Literary Giants Literary Catholics (5 page)

It is indeed ironic that Wilde is remembered only for the tragedy of his life and not for its happy ending. His last will and testament remains, however, in the brilliance of
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
, a poem that bears a remarkable similarity to Thompson’s masterpiece “The Hound of Heaven” in its description of the triumph of Christ through the suffering and desolation of a misspent life:

     And thus we rust Life’s iron chain

          Degraded and alone:

     And some men curse, and some men weep,

          And some men make no moan:

     But God’s eternal Laws are kind

          And break the heart of stone.

     And every human heart that breaks,

          In prison-cell or yard,

     Is as that broken box that gave

          Its treasure to the Lord,

     And filled the unclean leper’s house

          With the scent of costliest nard.

     Ah! happy they whose hearts can break

          And peace of pardon win!

     How else may man make straight his plan

          And cleanse his soul from Sin?

     How else but through a broken heart

          May Lord Christ enter in?

Ultimately, the Decadents were far more in revolt against the humanistic “rationalism” of the post-Enlightenment than they were ever in revolt against the traditions of the Church. They sprang from the same romantic tradition as Coleridge and Wordsworth, seeking the soul and its secrets in a world that had seemingly lost its soul through a lack of belief in its very existence. Whereas Coleridge and Wordsworth had become sceptical about scepticism, the Decadents had become cynical toward cynicism. Furthermore, when their cynicism led them to sin, it brought them into contact with authentic tradition, specifically the Church’s teaching on the seven deadly sins, reflected most sublimely in art by the divinely inspired infernal and purgatorial visions of Dante. The Decadents were groping uncertainly and sometimes blindly in search of the same Dantean vision. Their own visions may have been pale reflections of Dante’s masterpiece, but they were visions of sublime reality nonetheless. The Decadents discovered the reality of sin and, having kissed it, recoiled from its embrace. Having experienced the dire consequences of the real absence of God, they hungered for His Real Presence.

Apart from the striking similarity between the Decadent and the Dantean, there is also an obvious affinity of inspiration and intent between Decadent works such as
A Rebours
and
The Picture of Dorian Gray
and the Faustian parables of Marlowe and Goethe. Perhaps the most striking example of a Decadent reworking of the legend of Dr. Faustus was “Finis Coronat Opus”, a short story by Francis Thompson. The hero, or more correctly the antihero, of Thompson’s tale is Florentian, a character cast in the same mold as Dr. Faustus or Dorian Gray, who also makes a pact with the devil in order to achieve his heart’s desire. Whereas Dorian Gray had desired physical beauty and eternal youth, Florentian desires poetic genius and supremacy in the arts. In return for this, the devil demands the blood sacrifice of Florentian’s wife. Florentian removes the crucifix from the altar, treads the prostrate cross underfoot and places a bust of Virgil in its place. He then murders his wife on the altar of Art. His wish is granted, but, as with Dorian Gray, it brings nothing but misery and despair. At the very last, as the unbarred gate of hell looms menacingly, he is granted a glimpse of lost innocence:

I met a child today; a child with great candour of eyes. They who talk of children’s instincts are at fault: she knew not that hell was in my soul, she knew only that softness was in my gaze. She had been gathering wild flowers, and offered them to me. To me, to
me
!

In many respects, the figure of Francis Thompson stands symbolically as a unifying force between the Decadent converts of the 1890s and the decidedly non-Decadent converts of the Edwardian and Georgian era, such as Chesterton, Benson, Baring, Noyes and Knox. Throughout the 1880s Thompson had led a life of penury, squalor and opium addiction. Homeless, hungry and befriended by prostitutes, his experiences inspired his most famous poem, “The Hound of Heaven”, written in 1889. Although Thompson was a cradle Catholic, the poem, with its potent and poignant depiction of a reluctant soul’s final acceptance of God’s relentless and fathomless love, remains a classic of conversion literature.

Maurice Baring was another writer whose conversion to Catholicism was influenced, at least in part, by Huysmans. In the early years of the twentieth century, when Baring was grappling with the tenets of Christianity, the line of reasoning in Huysmans’
En Route
struck him very forcefully. It was, however, another Frenchman who would have the greatest influence on Baring’s conversion. In 1898 he had met Hilaire Belloc for the first time, and the two men formed a friendship that would last the rest of their lives. Two years later Belloc and Chesterton met for the first time in a restaurant in Soho, and through Belloc, Chesterton became friends with Baring several years later. The friendship of these three men would later be immortalized in Sir James Gunn’s group portrait, which can still be seen in the National Portrait Gallery. Belloc, Baring and Chesterton, both singularly and collectively, represented the dominant force in Catholic literary circles throughout the first third of the twentieth century. Baring is the least known of the three, and his own literary achievement is sadly neglected today. His
Collected Poems
, published in 1925, included many of considerable merit, most notably the sonnet sequence “Vita Nuova”, written to commemorate his reception into the Church in 1909. Yet he was known principally as a novelist. His first novel,
Passing By
, was published in 1921 when he was already almost fifty years old, and his last was published fifteen years later, when his literary vocation was tragically cut short by the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease. In between he commanded a small but passionate readership and enjoyed much critical acclaim. His novel C, published in 1924, was highly praised by the French novelist André Maurois, who wrote that no book had given him such pleasure since his reading of Tolstoy, Proust and certain novels by E. M. Forster. If anything, Baring was to enjoy greater success in France than in England. Ten of his books were translated into French, with one—
Daphne Adeane
—going through twenty-three printings in the edition of the Librairie Stock. Others were translated into Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Hungarian, Czech, Spanish and German.

Although Chesterton and Belloc were great admirers of Baring’s work, others failed to share their enthusiasm. Virginia Woolf, taking the opposite view, attacked what she perceived as Baring’s “superficiality”. Largely neglected and misunderstood in England, Baring gained solace once again from the empathy exhibited by a more discerning readership across the Channel. In particular, he was “too moved to speak” when, six months before his death in 1945, he learned of the deep admiration that François Mauriac had for his novels. Mauriac had told the Catholic actor Robert Speaight: “What I admire most about Baring’s work is the sense he gives you of the penetration of grace.”

Perhaps the profundity at the heart of Baring’s fiction was encapsulated in the words of one of the characters from
Darby and Joan
, his last novel:

“One has to
accept
sorrow for it to be of any healing power, and that is the most difficult thing in the world. . . . A Priest once said to me, ‘When you understand what
accepted
sorrow means, you will understand everything. It is the secret of life’.”

These words, which for Virginia Woolf and others represented Baring’s “superficiality”, were at once both mystical and practical, so practical that Baring put them into practice, accepting his own debilitating illness with a contrite and heroic heart. In 1941, the year in which Virginia Woolf took her own life in an act of despair, Baring answered his earlier complaint that his body was “a broken toy which nobody can mend” with the reply that his soul was “an immortal toy which nobody can mar”.

Baring’s obituary in the
Times
on 17 December 1945 regretted that “many English readers” saw his novels as “a form of Roman Catholic propaganda” but maintained that he was “above all concerned to express a passionate conviction that belief in God can alone bring storm-tossed humanity into harbour”. After referring to Baring’s “friendship with the late G. K. Chesterton, and with Mr. Hilaire Belloc”, the obituary concluded with an assessment of Baring’s literary legacy: “Concerning his final position in literature, time may perhaps confirm the judgment of those who see in him one of the subtlest, profoundest, and most original of recent English writers.”

The emergence of G. K. Chesterton, who entered the literary fray at the dawning of the new century, heralded the second dynamic phase of the Catholic literary revival. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that Chesterton’s role in popularizing Catholicism in the twentieth century was as crucial as Newman’s had been in the previous century. It would also be fair to say that Chesterton’s mind was akin to Newman’s in its ability to communicate timeless truth with seemingly effortless clarity. He hammered the “heretics” in his book of that title and pitted their heresies against infallible “orthodoxy”. Then, in 1909, he became embroiled in the controversy raging in the Church between the traditionalists and the modernists. In prose as profound as Newman’s he argued the case for tradition, labeling it the philosophy of the tree.

I mean that a tree goes on growing, and therefore goes on changing; but always in the fringes surrounding something unchangeable. The innermost rings of the tree are still the same as when it was a sapling; they have ceased to be seen, but they have not ceased to be central. When the tree grows a branch at the top, it does not break away from the roots at the bottom; on the contrary, it needs to hold more strongly to its roots the higher it rises with its branches. That is the true image of the vigorous and healthy progress of a man, a city, or a whole species.

The modernists, by contrast, did not subscribe to such a concept of tradition, believing instead in “something that changes completely and entirely in every part, at every minute, like a cloud. . . . Now, if this merely cloudy and boneless development be adopted as a philosophy, then there can be no place for the past and no possibility of a complete culture. Anything may be here today and gone tomorrow; even tomorrow.”

Elsewhere Chesterton would describe tradition as the proxy of the dead and the enfranchisement of the unborn, and he also seems to have seen it as a weapon wielded by the Church Militant in her centuries-long war against heresy. The latter vision was never brought more vibrantly to life, quite literally, than in a memorable essay on Gothic architecture.

The truth about Gothic is, first, that it is alive, and second, that it is on the march. It is the Church Militant; it is the only fighting architecture. All its spires are spears at rest; and all its stones are stones asleep in a catapult. . . . I could hear the arches clash like swords as they crossed each other. The mighty and numberless columns seemed to go swinging by like the huge feet of imperial elephants. The graven foliage wreathed and blew like banners going into battle; the silence was deafening with all the mingling noises of a military march; the great bell shook down, as the organ shook up its thunder. The thirsty-throated gargoyles shouted like trumpets from all the roofs and pinnacles as they passed; and from the lectern in the core of the cathedral the eagle of the awful evangelist clashed his wings of brass.

Chesterton’s militant approach to the authentic tradition of the Church found expression in many aspects of his work. It surfaced in some of his finest verse, particularly in “Lepanto” and “The Secret People”, in which the influence of his friend Hilaire Belloc is obvious.
The Ballad of the White Horse
captured the imagination of a whole generation and influenced some of the century’s greatest writers. John Galsworthy, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were among its admirers, although Tolkien later became more critical of its undoubted flaws. It was also one of Graham Greene’s favorite poems. In an interview published in the
Observer
on 12 March 1978, Greene called Chesterton “another underestimated poet”. To illustrate the point, he cited the
Ballad
: “Put
The Ballad of the White Horse
against
The Waste Land
. If I had to lose one of them, I’m not sure that . . . well, anyhow, let’s just say I re-read
The Ballad
more often!”

Neither does Chesterton’s literary reputation rest solely on his poetry. On the contrary, his genius resides primarily in his prolific versatility. His many works of literary criticism were much admired, by T. S. Eliot among others, as were his biographies of Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Thomas Aquinas, but perhaps he deserves to be remembered above all for his handful of novels. As with his verse, these sometimes suffer from a slapdash approach, a carefree and careless disregard for structural discipline, but what they lack in technical tuning they gain in sparkling spontaneity. His first novel,
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
, addressed one of the central political and cultural issues of the century, the belief that “small is beautiful”. This was summed up by Adam Wayne, a character in the novel, with the proclamation that a place, however small, “which is large enough for the rich to covet . . . is large enough for the poor to defend”.

Chesterton’s second novel,
The Man Who Was Thursday
, was published in 1908. It is arguably the best, and is certainly the most perplexing, of his works of fiction. On a superficial level the plot is literally a plot, in the sense of the Gunpowder Plot, revolving around a group of anarchists apparently intent on destruction. On this level, the book’s subtitle, “A Nightmare”, seems singularly appropriate. As a dreamer has difficulty unraveling the meaning of his dreams—if, indeed, his dreams have any meaning at all—Chesterton seems to have difficulty unraveling the meaning of his nightmare. On the deepest level, however, the novel explodes with the brilliance of paradoxical pyrotechnics, a fantasy of fireworks that illuminate the darkness with the deepest truths about God and his Creation. Years later C. S. Lewis drew a surprising parallel between
The Man Who Was Thursday
and the works of Franz Kafka: