"Waugh is me!": Reading Evelyn Waugh on Dante Gabriel Rossetti

"By birth, Mrs [sic] Rossetti was half Italian and wholly pedagogic." (p. 10)*

"He learned some Latin and a little Greek." (p. 13)

". . . while [Benjamin] Hayden was dying of neglected vanity." (p. 19)

*when the family had financial troubles: "Maria Francesca reverted to the family trade of governess" (p. 55)

The OUP Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh describes Rossetti: His Life and Works thus:

This, Waugh's first published book [the second book was his first novel, Decline and Fall], marked the centenary of the birth of the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). Waugh was fascinated by the bohemian lives of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and by his own family connection with them (William Holman Hunt had married, successively, two cousins of his grandfather). Rossetti is both compassionate towards its subject and critical of his self-destructive nature. The incisive analysis of Rossetti's painterly techniques contributed to the resurgence of public interest in Rossetti's art and poetry. The biography was also an early expression of Waugh's lifelong interest in narrative art, and laid the foundations for his own belief in the importance of the spiritual as well as the aesthetic vision of the artist. Although Rossetti was hastily compiled, it is nevertheless elegant and witty.

And how! 

I purchased and read the Penguin edition, which I wish had more and color plates of his artwork. While I found some of Waugh's wit distracting (like the examples above), he does analyze Rossetti's art, life, trials, poetry, character, achievement, and difficulties both judiciously and sympathetically. One of the more surprising comments Waugh often makes is that Rossetti did not really know how to paint: he had not acquired the proper techniques of preparing a canvas--when he and other Pre-Raphaelites worked on some frescoes for the Oxford Debating club for example, they did not begin with fresh lime plaster, and thus the works soon deteriorated. Rossetti used water color brushes for oil paint, Waugh tells us; he did not master the rules of perspective, etc.

Part of Waugh's effort in the book--the part that I didn't track that well with--is the analysis of how art criticism developed in the age of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Art criticism seems to have been so personal, addressing the character (indeed the morality) of the artist as the basis for praising or denigrating the work.

One of the saddest passages is when Rossetti, who had buried manuscripts of his early poems with his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, decided he wanted to review, revise, and publish them. He doesn't go to the grave; he waits for the papers to be delivered to him; then he must wait until the "poems had been dried and disinfected" and piece "together his work from among the stains and worm-holes of seven and a half years in the grave." (p. 205) (This reminded me of a line from Dominick Argento's opera The Aspern Papers when the Lodger is shocked that he might be thought capable of "desecrating a grave" to retrieve a lost opera by the composer.)

As for Waugh's analysis of Rossetti's art and poetry, I found it fascinating. There is one quibble I have with a comment about reading Rossetti's poetry: Waugh says it should be/must be read aloud (p. 210). I think all poetry must be read aloud, unless the author really didn't want us to hear the sounds of the words in our ears as we discerned the meaning and the music of her expression. (And then, has she really written a poem?)

One fun passage in chapter four, "The Good Years, 1862-1867", lists all the animals and bric-a-brac he collected in Tudor House. One of his obsessions was fine china. Fortunately, he had collected enough and it was valuable enough that when he desperately needed money (in chapter six, 'The Fleshly School') it could be sold for £650.00! (£650.00 in 1872 is worth £98,250.98 in 2025 with a "Purchasing Power Decrease: 99.34%"!)

Rossetti's life story is, like all of ours, a mixture of good and bad, but one of aspects Waugh constantly highlights is that he had a circle of friends who helped him over and over again as he suffered depression, ill health, mourning his wife, etc--in spite of how often, over and over again he subverted their attempts to help him or demonstrated a lack of gratitude. But they came back to help him anyway, knowing that illness, and addiction (to a prescribed medication, Chloral) and his absolute need moved them to great sacrifice and difficulty. He recovered from several crises, but entered his last illness on Good Friday, April 7 and died on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1882.

One musical note: Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote "The Blessed Damozel", which Claude Debussy, among other composers, set to music ("La damoiselle élue") and submitted to the Académie des beaux-arts as an entry for the Prix de Rome in 1892. And of course, Rossetti depicted the blessed Damozel, leaning out "From the gold bar of Heaven" with "three lilies in her hand," and seven stars in her hair.

An entertaining and enlightening read.

Image credit (Public Domain): An illustration of Rossetti's poem

Evelyn Waugh and Blessed Miguel Pro

On the memorial of Blessed Miguel Pro the Jesuit priest executed on November 23, 1927 in Mexico, it seems appropriate to remember how Evelyn Waugh, in the introduction to the second edition of his biography of then Blessed Edmund Campion, mentioned that the "Martyrdom of Father Pro in Mexico re-enacted Campion's in faithful detail" and that the "haunted, trapped, murdered priest is our contemporary."

Waugh visited Mexico after he wrote Campion's biography and wrote a book criticizing the Mexican revolution and its effects, particularly the persecution of the Catholic Church and her priests. He spent two months in Mexico:

I went to Mexico in order to write a book about it ; in order to verify and reconsider impressions formed at a distance. To have travelled a lot, to have spent, as I had done, the first twelve years of adult life intermittently on the move, is to this extent a disadvantage that one’s mind falls into the habit of recognizing similarities rather than differences. At the age of thirty-five one needs to go to the moon, or some such place, to recapture the excitement with which one first landed at Calais. For many people Mexico has, in the past, had this lunar character. Lunar it still remains, but in no poetic sense. It is waste land, part of a dead or, at any rate, a dying planet. Politics, everywhere destructive, have here dried up the place, frozen it, cracked it and powdered it to dust. Is civilization, like a leper, beginning to rot at its extremities? In the sixteenth century human life was disordered and talent stultified by the obsession of theology; today we are plague- stricken by politics. It is a fact; distressing for us, dull for our descendants, but inescapable. This is a political book; its aim, roughly, is to examine a single problem; why it was that last summer a small and almost friendless republic jubilantly recalled its Minister from London, and, more important, why people in England thought about this event as they did; why, for instance, patriotic feeling burst into indignation whenever a freight ship — British only in name, trading in defiance of official advice — was sunk in Spanish waters, and remained indifferent when a rich and essential British industry was openly stolen in time of peace. If one could understand that problem one would come very near to understanding all the problems that vex us today, for it has at its origin the universal, deliberately fostered anarchy of public relations and private opinions that is rapidly making the world uninhabitable. 

The succeeding pages are notes on anarchy. 

Waugh was very critical of the Wilson administration's response to the persecution of Catholics under the new Mexican government and Constitution:

President Wilson was reluctant to admit the crimes of his proteges; it was only after the facts had again and again been set before him and Catholic opinion in America was becoming seriously inflamed, that he sent a protest. He asked for three things: freedom for foreigners to pursue their businesses in peace; an amnesty for political opponents; a remission of the persecution of religion. ‘Nothing will shock the civilized world more,’ he wrote, ‘than punitive and vindictive action towards priests or ministers of any Church, whether Catholic or Protestant; and the Government of the United States ventures most respectfully but most earnestly to caution the leaders of the Mexican people on this delicate and vital matter. The treatment already said to have been accorded priests has had a most unfortunate effect on opinion outside of Mexico.’ Carranza accordingly went before the Congress in December 1918 to propose a modification of the ‘Constitution of Queretaro’ in favour of the Church. But Obregon had now entered into an alliance with the CROM; the price for their support was the continued persecution of the Church. Obregon’s supporters in Congress were therefore instructed to reject the amendments. Carranza was driven out and murdered. Once again American intervention had proved disastrous.

Chapter Seven of Robbery Under Law, "The Straight Fight", offers his interpretation of anti-Catholicism in Mexico, its sources and propaganda. Of Blessed Miguel Pro, he writes, noting how President Calles had photographs of his execution published, that he was the hero of Catholics in the late 1930's:

There were hundreds of others done to death at the same time. Mexico had been infertile of religious heroes for some generations; now she suddenly burst into flower; but popular imagination always seeks to personify its ideals, and it is on Pro, very worthily, that it has fastened as the embodiment of the spirit Calles provoked. Within a few hours of his death he was already canonized in the hearts of the people; with typical ineptitude Calles had photographers on the scene of the execution and issued pictures of it to the press; within a day or two it was a criminal offence to possess one; they circulated nevertheless from hand to hand and were reproduced in secret all over the country. Today you can buy cards of Pro outside the churches and even government apologists have stopped trying to justify his death. It was a mistake, they admit; it was indeed; one of those resounding mistakes which make history. While Dwight Morrow and his clown and Calles were off on a trip together in the Presidential train talking of debt settlements, Pro was being shot in a back yard. Dwight Morrow is already forgotten. Pro is the inspiration of thousands through whom the Mexican Church is still alive.

Waugh writes about the Cristeros:

The present situation of the Church in Mexico is the result of the truce effected with the mediation of Dwight Morrow. Mexican Catholics profess small gratitude to him for his intervention. The promises then made by the government have not been kept. The Cristeros were induced to surrender their arms under an amnesty which has been broken by a series of retributive murders. The hierarchy believed that their spiritual work was to be allowed to continue without persecution; they have been bitterly disappointed. For Catholics the unhappy character of the compromise has been emphasized by the grave warning of the late Pope in the encyclical Firmissimam Constantiam of Easter 1937.

Browsing that chapter, with Waugh's description of Our Lady of Guadalupe, demonstrated to me what a thoughtful Catholic Evelyn Waugh truly was. He understands--as a convert--both the outsider and the insider view of the Catholic Church, our doctrine, worship, and devotion.

Blessed Miguel Pro, pray for us!

The Effects of the Sacraments in Brideshead Revisited

On the Homiletic & Pastoral Review website, Sr. Albert Marie Surmanski, O. P., writes about the Anointing of the Sick/Extreme Unction that Lord Marchmain receives at the end of Charles Rider's story of his interactions with the family at Brideshead:

Several of the details in this description are inaccurate: anointing of the sick is given with blessed oil of the sick, not chrism; priests anoint with their own hands, not cotton balls, but the power of the sacrament is described with consummate skill. Lord Marchmain is moved by the sacrament to accept salvific sealing with the cross of Christ. His life finds its reconciliation by being finally blessed by the power of the cross which he had been fleeing for years. The image of the rending of the veil (cf. Matt 27:51) evokes the power of Christ’s death which is present, the unveiling of the merciful presence of God, and the tremendous change that the sacrament brings to Lord Marchmain’s soul. Lord Marchmain dies soon afterwards—his desperate fear of death is no more. In embracing the reality of Christ’s cross, in accepting his own sinfulness as forgivable, he has entered the freedom he has always sought.

Fr. Mackay takes on a tremendous dignity as the instrument of Christ’s mercy in this sacrament, truly acting in the person of Christ the head of the Church. His return to his jocular, simple personality in the subsequent paragraphs is so striking as to almost be funny. This contrast says something very true and also very comforting about the priestly vocation. The priest bears Christ, it is true, and images Christ, but the power on which he ultimately relies is the power of Christ himself. No matter how holy and good a priest is, there will always be a “gap” between his human limitations and Christ’s perfection, but it is a gap which Christ’s power will always bridge in the sacraments.

Even the prayer of Charles is significant. Describing the anointing of the sick the Catechism says: “By celebrating this sacrament the Church, in the communion of saints, intercedes for the benefit of the sick person, and he, for his part, through the grace of this sacrament, contributes to the sanctification of the Church.”26 Although the intercession of the Church for the sick is primarily expressed through the prayers of the priest, Charles and Julia, as baptized Christians, contribute by their prayers. In turn, Lord Marchmain’s acceptance of grace also impacts his family. Participating in the deathbed scene leads Julia to abandon her intentions to marrying Charles, and eventually brings Charles to the faith.

Read the rest there. This is an excellent teaching example of the effects of the Sacraments. If we cooperate with them, they change us and infuse us with Grace!

Evelyn Waugh, RIP--But Brideshead Lives On!

Of course, Evelyn Waugh lives on too, in eternal life, but as we mark the 50th anniversary of his dead in 1966, Harry Mount writes about the ongoing fascination of Brideshead Revisited for The Catholic Herald:

Evelyn Waugh’s life and work still captivate us. It’s not hard to understand why – he is one of the prose stylists of the age, and one of its funniest writers. His comic gift is all the greater for being shot through with pleasing melancholy and joyful malice.

The curious thing is that, of all his books, it’s Brideshead Revisited that enchants the public more than any other. Waugh obsessives, including me, prefer A Handful of Dust – for its macabre chill – or Scoop, for its mixture of comedy and eternal accuracy about the ridiculous side of journalism.

But it is Brideshead that dominates the popular vision of Waugh; Brideshead that was a huge hit in America after it came out in 1945; Brideshead that was made into the excellent Granada series in 1981, and the third-rate film in 2008.

Waugh was clear about the main point of Brideshead in his 1959 preface to the revised edition. “Its theme – the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters – was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it.” And, it’s true, Catholicism provides the spine of the book.

Charles Ryder begins, at his own admission, with “no religion … The view implicit in my education was that the basic narrative of Christianity had long been exposed as a myth.”

By the end of the book (spoiler alert), Ryder is kneeling before the tabernacle in Brideshead’s chapel, saying a prayer, “an ancient, newly-learned form of words”. The implication is that he is about to become a Catholic. Lord Marchmain receives the sacraments on his deathbed. Sebastian ends up in a monastery. A devout Julia separates from the divorced Rex Mottram, and backs out of marriage to Charles, who has already been married.

So, yes, Catholicism is the central theme of the book – but it is only one of several themes. Even Waugh acknowledged that religion is concealed below them. He said to A D Peters, his literary agent, “The whole thing is steeped in theology, but I begin to agree that the theologians won’t recognise it.”

Read the rest there.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in the peace of Christ. George Weigel, reviewing a biography of Waugh in two volumes by Martin Stannard for First Things, quotes the dearly departed: “I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.” Weigel also quotes Father D'Arcy, who received Waugh into the Church:

Few [converts] can have been so matter of fact as Evelyn Waugh. As he said himself, “On firm intellectual conviction but with little emotion I was admitted to the Church.” All converts have to listen while the teaching of the Church is explained to them”first to make sure that they do in fact know the essentials of the faith and secondly to save future misunderstandings . . . . Another writer came to me at the same time . . . and tested what was being told him by how far it corresponded with his experience. With such a criterion, it was no wonder that he did not persevere. Evelyn, on the other hand, never spoke of experience or feelings. He had come to learn and understand what he believed to be God’s revelation, and this made talking with him an interesting discussion based primarily on reason.

Pray for him. As St. Thomas More noted in his Supplication of Souls, prayer for the dead is never wasted.

Blessed Miguel Pro, SJ--Viva Christo Rey!

How appropriate that Blessed Miguel Pro's memorial comes this year the day after the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ King of the Universe! He was executed by firing squad on November 23, 1927 after crying out "Viva Christo Rey"--"Long Live Christ the King"!

This brief EWTN biography sums up his life:

Miguel Pro was born January 13, 1891, at Guadalupe Zacatecas, Mexico. From his childhood, high spirits and happiness were the most outstanding characteristics of his personality. The loving and devoted son of a mining engineer and a pious and charitable mother, Miguel had a special affinity for the working classes which he retained all his life.

At 20, he became a Jesuit novice and shortly thereafter was exiled because of the Mexican revolution. He traveled to the United States, Spain, Nicaragua and Belgium, where he was ordained in 1925. Father Pro suffered greatly from a severe stomach problem and when, after several operations his health did not improve, in 1926 his superiors allowed him to return to Mexico in spite of the religious persecution in the country.

The churches were closed and priests were in hiding. Father Pro spent the rest of his life in a secret ministry to the sturdy Mexican Catholics. In addition to fulfilling their spiritual needs, he also carried out the works of mercy by assisting the poor of Mexico City with their temporal needs. He adopted many disguises to carry out his secret ministry. In all that he did, he remained filled with the joy of serving Christ, his King, and obedient to his superiors.

Falsely accused in a bombing attempt on the President-elect, Pro became a wanted man. He was betrayed to the police and sentenced to death without the benefit of any legal process.

On the day of his death, Father Pro forgave his executioners, prayed, bravely refused the blindfold, and died proclaiming "Long Live Christ the King!"

Christ the King, by the intercession of Blessed Miguel Pro, I beg you to answer my prayers. Give me the grace and the strength necessary to follow your heroic example and to live my Catholic faith in spite of all temptations and adversities. Amen.

Evelyn Waugh referenced Pro's martyrdom in the second edition of his biography, Edmund Campion, in 1946 (the first edition was in 1935). Waugh also refers to a nineteenth century biography of Campion by Richard Simpson:

We have come much nearer to Campion since Simpson's day. He wrote in the flood-tide of toleration with Elizabeth's persecution seemed as remote as Diocletian's. We know now that his age was a brief truce in an unending war. The Martyrdom of Father Pro in Mexico re-enacted Campion's in faithful detail. We are nearer Campion then when I wrote of him. . . . The haunted, trapped, murdered priest is our contemporary and Campion's voice sounds to us across the centuries as though he were walking at our elbow.

Blessed Miguel Pro was not executed by being hung, drawn, and quartered, so that's not the "faithful detail" that Waugh highlights. The parallels between Campion and Pro are that they had served the Catholic people in disguise since their vocation as priest had been declared illegal by the state; that they were arrested and tried for a conspiracy that did not exist, and that they offered their lives for the true king of the world, Jesus Christ, and His Church.

Waugh's Interviews



(Waugh's Sword of Honor trilogy)

Francis Philips writes about Evelyn Waugh in The Catholic Herald, referring to a televised interview he gave in 1960:

Then I came across Fr Tim Finigan’s blog last year about Evelyn Waugh’s “Face to Face” interview with John Freeman in 1960. Never having watched this encounter before, I found it very revealing of the man who could write the mordant satire referred to above. Waugh smiled from time to time as he (briefly) explained a point, but only with his lips; his eyes remained cold, watchful, wary – indicative, as Freeman must have realised, of a gifted, complex and deeply private man who understood his own nature and failings and felt not the slightest desire to share this knowledge with the BBC.

Freeman was a model of patient, self-effacing and sensitive enquiry; a disembodied voice focused on his subject and unvaryingly courteous, even though Waugh refused to expand on any tentative avenues of enquiry. Asked whether he missed the life of the city (Waugh was then living at Combe Flory House in Somerset), he replied “I live in the country as I like to be alone”, indicating that further questions in this line would not be approved. . . .

 There were no revelations, confessions, psychologising or the kind of celebrity chumminess that has characterised interviews in a later age. When Freeman tried to probe him on his conversion, Waugh refused to be drawn; he had realised that “Catholicism was Christianity” at the age of 16, had ignored religion for the next decade and reprimanded Freeman for suggesting that his faith might have brought him comfort or solace: “It isn’t a lucky dip”, he replied, adding in an aside that was not picked up on, that it was “the essence”.

Waugh converted in 1930. In 1949 he explained in an interview that his conversion followed his realization that life was “unintelligible and unendurable without God.” Doubtless, if Freeman had quoted this on “Face to Face” Waugh would have declined to expand. But it indicates much about the intellectual clarity and emotional intensity with which he looked at life.

Julian Jebb interviewed Evelyn Waugh for The Paris Review in 1962, and seemed to have about the same luck, although there are some gems:

INTERVIEWER

It is evident that you reverence the authority of established institutions—the Catholic Church and the army. Would you agree that on one level both Brideshead Revisited and the army trilogy were celebrations of this reverence?

 

WAUGH

No, certainly not. I reverence the Catholic Church because it is true, not because it is established or an institution. Men at Arms was a kind of uncelebration, a history of Guy Crouchback's disillusion with the army. Guy has old-fashioned ideas of honor and illusions of chivalry; we see these being used up and destroyed by his encounters with the realities of army life.

 

INTERVIEWER

Would you say that there was any direct moral to the army trilogy?

 

WAUGH

Yes, I imply that there is a moral purpose, a chance of salvation, in every human life. Do you know the old Protestant hymn which goes: “Once to every man and nation / Comes the moment to decide”? Guy is offered this chance by making himself responsible for the upbringing of Trimmer's child, to see that he is not brought up by his dissolute mother. He is essentially an unselfish character.

 

And this exchange on characters in fiction:

 

INTERVIEWER

E. M. Forster has spoken of “flat characters” and “round characters”; if you recognize this distinction, would you agree that you created no “round” characters until A Handful of Dust?

 

WAUGH

All fictional characters are flat. A writer can give an illusion of depth by giving an apparently stereoscopic view of a character—seeing him from two vantage points; all a writer can do is give more or less information about a character, not information of a different order. . . .But look, I think that your questions are dealing too much with the creation of character and not enough with the technique of writing. I regard writing not as investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech, and events that interest me.

 

INTERVIEWER

Does this mean that you continually refine and experiment?

 

WAUGH

Experiment? God forbid! Look at the results of experiment in the case of a writer like Joyce. He started off writing very well, then you can watch him going mad with vanity. He ends up a lunatic.

Sadness and Confusion in the Sixties

This is a sad book. Reading about Evelyn Waugh's confusion and sorrow as he witnessed changes in the Mass during and after the Second Vatican Council is heartbreaking. Reading it now, seven years after Pope Benedict XVI issued Summorum Pontificum, is still heartbreaking, because Waugh demonstrates how so many Catholics suffered so much sadness, confusion, anger and pain. With a foreword by Joseph Pearce, an introduction by Alcuin Reed, and an afterword by Clare Asquith, the Countess of Oxford, the one thing the book does not do is clarify the historical context. Waugh died before the promulgation of the Missal of Pope Paul VI--what he endured was the confusing period when the Mass seemed almost a laboratory. Waugh laments, for example, the sudden change when he was no longer to genuflect during the Credo when the Incarnation was proclaimed--he was forbidden, in fact, to genuflect, with no explanation. The translation from Latin to English was in process, but the vernacular was introduced anyway. This review of the edition from The New Oxford Review makes that context more clear:

The first liturgical changes remarked upon by Waugh were the revisions of the Easter vigil in 1951 and the abbreviated new rite of Holy Week in 1955, with its changes, omissions, and “endless blank periods,” which left him “resentful of the new liturgy.” Other changes included the dialogue Masses of the 1950s, which were never made obligatory until the introduction of the vernacular in the 1960s, accompanied by persistent confusion occasioned by conflicting statements from Rome. “Repeatedly standing up and saying ‘And with you’ detracts from [the] intimate association” of uniting oneself to the action of the priest, he complained in 1965. Waugh lived through the Second Vatican Council, which nearly undid him.

One wag suggested that Waugh suffered “Death by Novus Ordo,” though the jest is more clever than accurate. Pope Paul VI’s New Mass was not promulgated until 1969; Waugh died three years earlier, about an hour after attending a private Latin Mass on Easter Sunday celebrated by his friend, Fr. Caraman. Yet, if the liturgy were understood as a “permanent workshop” of innovation — as it was by Fr. Joseph Gelineau, S.J., whom the chief architect of the new Mass, Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, described as “one of the great masters of the international liturgical world” — it would be accurate to say that Waugh’s bitter trial was an effect of the accelerating and seemingly interminable experiments in what he called “the new liturgy,” which he endured in the decade until his death the year after the Council ended.

Waugh certainly appreciated the connection between the Church's worship and the Church's teaching--he predicted that Catholics would become confused about doctrine: the Eucharist, the priesthood, the Incarnation because of the changes and confusion he was experiencing at Mass. He and Cardinal Heenan corresponded about the changes that were occurring and Heenan tried to console Waugh that in the end, it wouldn't be that bad and that surely some provision would be made for the Mass in Latin according to the Tridentine Rite would still be available. Cardinal Heenan did petition Rome for such permission and Paul VI granted it--the so-called "Agatha Christie" Indult, which was limited and restrictive indeed.

Again, it's wonderful that with Summorum Pontificum, what Pope Benedict XVI called the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Liturgy of the Roman Rite is more freely available, when a group of dedicated laity gather and request it, provide for it, prepare for it, and support it. But reading A Bitter Trial--and that title comes from Waugh's comment that attending Mass had become a bitter trial to him, testing his faith, hope, and charity--it's a sorrowful mystery that Catholic laity had to suffer such a trial in the first place.

Six Catholics Authors and Father Ian Ker

Dermot Quinn reviews The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh, by Father Ian Ker (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), for The Imaginative Conservative:

Assembling a sestet of writers whose dates describe an arc between the Oxford Movement and the first stirrings of the Second Vatican Council, Ker explores a rare moment when Catholics seemed to dominate a world generally inhospitable to their moral and sacramental preoccupations. These writers are a varied bunch—so miscellaneous, in fact, that it is hard to imagine them together anywhere other than in a church, and a very broad church at that. As individuals complex and contradictory, as a group they seem so eccentric that even shared Catholicism strains to contain them.

In order of treatment, Father Ker’s revivalists are Cardinal Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh. Allowing for taste and personal preference, it is an impressive roster. . . . 

This is a fine book, warmly recommended, full of sharp insight and telling quotation. The reader will not concur with every judgment (which is, indeed, one of the book’s pleasures) and one or two editorial errors creep in, but these niceties apart, it is a highly accomplished piece of work. Learned, witty, and humane, it will give much pleasure to specialist and generalist alike. . . .

They had an easy intimacy with mystery, these six, as all Catholics must have who take their church seriously. With Chesterton, for instance, the intimacy was with the mystery of goodness. With Greene, on the other hand, it was with the mystery of evil. Think of Chesterton’s insight in Orthodoxy that the task of the philosopher—of every person—is to be at once at home in the world yet utterly amazed by it. One must “somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.” “We do not fit into the world,” he said, but see, rather, “the unnaturalness of everything in the light of the supernatural.”

The same apprehension of the sheer gift and goodness of being, the strange loveliness of all creation, permeates the work of Hopkins, great poet of landscape and “inscape.” But think, too, of Greene, wrestling with malevolence and losing. His derelict characters reach their private Golgothas too broken even to hope for redemption, often refusing when freely offered it at the last. Greene in his own life came to resemble them, once for instance declining an invitation from Padre Pio (now a saint) because he knew such a meeting would require him to reform his life. He called his memoirs Ways of Escape. Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven should have reminded him there is no escape.

Yet in a more important sense the Church is not prison but liberation. It is the way of escape—from the cell of the self, from the solipsist nightmare, from the grubbiness of materialism, from the overwhelming fact, in every age, of sin and sorrow. For Hopkins, the church was a heaven-haven. For Belloc, it was freedom from “the isolation of the soul.” For Chesterton, it was salvation from being a child of his own time. For Waugh, it was “an island of order and sweetness in an ocean of rank barbarity.” For Newman, it was emergence from darkness to light. Without God, he wrote, “we are pent up within ourselves. We need a relief to our hearts…that they may not go on feeding upon themselves; we need to escape from ourselves to something beyond.” That “something beyond” is God. It is also, mysteriously, His Church on heaven and earth. Examining six of its members, Father Ker has written a splendid book.

Read the rest here.

Waugh's Helena, The Empress and Saint

If today wasn't Sunday we would be celebrating the feast of St. Helena, the emperor Constantine's mother and finder of the True Cross. BTW: in the next issue of OSV's The Catholic Answer Magazine, I'll have an article about the September feasts of the Triumph of the Cross and the Sorrows of Mary; that's the September/October issue.

As this site summarizes her life:

Empress mother of Constantine the Great. She was a native of Bithynia, who married the then Roman general Constantius I Chlorus about 270. Constantine was born soon after, and in 293, Constantius was made Caesar, or junior emperor. He divorced Helena to marry co Emperor Maximian’s stepdaughter. Constantine became emperor in 312 after the fateful victory at Milvian Bridge, and Helena was named Augusta, or empress. She converted to Christianity and performed many acts of charity, including building churches in Rome and in the Holy Land. On a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Helena discovered the True Cross. She is believed to have died in Nicomedia. Her porphyry sarcophagus is in the Vatican Museum. Geoffrey of Monmouth, England, started the legend that Helena was the daughter of the king of Colchester, a tradition no longer upheld. In liturgical art Helena is depicted as an empress, holding a cross.

When Evelyn Waugh wrote his novel Helena, he maintained the Colchester legend and his heroine meets her husband (and Constantine's father) Constantius Chlorus when he visits her father. Waugh was very proud of his achievement in Helena, and George Weigel, who wrote the introduction to the Loyola Classics edition (I bought my Penguin edition during a trip to Brussels many years ago) comments on Waugh's purpose in writing the novel:

At the same time, Helena was, and is, Waugh’s most intentional statement about the truth of Christianity, and about vocation – the divine call to a specific work in life – as the heart of Christian discipleship. Helena is full of biting historical and theological commentary (including a hilarious put-down of Edward Gibbon’s anti-Christian reading of Roman history). But, in the main, we are far, far away here from what one Waugh biographer calls the “jubilant malice” with which Waugh pilloried the California way of death in The Loved One. In Helena, Waugh explored, sparely but deeply, the question that shaped the last thirty-six years of his life – how does one become a saint?

In the course of his conversion to Catholicism, which took place in 1930, Evelyn Waugh came to the conviction that sanctity was not for the sanctuary only. Every Christian had to be a saint. And one of the hardest parts of that lifelong process of self-emptying and purification was to discover one’s vocation: that unique, singular something that would, in accord with God’s providential design, provide the means for sanctification. Helena’s sense of vocation, and the Christian scandal of particularity to which her vocation bore witness, was what attracted Waugh to the fourth-century Empress, whom the world remembers as the mother of the Emperor Constantine. Waugh later explained his choice in a letter to the poet John Betjeman, who confessed to being puzzled by the fact that, in the novel, Helena “doesn’t seem like a saint”:

"Saints are simply souls in heaven. Some people have been so sensationally holy in life that we know they went straight to heaven and so put them in the [liturgical] calendar. We all have to become saints before we get to heaven. That is what purgatory is for. And each individual has his own form of sanctity which he must achieve or perish. It is no good my saying, ‘I wish I were like Joan of Arc or St. John of the Cross.’ I can only be St. Evelyn Waugh – after God knows what experiences in purgatory.

"I liked Helena’s sanctity because it is in contrast to all that moderns think of as sanctity. She wasn’t thrown to the lions, she wasn’t a contemplative, she didn’t look like an El Greco. She just discovered what it was God has chosen for her to do and did it. And she snubbed Aldous Huxley with his perennial fog, by going straight to the essential physical historical fact of the redemption."

Waugh was not a proselytizer, and Helena is no more an exercise in conventional piety than Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, whose hero is an alcoholic priest. But Waugh was a committed Christian apologist, and his apologetic skills are amply displayed in Helena. Thus Helena was not only addressed to those Christians who were trying to figure out the meaning of their own discipleship; it was also intended as a full-bore confrontation with the false humanism that, for Waugh, was embodied by well-meaning but profoundly wrong-headed naturalistic-humanistic critics of the modern world like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.

Read the rest of Weigel's comments here.

The "best Catholic novel of the Twentieth Century"

Father Robert Barron states that Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited should receive that title. Allow me to parse the phrase: It is a novel; the author is Catholic; it was written in the 20th century; it is set in the 20th century; it is about a Catholic family and the protagonist's interactions with each member of that Catholic family; it is well-written, plotted, and filled with fascinating characters; it seems to fit the bill.

Charles Ryder meets Sebastian Flyte at Christ Church in Oxford and becomes his friend (and more?); Charles becomes the lover of Julia, the confidante of Cordelia, the antagonist of both Lady Marchmain and her eldest son, Bridey (the former because of his relationship with Sebastian, particularly his aiding and abetting Sebastian's alcoholism; the latter because of his relationship with Julia, particularly his leading her into "living in sin"), and finally the witness of Lord Marchmain's reconciliation to Jesus and His Church.

Through all the evocation of Oxford, the beauty of Brideshead, the curiosity of a Catholic noble family in Anglican England, all the tangle of relationships and conflicts, Waugh stated that real theme of the novel was the operation of God's grace in the Marchmain family and by extension, Charles, as he is a member of that family. Although none of the characters achieve a worldly happy ending, each of them receives grace:

Lady Marchmain remains true to her Catholic faith: she makes mistakes in handling the faults of others around her (her husband's infidelity, her son's drunkenness, etc), but she is faithful. She is not perfectly good; but no one in the novel is perfectly bad, either. She is like Bridey, staunch and strict: we don't really like her, but she has integrity.

Lord Marchmain returns home to Brideshead and home to the Church, and through his conversion, he brings Julia back to the Church: she feels the twitch upon the thread and knows that she cannot commit adultery with Charles. Whatever else Lady Marchmain else accomplished, Julia knows her Catholic faith, like Sebastian, she has the vocabulary of Catholicism, as when she acknowledges that she cannot choose a lesser love (Charles) instead of God!

Sebastian finds grace even in his drunkenness; Cordelia, who shares some of her mother and her brother's attributes, is my favorite character in the novel. She is the one who sees the dangers Charles and Julia face and also appreciates the holiness that Sebastian finds as the doorman at a monastery in Northern Africa. I always enjoy reading the scene in which Cordelia tells Charles the story of Sebastian's life at the monastery. She sees with eyes of faith the grace that Charles misses, even in her, when she accurately states his impression of her after returning from the Spanish Civil War: "thwarted"--because then she turns the term right back on him. She has prayed for his conversion and she works for her father's return to the Faith, because Cordelia believes in heaven and wants to go there after death: she is simple and profound.

Finally, Charles himself experiences conversion: he recognizes the grace that Lord Marchmain has received, and that it is "no little thing"; through that sign of Lord Marchmain on his deathbed, Charles realizes that there is a God--and he can even accept Julia's decision with a kind of bitter regret, yet understanding. The last scene, in the chapel Lord Marchmain built for his Catholic wife, demonstrates Charles' conversion and faith.

I do think Brideshead Revisited is the best Catholic novel of the twentieth century; it may be one of the best Christian novels on the twentieth century as it depicts the providence of God working in one family's, one man's life. Waugh's special insight is that he understands the human person in the fullest Catholic sense--fallen, redeemed, receiving God's grace and love all unmerited and yet participating in that grace with free will; he depicts the sacramentality of the Catholic Christian life. And although Waugh is dealing with very serious matters--life and death; love; eternal salvation or eternal damnation--there is a brilliant sense of humor and of the absurd (Rex Motram's attempt to become Catholic; Mr. Samgrass trying to keep up with Sebastian; Charles at home with his father during the summer break, etc).

If you haven't read it, I think you should; I reread it every other year. The 1981 Granada tv series is a good supplement; avoid the recent movie adaptation like the plague, or like Mr. Samgrass.

Regnans in Excelsis

April 30th is the Memorial of Pope St. Pius V (1504 to 1572) who was elected pope in 1566. He was certainly a great reformer pope, implementing the program of the Council of Trent, naming St. Thomas Aquinas a Doctor of the Church, and working to protect and aid the poor.

In 1570 he issued the Bull "Regnans in Excelsis" at the urging of Cardinal Allen and Father Robert Parsons, SJ to excommunicate Elizabeth I of England and release Catholics in England from loyalty to her as queen. The Bull might have supported the Northern Rebellions in 1569 and 1570 to rally more Catholics to the effort, but it came too late--after Elizabeth had defeated the rebels. After its issue, Elizabeth and Parliament passed more and more strict recusancy laws as English Catholic priests returned from exile (after preparation and ordination in Douai, Rome or Vallidolid as described in the series of posts this week) and Catholics continued to remain true to the ancient faith.

The next year, however, Pope Pius was more successful in forming the alliance between Spain and Venice which led to the October 7, 1571 victory over the Turks in the great naval battle of Lepanto. He then instituted the feast of Our Lady of Victory, now called Our Lady of the Rosary.
In his biography of St. Edmund Campion, Evelyn Waugh discussed that Papal Bull and whether Pope Saint Pius V had made a strategic error in issuing it, according to this website:

Reflecting upon the mysterious and very consequential decision which had been made ten years earlier (in 1570) by the sainted Dominican Pope Pius V, namely, to promulgate on Corpus Christi Day (25 May 1570) the Bull of Elizabeth’s Excommunication and Deposition (Regnans in Excelsis), Evelyn Waugh posed an important question, and with great humility:

Had he [Pope Pius V], perhaps, in those withdrawn, exalted hours before his crucifix, learned something that was hidden from the statesmen of his time and the succeeding generations of historians [who acutely criticized him for his act]; [had he] seen through and beyond the present and the immediate future [e.g., the October 1571 Battle of Lepanto!]; [had he] understood that there was no easy way of reconciliation, but that it was only through blood and hatred and derision that the faith was one day to return to England?[20]
Waugh shows a heart and a humility for this great Dominican Pope despite the manifold, “learned and prudent” criticisms against his Bull of Excommunication and Deposition. Waugh, then says, once again with a supernatural perspective:

It is possible that one of his more worldly predecessors [as Pope] might have acted differently, or at another season, but it was the pride and slight embarrassment of the Church that, as has happened from time to time in her history, the See of Peter was at this moment occupied by a Saint.[21]

Moreover,

His contemporaries and the vast majority of subsequent historians regarded the Pope’s action as ill-judged. It has been represented as a gesture of mediaevalism, futile in an age of new, vigorous nationalism, and its author as an ineffectual and deluded champion [like a Don Quixote], stumbling through the mists, in the ill-fitting, antiquated armour of Gregory [VII] and Innocent [III]; a disastrous figure, provoking instead of a few buffets for Sancho Panza the bloody ruin of English Catholicism.[22]

Waugh’s own artfully ironic description of Saint Pius V’s scoffers shows the depth of his own vision and Faith; and he truly tries to understand the Pope’s deeper reasons and motives:

Pius contemplated only the abiding, abstract principles that lay behind the phantasmagoric changes of human affairs. He prayed earnestly about the situation in England, and saw it with complete clarity; it was a question [a quaestio disputata] that admitted of no doubt whatever. Elizabeth was illegitimate by birth, she had violated her [Catholic] coronation oath, deposed her [Catholic] bishops, issued a heretical Prayer Book and forbidden her subjects the comfort of the sacraments. No honourable Catholic could be expected to obey her.[23]

Evelyn Waugh's Bitter Trial

Ignatius Press announces a new edition of A Bitter Trial, edited by Dom Alcuin Reid, with a Foreword by Joseph Pearce and an Afterword by Clare Asquith, Countess of Oxford:

English author Evelyn Waugh, most famous for his novel Brideshead Revisited, became a Roman Catholic in 1930. For the last decade of his life, however, Waugh experienced the changes being made to the Church's liturgy to be nothing short of "a bitter trial". In John Cardinal Heenan, Waugh found a sympathetic pastor and somewhat of a kindred spirit.
This volume brings together the personal correspondence between Waugh and Heenan during the 1960s, a trying period for many faithful Catholics. It begins with a 1962 article Waugh wrote for the Spectator followed by a response from then Archbishop Heenan, who at the time was a participant at the Second Vatican Council. These and the other writings included in this book paint a vivid picture of two prominent and loyal English Catholics who lamented the loss of Latin and the rupture of tradition that resulted from Vatican II.

In the light of the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI, many Catholics are looking again at the post-conciliar liturgical changes. To this "reform of the reform" of the liturgy now underway in the Roman Catholic Church, both Heenan and Waugh have much to contribute.

Alcuin Reid is a cleric of the Diocese of Fréjus-Toulon, France, and a liturgical scholar and author. His principal work, The Organic Development of the Liturgy carries a preface by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.
Joseph Pearce is a popular literary biographer whose works include The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde, Tolkien: Man and Myth, and The Quest for Shakespeare.
Clare Asquith, Countess of Oxford is the author of Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare.

Rich Leonardi, St. Edmund Campion, and Richard Simpson

Rich Leonardi posted information about the revised edition of Richard Simpson's biography of St. Edmund Campion.

There are two Richard Simpson's documented in Wikipedia: a martyr and the convert-biographer (who joined the Catholic Church on August 1st, 165 years ago):

"Richard Simpson (16 September 1820–5 April 1876) was a British Roman Catholic writer and literary scholar. He was born at Beddington, Surrey, into an Anglican family, and was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and at Oriel College, Oxford. He obtained a BA degree on 9 February 1843. He was ordained in the Church of England, and became the vicar of Mitcham in Surrey, in 1844, the same year that he married his cousin, Elizabeth Mary Cranmer. He resigned his position some time before being received into the Catholic Church on 1 August 1846. He then spent more than a year on the continent, becoming very proficient as a linguist.

Simpson returned to England in 1847, and settled in Clapham, Surrey. In 1850, he began to write for The Rambler, a Catholic periodical founded by converts. In 1856, he became its assistant editor, and in 1858, was made editor. When the magazine was discontinued in 1862 Simpson, with Sir John Acton, began the Home and Foreign Review. This met with resistance from the Catholic hierarchy, and was discontinued in 1864.

Afterwards Simpson devoted himself to the study of Shakespeare, to music, and to writing. He was one of the first to advance the theory that Shakespeare had been a Catholic. Also, he was elected a member of the committee of the New Shakspere Society in 1874. He is probably best remembered for his biography of the English martyr, Edmund Campion; this book was praised by Evelyn Waugh in his own Campion book from seven decades later.

Simpson died of cancer in Rome on 5 April 1876.

Works:
Invocation of Saints proved from the Bible alone (1849)
The Lady Falkland: Her Life (1861)
Edmund Campion (1867)
Introduction to the Philosophy of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1868)
The School of Shakespeare (1872)
Sonnets of Shakespeare selected from a complete setting, and miscellaneous songs (1878)"

Reading the title The Rambler, of course, reminds me of Blessed John Henry Newman's attempt to save that journal by taking over the editor position, and then getting it --and himself-- in even deeper trouble with his article "On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine". Here is a link to a consideration of Simpson and The Rambler.

Thanks, Rich!