Literary Giants Literary Catholics (39 page)

     Here, in this little Bay,

     Full of tumultuous life and great repose,

     Where, twice a day,

     The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,

     Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,

     I sit me down.

     For want of me the world’s course will not fail;

     When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;

     The truth is great, and shall prevail,

     When none cares whether it prevail or not.

This short verse, written by one of the most celebrated Catholic poets of the Victorian era, displays all the hallmarks of the literary revival heralded by Newman. It shows the same preoccupations that characterize the work of both Newman and Tolkien. There is the insistence upon the transcendent and objective nature of truth and upon its perennial prevalence regardless of the fashionable whims of a largely heedless humanity. More specifically, as far as direct comparisons with Tolkien are concerned, there is the same almost mystical reverence for the timeless endurance of the ocean. At the end of
The Lord of the Rings
, there is more than a glimmer of the poetic poignancy that Patmore felt in the majestic presence of the sea:

But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness as he stood at the Haven; and as he looked at the grey sea he saw only a shadow on the waters that was soon lost in the West. There still he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-earth, and the sound of them sank deep into his heart.

This reverence for the sea is given theological expression in
The Silmarillion
:

And they observed the winds and the air, and the matters of which Arda was made, of iron and stone and silver and gold and many substances: but of all these water they most greatly praised. And it is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance else that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Iluvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.

In prose such as this, Tolkien succeeds in encapsulating theological principles in terms that are evocative of the metaphysical poets. The Ainur are the angelic powers given responsibility for the Creation of Middle Earth by Iluvatar, the One omnipotent God. Their collective act of Creation, overseen by the One, is described as the Music, the symphonic subcreation of the universe. In thus describing water as something in which there still lives the echo of this angelic Music, Tolkien reaches sublime heights of imagery worthy of the great poets.

There is also a striking similarity between the words Tolkien puts into the mouth of Ulmo, the angel most responsible for the Waters, and the words of the Victorian Catholic poet Francis Thompson in his poem “To a Snowflake”. First, Tolkien:

Then Ulmo answered: “Truly, Water is become now fairer than my heart imagined, neither had my secret thought conceived the snowflake, nor in all my music was contained the falling of the rain.”

Compare this with Thompson’s verse:

     What heart could have thought you?—

     Past our devisal

     (O filigree petal!)

     Fashioned so purely,

     Fragilely, surely,

     From what Paradisal

     Imagineless metal,

     Too costly for cost?

Unfortunately, modern ignorance of both philosophy and theology has resulted in this deep love of nature being mistaken for a form of pantheistic paganism. The extent to which Tolkien sought to dispel such misunderstanding is evident in the early pages of
The Silmarillion
, in which he goes to great pains to ensure that his own version of the Creation myth conforms with orthodox Christianity.

Comparison with another Victorian Catholic poet will illustrate the intrinsic unity that exists between Tolkien’s “greenness” and the Christian philosophy that underpins his work. Gerard Manley Hopkins had been as devastated by the felling often or twelve poplar trees in 1879 as had been the young Tolkien by the felling of a favorite tree during his childhood. In both cases, the wanton destruction inspired literary creativity. For Hopkins, it resulted in the writing of “Binsey Poplars”, one of his finest poems:

     O if we but knew what we do

               When we delve or hew—

          Hack and rack the growing green!

               Since country is so tender

          To touch, her being só slender,

          That, like this sleek and seeing ball

          But a prick will make no eye at all,

          Where we, even where we mean

                    To mend her we end her,

               When we hew or delve:

     After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.

          Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve

               Strokes of havoc uńselve

                    The sweet especial scene,

                    Rural scene, a rural scene,

                    Sweet especial rural scene.

For Tolkien, this love of nature, and especially of trees, bore fruit in his creation of the arboreal ents and in the charming characterization of Treebeard and Quickbeam. As with Hopkins, the roots from which the fruit sprang were philosophical. The creative vision of both men was shaped to a profound extent by the scholastic philosophy of the Church. For Hopkins, the rigors of his training to become a Jesuit left him thoroughly conversant with the philosophy of both Duns Scotus and Saint Thomas Aquinas. The influence of the former is most evident in the way that
inscape
in Hopkins correlates with the concept of
haecceity
in the metaphysics of Duns Scotus. The concept of
inscape
also explains the omnipresence of nature-reverence and its mystical significance in Tolkien’s work, and this in turn represents a further example of the fact that one must plumb the philosophical depths if one is to understand the colorful surface of Middle Earth.

If comparisons with Newman, Patmore, Thompson and Hopkins illustrate the affinity that exists between Tolkien’s work and that of the early protagonists of the Catholic literary revival, comparisons with the works of G. K. Chesterton serve as further evidence that Tolkien’s achievement should be seen within the context of an orthodox Christian response to secular society. Like Chesterton, Tolkien subscribed to a vision of Merrie England that was an idealized view of what England had been before the Reformation and what she could be again. It was an England free from post-Reformation puritanism and postindustrial proletarianism, an England where individuals owned the land on which they lived and worked. It was Blake’s green and pleasant land liberated from the dominion of dark, satanic mills. Chesterton had eulogized this mythical England in his verse, his essays and his novels, and Tolkien had subcreated his own version of it with his descriptions of the Shire. “In many ways,” writes Charles A. Coulombe elsewhere in this volume, “the Shire expresses perfectly the economic and political ideals of the Church, as expressed by Leo XIII in
Rerum Novarum
, and Pius XI in
Quadragesimo anno
. . . It is the sort of society envisioned by Distributists Belloc and Chesterton”.

The linking of the Shire with the distributism of Chesterton and Belloc moves the discussion of Tolkien’s place within the Catholic literary revival from the philosophical to the socioeconomic. On this level, there are many striking similarities between Chesterton and Tolkien, most notably in their shared distaste for urban industrialism, which places them in a long plaintive tradition stretching back to Blake and Cobbett almost two centuries earlier. Chesterton had written a study of Blake and a full-length biography of “great Cobbett” describing him as “the horseman of the shires” and the champion of England’s dispossessed rural population, the last rustic radical: “After him Radicalism is urban—and Toryism suburban.” “In Mr. Chesterton’s view,” wrote a reviewer, “Cobbett stood for England: England unindustrialised, self-sufficient, relying on a basis of agriculture and sound commerce for her prosperity, with no desire for inflation.” Chesterton’s view of Cobbett’s England conforms with Tolkien’s view of the Shire, which he told his publisher was “based on rural England and not on any other country in the world”. Comparing Cobbett to Shelley, Chesterton wrote: “Going through green Warwickshire, Cobbett might have thought of the crops and Shelley of the clouds. But Shelley would have called Birmingham what Cobbett called it—a hell-hole.” This was certainly a view with which Tolkien would have concurred wholeheartedly, especially as he had seen the village in which he had spent his childhood swallowed up during his own lifetime by the “hellhole” of the West Midlands conurbation. It is also interesting that Chesterton’s description of Cobbett is equally applicable to Tolkien:

What he saw was not an Eden that cannot exist, but rather an Inferno that can exist, and even that does exist. What he saw was the perishing of the whole English power of self-support, the growth of cities that drain and dry up the countryside . . . the toppling triumphs of machines over men. . . the wealth that may mean famine and the culture that may mean despair; the bread of Midas and the sword of Damocles.

The evident convergence of opinions raises the question of Chesterton’s influence on Tolkien. Chesterton’s fame was at its height when Tolkien was still at school and arguably at his most impressionable, and it is clear that Tolkien knew, and largely sympathized with, Chesterton’s work. Nonetheless, the danger of overstating the case was apparent in Christopher Clausen’s essay “
The Lord of the Rings
and
The Ballad of the White Horse
”. Clausen claimed that
The Lord of the Rings
is “heavily indebted” to Chesterton’s ballad, particularly in the similarity of Galadriel’s role to that of the Virgin Mary in
The Ballad of the White Horse
. Clausen also saw Tolkien’s dwarves, elves and men, somewhat incongruously, as parallels of Chesterton’s Saxons, Celts and Romans. The basic structure of the two works is similar, in Clausen’s view, because both tell the story of a war between good and evil forces in which an alliance of the forces of good, despite all the odds, gains the victory against the vastly more powerful forces of evil. In both works, the culmination of events is the return of the king to his rightful state. Clausen also alludes to the symbolism implicit in the fact that Gandalf’s horse, Shadowfax, is the archetypal white horse of English legend.

One suspects that Clausen has read too much into the similarities between the two books, some of which are surely no more than coincidental or superficial. Although Tolkien was well acquainted with Chesterton’s
Ballad
, admiring it greatly as a young man before becoming more critical of its undoubted flaws in later years, the extent of his scholarship suggests that his direct indebtedness to Chesterton must be limited. Yet, regardless of the alleged nature of Chesterton’s
direct
influence upon Tolkien, there is considerable evidence of his
indirect
influence, and there are clearly discernible links of affinity between the two men.

One of the most notable of these is the sense of wonder that is an essential part of both men’s work, and indeed of both men’s outlook and philosophy. In
The Lord of the Rings
, the enigmatic figure of Tom Bombadil seems to embody this Chestertonian sense of wonder, in which wisdom and innocence are unified, to a sublime degree: “Tom sang most of the time, but it was chiefly nonsense, or else perhaps a strange language unknown to the hobbits, an ancient language whose words were mainly those of wonder and delight.”

Tom Bombadil also appears to be Chestertonian paradox personified. Older than the world, he is perennially young. He has the wisdom to wonder, the wisdom
of
wonder, which sees through worldly cynicism. He has childlike innocence without childish naïveté. These qualities are also present in the character of Quickbeam, an ent who is introduced to the hobbits by Treebeard:

All that day they walked about in the woods with him, singing, and laughing, for Quickbeam often laughed. He laughed if the sun came out from behind a cloud, he laughed if they came upon a stream or spring: then he stooped and splashed his feet and head with water; he laughed sometimes at some sound or whisper in the trees. Whenever he saw a rowan-tree he halted a while with his arms stretched out, and sang, and swayed as he sang.

T. A. Shippey, author of
The Road to Middle Earth
, referred to the infectious nature of this sense of wonder in Tolkien’s work when he said that Tolkien had “turned me into an observer. Tolkien turns people into birdwatchers, tree spotters, hedgerow-grubbers.” This was certainly one of Tolkien’s intentions, springing from his belief that one of the highest functions of fairy stories was the recovery of a clear view of reality:

We need recovery. We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. . . . This recovery fairy-stories help us to make. . .

   
Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say “seeing things as they are” and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity. . .

   
Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough. And there is (especially for the humble)
Mooreeffoc
, or Chestertonian Fantasy.
Mooreeffoc
is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day, and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.