The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961 (review)

Ian Ker, the renowned Newman scholar, has produced a fine book that examines six principle writers of the Catholic revival in English literature, beginning with John Henry Newman's conversion in 1845 and ending with Waugh's completion of The Sword of Honor in 1961. Newman's conversion heralded an evocative artistic and intellectual response to the prevailing agnosticism of the age, influencing many other Englishman to "come out" as Catholics over the next one hundred years. Ker looks at three distinct periods of English literature: Newman and Gerard Manley Hopkins in the Victorian period, Hilaire Belloc's friendship with G.K. Chesterton in the Edwardian period, and the contemporaries Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh in the modern period of the 1930s through the 50s. As a minority religion in England, Catholicism became for these intellectuals and artists both an imaginative lens and a source for artistic inspiration, one that is decidedly different from the Protestant dispensation of their contemporaries. The great strength of Ker's book is his attempt to show how these authors are historically connected to one another, with Newman's work rightly standing as the important link for all of them. Each author gets his own chapter, showing the development of their greatest works played out on the backdrop of Catholic ways of thinking and feeling in what was by all accounts a Protestant literary domain. If there is one weakness in the study, it is found in the unevenness of the chapters. Because they were originally conceived as lectures given at various occasions, some chapters are crowded with biographical anecdote while others are more systematic close readings of the texts.

Ker is at his very best and most insightful with John Henry Newman, noting that Newman "discovered" the lived reality of Catholicism only after his intellectual conversion. "The discovery of Catholicism," Ker notes, "was a consequence rather than a cause of his conversion." Using Newman's novels, poems, sermons, and letters, Ker brings to life the convert's gradual appreciation and personal appropriation of Catholicism as a lived religion of objective "fact." Newman notes that he discovered in Catholicism a "working religion" that is both spiritual and "matter of fact." Ker argues that Newman's conversion to Catholicism centers around his distinction between the "notional" and the "real," the dialectic of his life-long quest to experience a Christianity not reduced to private experience or a construction of the mind, but an independent reality outside the subjective self. Newman's discourse on the reality between the gentleman class of Anglican clergy and the classlessness of Catholic priests ends the chapter and prepares for the next, for while Anglican priesthood turned out classically trained Divines from Oxford, Catholic priesthood turned out a guild of craftsman professionally trained in the seminary.

Ker's reading of the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, develops this sense of the business-like, "matter of fact" nature of Catholic worship that so influenced Newman after his intellectual conversion. Ker observes that the great innovations in both the language and the use of rhythm in Hopkins' poetry stem in part from his embrace of Catholicism, a religious discourse expressed in the "matter of fact" language of devotional prayers and piety. If, as Hopkins wrote, sprung rhythm is "nearest to the rhythm of prose, that it is the native and natural rhythm of speech," then "the poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened […] but not an obsolete one." Ker suggests that Hopkins discovered that Catholic "difference" is embodied in a language that is not obsolete but alive in the devotions of the people. The discursive strategies of Catholicism thus become a linguistic and poetic source for the greatness of Hopkins' poetry.

Ker deals quickly with Hilarie Belloc, linking him with both Newman and Hopkins on the "matter of fact-ness" of Catholic faith. Belloc is a lesser figure of stature, but Ker argues that he is more than a...