Literary Giants Literary Catholics (6 page)

Is the difference simply that one is “dated” and the other contemporary? Or is it rather that while both give a powerful picture of the loneliness and bewilderment which each one of us encounters in his (apparently) single-handed struggle with the universe, Chesterton, attributing to the universe a more complicated disguise, and admitting the exhilaration as well as the terror of the struggle, has got in rather more; is more balanced: in that sense, more classical, more permanent?

In the light of Lewis’ comments it is interesting to note that Kafka was familiar with
The Man Who Was Thursday
.

Discussing both
Orthodoxy
and
The Man Who Was Thursday
, Kafka remarked that Chesterton “is so gay, that one might almost believe he had found God. . . . In such a godless time one must be gay. It is a duty.”

Another admirer of Chesterton’s first two novels is Terry Pratchett, the modern author of popular comic fantasy:

It’s worth pointing out that in
The Man Who Was Thursday
and
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
he gave us two of the most emotionally charged plots in the twentieth century: one being that both sides are actually the same side; it doesn’t matter which side we’re talking about, both sides are the same. This has been the motor of half the spy novels of this century. The other plot can’t be summarised so succinctly, but the basic plot of
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
is that someone takes seriously an idea that wasn’t intended to be taken seriously and gives it some kind of nobility by so doing.

Chesterton’s religious faith, which was present only implicitly in his first two novels, was much more to the fore in
The Ball and the Cross
. The two heroes, a devout Catholic and a militant atheist, are ennobled by their arguments and by their adherence to the ideals they espouse. Their nobility stands in stark contrast to the cynical indifference of the world they inhabit. On one level
The Ball and the Cross
can be seen as a parable of Chesterton’s arguments and relationship with George Bernard Shaw. Chesterton and Shaw disagreed passionately on most of the issues of the day but remained good friends. Their relationship was a living embodiment of the stricture to “love thine enemy”.

Manalive
is often overlooked when Chesterton’s novels are discussed and is arguably his most underrated work. It contains the charm, mystery and adventure of
The Man Who Was Thursday
and
The Ball and the Cross
but also has a depth beyond either of these, especially in its characterization of women. In Chesterton’s earlier novels, female characters play a peripheral role, whereas in
Manalive
they are not only central to the plot but possess a mystique that is absent, or at least only hinted at, in the earlier books. As
The Ball and the Cross
can be read as a parable of Chesterton’s relationship with Shaw,
Manalive
can be read as a parable of Chesterton’s relationship with Frances, his wife. The parallels between fact and fiction are obvious. The novel’s hero, Innocent Smith, was Chesterton, trying always to stir the world from its cynical slumber, while the heroine, Mary Gray, was Frances, the silence on which he depended utterly, the power behind the throne. On another level
Manalive
was a further affirmation of Chesterton’s philosophy of gratitude that had found its fulfillment in Christian orthodoxy. Ultimately, the novel’s whole
raison d’être
was to illustrate that the intrinsic wisdom of innocence was unobtainable to the naively cynical. This, of course, was the motive behind Chesterton’s creation of Father Brown, and it is no coincidence that the first volume of Father Brown stories, appropriately entitled
The Innocence of Father Brown
, appeared within months of the publication of
Manalive
.

Another noteworthy novel of Chesterton’s was
The Flying Inn
, published in 1914, a romp across an idealized Merrie England in praise of good ale, good companionship and traditional freedoms. In some respects it bore a remarkable similarity to Belloc’s
The Four Men
, which appeared two years earlier. The prose in both these works was punctuated with hearty verse, or drinking songs.

By the time that
The Flying Inn
and
The Four Men
were published, Chesterton and Belloc were seen so synonymously that Shaw had dubbed them the “Chesterbelloc”. For all their similarities, however, there remained many significant differences between the two halves of the Chesterbelloc, both in terms of their respective personalities and in terms of their literary achievement. With the notable exception of
Belinda
, Belloc’s novels were not as accomplished as Chesterton’s, but his verse is more consistent in its quality and more considered in its construction. At its best, Belloc’s poetry is better than anything Chesterton achieved, with the arguable exception of the latter’s “Lepanto”. Belloc’s poems “Tarantella”, “Ha’nacker Mill” and “The End of the Road” place him among the first rank of twentieth-century poets. His “Lines to a Don”, written in defense of Chesterton, is a timeless classic of comic vitriol, while “Twelfth Night”, “Ballade of Illegal Ornaments” and “Rose” are among the century’s finest religious verse.

Besides Chesterton and Belloc, the writer most responsible for carrying the mantle of the Catholic literary revival in the early years of the twentieth century was Robert Hugh Benson. In some respects, Benson’s life paralleled that of Newman. His conversion to Catholicism in 1903 and his subsequent ordination caused a sensation on a scale similar to that which greeted Newman’s reception into the Church almost sixty years earlier. In Benson’s case the sensation was linked to the fact that he was the son of E. W. Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1882 until 1896. Like Newman, Benson followed a literary as well as a priestly vocation, and before his untimely death in 1914 at the age of forty-three, he had published fifteen highly successful novels. The other obvious parallel with Newman was Benson’s writing of a lucid and candid autobiographical apologia describing the circumstances leading up to his conversion. Benson’s
Confessions of a Convert
warrants a position alongside Newman’s
Apologia pro Vita Sua
as one of the great expositions of the spiritual and psychological background to religious conversion.

An early admirer of Benson was Hilaire Belloc, who wrote in 1907 that he had met him once or twice “and liked him enormously”. Belloc was particularly impressed with Benson’s historical novels: “It is quite on the cards that he will be the man to write some day a book to give us some sort of idea what happened in England between 1520 and 1560. No book I ever read has given me the slightest conception, and I have never had time to go into the original stuff myself. This is the most interesting of historical problems”.

Benson’s early death ensured that he was never able to fulfill Belloc’s wish. In consequence, Belloc, increasingly frustrated at the Protestant bias of the Whig historians, would reluctantly take up the cudgels himself. In later life Belloc would publish studies of key sixteenth-and seventeenth-century figures such as Wolsey, Cromwell, James II, Charles I and Cranmer. His
How the Reformation Happened
, published in 1928, would endeavor to put the whole period into context. Yet to a large extent Benson achieved the same aim in his fiction.
Come Rack! Come Rope!
remains an outstanding work of literature in its prose, its plot, its characterization and its masterful control of the historical landscape in which it is set.

Nor did Benson restrict himself to historical fiction. He wrote novels that dealt with the contemporary religious and moral dilemmas of Edwardian society and, as in the case of
Lord of the World
, novels that conjured up apocalyptic visions of the future. The latter were a reaction to the optimistic science fantasies of Wells and a foreshadowing of the nightmare visions of Huxley’s
Brave New World
and Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. R. H. Benson, as a writer of fiction, was a master of the past, the present and the future. His
Poems
, published posthumously, mark him out as one of the most accomplished poets of his generation, and his
Spiritual Letters
, also published posthumously, display a deep religious faith rooted in a marriage of the mystical and intellectual. The neglect of Benson’s literary achievement says more about the decline and sickness of an increasingly secularized society than it does about any alleged shortcomings in his writing.

Benson’s biographer, C. C. Martindale, saw a “disconcerting affinity” between Benson’s
Papers of a Pariah
and Wilde’s
De Profundis
: “Benson had, and Wilde was resolving, so he thought, to get, that direct eye for colour, line, and texture that the Greeks possessed . . . Benson,. . . in his direct extraction of natural emotion from simple and beautiful elements, like fire and wax, as in his description of the Easter ceremonies . . . reaches, sometimes, an almost word-for-word identity with Wilde.” Martindale also wrote of the “Chestertonian quality” in Benson’s work and quoted a letter Benson had written in 1905 in which he expresses admiration for Chesterton’s
Heretics
:

Have you read a book by G. K. Chesterton called
Heretics
?. . . It seems to me that the spirit underneath is splendid. He is not a Catholic, but he has the spirit. He is so joyful and confident and sensible! One gets rather annoyed by his extreme love of paradox; but there is a sort of alertness in his religion and in his whole point of view that is simply exhilarating. I have not been so much moved for a long time. . . . He is a real mystic of an odd kind.

The writing of both Benson and Chesterton was a principal constituent in the conversion of Ronald Knox to the Catholic Church in 1917. Knox was only sixteen, “a schoolboy just beginning to think”, when he had first read Chesterton’s
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
. It affected him profoundly, as he confessed to Frances Chesterton shortly after her husband’s death:

He has been my idol since I read
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
as a schoolboy; I’ll only hope that you, who know as no one else does what we have lost, will find it easy to imagine as well as believe that he is alive and unchanged. Thank God for that faith; that I have it when so many of my friends lost it was due, I think, under God to him.

Elsewhere Knox had written that “Chesterton’s philosophy, in the broadest sense of the word, has been part of the air I breathed, ever since the age when a man’s ideas begin to disentangle themselves from his education. His paradoxes have become, as it were, the platitudes of my thought.”

The fact that Benson shared the distinction with Chesterton of being Knox’ idol during the formative years of his life is well documented in Knox’
A Spiritual Aeneid
:

It was at Manchester, on Christmas Day, 1903, that I read a book written (I was told) by an Anglican who had just become a Roman Catholic (actually, in that September). It was, of course,
The Light Invisible
, a collection of stories written by Mgr. Benson while he was still in the Church of England. . . . Most people find it an interesting book, but free from controversial tendency. . . Yet, to me, that Christmas Day was a turning point. It was the setting of the book—the little chapel in which the priest celebrated, the terms in which he alluded to the Mother of God, the description of confessions heard in an old parish church—that riveted me even more than the psychological interest. All that Catholic system which I had hitherto known only distantly . . . now for the first time entered my horizon.

Thereafter Knox always looked upon Benson “as the guide who had led me to Catholic truth”, and in the last few days before his conversion, almost fourteen years after he had first read
The Light Invisible
, he read Benson’s
Come Rack! Come Rope
! “Hugh Benson, who had set my feet on the way towards the Church, watched over my footsteps to the last.”

It was no great surprise that Knox considered Benson his mentor. They had so much in common. Both were sons of Anglican bishops and were educated at Eton. They both belonged to remarkable literary families and had brothers whose literary reputations were perhaps the equal of their own. Both passed through Anglo-Catholicism into full communion with the Catholic Church. There was, however, one major difference. Whereas Benson’s literary achievement was truly prodigious considering his early and untimely death, Knox failed to live up to his early promise. Evelyn Waugh, in his introduction to the 1958 edition of Knox’
A Spiritual Aeneid
, described the precocious and meteoric rise of the young Knox:

He went up to Balliol in 1906 preceded by a reputation of unique lustre. While still at Eton he had written a book of light verse in English, Latin and Greek and he is still remembered there as the cleverest boy who ever passed through that school. . . . At Oxford all the coveted distinctions—the Hertford and Ireland scholarships, the presidency of the Union, a first in Greats—came to him as by-products of an exuberant intellectual and social life. . . In 1910 there seemed no limit to the prizes, political, academic or literary, which a smiling world held out to him.

Seen in this context it was scarcely surprising that Knox’ conversion proved almost as controversial as that of Newman or Benson, shaking the establishments of both Canterbury and Oxford. Expectations were high, and many believed that Knox was destined to be a latter-day Newman. It was not to be. The reasons for the literary anticlimax were explained by Waugh:

After
Caliban in Grub Street
(1930) and
Broadcast Minds
(1932), in which he dealt with opponents who were mostly unworthy of his attention, he decided that his vocation was not to discomfort the infidel but to work among the clergy and laity of his own Church to fortify and refine their devotion and remind them of their high calling. He drew apart from secular life with the result that the name of one of the very few prose stylists of his age was seldom mentioned in literary journals.