The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910-1950

Epilogue

370 The eventual decline of the English Catholic intellectual community had been assured even before World War II. As George Orwell had pointed out, by the late 1930s it was Communism, rather than Bellocianism , that had become the fashionable ideology for young intellectuals . The community had ceased to replenish itself after the early 1930s, adding few if any contributors of significance. The handful of Catholic writers who came of age, or converted, later in the decade had more Christian Democrat than Bellocian in them—Barbara Ward and Manya Harari, for example. Bellocianism had already, before the war, proved less convincing than it had been for those who came of age in the 1920s. Without a younger generation of contributors the vitality of the community must have necessarily weakened over time.1 WhatwasnotpredictablewasthedramaticdissolutionoftheEnglish Catholic intellectual community in the 1940s. In order to understand what happened, it is necessary to review the community’s foundation and development, to clarify how Bellocianism was exposed as untenable by the end of World War II, and to explain why no new ideology emerged that could have healed the divisions between Catholic intellectuals in England after the war and reconsolidated the community. It will then be possible to draw some conclusions about the significance of the English Catholic intellectual community of the interwar era. In 1910 Hilaire Belloc, disillusioned with the political system in Britain, had decided not to seek reelection to Parliament. Over the course of the next ten years Belloc formulated a unified and self-­ consciously Catholic political philosophy, dismissing parliamentary democracy as corrupt and charging that the liberal political economy predominant in the nineteenth century had created a parasitic class of plutocraticcapitalistsandimpoverishedthemasses.Subsequentefforts Ep i l o g u e Epilogue 371 at economic reform in the interest of social justice had, in his estimation , only solidified the power of the plutocrats over the people. The nascent welfare state that Lloyd George and the Liberals had begun to construct just before the Great War had, Belloc believed, impelled workers to trade liberty for security when they ought to have had both. He proposed instead what came to be called Distributism, which emphasized the wide distribution of landed property and amounted to a restoration of the medieval economy of commercial guilds, village crafts, and self-sufficient peasant farms. Connecting this political philosophy and economic vision was his radically revisionist reading of English history. England, Belloc argued, was fundamentally Latin, founded by the Romans, nurtured by the Catholic Church, reaching its apogee in the High Middle Ages. The Reformation therefore had severed the trunk from its roots, and England, rather than progress as the dominant Whig historiography would have it, had declined. The political dysfunction and the economic failures that he ascribed to subsequent English history were, ultimately, the manifestations of England’s sixteenth-century apostasy. Belloc had proved especially persuasive, convincing a number of talented young writers not only that Catholicism stood with the downtrodden against the plutocracy but also that England itself was fundamentally a Catholic nation. These admirers formed an intellectual elite, the crème de la crème of English Catholicism, often graduates of the finest public schools and scholarship winners at the best Oxford colleges, many of whom converted to Catholicism under Belloc’s influence . Like Belloc himself, many of his most significant followers were former Liberals who became disillusioned with Liberalism and the Liberal Party. For these disaffected former Liberals, Bellocianism filled a political and intellectual vacuum, particularly after the collapse of the Liberal Party in the early 1920s. The charisma of the first generation of Bellocians, Vincent McNabb, Eric Gill, and G. K. Chesterton, as well as the manifest talent of Gill as an artist and Chesterton as a writer, proved invaluable in advancing Belloc’s ideological agenda. After the Great War the baton had been taken by a succession of young writers, editors, and publishers­, Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community 372­ including Douglas Jerrold, Douglas Woodruff, Christopher Hollis, Evelyn Waugh, and Arnold Lunn. This quintet had provided new energy , refining Bellocianism and updating during the 1930s the ideas that Belloc had first promulgated two decades earlier. While they had proclaimed the virtues of Bellocian history and the excellence of Distributism , what became most apparent was their devotion to Belloc’s political philosophy. At best, they had no use for parliamentary politics ; in most cases, they harbored the same animus toward Britain...