"The return of civilization to religion is like the return of the energy stored in coal to the heat of the sun." -- D. Merejkowski.
THE Catholic Spirit has been, and is, hard at work in modern English literature. By "Catholic" is meant here nothing sectarian or narrowly controversial, but instead the broad, traditionally Christian outlook upon life which through many centuries moulded European society into all but its ultra-modern forms. It antedated the agnostic and it superseded the pagan; it was both the enemy and the lover of Rome. Although inherently artistic, it condemned art for its own sake. We shall not try to account for it or to make an apology for what is so obvious that it has been ignored. Catholic art raised every structure worth looking at that has been built since the days of the Parthenon and the Capitol; wrote the "Divina Commedia," the "Morte D'Arthur," and, to some extent at least, the plays of William Shakespeare; and erected, finally, a social order in which the art of living was possible. There was nothing wooden or pedantic about it anywhere, but instead a surprising vitality, as of old Adam forgetting his age: yet it stood like a rock on two points -- belief in God and in Man. Theology and politics were written into its poetics. No workman in whom the Catholic Spirit breathed would have admitted that religion can be excluded from life and art. Christianity sent thousands of its representatives to death for a Roman holiday; it carried armies over pestilential wastes to the conquest of a blighted town; it was everywhere alarmingly reckless of life: but it tried honestly to make that life worth the trouble. Woman believed and was honored; the slave was freed and the king became a slave. And from one end of Christendom to the other, the Miserere ended in a chorus of laughter.
Gradually that spirit died out of the world and its sacred temples were profaned. During nearly four hundred years of English history it was reviled and spit upon, and then it returned, disguised at first, cautiously showing its face to friends until it had once more the right to sit in the market-place. It entered into the literature of England, wherever men lived again in the past of Christendom, wherever souls yearned for the faith and blessed peace that were symbolized by the spires of Lincoln and Canterbury, wherever the spell of modern pessimism was broken by sacramental mirth. Occasionally the hovels of the poor were shaken, and it got inside the gates of Oxford. Poets were thrilled with the rich music of mediaeval life, and thinkers battled with modern thought, clad in the armour of the schools. The world was shaken with memories and though many were heedless or distrustful or filled with rancour, those who loved them were given new courage and new vigour. They chanted songs that had long been forgotten and voiced hopes that had been changed into despair. While the world about them reeled in the din of its delusion, they stood serene; and when they wept their tears were pure. But they themselves shall tell the story of how they came to know the splendid continuity of Christendom, its interest in the fate of man, its trust in God.
That excellent knight, Sir Thomas More, who laid his head on the block during the first year of Henry's usurpation, had been saddened with the vision of evils which were to come over an England that had long been popular and merry and Christian. "Your shepe," he said, thinking of the growing tendency to oust the tenants from land that could be used for grazing, "that were wont to be so meke and tame, and so smal eaters, now, as I heare say, do become so great devowerers and so wylde, that they eate up and swallow downe the very men themselves." Sir Thomas did not live to witness the full rapacity of those sheep or of the wolves that went about in their clothing. He did not see the fiendish greed that would consume every bulwark in which the common man took refuge: the sacking of merciful monasteries, the bitter tyranny of kings and queens with lust in their bowels and blood in their eyes, the hunger and sickness of millions for whom there would be at length no refuge but the slavery of industrial towns, or the final darkness that would sit heavily on England's soul. He died in testimony to the past, and mindful of his serenity we shall hasten over the days of the democratic downfall, merely noting how every principle which the religious conscience had set up in defense of the poor was spurned; how the artistic impulse that had made of life a beautiful and holy thing was torn from the hearts of men; and how, at last, the very memory of the older Faith and the older Happiness was beaten into the dust by warriors' horses, the silken trains of courtesans, and all that musty paganism which is as brutal as it is proud. Verily, these were sheep that "swallowed downe the very men themselves" and they were remembered again and again, till even a gentle and sickly poet cursed them in his "Song of the Shirt." The middle years of the century into which that poet was born were indeed the days of the lost tradition, when England that had been gay was sad, and the throne of Edward a pedestal for gain.
The eighteenth century was sallow, stale. Over all of Europe walls began to crack, buttresses to sag. The humanistic solvent of the Great Revolt had steadily undermined the authority of the Church, but it was a long while at work before society began everywhere to decay. Clergy and nobility were, in the higher ranks at least, separated from the people by the new egoism of wealth; the sacred marks of consecration were not on their souls. France especially was restless. Under the thrusts of Voltaire, whose acrid pen was never at rest, tradition began to totter; and the false but fierce philosophy of the Encyclopedists stood out strong by comparison. Then, Rousseau, the watchmaker's son of Geneva, made the world believe that his drugged dreams of a perfect social order were capable of realization. Rousseau not only discovered a world by his writings, but conquered it also; and the already unstable structure of Bourbon society was doomed. In vain would his Lordship call for "Order" while he doubled the tithes; crass convention was at the death-grapple with radical vision. Add to this a new and widespread skepticism in matters of religion, and you will understand the eighteenth century soul. There were, at first, the French critics and dreamers; there was at the end the great Goethe, who is like a glass of Burgundy in a pint of Prussian beer -- both strong and flat. Everywhere the sufficiency of human reason was candidly assumed, and "Unknown" was subtly written over the name of God.
England, however, with much less to conserve was vastly more conservative. There was little demand for a change of political regime. What religion remained was firmly welded with the State, and the State was powerful, even though it would have to battle with revolutionary colonists in all its domains. Almost as if by design, the classes for whom reading was possible developed a code of genteel utilitarian morals slightly diluted with aristocratic sentiment. Aristotle came into his own and both the "Poetics" and the "Ethics" were consulted with some gusto. Except for the manly squirearchy of Fielding there is little in eighteenth century fiction which contains the substance of democratic thought. In general the novelists understood only one worth-while thing, laughter, and this the pre-modern Englishman seldom forgot. The representative thinkers followed the French lead to its ultimate conclusion and were either relentlessly Scotch or stubbornly British. The unstable epistemology of John Locke, the staid, cold skepticism of David Hume, the bitter and cruel politics of Hobbes, were adaptations of French thought to the more conservative attitude of an insular public; it seemed that men would gradually abandon, for the sake of a callous phrase, what remained of the decent philosophy of their fathers. History, which is philosophy in action, was courted by a brilliant pagan who appreciated fully the historic importance of the Gospel's success over the mandates of the Emperors. "It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764," says Gibbon, "as I sat musing amid the ruins of the Capitol while the barefoot friars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind." His "Decline and Fall" was a gorgeous and stately tyrant who closed the doors to the mediaeval narrative for many years, and supported the impression, not yet dead, that the science of history must confine itself to ancient and modern times. What a mass of nonsense about "dark ages" and "mummery" and "ignorance" was used to blanket the fires of the most amazingly active and speculative era in human annals! Instead we got the private scandals of Medes and Parthians, Roman bankers and prehistoric fossils; "progress" and "evolution" and "freedom" and a hundred other perversions of common nouns, which the most prevaricating of mediaeval annalists would have been ashamed to use.
Again it was a man from the midst of the people who rallied all that was most charitable in the friendly world of letters; and Doctor Johnson, brusque of figure and mellow of heart, guided the Irish Goldsmith as well as any man could. Johnson made a thousand errors in judgment and taste, but he was the only person in the land who understood what the author of "The Deserted Village" and "The Vicar of Wakefield" was worth. For that delightful vagabond remembered the death-cry of the poor, despoiled of property as well as freedom, and faced the hard syllogisms of Adam Smith with simple fact. One of the truths which humanity can never part with is that laissez-faire will never do; and if in Goldsmith's songs of a dying peasantry there runs the wail of a dirge, it was something to have sung it in the teeth of commercial pride. Johnson's other good deeds were numerous and his heart was right; he was the Englishman at his level best.
In still another way Art made a final stand. Poetry, deathless in spite of death, forgot the taunts of Pope and the smooth controversy of Dryden and murmured some of the old hymns. Gray, Warton, Percy, Chatterton -- all of them caught glimpses of ancient chivalry lost on haggard moors and set down something of what they had seen. A certain ploughman, whose name was Robert Burns, told more of human nature than the professors in his country had dreamed of. But through all of these and through the visions of Blake, the virulence of Byron, and even the nature-worship of Wordsworth, the face of Rousseau looked out, bathing in the smiles of Ceres, lost in the morning dew. They could not alter the fact that Europe had been built at the foot of the Cross and that its faith was dead. Old Triton and his horn were silent, indeed; chimney arose on chimney, loom next to loom, and around them were built the shambles of the new serfs. There was precious little religion left, just as there was no great freedom. The old stories of the Saints were derided; pilgrims no longer went to the rifled tomb at Canterbury, or clerks to Oxford. The former place was asleep and the latter was drinking port. A people that had been forbidden to utter the Virgin name of Mary was taught the monstrous fetish of the virgin-queen.
Meanwhile the peasant struck in France and the King went down. In his stead the minions of the new philosophy settled themselves in the judgment seat, the guillotine struck off heads with a kind of voluptuous cruelty, and men gathered in the temples to worship the goddess of reason. When the butchery had finally ceased and the standards of Napoleon had been furled forever, a new religious fervour was born out of the hearts of tired men. Chateaubriand in France, Gorres and Chamisso in Germany, and Manzoni in Italy began to look back upon the bright days of Christendom and to hunger for the things of the soul. It seemed for a time that the powerful missionary spirit of Art had returned, but the destruction had been too complete. Wonderful things were accomplished in the face of odds; but the sadness of the romantics was only too prophetic, only too profoundly real.
England escaped political revolution and the people continued in their silence. Instead, the spirit of change, of Liberty, entered into literature and uprooted its conventions, despite the beautiful pathos of Edmund Burke. There was the atheistic rebellion of Shelley and Byron, Godwin and Mary Woolstonecraft: English Voltaires and Rousseaus respectively, lashed into fury by the cant of the prevailing civilization. And then, far greater and more influential than any of these, appeared the perennially virile Sir Walter, enchanted spectator of a thousand vanished tournaments, delightful magician of trysts and trappings, knights and fair ladies, of the whole picturesque life of the olden time. But though he sent all the world into a feverish study of heraldry, he was unconcerned with the soul of Christendom, the spirit which had created these thousand rapturous symbols for its inward joy. Bluntly, Scott was neither democratic nor spiritual, though his influence made in the end for both qualities throughout Europe. The people were best represented by a strange and violent journalist whose copy brought him eventually into Parliament, but never far away from his folk. In his "History of the Reformation" William Cobbett emphasized one tremendous matter which the student of the period had generally neglected -- the spoliation of the poor. Through him was voiced, with a passion often boorish enough, their protest, which the philosophers and historians had apparently forgotten.
When Victoria came to the throne, the English had practically settled down to a smug admiration for trade. The girl-queen governed an Empire larger -- and more cruel -- than Caesar had dreamed of. This Empire had forgotten nearly all the traditions of Englishmen, being immensely more interested in the heathen. Commerce was god, and commerce implied a territorial policy, military force, and a continuous debate in Parliament over the subjugation of the Irish or the Hindus. Such an enormous scheme had little to do with the public, although occasionally it would be pestered by a publicist. The mob stayed speechless, but it was a subject for conversation -- a subject written in the miseries of a thousand industrial towns, in the crooked streets of London, in the quiet districts where men had kept their freedom. But for all of this the powers that ruled felt more or less contempt. That so good and great a man as Lord Macaulay could be utterly misled is significant of the times: he made his best speech against workingmen and his best poetry about Rome. It is not surprising either that Lord Monmouth, when talking of the established religion, should have felt the emotions of Caius Julius. These matters meant very simply that the popular institutions of the past had been swallowed up in a gigantic utilitarianism whose efficiency and refinement were utterly pagan. The most Christian thing economics could do was to use a French phrase; education confined itself to teaching wealthy boys how to quote Virgil and how to despise their neighbors; and the height of religious fervour was to sing a song for the Queen.
An hour had come, however, when this apparently fixed alignment would be violently assailed. First, England awoke to the giant protest of Charles Dickens. Here was a man, amazingly ignorant of ever so many historical details, who read history correctly; who was an optimist and yet a rebel; who walked the dirtiest streets of London and shook with laughter while his heart bled. Dickens' importance cannot be valued too highly, for, although he created no disturbance, he did create people -- a mob of people whom nobody can put down and nobody ignore. They broke through the priggishness of the Victorian era as a hod-carrier might disturb an ethical society. Still, after this stupendous sermon on charity, the world went to dinner and to bed, a little more kindly, a little more restless, but essentially the same world.
Then there followed in quick succession a series of surprising outbursts against the "progress" which Macaulay had so highly complimented. John Ruskin, angry with the interminable smokestacks and their soot, inspected modernity by the light of Beauty and found it decidedly shabby; for a while he contented himself with praising the art of the older time, but finally he understood, nearly, that art cannot be dissociated from life, and he even tried to restore civilization. Ruskin's greatest hindrance was Mont Blanc; somehow he never managed to look around it and see what lay beyond. Next, a dyspeptic Scotchman, who prided himself on "four walls" and some brains, discovered the amazing mediocrity of his environment, measured it by the rule of genius, and cursed it roundly. Carlyle was a good and worthy man but with all these prescriptions he did not even cure himself. The Positivists, from George Eliot to John Stuart Mill, consoled themselves with an altruistic version of the new gospel, advocated a thousand things which nobody would take, and died wondering at the folly of the world. It remained to suggest Culture pure and simple, and this Matthew Arnold did skillfully; but, though he has been quite largely complimented by the professors, Mrs. Grundy has lent a disdainful ear. George Meredith examined society by the gleam of nature's dawn, and Browning counseled vigour and exuberance. Thus one by one the thinkers railed at John Bull, but that stolid gentleman went on unperturbed.
The upshot of all this criticism was that the power of reason came at last to its goal. It scrutinized the bases of religious belief as matters quite independent of its own needs; and with the great catapult of Evolution set the entire structure of popular theistic opinion to tottering. Was it because man had become so like an ape that he was willing to concede that his ancestor was one? At least here was the paradox of reason equalling itself to Everything and consenting also to be Nothing. There came over England the final darkness: loneliness, the boredoom of being alone. Solidarity of intellectual effort was destroyed; step by step idiosyncrasy usurped the seat of originality and society pursued unbelievable philosophic tangents. The powers of the State increased, as the meaning of man was lessened. Force was worshipped either with frank rejoicing or with bitter acquiescence. And even tears were idle things, "from the depths of some divine despair."
As not the least of the energies loosened against the complacency of the English mood, the Catholic Revival appeared. Wherever the religious spirit was strong, whether in poet or preacher, there developed a concern with the beautiful faith of the past, with its sacraments and saints, with its manifest confidence in the voice of God. Almost in the twinkling of an eye, the members of a creed that had long been despised as impotent and ridiculous stood with their loins girt for battle and recruited some of the most brilliant minds of Britain. Whereas there had been no great Catholic apostle in the country since the days of Campion and More, a dozen now moved the hearts of men; whereas the poetry of the old religion had been silent since Crashaw, singers took up the Catholic lyre with abounding and brilliant gifts; and even the press, grown more tolerant, carried the defenders' voices to the ends of the earth. The challenge of the modern mind was accepted and even forestalled: the missionary now coveted battle as he had once sought martyrdom. Christendom, as the Great Tradition that guarded the rights and guided the aspirations of common humanity, won crowds of men by its new expositions of the beauties of the faith and by the honesty of its literary effort. New voices stirred in shrouded Ireland, and the testimony of Britain lent confidence to the army of God that struggled in Europe. The issue between belief and denial has now become clear everywhere, and the modern philosophers, who scoffed at Christendom as something withered and outgrown, have discovered its branches over their heads. And even the critics shall have to reckon with the Cross.
The story of the Catholic Spirit working in modern English letters is at once the record of a movement and the biography of strong men. If literature be the expression of great personalities considering general truths, it is no less a series of flaming windows where the colour of Life is broken and reflected under the arches of towering minds. We shall deal here with many fascinating men; with books that have brought answers to numberless hearts; with the victories and failures of literary effort. Most of all, however, we shall deal with the Spirit which any of these men valued more highly than life or success, their insight into and love for the sanctity of their hope. We shall scarcely divine their purpose or their meaning unless we remember that, while facing the modern opponent where-ever he appeared, they worshipped the beauty of the past. Behind them is the synthesis of mediaeval life, with the fervent symbolism of its cathedrals, the robust nobility of its moral code, and the success of its popular society. They kneel at shrines at which forgotten artisans laid down the glory of their buoyant lives and before which pilgrim and Crusader, saint and king, begged forgiveness of their sins. They go into battle gayly, but their voices tremble with the melody of dead songs. Only, they believe that the old realities can be again a reasonable ideal, and they have faith in God.
BOOK NOTE
In addition to the works mentioned -- More's "Utopia," Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village," Boswell's "Life of Johnson," Cobbett's "Reformation" -- see the following: "The Present Position of Catholics," by J.H. Newman; "The Eve of the Reformation," by Dom Gasquet; "The Victorian Age in English Literature" and "Notes on Charles Dickens," by G.K. Chesterton; "A Social and Political History of Western Europe," by Carleton Hayes (2 vols.) ; "La Renaissance Catholique en Angleterre" -- Vol. I. -- by Paul Thureau-Dangin; "Memories," by Kegan Paul, and the later volumes of "The Cambridge History of English Literature." Of interest also are the "Lives" of Gibbon, by J. Cotter Morison, of Hume, by T.H. Huxley, and of Locke, by Thomas Fowler. The files of the Tablet, the Dublin Review and the Catholic World contain indispensable information not available elsewhere.