Literary Giants Literary Catholics

by Joseph Pearce

  Ironically, this book of excerpts from the works of Baring’s favorite authors became better known than all his other books. Such neglect of his literary achievement does both the man and his work an injustice.

  In our uncivilized age, it is perhaps inevitable that Baring’s star should have been eclipsed by the polluting smog of mediocrity. For as long as the light of civilization dwindles, so will the reputation of this most civilized of writers. Ultimately, however, his future position in the ranks of the great novelists of the twentieth century is ensured. As the Permanent Things reassert themselves and as civilization rises from the ashes of burned-out nihilism, so the works of Maurice Baring will enjoy their own resurrection. The facile and the fashionable will fade, and the peripheral will pass away; but Baring, or at least the best of Baring, will remain.

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  R. H. BENSON

  Unsung Genius

  ROBERT HUGH BENSON WAS LAUDED in his own day as one of the leading figures in English literature, yet today he is almost completely forgotten outside Catholic circles and is sadly neglected even among Catholics. Few stars of the literary firmament, either before or since, have shone quite so brightly in their own time before being eclipsed quite so inexplicably in posterity. Almost a century after his conversion, Benson has become the unsung genius of the Catholic literary revival.

  It was not always so.

  Robert Hugh Benson was born in 1871, the youngest son of E. W. Benson, a distinguished Anglican clergyman. In 1882, when Benson was eleven years old, his father became Archbishop of Canterbury. Following in his father’s footsteps, Benson took Anglican orders in 1894. When, two years later, his father died, he read the litany at the funeral in Canterbury Cathedral. Everything seemed to suggest that the son would continue to follow dutifully in the illustrious steps of his father. Providence had, however, woven another pattern.

  After a torturously conscientious self-examination, the details of which were elucidated masterfully in his autobiographical apologia, Confessions of a Convert, Benson was received into the Catholic Church in 1903. His unexpected conversion caused a sensation and sent shock waves through the Anglican establishment. No conversion since Newman’s, almost sixty years earlier, had caused such controversy.

  There is no doubt that the new convert belonged to a remarkable family. Apart from his father’s rise to ecclesiastical prominence as head of the Church of England, both of Benson’s brothers became leading members of the Edwardian literati. A. C. Benson, his eldest brother, was master of Magdalene College in Cambridge and built a reputation as a fine biographer, diarist and literary critic, writing acclaimed studies of Rossetti, Fitzgerald, Pater, Tennyson and Ruskin. His other brother, E. F. Benson, wrote prolifically and is best known to posterity for his satirical Mapp and Lucia novels, which have been successfully adapted for television.

  The youngest Benson was not destined to live in the literary shadow of his famous brothers. On the contrary, his first novel, The Light Invisible, was quickly followed by a string of other novels, all of which were commercially successful. In the meantime, he was ordained in 1904, and upon his return from Rome that same year, he moved to Cambridge, where he served as a curate. Thereafter he became as popular for his preaching and his fiery oratory as he was for his novels. He was, according to Brian Masters, author of a biographical study of the three Benson brothers, “a preacher with fire in his voice”: “Whenever Monsignor Hugh Benson was due to preach one could be sure the hall, no matter how big, would be sold out months in advance. . . . Hugh gave a performance in the pulpit as certainly as Sarah Bernhardt gave one on stage.”

  The Light Invisible was published in 1903 and written when he was in the midst of the convulsive throes of spiritual conversion. The book is awash with a veritable confusion of emotive mysticism—a confession of faith amid the confusion of doubt. Once he had gained the clarity of Catholic perception, Benson looked upon his first novel with a degree of scepticism. In 1912 he commented that its subsequent popularity appeared to be determined by the religious denomination of those who read it. It was “rather significant” that it was popular among Anglicans, whereas Catholics appreciated it to “a very much lesser degree”: “most Catholics, and myself among them, think that Richard Raynal, Solitary is very much better written and very much more religious.”

  Richard Raynal, Solitary evokes with beguiling beauty the spiritual depth of English life prior to the rupture of the Reformation, as Benson seamlessly weaves the modern storyteller’s art with the chivalrous charm of the Middle Ages. It succeeds, principally, as a work that conveys the medieval spirit. The reader, if he allows himself to be carried thither, will find himself transported to the early fifteenth century. He will find himself at home in Richard Raynal’s England and will rejoice in the presence of the colorful character of “Master Richard” himself. At times he will be reminded of The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, but he will never be able to forget, nor will he wish to forget, that this is Catholic England, not Catholic Italy. He will find himself in the presence of a hermit on a God-given mission. Above all, he will find himself in the presence of holiness and will find himself at home in its presence. Richard Raynal, Solitary is Christian literature at its most beautiful, at once both edifying and efficacious. Its power is purgatorial. It purges. It cleanses. It makes whole. Ultimately it serves as a timely reminder that the roots of romance are in Rome.

  Hilaire Belloc was so impressed by Benson’s historical novels that he wrote enthusiastically of him to A. C. Benson in 1907 that it was “quite on the cards that he will be the man to write some day a book to give us some sort of idea what happened in England between 1520 and 1560.” In fact, prompted by his anger and frustration at the Protestant bias of the Whig historians, Belloc would write several books of his own on this subject, including studies of key sixteenth- and seventeenth-century figures such as Wolsey, Cromwell, James I, Charles II and Cranmer. Belloc’s How the Reformation Happened, published in 1928, was an endeavor to put the whole period into context.

  Benson, however, achieved in his fiction what Belloc was striving to achieve in his nonfiction. In Come Rack! Come Rope!, possibly the finest of Benson’s historical novels, the whole period of the Reformation is brought to blood-curdling life. With a meticulous approach to period detail, Come Rack! Come Rope! leaps from the page with historical realism. The reader is transported to the time of persecution in England when priests were put to a slow and tortuous death. The terror and tension of the tale grips the reader as tightly as it grips the leading characters, who courageously witness to their faith in a hostile and deadly environment. Few novels have so successfully brought the past so potently to life. This is not to say that the work is flawless. Far from it. Belloc, who for the most part was a great admirer of Benson’s historical novels, complained that the description of daily life in Come Rack! Come Rope! was inaccurate, resembling life in the eighteenth, not the sixteenth, century.

  Perhaps the clearest evidence of Benson’s genius is to be found in the ease with which he crossed literary genres. Aside from his historical romances, he was equally at home with novels with a contemporary setting, such as The Necromancers, a cautionary tale about the dangers of spiritualism, or with futuristic fantasies, such as Lord of the World. The latter novel is truly remarkable and deserves to stand beside Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as a classic of dystopian fiction. In fact, though Huxley’s and Orwell’s modern masterpieces may merit equal praise as works of literature, they are clearly inferior works of prophecy. The political dictatorships that gave Orwell’s novel-nightmare an ominous potency have had their day. Today his cautionary fable serves merely as a timely reminder of what has been and what may be again if the warnings of history are not heeded. Benson’s novel-nightmare, on the other hand, is coming true before our very eyes.

  The world depicted in Lord of the World is one where creeping secularism and godless humanism have triumphed over religi
on and traditional morality. It is a world where philosophical relativism has triumphed over objectivity; a world where, in the name of tolerance, religious doctrine is not tolerated. It is a world where euthanasia is practiced widely and religion hardly practiced at all. The lord of this nightmare world is a benign-looking politician intent on power in the name of “peace”, and intent on the destruction of religion in the name of “truth”. In such a world, only a small and shrinking Church stands resolutely against the demonic “Lord of the World”.

  If Benson’s literary output encompassed multifarious fictional themes—historical, contemporary and futuristic—he also strayed into other areas with consummate ease. His Poems, published posthumously, displayed a deep and dry spirituality, expressed formally in a firmly rooted, if sometimes desiccate, faith. The same deep and dry spirituality was evident in Spiritual Letters to One of His Converts, also published posthumously, which offers a tantalizing insight into a profound intellect. A series of sermons, preached in Rome at Easter 1913 and later published as The Paradoxes of Catholicism, illustrates why Benson was so popular as a public preacher, attracting large audiences wherever he spoke. Particularly remarkable is Benson’s masterly Confessions of a Convert, which stands beside John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua and Ronald Knox’ A Spiritual Aeneid as a timeless classic in the literature of conversion.

  In A Spiritual Aeneid, Knox confessed candidly that Benson’s influence was crucial to his own conversion: “I always looked on him as the guide who had led me to Catholic truth—I did not know then that he used to pray for my conversion.” The other great influence on Knox’ conversion was G. K. Chesterton, and it is perhaps no surprise that Benson was a great admirer of Chesterton. Benson’s biographer, the Jesuit C. C. Martindale, who was himself a convert, wrote that Benson’s Papers of a Pariah were “noticeable” for their “Chestertonian quality”: “Mr. G. K. Chesterton is never tired of telling us that we do not see what we look at—the one undiscovered planet is our Earth. . . . And Benson read much of Mr. Chesterton and liked him in a qualified way.”

  Further evidence of Chesterton’s influence on Benson is provided by Benson’s admiration of Chesterton’s Heretics. “Have you read”, he inquired of a correspondent in 1905, “a book by G. K. Chesterton called Heretics? If not, do see what you think of it. It seems to me that the spirit underneath it is splendid. He is not a Catholic, but he has the spirit. . . . I have not been so much moved for a long time. . . He is a real mystic of an odd kind.” Chesterton was not a Catholic in 1905, but Heretics was a first evidence that, as Benson put it, he “had the spirit”.

  If links of affinity with Chesterton are less than surprising, Martindale’s assertion that there is a “disconcerting affinity” between Benson’s Papers of a Pariah and Wilde’s De Profundis are more intriguing.

  Benson had, and Wilde was resolving, so he thought, to get, that direct eye for colour, line, and texture that the Greeks possessed. . . . In his direct extraction of natural emotion from simple and beautiful elements, like fire and wax, as in his description of the Easter ceremonies, [Benson] reaches, sometimes, an almost word-for-word identity with Wilde.

  A further affinity with Wilde could be detected in Benson’s love for the theater. He was a keen theater-goer and had lectured on the theme of the Church and the stage. In 1914 he became particularly fascinated by Chesterton’s Magic, which was being staged on both sides of the Atlantic. During a visit to the United States, he was regularly to be found behind the scenes at rehearsals of the play. Benson appeared to be at the very height of his power and popularity, and one might have expected that he would have enjoyed considerable success as a playwright were he to have turned his creative talents in that direction. It was not to be. Before the end of the year, his life would come to an abrupt and unexpected end. The cause of death was pneumonia. He was only forty-three years old.

  On 20 October 1914, the morning after his death, The Times carried the following tribute:

  Well known as a preacher, he had a yet larger following as a novelist. His first book, The Light Invisible, was recognised at once by good judges as remarkable for a peculiar charm of mind and manner. . . . Considering the number of novels that he wrote, the wonder is that they should be as good as they are. . . . Undoubtedly he had great gifts.

  Why, one wonders, has a writer of Benson’s popularity become so eclipsed by posterity? Why has a writer possessed with such “great gifts” failed to hold his own in the presence of lesser talent? The answer, perhaps, can be found in his militant and uncompromising defense of the Faith, a militancy and a lack of compromise that became strangely suspect in the age of “ecumenism”. In the decades after his death, Benson was attacked for exhibiting “triumphalism” (as if the Church Militant was not always mystically united to the Church Triumphant). Even among Catholics, his energetic proselytizing and uncompromising zeal led to criticism. “Most ‘cradle Catholics’ and many converts dislike those jibes at Anglicans”, opined the Catholic publisher and biographer Maisie Ward. “Moreover, along with the jibes at Anglicanism were attacks upon Catholic complacency.” Why, one is tempted to ask, is it reprehensible to criticize the complacency of the faithful—or, more correctly, the not-so-faithful—in the context of the Great Commandment of Christ that we should love God with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our mind? And as for the alleged “jibes at Anglicanism”, his attitude was expressed in his autobiographical Confessions of a Convert, published in 1913. Toward the end of the book, Benson asserted “that to return from the Catholic Church to the Anglican would be the exchange of certitude for doubt, of faith for agnosticism, of substance for shadow, of brilliant light for sombre gloom, of historical, worldwide fact for unhistorical, provincial theory”. This is certainly strong language, especially from the pen of a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but does it constitute a gibe? At worst, it could be said to display a tactless candor; at best, it shows a refreshingly sincere statement of belief. “I do not know how to express myself more mildly than that,” Benson continued, “though even this, no doubt, will appear a monstrous extravagance, at the least, to the sincere and whole-hearted members of the Anglican communion”.

  The harshness, or “triumphalism”, of Benson’s words is best judged within the context of his belief in the objective truth and rectitude of the teaching of the Catholic Church. This belief was expounded with eloquence in an essay on the future of Catholicism published in 1910:

  The modern thinkers take their rise, practically, from the religious upheaval of the sixteenth century. . . . Little by little there came into existence the view that “true religion” was that system of belief which each individual thought out for himself; and, since these individuals were not found to agree together, “Truth” finally became more and more subjective; until there was established the most characteristically modern form of thought—namely that Truth was not absolute at all, and that what was true and imperative for one was not true and imperative for another.

  To illustrate his belief in the ultimate insanity of subjectivism, Benson quoted Chesterton that “the man who believes in himself most consistently, to the exclusion of cold facts, must be sought in a lunatic asylum”. Benson had no doubt that this subjectivism was an anarchy of antitheses, a reductio ad absurdum to which the objective authority of the Church was the only solution: “To the Catholic it appears . . . certain that the crumbling of all systematic authority down to that of the individual . . . is the death sentence of every attempt to find religious Truth outside that infallible authority to whose charge, he believes, truth has been committed.”

  Are such words the product of “harshness”? Do they constitute a “jibe” against non-Catholics? Or are they, rather, the words of one who retains a refreshing sense of intellectual honesty? Are they, to echo Chesterton, the words of one who knows the difference between an argument and a quarrel? An argument, as Chesterton and Benson knew from their possession of more than a modicum of Latin, was a positive
force for good, a polishing of perception. A quarrel, on the other hand, is a dispute that, lacking charity, can produce only enmity and, in consequence, a negation of perception. Arguments, ipso facto, are good and should be pursued with diligence; quarrels, ipso facto, are bad and are to be avoided wherever possible. And herein lies the secret of Benson’s falling from favor in the age of “ecumenism”. It was simply his misfortune to know the difference between an argument and a quarrel in an age that was blinded by the belief that they were synonymous.

  Take “ecumenism”, for instance. Benson subscribed to the view that ecumenism, ultimately, should be translated as “you-come-in-ism”. Is this triumphalism? Perhaps so; but only in the sense that he desired that everyone should triumph over sin and death by entering into the fullness of Truth that Catholicism offered. Is it wrong to want what is best for others—even if it necessitates argument? Benson thought not. Perhaps, indeed, he was, and is, correct. The preference for dilution, as opposed to dilation, of the Truth has had harmful consequences. It is, in fact, only a short and dangerous step from dilution to delusion. It was, at least, a step that Benson could never be accused of taking.

  15

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  MAISIE WARD

  Concealed with a Kiss

  The truth is that the modern world has a mental breakdown; much more than a moral breakdown. Things are being settled by mere associations because there is a reluctance to settle them by arguments.

  G. K. Chesterton, The Thing

  THERE ARE SEVERAL WAYS of approaching the writing of someone else’s life. The most commendable approach, and the approach that is so rarely achieved even when attempted, is to seek for perfect empathy in the pursuit of objective truth. This involves the subjugation of the self in the service of the subject and the quashing of any temptation to squeeze the subject into the ill-fitting clothes of one’s own prejudices and preconceptions. In short, the biographer must be subject to his subject and not make his subject subject to him. This is far easier said than done.