Literary Giants Literary Catholics

by Joseph Pearce

  And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

  . . .

  The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes

  And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,

  And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,

  And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,

  And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,

  But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.

  . . .

  King Philip’s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck

  (Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)

  The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,

  And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.

  He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,

  He touches and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,

  And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey

  Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,

  And death is in the phial and the end of noble work,

  But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.

  The poem concludes thus:

  Vivat Hispania!

  Domino Gloria!

  Don John of Austria

  Has set his people free!

  Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath

  (Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)

  And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,

  Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,

  And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade. . . .

  (But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

  Chesterton’s concluding lines are curious. As a climax they are curiously anticlimactic. Why is this? Historically speaking, Miguel Cervantes fought at Lepanto and was severely wounded in his chest and arm during the battle. This is the fact of the matter. Chesterton, however, is using the fact only as a launchpad to the truth it represents. “Not facts first, truth first” was one of Chesterton’s maxims. What, then, is the truth that Chesterton is trying to convey? He is telling us that the Christian victory at Lepanto in 1571 saved European civilization and European culture from destruction. An Islamic victory would have meant the destruction of Christendom—the Europe of the Faith—and all that it represents. In short, if Don John of Austria had not set his people free, Cervantes would never have written Don Quixote. And here Don Quixote is a symbol of all the Christian culture that followed: Shakespeare, Calderon de la Barca, Manzoni, Newman, Hopkins, Eliot, Tolkien—yes, even Chesterton himself!

  Although Chesterton’s poem is about a battle fought in the sixteenth century, it is awash with cultural references to his own time. The battle for Christendom—for orthodoxy—was still being fought; the war against the heretics was still being waged. It was indeed no surprise that Chesterton had written books entitled Orthodoxy and Heretics a few years before writing “Lepanto”. Also, the allusions to Decadence in the poem were very close to home. Chesterton had grown to maturity in the fungoid atmosphere of the fin de siècle. Much of his work in the first decade of the twentieth century was, in fact, a reaction against the Decadence of the previous decade. In fact, the ennui, pessimism and cynicism of the 1890s had been replaced in the years from 1900 to 1914 by an overriding sense of excitement, optimism and romance. Decadence had been exorcised by a resurrected sense of the adventure of life.

  On the one hand, you had the counter-Decadent defiance of the dynamic orthodoxy propounded by Chesterton and Belloc—the excitement of a Crusade, the optimism of the vita nuova and the sheer romance of Rome. On the other hand, you had the counter-Decadent superciliousness of the dynamite idealism expounded by Shaw and Wells—the excitement of Socialism, the optimism of the New Age and the sheer romance of Revolution. Pilgrims or “Progress”—that was the question; Pilgrims or “Progress”—that was the choice. This almost universal sense of optimism would be blown apart by the utter carnage of the First World War, leaving only a wasteland of shattered dreams and broken images.

  The world entered the war with jingoistic optimism, besotted with the ideal of heroism. These early months of the war have been called the “Rupert Brooke period” after the poet of that name who marched to his death in 1915 having left as an epitaph to himself the haunting lines of his poem “The Soldier”:

  If I should die, think only this of me:

  That there’s some corner of a foreign field

  That is for ever England.

  Soon, however, after the war had become bogged down in the entrenched nightmare of no-man’s-land, and after the combatants had been butchered, or had witnessed their comrades being butchered, in battle after endless battle, the jingoistic optimism began to make way for the jungles of despair. In Germany, the horrifically graphic depiction of hideously deformed and limbless war veterans by the artist Otto Dix encapsulated the despair and desolation of that nation’s defeated army. The angst and anger of postwar Germany, captured so luridly on canvas by Dix, was the breeding ground of the hatred that festers and fosters revolution. The result was the rise of a certain Adolf Hitler.

  So much for the Weimar Wasteland.

  In England the artistic reaction against what Tolkien called the “animal horror” of the war was most graphically expressed not on canvas (though C. R. W. Nevinson and John Singer Sargent produced some gruesomely realistic paintings) but in poetry. In particular, the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen conveyed the growing sense of disillusionment and resentment. This was the poetry of protest, and Sassoon and Owen were pulling no punches.

  In Sassoon’s bitter verse invective “Fight to a Finish”, the poet dreams luridly of a Revolution of Revenge in which the returning troops would turn their guns and bayonets on the politicians and the press. Such a revolution would never materialize in England, although of course it became all too real in Russia, where the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 heralded seventy years of Marxist wasteland. Fueled with the fading dreams of the French Revolution and inflamed with the passions aroused by the bloodbath of the war, the Russians took the elusive and illusory vision of libertè, ègalitè et fraternitè and turned it into the three steps on the path toward their own enslavement, the three steps—or perhaps that should be steppes—toward the Gulag Archipelago from which Solzhenitsyn would emerge like a phoenix from the ashes. In Germany the Revolution of Revenge would take the form of the seeking of a scapegoat on which to enact the revenge: in Russia, the wasteland of the Gulag Archipelago; in Germany, the wasteland of Auschwitz and Dachau. Never in the long and bloody field of human history had there been an Inquisition as diabolical as the KGB or the Gestapo. Oh, how the gurus of modernity, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, had ushered in a brave new world of mass murder and genocide!

  So much for the Revolution of Revenge and the wasteland that followed in its wake. England would not follow such a path, though she would emerge into her own more insipid wasteland.

  Let’s return to England . . .

  Having heard Sassoon’s poetry of protest, let’s now turn to the poetry of his friend and comrade in arms, Wilfred Owen. Perhaps Owen’s best-known—and perhaps indeed his best—poem is “Dulce et Decorum Est”. Describing how from behind the safety of his gas mask he had watched another soldier “drowning” in the “green sea” of gas, the poet concludes in plaintive rage:

  If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

  Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

  And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

  His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

  If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

  Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

  Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

  Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

  My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
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  To children ardent for some desperate glory,

  The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

  Pro patria mori.

  Does one not sense that the bitter conclusion of Owen’s poem is a deliberate riposte to the naïve jingoism of Rupert Brooke’s rosy portrait of the dignity of heroism, written at the beginning of the war before its full “animal horror” was known? Rupert Brooke was killed in 1915 and was laid to rest in some corner of a foreign field that is, presumably, “forever England”. Owen would be killed in the last few days of the war and, in consequence, was not part of the “music of returning feet” of those “who’d refrained from dying” of whom Sassoon had written.

  Belloc lost a son in the war, and Chesterton lost his beloved brother. Such was the collective desolation, if not despair, that gripped England in the wake of the war that even the usually upbeat and optimistic Chesterton, mourning his brother, descended to the level of the protest poem. A year or so after the war’s end, Chesterton poured forth his anger in his “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”, the very title of which conveyed a bitterly ironic allusion to the peaceful tranquility of Thomas Gray’s eighteenth-century poem of the same name.

  The men that worked for England

  They have their graves at home:

  And bees and birds of England

  About the cross can roam.

  But they that fought for England,

  Following a falling star,

  Alas, alas for England

  They have their graves afar.

  And they that rule in England,

  In stately conclave met,

  Alas, alas for England

  They have no graves as yet.

  Chesterton, like Belloc, had been a jingoistic supporter of the war at its outset; by its end, he was singing the same tune as Owen and Sassoon.

  It was in this death-laden and doom-laden atmosphere that T. S. Eliot emerged as the voice of what became known as the Wasteland generation.

  Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, published in 1922, four years after the war had ended, is probably the most influential and controversial poem of the twentieth century. Its appearance was at once a revelation and a revolution, polarizing opinion. It bemused and beguiled its admirers and irritated and infuriated its detractors. The avant-garde gazed in awe at its many layers; the old guard claimed that the layers were an illusion and that the emperor had no clothes. The pessimism of its language and the libertine nature of its form both added to the controversy. The war of the Waste Land was joined.

  Almost half a century later, the obituary to Eliot in The Times perceived the heated reaction to the poem with a detached perspective that few at the time, caught in the heat of the fray, could achieve:

  Its presentation of disillusionment and the disintegration of values, catching the mood of the time, made it the poetic gospel of the post-war intelligentsia: at the time, however, few either of its detractors or its admirers saw through the surface innovations and the language of despair to the deep respect for tradition and the keen moral sense which underlay them.

  It is certainly true that few, at the time, understood Eliot’s purpose in writing The Waste Land. Lack of understanding led to misunderstanding so that battle lines were drawn according to erroneous preconceptions. On the one side, the “moderns” hailed it as a masterpiece of modern thought that had laid waste traditional values and traditional form. On the other side, the “ancients” attacked it as an iconoclastic affront to civilized standards. Both sides had made the grave and fundamental error of mistaking Eliot’s pessimism toward the wasteland of modern life for a cynicism toward tradition. In fact, the philosophical foundations of Eliot’s thought were rooted in classical tradition and found expression in a deep disdain for modern secular liberalism and the heedless hedonism that was its inevitable consequence.

  The real key to understanding Eliot’s message in The Waste Land, and his motive for writing it, is to be found in his devotion to Dante. Eliot upheld the “philosophy of Aristotle strained through the schools”, that is, strained, particularly, through the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Dante was, of course, the poetic master of the Thomist school. Scarcely two years before The Waste Land was published, Eliot had written:

  You cannot . . . understand the Inferno without the Purgatorio and the Paradiso. “Dante”, says Landor’s Petrarch, “is the great master of the disgusting.” . . . But a disgust like Dante’s is not hypertrophy of a single reaction: it is completed and explained only by the last canto of the Paradiso. . . . The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting, by an artist, is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit of beauty.

  The fact is that modernity is more at home in hell than in Purgatory and paradise. It is where it wants to be. It is where it has condemned itself to be by its perverse desire. As post-Reformation puritanism had stressed the punishment of hell in Dante and had ignored the “papist” parts about Purgatory and paradise, so postwar cynicism had stressed the negative aspects of Eliot’s wasteland and had ignored the “impulse toward the pursuit of beauty” that had led Eliot to the positive conclusion pointing to a “resurrection”. A world without faith, basking self-indulgently in its self-proclaimed futility, could understand the ugliness of the wasteland, sympathize with the souls in the inferno, see the Crucifixion and perhaps even weep for itself as the victim on the Cross; but it could not perceive the cleansing fires of Purgatory, the sanctified bliss of paradise or the glory and significance of the Resurrection. Ignited by the indignation of its own ignoble desires, it could not perceive perfection, nor the nobility that is its cultured servant.

  Eliot responded to the sheer vacuity of those who could not perceive the beauty beyond the ugliness in The Waste Land in his next major poem, “The Hollow Men”. Here, the doyens of modernity are depicted as the hollow, empty-headed inhabitants of the postwar no-man’s-land: the anticultural no-man’s-land in which reside the no-men who refuse the call to manhood. Thus the poem begins:

  We are the hollow men

  We are the stuffed men

  Leaning together

  Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

  It ends with a prophecy of the self-destructive doom that awaits those who dwell in the anticultural abyss of nihilistic self-indulgence:

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.

  Put simply, Eliot’s poetry might have been a reaction to the “animal horror” of the war, but it was much more than that. Ultimately, it was not so much a reaction to the war as a reaction to the reaction. The destruction and desolation of the war had led to the cynicism and nihilism of the postwar generation; Eliot’s depiction of the hollow men who live in the wasteland of modernity was a reaction against this abysmal slide into the nihilistic inferno.

  Seen in this light, Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism is scarcely surprising. Paradoxically, he had perceived the light of heaven through a deep penetration into the light of the fires burning in the infernal soul of postwar modernity. He, at least, had no intention of ending with a whimper.

  Eliot’s conversion sent shock waves through the self-proclaimed avant-garde of the British literary establishment. How could the ultramodern poet have embraced the ultratraditional creed of Catholic Christianity? It was all too much for Virginia Woolf, who greeted the news with horror. “I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot,” she wrote to a friend, “who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. . . . There’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.” (It is difficult to resist the temptation to retort that it is better than sitting in the fire by not believing in God!)

  One is tempted, in fact, to treat the comparison between T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf as a parable of our singula
rly corrupt age. Eliot is still considered suspect in modernist circles for his “reactionary” embrace of Catholicism, whereas Virginia Woolf is lionized as a “progressive” soul who has much to say to the modern world. The Hollywood film The Hours has restored her status as one of the leading literary lights of the twentieth century. Indeed, in the wake of the film’s success, Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, made the U.S. bestseller lists. What are her credentials for such laudatory treatment? She was an active homosexual who, as we have seen, detested traditional Christianity. In the end, her “enlightened” views brought her to despair, and she committed suicide. Thus, in our perverted age, Eliot, who preached the Gospel of Life, “may be called dead to us all” (to reemploy Woolf’s own words), whereas Woolf, as a prophet of the culture of death, is declared immortal for the “martyrdom” of taking her own life. It is easy to detect the satanic inversion at work in such a state of affairs. Hell on earth, or at least a foretaste of it.

  Appropriately, Eliot’s first major poem following his conversion was the penitential “Ash Wednesday”, and he went on to produce several major works of Christian literature, notably the religious plays The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral, and the long, mystically sublime poem Four Quartets. Taken as a whole, one can see Eliot’s major work paralleling that of his master, Dante. The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men” were his Inferno, “Ash Wednesday” and The Rock were his Purgatorio, and Four Quartets was his vision of Paradise. What a legacy he has bequeathed to posterity!

  One cannot conclude a reflection on the cultural reaction to the wasteland of modernity without paying respect, at least in passing, to several other major figures who followed in Eliot’s footsteps. Most notably, Evelyn Waugh should be considered “the T. S. Eliot of prose fiction”. His early satirical novels parodied the “bright young things” of the Wasteland generation in much the same terms as had Eliot in his early verse. Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust even took its title from Eliot’s The Waste Land. Waugh’s conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1930 caused as much of a sensation as had Eliot’s conversion two years earlier. In avant-garde circles, Waugh was hailed as the “ultramodern novelist” just as Eliot had been the “ultramodern poet”. The fact that both had embraced Catholicism served as a salutary shock to the supercilious presumptions of modernity and as a source of salvific inspiration to the Christian literati.