The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh (review)

A glance at the title of Ian Ker's new book will convince most Victorianists that this is not a book they need to read, or perhaps some will conclude that they need read only the introduction and the two chapters on John Henry Newman and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the only writers surveyed who fall clearly into the Victorian period. That would be a mistake, for this survey of six English Catholic writers is in fact an account of the legacy of the Victorians, or more accurately, of the impact Newman has had on Ker. A leading Newman scholar, Ker seeks in this book to show that Newman's desire for "the formation of a Catholic literature in the English language" (116) has been achieved by Newman and the five other writers listed in the subtitle. While the argument is problematic, as it assumes that revival can extend for over a century and that a tradition can be represented by six individuals, it should certainly be debated by scholars of twentieth-century literature. What is most fascinating about this book for Victorianists is that it reveals a Newman scholar who wants to show that what Newman sought was in fact achieved. Ker's study is really an account of the afterlife of Newman.

Ker seeks to disprove Newman's assertion, in Lectures and Essays on University Subjects (1859; later incorporated into The Idea of a University, 1873), that "English literature— and he means modern or postmedieval literature, as he doesn't refer even to Chaucer—is essentially Protestant literature and there is nothing that Catholics can hope to do to change the situation: a Catholic literature is simply an impossibility in the context of English culture" (1). By "a Catholic literature," Ker means literature written by practicing Roman Catholics whose religion was a formative influence on their work. Thus he excludes writers like Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford on the grounds that their religion was not integral to their lives or their work; Siegfried Sassoon and Edith Sitwell because their poetry was written before their conversions; and Francis Thompson and Coventry Patmore because their poetry is more generally Christian than specifically Roman Catholic. The six authors Ker has chosen—all, except for Belloc, converts and major authors—could not have written as they did, he argues, "without the formative Catholic influence" (8).

Although he was the leading Victorian Roman Catholic and remains a towering figure to this day, Newman is the least obvious choice to be included. He wrote two novels that are deservedly mostly forgotten, Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (1848) and Callista (1855), and a slightly more successful poem, The Dream of Gerontius (1865). Ker argues that Newman's novels have been unjustly overlooked, but he actually spends very little time on literary analysis of these works in the chapter devoted to Newman. Instead, Newman occupies a key place in this work as an influence on and silent judge of the five later writers. To make his point that the litany (and not, as Geoffrey Hill has argued, chanting, which was actually not a significant part of Jesuit spirituality) was the key influence on Hopkins's "sprung rhythm," Ker compares Hopkins's poetry with Newman's litany on the Immaculate Heart of Mary. He connects Belloc to Newman by a shared love of "the sheer concreteness of Catholicism" (65) and G. K. Chesterton to Newman in their "rejoicing in the way in which the sacred and the secular mingle in a Catholic culture" (101); he argues that Newman would have appreciated the complexity of Graham Greene's Catholicism, and he finds hints of Newman's sayings in statements voiced by some of Evelyn Waugh's characters.

This book is written clearly and confidently, and Ker has an impressive command of the literature he studies. The argument is...