries, and to future generations, is clear: relearn Catholicism; that is, convert, or perish. Perhaps the inextricable link between tradition and conversion has never been put so forcefully, either before or since.

Reading these lines, it is easy to concur with the critic George Levine’s judgment that Newman is “perhaps the most artful and brilliant prose writer of the nineteenth century”. Such a judgment should not, however, detract from Newman’s achievement as a poet. His most ambitious poem, and arguably his finest, is
The Dream of Gerontius
, which presents the vision of a soul at the moment of death, and its conveyance by its guardian angel to the cleansing grace of Purgatory. Although it is steeped in Catholic doctrine, itself something of a novelty in Victorian verse, Newman’s poem has been compared with
Paradise Lost
. “It reminds us at times of Milton,” suggests the critic A. S. P. Woodhouse, “and it strikingly anticipates T. S. Eliot in its presentation of Christ as the surgeon who probes the wound in order to heal.” There is, however, none of Milton’s deformed, darker spirit in Newman’s poem. Instead, it resonates with the hopeful spirit of Dante’s
Purgatorio
and the glory of Dante’s
Paradiso
, which it resembles in faith, if not in form.
The Dream of Gerontius
is not a lament over a paradise lost but the promise of a paradise to be gained.

Newman returns to the purgatorial theme in “The Golden Prison”, in which Purgatory is described as “the holy house of toil, / The frontier penance-place”. As in all else that he wrote, it seems that Newman is more intent on instructing his readers than with entertaining them. Poems such as “The Sign of the Cross” and his hymn “For the Dead” are deliberately designed to elucidate those aspects of Catholicism that aroused the ire and suspicion of his non-Catholic or anti-Catholic contemporaries.

Paradoxically perhaps, Newman is at his most charming when he is at his least Victorian. In “The Pilgrim Queen”, subtitled “A Song”, he throws off the formalities of Victorian verse to unleash his muse on the simplicity of medieval rhythm and rhyme.

     I looked on that Lady,

          and out from her eyes

     Came the deep glowing blue

          of Italy’s skies;

     And she raised up her head

          and she smiled, as a Queen

     On the day of her crowning,

          so bland and serene.

     “A moment,” she said,

          “and the dead shall revive;

     The Giants are failing,

          the Saints are alive;

     I am coming to rescue

          my home and my reign,

     And Peter and Philip

          are close in my train.”

Newman’s choice of this particular and uncharacteristic verse-form to convey the story of England’s rejection of the Mother of God is intriguing. The jauntiness and joyful rhythm is reminiscent of pre-Reformation religious verse. It evokes England’s Catholic past, the mythic Merrie England that still had the power to move Newman’s contemporaries to feelings of nostalgia for a lost pastoral paradise in which people were united by a sure and simple faith. The jollity of the pre-Chaucerian meter serves as a counterpoint to the Pilgrim Queen’s sorrowful lament that England had betrayed and deserted her to erect “a palace of ice”:

     “And me they bid wander

          in weeds and alone,

     In this green merry land

          which once was my own.”

The betrayal, the desolation, the melancholy are all reminiscent of the anonymous verse “The Ballad of Walsingham”, which laments the destruction of England’s Marian shrine, once the most prestigious in Christendom, under Henry VIII. Yet unlike the sorrowful and plaintive passion of the “Ballad”, Newman’s “Pilgrim Queen” transcends and transforms the sorrow with the promise of future glory. Beyond the Passion is the Resurrection. The Queen will rescue her people, and, aided by the company of heaven, she will be restored to her rightful throne.

The balance and symmetry of “The Pilgrim Queen” is the balance and symmetry of the Rosary. England’s destiny, past, present and future, is reflected in the Rosary’s mysteries. From joy, through sorrow, to glory. As such, England emerges as a subplot in a far greater mystery play. The lost paradise of Merrie England is the lost Eden of humanity’s primeval past. The paradise has been lost through betrayal, and all that remains is the deep sense of exile at the broken heart of humanity. The brokenhearted can only look with hope for the promised glory—the conversion of humanity, and of England, through the restoration of the King and Queen to their rightful place. In tapping into authentic tradition, and calling for conversion, Newman had tapped into a wellspring of faith and hope.

Similarly, Newman had tapped into the hopes and aspirations of his fellow English Catholics when, with characteristic eloquence, he described the reestablishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England in 1850.

A great change, an awful contrast, between the time honoured Church of St. Augustine and St. Thomas, and the poor remnant of their children in the beginning of the nineteenth century! It was a miracle, I might say, to have pulled down that lordly power; but there was a greater and a truer one in store. No one could have prophesied its fall, but still less would anyone have ventured to prophesy its rise again. . . . The inspired word seems to imply the almost impossibility of such a grace as the renovation of those who have crucified to themselves again, and trodden underfoot, the Son of God. Who then could have dared to hope that, out of so sacrilegious a nation as this, a people would have been formed again unto their Saviour?

Having been received scarcely five years earlier, Newman was already emerging as a leading figure in English Catholicism and was the effective instigator of the Catholic literary revival, the beginnings of which coincided almost exactly with the hierarchy’s reestablishment. Ironically,
Anglican Difficulties
, the title given to a series of Newman’s lectures published in the same year, pinpoints the central difficulty at the heart of any discussion of Catholic literature over the following century and a half. There are “Anglican difficulties” in any such discussion because of the essentially Catholic nature of the work of some writers who belong to the Anglo-Catholic tradition in the Church of England. This tradition was responsible for the largely orthodox writing of, among others, Christina Rossetti, Dorothy L. Sayers and, most notably of all, T. S. Eliot.

Newman’s example, his genius, his energy and the impact of his life and work provided the creative spark that ignited and inspired a new generation of Catholic literary converts. One in particular was to become arguably the greatest of all the Victorian poets.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was received into the Catholic Church by Newman himself in 1866 and became, in literary terms, a sleeping giant. His friend Coventry Patmore probably summed up the Victorian attitude to Hopkins’ experimental approach when he confessed his critical reservations to Robert Bridges: “To me his poetry has the effect of veins of pure gold imbedded in masses of unpracticable quartz.” Although he remained utterly unknown as a poet during his own lifetime, he would emerge, thirty years after his death, as one of the most popular and influential poets of the twentieth century.

It is often said that Hopkins was ahead of his time, and perhaps there are few people to whom such a judgment could be applied more truly. Yet Hopkins was more than merely ahead of his time. He was outside his time, beyond his time. His verse is ultratemporal. It is essentially free, philosophically and culturally, of the fads and fashions of the Victorian age in which he lived. It is, however, equally free of the fads and fashions of the literary avant-garde that “discovered” and championed it during the period between the two world wars. Certainly there is no logic in the oft-repeated claim of many modern and “postmodern” critics that Hopkins should be considered a twentieth-century poet. Regardless of his undoubted influence on the poetry of the twentieth century, the publication of his poems so long after his death was essentially no more than an accident of birth.