Book Review: "The Fame of Blessed Thomas More" (1929)

Almost six years after the speeches in this book were delivered, Saint John Fisher and Saint Thomas More were canonized in Rome on May 19, 1935. The occasion of the speeches and the publication of them was the presentation of an exhibit of paintings, manuscripts, relics, and other materials related to Thomas More in Chelsea, where he had lived. It's also important to note that the year 1929 marked the 100th anniversary of the Catholic Emancipation Act, which was commemorated in this collection, Catholic Emancipation, 1829 to 1929: Essays by Various Writers with an Introduction by His Eminence Cardinal Bourne, which I reviewed in 2021.

Just to give you some context: Lillie Langtry, who might have been Edward VII then the Prince of Wales's mistress, died in 1929; Jean Simmons and Audrey Hepburn were born in 1929. George V, Edward VII's second son (1865-1936) was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India; Ramsey MacDonald led a Labor government starting in June; and on October 18, the London Stock Exchange experienced a "sharp fall" after Black Friday in the USA. On December 15, Pope Pius XI beatified 136 Martyrs of England and Wales (29 of which were canonized in 1970; Chesterton attended that 1929 beatification and wrote about in The Resurrection of Rome).

Reading this book requires an adjustment on the part of the reader because "Blessed" Thomas More's fame seemed more secure in 1929. Now we're still dealing with the images (on screen especially) of Saint Thomas More from Hilary Mantel's trilogy, based on what Travis Curtright contends are G.R. Elton's outdated and disproved views of Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More:

Because the plot of Wolf Hall relies on Elton’s characterizations of Cromwell and More, Mantel writes as if the last thirty years of research in the Tudor period never happened. Though many prominent historians of the period—such as John Guy, Brendan Bradshaw, and Eamon Duffy—have refuted Elton’s claims about More already, George Logan most recently assembled a team of international scholars to reassess More’s life, writings, and political actions in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More (2011). These scholars put to rest the most inflammatory claims of Elton and his school. Instead, Logan’s team finds More to be a superlative humanist scholar and, as the chapter on statesmanship claims, the historical record reveals “a statesman of conscience” and one of “extraordinary insight and foresight.”

When reading, for example, R.W. Chamber's essay on "Sir Thomas More's Fame Among His Countrymen", we're made aware of how much has been accomplished since 1929 in the publication of Thomas More's works: the translations of his Latin works, the Yale University editions, the work of the Amici Thomae Mori societies, etc.  A new edition of More's works was forthcoming at the time from Eyre and Spottiswoode: The English Works of Thomas More, editors W.E. Campbell*, A.W. Reed, R. W. Chambers, and W.A.G. Doyle-Davidson, 2 volumes (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode Limited, 1931)

Contents and comments:

Introductory Essay: "Sir Thomas More's Fame Among His Countrymen" by R.W. Chambers (not part of the presentations made at the exhibition)

Chambers (1874-1942), was a friend of J.R.R. Tolkien and wrote Man's Unconquerable Mind, The Place of Thomas More in English Literature and History, and Thomas More.

"The Charge of Religious Intolerance" by Ronald Knox

In dealing with this accusation, Knox contrasts Cranmer with More: when Cranmer questioned Joan Bocher during the reign of Edward VI, they were comparing their private judgment as Joan was an Anabaptist. Cranmer brought her to the stake and even John Rogers thought burning at the stake appropriate for one found guilty of heresy. Knox argues that More was questioning--never with torture--those accused of violating heresy laws for the sake of the Common Good and the Church's "continuous tradition" (p. 52) He notes that Bocher, who pointed out that in 1546 Anne Askew had been found guilty of heresy for denying Transubstantiation, which by that time (1550) Cranmer also denied, saw "that complete toleration was the logical corollary of private judgment, and Cranmer did not." (p. 54)

"The Witness to Abstract Truth" by Hilaire Belloc

I think Belloc misses the mark slightly by not acknowledging that by upholding Papal Primacy More was upholding the Unity of the Church: that More knew once the Church in England was schismatic, the doctrines and Sacraments of the Catholic Church would fall away.

"A Turning Point in History" by G.K. Chesterton

The briefest and and best. Contains the famous line that Thomas More was "important today, but he is not as important now as he will be in 100 years from today.”

"A Great Lord Chancellor" by Lord Justice Russell

Russell (1867-1946), Frank Russell, Baron Russell of Killown, was Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, Lord Justice of Appeal, and Justice of the High Court (overlapping positions): he was a Catholic and argued for lifting the restriction on Catholics from including Masses for their Souls in their Wills in Parliament. That restriction was lifted in 1926.

He testifies that More was great Lord Chancellor because he heard and decided cases impartially and expeditiously; that he did not, unlike Wolsey before him, become wealthy through his office; not even his sons-in-law received any special treatment!

"A Catholic of the Renaissance" by Henry Browne, SJ

Browne (1853-1941) was a classical scholar; much interested in the Cause of the English Martyrs of England and Wales, he worked for the growth of Catholicism in England.

His essay contrasts the relative corruption of the hierarchy in England before the Reformation with the enduring devotion and practice of the Catholic Faith after Henry's break from the Church and the subsequent changes in doctrine and practice. There must have been, he avers, great devotion, in spite of bad examples, to the Church's practice in England for so many priests and laity to have remained true through decades and decades of persecution and prosecution. Thomas More is an example of that devotion.

"The Glory of Chelsea" by Reginald Blunt

Blunt, CBE, was the founder of the Chelsea Society (1927). 

He comments that he is not a Catholic, so does not concern himself with religious issues, but that he admires Thomas More as a good farmer, neighbor, and family man. He cites, in particular, when there was a fire on his farm and More was very concerned that the fire had harmed his neighbors. He wrote to Alice from Court, where he was detained on the King's business, to make sure they were taken care of, with supplies from his farm's store as needed.

"A National Bulwark against Tyranny" by Bede Jarrett, OP

Jarrett (1881-1934) was a historian and author; founder of Blackfriars Priory in Oxford (1921) and author of S. Antonino and Medieval Economics, Life of St. Dominic, and The English Dominicans, among many other works.

Why was it so necessary for Henry VIII to pursue the compliance of Thomas More and John Fisher? Why was Henry VIII afraid of More's silence? Jarrett suggests it was not because of political reasons; it was because of the national and international standing of More and Fisher as good, holy, and learned men, known far and wide as scholars. They were among the leaders of the Renaissance in England and like Colet, Linacre, Grocyn, and Lilly, they were devout Catholics. "He really was the head of the whole cultural society then existing in England" (p. 129). Remember that More had upheld the study of Greek and Latin pagan classics: he "shared to the full the Renaissance spirit" (ibid). Not to have More on his side--Henry could not abide that and had to get him out of the way--thus the particularly aimed Act of Attainder against him. It's Jarrett's judgment that More was "forced into prominence" (p. 131) even more through Henry's efforts, and that "his greatness came from the moment really that he went to prison" (p. 134), because before More had not sought such prominence and greatness, even as he worked to support his king and his Church and be the King's servant and God's first.

Both Jarrett and Knox present cogent arguments and impressed me the most.

Appendix I: Catalogue of the More Memorial Exhibition

Appendix II: A Short Bibliography of Books Relating to the Martyr (Compiled by *W.E. Campbell)

One of the reasons the book was published was to support the building fund for the Beaufort Street Convent, where the Sisters of the Adoration Reparatrice at that time maintained "ceaseless adoration by day and by night in reparation for the national crime of the Blessed Martyr's execution." The convent was founded in 1898, but the Sisters left the convent in 1975 and now it's the site of Allen Hall.

It's good of Cluny to make this rarity available again, just four years before we see how Chesterton's prediction comes true in 2029. Please note that I purchased the book.

Chesterton on the "Book of Common Prayer"

Hilaire Belloc commented on Thomas Cranmer's masterpiece of English prose in the Book of Common Prayer as I noted in my review of Mysterium Press's edition of Cranmer last week. Belloc was born and raised in a Catholic family; his friend G.K. Chesterton was a convert to Catholicism after sharing the Anglo-Catholic faith of his wife Frances for years. As an Anglican, Chesterton used the Book of Common Prayer in church services; as a Catholic (after 1928), he looked back on the experience.

The late Father John Hunwicke (+April 30, 2024), a former Anglican minister who converted to Catholicism as a member (and priest) of the Anglican Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, posted some comments from Chesterton about the Book of Common Prayer on his blog. He does not give the source, however, but I wonder if they're from a collection of columns from the Illustrated London News. This post from the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society doesn't give the source either.

From Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment, May 2, 2018:

" ... why has the old Prayer-Book a power like that of great poetry upon the spirit and heart? The reason is much deeper than the mere avoidance of journalese. It might be put in a sentence; it has style, it has tradition; it has religion; it was written by apostate Catholics. It is strong, not in so far as it is the first Protestant book, but in so far as it was the last Catholic book. 

"As it happens, this can be proved in the most practical manner from the actual details of the prose. The most moving passages in the old Anglican Prayer Book are exactly those that are least like the atmosphere of the Anglicans. They are moving, or indeed thrilling, precisely because they say the things which Protestants have long left off saying; and which Catholics still say. Anybody who knows anything of literature knows when a style lifts itself to its loftiest efforts; and in these cases it is always to say strongly what we [Catholics] still endeavour to say, however weakly; but which nobody else ever endeavours to say at all. Let anyone recall for himself the very finest passages in the Book of Common Prayer, and he will soon see that they are concerned specially with spiritual thoughts and themes that now seem strange and terrible; but anyhow, the reverse of common."

Father Hunwicke further commented: More of this tomorrow; it comes from a collection of his pieces published in 1935, the year before he died (he had converted in 1922). When you read my next instalment, you will grow, I suspect, more and embarrassed about .... modern Catholic culture.

Here is the second post and here is the third.

Even though the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (BCP) revised some of the rubrics, etc., much of Cranmer's English prose, including the Litany and the Collects, etc., remained, as this interview about the 1662 BCP notes:

This quality is one that the 1662 BCP preserves from Cranmer’s work more than a century earlier. It reflects the orality of mid-sixteenth century written English. This is also why people notice its strong cadences. It was written for the ear. That’s a great usability advantage because it increases memorability.

So Belloc and Chesterton agreed on the excellence of Cranmer's English prose! ChesterBelloc!

Happy 150th Birthday to G.K. Chesterton!

Only G.K. Chesterton could make such an event as his birth an excuse for levity, with deeper intent than at first perceived:

Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. I do not allege any significance in the relation of the two buildings; and I indignantly deny that the church was chosen because it needed the whole water-power of West London to turn me into a Christian.

Nevertheless, the great Waterworks Tower was destined to play its part in my life, as I shall narrate on a subsequent page; but that story is connected with my own experiences, whereas my birth (as I have said) is an incident which I accept, like some poor ignorant peasant, only because it has been handed down to me by oral tradition. And before we come to any of my own experiences, it will be well to devote this brief chapter to a few of the other facts of my family and environment which I hold equally precariously on mere hearsay evidence. Of course what many call hearsay evidence, or what I call human evidence, might be questioned in theory, as in the Baconian controversy or a good deal of the Higher Criticism. The story of my birth might be untrue. I might be the long-lost heir of The Holy Roman Empire, or an infant left by ruffians from Limehouse on a door-step in Kensington, to develop in later life a hideous criminal heredity. Some of the sceptical methods applied to the world's origin might be applied to my origin, and a grave and earnest enquirer come to the conclusion that I was never born at all. But I prefer to believe that common sense is something that my readers and I have in common; and that they will have patience with a dull summary of the facts.

from his Autobiography. He has received and accepts on faith the history of his birth, as have nearly all of us. Please note that Chesterton finished his Autobiography just before he died and it was published posthumously.

He also wrote about birthdays:

The first fact about the celebration of a birthday is that it is a way of affirming defiantly, and even flamboyantly, that it is a good thing to be alive….But there is a second fact about Birthdays, and the birth-song of all creation, a fact which really follows on this; but which, as it seems to me, the other school of thought almost refuses to recognize. The point of that fact is simply that it is a fact. In being glad about my Birthday, I am being glad about something which I did not myself bring about.

--from G.K.’s Weekly, 21 March 1935

Our local Chesterton society is meeting extraordinarily tonight (6 pm) at Eighth Day Books to celebrate his birthday by buying books and then repairing to a local ice cream shop -- not a pub? -- for a treat!

Happy Chesterton's Birthday to all his fans!

Image Credit (Public Domain): Picture of Chesterton with a Dog

"My Name is Lazarus": Chesterton's Converts

I haven't been blogging much this month, since late March and early to mid-April (and April is almost gone) was first taken up by Holy Week and Easter and the Octave, and then by two deaths in my circle of friends, one after hospitalization, surgery, another surgery and then hospice, and the other killed by a hit-and-run driver while walking, preparing for the Kansas Camino from Wichita to Pilsen, Kansas.

The latter death, of Laurie Robinson, the founder of our local "Greater Wichita" local Chesterton Society, led me back to this book, which I've dipped into before:

34 stories of converts whose path to Rome was paved by G.K. Chesterton. Edited with an introduction by Dale Ahlquist.

Jewish converts, Muslim converts, former atheists, agnostics, and Protestants of all stripes. Drawn to Chesterton for utterly different reasons. All arriving at the same destination.

A book of curiosity and confrontation and consolation.

Contributors include Bishop James Conley, Fr. Dwight Longenecker, Peter Kreeft, Joseph Pearce, Leah Libresco, Kevin O’Brien, Brandon Vogt, Emma Fox Wilson, Carl Olson, Victoria Darkey, Matt Swaim, David Fagerberg and others. An utterly engaging collection of conversion stories. Includes a fascinating “new” account of Chesterton’s own conversion in his own words.

The book features this poem by Chesterton, written after he had been received into the Catholic Church:

The Convert

After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white.
I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
Being not unlovable but strange and light;
Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
But softly, as men smile about the dead.

The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.

The painting from which the cover detail is taken (Public Domain): 

The Raising of Lazarus by Leon Bonnat (1857)

Many of the essays demonstrate how reading Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man, The Catholic Church and Conversion, etc., influenced the writers' journeys into the Catholic Church. 

Laurie's essay is different, because she describes how re-reading Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, after she had been received into the Catholic Church after growing up and working for years in the Mennonite community--and particularly as a journalist for Mennonite publications--helped her resist some of the pressures she was facing. His words, read while recovering from the flu, were a weekend Mystagogy for her.

She organized our Chesterton group, which meets at Eighth Day Books the second Friday every month, nearly 12 years ago, composing this prayer for the beginning of our gatherings:

Heavenly Father,

We thank you for all your good gifts. We ask you to guide us in this conversation; illuminate our minds and hearts with eternal truth as it was expressed through the pen of G.K. Chesterton. 

Grant us the grace to bring glory and honor to you all that we say and do.

We ask this through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

We are reading Chesterton's The Everlasting Man currently and our next meeting will be on Friday, May 10. When we met on the Friday after her death on the Solemnity of the Annunciation (transferred to April 8 because of Holy Week and the Easter Octave), we read her chapter from My Name is Lazarus, paid tribute to her influences on many of us, and prayed for the repose of her soul and her family's consolation, and our own.

Eternal rest grant unto to her, O Lord, and may Laurie's soul, and the souls of all the Faithful departed, rest in peace. May Laurie rest in peace. Amen.

Charles Lamb and Chesterton Agree: More Graces, Please!

G.K. Chesterton's famous quote on gratitude: 

“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”

Note that this website presents Chesterton's reflection as a poem.

In the Essays of Elia, Charles Lamb reflects on saying "Grace Before Meat" and like Chesterton, wants to add occasions of gratitude--but he wants specially written "forms":

THE custom of saying grace at meals had, probably, its origin in the early times of the world, and the hunter-state of man, when dinners were precarious things, and a full meal was more than a common blessing; when a belly-full was a windfall, and looked like a special providence. In the shouts and triumphal songs with which, after a season of sharp abstinence, a lucky booty of deer's or goat's flesh would naturally be ushered home, existed, perhaps, the germ of the modern grace. It is not otherwise easy to be understood, why the blessing of food -- the act of eating -- should have had a particular expression of thanksgiving annexed to it, distinct from that implied and silent gratitude with which we are expected to enter upon the enjoyment of the many other various gifts and good things of existence. I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, these spiritual repasts -- a grace before Milton -- a grace before Shakespeare -- a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading The Fairie Queene? . . .

Eighth Day Books has used the selection in bold italic for one of its bookmarks, free with the purchase of any book!!

I think one form will do for any of the occasions Chesterton and Lamb mention:

Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Neither author considers expressing gratitude after the experience of the concert, the opera, the pleasant walk, The Faerie Queene:

We give Thee thanks, Almighty God, for all thy benefits, Who live and reign for ever and ever. Amen.

Charles Lamb cared for his beloved sister Mary throughout his life, protecting her from condemnation when she killed their mother during a fit of "lunacy" as authorities called it (there was no insanity defense at that time). He kept her out of public "mad houses" but she and he both spent time in asylums when their madness was out of control. More on Charles Lamb here. More on eighteenth century insane asylums here.

Image Credit (public domain): Grace before the Meal, by Fritz von Uhde, 1885

G.K. Chesterton, RIP

So last Friday night, on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, our Greater Wichita Chesterton Society local chapter (including residents of Derby, St. Mark's, Hutchinson and Newton) met in The Ladder to finish our discussion of Joseph Pearce's biography of G.K. Chesterton. As you might expect, the last event in Chesterton's life to be discussed was his death, 85 years ago today (June 14, 1936).

There were two very beautiful anecdotes about Chesterton's decline and death. One was that he had memorized the Sequence for the Feast of Corpus Christi (having published his great work on St. Thomas Aquinas just three years before in 1933). Pearce quoted the last two stanzas of Lauda Sion, with its prayer to see God face-to-face at the Heavenly Banquet:

Bone pastor, panis vere,

Jesu, nostri miserére:

Tu nos pasce, nos tuére:

Tu nos bona fac vidére

In terra vivéntium.

Tu, qui cuncta scis et vales:

Qui nos pascis hic mortáles:

Tuos ibi commensáles,

Cohærédes et sodáles,

Fac sanctórum cívium.

Amen. Alleluia.

He also cited the last words of Verbum supernum prodiens, reflecting on Heaven as being in patria (our true native land!). For a man who loved England so much, this was remarkable statement.

UPDATE: I think that the feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated on Thursday, June 11 in 1936. (Easter was on April 12; Pentecost on May 31, and Trinity Sunday on June 7.)

The other anecdote was that Pope Pius XI sent telegrams to Frances Chesterton and Cardinal Hinsley, referring to Chesterton as a "Defender of the Catholic Faith". The telegram was read at a memorial Requiem Mass celebrated at Westminster Cathedral on June 27, 1936. The British press would not publish the pope's telegram because it gave Chesterton the title which, in its view, belonged only to the King of England, Edward VIII. (Edward VIII had not been crowned yet and never would be because he abdicated in December of 1936 because he could not reign "without the help and support of the woman" he loved.)

Since he had not been crowned or anointed, or sworn his coronation oath to defend the faith, the future Duke of Kent was not really the Defender of the Faith at that time at all! 

I wonder what Chesterton would have made of all the ironies of Edward VIII's abdication in his column for G.K.'s Weekly.

Pearce reminded us, of course, that King Henry VIII had received the title "Fidei Defensor" from Pope Leo X "shortly before the King had rebelled against the Church". It was actually in 1521, about six years before Henry started seeking an annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. We could date his rebellion against the Catholic Church and Papal authority to 1532, so perhaps not that "shortly before". Pearce also comments that Chesterton had little in common with the king, "except perhaps the size of their girths."! (p. 485)

You may see a digitized image (showing the damage incurred in a fire) of the Papal Bull of Pope Leo X proclaiming Henry VIII the Defender of the Faith at the British Library's Medieval Manuscripts blog, reminding us why he received that title:

Henry was given the title Defender of the Faith in recognition for his Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (Defence of the Seven Sacraments). Possibly written in consultation with Thomas More (b. 1478, d. 1535) and Cardinal Wolsey (b. c. 1473, d. 1530), Henry’s principal statesmen at this point in his reign, this theological treatise acted as a response to the pronouncements of the German theologian Martin Luther (b. 1483, d. 1546), whose ideas helped to shape the Protestant Reformation movement during the 16th century. . . .

Henry’s positive relationship with the Papacy did not last. Only a decade after Leo X issued the papal bull, Henry decided to break away from the Church of Rome, following Pope Clement VII’s refusal to annul his marriage to his first wife Catherine of Aragon (b. 1485, d. 1536). He also distanced himself from the Assertio, claiming that he had been manoeuvred into writing it by his bishops. His actions ultimately resulted in his own excommunication by Clement’s successor Paul III (b. 1468, d. 1549) in 1538 and he was stripped of the title Defender of the Faith.

However, towards the end of Henry’s reign, in 1543, the English Parliament passed an act that restored the title for him and his successors. Since then, it has continued to be used as part of the styling of British monarchs (including the reigning Elizabeth II) to indicate their role as Head of the Church of England. It even features on coins of the realm, with the Latin Fidei defensor appearing in its abbreviated form F.D beside the Queen’s portrait.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Defender of the Catholic Faith, Rest in Peace in Our True Native Land!

Book Review: Essays on Catholic Emancipation, 1829 to 1929

This really is a book of its time: the publisher/editor assumed that everyone knew exactly who the authors were and why each one was qualified to write his or her particular essay. It's also a book in which Cardinal Newman is often mentioned in good standing and fond remembrance. 

Published on the 100th anniversary of Catholic Emancipation in England, Catholic Emancipation, 1829 to 1929: Essays by Various Writers with an Introduction by His Eminence Cardinal Bourne (Longmans, Green and Co., London, New York, Toronto, 1929) contains honest and informative analyses of how Catholics in England had succeeded or failed to take advantage of relative religious freedom in England throughout one hundred (100) years.

Contents:

Introduction by His Eminence Cardinal Bourne [the fourth Archbishop of Westminster from 1903 to 1935; born in 1861; died in 1935]

I. Joy in Harvest--A Sequel to the Second Spring by Monsignor William Barry, DD (referring to St. John Henry Newman's famous "Second Spring" sermon of 1852)

II. The Catholic Church and the Spiritual Life by The Most Reverend Archbishop [Alban] Goodier, SJ [author of many books including Saints for Sinners] One very lovely line: "When he witnessed, in 1908, the Eucharistic Congress in London, Newman in heaven must indeed have thanked God." p. 43)

III. The Catholic Church and Education by Sir John Gilbert, KBE, KCSG [praises Newman's efforts to educate Catholics; deprecates the unfortunate decision by Henry Cardinal Manning, et al, preventing Catholic men from attending Oxford and Cambridge]

IV. The Catholic Church and Literature by Algernon Cecil [author and barrister; author of Six Oxford Thinkers, including Newman]

V. The Catholic Church and Science by Sir Bertram C.A. Windle, FRS, ScD, PhD [most interesting comment: Thomas Huxley was most influential in convincing Englishmen of the conflict between the Church and science]

VI. The Catholic Church and Music by Ernest Oldmeadow

VII. Catholics in Public Life by Viscount [Edmund Howard] Fitzalan

VIII. Catholic and Philanthropy by The Bishop of Brentwood [Arthur Doubleday]

IX. Religious Orders of Men by Abbot [Basil Christopher] Butler [of Downside Abbey; later Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster; born in 1902; died in 1986; he was a participant in and strong proponent of the Second Vatican Council; one of the youngest contributors to this volume]

X. Religious Communities of Women by Maud Monahan [I could not find any dates for her; she translated spiritual works and wrote about Janet Erskine Stuart, superior general of Society of the Sacred Heart]

XI. The Influence of Catholic Laywomen by Miss Margaret Fletcher [1862-1943; she became a Catholic in 1897 and was the founder of the Catholic Women's League]

XII. Statistical Progress of the Catholic Church by Rev. Herbert Thurston, SJ [author of many entries in the Catholic Encyclopedia; interested in Spiritualism and Madame Blavatsky; friend of  Father George Tyrrell, SJ of the Modernist Movement]

and, saving the best for last:

XIII. The Outlook by G.K. Chesterton [just seven (7) years after becoming a Catholic!!]

Perhaps among the most entertaining of the chapters before Chesterton's Outlook is Oldmeadow's analysis of music in Catholic cathedrals and churches (VI). He deplores the long-lasting legacy of the Embassy chapels, which presented many great professional soloists (especially Italian opera singers), thus discouraging the congregation from singing. Oldmeadow encourages instead the use of plainchant, Gregorian or otherwise, and welcomed Pope St. Pius X's 1903 motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini. One of the best passages in his chapter:

Rossini, with his flashy "Stabat Mater", found us an easy prey; and Gounod wound us round his little finger. The show-choirs rose to their showiest; their tenors shook shakes, their leading ladies trilled trills, and a little later on Mendelssohn's "Lauda Sion" was thought to be the most lofty and severe of Church music. Yet there might have been unison singing from every throat and celestial polyphony from a few divinely favored choristers. (p. 135)

Throughout most of the chapters, the constant themes are the patchwork method of repealing penal acts against Catholics, the influx of Irish Immigrants, the influence of French religious and priests (welcomed into England during and after the French Revolution), the growth in schools and colleges, the importance of converts, the development of religious orders (for both men and women), the impact of World War I on how the English viewed Catholics after serving as soldiers, sailors, chaplains, nurses, etc.

One of the most frustrating chapters was on the influence of Catholic laywomen in England between 1829 and 1929. Miss Margaret Fletcher begins with some stirring images as she begins to describe the progress of Catholic laywomen and the "woman's movement":

When in 1829 Emancipation was at last granted, and Catholic women realised that henceforth they would not form part of the quarry of a slackened hunt, they knew themselves to be in many ways scarred and spent by the long chase; and yet at the same time to be gloriously free. They had acquired a spiritual fortitude and had preserved an inner moral liberty which were not characteristics of English women at the beginning of the nineteenth century. (p. 225)

Although she recounts how English Catholic laywomen rejected some aspects of the international woman's movement, I was never sure what influence they really exerted in England. Fletcher intends to sketch the history of their efforts in meetings and publications but uses so much passive voice that I don't know who did what--perhaps she was too reticent to describe her own activity and achievements.

Now to Chesterton's Outlook: he was was the right person to write that chapter: his hopeful innocence and insightful wisdom are evident throughout his contribution:

. . .Whole aspects of Catholic doctrine and tradition, hidden by historical accident and the special quarrels of recent times, will be revealed to the world when it begins to address new questions to the Church. This is a point that has not been sufficiently stressed in the relations between Protestantism and Catholicism. Very often a Protestant was not only a man merely protesting, but a man merely protesting against a particular thing. He sometimes thought that thing was Rome; but it was really only one of the thousand aspects of Rome. When new aspects appear under new searchlights, he will be not so much defeated as simply outside the affair. A Baptist disapproves of baptising babies; a Presbyterian disapproves of bishops; a Prohibitionist disapproves of beer, and so on. But a Presbyterian, as such, has nothing very special to say about the Subconscious Mind. A Baptist as such has nothing special to say to a Behaviorist as such. But a Catholic may have a great deal to say to these people.

For the Catholic commentary on life has gone on so much longer, it has covered so many different social conditions, has dealt so carefully with countless fine shades of metaphysics or casuistry, that it really has a relation to almost any class of speculation that may arise. Thus, in the matter of psychoanalysis and the study of the subconscious, the Church will probably be found sooner or later defending certain essentials about Will and Conscience against a welter of wild impersonality. Catholics remembering Catholicism will have a right and reason to do this. But Calvinists who have half forgotten Calvinism have no particular reason to do it.

There is, for instance, one influence that grows stronger every day, never mentioned in the newspapers, not even intelligible to people in the newspaper frame of mind. It is the return of the Thomist Philosophy; which is the philosophy of common sense, as compared with the paradoxes of Kant and Hegel and the Pragmatists. The Roman religion will be, in the exact sense, the only Rationalistic religion. The other religions will not be Rationalist but Relativist; declaring that the reason is itself relative and unreliable; declaring that Being is only Becoming or that all time is only a time of transition ; saying in mathematics that two and two make five in the fixed stars, saying in metaphysics and in morals that there is a good beyond good and evil. Instead of the materialist who said that the soul did not exist, we shall have the new mystic who says that the body does not exist. Amid all these things the return of the Scholastic will simply be the return of the sane man. (pp. 278-279) 

There goes Chesterton, leading the way into the future, pointing out what the Catholic Church will need to offer the civilization and culture of the next hundred years:

But to say that there is no pain, or no matter, or no evil, or no difference between man and beast, or indeed between anything and anything else — this is a desperate effort to destroy all experience and sense of reality; and men will weary of it more and more, when it has ceased to be the latest fashion ; and will look once more for something that will give form to such a chaos and keep the proportions of the mind of man. Millions of men are already at least wondering whether this solution is not to be found in the Catholic order and philosophy.

Above all, the Church has regained that unique position in the world in a fair field and under the very reverse of favour; having had for a hundred years no more than the common right of speaking and publishing and voting in popular assemblies; and as her Master affirmed his divinity by becoming a man among men, she has become for a season a sect among sects, to emerge at the end as something separate or supreme. (p. 281)

As usual, he's almost too right; it's only too bad that we Catholics haven't held on tightly enough to the Common Sense of St. Thomas Aquinas! 

I'd say his chapter, Oldmeadow's and Goodier's on the spiritual life of English Catholics are the best in this book of insights, gratitude for the progress made, and acknowledgement of difficulties and even failures.

Book Review: Joseph Pearce's Biography of G.K. Chesterton

It seems like I've been reading this book forever! We started reading it in our local Chesterton Society group late in 2019 I think, three chapters at a time, although we sometimes only got through two chapters during our monthly discussions. Then because of COVID, we had to skip several meetings, both in the spring of 2020 and particularly at the end of the year. My late brother and I were both in the hospital in December; then Steven died on the second day of January and we met on the second Friday of that month to pray a Rosary for the repose of his soul, and then it was bitterly cold in February so we cancelled. A smaller group of us finally met in March this year, and a larger group gathered on the Friday in the Octave of Easter this month. 

We determined then we'd all read the last four chapters, hope to get through two of them in May and finish our discussion of this book in June! Next month we'll decide what to read next: we're leaning toward either Chesterton's study of Charles Dickens or his book about Geoffrey Chaucer. I'm in favor of either, but we'll vote so that Eighth Day Books may obtain the book for us and we'll start discussing it in July!

Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton is an excellent biographical study, combining the narrative of Chesterton's life with a comprehensive review of his works, their reception at the time, and their influence on other writers like C.S. Lewis, Christopher Dawson, Dorothy L. Sayers, and many others. Pearce's vivid description of the Chestertons' (Gilbert and Frances) domestic life is well-matched by his recounting of their travels to the Holy Land, the U.S.A., Ireland, etc.

One theme we did comment on several times, because we had previously (in 2016) read Nancy Carpentier Brown's The Woman Who Was Chesterton, was how Pearce's biography was considerably more favorable toward Chesterton's sister-in-law, Ada Chesterton (his brother Cecil's wife/widow) than Brown's view of her in the context of Frances' life. In Pearce's narration, she seemed more sympathetic to Chesterton and his work, while Brown highlights Frances' negative reaction to Ada's biographical work The Chestertons.

There was one error I spotted: one page 381 in the chapter "Rome and Romance" Pearce mentions that the Chestertons were in Rome for the "Beatification of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales"--that's incorrect: 136 Martyrs of England and Wales were beatified in 1929 by Pope Pius XI. Twenty-nine of those beatified in that group would be canonized among the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales in 1970 by Pope Paul VI.

It was difficult for me to read the last pages, describing Chesterton's death and Frances' grief--too close to my own feelings; I had to put the book down for a day before I could finish it.

I think this biography is one of Joseph Pearce's greatest achievements. Highly recommended.

Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1926

Let's just file this under the category: Learning Something New Each Day. I was doing some research before responding to a post about the death of Prince Philip on Facebook--someone had said it would still be an act of treason if a Catholic persuaded an heir to the throne (Prince Charles or Prince William, especially) to leave the Church of England for the Catholic Church. I thought that such penal laws had been repealed with the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, which was given Royal Assent by King George IV on April 13 of that year. I knew that Act left some disabilities for Catholics yet to be removed, but I had not heard of or studied the Catholic Relief Act of 1926, to which King George V, Queen Elizabeth II's grandfather, gave his Royal Assent on December 15 of that year. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica the 1829 Emancipation Act left these protections of the Protestant religion of the Church of England in place:

In 1829 this carefully restricted freedom again to practise the proscribed religion was extended by the statute commonly known as the Catholic Emancipation Act (io Geo. IV., c. 7). It further disestablished oaths and declarations against Transubstantiation, the invocation of saints and the sacrifice of the mass, by making such oaths and declarations no longer a qualification for member ship of parliament or the holding of any office, franchise or civil right, except offices in or connected with the Established churches, or in any educational institution in regard to which such oaths obtained. But a new oath, against any attempt to subvert the Protestant religion, was imposed upon Members of Parliament, naval, military and municipal officers and electors. Priests were forbidden to sit in the House of Commons, but all civil and mili tary offices were thrown open to Catholics, except the regency of the kingdom, the lord chancellorship, the lord-lieutenancy of Ire land and the high commissionership of the Church of Scotland.

Also they could not present to livings in the Church of England.

Many other restrictions upon religious liberty were maintained. Judicial and municipal officers were forbidden to attend in their insignia any public worship, except in a building of the Established Church; priests and monks were prohibited from conducting ceremonies or wearing habits save in their churches or private houses. Jesuits and all other male persons under religious vows already in the country were to register themselves—they did so for many years—and the entry into the country of those not already there was forbidden, with the exception of those of them who, being natural born British subjects, had left the country temporarily, and of others who might get a licence from a Protestant secretary of State to come into the country for a period not exceeding six months. To admit a person into a religious order was made a misdemeanour; the admitted person was to be banished for life, and transported for life if he had not gone within three months after the sentence of banishment. An attempt (apparently the only attempt) to enforce this law against religious orders was made as late as 1902, but the magistrate refused a summons and was upheld by the High Court : R. v. Kennedy; 86 Law Times Rep. 753. In 1898 parliament had declined to pass a bill for repealing the law, but it has now been repealed by the Roman Catholic Relief Act, 1926.

Please read more here from the same source about attempts to address such limitations on Catholics.

The Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1926 removed other disabilities against Catholics that were not being enforced:

Disabilities still remained however, and in 1926 yet another repeal Act was passed, the Roman Catholic Relief Act, 1926 (which however does not apply to Northern Ireland). The enactments repealed by this latest legislation are, in addition to the repeal of the law against religious orders already referred to, as follows:—The Act of forbidding the possession of Catholic liturgies and books of devotion and statues, is repealed. The Religious Houses Act, 1559, which declared religious orders to be superstitious, and gifts for their benefit therefore voidable, as being for a superstitious use is also revoked. So is the Act of 1715, above referred to, for appointing commissioners to raise money out of recusants' estates. Then the Relief Act of 1791 was made more fully relieving by removing from it the section which forbade steeples and bells in Catholic churches and prohibited a priest from officiating at funerals in (presumably Protestant) churches or church-yards, or from exercising any rights or ceremonies or wearing the habits of an order out of doors or in a private house where more than five persons in addition to the household were assembled, or from exercising his functions at all unless he had first taken the oath of allegiance and abjuration (a similar prohibition in the Act of 1829 being also removed). From the Act of 1791 was also eliminated the section which prohibited the establishment or endowment of a religious order or school or college by Roman Catholics.

Another issue to be addressed was the offering of Masses for the Dead requested in the Last Wills and Testaments of Catholics in England:

It related to bequests for masses for the testator's soul, and the decision may be classed with the measures of legislative relief since, until 1919, when the decision was given, it had been assumed (after ineffectual attempts to obtain legal sanction for such be quests) that they were unlawful. The decision was given by the House of Lords in the case of Bourne v. Keane (Law Rep. [1919] App. Cas. 815). It overruled the leading case of West v. Shuttleworth (decided in 1835) and other cases following that decision, which had proceeded on the assumption that bequests for masses for the dead were now illegal because the Chantries Act of 1547 had confiscated gifts for such masses in existence at that time. It was held by the House of Lords in Bourne v. Keane that this was a wrong interpretation of the Chantries Act, that that Act did not govern subsequent bequests, and that with the repeal of the statutes which had made the Catholic religion illegal, the old common law legality of masses for the dead revived.

The author of the article in the Encyclopedia Britannica believes that Catholics are completely free to practice their religion in England as long as they don't interfere with the affairs of the Church of England, but he does offer a caveat to his stated confidence:

. . . it may now be said, with some confidence (but the maze of anti-Catholic legislation and the piecemeal nature and intricacies of the repeals make absolute confidence appear rash) that full liberty is now restored to the Catholic religion . . .

Doing this research of course led me to a book, which I've ordered from England through Amazon (in one of those exceptions to my rule of buying books at Eighth Day Books!):  Catholic Emancipation 1829 to 1929: Essays by Various Writers with an Introduction by His Eminence Cardinal Bourne. I am in great anticipation of receiving it and reading it later this month! One of the "various writers" is G.K. Chesterton!

Right now, I'm still being dazzled by Saint John Henry Newman's great efforts to persuade the remaining members of the "movement of 1833" to become Catholic--moving onto the section in which he attempts to remove their bad, English superiority complex influenced, views of the Catholic faith as practiced, including in so-called Catholic countries. How can the the Catholic Church be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic when it has so many bad Catholics in it? Isn't that the mystery so many Catholics wrestle with even today, much less those who may be attracted to her as the "one, true fold of Christ" (Newman's phrase)?

Happy Easter! It's still Easter: Christ is Risen; He is Risen Indeed!

Image credit (public domain): King George V in 1923.

Best Books Read in 2020

Near the top of my selections for best books read in 2020: Reinhard Hutter's John Henry Newman on Truth & Its Counterfeits: A Guide for Our Times. I devoted two posts to my review of it: here and here. As I summarized my impressions of the book and its impact on me:

The bibliography is excellent, and the footnotes, as I mentioned, are important to read. I recommend the book to anyone who is interested in the influence of Newman's teachings and writings on conscience, faith, ecclesiology and the Church's magisterium, and the idea of a university. I enjoyed and benefited from "hearing" Professor Hutter's voice of reason and experience throughout his discussion of these important subjects. It's a book I've had a hard time putting down even after I read the last word.

In contrast, Eamon Duffy's brief study of Newman was the most disappointing read of 2020. It could have been written by his brother Frank or Edwin Abbot.

Either a close second or tied for top spot: Robert R. Reilly's America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding. It also merited two posts for my review: here and here. For me, Reilly's survey of the influences on our countries founders as framers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America was a great philosophical education:

Robert R. Reilly, whom I saw speak at the Midwest Catholic Family Conference in Wichita (cancelled this year by COVID of course) a few years ago on his book The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, in this book offers an exploration of the philosophical and intellectual sources that inspired the Founders of the United States of America in their quest for independence from Great Britain and the establishment of a new nation.

He goes all the way back to the pre-philosophical era, explores Greek philosophy focusing on Aristotle, Jewish monotheism, and the Latin/Roman Catholic synthesis of Greek philosophy and Revelation focusing on St. Thomas Aquinas, and continues his philosophical lessons through to the eighteenth century.

Other best non-fiction books: Lisa McClain's Lest We Be Damned; Maura Jane Farrelly's Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860; and Liturgical Mysticism by David Fagerberg.

I did not read much fiction last year, so Simon Tolkien's No Man's Land is my top pick in that category.

For the most entertaining book read last year: G.K. Chesterton's The Victorian Age in Literature. In his chapter on the Great Victorian Novelists, he shows a great appreciation for Jane Austen, which I appreciated:

Her [George Eliot's] originals and even her contemporaries had shown the feminine power in fiction as  well or better than she. Charlotte Brontë, understood along her own instincts, was as great; Jane Austen was greater. The latter comes into our present consideration only as that most exasperating thing, an ideal unachieved. It is like leaving an unconquered fortress in the rear. No woman later has captured the complete common sense of Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while all the after women went about looking for their brains. She could describe a man coolly; which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Brontë could do. She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what she did not know—like a sound agnostic. But she belongs to a vanished world before the great progressive age of which I write. (p. 35)

He later says of her in comparison to Eliot and the Brontës :

Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected woman from truth, were burst by the Brontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that Jane Austen knew much more about men than either of them. Jane Austen may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth that was protected from her. When Darcy, in finally confessing his faults, says, "I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice though not in theory," he gets nearer to a complete confession of the intelligent male than ever was even hinted by the Byronic lapses of the Brontës' heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot's. Jane Austen, of course, covered an infinitely smaller field than any of her later rivals; but I have always believed in the victory of small nationalities. (p. 37)

If you like, please cite your favorite books from last year in the comments. 

Happy New Year!!

Book Review: Chesterton on "The Victorian Age of Literature"

According to Joseph Pearce in his biography of G.K. Chesterton, Wisdom and Innocence, the editors of The Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, The Rt. Hon. H. A. L. (Herbert Albert Laurens) Fisher, M.A., F.B.A., Prof. Gilbert Murray, Litt.D., LL.D., F.B.A. (Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford), Prof. Sir J. Arthur Thomson, M.A., and Prof. William T. Brewster, M.A., asked Chesterton to write a survey of the Victorian Age in Literature. His book was published in 1913 as no. 61 in the library; the editors thought it best to warn their readers:

The Editors wish to explain that this book is not put forward as an authoritative history of Victorian literature. It is a free and personal statement of views and impressions about the significance of Victorian literature made by Mr. Chesterton at the Editors' express invitation.

Chesterton was an author, he was a Victorian (his dates: 1841-1922) , and he had obviously read the Victorians and their works, so I read the book as his authoritative history of Victorian Literature. He approaches the composition of a survey of an age in literature in the only way that Chesterton could: a systematically unsystematical way. He can't do it chronologically any more than he can do it alphabetically, so he traces themes and genres throughout the queen's long reign (her dates: 1837-1901), highlighting along the way a few of his favorites: Cobbett, Dickens, and Shaw. And he does it all in an introduction and four chapters:

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Victorian Compromise and its Enemies

Chapter 2. The Great Victorian Novelists

Chapter 3. The Great Victorian Poets

Chapter 4. The Break-up of the Compromise

Bibliographical Note (added by the editors?)

The page numbers below are based on the Dodo Press edition pictured above.

He actually begins his overview before Queen Victoria's reign begins with the French Revolution: "the most important event in English history [that] happened in France". Moreover, he asserts "that the most important event in English history was the event that never happened at all—the English Revolution on the lines of the French Revolution." The Romantic poets were the radicals: unlike the first of his favorites, William Cobbett, who really knew how the rural and urban poor suffered and had suggestions for correcting these injustices, there was no revolution. Or as Chesterton states, there was a counter-revolution: "an aristocratic revolution, a victory of the rich over the poor. It was about this time that the common lands were finally enclosed; that the more cruel game laws were first established; that England became finally a land of landlords instead of common land-owners." While that was being implemented, "English Romantics, English Liberals, were not public men making a republic, but poets, each seeing a vision." . . .  "Ideals exhausted themselves in the void; Victorian England, very unwisely, would have no more to do with idealists in politics." (p. 3)

Thus the Victorian Compromise: implement reform and progress in England without great social unrest. Chesterton identifies Thomas Babington Macaulay as an exponent of this compromise: "its praise of Puritan politics and abandonment of Puritan theology; its belief in a cautious but perpetual patching up of the Constitution; its admiration for industrial wealth." (pp. 7-8) 

You'll have to read the book for yourself to appreciate how Chesterton characterizes and criticizes the strengths and weaknesses of the authors he discusses. It is a very quotable book and believe it or not, I have restrained myself in quoting it in this review. As an example, 

"There were two Macaulays, a rational Macaulay who was generally wrong, and a romantic Macaulay who was almost invariably right. All that was small in him derives from the dull parliamentarism of men like Sir James Mackintosh; but all that was great in him has much more kinship with the festive antiquarianism of Sir Walter Scott." (p. 8)

Macaulay could be Homeric, he could praise both the England that defeated the Armada and the Jacobite who died in exile after fighting to restore the Catholic Stuarts:

TO my true king I offered, free from stain,
Courage and faith; vain faith, and courage vain.
For him I threw lands, honours, wealth, away,
And one dear hope, that was more prized than they.
For him I languished in a foreign clime,
Grey-haired with sorrow in my manhood’s prime;
Heard on Lavernia Scargill’s whispering trees,
And pined by Arno for my lovelier Tees;
Beheld each night my home in fevered sleep,
Each morning started from the dream to weep;
Till God, who saw me tried too sorely, gave
The resting-place I asked, an early grave. . . . (my example, not his)

Chesterton thus praises Macaulay's greatness: "His noble enduring quality in our literature is this: that he truly had an abstract passion for history; a warm, poetic and sincere enthusiasm for great things as such; an ardour and appetite for great books, great battles, great cities, great men." (pp. 8-9)

He also cites John Stuart Mill and his utilitarian and libertarian philosophy but without much analysis of Mill as a writer.

If Macaulay is an emblem of the Victorian Compromise, with its rationalism and utilitarianism, Newman and the Oxford Movement is an example of one of its enemies: The Oxford Movement "was an appeal to reason: reason said that if a Christian had a feast day he must have a fast day too. Otherwise, all days ought to be alike; and this was that very Utilitarianism against which their Oxford Movement was the first and most rational assault. This idea, even by reason of its reason, narrowed into a sort of sharp spear, of which the spear blade was Newman." (p. 13)

(I've already quoted most of Chesterton's comments about Newman here.)

Then Chesterton goes on to analyze Carlyle, Froude, Ruskin, Kingsley, and Arnold, all with the same balance of praise and blame. He cites them all as "roughly representative of the long series of protests against the cold commercial rationalism which held Parliament and the schools through the earlier Victorian time, in so far as those protests were made in the name of neglected intellect, insulted art, forgotten heroism and desecrated religion. But already the Utilitarian citadel had been more heavily bombarded on the other side by one lonely and unlettered man of genius."  (p.25)

And that genius is, of course, Charles Dickens, who Chesterton includes both among "the fighters" in this chapter and the novelists in the next. 

In that chapter Chesterton begins by highlighting the great achievement of female novelists, from Austen to the Brontës , but especially George Eliot. He certainly admires Jane Austen:

Her [George Eliot's] originals and even her contemporaries had shown the feminine power in fiction as  well or better than she. Charlotte Brontë, understood along her own instincts, was as great; Jane Austen was greater. The latter comes into our present consideration only as that most exasperating thing, an ideal unachieved. It is like leaving an unconquered fortress in the rear. No woman later has captured the complete common sense of Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while all the after women went about looking for their brains. She could describe a man coolly; which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Brontë could do. She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what she did not know—like a sound agnostic. But she belongs to a vanished world before the great progressive age of which I write. (p. 35)

He later says of her in comparison to Eliot and the Brontës :

Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected woman from truth, were burst by the Brontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that Jane Austen knew much more about men than either of them. Jane Austen may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth that was protected from her. When Darcy, in finally confessing his faults, says, "I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice though not in theory," he gets nearer to a complete confession of the intelligent male than ever was even hinted by the Byronic lapses of the Brontës' heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot's. Jane Austen, of course, covered an infinitely smaller field than any of her later rivals; but I have always believed in the victory of small nationalities. (p. 37)

Then he goes on to the men: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins, Reade, Kingsley, Bulwer Lytton, Meredith, and Hardy. He concludes chapter 2 with a discussion of children's literature and "literature meant merely for fun": Macdonald, Lear, Carroll, and W.S. Gilbert (and Sullivan?), ending with a joke about the librettist's last name and his own first name: "the word "Gilbertian" will probably last longer than the name Gilbert."! (p. 83)

Among the poets in chapter three he reviews Tennyson, and Browning, with this comment on Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

With all his Italian sympathies and Italian residence, he was not the man to get Victorian England out of its provincial rut: on many things Kingsley himself was not so narrow. His celebrated wife was wider and wiser than he in this sense; for she was, however one-sidedly, involved in the emotions of central European politics. She defended Louis Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel; and intelligently, as one con scious of the case against them both. . . . She is by far the most European of all the English poets of that age; all of them, even her own much greater husband, look local beside her. Tennyson and the rest are nowhere. (pp. 61-62)

Then he goes on to Swinburne, Rossetti, Fitzgerald, Morrison, Thompson, and Patmore.

Chesterton summarizes the end of the Victorian Age and the break-up of the Victorian Compromise thus:

There came a time, roughly somewhere about 1880, when the two great positive enthusiasms of Western Europe had for the time exhausted each other—Christianity and the French Revolution. About that time there used to be a sad and not unsympathetic jest going about to the effect that Queen Victoria* might very well live longer than the Prince of Wales. Somewhat in the same way, though the republican impulse was hardly a hundred years old and the religious impulse nearly two thousand, yet as far as England was concerned, the old wave and the new seemed to be spent at the same time. [*Today we could substitute the name "Queen Elizabeth II"!] . . .

Liberalism (in Newman's sense) really did strike Christianity through headpiece and through head; that is, it did daze and stun the ignorant and ill-prepared intellect of the English Christian. And Christianity did smite Liberalism through breastplate and through breast; that is, it did succeed, through arms and all sorts of awful accidents, in piercing more or less to the heart of the  Utilitarian—and finding that he had none. Victorian Protestantism had not head enough for the business; Victorian Radicalism had not heart enough for the business. Down fell they dead together, exactly as Macaulay's Lay says, and still stood all who saw them fall almost until the hour at which I write. (pp. 75-76)

In this chapter he examines the Æsthetes and the Decadents: Wilde, Beardsley, and even Maeterlinck(?). He did not include Dowson ("days of wine and roses"; "gone with the wind")! Among novelists, he critiques Henry James, opining that The Turn of the Screw is such a great achievement as a ghost story because the characters in the rest of James's novels are like ghosts! Again, he brings in one of his best literary friends (and designated heretic), G.B. Shaw, and another heretic H.G. Wells for his commendation and criticism.

Then he closes with the Imperialist phase: Stevenson, Henley, and Kipling. His appreciation of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is astute:

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a double triumph; it has the outside excitement that belongs to Conan Doyle with the inside excitement that belongs to Henry James. Alas, it is equally characteristic of the Victorian time that while nearly every Englishman has enjoyed the anecdote, hardly one Englishman has seen the joke—I mean  the point. You will find twenty allusions to Jekyll and Hyde in a day's newspaper reading. You will also find that all such allusions suppose the two personalities to be equal, neither caring for the other. Or more roughly, they think the book means that man can be cloven into two creatures, good and evil. The whole stab of the story is that man can't: because while evil does not care for good, good must care for evil. Or, in other words, man cannot escape from God, because good is the God in man; and insists on omniscience. This point, which is good psychology and also good theology and also good art, has missed its main intention merely because it was also good story-telling. (p. 87)

The main caveat to be made about this book is that you have to know Victorian literature--you have to know it just to know who Chesterton is talking about sometimes for he does not always include first names (unless like Henry James the author has two first names as his name) or the title of the novel or book he is describing. You have to know the novels and the poems and the characters and the plots. I pulled out the second volume of the Norton Anthology of English Literature just to double-check some things. 

Sadly, the only author not included in this survey is G.K. himself (which would have been a conflict of interest anyway)--but it's interesting to think about the contributions he made to literature before Queen Victoria died and his attacks on the Victorian compromise on the side of reason and faith, against utilitarianism, industrialism, and jingoism, and how he continued the fight long after the queen died. 

An enjoyable and enlightening read. Notice how the discussion of the English reaction to the French Revolution dovetailed with my recent reading of Robert R. Reilly's book. Notice how Chesterton would have been particularly pleased with the alliteration of my penultimate sentence.

One Good Book Leads to Another: Chesterton on the Victorians

Our local Chesterton Society is reading Joseph Pearce's biography of Chesterton, Wisdom and Innocence. Next month we're going to conclude our discussion of a chapter  in which Pearce introduces us to one of Chesterton's works of literary criticism, The Victorian Age in Literature.

Dale Ahlquist of the American Chesterton Society offers some background for the book, which is out of print:

In 1913 the Home University Library published Chesterton’s The Victorian Age in Literature. But the editors emphatically declared that the book was not being offered as “an authoritative history of Victorian Literature” but only as Chesterton’s “personal views” on the subject. Apparently someone with personal views cannot write an authoritative history. In other words, an author cannot be an authority.

In spite of this handicap, the book was hugely successful, with multiple reprintings. One reviewer, however, while admiring the book, still expressed his irritation at “Chesterton’s obsession with religion.” (Again, authors should not have opinions, though critics may.) The reviewer’s irritation enabled him to miss the whole point of the book: that we cannot understand the Victorian writers without reference to their traditions and creeds – especially the traditions and creeds that they have rejected. Chesterton says religion “was the key of this age as of every other.” . . .

We cannot really understand the Victorian era unless we go back to the breakup of Catholic society. The multiple heresies that pulverized Catholicism were not merely religious but cultural and political and artistic. The old order was never replaced with a new order, but only with continued reactions against the old order. Chesterton says the later Protestant-types kept the Protestantism but did away with the Christianity. The Victorian Age began under the godless philosophy of Utilitarianism; it ended in the god-defying philosophy of Decadence, where men engaged in vile behavior not because they did not know it was wrong but because they did know it was wrong. “The decadents utterly lost the light and reason of their existence.” . . .

When I began reading the on-line edition of Chesterton's study I was happy to see his mention of St. John Henry Newman as a writer:

A mere conviction that Catholic thought is the clearest as well as the best disciplined, will not make a man a writer like Newman. But without that conviction Newman would not be a writer like Newman; and probably not a writer at all. It is useless for the æsthete (or any other anarchist) to urge the isolated individuality of the artist, apart from his attitude to his age. His attitude to his age is his individuality: men are never individual when alone.

And in the first paragraph of the first chapter Chesterton cites Newman again:

Now in trying to describe how the Victorian writers stood to each other, we must recur to the very real difficulty noted at the beginning: the difficulty of keeping the moral order parallel with the chronological order. For the mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead. It is no good getting the almanac to look up moonshine; and most literature in this sense is moonshine. Thus Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as it were, from a Shelleyan extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. Thus Newman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet delivered, that was coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason no one can understand tradition, or even history, who has not some tenderness for anachronism.

Chesterton identifies the Oxford Movement as one of the three great trends of Victorian thought along with Utilitarianism and Romantic Protestantism, and he summarizes his view of Newman's leadership of the Oxford Movement and his Catholic career after he left it thus:

But the greater part of all this happened before what is properly our period; and in that period Newman, and perhaps Newman alone, is the expression and summary of the whole school. It was certainly in the Victorian Age, and after his passage to Rome, that Newman claimed his complete right to be in any book on modern English literature. This is no place for estimating his theology: but one point about it does clearly emerge. Whatever else is right, the theory that Newman went over to Rome to find peace and an end of argument, is quite unquestionably wrong. He had far more quarrels after he had gone over to Rome. But, though he had far more quarrels, he had far fewer compromises: and he was of that temper which is tortured more by compromise than by quarrel. He was a man at once of abnormal energy and abnormal sensibility: nobody without that combination could have written the Apologia.  In this sense his Apologia is a triumph far beyond the ephemeral charge on which it was founded; in this sense he does indeed (to use his own expression) vanquish not his accuser but his judges. Many men would shrink from recording all their cold fits and hesitations and prolonged inconsistencies: I am sure it was the breath of life to Newman to confess them, now that he had done with them for ever. His Lectures on the Present Position of English Catholics, practically preached against a raging mob, rise not only higher but happier, as his instant unpopularity increases. There is something grander than humour, there is fun, in the very first lecture about the British Constitution as explained to a meeting of Russians. But always his triumphs are the triumphs of a highly sensitive man: a man must feel insults before he can so insultingly and splendidly avenge them. He is a naked man, who carries a naked sword. The quality of his literary style is so successful that it succeeds in escaping definition. The quality of his logic is that of a long but passionate patience, which waits until he has fixed all corners of an iron trap. But the quality of his moral comment on the age remains what I have said: a protest of the rationality of religion as against the increasing irrationality of mere Victorian comfort and compromise. So far as the present purpose is concerned, his protest died with him: he left few imitators and (it may easily be conceived) no successful imitators. The suggestion of him lingers on in the exquisite Elizabethan perversity of Coventry Patmore; and has later flamed out from the shy volcano of Francis Thompson. Otherwise (as we shall see in the parallel case of Ruskin's Socialism) he has no followers in his own age: but very many in ours.

More of Chesterton's appraisal of Newman's style may be found here (also highlighting Newman's Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England).

At our last meeting, we ended our discussions in the midst of chapter 12, "Brothers in Arms" as Chesterton has confessed to Father O'Connor (the model for Father Brown) in the spring of 1912 that he wants to become a Catholic but is waiting for his wife Frances. Pearce's description of Chesterton's The Victorian Age in Literature will be part of our reading next month as we finish up chapter 12 and move along to chapters 13 through 15. In the meantime, I'm reading Chesterton's evaluations of the Brontes, Thackeray, Dickens, Meredith, Browning, Barrett Browning, et al.