Literary Giants Literary Catholics (19 page)

Belloc, who had observed his friend’s slow but steady spiritual progress for more than a decade, greeted his conversion with jubilation. “It is an immense thing”, he wrote to Charlotte Balfour, who had herself been received into the Church in 1904. “They are coming in like a gathering army from all manner of directions, all manner of men each bringing some new force: that of Maurice is his amazing accuracy of mind which proceeds from his great virtue of truth. I am profoundly grateful!”

Baring also brought a depth of culture that few of his generation could equal. Although still only thirty-four years old, he had traveled widely throughout Europe as a diplomat, journalist and man of leisure. He knew Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, Russian and Danish, and he was widely read in the literature of all these languages. He was the quintessential European. As such, Belloc’s words in
An Open Letter on the Decay of Faith
, published in 1906, would have struck Baring with a particular resonance and poignancy as he made his final approach to the Church:

I desire you to remember that we are Europe; we are a great people. The faith is not an accident among us, nor an imposition, nor a garment; it is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh: it is a philosophy made by and making ourselves. We have adorned, explained, enlarged it; we have given it visible form. This is the service we Europeans have done to God. In return He has made us Christians.

At the time of his reception, Baring had only scratched the surface of his own literary potential. He had written several books, most notably on his experiences in Russia, and also a translation of Leonardo da Vinci’s
Thoughts on Art and Life
. He had also published, in 1906, a volume of poetry,
Sonnets and Short Poems
, which had not received the critical acclaim it deserved. Sadly, today, as in his own day, Baring’s position as a poet of considerable merit continues to go largely unnoticed. Several sonnets inspired by his experience as a war correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, particularly “The Dead Samurai to Death” and “The Dying Reservist”, warrant a place in any anthology of war poetry. The place warranted is, however, seldom granted. Similarly, several sublimely beautiful sonnets inspired by his love for Russia, most notably “Harvest in Russia”, and by his love for the arts, particularly his trilogy of sonnets on “Beethoven”, “Mozart” and “Wagner”, remain unread and completely unknown to modern readers. His poem “Candlemas”, written alongside the sonnet sequence “Vita Nuova” as a commemoration and celebration of his reception into the Church, is one of the finest religious sonnets of the twentieth century.

Further books on Russia followed in the wake of his reception into the Church, along with a number of genre-defying humorous volumes,
Diminutive Dramas, Dead Letters
and
Lost Diaries
, in which subtle pastiche, mischievous satire and sheer farce are combined in equal measure. It was, however, as a novelist that he would finally receive the literary recognition commensurate with his superlative gifts.

Baring’s career as a novelist was relatively short, commencing with the publication of
Passing By
in 1921 and ending prematurely fifteen years later with the onset of the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease. In between he left his claim to posterity in the form of several novels of outstanding grace.
C
, published in 1924, was highly praised by the French novelist André Maurois, who wrote that no book had given him such pleasure since his reading of Tolstoy, Proust and certain novels by E. M. Forster. If anything, Baring was to enjoy greater success in France than in England. Ten of his books were translated into French, with one
—Daphne Adeane
—going through twenty-three printings in the edition of the Librairie Stock. Others were translated into Czech, Dutch, German, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish and Swedish.

Not surprisingly, Baring’s greatest literary champions in England were Belloc and Chesterton. Belloc considered
Cat’s Cradle
, published in 1925, “a great masterpiece . . . the best story of a woman’s life that I know”. He also greatly admired
Robert Peckham
. “The style,” Belloc wrote, “which is characteristically yours, is even better in
Robert Peckham
than in any of the other books. . . . Where you triumph unusually is in the exact valuation of characters which do not differ in black and white, but in every shade. You do it better in this book, I think, than in any other, even than in
Cat’s Cradle
. . . . It seems to me to have a more permanent quality than any other. . . . All those who count will unite in its praise, except those who do not feel a subtle thing at the first shock.”

In 1929, shortly after Baring’s novel
The Coat without Seam
had been published, Chesterton wrote that he had been “much uplifted” by his friend’s latest book:

It is, as you say, extraordinary how the outer world can see everything about it except the point. It is curiously so with much of the very good Catholic work now being done in literature, especially in France. The Protestant English, who prided themselves on their common sense, seem now to be dodging about and snatching at anything except the obvious. . . . But there are plenty of people who will appreciate anything as good as
The Coat Without Seam
.

If Baring could rely on Belloc and Chesterton to appreciate the subtleties of grace and providence that he had sought to weave throughout the fabric of his novels, he could count on the “dogmatic disbelief” of the Bloomsbury group to miss the point entirely. Virginia Woolf dismissed what she perceived as the “superficiality” of Baring’s novels. Baring’s riposte to what he himself perceived to be the superficiality of such criticism was expressed plaintively in his last book,
Have You Anything to Declare
?

It is utterly futile to write about the Christian faith from the outside. A good example of this is the extremely conscientious novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward called
Helbeck of Bannisdale
. It is a study of Catholicism from the outside, and the author has taken scrupulous pains to make it accurate, detailed and exhaustive. The only drawback is that, not being able to see the matter from the inside, she misses the whole point.

If Baring felt frustrated at being misunderstood by those who were exiled in ignorance from the Faith that breathed life into his novels, he was “too moved to speak” when he learned that François Mauriac had a deep admiration for his work. “What I most admire about Baring’s work”, Mauriac had told the Catholic actor-writer Robert Speaight, “is the sense he gives you of the penetration of grace.”

Speaight himself described
Have You Anything to Declare
? as “the best bedside book in the English language”. The extensive nature of Baring’s knowledge of European literature was displayed in this anthology, which was inspired by the author’s imagined arrival on the banks of the Styx and his being asked by Charon to declare his literary luggage. His selection, gleaned from the literature of many of the languages in which he was conversant, displays an extraordinary catholicity of taste and reminds one of the description of a character in his novel
The Coat without Seam
: “Everything about him . . . gave one the impression of centuries and hidden stores of pent-up civilisation.” Baring’s selection exhibited a particular love for Homer and Virgil, and a deep devotion for Dante:

Scaling the circles of the
Paradiso
, we are conscious the whole time of an ascent not only in the quality of the substance but in that of the form. It is a long perpetual crescendo, increasing in beauty until the final consummation in the very last line. Somebody once defined an artist . . . as a man who knew how to finish things. If this definition is true—and I think it is—then Dante was the greatest artist who ever lived. His final canto is the best, and it depends on and completes the beginning.

Ironically, this book of excerpts from the works of Baring’s favorite authors became better known than all his other books. Such neglect of his literary achievement does both the man and his work an injustice.

In our uncivilized age, it is perhaps inevitable that Baring’s star should have been eclipsed by the polluting smog of mediocrity. For as long as the light of civilization dwindles, so will the reputation of this most civilized of writers. Ultimately, however, his future position in the ranks of the great novelists of the twentieth century is ensured. As the Permanent Things reassert themselves and as civilization rises from the ashes of burned-out nihilism, so the works of Maurice Baring will enjoy their own resurrection. The facile and the fashionable will fade, and the peripheral will pass away; but Baring, or at least the best of Baring, will remain.

14

_____

Unsung Genius

R
OBERT HUGH BENSON WAS LAUDED
in his own day as one of the leading figures in English literature, yet today he is almost completely forgotten outside Catholic circles and is sadly neglected even among Catholics. Few stars of the literary firmament, either before or since, have shone quite so brightly in their own time before being eclipsed quite so inexplicably in posterity. Almost a century after his conversion, Benson has become the unsung genius of the Catholic literary revival.

It was not always so.

Robert Hugh Benson was born in 1871, the youngest son of E. W. Benson, a distinguished Anglican clergyman. In 1882, when Benson was eleven years old, his father became Archbishop of Canterbury. Following in his father’s footsteps, Benson took Anglican orders in 1894. When, two years later, his father died, he read the litany at the funeral in Canterbury Cathedral. Everything seemed to suggest that the son would continue to follow dutifully in the illustrious steps of his father. Providence had, however, woven another pattern.

After a torturously conscientious self-examination, the details of which were elucidated masterfully in his autobiographical apologia,
Confessions of a Convert
, Benson was received into the Catholic Church in 1903. His unexpected conversion caused a sensation and sent shock waves through the Anglican establishment. No conversion since Newman’s, almost sixty years earlier, had caused such controversy.

There is no doubt that the new convert belonged to a remarkable family. Apart from his father’s rise to ecclesiastical prominence as head of the Church of England, both of Benson’s brothers became leading members of the Edwardian literati. A. C. Benson, his eldest brother, was master of Magdalene College in Cambridge and built a reputation as a fine biographer, diarist and literary critic, writing acclaimed studies of Rossetti, Fitzgerald, Pater, Tennyson and Ruskin. His other brother, E. F. Benson, wrote prolifically and is best known to posterity for his satirical Mapp and Lucia novels, which have been successfully adapted for television.

The youngest Benson was not destined to live in the literary shadow of his famous brothers. On the contrary, his first novel,
The Light Invisible
, was quickly followed by a string of other novels, all of which were commercially successful. In the meantime, he was ordained in 1904, and upon his return from Rome that same year, he moved to Cambridge, where he served as a curate. Thereafter he became as popular for his preaching and his fiery oratory as he was for his novels. He was, according to Brian Masters, author of a biographical study of the three Benson brothers, “a preacher with fire in his voice”: “Whenever Monsignor Hugh Benson was due to preach one could be sure the hall, no matter how big, would be sold out months in advance. . . . Hugh gave a
performance
in the pulpit as certainly as Sarah Bernhardt gave one on stage.”

The Light Invisible
was published in 1903 and written when he was in the midst of the convulsive throes of spiritual conversion. The book is awash with a veritable confusion of emotive mysticism—a confession of faith amid the confusion of doubt. Once he had gained the clarity of Catholic perception, Benson looked upon his first novel with a degree of scepticism. In 1912 he commented that its subsequent popularity appeared to be determined by the religious denomination of those who read it. It was “rather significant” that it was popular among Anglicans, whereas Catholics appreciated it to “a very much lesser degree”: “most Catholics, and myself among them, think that
Richard Raynal, Solitary
is very much better written and very much more religious.”

Richard Raynal, Solitary
evokes with beguiling beauty the spiritual depth of English life prior to the rupture of the Reformation, as Benson seamlessly weaves the modern storyteller’s art with the chivalrous charm of the Middle Ages. It succeeds, principally, as a work that conveys the medieval spirit. The reader, if he allows himself to be carried thither, will find himself transported to the early fifteenth century. He will find himself at home in Richard Raynal’s England and will rejoice in the presence of the colorful character of “Master Richard” himself. At times he will be reminded of
The Little Flowers of Saint Francis
, but he will never be able to forget, nor will he wish to forget, that this is Catholic England, not Catholic Italy. He will find himself in the presence of a hermit on a God-given mission. Above all, he will find himself in the presence of holiness and will find himself at home in its presence.
Richard Raynal, Solitary
is Christian literature at its most beautiful, at once both edifying and efficacious. Its power is purgatorial. It purges. It cleanses. It makes whole. Ultimately it serves as a timely reminder that the roots of romance are in Rome.

Hilaire Belloc was so impressed by Benson’s historical novels that he wrote enthusiastically of him to A. C. Benson in 1907 that it was “quite on the cards that he will be the man to write some day a book to give us some sort of idea what happened in England between 1520 and 1560.” In fact, prompted by his anger and frustration at the Protestant bias of the Whig historians, Belloc would write several books of his own on this subject, including studies of key sixteenth- and seventeenth-century figures such as Wolsey, Cromwell, James I, Charles II and Cranmer. Belloc’s
How the Reformation Happened
, published in 1928, was an endeavor to put the whole period into context.