Book Review
of The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961, By Ian Ker
Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. 230 pages


There are more problems with the idea of this book than there are with the book itself.

To cite one such problem, religion  and literature have been uneasy with one another since Plato and especially since the Modernists. That uneasiness was stated pretty well  by George Orwell in a 1940 essay “Inside the Whale” in a passage cited in an earlier  book on the American side of this subject, The Catholic Imagination in American Literature, published by Ross Labrie in 1997. In Labrie’s paraphrase, Orwell declared that  “the atmosphere of orthodoxy was inimical to art, especially the novel, which he [Orwell] described as  the most anarchical form of literature, a ‘Protestant’ form of art that necessarily issued from an autonomous mind.”
   
 The same would seem to go double for Criticism. Among all the myriad kinds of criticism listed in a standard handbook (say, M.H. Abrams’ Glossary of Literary Terms) there is no category, “religious criticism” let alone Catholic criticism, which is probably why critics known to be devout ( F.O. Matthiessen, C.S. Lewis) generally kept their  criticism as pure as possible and reserved their religious views for essays on the relationship of the two subjects in the abstract.
For another thing, what is “the Catholic Revival”? Certainly it never existed in the way the Celtic Revival did—as a group of writers working closely together to launch and sustain a self-conscious literary movement. And what would it have been a revival  from? English Literature before Henry VIII?
   
And how is Catholicism to be defined in the context of literary studies? If you limit it to books about people saying the rosary and going to confession, you will have a very small corpus to write about.  If you say, as Ian Ker does, that it is books by practicing Catholics, what literary techniques and strategies can  you point to that are specifically Catholic, distinct from what that author might have done in one his or her other identities, as a southerner, say, or an only child?  Ross Labrie’s struggles with the same problems yielded mixed results, at best.
   
Yet, once we are done resisting the idea of a book about this topic, and actually begin to read it, we find that somehow Professor Ker has managed to solve--or at least finesse--most of the inherent problems and write a readable book that sheds helpful light on his seven authors, who are John Newman, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterson, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh.
 
One of the book’s attractive features is that Ker  has not done what Labrie did, which is to identify Catholic motifs, state them in the introduction,  and then go find them in his chosen authors. In his conclusion, Ker himself succinctly the ones he did would have used if he had chosen this approach: “aestheticism, a love of ritual, ceremony, tradition, the appeal of authority, a romantic triumphalism, the lure of the exotic and foreign, a preoccupation with sin and guilt. “ Ker claims--not quite accurately--that these writers do not, in fact, develop these motifs. But more important, he finds other patterns (generally a different one for each per author and always an interesting one) and defends those motifs as  Catholic.  The strategy is not uniformly successful, but it works more often than one might expect.
   
For Newman, the Catholic touchstone is the “objectivity” of the Roman faith. Ker does not, in this context at least, mean the faith’s objective truth, but rather its concrete embodiment in sacrament and liturgical act. For Newman the essential symbol of that concreteness was the light burning over reserved sacrament in every Catholic church. For Hopkins, Ker’s touchstone is the repetitive devotional language (Heart of Mary/Pray for us) which he ingeniously links to the characteristic Hopkins rhythm. For  Belloc it is the “corporate quality” of the faith, which Belloc thought made possible a kind of spiritual and cultural unity that the Reformation rent asunder in favor of nationalism and individualism. For Chesterson, it is the exuberance and variety of life and an attitude of “gratified wonder.” Chesterton found those qualities overflowing in of Charles Dickens, and that,  Ker thinks, is why  Chesterton’s Dickens biography is his best book. For Greene, it is the serious treatment (some would say obsession) with heaven, hell, guilt, sin and forgiveness—which does seem to be a lapse from Ker’s stated intention of avoiding the “standard” Catholic motifs. For Waugh, Ker’s  touchstone is “craftsmanship”—particularly as embodied in the liturgical acts done by the priest in the mass. For Waugh, these are examples of “the matter of fact, indeed mechanical, the concrete, the punctiliously   exact, the cut-and-dried nature of Catholicism, which brings divine order into the chaos and uncertainty of human life.”
   
In the abstract, the problem remains: How can Ker claim that concreteness, and corporateness and exuberance, and craftsmanship are specifically “Catholic” qualities? But page by page, author by author, it seems to work. It works partly because for each author, Ker has found a quality that does really seem to be there and that does help us to see these authors in a new light, and he makes a reasonable (or at least ingenious) case that these qualities are just those things we would expect a devout Catholic to exhibit. If the argument seems a bit  strained in some cases (Chesterton on Dickens’ exuberance, for example), we are willing to overlook it because we are so busy being grateful for the fresh insights the approach produces.     

Partly he does it by exhibiting one of the qualities Waugh liked so much: craftsmanship. Ker has a particular faculty for weaving quotations (mostly from primary sources)  into his own prose and somehow producing sentences that are readable rather than irritating. A typical sentence, chosen almost at random will have two and sometimes three quotations in it, like this one, on Belloc:

 But he [Belloc] is sufficiently observant of the Faith to stick to the letter of his vow not to take a lift on any “wheeled thing,” while practicing the casuistry  of clinging on to a wagon that happens to arrive at an opportune moment ”in such a manner that it did all my work for me, and yet could not be said to be actually carrying me.”

Poorly done, this kind of conflation can be a disaster, but it Ker almost never does it poorly. The result is a sprightly and readable style that simultaneously embodies and analyzes the style of these six writers and leave us convinced that a good book on the Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1860 was possible after all.