Literary Giants Literary Catholics (18 page)

Like Belloc, Bob Copper was a living incarnation of the theology of place, one who lived in mystical union and communion with the land and culture that had nurtured and nourished him. In our rootless age of fungoid cosmopolitanism, such men are the breath of fresh air blowing through the branches of the Grizzlebeards and Treebeards of Permanence.

Bob Copper was quite simply a true giant among men, exuding a true gentleness and a giant humility. As my Grizzlebearded memory of him flashes across my consciousness, I am reminded of the words of Chesterton: “All roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters: and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world.” I cherish the hope, and the prayer, that, along with Dickens and all his characters, I shall also meet once more Bob Copper and that I shall find him drinking to the eternal health of those others gathered around the table: Belloc and Chesterton, along with Grizzlebeard and the Sailor, and the Poet and Myself. For the tavern at the end of the world is where everlasting men commune everlastingly.

In the meantime, I can console myself with some timely words by Hilaire Belloc that will serve as a timeless epitaph to the late and greatly missed Bob Copper.

     He does not die that can bequeath

     Some influence to the land he knows,

     Or dares, persistent, interwreath

     Love permanent with the wild hedgerows;

          He does not die, but still remains

          Substantiate with his darling plains.

     The spring’s superb adventure calls

     His dust athwart the woods to flame;

     His boundary river’s secret falls

     Perpetuate and repeat his name,

          He rides his loud October sky:

          He does not die. He does not die.

13

_____

In the Shadow of the Chesterbelloc

T
HE TWO GIANTS OF THE CATHOLIC LITERARY REVIVAL
in the first third of the twentieth century were, without doubt, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. They were seen so synonymously in the eyes of the reading public that they were the butt of the caricaturist’s humor and the satirist’s wit. Max Beerbohm, a friend of both men, drew a famous caricature depicting Belloc and Chesterton seated at a table, each holding a tankard of foaming beer, with the former lecturing the latter on “the errors of Geneva”. George Orwell, in the satirical attack on the literati in the opening chapter of his novel
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
, went one step further than other humorists by bestowing an honorary ordination on the Chesterbelloc, describing “Father Hilaire Chestnut’s latest book of R.C. propaganda”.

The literary legend surrounding the figure of the Chesterbelloc has cast such a long and enduring shadow that the less-known figure of Maurice Baring has been almost eclipsed by it. This is unfortunate and unjust. As a man of letters, and as a man of faith, Baring deserves to emerge from the shadow of his two illustrious friends. He deserves, in fact, to take his place beside them as he did in the famous painting
The Conversation Piece
by Sir James Gunn. This large group portrait, now displayed in London’s National Portrait Gallery, depicts Baring, Belloc and Chesterton assembled around a table. The three literary figures, whom Chesterton, with characteristic humor, labeled “Baring, over-bearing and past-bearing”, represented more than a mere assemblage of friends. By the 1920s, after Baring had established a reputation as a Catholic novelist, he was seen in the eyes of the reading public as the third person, alongside Belloc and Chesterton, in a Catholic literary trinity. Sharing not only a common friendship, but a common philosophy and a common faith, Baring, Belloc and Chesterton might not have been as indivisible as the Holy Trinity, but they were certainly seen by many as being as indomitable as the Three Musketeers.

Baring was born in 1874, the same year as Chesterton and four years after Belloc. A younger son of the first Lord Revelstoke, and an heir to the Baring international banking dynasty, he enjoyed all the trappings of privilege. As a child, he was looked after by a succession of nannies and governesses in the sprawling opulence of England’s great country houses or in the dignified splendor of town houses in London. His autobiography,
The Puppet Show of Memory
, evokes a world of wealth and cultured comfort, a world furnished with servants and characterized by a
savoir vivre
that would be beyond the reach of following generations. It is invaluable as an elegy and as a eulogy to a dying world and as a testament to a blissfully carefree childhood.

Baring’s schooldays at Eton are also remembered in
The Puppet Show of Memory
and are re-created atmospherically in his novel
Friday’s Business
. From Eton he went to Hildesheim, near Hanover, to learn German, adding to the French he had learned in the nursery and to the Latin and Greek in which he had excelled at school. Later, he would become fully conversant in Italian, Russian and the Scandinavian languages. After a period in Florence, he went to Trinity College in Cambridge, where he first came into contact with the fashionable scepticism of the 1890s. He met Bertrand Russell, Robert Trevelyan and other “intellectuals” who sought to convince him that he should not go to chapel because “Christianity was exploded, a thing of the past” and that “nobody believed in it really among the young and the advanced”.

I remember thinking that although I was much younger in years than these intellectuals, and far inferior in knowledge, brains, and wits, no match for them in argument or in achievement, I was none the less older than they were in a particular kind of experience—the experience that has nothing to do either with the mind, or with knowledge, and that is independent of age, but takes place in the heart, and in which a child may be sometimes more rich than a grown-up person. I do not mean anything sentimental. I am speaking of the experience that comes from having been suddenly constrained to turn round and look at life from a different point of view. So when I heard the intellectual reason in the manner I have described, I felt for the moment an old person listening to young people. I felt young people must always have talked like that. It was not that I had then any definite religious creed. I seldom went to Chapel.

Although the “dogmatic disbelief” of these intellectuals remained “intolerable”, the “religious tenets” of his own lukewarm Protestant faith were equally unsatisfactory. Eventually his insecurely held faith, the remnants of childhood, “just dropped away . . . as easily as a child loses a first tooth”. By the winter of 1893 he was an avowed agnostic, ceasing all church attendance and declaring to friends that he “didn’t believe in a Christian faith”. This was his state of heart and mind when, in 1897, he first made the acquaintance of Belloc.

Having witnessed one of Belloc’s pyrotechnic displays at the Oxford Union, Baring described him as “a brilliant orator and conversationalist . . . who lives by his wits”. At their first meeting, Belloc confronted Baring’s agnostic arguments with the uncompromising riposte that he would “most certainly go to hell”. Evidently finding Belloc’s dogmatic belief more tolerable than the dogmatic disbelief of Bertrand Russell’s intellectual coterie in Cambridge, Baring concluded from “the first moment I saw him” that Belloc was “a remarkable man”.

In spite of their differences, Belloc’s and Baring’s friendship was cemented by mutual respect. “I like him immensely and think him full of brilliances and delightful to be with”, Baring wrote of Belloc three years later. At this stage, however, Baring did not feel tempted to succumb to the allure of Belloc’s faith. When Baring’s friend Reggie Balfour informed him in the autumn of 1899 that he “felt a strong desire to become a Catholic”, Baring was “extremely surprised and disconcerted”. Until that moment, he had only known two converts—his sister Elizabeth, who had married the Catholic Earl of Kenmare, and an undergraduate who had explained his motive merely as a need to have all or nothing. He was “amazed” that his friend should consider such a step and sought to discourage him, arguing that the Christian religion “was not so very old, and so small a strip in the illimitable series of the creeds of mankind”.

Out of loyalty to his friend, or simple curiosity, or both, Baring accompanied Balfour to a Low Mass. He was pleasantly surprised. “It impressed me greatly. . . . One felt one was looking on at something extremely ancient. The behaviour of the congregation, and the expression on their faces impressed me too. To them it was evidently real.”

Soon after their attendance at Low Mass, Balfour sent Baring an epitaph that he had come across in the church of San Gregorio in Rome.

Here lies Robert Peckham, Englishman and Catholic, who, after England’s break with the Church, left England not being able to live without the Faith and who, coming to Rome, died not being able to live without his country.

This epitaph, and its underlying tragedy, produced a marked and lasting effect on Baring’s whole view of the Reformation and probably had as much to do with his eventual conversion as anything he might have discussed with Belloc. The epitaph itself would haunt him to such a degree that, thirty years later, it would reemerge as the inspiration for his novel
Robert Peckham
, which, alongside R. H. Benson’s classic,
Come Rack! Come Rope
! is perhaps the finest historical novel ever written about the bloody legacy of the English Reformation.

Baring entered the diplomatic service and was posted, between 1899 and 1904, to Paris, Copenhagen and Rome. Becoming disillusioned with life as a diplomat, and simultaneously becoming enamored of Russia, its language and its people, he resigned from the diplomatic service and arrived in Saint Petersburg shortly after Christmas 1904. It was from here, in January 1906, that he had written excitedly to a friend about the books of Chesterton, particularly Chesterton’s first novel,
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
, and his controversial book of essays entitled
Heretics
, stating emphatically that “I like his
ideas”
.

Considering that Baring and Chesterton had both been good friends of Belloc since the turn of the century, it is perhaps surprising that they did not become acquainted with each other until 1907. Indeed, as late as March 1908, Baring was writing to Chesterton from Moscow requesting a greater intimacy in their relationship, asking whether he might “call you by your Christian name” and adding his hope that “you & I & Hilaire may meet”. The slow development of their friendship was probably due principally to Baring’s long absences from England, but, once formed, their affection for each other grew stronger as the years passed. Frances Chesterton was to say, many years later, that “of all her husband’s friends” there was none he loved more than Maurice Baring.

It is not clear whether Chesterton’s
Orthodoxy
, published on 25 September 1908, had any direct influence on Baring’s conversion, but considering Baring’s admiration for Chesterton’s earlier works and his growing fondness for the author, it would be surprising if he had not read Chesterton’s hugely influential volume in the months immediately preceding his reception into the Church on 1 February 1909.

Describing his reception as “the only action in my life which I am quite certain I have never regretted”, Baring sought to elucidate the forces at work in his conversion in the admirable sonnet sequence “Vita Nuova”. Divided into a chronological trinity, the first sonnet deals with the initial approach to conversion: “I found the clue I sought not, in the night, / While wandering in a pathless maze of gloom”.

The second sonnet describes the act of conversion itself, the desire to linger no longer “in a separated porch” and the sudden realization that the fire was “ablaze beyond the gate”. He knocked, “and swiftly came the answering word” inviting him to enter into his own estate, where “my broken soul began to mend”.

     I knelt, I knew—it was too bright to see—

     The welcome of a King who was my friend.

The final sonnet centers on the hope for eternity beyond the grave, where the “tranquil harbour shines and waits”.

Explaining his reasons for conversion more prosaically, he wrote that once “I came to the conclusion
inside
that life was for me divine, and that I had inside me an immortal thing in touch with an Eternal Spirit, there was no other course open to me than to become a Catholic”. He told the composer Ethel Smyth, who was a close friend and confidante, that his faith was a fusion of want and need. “I feel that human life which is almost intolerable as it is, would be to me quite intolerable without this which is to me no narcotic but food, air, drink”. These words, so candidly self-perceptive, offer a key not only to Baring’s conversion but to the motivation behind so many of his novels, in which his stoically self-sacrificial heroes and heroines cope with the exile of life, its trials and sufferings, with the help of the consolation offered by their faith. “One has to
accept
sorrow for it to have any healing power, and that is the most difficult thing in the world”, says one of the characters in his final novel,
Darby and Joan
. “When you understand what
accepted
sorrow means, you will understand everything. It is the secret of life.”

Ethel Smyth described Baring’s conversion as “the crucial action of his life”, and when she had been informed of the event, she “had the feeling that the missing piece of a complicated puzzle, or rather the only key wherewith a given iron safe could be unlocked, had at last been found”. A similar view was held by the French writer Raymond Las Vergnas in his critical study of Chesterton, Belloc and Baring, translated into English by the Jesuit C. C. Martindale. Baring’s Christian faith was, wrote Las Vergnas, the “powerful unifying force” responsible for “harmonising the complex tendencies” in his artistic temperament.