The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature, 1850–2000 by Richard Griffiths (review)

In The Pen and the Cross, Richard Griffiths gives us a very effective survey of modern English Catholic literature. This book is a good introduction for the general reader, providing a particular breadth in canonical authors. For the Victorianist, Griffiths offers an overview that locates the nineteenth century as the point of origin for the genre, tracing a trajectory from John Henry Newman to David Lodge. In the process, Griffiths focuses on the strictly literary. As cultural history, while the work pays attention to questions of class, it is primarily concerned with a rather narrow group of writers in its genealogy. Griffiths, coming out of French studies, differentiates the particularities of English versus French Catholic identity. He further limits himself to Roman Catholic literature in England, as opposed to works by Anglo-Catholics (Anglicans). My main objection to this book, a worthwhile guide, is what Griffiths doesn’t talk about rather than what he does.

It makes sense to begin a readable study of Roman Catholicism in English literature with the Oxford Movement, and Griffiths stops short of mythologizing or sentimentalizing that historical moment as iconic. Rather than celebrating the return of Romanism to English shores (with the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy), Griffiths delivers a useful discussion of Newman. As he notes in the introduction, his subject is not the Catholic identity of these writers but the “coherent system of imagery” and “specific forms of expression” that define Catholic literature as a genre (3). As social history, Griffiths’s book provides most insight into the peculiar kind of Catholicism found in English literature, generally that of the (middle-class) convert, standing in some relation to the old recusant aristocratic families. Stylistically this phenomenon led to literary concentration on sacramental theology, rather than the mysticism, miracles, or sentimental piety seen in the Catholic literatures of other countries. Griffiths also argues that English Catholic discourse is marked by its resistance to “centralization and regimentation” and “the triumph of ultramontanism” (16). He suggests an individualistic artistic tradition emerging out of a history of marginalized gentry and the modern bourgeoisie. For example, Griffiths calls Gerard Manley Hopkins “a very modern poet in his form, and also a very modern Christian in much of his content” (41).

This question of convert Catholicism reaches its climax with the Decadents at the fin de siècle. Griffiths distinguishes between the “dilettantism” of the attraction to Catholicism exemplified by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which Griffiths blames on Walter Pater’s aesthetic legacy, and the faith of a “number of young poets, including Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and John Gray, [who] were converted to Catholicism and there is no reason to doubt their sincerity in this” (47, 48). Griffiths opposes the good convert (sincere) to the bad convert (solely drawn to the exotic and beautiful). Acknowledging the debt to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours (1884), Griffiths characteristically sacrifices Wilde in a chapter that is ambivalent about whom to praise and whom to blame in this era. Regarding the notoriously eccentric Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, he states that “his idiosyncratic, ornate and mannered style is strangely effective and he stands out as one of the most curious and original figures in the literature of the period” (51). Yet leading to a discussion of Lionel Johnson, Francis Thompson, and Alice Meynell, Griffiths poses their “revival in serious religious poetry” in “contrast to the aesthetic dilettantism of the circle around Wilde” (52). He values Johnson and John Gray as Catholic poets only after they have rejected Wilde’s influence. No mention is made of Wilde’s deathbed conversion or lifelong writings on Catholicism. Griffiths constructs a heresy trial for art that’s been done many times before, distancing so-called sincere conversion from aesthetic appeal in a manner that is far too simplistic. As he self-stylized with camp awareness in his prose, Wilde...