Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910-1950 [1 ed.] 026803382X, 9780268033828

Citation preview

Continued from front flap

Jacket photos: Top left: Christopher Dawson, courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN. Right: Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, photos courtesy of the University of Notre Dame Archives. Bottom left: Hilaire Belloc photo from the George Grantham Bain collection, Library of Congress. Jacket design: Margaret Gloster

J a m e s R. L o t h i a n “James Lothian has presented in a coherent and even-handed way a vivid picture of the most important English Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century. He also deals perceptively with their excesses and defects. Hilaire Belloc is the dominant and shaping figure in this study, but others play major roles, such as G. K. Chesterton, Eric Gill, and Evelyn Waugh. These intriguing figures raise questions about modern capitalism, add considerably to our understanding of modern Britain, and bring to mind as well queries about our present economic discontents.”

—Ian Ker, University of Oxford

“An astounding number of English intellectuals embraced Catholicism in the first half of the twentieth century. But they did not all share the same understanding of politics or the social order. Lothian’s perceptive analysis of the important groups of thinkers and the trends within their thought sheds much light on their quarrels as well as their common sympathies, with special emphasis on the thought of Belloc, Chesterton, and Dawson. By providing such a careful account of the historical situation, it becomes far more clear why the giants of that generation took the stands they did on the important questions of the day.” —Fr. Joseph Koterski, S.J., Fordham University

“Lothian claims that Chesterton and especially Belloc created the underpinnings of a community of thinkers and writers that shaped the Catholic cultural environment of England in the years after the Great War. Their influence, however, was not only confined to Catholicism, as Lothian shows how this religious cohort also had an impact on the broader national community. This book fills a significant gap in the history of English Catholicism.” —Jay P. Corrin, Boston University

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, IN 46556 undpress.nd.edu

ISBN-13:978-0-268-03382-8 ISBN-10:0-268-03382-X 90000

9 780268 033828

LothianRev..indd 1

EngIntellectual lish Catholic Community, of the



—Peter Stansky, Stanford University

“This wide-ranging study of the flourishing English Catholic community in the first part of the twentieth century is an impressive and substantial contribution to scholarship. Lothian writes with clarity and vigor.”

M a k i n g and Unmaking

1910 –1950

THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE

James R. Lothian is visiting assistant professor of history at Binghamton University.

Intellectual Community, 1910–1950

Lothian

Lothian explores the community’s development in the 1920s and 1930s and its dissolution in the 1940s, in the aftermath of World War II. Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, joined by Tom Burns and Christopher Dawson, promoted an aesthetic and philosophical vision very much at odds with Belloc’s earlier political and social one. Weakened by internal disagreement, the community became fragmented and finally dissolved.

English Catholic

English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910 –1950

War and was inspired by Hilaire Belloc’s ideology. Among the more than two dozen figures considered in this volume are G. K. Chesterton, novelist Evelyn Waugh, poet and painter David Jones, sculptor Eric Gill, historian Christopher Dawson, and publishers Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward. For Catholic intellectuals who embraced Bellocianism, the response to contemporary politics was a potent combination of hostility toward parliamentary democracy, capitalism, and so-called “Protestant” Whig history. Belloc and his friends asserted a set of political, economic, and historiographical alternatives—favoring monarchy and Distributism, a social and economic system modeled on what Belloc took to be the ideals of medieval feudalism.

The

The Making and Unmaking of the

J a m e s R. L o t h i a n

The Making and Unmaking of the

English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910–1950 J a m e s R. L o t h i a n

  “Until this book, there has been no full study of the English Catholic intellectuals active between the world wars. This is not to belittle the achievements of those scholars who have, particularly in recent years, examined these English Catholic writers, merely to point out that their concerns have not been those of this project. There have been new biographies of some, though by no means all, of the actors, as well as many articles treating the Catholic institutions and organizations of the period and examining Catholic opinion. But by their nature such efforts are not suited to the portrayal of such a large and active community over the course of nearly half a century. Biographers of key figures such as Maisie Ward and Christopher Dawson, for example, have noted the connection of their subjects to a number of like-minded thinkers, but given the close attention paid to an individual subject, it is difficult for the biographer to represent accurately and fully the group dynamic. Likewise, articles treating particular issues and events have been able to provide only brief, if important, glimpses into Catholic intellectual life.” —from the Prologue In The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910–1950, James R. Lothian examines the engagement of interwar Catholic writers and artists both with modernity in general and with the political and economic upheavals of the times in England and continental Europe. The book describes a close-knit community of Catholic intellectuals that coalesced in the aftermath of the Great Continued on back flap

3/11/09 3:02:36 PM

The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910–1950

The Making and Unmaking of the

English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910–1950

James R. Lothian

university of notre dame press notre dame, indiana

Copyright © 2009 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lothian, James R., 1969 – The making and unmaking of the English Catholic intellectual community, 1910 –1950 / James R. Lothian. p.   cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-268-03382-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-268-03382-X (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Catholic Church — England — History — 20th century. 2. Catholics — England — Intellectual life — 20th century. 3. England — Intellectual life — 20th century. I. Title. BX1493.L68   2009 305.6'824209041 — dc22 2009005438

This book is printed on recycled paper.

For Sheila

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Prologue

xi

C HA P T E R 1 From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism: Hilaire Belloc and the Roots of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

1

C HA P T E R 2 The Greater Servants: McNabb, Gill, Chesterton, and the Establishment of the Bellocian Orthodoxy

71

C HA P T E R 3 The Lesser Servants: The Next Generation and the Maturation of the Bellocian Orthodoxy

142

C HA P T E R 4 The Dawsonite Challenge

221

viii

Contents

C HA P T E R 5 The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

292

Epilogue

370

Notes

385

Selected Bibliography

445

Index

467

Ac k n o w l e d g m e n t s

A number of people have made this book possible. At the University of Chicago my dissertation supervisor, Emmet Larkin, not only guided the project through its many stages but also provided a peerless example of professionalism. He is a model as to how to conduct oneself as a scholar and a teacher. Two other members of my dissertation committee, David Tracy and Andrew Greeley, supported the project at its inception and provided constructive criticism. But for the early encouragement of Stewart Weaver and John Guy at the University of Rochester I would never have enrolled in a Ph.D. program in history. They introduced me to British history and gave me the confidence to make a career of it. Two members of the Fordham University philosophy department, John Conley, S.J., and Joseph Koterski, S.J., introduced me to Catholic intellectual history. I first encountered Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism in ­Professor Conley’s course on aesthetics, little knowing that I would discuss it in my Ph.D. dissertation and book; and Joe Koterski has continued to encourage my work. I must also thank the anonymous readers for the University of Notre Dame Press, both of whom provided helpful criticism of my manuscript and also saved me from several embarrassing errors. Any remaining errors are mine. Thanks are also due to the staff at the University of Notre Dame Press, especially Barbara Hanrahan, director; Rebecca DeBoer, managing editor; Margaret Gloster, design manager; and Sheila Berg, copy editor. The staffs of a number of libraries and archives provided vital assistance to this project, including those of the Interlibrary Loan Department at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library, the ix



Acknowledgments

New York Public Library, the British Museum Manuscript Reading Room, the British Library, the British Newspaper Library, the Burns Library at Boston College, and the Hesburgh Library at the University of Notre Dame. Several librarians and archivists deserve special mention. Nicholas Scheetz, Manuscripts’ Librarian at Georgetown, was a font of information on English Catholic intellectuals; Fr. Ian Dickie was a cordial host for the two summers I spent investigating the Archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster; and John Davenport of the O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, was gracious enough to find me accommodation on campus, greatly easing the financial burden of my investigation of Christopher Dawson’s papers. While I was conducting several weeks of research at Boston College, Gavin and Colleen Fischer were kind enough to have me live in their home. I spent a summer in London staying with David Tuvlin, only a short walk from the Westminster Diocesan archives. I am thankful as well to Jen and Andy Kitt for hosting me in their Maryland home when I was investigating the collections at Georgetown. I need also to express my gratitude to my father-in-law and mother-in-law, Steve and Peggy Gorman. They provided a haven at their home on many Sunday afternoons with my wife and children, a refuge from my work. My own parents provided not only needed financial support for some of the research but also the encouragement and understanding that perhaps only two fellow academics can provide and of course, most important, their love.

Prologue

George Orwell noted in several of his essays of the 1940s that what he referred to as “political Catholicism” had been a central feature of intellectual life in England between the two world wars. Comparing au courant intellectuals’ recent interest in the Communist Party to the earlier influence of Catholicism, Orwell, writing in 1940, observed of the late 1930s, “It became as normal to hear that so-and-so had ‘joined’ as it had been a few years earlier, when Roman Ca­tholi­cism was fashionable, to hear that so-and-so had ‘been received.’” Explaining that “nationalism” was “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests,” Orwell noted in 1945 that “ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism.” For Orwell then, this brand of Catholicism was more than a religion, more that is than a particular theology and form of worship. It was a political phenomenon, comparable to Communism or Fascism, and just as mischievous in his estimation.1 Orwell’s political Catholicism was the product of an articulate counterculture of self‑consciously Catholic writers and artists— ­including novelists and poets, historians, an accomplished painter, a prominent sculptor, several publishers, and many journalists. That such a group developed in a nation of peoples who had defined themselves as Protestant for centuries is noteworthy. That many of these individuals were neither members of England’s old recusant Catholic community nor from among the recent generations of Irish immigrants who had accounted for the vast majority of the Church’s increase in England but were instead converts to Catholicism makes this religious dimension of interwar England extraordinary. xi

xii

Prologue

To most scholars, however, the notion that Catholicism had been an intellectual force in interwar England will come as a surprise. While the names Belloc and Chesterton remain familiar, they are likely to evoke the atmosphere of late-Victorian and Edwardian England—of opposition to the Boer War, of debates with Shaw and Wells, and perhaps of the prewar Marconi scandal. Not enough attention has been paid to the impact of Belloc and Chesterton after the Great War, and of the many Catholic writers and artists whom they influenced during this later period too little is heard. To be sure, Catholic novelists such as Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh have not been ignored, but of the many other prominent Catholic intellectuals of the era, of Eric Gill and Vincent McNabb, of Douglas Jerrold, Christopher Hollis, Douglas Woodruff, and Arnold Lunn, of David Jones, Tom Burns, Bernard Wall, and Michael de la Bedoyère, or of Frank Sheed, Maisie Ward, and Christopher Dawson—to name just a few—not much has been written beyond the odd biography and essay. That this group constituted an intellectual community of considerable weight and influence in these years has been, in general, lost on historians of the interwar frame of mind. This book seeks to repair this neglect. It argues that the Catholic intellectuals in interwar England were not a disparate collection of individuals but a genuine community united not only by close personal ties but especially by ideology. The foundation for this community, I explain in chapter 1, lay in the ideas of Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), as promulgated in the years immediately before and after the Great War. Belloc presented a unified and self-consciously Catholic theory of government, political economy, and history. Coupled with his dynamic, confrontational personality, this ideology made its first influential converts, as I detail in the second chapter, in the persons of the Dominican priest and social critic Vincent McNabb (1868–1943), the sculptor and writer Eric Gill (1882–1940), and the prolific man of letters G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936). The members of this first generation of Bellocians, who had each, like Belloc himself, come of age in late-Victorian England, began to promote Belloc’s ideas almost as soon as he had proclaimed them.

Prologue

xiii

The next generation of Bellocians, examined in chapter 3, included the author and publisher Douglas Jerrold (1893–1964), the journalist Douglas Woodruff (1897–1978), the historian Christopher Hollis (1902–77), the novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903–66), and the apologist Arnold Lunn (1888–1974). These writers were fundamentally of the postwar world, emerging in the 1920s and making their mark by the early 1930s. If the charisma and energy of the first generation helped Belloc to evangelize on behalf of his political and social gospel, effectively launching the English Catholic intellectual community, the new generation ensured that Bellocianism remained the unifying ideology for this community. The fourth, and penultimate, chapter introduces a challenge to Bellocianism from within. Although much influenced by Chesterton and McNabb, the publishers Frank Sheed (1897–1981) and Maisie Ward (1889–1975) went in a different direction. In contrast to the political and economic focus of the Bellocians, they were interested in theology and philosophy, and particularly in new voices on the continent, from France and Germany. While neither Sheed nor Ward mounted a critique of Belloc, their onetime editor, Tom Burns (1906–95), was not so reticent. Although he began as an admirer of the Bellocians, and especially of Eric Gill, Burns and the participants in the salon that he hosted at his Chelsea home promoted, under the influence in part of the emerging historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970), an aesthetic and philosophical vision at odds with Belloc’s agenda. However, the challenge of these Dawsonites to Belloc’s dominant ideology in itself did not mean the end of the community. Only with the onset of World War II, as described in the final chapter, was the integrity of the English Catholic intellectual community fully tested and ultimately compromised.

Historiography To observe that scholars have neglected the English Catholic writers of the interwar period is not to maintain that they have been entirely

xiv

Prologue

ignored. To that end, a word about the historiography of English Catholicism during these years is necessary. Indeed, an explanation of the genesis of this project will no doubt be of use in this regard, shedding light on what it attempts to accomplish and why it stands apart from recent scholarship on English Catholicism. The research into the English Catholic intellectuals of the interwar period that culminated in this book began with a graduate seminar paper a decade ago on Christopher Dawson. The result was a brief intellectual analysis of Dawson’s work, which focused, naturally, on his published writings, in the field of both history and social criticism. Due to constraints of time, space, and lack of access to unpublished, archival sources, that paper paid no more than cursory attention to the intellectual milieu in which Dawson worked. Mention in Christina Scott’s Dawson biography of his interaction with the other Catholic writers of the era was intriguing and subsequently led to investigation of this intellectual milieu. One of the most stimulating studies that my research uncovered was Adrian Hastings’s pioneering article, “Some Reflexions on the ­English Catholicism of the 1930s” (1977). Hastings identified a Catholic intellectual renaissance in interwar England, pointed to the influence of Belloc and Chesterton as integral to it, described the institutions that helped to sustain it, and argued that authoritarianism­— ­ecclesiastical and political—was its ideological glue. Observing that this renaissance had dissipated in the 1940s, and indeed that the English Catholicism of the late 1930s had subsequently “fallen into ­oblivion,” Hastings attempted to account for the decline. World War II, he noted, had obliged English Catholics to support democracy in its battle against Fascism, causing them to “bury much of the sentiments of the prewar years”—a compelling point, as chapter 5 of this book explains. He also suggested that social changes following war, as well as the more restrictive leadership of Bernard Cardinal Griffin (1943–56) at the Archdiocese of Westminster, might also have contributed to the end of this intellectual revival.2 Hastings provided a valuable introduction to the Catholic intellectuals of the interwar era, but had subsequent scholars followed his

Prologue

xv

lead? There seemed a need to scrutinize these Catholic writers and artists, to discover if, as Hastings had argued, they shared fundamental beliefs, to examine if their community had collapsed as dramatically as Hastings had supposed, and, if so, to explain why and how this had happened. Surprisingly, though a number of talented historians and literary scholars had written about these Catholic intellectuals, few had taken up the questions that Hastings had raised. Until this book, there has been no full study of the English Catholic intellectuals active between the world wars. This is not to belittle the achievements of those scholars who have, particularly in recent years, examined these English Catholic writers, merely to point out that their concerns have not been those of this project.3 There have been new biographies of some, though by no means all, of the actors, as well as many articles treating the Catholic institutions and organizations of the period and examining Catholic opinion. But by their nature such efforts are not suited to the portrayal of such a large and active community over the course of nearly half a century. Biographers of key figures such as Maisie Ward and Christopher Dawson, for example, have noted the connection of their subjects to a number of like-minded thinkers, but given the close attention paid to an individual subject, it is difficult for the biographer to represent accurately and fully the group dynamic. Likewise, articles treating particular issues and events have been able to provide only brief, if important, glimpses into Catholic intellectual life.4 Most scholars who have addressed these Catholic intellectuals as a group have done so primarily in the context of a “literary revival.” The best of these, such as Ian Ker’s Catholic Revival in English Litera­ ture, 1845–1961 (2003), provide valuable examinations of the work of the most accomplished Catholic authors. Such scholarship is important in its own right, not least because it introduces readers to the work of writers otherwise neglected. In terms of portraying a community of intellectuals, however, this approach has also proved too circumscribed. To view Catholic intellectuals through a literary lens is most often to restrict one’s studies to the “great writers,” selected via aesthetic criteria. Yet their work accounted for only a fraction of

xvi

Prologue

the contributions of Catholic intellectuals. As will become clear, Belloc, the mediocre novelist, was much more important to the English Catholic intellectual community than Chesterton, who wrote several very good novels. Likewise, Waugh’s friend Douglas Woodruff arguably had a greater impact on the community as editor of The Tablet than did Waugh through his own first-rate fiction, while Tom Burns, an editor and publisher who wrote almost nothing, was of more significance than his comrade David Jones, whose work ranks with the best of modernist literature, to say nothing of his accomplishments as a painter. It was their social thought rather than the quality of their fiction or poetry that united the Catholic writers of the era. To focus on Chesterton at the expense of Belloc, Waugh rather than Woodruff, or Jones instead of Burns makes it difficult if not impossible to capture the priorities and dynamics of this community of Catholic intellectuals.5 There has been work of significance on the Catholic intellectuals of interwar England as a group. Some of the most fruitful contributions have focused on their decline. In addition to Hastings, Joan Keating and Tom Buchanan have tried to explain when and why Catholic intellectual contributions diminished. Like Hastings, they have acknowledged the strong authoritarian streak among many Catholic writers during the period. Keating and Buchanan both observe that Christian democratic views became ascendant during World War II and remained so in its aftermath. The authoritarians who had predominated during the 1930s were marginalized during the war, in this interpretation, and discredited by the end of it. There is much to say in favor of this view, as I explore in this book. Valuable as their contributions have been, however, in their brief essays neither Buchanan nor Keating has had the necessary space to develop a comprehensive narrative and analysis concerning the Catholic intellectuals of the period. While they have provided a needed examination, for example, of dissension among English Catholic writers during the war and the change in Catholic thought after it, neither has portrayed satisfactorily the work of Catholic intellectuals before the war. Both have overemphasized the influence of a small minority of democratic-minded Catholics, those

Prologue

xvii

who ended up on the winning side, as it were, after the war but whose influence, compared to the Bellocians, had been negligible before the war. Neither is able to provide, therefore, the necessary account of the community’s genesis and development, and even their theories concerning postwar events are couched in terms of transformation rather than the dissolution of a formerly vibrant community.6 Two other recent works treating English Catholic intellectuals also deserve specific mention. Both Patrick Allitt’s Catholic Converts (1997) and Adam Schwartz’s The Third Spring (2005) treat many of the same writers discussed here. Each of these volumes, like the literary studies mentioned above, is a significant work in its own right, but in the end neither presents a portrait of the English Catholic intellectual community that is both deep and broad enough. Allitt provides a comprehensive survey of Catholic converts on both sides of the Atlantic from the nineteenth century until the eve of the Second Vatican Council. He is to be commended for this inclusive approach, which discusses many neglected intellectuals. In the end, though, Catholic Converts is too impressionistic, failing to treat many of these thinkers in sufficient depth. Indeed, while his narrative of the postwar period is concerned almost entirely with the United States, Allitt does not adequately explain why the contributions of the English converts, on which much of his discussion of the first half of the twentieth century focuses, declined so precipitously, noting only that there was a sense of disillusion among English Catholic intellectuals concerning their failure to transform the modern world.7 Schwartz’s volume suffers from the opposite problem. He provides a sustained and erudite examination of the work of his four subjects, with a focus on their conversion experiences. The chapter on David Jones, for example, is especially enlightening. Schwartz argues, correctly, that to understand the intellectual history of modern Britain one has to be familiar with the contributions of Catholic ­writers and artists and what he characterizes as their “rebellion against modern unbelief.” Indeed, he also recognizes that what these Catholic intellectuals were contributing to was not only a literary revival but also a cultural phenomenon, and he is rightly critical of those who would

xviii

Prologue

study these writers in isolation rather than as contributors to “counter­modern communities of discourse.” In the last analysis, however, Schwartz’s approach—the selection of his four subjects based on their manifest talents—leads to the same weakness referred to above with regard to the literary studies. While Schwartz convincingly relates the ideas and experiences of Chesterton, Greene,8 Dawson, and Jones, his focus on four of the many intellectuals active during this period makes it difficult to grasp the broader group dynamic.9 Finally, it should be noted that the focus of both Schwartz and Allitt on converts alone necessarily downplays the contributions to the Catholic intellectual community of those who were not converts. The converts were very important, but so were “cradle Catholics” such as Belloc, Sheed, Ward, and Burns, to name just a few.

E nglish Catholicism before Belloc Before I turn to Hilaire Belloc and the foundation of the English Catholic intellectual community some historical context is needed. In order to comprehend the emergence of this intellectual community in the early twentieth century, it is necessary to appreciate the transformation that English Catholicism underwent in the nineteenth century. Only if one begins with a clear conception of where English Catholicism stood prior to the entrance of the Bellocians can one understand and accurately evaluate the English Catholic intellectual community. At the end of the eighteenth century, English Catholics were just beginning to emerge from the penal period, during which they had been effectively excluded from national life. The Test Acts and the Oath of Supremacy had prevented them from holding offices under the Crown, and additional legislation affected their worship, the building and maintenance of their churches and chapels, their purchase and inheritance of property, and their education. Although these laws were rarely enforced after the early eighteenth century, their very existence meant that Catholics practiced their faith at the favor of the Protestant establishment.

Prologue

xix

Historians have portrayed eighteenth-century English Catholics (and even Catholics prior to 1850) as timid, isolated, and invisible. By 1780 the Catholic population had declined to 70,000 (from 115,000 in 1720), during a period in which the overall population of England and Wales had increased from 6 million to 7.5 million. English Catholics were confined, mostly, to communities in the northeast and in ­Lancashire, and led by a very few recusant families of the gentry and the nobility. Clerical power was minimal, as it was the laity that appointed and paid the clergy and administered church property. Nor did Catholic worship in England partake of the Roman devotions that had become commonplace on the continent. English Catholicism was rural and local, suspicious of clericalism, and distrustful of centralized authority.10 Beginning in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, however, English Catholics were brought into closer proximity not only to the broader society in England but also to Rome. In 1778 and 1791 Parliament passed relief acts that effectively did away with much of the penal legislation, and in 1829, after a protracted political campaign, Catholics were fully “emancipated” when the oath required to take a seat in Parliament and to hold office was revised. It was this struggle for emancipation, however, that began to transform the traditional, lay- and gentry-dominated English Catholicism, increasing the influence of Rome at the expense of local authority and clerical power, at the expense of the laity. This process would only accelerate during the coming decades.11 The chief feature of the Catholic Church in England during the nineteenth century was its growth, both institutionally and in terms of population. By 1851, the year of the noted religious census, there were an estimated 900,000 Catholics in England and Wales, a more than tenfold increase on the Catholic population of 1780, and by 1891 they numbered some 1.35 million. Even when one takes into account the fact that the total population had more than doubled from about 7.5 million to 17.9 million by midcentury and increased to 29 million by 1891, the growth rate of the Catholic Church was extraordinary. Most of this increase was the result of Irish emigration to England,

xx

Prologue

which had been minimal before 1800. The census reported 420,000 Irish-born men and women in England and Wales in 1841, 520,000 in 1851, 600,000 a decade later, and some 460,000 in 1891. Well over half the estimated 900,000 Catholics in 1851 were therefore Irishborn, and some have concluded that the Irish may actually have accounted for as much as three-fourths of the Catholic population in mid-Victorian England. Cardinal Manning, archbishop of Westminster from 1865 until 1892, could therefore maintain with some truth that he had “given up working for the people of England to work for the Irish occupation of England.”12 The Irish immigration provided the major stimulus for the subsequent expansion in England of the Catholic Church as an institution. The building of new churches and the addition of many more clergy were required. Both challenges were to a great extent met. In 1840 there had been only 469 Catholic churches and chapels in England and Wales, but by 1891 there were 1,387. The clergy ministering to Catho­ lics in England increased apace, from 788 in 1851 to 2,812 at the turn of the century. The Church also expanded in the area of education. In 1835 there had been a mere 86 Catholic primary schools in England, but by 1843 there were 236, capable of educating 38,207 students, and by the time Parliament passed Forster’s Education Act in 1870 the number of students had more than doubled to 101,556.13 The growth in infrastructure was accompanied by a transformation in the government of the English Church. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church in England, because Rome had classified it as missionary territory, was administered by vicars apostolic, bishops who held titular rather than English territorial sees and whose authority was delegated directly from the pope. Since 1688 England had been divided into four districts, each governed by its own vicar apostolic. In 1840, in response to the Church’s growth, these were doubled to eight. The new division lasted only ten years; in 1850 Pope Pius IX restored the English hierarchy, creating thirteen dioceses (though England would remain a missionary territory until 1918). The archbishop of Westminster was to be the metropolitan, with the privileges of convoking provincial synods, appellate

Prologue

xxi

jurisdiction, and precedence, though, crucially, the twelve suffragan bishops were not subject to his authority.14 As a result of the Church’s successes, some Catholics in midnineteenth-century England, including Cardinal Wiseman, first archbishop of Westminster, believed that England was returning to the Catholic fold. Indeed, a wave of accomplished converts in the 1840s, most notably from the Oxford Movement, the group of Anglican divines critical of the Erastianism of the Church of England, contributed to this triumphalism. The most prominent of these converts, John Henry Newman, though he was to become a restraining influence among English Catholics, indulged this fancy in his famous “Second Spring” sermon, preached at the First Provincial Synod of Westminster in May 1852. For Newman, the restoration of the hierarchy was “a miracle in the course of human events,” heralding “the coming of a Second Spring,” “a restoration in the moral world, such as that which yearly takes place in the physical.”15 The restoration of the hierarchy contributed to the Ultramontane revolution that transformed Catholicism throughout much of the world during the nineteenth century. Although it was the Catholic gentry, jealous of the power of the vicars apostolic, who had first pressed for the restoration, in the expectation that the authority of diocesan bishops would be more restricted, the first two archbishops of Westminster, Wiseman and Henry Cardinal Manning, proved to be the point of the Ultramontane spear that ultimately broke the power of Cisalpine lay leaders and their allies among the secular clergy. Greater Roman involvement with the English Church, combined with Pius IX’s increasingly combative stance toward modern, liberal Europe in response to the loss of the papal states during the 1860 unification of Italy, gave rise to a more militant and defensive Catholicism. This found expression most notably in Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors, which famously condemned the proposition that the “Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to, and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.” With the 1870 definition of Papal Infallibility at the Vatican Council, the victory of the Ultramontane party led by Manning, who had been a vociferous proponent of the

xxii

Prologue

definition, was complete. Opposition to defining Papal Infallibility had been the last gasp of the Liberal Catholics in England, led by Lord Acton.16 Though Manning’s social work among the Irish poor in London and his support for Irish Home Rule often aligned him with both the developing labor movement and the Liberal Party, he proved to have more in common with the defiant “fortress” Catholicism of Pius IX regarding the relation of English Catholics to the broader society than with the Liberalism of Mr. Gladstone, who had after all sided with his friend Acton in 1870. In this respect, Manning’s attitude toward England’s two great universities was emblematic. Manning had been instrumental in 1864, while Wiseman was still archbishop, in getting the English hierarchy to prohibit Catholic matriculation at Oxford and Cambridge, and he ensured that this policy continued throughout his tenure at Westminster. This refusal to allow Catholics to study at the nation’s ancient seats of learning was characteristic of a siege mentality. The modern world was suspect. Catholics therefore had to keep their distance from secular and Protestant English society, or risk corruption.17 During the nineteenth century, then, Catholicism in England had emerged from the catacombs. English Catholics no longer tried to remain unobtrusive, as they had during the penal period, but instead sought confrontation with the greater society. The increase in the Church’s numbers, as well as the intellectual weight of recent converts, including Newman and Manning, and the restoration of the hierarchy had contributed to a more public, confident, and even triumphalist English Catholicism. This was the soil in which the English Catholic intellectual community would take root. Two streams were to nourish it. On the one hand, there was the new Ultramontane and illiberal culture that looked on the contemporary world with deep suspicion. On the other hand, there was the older tradition in English Catholicism, one that had declined in power as Roman and clerical influence increased, of an educated and independent-minded laity. Although these traditions had often been in conflict during the nineteenth century, both were to have a significant influence on the

Prologue

xxiii

English Catholic intellectual community. Belloc and the Catholic writers and artists whom his ideas inspired were themselves, almost to a person, representatives of this lay intellectual heritage, but they also inherited the antipathy toward the modern world that had come to characterize Catholicism in the second half of the nineteenth century. The tension between these two traditions, between the intellectual appetite for engagement with the contemporary society and the impulse to turn away from it, would characterize the English Catholic intellectual community as it developed.18

C h a pt e r 1

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism Hilaire Belloc and the Roots of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

When he was an Oxford undergraduate in the 1890s, Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) established a Republican club with a few friends. Their patron was Thomas Jefferson, and their feast days included the anniversaries of the beheadings of Charles I of England and Louis XVI of France. Celebrating the club in verse several years later, Belloc observed, “We taught the art of writing things / On men we still should like to throttle: / And where to get the Blood of Kings / At only half a crown a bottle.” After taking his degree, Belloc moved to London, where he became an influential radical journalist. In 1906 he was elected as a Liberal member of Parliament and became a gadfly on the back benches, where he sat until 1910. By 1920, however, Belloc was calling himself a monarchist, convinced that if “some form of Monarchy does not succeed to the lost inheritance of the House of Commons, the State will lose its greatness.”1 How had the erstwhile radical who had joked about the blood of kings become in little more than a decade an advocate for the restoration of monarchy? The answer to this apparent conundrum is significant not because of the light it sheds on the intellectual transformation of one man but because Belloc proved to be a man of 



Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

e­ xtraordinary influence. More than anyone else, Belloc was responsible for articulating the political and economic creed that bound the English Catholic intellectual community of the interwar era. It was through his reaction against both Victorian Liberalism and the New Liberalism of Edwardian England that this community was forged. Understanding Belloc’s intellectual transformation is vital, therefore, to comprehending its genesis.

I ntellectual Foundations Hilaire Belloc’s roots, both familial and intellectual, lay in the disparate political traditions of English radicalism and French revanchiste republicanism. Belloc was born on 27 July 1870 in the suburban village of La Celle St. Cloud, thirteen miles west of Paris. His father, Louis Belloc (1830–72), was a French barrister, and his mother, Eliza­ beth “Bessie” Parkes (1829–1925), was English. Both his parents came from distinguished families. Belloc’s French forebears linked him to the literary and artistic worlds of Paris. Louis Belloc was the son of Hilaire Belloc (1786–1865), a portrait painter of some standing, and his Franco-Irish wife, Louise Swanton (1796–1881), a noted literary figure, the author of children’s stories and a biography of Byron (with a preface by Stendhal) and the translator of Dickens and other celebrated nineteenth-century authors. Belloc’s English grandparents connected him to the tradition of radical politics in Britain. His grandfather Joseph Parkes (1796–1865) had been a well-known figure in Whig and Radical political circles in his native Birmingham and later London, while Parkes’s wife, Eliza Priestley (1797–1877), was the granddaughter of the eighteenth-century English scientist and radical agitator Joseph Priestley.2 Belloc’s mother combined both the political engagement of her father and the artistic interests of her French in-laws. Before her marriage, Bessie Belloc had been devoted to the nascent struggle for ­women’s emancipation. Her ambition, however, had always been to be a poet, and she published two volumes of poetry in the 1850s to

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism



modest success. Her closest friends included some of the most notable writers and artists of the day, in particular George Eliot (­Marian Evans), who was her frequent and longtime correspondent. What set Bessie Parkes apart from her literary friends, from her family, and from English Radicalism in general was her religion. Raised in an irreligious although ostensibly Unitarian home and influenced as a young woman by the agnosticism of friends such as Eliot, she had nonetheless converted to Catholicism in 1864. According to her daughter, it was Bessie Belloc’s concern for the poor that had drawn her to Christianity, and it had been “the active, ordered charity of the Catholic Church,” which she had witnessed in the work of the Irish Sisters of Mercy and Sisters of Charity, that had led her to convert to Catholicism. She would inculcate in her son not only her Catholic faith but also the concern for the less fortunate, for social justice, that had led her to the Church.3 Belloc’s parents married in September 1867. The couple had two children, Hilaire and his older sister, Marie. Louis Belloc died suddenly from the effects of sunstroke in 1872, and his death drastically changed young Hilaire Belloc’s future. Had Louis Belloc lived, his son would have remained a Frenchman. Instead, his mother returned with her two young children to England. For much of Belloc’s youth, he and his mother and sister would divide their time between France and England, and though he would be educated in England, the months of each year spent in France meant that Belloc absorbed elements of both cultures. This combination of English and French influences set him apart from his peers in England. His sister observed of Belloc as a young man that he was neither an Englishman nor a Frenchman. Indeed, only in his twenties would he choose England over France.4 Belloc’s French roots provided him with an intellectual heritage vastly dissimilar to that of his fellow Englishmen. From his family and friends in La Celle St. Cloud, he received a deep and abiding antipathy to Germany, born of the humiliation France had suffered in the 1870–71 war with Prussia and the violence that the occupying army had done to the family home. The Prussian advance across France in late summer 1870, when Belloc was only weeks old, had forced the



Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

family to withdraw, first to Paris on 28 August and then from Paris to England after the catastrophe of Sedan, where, on 2 September, the Prussians captured Emperor Napoleon III. As the Bellocs left Paris by train for Le Havre and then by steamer to Southampton, Bessie Belloc watched workers preparing fortifications, “piling earth upon the road, leaving only the one line of rails on which [their] train rolled.” As both his mother and his sister later pointed out, had they not escaped Paris Belloc likely would not have survived, for many children under the age of three had died when the Prussians besieged the city.5 During autumn and winter 1870–71, the Prussian army occupied the Bellocs’ villa. Though the damage to their property was relatively light, the family was indignant that the Prussians had dared to invade and occupy France. Louis Belloc’s sister, Lily Ballot, railed on returning to La Celle St. Cloud: Germany has shown herself to be a nation of brigands, bombing open towns, large and small, burning alive men who were defending their honour, sacking houses of every type, and committing innumerable acts of the most disgusting and filthy nature. If the world is wise, all humanity will now rise against Germany. Madame Belloc’s sister, Jenny, also protested, using even stronger language: Oh, my dear sister, do you not agree that all the forces of our souls and of our bodies should be employed to destroy, at any rate morally destroy, a nation composed of men like these, who behaved in so filthy and bestial a manner in our clean happy homesteads? For the future tranquillity of humanity we must hope that Prussia will one day be annihilated. His French family would instill in Belloc this bitterness and hostility toward Prussia. His sister, writing during the early years of World War II, summed up the attitude that her family had impressed on her and her brother: “Happy as was my early childhood, the pall of war

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism



hung over every day of my life.” “I foresaw the war of 1914,” she maintained, “and I always expected that Germany would try and retrieve her defeat.” This was a view that her brother certainly shared, and it was a belief that was to set Belloc apart from his fellow Englishmen of the educated classes before the Great War.6 If the roots of Belloc’s antipathy to modern Germany lay in his French family’s reaction to the Prussian war, these convictions were only deepened by his acquaintance as a boy with the radical French republican Paul Déroulède. The Déroulède family owned a villa in the town of Croissy, only a few miles from La Celle St. Cloud, and Paul’s mother was a friend of Belloc’s grandmother. In the summer of 1885 Madame Déroulède invited Bessie and Marie Belloc to her home for the afternoon. Both Paul and his sister, Jeanne, were there as well, and the Bellocs and the Déroulèdes became friends.7 As a young man of twenty-five, Paul Déroulède had distinguished himself in the war against Prussia, earning the Légion d’honneur for a daring escape from a prisoner-of-war camp. Wounded storming a barricade during the Commune, he had retired to his parents’ estate near Angoulême, north of Bordeaux, where he wrote his Chants du Soldat, a volume of poems, published in 1872, that became one of the best-selling books in French history. The Chants’ nationalist-patriotic sentiment­—expressed in lines such as “Mourir pour la patrie est le sort le plus beau! / Et si je dois tomber en un jour de bataille, / C’est au sol Prussien que je veux mon tombeau”—struck a deep chord with the citizens of humiliated postwar France. It went through twentynine editions by 1889 and became required reading in elementary schools. For the next forty years, Déroulède would continue to promote “the virtues of the army, the family, the Republic, and the heroism of the simple man.”8 By the time the Bellocs met him in 1885, Déroulède had founded the Ligue des Patriotes, an organization of at least one hundred thousand members, dedicated to a political program of revanche and revision—that is, of revenge against the Prussians, in particular the reconquest of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which had been lost in the war, and the revision of the 1875 constitution of the Third



Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

­ epublic, which Déroulède considered insufficiently radical. Déroulède R had created his Ligue in 1882 to oppose the moderate Republicanism, which he dismissed as “opportunism,” of Jules Ferry. As Ferry’s vision of government increasingly prevailed over his own, Déroulède became deeply disillusioned with the parliamentary politics of the Third Republic. In the late 1880s he supported the monarchist General Boulanger’s bid for power, as he had begun to believe that only a powerful executive could bring about his program of republican revision and revanche. After Boulanger fled to Belgium, Déroulède disbanded the Ligue, only to reestablish it in 1897 during the height of the Dreyfus Affair, in which he took an ardent anti-Dreyfusard position, earning the Ligue enormous popular support among the masses in Paris. By this time Déroulède had begun to believe that a revolution would be necessary to restore order in a French nation betrayed by a Parliament that had become a “prisoner of foreign interests, slave to cosmopolitan thievery that was itself joined with international-finance capital.” While he himself was not openly anti-Semitic, many members of the Ligue were, and much of the Ligue rhetoric began to resemble closely that of Jules Guérin’s Ligue antisémitique de France. On 23 February 1899, the day of the funeral of President Faure, Déroulède was arrested for attempting to incite a coup d’etat.9 Bessie Belloc and her children were drawn to the radical French patriot in 1885 because of their republican and revanche sympathies. Despite having been warned by her nephew René Millet, a French diplomat, that Déroulède was peddling “extremely dangerous” nonsense about the certainty of a future war with Germany and that she ought not to take her impressionable teenaged son to the Déroulède’s home, Bessie Belloc and her family continued to visit Croissy. Indeed, Millet’s worst fears were confirmed when both Belloc children joined the Ligue des Patriotes. Belloc became an avid reader of the Ligue’s weekly newspaper Le Drapeau, and attended several of the Ligue’s meetings. Even his mother and sister, to the horror of their French family, went to a rally on the Champs de Mars.

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism



Belloc himself would keep in touch with Déroulède until the latter’s death in 1914. In fact, when he journeyed to England on the eve of the Great War, Déroulède visited both Belloc and his sister. Of his friend Déroulède Belloc later wrote admiringly: I knew Déroulède well, and Déroulède hammered away all his life at the expense of ceaseless insult and contempt, paying for the preservation of his honour the heavy price of an unbroken isolation, and dying without seeing any apparent fruit of his effort. It was his mission to proclaim to his French compatriots the ele­ mentary truth that, until they had secured the defeat of Prussia in a war, they themselves were doomed to increasing decay, and Europe to increasing ills. After the French halted the German advance in September 1914 at the Marne, a mere thirty miles from Paris, thus preventing a defeat even more ignominious than that of 1870–71, Belloc visited Déroulède’s grave, finding placed there in homage the frontier posts that some French soldiers had pulled up after their charge into Alsace a month earlier.10 Belloc’s praise of Déroulède in 1925, after Dreyfus and after the failed coup, left little doubt that he had supported the French radical to the full. As will become clear, Belloc’s description then of his old friend’s isolation was also self-referential, a profile of his own feelings about his place in English politics after the Great War. The transformation of his political thought mirrored in many respects that of Déroulède, particularly disillusion with parliamentary politics and Belloc’s subsequent advocacy of a monarchist alternative. All this would come later, but what is of significance to Belloc’s formative years was the early influence of Déroulède the radical republican and revanchiste leader. These views, republicanism and the obsessive need for France to revenge its losses of 1870–71, were central to the young Belloc. Even more important, they were also quite exceptional for an Englishman of his background, and it was an Englishman that Belloc eventually chose to become, though not without consideration.



Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Although the family spent a good deal of time in France, Bessie Belloc chose to educate her children in England. A precocious child intellectually, Belloc earned a place in fall 1880 among boys several years his senior at Cardinal Newman’s Oratory school in Birmingham, which his mother had chosen over the other English Catholic public schools because of her deep respect for Newman. At the Oratory Belloc soon earned a place among the best students, primarily studying classics but also winning a number of prizes in literature and mathematics—and meriting an autographed set of Newman’s works as the Norfolk Prize winner of 1885. Extracurricularly, he excelled in both drama and debate. He also made a few close, indeed lifelong, friends. The most significant of these were James Hope (later Lord Rankeillour), a nephew of the Duke of Norfolk who would eventually become deputy speaker of the House of Commons, and Arthur Hungerford Pollen, a future colleague in London journalism. Both Hope and Pollen were to play tangential roles in the English Catholic intellectual community in the next century.11 Belloc, however, found the atmosphere of the Oratory—which reflected, he believed, that of the narrow and privileged ranks at the top of English Catholic society—too stifling. He would maintain this antagonism toward the upper-class “old Catholics” of England throughout his life, and pass it on to many in the Catholic intellectual community. Nor did he possess his mother’s reverence for the school’s presiding eminence, Cardinal Newman. To the boys, the elderly cardinal was a remote figure. Later Belloc would note that Newman was too much of a don—this was not intended as a compliment—and his admiration, both as a young man and subsequently, was always reserved for Newman’s great rival, Cardinal Manning.12 Belloc left the Oratory in summer 1887 still uncertain whether his future lay in France or England. He first considered a career in the French navy and briefly attended the Collège Stanislas in Paris, a preparatory school for the French Naval College. The experiment was short-lived, and Belloc returned to England after little more than a term. After several more false starts, he turned to writing. He had already been composing poetry, including an ode addressed to Paul

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism



Déroulède, and had had some of his work published. In 1889 his sister’s employer, W. T. Stead, engaged him on a number of projects for the Pall Mall Gazette. With Arthur Pollen, his friend from the Oratory, Belloc ambitiously launched a monthly review, the Paternoster. The two young men were coeditors, and although only six issues of the journal appeared between September 1889 and March 1890, it was well-received in the London press and succeeded in publishing articles and poetry by such well-known figures as Lord Ripon, George Meredith, W. T. Stead, and Cardinal Manning—the latter writing in praise of the Salvation Army’s work among London’s poor. Although Belloc might not have recognized it at the time, he had found his vocation in the world of London journalism and letters.13 In addition to preparing him for his subsequent career, the two years he spent in London from 1889 though 1890 were significant because of the relationship he formed with Cardinal Manning, who vied with Déroulède in his influence on the young man’s intellectual development. Manning was already an acquaintance, one might even say a patron, of the Belloc family. Bessie Belloc had sought his counsel in the early 1860s when she had first considered converting to Catholicism. Subsequently, during the Franco-Prussian War, Manning had helped Bessie Belloc raise funds to support French exiles in England. When she returned to London in 1872 a grieving widow, she had turned again to Manning for his counsel, and his advice had helped her put her anguish behind her. The connection between the Belloc family and the future cardinal had continued, and in the late 1880s it was he who had helped Marie Belloc obtain her position with Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette.14 As had his mother and sister, Belloc sought the cardinal’s advice during this unsettled period in his life. “It was my custom during my first days in London,” Belloc later explained, “as a very young man, before I went to Oxford, to call upon the Cardinal as regularly as he would receive me.” The cardinal, he wrote, “was certainly the greatest of all that band, small but immensely significant, who, in the Victorian period, so rose above their fellows, pre-eminent in will and in intelligence, as not only to perceive, but even to accept the Faith.” In later

10

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

life, when he wrote these words, it would be Manning’s division of the world into two groups—Catholics and non-Catholics—that would command Belloc’s imagination. By then his experience as a politician had soured his faith in parliamentary politics, and he sought the cure for the evils of contemporary society in that brand of political Catholicism that he himself had articulated to a burgeoning Catholic intellectual community rather than in the political radicalism of his youth. Then he would note in admiration that Manning had “never admitted the possibility of compromise between the Catholic and non-Catholic society,” that “he perceived the necessary conflict, and gloried in it.” In 1889, however, it was the cardinal’s commitment to social action, his affinity with the trades union leaders and political radicals of the day, that inspired the young Belloc.15 Manning had earned the respect and devotion of Belloc and many others in late-Victorian England by his speeches and writings in defense of the working classes, by his charity work, and especially by his successful intervention in the London Dock Strike of 1889. The English press, which had with few exceptions supported the dockworkers, had hailed him then for his work in settling the strike, and the public had spoken of the “Cardinal’s peace.” Belloc was in London at the time, and much later in life, scarred by his own experiences in politics, he recalled those days. “Well do I remember the fevers of that struggle!” he wrote in 1925. “I was but nineteen years of age; it was my delight to follow the intense passions of the time; and those passions were real.” “I remember the great mobs that followed John Burns,” Belloc noted of one of the leaders of the Dock Strike, “and how I myself would go miles through the East End to hear him.” “I call that time of my youth,” he concluded nostalgically, “a better time.”16 In Cardinal Manning the idealistic young Belloc found a mind much in sympathy. He believed with Manning, and would reiterate throughout his life, that “labour has a right to liberty,” that “a labourer has a right to determine for whom he will work, and where he will work,” that he has “the right to say whether he can subsist upon certain wages,” and that laborers have the right to “unite together for

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

11

the protection of [their] interest.” He also agreed with the cardinal on the need for land reform in Ireland, in his support for Irish Home Rule, and in his antipathy toward many of the old Catholic families of England with their Tory political allegiances and their distaste for the urban Irish masses who formed the vast majority of the Catholic Church in England. Differences of opinion—concerning, for example, temperance, which Belloc always abhorred, and which Manning tirelessly promoted—could not dim the esteem of the young man for the old convert who had once proclaimed that “if he were not a Cardinal he would be standing for Westminster in the radical interest.” Manning’s declaration, “There is no justice, mercy, or compassion in the Plutocracy: that is my creed,” could well have been Belloc’s motto.17 Belloc’s veneration for Manning, and the emphasis on social justice he inherited from the cardinal, would affect significantly the intellectual life of those English Catholics whom Belloc came to influence in the coming years. When through Belloc’s intellectual leadership and charisma a genuine community of English Catholic intellectuals formed in the next century, that community was to be largely concerned with social and political problems, the chief focus of Manning, rather than with the theological issues and spiritual concerns that preoccupied Newman. These stimulating London years of Belloc’s late adolescence ended in 1891. In early May he returned to England from a journey across the United States to California to visit an Irish American girl, Elodie Hogan, whom he had met in London the previous summer. Elodie Hogan would become Belloc’s wife five years later, but for the moment the combination of her mother’s opposition and her own consideration of a religious vocation prevented the match. Although he was so distraught at his failure that his mother feared for his well-being, his pursuit of Miss Hogan instilled in him a sense of purpose. On his return he decided, first, to complete the military service necessary to maintain his French citizenship, despite his mother’s objection that this would brand him a foreigner in England. In mid-November 1891 Belloc joined an artillery regiment in Touls as a driver of the guns. As

12

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

the only son of a widow, he was eligible for a dispensation reducing the required service from the usual three years to only one.18 On the one hand, Belloc’s experience in the French army confirmed his egalitarian republicanism. Later he would note approvingly that the French army was the “most universally recruited” of the European armies. “Young men of every social rank serve as private soldiers,” Belloc observed, “and during their period of service are merged entirely into the rank and file.” He compared favorably also the French practice of routinely promoting officers from the ranks of common soldiers with the strict class division between officers and men in the armies of the other European powers, including Britain, arguing that the French policy strengthened the army by increasing discipline and obedience. The treatment of soldiers as individuals, rather than as members of a social class, as well as the system of basing reward and promotion on merit as opposed to either birth or wealth, appealed to the political radical in Belloc who wanted such democratic and egalitarian practices extended to the whole of society. On the other hand, the year spent in the French military made him realize that he was an Englishman rather than a Frenchman. As he recalled: I had come into the regiment faulty in my grammar and doubtful in accent, ignorant especially of those things which in every civilization are taken for granted but never explained in full; I was ignorant, therefore, of the key which alone can open a civilization to a stranger. Things irksome or a heavy burden to the young men of my age, born and brought up in the French air, were to me, brought up with Englishmen an Englishman, odious and bewildering. His future, he now realized, lay in England.19 As his military service drew to a close in summer 1892, Belloc intended to return to London and resume his literary career, but his mother suggested instead that he try for a place at Oxford. Previously university had not been an option both for financial reasons

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

13

and because Cardinal Manning had forbidden Catholics to attend the university. Manning, however, had died earlier in the year, and the problem of money was solved when his sister sacrificed her portion of the Parkes’s family trust, raising £600. Belloc then found a college that would accept him when his mother encountered Benjamin Jowett, the renowned Master of Balliol College, at a party. The Priestley connection persuaded Jowett, who told Mrs. Belloc that “it would give him great pleasure to have at Balliol a great-great-grandson of Joseph Priestley.” Ironically, therefore, given the egalitarianism of both Belloc and Priestley, Belloc owed his place at Balliol not to merit only—though he did have to pass the entrance examination—but to birth as well. He went up to Oxford in January 1893, appropriately for the Hilary term.20 At Balliol Belloc opted to study modern history and soon distinguished himself, winning the Brackenbury scholarship, the highest prize in history, in the Michaelmas (fall) term of 1893. His friend E. C. Bentley, who had been a classmate at St. Paul’s of G. K. Chester­ ton, first encountered Belloc at the scholarship examination held in Balliol Hall: Immediately opposite me across the narrow refectory table was a formidable-looking candidate wearing a commoner’s gown, who fell upon each paper the moment it was given to him, and tore it limb from limb with a startling rapidity of penmanship, never looking up from his work until time was called. I, feebly pecking at the papers whenever I could find anything of which I was not totally ignorant, told myself that this man ought to be the winner; and so he proved to be. It was Belloc. Bentley was not the only student to be taken with Belloc, who quickly cut a figure not just at Balliol, but throughout the university. Another friend, F. Y. Eccles, later a professor of French literature at the University of London, observed that it was Belloc’s “marvellous facility of speech” that had “made his reputation at Oxford.” “He would,” Eccles reminisced, “talk about himself without the slightest trace of

14

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

boasting; but he talked, as he talked about everything else, with a frankness and a spontaneity, as admirable as they were rare.” “While those who knew him superficially,” his friend concluded, “remarked that in whatever society he happened to be, he talked more than anyone else; they said this before realising that he talked better and more to the point, and before seeing that there was more substance in what he said.”21 Belloc combined this loquaciousness with an eccentric manner of dress—“big dark cloak, soft hat and bludgeon”—that he would sport throughout his life. Before he had been two years at Balliol, all of Oxford knew him and what he valued—“Burgundy, sunshine, tobacco, music, Rabelais, good verse, non-typical Frenchmen, beggars, Irishmen, gaslamps, pretty stories, Gothic architecture, and all good fellowship”—as well as what he detested—“Oxford tradesmen, the Proctorial system, affectation, prudery, English weather, silence, the German Emperor, modernity, hero-worship,” and “socialists and oligarchs.”22 Where Belloc shone most brightly, however, was in the heat of debate at the Oxford Union, where he employed his gifts to become one of the most celebrated orators that nursery of statesmen had produced in its long history. Contemporaries have described his prowess in terms so glowing that one would think their praise mere hyperbole were it not unanimous. Eccles, for example, recalled that Belloc “astonished, then captivated and dazzled his audience”: Most of the young speakers, when they are not hum-ing and hawing, recite what they have already got by heart; and the most applauded are the dry wits who manage to introduce into a solemn context the most far-fetched allusions and the most idiotic puns. Belloc’s eloquence was of quite a different sort. He spoke with great fluency, without the slightest hesitation and without any blurring of his words. There was no emphasis and no clowning. But above all there was inspiration and there was movement. Another Oxford contemporary recounted Belloc’s first triumph before the Union. Following outstanding speeches concerning the Ottoman

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

15

Empire by John Simon (a future cabinet minister), taking the Liberal position, and F. E. Smith (later Lord Chancellor) for the Conservative, the unknown Belloc had risen to speak versus Smith, who would be his great rival. “As he rose,” Basil Matthews reminisced: men started up and began to leave the house; at his first sentence they paused and looked at him—and sat down again. By the end of his third sentence, with a few waves of his powerful hands, and a touch of unconscious magnetism and conscious strength, the speeches of J. A. Simon and F. E. Smith were as though they had never been. For twenty minutes the new orator, Mr. Hilaire Belloc, who was soon to sit in the seat of Gladstone, Salisbury, Milner, Curzon, and Asquith, as President of the Union, held his audience breathless. The Isis too commented on Belloc’s eloquence, especially his persuasiveness in debate: From Mr. Belloc you get a speech different from anything else you will hear at the Union. He dares to be serious and to show it; the ordinary speaker is too much afraid of being taken to mean what he says. He loves general principles, has a perfect lust of deduction; and it is the unity in which he comprises all departments of politics, the consistent measure to which he reduced them all, which gave colour to the taunt that he had one speech of all work. Of course that kind of oratory is prey to the scoffer, but its effect outlasts the laugh; and Mr. Belloc, almost alone of all Union speakers, makes converts.23 These comments illustrated a significant change in the character of Belloc at Oxford compared with the young man at the Oratory. By the time he went up to Balliol, he had become an individual of uncommon vitality and persuasiveness, a man whose vigor and enthusiasm drew others to him and to his ideas. Thus, in introducing Essays in Liberalism by Six Oxford Men (1897), a volume that heralded the

16

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

arrival not only of Belloc but also of F. W. Hirst, J. L. Hammond, and Simon as young public intellectuals of note, Hirst and Phillimore observed that “Mr. Belloc has been the leading spirit” and concluded, “Much that he has not written is indirectly derived from him, inspired by a companionship which we have all found a liberal education.”24 The last reference in the Isis to his talent for making converts was an especially telling one. If while in his Oxford days Belloc used his powers of persuasion to convince his peers of the truth of his radical republican political views, in later life, when his Catholicism had become the much more dominant weapon in his intellectual arsenal, his speeches and writings were just as effective in leading a number of individuals into the Catholic Church and in forging these men and women into a Catholic intellectual community. In June 1895 Belloc took his examinations and earned first-class honors. His subsequent failure to win either the prestigious prize fellowship at All Souls’ College, as had such friends and contemporaries as Simon, or a fellowship from his beloved Balliol College, which he expected at the least, left him bitter toward the university and would increasingly obsess him later in life. Despite the failure to win the fellowship he regarded as his due, Belloc’s Oxford career was an outstanding success in both personal and scholastic terms. The combination of the Brackenbury scholarship, the presidency of the Union, and the first-class degree spoke to his intellectual ability. On the personal side, he formed a number of close friendships with some of the most talented young men of his day, friendships that in a number of cases he would maintain for the rest of his life. Belloc was ideally positioned for success, whether he opted for a career at the bar, which he was considering, as a writer, or in politics, which was becoming a predominant interest. He had chosen to be an Englishman rather than a Frenchman, and on the basis of his accomplishments at Oxford and his bright future prospects, it would appear that he had wisely chosen. The next decade brought Belloc fame as a writer and a reputation as a coming man in English politics. Soon after taking his degree,

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

17

Belloc began the writing career that he had deferred when he went up to Balliol. The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts (1896), the first of his very successful volumes of nonsense verse for children, established his popularity, and The Path to Rome (1902) made his reputation as a talented writer, while biographies of Danton (1899) and Robespierre (1901) represented his first forays into historical scholarship. For the next four decades not a year would pass without a book from Belloc, and in one three-year period, from 1910 through 1912, his output would be an astonishing twenty-two volumes. To finance his writing during the years from 1895 to 1899 in which he remained in Oxford, Belloc coached undergraduates preparing for their examinations, taught as a University Extension lecturer, and traveled throughout both England and the United States lecturing, chiefly on French history. The first of these tours was to America in spring 1896, where he spoke in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans. The true object of this journey, however, was to marry Elodie Hogan, with whom Belloc had continued to correspond while he was at Balliol, and who had discovered, after several months in a Sisters of Charity convent, that she did not have a religious vocation. The couple wed on 16 June 1896 in Napa, California; between 1897 and 1904 Elodie Belloc would give birth to five children, three sons and two daughters.25 The circumstances of Belloc’s marriage strengthened his religious faith and were therefore significant in the long run to his transformation from political radical into the leader of the English Catholic intellectual community. When Belloc arrived in California he found Miss Hogan seriously ill, apparently having suffered a nervous breakdown after leaving the convent, although beginning to recover. For Belloc, finding her in this condition proved a great shock. He contrasted his boisterous Balliol days with the piety of her life. The result was a renewal of his faith. “God brings man to knowledge in any one of a thousand paths,” he explained to his friend Phillimore. “I felt as though I had not understood the Mother Rome until these days.” “I had no conception till I got here of what these five years had been,”

18

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Belloc somberly concluded. “My soul had frozen—a little more and I should have done nothing with my life.”26 Belloc would expand several years later on this theme of a renewal of faith in adulthood after a youth in which the Church had hovered in the background, a key formative influence but not a transformative truth. In The Path to Rome, his narrative of a pilgrimage he had made, chiefly on foot, from his old garrison town of Toul to Rome in June 1901, Belloc described such a reawakening: We, when our youth is full on us, invariably reject [the Faith] and set out in the sunlight content with natural things. Then for a long time we are like men who follow down the cleft of a mountain and the peaks are hidden from us and forgotten. It takes years to reach the dry plain, and then we look back and see our home. Reflecting on the causes for such a return, he observed: I think it is the problem of living; for every day, every experience of evil, demands a solution. That solution is provided by the memory of the great scheme which at last we remember. Our childhood pierces through again. . . . But I will not attempt to explain it, for I have not the power; only I know that we who return suffer hard things; for there grows a gulf between us and many companions. We are perpetually thrust into minorities, and the world almost begins to talk a strange language; we are troubled by the human machinery of a perfect and superhuman revelation; we are over-anxious for its safety, alarmed and in danger of violent decisions. Belloc’s Catholic faith, thus regenerated, became a significant part of his life as he settled into his marriage and he and his wife began raising their children.27 While Belloc believed that his newly recovered faith strained many of his friendships, this does not seem to have been entirely the case in

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

19

the decade or so after his marriage. He continued to move among his former university companions, and indeed to profess the same radical political beliefs as he had before. Although his letter to Phillimore in 1896 and the passages from The Path to Rome five years later indicate the first beginnings of a move away from old friends and old ideas, the true break would not come until another decade had passed. Belloc finally left Oxford in winter 1899–1900, moving his family to London, where they settled in Chelsea. His fellow contributor to Essays in Liberalism, Hammond, was the editor of the liberal journal the Speaker, and nearly all his other Oxford companions were involved with the periodical as well. Hirst, Eccles, Phillimore, and Simon (the latter for only a brief time) all either contributed to the journal or helped edit, and Lucian Oldershaw and E. C. Bentley, both of whom had been at St. Paul’s with G. K. Chesterton and at Oxford with Belloc, were also key figures in the Speaker group. Chesterton too wrote for the weekly, and through these common acquaintances he and Belloc met in 1900.28 The Speaker group, Belloc and Chesterton in particular, were united in these years by their anti-imperialism, which manifested itself in opposition to the Boer War. Belloc’s antipathy to British imperialism was founded on the belief that imperialism’s true object, particularly the aim of the Boer War, was to benefit a tiny minority of European financiers, in this case South African mine owners, many of them non-English, at the expense of independent farmers and small businessmen. Much of his verse of the period expounded on this notion—“To the Balliol Men Still in Africa,” for instance—as did his novels, especially Emmanuel Burden. In Emmanuel Burden, first published serially in the Speaker, the narrator described a political viewpoint that increasingly became Belloc’s own: There is a kind of rash political indignation, which we all come across, and to which some of us are attracted. There are men who hate the successful or the rich, but whose hatred is not quite

20

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

dishonest, though it is wildly unjust. They see conspiracies on every side, they scowl at every new fortune, but they do so in good faith, for they are haunted by a nightmare of Cosmopolitan Finance—pitiless, destructive of all national ideals, obscene, and eating out the heart of our European tradition.29 Belloc’s cosmopolitan financiers possessed no national allegiance and manipulated with their wealth the foreign and domestic policies of Britain and other nations. Belloc’s financiers were as such a threat to his vision of England. While he emphasized the importance of the land, of the independent small businessman (of whom Emmanuel Burden was the type), and of local traditions, the financiers promoted only wealth, which recognized no traditions or allegiances, local or national, was attached to no specific plot of land, and absorbed, corrupted, or overwhelmed the small businessman. In retrospect, one recognizes even in these early stages of Belloc’s campaign against plutocracy the first signs of his disillusion with the British political system. The plutocrats had corrupted the Tory government, forcing the nation into an unjust war against an honorable opponent. Belloc retained faith in the party out of power, the Liberals. After all, he and his young friends were in the intellectual avantgarde of the opposition party. What if, however, the Liberals were to regain power? Would power corrupt them as well? Would they too succumb to the open pocketbooks of the plutocrats? Belloc’s attachment to the farmer-soldiers battling the cosmopolitan empire in South Africa was also related to his republicanism, which his study of history in the years since taking his degree had served to strengthen. Although he had first considered focusing in his historical research on England, he had found that publishers, noting his French surname, were more enthusiastic about commissioning volumes on French history. After leaving Balliol, he had therefore devoted much of his time to the study of Revolutionary France. He spent 1897 and 1898 researching and writing his biography of Danton (1899), and the years immediately following were employed in the work that produced a companion volume on Robespierre (1901).

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

21

In Danton, in particular, Belloc found a political role model. He summarized the French revolutionary thus: “What he was all his life and by nature was a Tribune.” Just as Danton had defended the rights and interests of the mass of citizens against the French aristocracy, so Belloc envisioned himself as the people’s champion against the present­-day plutocracy. Indeed, the populism and the patriotism that Belloc ascribed to Danton, as well as the Frenchman’s direct, powerful oratory, were the very qualities that Belloc himself cultivated. Likewise, Danton’s republicanism and defense of democracy appealed to him. Ultimately, and increasingly in the coming years, the French revolutionary’s commitment to the use of a tribunate, or even a dictatorial, authority to defend the people and the ideal of civic equality versus oligarchic power, whether in the form of an aristocracy of birth or a plutocracy of wealth, became central to Belloc’s political philosophy as well.30 Not surprisingly, given his veneration for Danton, the biography was also Belloc’s apology for the French Revolution. The Revolu­ tion represented for him the “spirit of the Middle Ages, the spirit of enthusiasm and of faith, [of] the Crusade.” For Belloc, it had been “essentially a reversion to the normal—a sudden and violent return to those conditions which are the necessary bases of health in any political community, which are clearly apparent in every primitive society, and from which Europe had been estranged by an increasing com­plexity and spirit of routine.” Not for Belloc then the idea that the Church and the Revolution were irreconcilable enemies.31 By 1904 Belloc had made a name for himself in radical and Liberal political circles in England. His association with the Speaker, his stand against the Boer War, and his fame as a writer had elevated him to prominence. He was considered a “coming man.” He consulted with the National Liberal Association, looking for a constituency that would select him to contest the next general election. On 13 May 1904 he presented himself to the council of the local Liberal Association in South Salford, the industrial suburb of Manchester, and was unanimously adopted as their candidate. In the Liberal landslide election of 1906, Belloc took his seat in Parliament by a majority of 852 of the 8,645 voters in South Salford.32

22

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Parliament and The Servile State The four years Belloc spent in Parliament resulted in a remarkable intellectual transformation, one that in a number of ways mirrored that of his mentor, the French radical republican turned monarchist Paul Déroulède. His experience at Westminster convinced him that the wealthy plutocrats who contributed to the party funds had corrupted parliamentary democracy in Britain. Reflection on what had gone wrong in English politics resulted in two important books, The Party System (1911) and The Servile State (1912). The latter volume provided the blueprint for Belloc’s new, even more radical political Catholicism and laid the foundation for the English Catholic intellectual community. The new member for South Salford almost immediately aroused the enmity of his constituency, as well as the antipathy of the Liberal Party’s parliamentary leaders. For though he supported the Liberal platform during his election campaign, he had done so in a manner that was not entirely compatible with his fellow Liberals, or even with his fellow Radicals. While his support of free trade was conventional, his beliefs concerning the issues of Chinese labor, education, and public­-house licensing—three of the key issues on which the election had been contested—soon brought him into conflict with the Liberal front bench, with the Radical Nonconformist back-benchers who formed such a significant section of the Liberal majority, and with the very voters who had sent him to Westminster to represent their interests. In November 1904 Arthur Balfour’s Conservative government had issued to the owners of the Transvaal gold mines licenses to import indentured laborers from China. British Radicals such as David Lloyd George charged that this represented the return of slavery to the British Empire, and British labor, already threatened by the Taff Vale decision of 1901 holding that unions were financially liable for the acts of their agents, was incensed. In a campaign speech in December 1905 at London’s Albert Hall, the new Liberal prime minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, proclaimed that his government would

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

23

stop both the importation and the embarkation of the so-called coolie workers, and Belloc, for one, believed that the overwhelming Liberal victory in the subsequent election represented a public mandate for fulfilling this campaign promise. Others within Campbell-Bannerman’s cabinet, particularly Herbert Asquith, the new chancellor of the Exchequer, pointed out, however, that the mine owners had a legitimate claim to compensation for the purchase of the licenses to import the laborers, and so the Liberal cabinet decided to prohibit the issuing of future licenses rather than halt the use of those already issued. Belloc was outraged, believing the government’s refusal to begin deporting those Chinese workers already in the Transvaal a betrayal both of principle and of the voters. In his maiden speech in the House of Commons, 22 February 1906, Belloc demanded that the government begin the deportation of the Chinese laborers within three months, at the expense of the mine owners. Thus, in his first contribution to debate in the House of Commons, Belloc marked himself as unamenable to the party line. He would continue to play the role of the gadfly, in the process both irritating the Liberal government and alienating his own constituents.33 On the education issue, Belloc was caught between his party, including the significant Nonconformist faction of the South Salford voters who had elected him, and the Catholic Church in England. In 1902 the Balfour Education Act had eliminated the “dual system,” which had distinguished between “board” schools—the responsibility of the local school boards, financed entirely by the local school rates, and providing nondenominational religious instruction—and “voluntary” schools—partially funded by parliamentary grants directly from the Exchequer and providing denominational religious instruction. Under the terms of the 1902 act, the local education authorities were to provide the teachers’ salaries and the maintenance expenses for the voluntary schools out of the local rates—infuriating the Nonconformists in particular, who rallied opposition with the cry “Rome on the rates.”34 In his speech before the Liberal Association of South Salford in May 1904, promoting his adoption as its candidate, Belloc had opposed

24

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

the 1902 act on the principle that parents ought to be able to choose the religious education of their children. The new act, he argued, had led to situations in which where there was no local nondenominational school, non-Anglicans would be educated in Anglican schools funded from the public purse. Such a position was the standard Catholic one on education—an emphasis on the rights of the family as opposed to those of the state—and it was also, in the manner Belloc had stated it, with the focus on the education monopoly that the Church of England maintained in many areas, unobjectionable to the Nonconformist opponents of the 1902 act.35 Ultimately, however, Belloc’s position was quite far from that of the Nonconformists, who formed a significant body of his electors, for whom all denominational schools, including Catholic ones, were objectionable if provided for in any way by public taxes. Indeed, the seeds for future conflict were sown when he closed his speech with the words, “My religion is of course of greater moment to me by far than my politics. . . . If I had to choose between two policies, one of which would certainly injure my religion and the other as certainly advance it, I would not for a moment hesitate between the two.” When the Liberal government introduced in April 1906 its Education Bill, which essentially sought to end state funding of denominational schools by demanding that they either forgo their aid or turn their schools over to the local education authorities, it therefore ought not to have surprised anyone that Belloc sided with his coreligionists in opposing it. The one part of the bill that Belloc supported, a clause allowing schools in which four-fifths of the students’ parents supported religious instruction to remain denominational, the Nonconformist advocates of nondenominational education opposed.36 If his stand on Chinese labor was opposed to that of his party’s leaders and if his attitude to education was quite different from that of the Nonconformists who had helped send him to Westminster, Belloc’s beliefs about public-house licensing reform were certain to exasperate both the Liberal front bench and the voters of South Salford. For the Nonconformist, “drink” itself was the problem, and the solution was to make as little of it as possible available for public consumption. To

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

25

Belloc, however, the real issue was the “tied-house” system, whereby wealthy breweries owned and operated many hundreds of pubs. In 1908 the government introduced the Licensing Bill, under the terms of which 32,000 public houses in England and Wales, about onethird of the total, would be closed over the next fourteen years. The owners of these premises were to be compensated by a tax on the remaining pubs. While Belloc was pleased that the bill attacked the power of the brewing industry by forcing the closing of many of the tied houses, he criticized it for failing to distinguish between those pubs that individuals owned and those that the breweries owned. He advised that the bill be amended to treat those public houses that were small businesses preferentially with regard to licensing and taxation, and, in contrast to the Nonconformist temperance advocates, he criticized it for failing to compensate adequately the “tenant, or manager, and employees of the closed houses.” The Nonconformists’ chief ambition, an amendment to establish a “local option” to prohibit public houses entirely, Belloc opposed, calling instead for an amendment to give localities the power to increase as well as diminish the number of licenses in their areas but denying them the power to impose total prohibition.37 With Belloc’s criticism of the Licensing Bill, the patience of his constituents, long-tested, finally broke. His election agent, Charles Goodwin, a wealthy Mancunian soap manufacturer who had to a great extent financed Belloc’s campaign, informed him: It is taking me all my time to keep the peace here. We had a meeting last night and a resolution was passed regretting your vote on the Licensing Bill. The rank and file keep forgiving you your antagonism to the Government ever since you were elected but the temper exhibited last night indicated that they are fed up with your policy which they do not understand. What they want is to feel that they are behind a man who supports their ideas in the House—and you do not. Belloc responded that he had opposed the government only when they had acted either against his “public pledges” or “against plain

26

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

democratic common sense.” The true problem, he implied, was not with his constituents, largely working class, to whom, he believed, teetotalism was “poison,” but rather with the local Liberal Association, those “other men who may not like my democratic views.” While Belloc accepted that “one cannot take other people’s money and at the same time render services in any way distasteful to them” and admitted that the local association would be justified in putting forward a candidate against him in the next election, he threatened to run as an independent if they did so.38 Belloc’s dislike of the influence financial supporters had over a member of Parliament was related to his suspicions concerning the secrecy of the party funds. In a letter to the Manchester Guardian in 1906 he had called for a public audit of the funds, asserting that they were accumulated largely through the sale of public honors and charging that “whenever a Government makes a fool of itself, especially a Liberal Government, one may be pretty certain that it is due to the pressure of one of the big subscribers.” Belloc raised the issue in Parliament in 1908, noting then that it was the secrecy of the funds that was the issue, not the existence of the funds themselves: “wealth when it acts publicly cannot dare do what it would often dare do when it acts in a secret manner.” Indeed, for him the Licensing Bill had been a chief example of the mischievous influence of the party funds. The Liberals, he believed, had catered to the wishes of the wealthy temperance advocates and soft-drink manufacturers, while their rivals had bowed before the demands of the brewers, and the result was the worst of both worlds, a bill that maintained the tied-house system, thus pleasing the brewers who funded the Unionists, yet closing thousands of pubs and thus appealing to the Liberal Party’s contributors.39 Despite Belloc’s vociferous opposition to the government on this issue and others, when Asquith dissolved Parliament and called for a new election in December 1909, seeking a popular mandate to force Lloyd George’s “People’s Budget” through the House of Lords, Goodwin opted to back Belloc’s campaign. While Belloc supported the budget—with the exception of the increased duty on whiskey, which he believed was a disproportionate and unjust burden on the already

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

27

overtaxed Irish—he began attacking the government soon after he was returned to Parliament. This time the issue was the prospective reform of the House of Lords, and the consequence was Belloc’s complete disillusionment with parliamentary politics.40 In the January 1910 election in which Belloc was returned, the Liberal majority was greatly reduced, with the Unionists taking 273 seats to their rivals’ 275, Labour winning 40 seats, and the Irish, with 82 seats, thus holding the balance of power. The Irish used this leverage to push for the end of the Lords’ veto power, which would allow Parliament finally to enact Home Rule. Belloc, a consistent Home Ruler, supported these efforts, believing as well that the election results, despite the vastly decreased Liberal majority, represented a public mandate for reform of the Upper House. Belloc soon began to suspect, however, that the government was trying to avoid challenging the Lords. As he explained to Goodwin in a letter of 18 February: You have probably seen in the papers that the Whig side of the Cabinet quietly proposed to “sell the pass,” but the Radical side, led by the indomitable Lulu,41 stuck firm. The Irish had already been nobbled and the Labour members had tamely said they would vote with the Government whatever it did, when the noble Radicals jumped in—and I was one—for I wrote a letter to The Times saying “Curfew Should Not Ring Tonight”—a thing which has drawn down upon us the wrath of the Tory press. I have explained my view in the Saturday Review, which comes out tomorrow, and I believe that we Radicals have got what we wanted. By early March, however, he was growing more pessimistic, believing the Radicals’ effort to bring Lords reform to the fore had failed. “Balfour and Asquith have come to an understanding,” he charged in another letter to Goodwin, “which the country in general may not be told but which is now fairly generally known.” “By this understanding,” he explained, “all real attack upon the House of Lords will be prevented.” Belloc believed that Asquith and the other “Whig”

28

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

ministers had acted undemocratically—against “the direction which the whole of the Democratic majority of 124 demanded”—by failing “to get rid at once of the veto of the House of Lords.” Furthermore, he maintained that Asquith’s plan to call for another election on the issue was tantamount to the “punishment” of those such as himself who acted independently of the front bench and who as a result had no recourse to the party funds to defray their election expenses.42 Belloc was wrong. Asquith was prepared to push for reform of the Upper House and indeed introduced a bill in April to curtail the Lords’ veto power. The death of Edward VII in May, however, postponed the anticipated final confrontation with the Upper House. His successor, George V, followed his father’s lead and refused to create enough new peers to force the bill through the Lords until another election had been contested.43 Asquith’s attempted solution to the dilemma, however, confirmed all of Belloc’s worst suspicions about both major parties. The prime minister convened a roundtable conference to resolve the issue, with four individuals representing the government and four representing the Unionists. That the proceedings were kept confidential convinced Belloc of the undemocratic nature of British politics. He was certain that the government was not sincere in its plans to reform the Lords, that the conference was a smoke screen, and that after negotiations Asquith would explain that no compromise had been reached and then shelve the issue.44 Belloc was again mistaken. In November 1910 Asquith called for another election, possessing the assurance of the king that he would create enough new peers to secure passage of the bill if the Liberals won the election, which they did with another narrow majority. With the threat of new creations hanging over them, the Lords ultimately passed the bill in August 1911. But Belloc, disgusted with parliamentary politics and facing a challenge from a suffragette-sponsored candidate, had opted not to stand again in the December 1910 election.45 Given his temperament and deeply held beliefs, Belloc was not the type simply to abandon what he considered by now his vocation. If he could not use Parliament as a platform from which to push for reform,

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

29

then he would find another means. G. K. Chesterton would in jest refer to Belloc’s decision to leave Parliament, paraphrasing the reference of a historian of classical Rome to a relation of the emperor Caligula: “This was the imbecile who passed his life in historical studies and investigations; and who was so much divorced from practical politics that he was no longer even a senator.” As Chesterton well knew, however, Belloc had left Parliament not to become a contemplative but rather to redouble his efforts. To his closest friend in Parliament, George Wyndham, the former Tory minister, Belloc explained: You know how often men have been told in the last few years that direct statement upon public affairs was “impossible.” To tell the multitude what all educated men were saying in private was thought a sort of madness. Men who attempted to do it have been at once hated and despised. But they were right. The affairs of a nation cannot be conducted apart from and alongside of a national spirit, and the national spirit cannot act unless it is informed. “I have a foreign name, and I have served in a foreign service, and in one or two other ways I have foreign ties,” Belloc concluded, “but what I feel about this country is passionate enough, and if I can serve her I will.”46 The service that he determined to perform was the informing of the “national spirit” to which he had referred. Between his retirement from the House of Commons in December 1910 and the onset of the Great War in August 1914, Belloc penned The Party System and The Servile State, and he established, and edited for a brief period, a political weekly, the Eye-Witness—all in an effort to inform and instruct the public about the failures of English government and society. To understand the extent of Belloc’s political transformation, one need examine no more than his changed conception of the French Revolution. His belief in the need for a Dantonlike tribune had driven him into Parliament, but his experience at Westminster had tempered his admiration for the Revolution. By 1911 he had concluded that the revolutionaries “did as a fact pay an almost absurd reverence to

30

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

the machinery of representation and election.” He now opposed “parliamentarism,” blaming the revolution for the subsequent “spectacle of modern parliamentary nations driven against their wills into economic conditions which appal them.” Belloc noted now that Rousseau, whom he admired more than any other political philosopher, had warned that “men who consent to a representative system are free only while the representatives are not sitting,” that representative government was not “essentially democratic,” and that “a democracy cannot live without ‘tribunes.’” It was in vain, Belloc lamented, that Rousseau had told this cautionary tale. Although the revolutionaries “could not foresee modern parliamentarism” and although “nothing could be more alien to their conception of the State than the deplorable method of government which parliamentarism everywhere tends to introduce today,” it was they who had confused democracy with representative government in the mistaken belief that a representative would be merely a delegate, a “permanent receptacle” of the corporate will of the electorate.47 Belloc’s primary attack on parliamentarism came in The Party System, which he cowrote with Cecil Chesterton, the younger brother of his friend Gilbert. Cecil Chesterton, who had been attracted to Tory democracy as a young man and had subsequently flirted with Fabian socialism, was much more combative than his brother, and the younger Chesterton’s shrillness was evident in the book. They had begun writing the book while Belloc was still a member of Parliament, and it was published in February 1911. It reflected the disillusion of Belloc’s last months in Parliament and was strewn with embittered examples from his political career, beginning with the Chinese labor issue and culminating with the supposed collusion of the front benches to suppress the reform of the Upper House. The core of Belloc and Chesterton’s attack on the party system was that it prevented the proper functioning of representative government. Contrary to his earlier accusations against Asquith and the other “Whigs” in the Liberal cabinet, Belloc was now blaming the system itself rather than those such as Asquith who merely played by its rules. Under the present political system, he and his coauthor

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

31

argued, England was not a true democracy—which they defined as “government by the general will.” “Wherever,” they explained, and “under whatever forms, such laws as the mass of the people desire are passed, and such laws as they dislike are rejected, there is democracy.” For a representative system to be genuinely democratic, Belloc and Chesterton asserted, three things were necessary: first, “there must be absolute freedom in the selection of representatives; secondly, the representatives must be strictly responsible to their constituents and to no one else; thirdly, the representatives must deliberate in perfect freedom, and especially must be absolutely independent of the Executive.” “In a true representative system,” they concluded, “the Executive would be responsible to the elected assembly and the elected assembly would be responsible to the people. From the people would come the impulse and the initiative. They would make certain demands; it would be the duty of their representatives to give expression to these demands, and of the Executive to carry them out.” The political system in Britain, Belloc and Chesterton made clear, failed to meet each of these conditions.48 Far from there being absolute freedom in the selection of candidates for parliamentary seats, Belloc and Chesterton maintained, the central offices of the two parties essentially nominated candidates whom the local party caucuses merely rubber stamped. The central offices chose their candidates based on “one common test,” according to Belloc and his coauthor: they “must be prepared to defend not only an existing programme settled between the various officials and professional politicians, but any future decision which their superiors may feel inclined to take.” Representatives, therefore, were not responsible to their constituents but rather to the party leaders who had selected them in the first place, and who had paid their election expenses using the secret party funds that Belloc had railed against from his earliest days in Parliament. “The effect of paying a man’s election expenses out of a secret fund,” the pair observed, “is that the member becomes responsible not to his constituents, but to the caucus which pays him.” Indeed, Belloc and Chesterton charged that in addition to the power of the party funds, the front benches used

32

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

both the lure of salaried positions and the threat of the dissolution of Parliament, which would entail the expense of an election campaign, to control the House of Commons.49 If there existed neither freedom in the selection of candidates for Parliament nor responsibility to one’s constituents, neither did the members of Parliament deliberate in perfect freedom, according to Belloc and Chesterton. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the front benches had managed to limit the time available to private members, that is, nongovernmental representatives, to such an extent that it was virtually impossible for such a member to get so much as a mere resolution passed by the House, let alone an item of legislation. It was the party leaders who initiated legislation and dominated the House of Commons, and rather than a representative body themselves, the front benches, according to Belloc and Chesterton, were a self-selecting clique, dominated by a handful of English families among whom actual differences of political philosophy, no matter the party they claimed to represent, did not exist.50 Any possibility of reforming the party system in order to make Parliament truly representative of the nation, Belloc and Chesterton lamented, was checked by the support that the populace gave to the existing system. The majority either remained ignorant of the current system or simply did not want the “popular will” to be represented at Westminster. They warned, however, that unless something were done, and soon, to change the way the nation was governed, Britain’s very survival would be threatened. Parliament under the party system had proven itself incapable of governing. Appalling economic conditions at home among the mass of citizens, combined with the threat from abroad and the alarming state of the nation’s military preparedness, imperiled the nation.51 Although franchise extension, the abolition of plural voting, the payment of candidates’ election expenses, and the institution of salaries for members of Parliament might help weaken the party system, the authors argued, these reforms in themselves would not be enough. They called instead for the auditing of party funds and recommended particularly an end to the government’s power to dissolve Parliament.

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

33

If dissolution were impossible, they argued, then a member of Parliament could vote against his party, could act independently and truly represent his constituency, because in so doing he would face neither the expense of an election nor the possibility of the other party taking power. Likewise, Belloc and Chesterton believed that the use of primaries to select candidates for election, as well as the employment of referendums to set party programs, would help to undermine the current system by breaking the power of the front benches to select candidates and to define the issues on which elections would be fought.52 In The Party System, Belloc and Chesterton were thus attempting to alert what they believed to be an uninformed public about the possibly fatal flaws in the British political system as it had evolved in the past century. Their concern was entirely with politics, and the assumptions were that an educated electorate would recognize the breakdown and demand reform and that such reform would solve the problems of English society. Truly popular government, Belloc and Chesterton believed, would mean competent government and, ultimately, a healthy society. With such beliefs, Belloc remained within the pale of the political radicalism that had been his inheritance. In his subsequent volume, The Servile State, however, he broke significantly with the political tradition that had nourished successive generations of the Priestley, Parkes, and Belloc families. Faith in political reform gave way to a total indictment of English society. Whereas the Belloc of previous years had professed admiration for the French Revolution, belief in the power of parliament to effect changes beneficial to English society, and affection for the previous centuries of English history as a part of the movement toward a more just and egalitarian society, the disillusioned man who emerged from Westminster had serious misgivings about the consequences of the Revolution (although not its principles), no longer possessed the same faith in parliamentary government, and presented a withering critique of the post-Reformation history of England. Indeed, political radicalism ceded its pride of place in Belloc’s philosophy to what one might call political Catholicism—a political philosophy that was in fact strikingly more radical than traditional English radicalism.

34

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Belloc wrote The Servile State in response to the 1911 National Insurance Act, which Lloyd George, whom Belloc detested, had sponsored. One part of the two-part act created a system of national health insurance, covering all employed workers (nearly 12 million ­people); the other part, applying to approximately 2.5 million indi­ viduals, established a compulsory system of compensation for workers in a handful of trades that were subject to high cyclical unemployment. Belloc, though he had supported Lloyd George’s controversial “­People’s Budget” of 1909, was quick to attack the new measure. In June 1911 the first issue of the Eye-Witness, the weekly newspaper Belloc had established to continue his battle against the party system, appeared, and the newspaper became the forum for his opposition to the Insurance Bill.53 The Eye-Witness charged that the bill failed to assist the truly indigent, providing instead for those workers already aided by trade unions and friendly societies, and objected to its compulsory nature and to the fact that one-third of the cost fell on the workers themselves. As it stood, the bill would saddle those least able to afford it with a highly regressive new tax. In addition, the denial of coverage to striking workers, workers fired for misconduct, and workers who turned down employment disturbed the Eye-Witness, which believed such conditions were a step toward the conscription of labor. Finally, it claimed that the gathering of information on individual workers by employers and labor exchanges would further subordinate laborers to both the capitalist class and the state, which would now possess a dossier on each worker. In a June 1912 article, Belloc advocated a voluntary rather than compulsory unemployment plan, to be financed entirely by the wealthy—one that would give priority of coverage to the poorest families, with any funds remaining then distributed to the unions and friendly societies to supplement their own insurance schemes.54 At first Belloc refused to believe that the English public would accept the Insurance Bill. “The fact that you will never get Englishmen to come voluntarily every week with three pence to a post office under pain of imprisonment,” he explained to Wyndham, “ought to

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

35

be as obvious to a man who can still sleep, eat and drink as that you will never get them to adopt the decimal system.” “It may pass as a Law,” he concluded, “but its failure in practise will make its authors ridiculed.” Of course, Belloc erred considerably in his judgment of the bill’s popularity. In fact, however, he had already begun to fear that English laborers would be all too willing to accept measures such as the National Insurance Act, to accept what he had begun to call, in a May 1910 article published in A. R. Orage’s weekly, the New Age, the “Servile State.”55 The thesis of Belloc’s Servile State, which expanded on the New Age essay, was that “our free modern society in which the means of production are owned by a few being necessarily in unstable ­equilibrium . . . is tending to reach a condition of stable equilibrium by the establishment of compulsory labor legally enforceable upon those who do not own the means of production for the advantage of those who do.” Modern society was capitalist, he noted, defining a capitalist society as one in which private property, land and capital, was confined to a minuscule minority of citizens, while the vast majority “have not such property and are therefore proletarian.” In the modern capitalist state, according to Belloc, citizens were politically free, that is, able to use their labor and possessions as they saw fit, but were divided into two classes, “the one capitalist or owning, and the other propertyless or proletarian.”56 Belloc detailed the historical genesis of this capitalist society, presenting in the process a powerful indictment of English history during the allegedly progressive centuries, so dear to England’s Whig historians, following the Reformation. Capitalist society had been created in England, he argued, by “an artificial revolution of the most violent kind”—the Crown’s confiscation in the sixteenth century of monastic property, which at the time had amounted to more than one-fourth of all English land. Had the Crown retained this property, however, it “would presumably have used it, as a strong central government ­always does, for the weakening of the wealthier classes, and to the indirect advantage of the mass of the people.” Unfortunately, nearly all of this property had found its way, over the course of the next

36

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

century, into the hands of large landowners, a class of citizens who had already possessed nearly one-third of the land in England and subsequently, by Belloc’s estimate, controlled more than one-half. Both the Crown and the mass of Englishmen, he lamented, were soon subservient to this new oligarchy, and by 1700 the process had been complete: “Not one man in two inhabited a house of which he was the possessor, or tilled land from which he could not be turned off.”57 It was, Belloc maintained, the Reformation, rather than the “socalled Industrial Revolution, a later thing, which accounts for the terrible social condition in which we find ourselves today.” Industrialization had occurred “in an England already directed by a dominating capitalist class, possessing the means of production.” The Industrial Revolution had thus merely exacerbated an already pernicious situ­ ation, continuing the process of turning “the mass of Englishmen into a poverty-stricken proletariat,” cutting off “the rich from the rest of the nation,” and further developing “to the full all the evils which we associate with the capitalist state.” “The vast growth of the proletariat, the concentration of ownership in the hands of a few owners, and the exploitation by those owners of the mass of the community,” he concluded, “had no fatal or necessary connection with the discovery of the new and perpetually improving methods of production.”58 The capitalist society that had developed in post-Reformation England, Belloc argued, was inherently unstable, however, and therefore could not endure. The chief cause of this instability, he explained, was the “insecurity to which capitalism condemns the great mass of society, and the general character of anxiety and peril which it imposes on all citizens, but in particular upon the majority, which consists, under capitalism, of dispossessed free men.” It had therefore become inevitable that capitalist society would “transform itself into some more stable arrangement.” While the reform-minded in contemporary England were advocating the abolition of private property as the means to a more enduring order, Belloc proclaimed that such a socialist ideal would lead instead to “a society wherein the owners remain few and wherein the proletarian mass accepts security at the expense of servitude.” A servile state was being created, one in which,

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

37

despite the intentions of the socialists, the capitalists would not only continue to control nearly all property, but would actually increase their power.59 In his explanation of how the plans of the collectivists had been “deflected,” Belloc posited that a dialogue had essentially occurred. The collectivist had told the capitalist, “I desire to dispossess you, and meanwhile I am determined that your employees shall live tolerable lives.” But the capitalist, according to Belloc, had retorted: I refuse to be dispossessed, and it is, short of catastrophe, impossible to dispossess me. But if you will define the relationship between my employees and myself, I will undertake particular responsibilities due to my position. Subject the proletarian, as a proletarian, to special laws. Clothe me, the capitalist, as a capitalist, and because I am a capitalist, with special converse duties under those laws. I will faithfully see that they are obeyed; I will compel my employees to obey them, and I will undertake the new role imposed on me by the state. Nay, I will go further, and I will say that such a novel arrangement will make my own profits perhaps larger and certainly more secure. This was the essence of the servile state—“that arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labor for the advantage of other families as to stamp the whole country with the mark of such labor.”60 The servile state was not a thing of the future, Belloc asserted, but was being created in contemporary England through legislation such as the National Insurance Act, which created a “distinction between two classes of citizens, marking off the one as legally distinct from the other by a criterion of manual labor or income.” This servile legislation introduced “into the positive laws of the community a recognition of social facts which already divide Englishmen into two groups of economically more free and economically less free.” “Society,” he concluded, “is recognized as no longer consisting of free men bargaining freely for their labor or any other commodity in their possession,

38

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

but of two contrasting statuses, owners and nonowners.” Status was replacing contract, as legislation such as the National Insurance Act, minimum-wage laws like the one applied to the mining industry in September 1912, and recent employer liability laws divided employers and employees into two distinct legal classes with rights and duties toward each other separate from any contract to which they had themselves agreed.61 Belloc asserted that capitalists were elated with the new legislation because it essentially confirmed and safeguarded their position in contemporary society and that socialists accepted it because their chief motivation laudably remained a “burning pity for the poverty and peril of the masses.” The freedom of the working classes would be circumscribed, but their immediate economic situation would be more secure. Indeed, the workers themselves were accepting the new legislation for the same reason. To the working classes, the capitalist minority who possessed property had become a class apart, in effect a caste, one whose “moral right to so singular a position most of them would hesitate to concede,” yet “whose position they, at any rate, accept as a known and permanent social fact, the origins of which they have forgotten, and the foundations of which they believe to be immemorial.” The workers no longer had any experience of property, nor had they any expectation of ever possessing property. Thus, Belloc concluded, they were willing to accept the loss of liberty, and also to sacrifice any chance of obtaining property, in exchange for the proffered security.62 What was occurring in contemporary England, Belloc warned in The Servile State, was the creation of a neofeudal society. Servile legislation, passed by a Parliament that had sold itself to the new barons, the plutocrats, was reducing the working classes to the status of serfs. Belloc, however, refused merely to despair at this transformation. There was a solution to the present injustice, he maintained, and it lay in the example of the society that predated the Reformation. Belloc dubbed the English society that the Reformation disrupted the “Distributive State.” While acknowledging that early medieval society had been marked, as had Roman Europe, by the institution of

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

39

slavery, he maintained that during the medieval period English society had become more and more egalitarian, with property ownership becoming the rule rather than the exception. Over the course of the approximately five hundred years following the dissolution of the Roman Empire, the slave who labored on the estates of the great landowners during the later stages of the empire had gradually evolved into the serf who, while remaining tied to a particular piece of land, owed only a portion of his labor, fixed by custom, to the lord, who could no longer buy and sell him. Indeed, Belloc noted, from the eleventh century “the ancient servile conception of the laborer’s status grows more and more dim, and the courts and the practice of society treat him more and more as a man strictly bound to certain dues and to certain periodical labor, within his industrial unit, but in all other respects free.” By the early fifteenth century, the slave had essentially become a free man who could inherit, buy, and sell property. “He saved as he willed,” Belloc concluded. “He invested, he built, he drained at his discretion, and if he improved the land it was to his own profit.”63 Simultaneously with this evolution of the serf into a free peasant in the countryside, Belloc explained, a number of institutions were “similarly making for a distribution of property” in the expanding towns. Chief among these, the guild had developed to organize and regulate industry of all kinds. “A society partly cooperative, but in the main composed of private owners of capital whose corporation was self-governing,” the guild had been designed to “safeguard the division of property, so that there should be formed within its ranks no proletarian upon the one side, and no monopolizing capitalist upon the other.” For Belloc: These three forms under which labor was exercised—the serf, secure in his position, and burdened only with regular dues, which were but a fraction of his produce; the freeholder, a man independent save for money dues, which were more of a tax than a rent; the guild, in which well-divided capital worked cooperatively for craft production, for transport and for commerce—all

40

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

three between them were making for a society which should be based upon the principle of property. All, or most—the normal family—should own. And on ownership the freedom of the state should repose. The guild in the town, together with the creation of the free peasant proprietor on the land, Belloc concluded, indeed, “every action of medieval society, from the flower of the Middle Ages to the approach of their catastrophe, was directed towards the establishment of a state in which men should be economically free through the possession of capital and land.”64 This medieval society, Belloc emphasized, had been closely connected with the Catholic faith. While he acknowledged that early Christianity, as it had evolved under the Roman Empire, had “included no attack upon the servile institution,” nor had any “dogma of the church pronounced slavery to be immoral,” he linked the transformation of slave into free peasant proprietor to the Church’s growing influence in the centuries following the empire’s fall. He pointed out that only in “those societies which broke with the continuity of Christian civilization in the sixteenth century”—England and the other northern European Protestant nations—had the economically free medieval society of property owners come to an end. In contemporary Europe, Belloc maintained, it was only those nations that “held fast to tradition and saved the continuity of morals” during the Reformation—that is, remained Catholic—that had opposed capi­ talism and industrialism, and he singled out France and Ireland for praise in this regard. Finally, if any reader should have yet failed to connect Catholicism with the economically free “distributive state,” Belloc concluded The Servile State with the hope that “the faith will recover its intimate and guiding place in the heart of Europe.” The tragedy of the Reformation for Belloc thus lay less in theological or devotional controversies than in the fact that the seizure and sale of Church lands not only created the new and immensely wealthy capitalist class but also strangled “that excellent consummation of human society.”65

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

41

There had clearly occurred a sea change in Belloc’s political philosophy. The university student who had founded with Eccles and Phillimore the Oxford Republican Club, who with his comrades had celebrated each year the anniversaries of the executions of Charles I and Louis XVI, now lamented the deterioration of the Crown’s power in post-Reformation England. And yet, while Belloc had indeed evolved from a radical republican into what he began to call in coming years a monarchist, the core of his political philosophy remained unchanged. Essentially, Belloc had been and remained a populist. As a young man he had called himself a republican because he believed a democratic republic was the type of government that most benefited the mass of citizens. His experience in Parliament, however, had led to disillusion with representative government, as illustrated in The Party System. He was now convinced that the wealthiest and most privileged elements in society had too easily co-opted representative government and thus that the government had ceased to represent the interest of the people. A strong central government, he was coming to believe, with a powerful figure at its center—essentially functioning as a tribune whom the plutocrats could not corrupt—would be a truly populist one, governing in the interest of the mass of the people rather than for the wealthy few. The Servile State proved the most influential of Belloc’s writings. As I demonstrate in subsequent chapters, most if not all of the writers who rallied to his standard in the years following the Great War cited the volume as a significant factor in their intellectual development. The importance of The Servile State became clear to Belloc himself within a few years of its publication. Complaining to Maurice Baring that English Catholics did not read “things which are fundamentally Catholic in tone,” he noted, “The one exception I have found to this in all my huge mass of writing in ephemeral and solid, has been the book called The Servile State.”66 What accounted for The Servile State’s success? Those who became Bellocians did not specify what inspired them about it, but one can extrapolate from their intellectual interests. Certainly Belloc’s emphasis on the liberty and the dignity of the workingman was attractive

42

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

to many of them. His allegation that the worker was being compelled through a collusion of capitalist and politician to trade freedom for security, when he ought to have had both, appealed to their sense of justice. These were not themes, however, that they themselves stressed. Belloc’s focus on the corrosive influence of the financiers and his belief that parliamentary democracy had become corrupt were echoed by his acolytes, but such charges were not original to The Servile State. What they seized on was his emphasis on the pervading importance of property, particularly land, to economic freedom. Related to this Bellocian emphasis on property was the theory of history sketched in the book, which evaluated past societies based on how widespread property possession had been. In particular, the thesis that medieval Catholic England had been an economically just society according to this standard and that it could and should therefore provide a model for the radical political and economic transformation of contemporary England proved most influential in forming the English Catholic intellectual community.

C onsolidating the Bellocian Orthodoxy During the decade following the publication of The Servile State, Belloc explored further the historical, economic, and political themes that he had first expressed in his magnum opus. His conviction that economic justice, indeed a stable society, demanded widespread private property led him to promulgate plans for the redistribution of property. He expanded the admiration he had expressed for medieval kingship into a treatise on the restoration of monarchy, in which he disclosed his final disillusion with parliamentary democracy. Belloc’s new political faith contributed to his flirtation with authoritarian regimes on the continent, most notably that of Mussolini’s Fascists in Italy. Particularly during the Great War and into the early 1920s, his obsession with the influence of financial capital contributed to his suspicions concerning the loyalties of “cosmopolitan financiers” and led to accusations that he was an anti-Semite. The outline of English

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

43

history that he had provided in The Servile State he developed into the four-volume History of England. Because his historical analysis undergirds his political and economic work and because his historical output was to prove so significant an influence on the English Catholic intellectual community, it will be treated first. In order for his political and economic analyses to be at all persuasive, it was essential that Belloc challenge the progressive history of the great nineteenth-century Whig historians. Although Belloc continued to be a radical in the sense that he wanted root change, his had become a conservative radicalism in that he now looked to the past for his model. This meant, however, that he was at a disadvantage compared to progressive radicals, such as the Fabian socialists, who anticipated a future that would be far different from a past that had never been compatible with their ideal society. The socialists, therefore, did not necessarily have to combat the nineteenth-century Whig historians’ interpretation of history, because, like the Whigs, they had adopted a progressive view of history; they merely differed with their predecessors as to the proper end toward which society had been moving. Belloc, however, had discovered a better society not in a socialist future but in medieval Europe. He therefore needed to overcome the progressives’ interpretation of the past, to convince his countrymen that England’s past was not as they had been taught, was not as the progressive Whig historians had portrayed it. He had to convince the English that the medieval society of England was not necessarily inferior to that of the eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth century, that one could find in the past a model for the future. English history would need to be radically rewritten. In his History of England (1925–31) and his one-volume synopsis, A Shorter History of England (1934), Belloc attacked the very foundations of nineteenth-century Whig history. In the process, he assaulted many of the dominant myths about English history in an attempt, ultimately, to redefine what it meant to be English. One by one, he took on and dismissed the accepted notions of the AngloSaxon invasions, the Norman yoke, the Reformation, the Gunpowder Plot, Stuart pretensions to absolutism, and, especially, the belief in

44

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

unbroken progress since the Glorious Revolution. In their place he erected an England that was fundamentally Roman and Catholic but one that had taken a disastrous four-century detour to Protestantism and plutocracy, impoverishing the nation politically, economically, and intellectually. Belloc’s volumes on English history began with Julius Caesar’s first incursion into Britain. English society and culture, he emphasized, was of Roman foundation. For four centuries England had been part of the Roman Empire. Even after the legions left Britain, Rome’s influence remained, as England was incorporated into a new empire, that of the Roman Catholic Church. Belloc denied that the AngloSaxon invasion had displaced the existing Romano-Celtic civilization, vociferously arguing for the continuity of British civilization from the Roman period. Any Anglo-Saxon influence, in his view, had merely been a brief interlude between imperial Roman Britain and Roman Catholic Britain. Belloc’s explanation of these Roman origins provided the foundation for his overarching thesis that England was Roman in root as well as religion and that the Protestant Reformation was therefore a cataclysmic event because it severed from the Roman trunk an original limb. Britain was the only province of the Roman Empire, Belloc often noted, that had sided with the Reformers in the sixteenth century.67 Belloc emphasized that England’s ties with the European mainland and the Roman Church had remained strong from the time of Saint Augustine’s arrival in 597 into the second millennium. Thus, for Belloc, the Norman invasion had not represented the rupture that Whig historians had portrayed. Whereas for prominent nineteenth-century scholars such as John Richard Green, author of the popular Short History of the English People (1874), Edward the Confessor, who reigned from 1042 to 1066, was “last King of the old English stock,” Belloc emphasized that Edward’s mother was Norman. Whereas Green maintained the legitimacy of Harold’s claim to the throne in 1066 following Edward’s death, Belloc upheld William’s right to the kingship, contending that Edward had promised the crown to William and accepting the notion that Harold himself had sworn to support the Norman’s

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

45

claim. For Green, William and the Normans had enslaved the native English, leading to one hundred fifty years of rule “by foreign kings”—the title of one of the chapters of his Short History—but for Belloc, they had essentially created the English nation-state, unifying a weak, decentralized, feudal kingdom through the strength of their innovative monarchy.68 Belloc’s Normans, rather than a disaster for the natives, had inaugurated in England the Middle Ages, the rebirth of civilization after centuries of cultural hibernation. Belloc’s medieval England was not inferior to the contemporary world; rather, the medieval era represented the height of human achievement. “The thirteenth century,” he observed in his Europe and the Faith (1920), had been the “flower of our race”: “Everywhere Europe was renewed; there were new white walls around the cities, new white Gothic churches in the towns, new castles on the hills, law codified, the classics rediscovered, the questions of philosophy sprung to activity and producing in their first vig­ our, as it were, the summit of expository power in St. Thomas, surely the strongest, the most virile, intellect which our European blood has given to the world.” Indeed, while Belloc thus emphasized the artistic and intellectual achievements of medieval society, he singled out the economic life of the age for special praise: “Our property in land and instruments was well divided among many or all; we produced the peasant; we maintained the independent craftsman; we founded coöperative industry.” Well-distributed property, an independent peasantry, and self-supporting craftsmen were for Belloc the foundation of any healthy economic order and thus of a stable and just society.69 Although the medieval economic order earned Belloc’s admiration, it was the organization of English government that in his estimation had accounted for this equitable distribution of property. Medieval England had flourished economically, he argued, primarily because powerful monarchs had combined with the moral authority of the Church to prevent property from accumulating in the hands of the few. In England in particular, Belloc emphasized, a series of strong kings, such as Henry I, had protected the rights and property of common men against the predatory wealth of merchants and nobility. The Church

46

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

had assisted the monarchy, functioning from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries as both the “vital principle of civilization” and the guardian of “popular custom and traditional morals.” The kings had provided the physical and legal power while the Church had contributed the moral might and spiritual leadership.70 Belloc continued his attack on the myths that had formed the English historical consciousness in his analysis of the Reformation. He denied that Protestantism had possessed any popular basis. England had been a fundamentally Catholic society rather than a proto­Protestant one when Henry VIII broke with the Roman Church in 1534 over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon: Put yourself into the shoes of a sixteenth century Englishman in the midst of the Reformation, and what do you perceive? A society wholly Catholic in tradition, lax and careless in Catholic practice; irritated and enlivened here and there by a few furious preachers, or by a few enthusiastic scholars, at once devoted to and in terror of civil government; intensely national; in all roots and traditions of its civilization, Roman. For Belloc, then, the Protestantization of England had been the work of a tiny minority, a “few furious preachers” and a “few enthusiastic scholars,” who had used their influence to undermine eventually the hold Catholicism had retained over the English people. Between 1534 and 1620 the Tudor cult of civil power had combined, first, with the “violent economic revolution” sparked by the dissolution of church property and, second, with the increase in national feeling engendered by the long conflict with Spain to transform England into a fundamentally Protestant nation. The only widespread popular aspects of England’s Protestantization, Belloc argued, had been the affection for the Crown and the passion against Spain. The masses of Englishmen had adopted a taste for neither Protestant theology nor liturgy. Even the patriotism that the Spanish Armada had aroused had not involved Protestantism per se but had represented only the increased nationalism of the English people.71

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

47

For Belloc, that other great English national myth, the Gunpowder Plot, was another example of the pernicious influence of the same small group of powerful Protestants. He maintained that the plot was the work of Robert Cecil, James I’s chief minister. He argued that Cecil had found the new king’s toleration for Catholicism excessive. Although Belloc acknowledged that he had no proof for this allegation, he hypothesized nonetheless that Cecil’s agents had nurtured the conspiracy to blow up Parliament in order to discredit Catholicism and force the king to persecute Catholics. Guy Fawkes and his Catholic co-conspirators had merely been pawns in Cecil’s scheme. Belloc insisted that the plot had accomplished Cecil’s purpose so well that he must have provoked it.72 Not only had there been no popular Protestantism in England and no Catholic plot to blow up Parliament, for Belloc there had been none of the Stuart pretensions to absolutism that had provided another stone in the foundation of Whig history. Belloc argued instead that the new oligarchy had destroyed the power and authority of the Crown long before James’s accession to the throne of England in 1603. By then the Crown had no longer possessed the financial resources to contain the powerful new aristocracy. The subsequent civil war had therefore merely completed the destruction of royal authority, eliminating any remaining threat to oligarchic government in England. The consequences of the rebellion that had begun with the Protestant Reformation and culminated in the “death of the monarchy” were for Belloc appalling: “the abomination of industrialism; the loss of land and capital by the people in great districts of Europe; the failure of modern discovery to serve the end of man; the series of larger and still larger wars following in a rapidly rising scale of severity and destruction—till the dead are now counted in tens of millions; the increasing chaos and misfortune of society,” all the ills that he attributed to modern society. The centuries following the Reformation had been but a continuing downward spiral.73 Implicit in the Bellocian interpretation of English and European history was the solution to these problems. Something of that society which had functioned best both economically and politically

48

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

needed to be re-created. Belloc argued quite explicitly that the society of the Middle Ages had been not only best suited to the European temperament but also more truly English than the society of post­Reformation England. Pre-Reformation England, in contrast to contemporary England, “was not an England of squires; it was not an England of landlords, it was still an England of Englishmen.” England in its essence therefore was not Protestant, as the post-Reformation English historical consciousness would have it; it was Catholic, as was all that was best in Europe. This was the sentiment underlying Belloc’s attacks on the myths that had formed England’s sense of its past. “Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish,” Belloc concluded in his Europe and the Faith, and he might have said the same about England in particular.74 What to make, then, of Belloc’s historical work? First, a brief for Belloc. He was responding in his history of England directly to Green and the popular Whig historians of the nineteenth century. Although he admitted that this school’s influence had recently begun to collapse in the academy, he feared that it continued to hold the popular imagination. Belloc’s historical writing ought therefore to be compared not with subsequent historians who paid greater attention both to sources and to detail and were more circumspect in their arguments about eras such as the fifth and sixth centuries in Britain for which sources remained scant but to historians such as Green and his lesser disciples who created sweeping narratives for popular audiences based on narrow documentation. Belloc, therefore, was replying in kind to Green.75 Such a defense of Belloc cannot, however, excuse his deficiencies as a historian. If the Whigs were intent on portraying modern English history as the triumph of Protestantism and parliamentary democracy over ecclesiastical and monarchical absolutism, culminating in the unbroken march of political and economic progress, then Belloc was equally focused on depicting medieval society as the summit of English history and post-Reformation English history as a continual decline from this golden age. Neither his insistence on countering the likes of Green on virtually every point of English history nor his re-

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

49

ductive portrayal of post-Reformation history was very persuasive. While the Whig historians who were the target of Belloc’s invective were often too simplistic, Belloc himself was just as bad if not worse. If the history of England from the sixteenth century involved more than the progressive development of political freedom for all and economic prosperity for an increasing majority, then certainly the history of those centuries also concerned more than the continual concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, a process masked by the granting of political liberties to a people who had lost their property and thus their economic freedom. Most damning for Belloc was his acknowledgment that he had purposely exaggerated in his history. As he admitted to the historian H. A. L. Fisher, “My long tendency to see everything in terms of civilization has now driven me mad, and the First Volume of my History of England—oh shameful insolence!—makes out pretty well everything to be Greek or Roman.” This was, he informed Fisher, “an error on the right side.” To any honest and responsible historian, such a conscious manipulation of the historical record was inexcusable.76 What Belloc was writing, therefore, was not so much history as advocacy. Everything that connected England to Rome, religiously or culturally, was to be exaggerated while the Teutonic or Protestant was to be minimized. The lengths to which Belloc was willing to go were illustrated in his treatment of the Gunpowder Plot. The notion that Cecil, rather than a group of Catholic extremists, had been responsible was not a new one: it had been proposed in the immediate aftermath of the plot’s discovery and repeated periodically ever since. Most recently, before Belloc, a Jesuit scholar, John Gerard, had promoted this theory in 1896, prompting a reply from S. R. Gardiner, the formidable historian of Stuart England, who had convincingly refuted Gerard’s work. As Belloc himself at least acknowledged, there existed little or no evidence, in 1605 or in 1925, of Cecil’s involvement in the plot. Indeed, evidence to the contrary was available. Though Parliament did pass severe penal legislation against Catholics in response to the conspiracy, the new laws were not strictly enforced, as they could have been if Cecil had truly instigated the plot in order to destroy

50

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

English Catholicism. Belloc’s unfounded speculations were a dangerous path on which to tread, not least because they tend always to undermine for readers a historian’s authority. It was assertions such as this that rightly provoked the distrust of many historians for Belloc’s work. In the final analysis, Belloc, in his zeal to overturn the myths of Protestant England, had ended up writing propaganda rather than history. Given his talents, he could have done much better.77 Belloc’s history did not have to be accurate, however, to be significant for the forging of the English Catholic intellectual community. In his hands history became a branch of apologetics. His historical analysis was not just a means of convincing his readers of the necessity of Distributist economics and monarchist politics; it redefined English national identity. Belloc employed history to reestablish England as a Catholic nation. England’s Protestant identity became a disastrous four-hundred-year detour. Many of the writers who were to make up the English Catholic intellectual community were converts to Catholicism. The converts, in many cases, were the ones who agreed most strongly with Belloc’s interpretation of English history. Although they did not make this explicit, one might surmise that Bellocian history was a comfort to them, letting them know that just because they were leaving the Church of England for the Church of Rome, they were not abandoning their English heritage. For the English Catholic intellectual community, this was the legacy of Belloc’s vision of history. The most astonishing feature of Belloc’s history for the reader familiar with his French Revolutionary biographies, or even The Servile State, was the extent to which he was promoting monarchy. This pronounced appreciation for monarchy reflected Belloc’s increased disillusion with parliamentary democracy in Britain. Since writing The Party System and The Servile State, he had reflected more on the possibility of political and economic reform. In the former volume he had continued to express his belief that Britain’s parliamentary democracy could be redeemed, through auditing of the party funds and the like. In the latter volume he had been less sanguine, but neither had he condemned entirely the present political system. During the

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

51

succeeding decade, however, Belloc became convinced that Parliament was too corrupt to reform itself. A combination of the prewar Marconi scandal, subsequent concerns about plutocratic opposition to defeating Germany during the war, and the postwar consolidation of the “servile state” caused him to give up on parliamentary democracy. Even before the war, Belloc’s disenchantment with British parliamentary democracy had come to a head. In June 1912 Belloc had resigned the editorship of his muckraking weekly newspaper, the EyeWitness, and sold his stake in the enterprise. Cecil Chesterton succeeded him and renamed the journal the New Witness in November 1912. Soon after taking over, the younger Chesterton launched a campaign against government corruption in the case of the recent Marconi contract. An 8 August 1912 article accused Rufus Isaacs, the attorney general, and Herbert Samuel, the postmaster-general, of corruption. Specifically, the Eye-Witness alleged that Samuel had granted the Marconi Company a British government contract to construct a series of state-owned wireless-telegraphy stations throughout the empire, despite better bids from competitors, in order to enrich the company’s managing director, Godfrey Isaacs, a brother of the attorney general. Subsequently it came out that Rufus Isaacs, Lloyd George, then chancellor of the Exchequer, and the master of Elibank, the government Whip, had all traded in shares of the American Marconi Company, shares that they had bought from Rufus and Godfrey’s brother Harry, who had himself bought them directly from Godfrey.78 Not content with charging the government ministers with insider trading, Cecil Chesterton then attacked Godfrey Isaacs’s record as a businessman in January 1913. Someone at the New Witness— Chester­ton denied it was he—even paraded men in sandwich boards detailing the Marconi managing director’s “ghastly failures” outside Isaacs’s office. Isaacs successfully sued Chesterton for libel in a case decided on 9 June 1913. That same month, a parliamentary committee investigating the allegations against Lloyd George and Rufus Isaacs concluded, in a party-line vote of 8–6, that the ministers had acted in good faith, and a subsequent Tory effort to pass a motion in the House of Commons condemning Lloyd George and Isaacs failed, with voting

52

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

again on strict party lines. Belloc unsurprisingly remained convinced of the ministers’ guilt, and their actions, combined with their acquittal in the House of Commons, convinced him all the more that parliamentary democracy was hopelessly corrupt, beyond saving.79 The Great War only hardened Belloc’s animosity to British politics, and its aftermath, in particular the Versailles Treaty, increased the Catholic dimension of both his critique of contemporary politics and society and his prescriptions for reform and renewal. For Belloc­— who ignored the inconvenient fact that Protestant Britain was one of the chief opponents of Germany and Catholic Austria, its leading ally—the conflict represented an apocalyptic struggle between Protestant Prussia and Catholic Europe. “The war is the end of the great schism of the sixteenth century,” he maintained, “and its morals on the German side are the last morals of Protestantism.” Belloc anticipated that the war would put an end to the “odious ‘tame’ Catholicism” in the Catholic parts of Germany that had become subservient to Prussia. The war, he hoped, would provide the opportunity for ­England to throw off finally the pestilent, barbarian influence of Prussia, to ally herself with Catholic Europe, and to help rebuild a Europe in which Catholic France, Poland, and Italy would be the most significant nation-states.80 Belloc feared, however, that the “financiers,” whom he insisted continued to dominate the governments not just in Britain but across Europe, desired only to maintain a German market for their commerce. He worried during the war, therefore, that they would try to precipitate a negotiated peace that would leave Prussia wounded but still powerful—and thus even more dangerous. “It has been clearly seen,” Belloc argued in his preface to Cecil Chesterton’s Perils of Peace, “that private interests in trade—the advantages of private fortunes—have been allowed to weigh, if not against the commonwealth, at any rate on a par with the interests of the commonwealth.” He concluded: We have seen it in the handling of freights; we have seen it in the exceptions to the blockade; we have seen it in the field of contracts. But this evil is particularly apparent in the hesitation

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

53

shown by many when they discuss the commercial terms to be imposed upon the enemy, and their fear lest a complete victory should interfere with private gain of commerce. Belloc continued throughout the war to rail against the defeatist attitudes that, he believed, English commercial magnates with German business interests were promoting—particularly through their domination of the press. Although Belloc himself did not refer specifically to Jewish financiers and businessmen, the point was made by others in the New Witness. The extent to which Belloc shared such views is treated below.81 His friend Cecil Chesterton’s Perils of Peace represented many of Belloc’s own beliefs concerning the proper ends of the war. Chesterton and Belloc wanted a Carthaginian peace—under the terms of which Prussia (as distinguished from Germany as a whole) needed to be “utterly broken and humiliated, incapable of further resistance, and compelled to beg from those she has wronged such contemptuous mercy as they may see fit to grant her.” Germany was to be partitioned into its constitutive states. Poland was to be reconstituted, and the new state was to include Silesia and Posen, making it as large as or larger than the old Polish kingdom at the height of its power in the seventeenth century. As for Austria, it was to be stripped of its Slav and Italian provinces, including Bohemia, but the Hapsburg monarchy was to be retained, and to Austria proper was to be added Bavaria, creating a Catholic German nation-state powerful enough to resist future Prussian aggression. Prussia was thus to be kept completely isolated—as Cecil Chesterton put it, “reduced to her original territory of sand and marsh,” treated “as the Americans treated Indian territory,” a “reservation of barbarism.”82 Although the Versailles Treaty failed to meet all his ambitions, Belloc harbored high hopes for the possibilities of a revitalized continent. Writing in August 1920, he proclaimed, “The tide in Europe has turned and is beginning to flow again towards the right things and especially in reaction towards Catholic culture the death of Prussia is an enormous effect.” He remained pessimistic with regard to

54

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

England, however, lamenting in late 1919 that at home they had lost the battle against the “servile condition.” He had hoped to start an explicitly Catholic review but had been unable to raise the necessary funds. Disillusioned by this temporary setback, Belloc commented, “I think it wastes energy to continue to attack when you are defeated.” “The right thing to do then is to retreat and save what can be saved.” “The reaction to the advantage of the English,” Belloc argued, “will not come from within the country, for its living forms are dead.” “It will come from outside,” he concluded, “and only when it comes will it be worthwhile supplementing that reaction by work from within.” The continental nations bore the scars of unprecedented carnage but were therefore much riper for the type of radical change that Belloc advocated. England had of course suffered as well but not to the extent that France and Germany had. At home, Belloc believed, the same plutocrats and their political puppets had retained and even consolidated their power.83 Belloc was pessimistic about the possibilities for reform at home, but he nonetheless continued to ponder what would need to be done politically and economically to transform England. Even before the war Belloc had begun to address the problem of providing at the very least a strategy for the creation of the “distributist state,” that is, one defined by widely distributed private property. After the war he continued to fine-tune his ideas for radical economic reform. Could the “servile state” be countermanded, and if so, how could this be accomplished? Was Bellocian Distributism, with its ideal of the village and the farm, the individual craftsman and the small farmer, merely a negative political philosophy, standing in opposition to the modern political and economic regimes but ultimately incapable of positive realization? Indeed, was Belloc merely a utopian, building medievalist castles in the air, his dream in the final analysis unsubstantial? Belloc had recognized and responded to this problem even before the Great War. In late 1912, soon after publication of The Servile State, he had written an article titled “Restoration of Property.” Not surprisingly, given his high regard for the medieval economic system and the ideal of the peasant farmer, his scheme centered on the

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

55

redistribution of land to create large numbers of independent, self­sufficient farmers. In both his 1912 article and his subsequent work on the same question, Belloc emphasized the radical nature of his schemes for the redistribution of property. “In other words, you must here, as everywhere, reverse the present current of economic life,” he maintained. “You must do the opposite of what was done by those who began the industrialization of the modern world—you must act in a fashion which they would have called reactionary.” “That spirit of reaction must run through all our effort at the restoration of property,” he concluded, “if there is to be any chance of its even partial success.”84 In part, Belloc’s plans with regard to land drew on the successful Wyndham Act of 1903. His closest friend in Parliament, the former Tory minister George Wyndham, had been the architect of this act, by which the government had financed the buyout of their landlords by Irish tenant farmers. In order to promote a redistribution of landed property, Belloc followed the Wyndham Act in advocating that the government subsidize those wishing to purchase from the great landowners small plots on which to live and farm. Belloc also called for the state to tax large properties at a punitive rate to prevent land from reaccumulating in the hands of the few. Small plots of land that the owners themselves farmed, in contrast, needed to remain relatively tax-free. In a later volume, The Restoration of Property (1936), Belloc warned that the government needed also to ensure that money lent to finance purchases of property by prospective small farmers remained at low interest rates; otherwise the banks would merely be replacing the big landowners as the landlords.85 In The Servile State, Belloc’s discussion of property had centered on land. In his subsequent article and even more in his later volume, The Restoration of Property, he defined property more broadly to include capital. He therefore proposed a number of reforms that he hoped would lead to a better distribution of capital as well. He began by identifying factors that left the majority of individuals at a distinct disadvantage when it came to capital investment. Low interest rates made investment much more attractive to the wealthy,

56

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

who could benefit from the low returns by investing very large sums. The wealthy could also afford to meet the large commission expenses needed to invest, including the fees of clerks, brokers, and lawyers. The high cost of borrowing small amounts of money, the only sums the less well-off were likely to attempt to borrow, he argued, contributed to the problem as well, as did the better information on investments available to the wealthy. Belloc called for the government to counteract these disadvantages of the small investor through tariffs and graduated taxation. New and small businesses, he urged, ought to pay minimal taxes, while their larger competitors needed to be subject to progressively increasing rates. He also advocated a graduated capital gains tax, minimal or nonexistent at the lower end but steeply rising. In order to promote a more immediate transfer of capital from the wealthy, he called in addition for the state to take on the roles of guarantor, broker, and adviser, acting on behalf of the small investor. With this emphasis on government action to ensure that capital would be more widely held, Belloc was promoting, as the historian John McCarthy has argued, a “people’s capitalism” rather than just a medieval agrarian utopia. Belloc recognized, however, that many of his closest followers rejected any such accommodation with modern, capitalist political economy. He acknowledged that many of his more radical compatriots “will say that shareholding in large concerns, however well distributed, is a most imperfect way of realising economic freedom.” He admitted the justness of their argument that “true and full economic freedom is only present when a man himself possesses and himself uses the instruments of his craft,” agreeing that whereas the craftsman remained “in full control, personal and alive,” the shareholder’s control was only “distant, indirect and largely impersonal.” Yet, while allowing that solutions such as shareholding were “not in harmony with full economic freedom,” Belloc maintained that his “policy of emancipation must deal with things as they are.” He emphasized that “our effort at restoring property does not aim at perfection nor even at any large universal upheaval of the existing system.” “It aims,” he observed, “at making a beginning.” “The carpenter with £150 a year

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

57

from public bonds,” he concluded, “is in a much more independent position than the same carpenter dependent on his craft alone” because “he has reserves.”86 It is worth emphasizing that in proposing his schemes for the “restoration of property” Belloc favored government action. It has been tempting, because of his critique of the nascent welfare state, to view Belloc as a libertarian. For him, however, classical liberalism had led directly to the plutocracy against which he railed. Like Leo XIII, whose encyclical Rerum Novarum remained fundamental to Catholic social thought, and not least to his own political economy, Belloc believed that the state needed to restore through legislation the property and property rights that the masses of men had held via custom and tradition before the advent of the modern world. Property needed to be reestablished and maintained, and only the state could accomplish this. The real enemy for Belloc was not socialism, nor was it the authority of the state as such—although with Leo XIII he was suspicious of government power if not checked by the intermediary institutions of family, guild, and Church—but rather the plutocrats who dominated modern England, both politically and economically. From the perspective of England in the 1920s and 1930s, Bellocian political economy was perhaps more convincing than it would later seem. The idea that capitalism not only had deteriorated into monopoly in the hands of giant trusts but also had failed to provide the prosperity promised by political economists was quite compelling, and accounted also for the growing appeal of communist socialism among many intellectuals of the period. In fact, Belloc, if not some of his more radical disciples, had provided a plausible plan for the redistribution of property and the establishment of what they came to call a “Distributist” state. Belloc’s “people’s capitalism,” with its emphasis on the state’s targeting of taxes to establish and maintain wide ownership not only of landed property but of capital as well, proves much more credible than the extreme agrarianism of some of his followers, several of whom are examined in chapter 2. Although one might question whether a tax code that prohibitively punished economic success would prove ultimately beneficial to the commonwealth, Belloc was quite clear that it

58

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

was not the size of the gross national product that mattered to him but rather that each family or individual possessed a minimal amount of property, enough to guarantee economic independence. Ultimately, Belloc was asking people to choose economic freedom, which he defined as possession of private property—ideally land but possibly, he conceded, capital—over the security that liberals and socialists had offered. Without the economic freedom that property provided, he argued, the political freedom extended during the previous century was useless. Belloc was under no illusions concerning the possibility of any immediate success. The complete reversal of the current economic system lay in the distant future. He maintained, however, that he would be satisfied if he was able to persuade a handful of intelligent and capable individuals who could act as further propagandists for the cause. The sea change that Belloc desired, however, required more than simply asserting an economic program. The pluto­ crats and their puppets in Parliament would not allow property to be redistributed. To establish the foundations for any future implementation of his scheme of economic reform, England would have to be politically transformed. In 1920, the same year in which the Treaty of Versailles went into effect, Belloc published his House of Commons and Monarchy. In this volume he argued that the House of Commons had effectively ceased to function, that it could not be reformed, and that only a monarchy, which would perhaps be assisted by representative corporate bodies, could replace it. Although Parliament had governed the nation well for several centuries, it had never been a representative body, according to Belloc. Rather it had always been the preserve of an oligarchy. An oligarchy, however, could govern effectively only if it was aristocratic, in the sense that it represented excellence. If truly aristocratic, an oligarchic government would be respected, both by the members of the oligarchy and by those they ruled, and would therefore possess the moral authority that would allow it to function. According to Belloc, however, this moral authority no longer existed in Britain. The governing class had disintegrated. Wealth had replaced principle, and the oligarchs in their pursuit of wealth had suf-

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

59

fered a “grave loss of dignity.” As a result it had become impossible for the nation to respect its governors. The rest of the nation no longer wanted to be governed “by the revered few.” “The House of Commons,” Belloc asserted, “is going down into a sort of tomb, wherein it survives like a skeleton the ritual alone of what was once living movement and the names alone of what were once actual things.”87 The only potential replacements for an aristocratic government, in Belloc’s estimation, were a truly democratic government or a monarchy. Nations previously governed by an oligarchy, however, had never been able to acquire the democratic spirit, the necessary interest in public affairs. Centuries of oligarchic rule resulted in a passivity, according to Belloc, a lack of the corporative initiative needed for democratic government to function. In any case, he maintained, there were “no signs of Democracy in modern England,” and one would “wait in vain” for them. Belloc suspected instead that new corporate councils would take on some of the responsibilities of the House of Commons. He pointed out as examples the growing influence of the Council of Trades Unions, as well the importance of professional guilds such as those of the lawyers, physicians, and teachers, all of which were increasingly involved with government, often as expert advisers. These “subsidiary bodies,” however, could never effectively govern because they represented divergent interests. They could ultimately only advise, council, check, and support. They needed a superior authority to guide them and to settle disputes among them. In the absence of an aristocratic body or a true democratic alternative, the only solution was monarchy.88 Belloc’s definition of monarchy was quite distinctive. His monarch was not necessarily a hereditary king, nor need he or she hold the position for life. By “monarch,” Belloc meant instead “any man or woman or child, but normally an adult man, in possession of his faculties, who is responsible ultimately to the commonwealth for the general conduct and preservation of the commonwealth at one moment.” According to this definition, the United States provided examples of monarchy at all levels of government: “the Mayor of the American city, the Governor of the American State, and the President

60

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

of the American Republic in action: all Monarchs, if ever there were such!” What was not evident was how the Bellocian monarch was to be selected. Belloc himself was agnostic on the question, noting that there were several options, including elections. He was clearer regarding the minimum term of office: four years, with seven the ideal, and even a lifetime appointment possible.89 Whether the monarch was elected or selected, in office for four years or until he or she died, monarchy was a necessity because a functioning government demanded an individual who could make the final decisions and take responsibility for them. One person needed to be accountable for the actions of the government, and that person also needed to possess the security of office that would allow him or her to remain above the fray. In contemporary Britain, Belloc lamented, there was no one ultimately responsible, no one with whom the “buck stopped.” The prime minister had no real power, and members of Parliament could (and had) responded to corruption and ineffective governance by blaming their peers, an endless passing of the buck. There was no one to take responsibility for the failures of contemporary parliamentary democracy. A monarch would solve this problem, according to Belloc.90 Belloc’s assertion that a monarch would be necessarily accountable to the populace, however, was counterintuitive. Would one man not be easier to corrupt than many men or an entire institution? Indeed, although a monarch with a limited term of office and subject to election might well be accountable to the people, a monarch for life, to which Belloc was not opposed, would not be. The mere fact that citizens would hold him responsible for the government’s actions does not mean that these citizens would have any ability to remove him from office. Belloc admitted this weakness but claimed that the alternative, the present decayed system, was worse. Nor was Belloc necessarily opposed to a despotic monarchy. Although he hoped that local autonomy would predominate, with the trades unions and professional councils governing locally and the monarch acting only as their supervisor and arbiter, he acknowledged that monarchy, if it came to England, “may also (and more probably I fear), be unchecked by such chambers.”91

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

61

Given both his call for monarchy in Britain and his willingness to do so even as he acknowledged that such a system might well be despotic, it was hardly surprising that Belloc excitedly welcomed Mussolini’s Fascist revolution in Italy. Indeed, in June 1922, some four months before Mussolini’s March on Rome, Belloc not only predicted the rise of such a dictator but actually hoped for such a person, maintaining that “what will save our civilization when it comes will be some new line of Dynasties sprung from energetic individual men who shall seize power.” For Belloc, the Italian Revolt, as he called it, represented a “warning to the Parliamentary humbug with its secret plutocratic control, its tiresome corrupt mediocrities, its gross corruption and its cynical contempt for popular liberties and the popular will.” Although he acknowledged that a reinvigorated, powerful Italy could present a threat to British interests in the Mediterranean— Malta in particular, he observed, remained central to British access to the Suez Canal and thus to India—the Fascists themselves delighted Belloc. “Italian manhood,” he argued, echoing the Fascists’ own overheated rhetoric, “has been specially exasperated by the parliamentarian filth.” “At last the brains and manhood of the nation,” Belloc claimed, “could stand it no longer, and all that crowd which the later nineteenth century had known to nausea, the ‘advanced’ journalist, the high-brow reformer, the Earnest Woman, the militant socialist, the party fund banker, the inevitable Jewish cabinet minister, the pimp-secretary, were swept away into the common rubbish heap.” “It was,” he concluded, “high time.” Mussolini himself could hardly have bettered Belloc’s description of his revolution.92 Throughout the 1920s Belloc continued to defend Mussolini’s government against its English critics. Of particular note was the visit that he paid to the Italian dictator himself in Rome in 1924. Belloc recorded his reaction to his interview with Mussolini in The Cruise of the Nona, in which he included the Fascist leader on his short list of the great men of the age, the savior of Italy. “What a contrast,” Belloc observed after meeting him, “with the sly and shifty talk of your parliamentarian!” “What a sense of decision, of sincerity,” he delightedly noted, “of serving the nation, and of serving it towards

62

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

a known end with a definite will!” “Meeting this man after talking to the parliamentarians in other countries,” he concluded, “was like meeting with some athletic friend of one’s boyhood after an afternoon with racing touts; or it was like coming upon good wine in a Pyrenean village after compulsory drafts of marsh water in the mosses of the moors above, during some long day’s travel over the range.”93 Italian Fascism and its leader had exerted an undeniable influence on Belloc, but his was not an entirely blind adulation. Mussolini’s diatribes against majority rule, one of which Belloc had received during his audience with the Italian, particularly troubled him. When Mussolini had explained to him that majority government was “ridiculous” and “immoral”—“evil in itself”—Belloc had found the statement “extreme and ill-founded.” He maintained in contrast that under certain conditions the case for majority rule remained not only unobjectionable but also in fact morally “unanswerable.” Mussolini, Belloc believed, had rightly reacted against parliamentary government, which Belloc called that “ludicrous abuse of the doctrine of majority,” but he had wrongly dismissed those instances in which majority rule remained the most legitimate form of government.94 Belloc’s suspicions about Italy’s Fascist government increased as he became more aware of its true nature. In 1935 he admitted that he had been prone to overstate the case for Italy. “I have no doubt,” he explained to Maurice Baring during the Italo-Abyssinian War, “that I exaggerate a little on the Italian side—but there is always a tendency to do that when one is playing a lone hand, otherwise one is not heard.” Indeed, he told Baring that he regretted what Mussolini’s military was doing to the “old native kingdom” of Ethiopia. Belloc believed that dictatorial powers and restrictions on liberty such as those Mussolini had employed were appropriate only in emergencies. As the Fascist dictatorship extended into the 1930s he therefore became more critical, at least in private, of the Italian regime. After a March 1939 visit to Rome for the papal coronation of Pius XII, Belloc rejoiced on leaving Italy and entering France that he was back in a free country again. “Despotism,” he concluded, “is excellent as a sharp momentary remedy, but it is no more a permanent food than raw brandy.”95

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

63

In view of his misgivings and criticisms of Italian Fascism, why did Belloc for so long defend Mussolini’s government? The answer is twofold. First, neither the violence of the Fascists nor Mussolini’s autocratic rule, both of which outraged many in England and throughout the democratic world, troubled Belloc. In his biographies of Danton and Robespierre, he had defended consistently the authority of France’s revolutionary leaders to employ their power against the enemies of the Revolution. Even the Terror itself was justifiable for Belloc because the democratic and egalitarian ideals of the Revolution had faced a serious threat from both the aristocracy within France and the armies of neighboring nations. Nor did he find anything inherently wrong with the employment of violence in the attainment of political objectives. European nations, he had long argued, were in the grip of dysfunctional, corrupt, plutocrat-dominated governments. Revolutions would perhaps be necessary in order to overthrow these governments, and revolutions, he acknowledged, invariably involved violence and even injustice. Second, and more important, Belloc’s apologies for Italian Fascism must be understood in the context of what he was attempting in England. Just as his historical exaggerations can be properly grasped only in relation to the popular nineteenth-century historians against whom he was reacting, so his attitude to Fascism can be understood more accurately as part of his attack on the perceived ills of English politics and economics. Belloc was a critic of the British government much more than he was a proponent of Fascism. His admission that he had exaggerated the case for Italy illustrated that his apologies for the Italian dictatorship ought to be interpreted in the same light as his historical hyperbole. In the same manner he had overstated the case in his attempt to dismantle the entire structure of the popular nineteenth-century Whig history of England, he had embellished his defense of Mussolini. In each case, the true targets remained the shibboleths of contemporary English politics and economics. None of this, of course, excuses the egregious short-sightedness of his apologies for Mussolini. What was evident to many in England soon after Mussolini seized power took Belloc more than a decade to

64

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

grasp, so eager was he to welcome this “energetic individual” who would save civilization. Not only Belloc’s apologies for Mussolini in the 1920s but also, and more particularly, his admiration for the Italian regime’s acknowledgment of papal authority proved of enormous consequence in molding the ideology of the Catholic intellectual community. Insofar as Mussolini’s regime broke with the anticlericalism that had marked the Italian nation-state since its inception, Belloc and the English Catholic writers who embraced his views were more than willing to defend the Fascists. The Lateran Treaty (1929) and similar apparently pro-Church measures enacted by authoritarian governments in other traditionally Catholic continental nations such as Austria, Portugal, and Spain (and later Vichy France) combined to help create the idea of a Latin Catholic bloc of continental nations. Indeed, the story of the postwar generation’s flirtation with the notion of a Latin Catholic bloc was central to the story of the English Catholic intellectual community in the late 1930s and into the first years of World War II. Before turning in the next chapter to the postwar English Catholic writers who took their lead from Belloc it is necessary to examine a final aspect of Belloc’s thought—one related to his dalliance with Mussolini. For not only has Belloc been criticized for his philo-­Fascism, but he has also been accused of anti-Semitism. This indictment, like that of Fascism, is too serious to be ignored. These allegations were damaging enough in the post–World War II era to cast their shadow across the entire community of English Catholic intellectuals. It must therefore be treated in some detail. Any discussion of Belloc and anti-Semitism must focus on the period 1912–22, that is, from the Marconi affair to the publication of Belloc’s volume The Jews. During the Marconi scandal, the New Witness’s attacks on the Isaacs and Samuel had been scurrilously anti-Semitic. Belloc himself, to his credit, was often critical of Cecil Chesterton’s weekly in this regard. During the Marconi affair, he objected to the New Witness’s attacks, observing that “detestation of the Jewish cosmopolitan influence, especially through finance, is one thing,” but “mere anti-semitism and a mere attack on a Jew because

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

65

he is a Jew is quite another matter.” During the war, he had again lamented the “Jew-baiting” of the New Witness, in particular, the policy of attacking any Jewish businessmen with German roots, even if, as Belloc tried to explain in one case, such a person was actually an integral contributor to the British war effort. G. K. Chesterton replaced his brother as editor after the latter’s death in 1918 but retained many of the same contributors. Of particular note was Cecil Chesterton’s widow, J. K. Prothero, an anti-Semite of the crudest sort. It was in fact Belloc who finally convinced G. K. Chesterton, who had continued to publish Prothero because of his loyalty to his brother, to demote her because of her violent anti-Semitism from political commentator to drama critic, where she could do much less harm.96 Belloc himself, however, harbored an evident antipathy to the Jewish people. If he rejected Cecil Chesterton’s dislike of “a Jew because he is a Jew,” he did not balk at expressing his own “detestation of the Jewish cosmopolitan influence.” That Jewish financiers exercised a dangerous influence over the governments of Europe was an article of faith for him. The most striking example of this supposedly pernicious power was the Boer War, which Belloc argued had been “openly and undeniably provoked and promoted by Jewish interests in South Africa.” Indeed, from the time of that war, particularly in the quartet of satirical political novels of which Emmanuel Burden (1904) was the first, the Jewish financier, usually marked by his “hooked nose” and foreign accent, became a stock character (or more aptly a caricature) in Belloc’s fiction. Even as late as 1929, when he was penning another novel, The Missing Masterpiece, Belloc was writing to G. K. Chesterton, his illustrator, concerning the need to make certain characters, the “swindlers and fakers and stealers,” “recognizable as Jews without mentioning that they are.”97 The roots of Belloc’s anti-Semitism lay, not surprisingly, in his association with Paul Déroulède’s Ligue des Patriotes, which had turned aggressively anti-Semitic during the Dreyfus Affair. To Belloc, the Dreyfusards, among whom French Jews, in defense of their coreligionist, were prominent, remained enemies of France. Dreyfus may have been innocent, Belloc admitted only grudgingly and long after the fact,

66

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

but his supporters had used the affair not only to embarrass the nation but also to weaken the military and so leave France vulnerable to any future belligerence from the hated Prussians. Indeed, Belloc maintained later that the Dreyfus case had precipitated the long-drawn-out Great War—“for it destroyed the French Intelligence Bureau and so permitted the German surprise on Mons and Charleroi.”98 The Dreyfus Affair, then, was the foundation of Belloc’s suspicion that the Jews constituted a separate nation, potentially disloyal to the states in which they lived, and it was on this notion that he based his subsequent analysis of the “Jewish problem.” In The Jews he maintained that the Jewish people could not be assimilated properly into other nations and argued that a solution to the “Jewish problem” had to be founded on the recognition of this fact. As to what such a recognition of Jewish difference would accomplish and how it would be carried out, Belloc remained uncertain. He asserted, however, that this separateness of the Jews ought not, at present, be defined legally by the state. “In my judgment,” he wrote, “the wrong decision would be that which would give precedence to legal change, to new definitions, to new institutions, and attempt out of them to build a new spirit.” Such a course would be unilateral, he warned, forced on the Jews, who would necessarily be coerced into accepting such changes in their legal status. If there were to be any separatist legislation, Belloc advised, it ought to “arise naturally out of a long practice and full recognition of the Jews as a separate people and of the accompaniment of that recognition with respect.” Therefore, he advocated first what he called a voluntary change in morals and social conventions, focused on the recognition that Jews were a separate nationality—a settlement, he acknowledged, “proposed with deliberate vagueness and softness” so as not to inflame already dangerous passions.99 Despite the deep-seated animosity that caused him to flirt with apartheid regarding the “Jewish problem,” in his volume on the Jews Belloc was also genuinely concerned about their plight. He was worried about what he viewed as a dangerous new phenomenon. Belloc had railed against the stereotypical Jewish financier and attacked the supposed Jewish influence over the national politics of England.

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

67

Now he detected a different breed, the thoroughgoing anti-Semite, the person who truly abhorred all Jews, simply because they were Jewish. Rather than persons outside the pale, figures to be ridiculed, the purveyors of this vicious hatred, Belloc feared, possessed a “vast numerical strength.” “The anti-Semite,” he maintained, “has become a strong political figure,” and it would therefore be “a grave and dangerous error at this moment to think his policy is futile.”100 Belloc’s great fear was that people would conclude that this new breed of anti-Semite would remain powerless, unable to act on its ­hatred. It was becoming clear to him, however, that this new breed could and would act against European Jews. Prophetically, he observed: The Anti-Semite can persecute, he can attack. With a sufficient force behind him he can destroy. In much of this destruction he would have, in a present state of feeling and in most countries, the mass of public opinion behind him. He could begin with a widespread examination of Jewish wealth and its origins and an equally widespread confiscation. He could use the dread of such confiscation as a weapon for compelling the divulgence of Jewish origins where a man desired to conceal them. He could do this not only in the case of the wealthy men, but, through the terror of wealthy men, over the whole field of the Jewish community. He could introduce registration and with it a segregation of the Jews. Inspired as he would be by no desire for a settlement agreeable to them, but solely for a settlement agreeable to himself, he could aim at that harsh settlement, and even though he might not reach his goal, it is not pleasant to envisage what he might do on his way to it. What Belloc described in this passage could have been a blueprint for the Nazi persecutions that began some ten years later, confirming and of course surpassing his worst fears.101 What, then, can we conclude about Belloc’s attitude to the Jews of Europe? First, he has not lacked for defenders against the charge of anti-Semitism. These have noted that Belloc had a Jewish woman as his secretary for many years and had a number of Jewish friends. They

68

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

have argued that the prejudice was common to many of his contemporaries. His advocates have also asserted that he had distinguished in his criticism between the vast majority of Jews and the cosmopolitan international financiers and traders who were his targets. None of these defenses, however, is very convincing. Belloc’s antipathy to the Jews was exceptional enough that he gained a reputation for anti‑Semitism among his contemporaries. Portraying Jews as “cosmopolitan financiers” was in itself a typical anti-Semitic trope. Leaving that aside, however, Belloc also failed to distinguish the Jewish masses from the minority that he caricatured as usurers and traitors. Indeed, he consistently argued that all Jews were aliens in Europe, that they could not be assimilated, that they constituted a separate nation, and that they lacked an attachment to the nations in which they resided.102 The one mitigating factor was Belloc’s outspoken abhorrence of violence against the Jewish people, which he made clear in The Jews. He was acutely aware of the increasingly hostile situation faced by European Jews even in 1922, a decade before the Nazis came to power. Indeed, William Rubinstein, a defender of the actions of the Catholic Church during the subsequent Holocaust and an accomplished historian of anti-Semitism, has argued that the position taken by Belloc toward Jews, the combination of his bigoted refusal to accept Jews as part of the nation and his opposition to violence against Jews, whether state or mob inspired, was of a piece with Catholic attitudes throughout Europe. While this anti-Semitism was appalling, Rubinstein has maintained, it was Catholic willingness to defend Jews against violence that accounted for the significantly higher rates of survival for Jewish people in traditionally Catholic nations during the Holocaust.103 Ultimately, however, one must conclude that Belloc’s belief in the separateness of Jews from other Europeans was itself a central part of the problem. In 1922, in expressing the view that Jews constituted a distinct nationality, Belloc argued that they were in serious danger. Yet during the Great War, the New Witness had used the idea that Jews were a separate nation to denounce them as disloyal, interested only in preserving their familial commercial interests rather than in winning the war. The notion that Jews could not be true citizens of

From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism

69

nations other than Zion was inherently anti-Semitic and contributed to the atmosphere of hostility toward the Jewish people that led to violence. Why could a Jew not remain devoted to his family and religious community, even when these transcended national borders, and yet still remain loyal to the nation-state of which he was a citizen? In the final analysis, it was actually quite remarkable that an English Roman Catholic such as Belloc was asserting the separate nationality of Jews and questioning their allegiance. The idea that Catholics maintained dual loyalties, and that ultimately it was to the Roman Church and the pope that they owed their allegiance, rather than to king or queen and country, often had been employed against Catholics in England. Indeed, during the height of the New Witness’s vicious campaign against European Jews, a perceptive correspondent pointed out the folly of English Catholics taking the position that Jews remained a distinct nationality loyal only to their coreligionists. “I suggest that certain ferocious Roman Catholics in Protestant England,” a Mr. H. F. Rubinstein observed dryly in a letter to the editor, “should, on the same principle, confirm their allegiance to the Pope and all that he stands for by removing themselves to a country officially under his spiritual authority.”104 In fact, Catholic loyalties would again be questioned largely as a result of Bellocian attitudes to the authoritarian governments that dominated a number of the traditionally Catholic nation-states of the continent during the interwar period—beginning, as has been noted, with Mussolini’s Italian Fascists in the 1920s. The concerns of many in England with Catholic allegiance to the British nation-state, however, would only be aroused in the last half of the following decade. The story of the 1920s involved instead the emergence of the English Catholic intellectual community.

— By the early 1920s, then, Belloc had completed his political transformation. In The Servile State, his articles on the “restoration of property,” his History of England, and his House of Commons and Monarchy he had expressed a political and economic creed that was to

70

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

bind together the English Catholic intellectual community of interwar Britain. What were the central tenets of Bellocianism? First, there was the emphasis on social justice rather than theological speculation when it came to religion. This was a reflection of Belloc’s esteem for Cardinal Manning’s labors on behalf of the London dockworkers, as well as his mother’s affection for the charity work of Catholic religious orders. Second, there was Belloc’s antipathy to parliamentary democracy and his advocacy of monarchy as the more desirable form of government in contemporary Europe. The result of this attitude was that subsequent English Catholic writers, though they took from Belloc an interest in politics, were extraparliamentary in their focus. They consequently shared Belloc’s enthusiasm for the authoritarian regimes in nations such as Italy, Austria, and Portugal (though nearly all also adopted his antipathy to Germany). Third, Belloc’s history proved especially influential, as his followers echoed his assertion of England’s Roman and Catholic roots, and especially his interpretation of the Reformation as the work of a cabal and his systematic denunciation of post-Reformation England. Fourth, those who subsequently formed the Catholic intellectual community believed strongly in Belloc’s Distributism. Capitalism had resulted in unacceptable economic inequality. Land and capital both needed to be redistributed, and safeguards had to be put in place to ensure that neither could be amassed by a tiny minority again. Not surprisingly, many subsequent Catholic writers also inherited from Belloc his obsession with the corrosive influence of financiers, though only a very few shared his related anti-Semitism. Like Belloc, his Catholic followers held that property, particularly land, was the most important economic factor. Indeed, here was where Bellocian history and economics intersected, for as much as Belloc himself discussed the need to “deal with things as they are” in the modern world, a number of his most prominent followers were much more radical. They rejected industrial civilization completely and advocated retreating to the land, to self-sufficient communities, where they could attempt to re-create the medieval economy of village and farm, craftsman and farmer. It is to these radical Bellocians that I turn next.

C h a pt e r 2

The Greater Servants McNabb, Gill, Chesterton, and the Establishment of the Bellocian Orthodoxy

Hilaire Belloc’s first notable disciples included a Dominican friar, an avant-garde sculptor, and a giant—literally and figuratively—of the Edwardian literary scene.1 In Fr. Vincent McNabb, O.P., Belloc found a clerical ally, someone he had despaired of discovering among the English clergy, whom he considered too conservative. In Eric Gill, the first of the many converts to Catholicism who would make their mark in the nascent English Catholic intellectual community, Belloc obtained an enthusiastic confederate who transformed his economic tenets into an ethic that governed not only Gill’s work but also his daily life. It was, however, in the final figure of this triumvirate, G. K. Chesterton, another convert, that Belloc acquired his most important supporter. Alone among the English Catholic writers of the era, Chesterton was Belloc’s equal as a man of letters. As a public figure, indeed, he surpassed Belloc, and as a result was uniquely capable of popularizing Belloc’s ideas. Each of these converts to Bellocianism would in turn make his own valuable contribution to the English Catholic intellectual community. Each would seize in particular on Belloc’s political economy, interpreting his call for a redistribution of property, especially land, more radically than the master himself. Whereas Belloc advocated a “people’s capitalism,” his foremost followers were less accommodating 71

72

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

of modern industrial society, calling instead for a return to the land, to a premodern way of life. McNabb and Gill in particular were explicit in their rejection of the modern world and attempted to avoid modern technology and its fruits as much as possible. Even Chesterton, though he staked out the middle ground between McNabb and Gill and the more pragmatic Belloc, took a romantic view of the preindustrial world and envisioned an agrarian future. All three were men whose achievements matched their great gifts. McNabb was perhaps the most recognizable clergyman of the period. Gill was one of the most accomplished sculptors, producing work comparable to that of his most talented English contemporaries. Chesterton, for his part, was a man of genius, creating a distinguished body of written work that spanned genres, including fiction, poetry, biography, history, theology, politics, and social criticism. It was their virtuosity that accounted for the great influence of these three early disciples of Belloc in the establishment of the English Catholic intellectual community.

A Latter-day Savonarola? Vincent McNabb and the “Call to Contemplatives” One of the earliest and most important promoters of Belloc’s ideas was Fr. Vincent McNabb (1868–1943), the Irish-born Dominican friar.2 McNabb became an effective propagandist for the Bellocian consensus that provided the foundation for the English Catholic intellectual community. Indeed, he took the economic ideas of Belloc to their logical, and extreme, conclusion, urging in his preaching and his writing a complete retreat from the industrial and urban modern world. McNabb provided the nascent community of Catholic intellectuals with a clerical presence supremely sympathetic to their ideas. Clad in his homespun black-and-white habit, the Dominican friar appeared as if he had stepped directly from the medieval world that the Bellocians compared so favorably with the modern, and in fact he became to the Catholic writers of the interwar era the embodiment of Distributist ideals.

The Greater Servants

73

McNabb was born in 1868 in Portaferry, County Down, a seaside town at the entrance to Strangford Lough, about twenty-five miles southeast of Belfast. The McNabbs were a seafaring family. Vincent’s father was a master mariner, and his mother, who hailed from Donegal, was the daughter of a gunner in the Royal Navy. The tenth of eleven children, McNabb was the youngest of seven boys (four of his six older brothers survived long enough for him to have known them). Having to compete with his older and stronger brothers undoubtedly honed the combative and argumentative nature he would exhibit later in his preaching and writing. That his family—Catholics in Ulster—had to “fight” for their Faith (as McNabb later put it) only intensified his pugnaciousness. Of his relation to the nation of his birth, compared to that which he had formed with his adopted land, McNabb would later observe that while he loved Ireland as a man loves his mother, he loved England as a man loves his wife. Thus in a very real sense, McNabb, though an Irishman, presented himself as an English patriot, much like the French-born Belloc.3 McNabb was educated at St. Malachy’s College, Belfast. Secular clergy conducted the school, which had a junior seminary attached. After his family moved in 1882 to Newcastle upon Tyne, in England, he returned to St. Malachy’s to complete his studies. Much to the surprise of his parents, who were prepared to send him to study for the secular priesthood in the Belfast diocese, Down and Connor, he opted on leaving St. Malachy’s to join the Dominican order. There was a Dominican priory near his family’s new home in Newcastle, and his sister Mary, the eldest of the McNabb children, had introduced him to her confessor there, who had a great influence on the younger man.4 McNabb entered the Dominican novitiate at Woodchester in November 1885. Of his decision to don the Dominican habit, he recalled: I was already at the advanced age of 17 when I made up my mind to escape from the world. I went into the religious life as being the easiest way of avoiding eternal punishment. As I didn’t want to go to hell, I went to Woodchester. I always say I did not become a

74

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

religious—God took me by the back of the neck and put me there. He saw more clearly than I the dangers that might befall me in some other walk of life.5 The religious orders had always been a refuge for those seeking their eternal reward, but the above passage illustrates McNabb’s acute awareness that his nature, his personality, presented a particular problem. He recognized that his ego, especially his pride in his intellect, needed to be checked by the rules of a religious order. Indeed, McNabb fought a constant battle throughout his life to remain humble, especially toward his fellow religious. While his sometimes overbearing manner and his conspicuous dress—contrary to common practice McNabb wore his Dominican habit outside the priory—often irritated those with whom he lived, these proved his best weapons for his work in the outside world. The very qualities that annoyed his brethren won for him the prominence that allowed him to preach effectively outside the Dominican community.6 Despite his differences with some of his fellow friars, the Dominican order turned out to be the ideal place for McNabb. Known as the Order of Preachers, and founded to root out the Albigensian heresy in the early twelfth century, the Dominicans had been among the first of the mendicant orders, so called because they renounced not only personal wealth, as had earlier monks, but corporate wealth as well, and were thus reduced to alms for their sustenance. Although they took the standard monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, the mendicant friars were dedicated to working in the world. The mission of the Dominicans had been from the first an intellectual one, to combat heresy through preaching the truth and attacking error. This became McNabb’s vocation, and the spoken and written word, as well as his personal example, his means of accomplishing this. If he entered the order to save his own soul, he eventually turned outward to the people of modern England, and what he chose to condemn was urbanism and industrial capitalism—not necessarily as heresies in and of themselves, but as threats to the salvation of contemporary men and women. McNabb viewed himself as an apostle to the English, believing

The Greater Servants

75

that he “had been drawn from childhood by the dream of helping in the conversion of England.”7 From November 1885 until his ordination as a priest in September 1891, McNabb studied philosophy and theology at the Dominican priory at Woodchester. In these subjects he distinguished himself, and therefore he was sent in October 1891 to continue his studies at the prestigious University of Louvain in Belgium as a member of the Dominican studentate. There he came under the influence of Père Dummermuth, regent of studies and a leading light in the Thomist revival.8 In his August 1879 encyclical, Aeterni Patris (On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy), Leo XIII, elected pope the previous year, had advocated the renewed study of St. Thomas Aquinas. In particular, he had emphasized that Thomism ought to be given pride of place in the philosophical training of seminarians. One of the results of Leo XIII’s patronage was the creation at Louvain of a chair in the philosophy of St. Thomas in 1882 and then the foundation, some seven years later, of the neo-Scholastic Higher Institute of Philosophy. The three years McNabb spent at Louvain coincided with the 1893 appointment of the first professors at the new institute and the 1894 publication of the institute’s journal, La Revue Néo-Scholastique.9 The atmosphere of Louvain during the first fruits of the Leonine Thomistic revival was exhilarating for McNabb. As he recalled: At Louvain where I was a student from 1891–1894, I suppose we10 were as important a group as any group in the Church from the point of view of Catholic theology. Some of the students were most brilliant. At recreation I remember them getting quite excited. They could talk thirteen to the dozen and almost differ violently on some deep philosophical point, but not about principles. In an atmosphere of study like that we had most exciting discussions. McNabb’s biographer, who was a student of his, has questioned, however, whether the training his subject received at the Belgian university was ultimately beneficial. McNabb had a tendency to “see things

76

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

too much and too easily as black or white,” which his education reinforced. According to one Dominican contemporary, he lacked the “temperament of the true metaphysician” to examine dispassionately all sides of an argument. When his beliefs were challenged, McNabb was in fact quick to lose his temper, and appeared to his students in particular less as a philosopher or theologian and more as a “counsel for the defence.” His experience at Louvain, instead of making him more open to argument, had only “made him more sure of his ground,” more convinced that he was right.11 McNabb’s Louvain education also serves to illustrate an aspect of the English Catholic intellectual community. During the same years at the turn of the century in which neo-Thomism was becoming ascendant, another intellectual movement within the church was also growing in influence, that of modernism. Whereas the one looked to Aquinas as the “great and invincible force to overturn those principles of the new order which are well known to be dangerous to the peaceful order of things,” the other was convinced that neo-Scholasticism was incapable of meeting the intellectual challenges of the contemporary world. The modernists were instead “united in the common desire to adapt Catholicism to the intellectual, moral and social needs of today.” Whereas the papacy promoted neo-Scholasticism, Leo XIII’s successor, Pius X, condemned modernism in his 1907 encyclical Pascendi.12 The English Catholic intellectual community as it formed was not fertile soil for modernism. Belloc himself applauded Pius X for suppressing the modernists, who were a constant target for his ridicule. He contrasted the “old Heretics” who “had guts, notably Calvin, and could think like the Devil, who inspired them,” with the modernists, who “are inspired by a little minor he-devil with one Eye [sic] and a stammer.” Referring to a well-known English modernist, Belloc quipped that the modernists “think we’ve got the text wrong, and that what Our Blessed Lord really said was ‘Thou art Maud Petre, and upon this rock I will build My Church.’” McNabb, for his part, was not as outspoken a critic as Belloc, but neither is there evidence that he harbored any sympathies either for modernism or for the modernists who suffered in the years after Pascendi. McNabb’s own theological questions

The Greater Servants

77

were settled at Louvain under the tutelage of the neo-Thomists. He was to concern himself with social and economic issues and apologetics rather than theological speculation. In this he proved a representative Bellocian. Even those English Catholic intellectuals who were to take a greater interest in theology than Belloc gravitated for the most part to neo-Thomism and avoided anything that smacked of modernism.13 After taking the degree of Lector in Sacred Theology at Louvain, McNabb returned to Woodchester in October 1894 as a professor of philosophy, teaching the subject both to novices and to newly professed Dominicans while also acting as parish priest for the local Catholic community. There he remained until October 1897, when his superiors sent him to Hawkesyard Priory, north of Birmingham, to teach theology. It was during the three years he spent there that McNabb made a name for himself within the order, displaying an aptitude for debating, lecturing, and preaching. During these years, McNabb, much like Belloc at Oxford, believed his future lay in scholarship. As was the case with Belloc, however, others had different ideas. Whereas for Belloc it was the fellows, first of All Souls’ and then of Balliol and the other colleges, who set him on a different path, McNabb’s course was chosen by Dominican superiors, who sent him back to Woodchester in 1900, this time as prior.14 As prior, McNabb’s primary responsibility was the governance of the community, but he also continued at Woodchester to teach philosophy and theology and to act as parish priest. It was during this period also that he began to write—publishing several volumes on faith and prayer but ultimately turning to social issues, beginning with the education question, which, one might recall from Belloc’s tenure in Parliament, was much debated across England in the first years of the twentieth century. A local newspaper, the Stroud Journal, published his sermons on the subject, and he contributed articles as well to a London paper, the Morning Leader, while he also began to lecture on this and other topics, even as far afield as London. Indeed, it was as a result of his contributions to the education controversy that McNabb first became acquainted with Belloc. In March 1906, when Belloc was a newly elected member of Parliament, McNabb wrote to

78

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

him, expressing his hope that he would “protect the interests of the Faith” with regard to the education bill. He enclosed a copy of his book, Oxford Conferences on Faith, based on a series of sermons he had delivered to undergraduates during the summer term of 1903, and commended Belloc’s own Path to Rome.15 McNabb spent some six years at Woodchester as prior, but when his term of office expired in 1906, he was assigned to St. Dominic’s Priory, London, where he spent the better part of two years as a parish priest. In August 1908 he was elected prior of Holy Cross, Leicester. While McNabb had begun publicly to address social questions as prior at Woodchester, and continued to do so in London, it was during his six-year service in Leicester City that he first focused on these issues. In Leicester, in contrast to the more rural Woodchester and Hawkes­ yard Priories, McNabb experienced at first hand the urbanism and industrial capitalism against which he began to rail. It was there also that he came under the influence of Belloc.16 Although McNabb had written Belloc several times in London between 1906 and 1908 regarding the education question, it appears that they first met in June 1910, when Belloc visited Leicester Priory at McNabb’s invitation. The two quickly became friends, and McNabb was soon visiting Belloc’s Sussex home, Kingsland, on a regular basis. He often came during Holy Week while Belloc’s children were still young, and he spent Christmas Eves with the Bellocs until 1939. When Belloc’s wife, Elodie, died suddenly in February 1914, McNabb immediately journeyed to Sussex and remained with the family through the funeral, saying Mass at Kingsland each morning in the private chapel and consoling Belloc and his children.17 Belloc’s writings, The Servile State in particular, were an enormous influence on McNabb, and when he too began addressing social questions, he published some of his earliest essays in Belloc’s EyeWitness. It was primarily, it must be noted, Belloc’s economic ideas that had the most influence on him. McNabb shared Belloc’s cynicism regarding parliamentary politics, but he never embraced Bellocian monarchism, nor did he succumb to his friend’s penchant for continental dictatorship. According to one friend, who often heard him

The Greater Servants

79

preach, McNabb consistently condemned Fascist Italy, denouncing in particular the invasion of Abyssinia, and he was suspicious of concordats with autocrats like Mussolini, fearing that the Church would suffer in the long run for making such accommodations with tyrants. As for Belloc’s anti-Semitism, the same friend, who was a Jew himself, maintained that McNabb showed a great love for the Jewish people and denounced their persecutors.18 For his part, Belloc returned McNabb’s admiration in kind. Writing in 1933 to a friend who was to attend a retreat with McNabb, he referred to the “strange and profound experience” of hearing the Dominican friar “speaking quietly upon the essential things.” For Belloc, McNabb was at his best in intimate settings, in his room or in a chapel, where “the effect is extraordinary; it is his personal holiness which comes out and the force of it is incalculable.” “There is no living man,” he maintained, “for whom I feel such awe and reverence.” It was this holiness that made the strongest impression on Belloc. Remembering McNabb after his death, Belloc touched on “the greatness of his character, of his learning, of his experience, and, above all, his judgement,” and noted that those “who knew him marvelled increasingly at every aspect of that personality.” “But the most remarkable aspect of all,” Belloc concluded, “was the character of holiness.”19 Under the tutelage of Belloc, and in emulation of him, McNabb was soon courting controversy. Belloc had written to him in 1911 regarding the Catholic Church and socialism: “Most of the official and clerical everyday condemnation of it utterly fails to tackle the corresponding evil of industrialism, out of which collectivism came and all of which is felt by the proletariat who suffer from it, to be perfectly intolerable. It is high time that some popular clerical authority in this country should take the popular side.”20 McNabb took upon himself the mantle of “popular clerical authority.” In January 1914 the Tablet published an article of McNabb’s titled “Towards Social Thinking.” Catholic antisocialists, according to McNabb, charged that socialism made citizens into slaves, “regimented” by the state; that it secularized education; that it degraded women, forcing them into the workforce and therefore undermining

80

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

the home and family; and, most important, that it destroyed the “inborn and inalienable right of property.” Citing Belloc’s Servile State, McNabb argued that the regimentation of the lives of citizens already existed. The secularization of education in England, he maintained, was a plank in the existing platform of the Liberal Party. Regarding the condition of women, McNabb noted that women worked outside the home at present, and for meager wages and in poor conditions. Indeed, for the working classes, he argued, the home had long since been destroyed: “a room or two overcrowded with inmates cannot be called a home.” As to property, McNabb proclaimed that the right to property meant “not that some men shall own all property but that all men shall own some property.” By this standard, property rights had not existed for some time. All this, he emphasized, was the product of existing political regimes, not of socialism.21 Along with The Servile State, the great influence on McNabb’s social thought was Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, “On Capital and Labor” (1891). Indeed, he required his students at Hawkesyard to have a copy of the encyclical always at hand. For McNabb, Rerum Novarum was unequivocally a defense of the rights of the working classes. “It has often been replied,” McNabb observed to Belloc, “‘Yes! but there are a number of things on the other side. Read what the Pope says on the Rights of Property.’” McNabb insisted, however, that by “rights of property,” Leo XIII had meant the right of all men to property rather than the right of a small number of men to amass property at the expense of the propertyless masses. In “Towards Social Thinking,” McNabb used Rerum Novarum to buttress his conclusion that Belloc’s servile state existed in contemporary Europe. According to the encyclical, he noted, “a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.” He also pointed to Leo XIII’s statement that there were “two widely differing castes[,] . . . one which holds power because it holds wealth which has put in its grasp the whole of labour and trade, on the other side there is the needy and powerless multitude, broken down and suffering,” to support his own contention that such a state “whereby the vast majority of the working classes

The Greater Servants

81

are in a position of misery is not exactly a state based on the right of property.” McNabb thus used the Leonine encyclical to add authority to the conclusions he had reached under Belloc’s tutelage.22 Rerum Novarum in fact proved an extremely influential work, not merely for Belloc and McNabb, but for all the contributors to England’s Catholic intellectual community. The combination of a defense of private property and a condemnation of the conditions of the propertyless engaged the English Catholic writers of the interwar period for the same reasons it engaged McNabb. Belloc, McNabb, and those that followed their lead were indignant at the suffering of the working classes but also believed that social reform meant well-divided property­—true property rights—rather than no private property. McNabb insisted in the Tablet article that he was not a socialist and maintained that he was not defending socialism per se. The article nonetheless caused a controversy, as antisocialist Catholics refused to take McNabb at his word and attacked him for defending socialism. Thomas Burns, secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Trade Unionists, claimed that McNabb’s article made the task of anyone “actively engaged in forming an organised opposition to Socialism in the democratic movement” more difficult. “Every advocate of Socialism,” he complained, could now “point triumphantly to Father McNabb.” The uproar raised McNabb’s profile among English Catholics, however, and probably made it easier for him to promote the very views that those such as Burns would condemn.23 In July 1914, just before the outbreak of the war, McNabb returned to Hawkesyard as prior and regent of studies, teaching theology and social science, in addition to his administrative duties. While in Leicester he had been a great success both with his parishioners and with the non-Catholic community, but as leader of the Dominican community he had been less than popular. His biographer, who knew McNabb as both teacher and prior, noted that he sparked divisions among his fellow Dominicans, with some finding him easy to live with and ­others finding him quite difficult. The term of office for prior was three years, and it had only been “the merest chance” that McNabb had been reelected in 1911. As his biographer recalled,

82

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

“only three fathers in the house had an active voice, whereas the community as a whole seem not to have wanted him back.” His great weaknesses were an inability to compromise and a lack of diplomacy, both of which had been problems not just at Leicester Priory but elsewhere. In Leicester these faults were compounded by his brethren’s belief that McNabb had neglected their interests, so concerned was he with the people of the city. In contrast to the warming feelings that the surrounding community had for him, his fellow Dominicans found him “cold, unapproachable and unsympathetic.” Thus, in spite of the adoration of the citizens of Leicester, “there was never any question of re-election.”24 Hawkesyard was to be McNabb’s last administrative post. He served only one three-year term as prior, although he remained there as professor of dogmatic theology for another three years. In 1920 McNabb was again transferred, back to St. Dominic’s Priory, London, where he had neither the teaching duties nor the onus of governing the religious community. If as a prior McNabb had often proved insufferable to his subordinates, when no longer in a position of au­thority he was the model of obedience. Fr. Wulstan McCuskern, O.P., who was his superior for nine years at the London priory, maintained, “No one gave me less trouble as superior than Father Vincent.” The lack of intellectual humility that had been apparent when he was teaching the Dominican studentate diminished during these years as well. In London McNabb found his true calling. He was able to devote himself almost entirely to the parish work and the public preaching that he had grown to love at Leicester. As his biographer has observed, “As Father Vincent grew older, the more powerfully did his love of Christ overflow and find expression in his love of people, especially the poor, to whom he truly belonged, and quite ordinary folk.” The biography of McNabb was no hagiography, but the biographer had grown to respect him deeply and was at his most eloquent in describing his subject’s transformation: If we want the truth about Father Vincent we should never ask the economists, philosophers or even the theologians, but the

The Greater Servants

83

thousands of ordinary folk whom he befriended and loved—the down-and-outs of every description, his penitents, the sick he visited, the old he comforted, the young children he led to God by showing them a flower, his own brethren who saw the living Christ shining through his later transparency—intelligent men, learned men, men who could match his own brilliance and who disagreed with him in very many things but who could never resist the ­Father Vincent Christ had released from the prison of pride. Although his biographer, who witnessed the change in McNabb once he came to London, attributed the transformation to “self­purification,” it is likely that McNabb’s skills were simply not those of an effective professor of theology or a successful prior. Freed from responsibilities for which he was not suited, he was able to devote himself to areas in which he could apply his true talents. When outside the Dominican community, doing what he loved rather than what he was obligated to do, McNabb’s pride was not the problem it had been when his work was mostly with his fellow friars.25 Free to devote himself entirely to preaching his social gospel, McNabb took Belloc’s critique of contemporary politics and society to its logical, and extreme, conclusion. If wage labor had enslaved men, stripping them of their dignity, in addition to their freedom, then it must be abolished. If industrial capitalism had taken their property, then industrialism too must be replaced, the products of factories shunned, and handcrafts and small-scale farming revived as the center of life and work. If the rise of cities had facilitated the Industrial Revolution and the proliferation of wage labor, then families must return to the village and the land. It must be emphasized that McNabb was not arguing on political or economic grounds, as had Belloc, but rather on religious precepts. The industrial capitalism and urbanism of modern society were not merely materially bankrupt; they were spiritually impoverishing and as such a threat to the eternal souls of modern men and women. “For us, Catholics, the Distributive State (i.e., the State in which there are as many owners as possible) is not something which we discuss,” McNabb urged, “but something we

84

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

have to propagate and institute.” “No advance in social thought or social action is possible,” he concluded, “if we are seeking to prove to ourselves as a theory what we should be trying to realize as a fact.” What was needed was action, not theorizing.26 For McNabb, the solution was a return to the land, to an agrarian society. “If there is one truth more than another which life and thought have made us admit, against our prejudices and even against our will,” McNabb argued in his essay, “A Call to Contemplatives,” “it is that there is little hope of saving civilization or religion except by the return of contemporaries to the land.” If, as he envisioned it, the modern industrial city was Babylon, then the fertile land of southern England was Zion. “If God allows you a plot of soil, and hands for toil,” he proclaimed, “why should you be solicitous to have your revenues from Babylonian brickworks—your meat from Babylonian cold-storage—your drink from Babylonian waterworks—your clothes from Babylonian cloth-factories?” “Is there no clay in Sussex soil,” McNabb asked, “are there no cattle in Sussex meadows—is there no water in Sussex wells—is there no wool on Sussex sheep?” The commodities of industrial society, of Babylon, had to be shunned, and in their stead the products of the land, of local self-sufficient communities, needed to be embraced. Ultimately, the model for McNabb was St. Benedict. One had to retreat from the city, from modern society, just as the first Benedictines had abandoned the decayed civilization of classical Rome in the sixth century. “Be a monastery then—a MONK—a thing apart,” he advised, “a self-sufficient, self-supporting kingdom; and though you surround yourselves, your lands with a high wall of brick and a higher wall of silence, your sermon will be the heart and hope of all the sermons we apostles will preach in the daily exercise of our craft of apostle.” Such a life in this world would, McNabb believed ardently, better prepare one for the next. Thus he concluded his call to arms: Go forth, Christian soul, to the unfallen earth, and there amidst the tares and the briars sing the song of work that is worship. Soon around your croft will gather a sheaf of homes and homesteads,

The Greater Servants

85

where the GREAT SACRAMENT may prepare the ploughman for the furrow, the monk for the choir, the priest for the altar. Dieu Le Veut. Fiat.27 This time, in contrast to St. Benedict’s era, it was to be laypeople, men, women, and families, who would remove themselves and establish these new, self-sufficient communities. McNabb began to practice what he preached, eschewing even the few modern comforts granted a Dominican friar. He never smoked or drank, and always ate little, but after his move to London he became increasingly ascetic, mortifying himself. He stripped his room of all furnishing but for an old backless chair, a desk, and a bed, and even these he seldom used. He read and wrote standing or kneeling, and he preferred to sleep on the bare boards in the corner of his room, wrapped in his cloak. Even in winter he never closed his windows. McNabb cleaned his room himself, on his hands and knees each morning, using an old rag to polish the floor until it shone. At one point he even traded his fountain pen for a quill, though this proved a bridge too far. He also did his own laundry, which was minimal, in that he wore only a habit and heavy hose, both homespun on a domestic loom from local wool, and a pair of handmade hobnailed boots.28 McNabb’s distinctive habit—his fellow friars called him the Mahatma Gandhi of Kentish Town because of it—and the fact that he walked everywhere, even to speaking engagements as far as fifteen miles away, to avoid the machinery of modern civilization as much as possible, made him a familiar London figure. It was as the Hampstead friar, famous throughout the city for striding down to Hyde Park, where he proselytized for the Catholic Evidence Guild (CEG), or to St. Peter’s Hall, Westminster, where he lectured weekly on theology and Scripture for the University of London Extension scheme, that McNabb exerted his greatest influence on the developing community of Catholic intellectuals. Indeed, the CEG proved to be a particular help to the Dominican friar in his apostolate. Founded in 1918 by a somewhat eccentric New Zealander, Vernon Redwood, the CEG’s purpose

86

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

was to “teach anyone who wants to listen about the Catholic faith.” Under the direction of the bishop of the diocese, beginning with Cardinal Bourne at Westminster, the CEG trained speakers—primarily laymen and laywomen and including individuals from across the class spectrum—to present the faith in terms capable of being understood by the audiences they gathered in public forums such as the famous Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park near Marble Arch.29 McNabb became one of the CEG’s most popular speakers, amassing an audience of regulars, among them many nonbelievers who relished matching wits with him. The testimony of Edward Siderman, a Jewish agnostic who regularly argued with McNabb, illustrates the difference between McNabb the professor and prior and McNabb the Hyde Park proselytizer. If when teaching theology to novices he had been less than charitable to dissenters, in the rough and tumble of the Speakers’ Corner he could be sympathetic to even the most hostile opponent. In 1950, some seven years after McNabb’s death, Siderman’s homage to McNabb, A Saint in Hyde Park, was published. The book included numerous anecdotes concerning McNabb’s considerate treatment of his opponents, even those who were quite antagonistic. One example ought to suffice. Dealing with a former Catholic whose disrespect was angering the Catholics in attendance, McNabb calmed the crowd: “Please do not interfere with him,” pleaded Father McNabb, who appeared to be overcome rather by sadness than by anger. “You will not help him by annoying him. Pray for him, and pray that you yourselves may not lose the Faith. It is so hard to gain but easy to lose. Even I could lose it, so pray for me also, and remember that there are difficulties in the Faith.” That one of his most ardent opponents, Siderman, had the deep respect for him to compile the tribute spoke even more to McNabb’s charity, and intellectual ability, on the platform.30 McNabb’s work with the Catholic Evidence Guild directly influenced the development of the English Catholic intellectual community. Two young lay speakers for the CEG beginning in its early

The Greater Servants

87

years were Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward. They met on a guild platform, married, and established Sheed & Ward, the Catholic publishing house that was to produce from the late 1920s the work of many English Catholic writers. McNabb proved a great influence on Maisie Ward in particular. While she acknowledged his “great apostolate to the crowds,” she was more grateful for the example he provided for the other speakers. “He loved to preach on St. Peter’s epistles,” Ward recalled, “and I realized as never before the meaning of the ‘kingly priesthood’ in which we all had our share.” She shared too McNabb’s faith in Bellocian Distributism, and his passion for the back-to-theland movement. Tom Burns, in many respects the impresario of the younger generation of Catholic intellectuals, was another disciple of McNabb’s, having visited the CEG’s platforms while still a public school boy.31 Even when speaking for the CEG, and concerned primarily with apologetics, social issues were never absent from McNabb’s thoughts. It was the materialism of modern society that brought out his passion, whether in Hyde Park preaching or in his written work. Siderman describes McNabb when he hit his stride, attacking the machinery of modern civilization, which, the Dominican claimed, “you are told you must have in the name of Progress!”: It was fascinating to watch Father McNabb when he was in this mood. The outstretched arm with pointing finger moving jerkily as he was pressing home a point; the shrug of his shoulders, his grimaces, the jutting out of his chin, compressing of his thin lips and stroking of his head, pulling up the overlapping sleeves and stamping on the platform—all combined to make him seem like a prophet of old, warning the people to take heed in time, lest worse befall them. His listeners, whether they agreed or not, were in no doubt as to his absolute sincerity and depth of feeling and one could sense the deep impression he made on them. Even those who usually questioned him became subdued and hesitated to disturb the atmosphere of silent reflection he had created.

88

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

His fellow Dominicans may have tired of listening to McNabb’s jeremiads against modern civilization, but they were meat to the crowds that gathered around the guild platforms, and to young Catholic intellectuals such as Maisie Ward.32 McNabb’s contribution to the Catholic Evidence Guild mirrored his influence on the interwar English Catholic intellectual community as a whole. He provided a sympathetic and prominent clerical presence. This was important because many English Catholic writers, Belloc especially, remained suspicious of the clergy, fearing that they were upholders of the status quo and thus an impediment to the type of radical change the Bellocians desired. As noted above, Belloc himself lamented that too many in the Church were more interested in condemning socialism than in combating the evils of industrial capitalism. McNabb, by virtue of his position as a priest and a Dominican friar, provided a veneer, at least, of imprimatur to Bellocianism. Belloc had, in his history in particular, emphasized the Catholicity of his radical program. McNabb’s promotion of his ideas supported Belloc’s claim of Catholic authenticity. That he looked the part of the medieval cleric enhanced his authority. The extraordinary vitality and the sharpness of his mind, particularly in the open-air combat of the CEG platform, added to his influence. To have Vincent McNabb as a supporter was to have a sincere, tenacious, and enthusiastic advocate for one’s cause. McNabb found another means of influence in an ally who shared his radical interpretation of Bellocianism. In March 1917, when he was still prior of Hawkesyard, McNabb had invited Eric Gill, the sculptor, to speak to the students, and Gill became a frequent visitor to Hawkes­ yard for the remainder of McNabb’s tenure. Gill had recently retreated from the world to live precisely the type of monastic and antimodern life for which McNabb clamored in his “Call to Contemplatives,” gathering around him a group of like-minded men and their families near the village of Ditchling, Sussex. McNabb became a frequent visitor there and in effect a clerical adviser to the community. All his hopes for a radical return to the land were bound up with Gill’s experiment in Sussex, which McNabb tirelessly promoted to the wider world in his writing and his preaching. To understand Gill and Ditchling, and

The Greater Servants

89

the allure the Sussex experiment had for McNabb, is to understand the ultimate, radical ends to which Bellocianism could be pushed.33

The Road to Ditchling Common: Eric Gill and the “Cell of Good Living” The community of craftsmen and artists that Gill established at Ditchling constituted his most significant contribution to the English Catholic intellectual community. As McNabb’s work with the Catholic Evidence Guild had expanded his influence, so Ditchling expanded Gill’s. Although already known to English Catholics because of his work as a sculptor, it was the Sussex experiment in self-­sufficiency that made his reputation. Despite being short-lived, Ditchling proved a magnet for a number of romantic, disaffected young men, many of them veterans of the Great War, several of whom went on to make substantial contributions as Catholic intellectuals themselves. For others, who only visited or who merely read about Gill’s community in the pages of the New Witness and the Catholic press or heard about it from promoters such as McNabb, Ditchling represented an ideal, the embodiment of Bellocian economic principles. Eric Gill was born in February 1882 into a middle-class Brighton family. He was the second child, the eldest son, of Arthur and Rose Gill; six brothers and five sisters would follow. Arthur Gill was a Nonconformist curate when his son was young, assistant to the minister at the original chapel of the countess of Huntingdon’s Connection, a sect of Calvinist Methodists dating from the eighteenth century. The evangelical atmosphere of Victorian Nonconformity dominated Gill’s upbringing: both a grandfather and a great-uncle had been missionaries (Gill’s father was born in the South Seas), and two of his brothers and a sister would become missionaries as well. Gill’s brand of Catholicism, when he converted, was to exhibit aspects of this heritage, particularly in his zealousness and his fervent concern with reforming the world. Wherever he went, he carried pamphlets to distribute stating Catholic positions on issues such as birth control and the status of the worker.34

90

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

In 1896, when Eric was fourteen, Arthur Gill left the countess of Huntingdon’s Connection and joined the Church of England. The family moved the following year to Chichester, a cathedral town near Brighton with roots in Roman Britain, where Gill’s father enrolled at the theological college (he eventually became an Anglican curate in the town). The contrast between Brighton and Chichester startled Gill, who realized that the former city was but a “shapeless mess,” a suburban sprawl, the product of “nineteenth-century speculative builders” eager only to put up as many houses as possible, quickly and at the least expense, without any concern for scale or proportion. Chichester, by contrast, had shape and meaning. To Gill, the cathedral town with its ancient walls was a work of art—built according to a plan, “clear and clean and rational.” It came to represent for him “the idea of civitas, of a town as a complete and self-sufficing entity.”35 Chichester provided in fact the model for Gill’s ideas concerning life and society as these developed in the ensuing years. He understood society always in aesthetic terms, and demanded that it exhibit the same clean lines as his sculpture and typeface designs. Gill wanted, intensely, to re-create in society the same order and proportion that he was able to produce in stone as an artist. This aesthetic sense proved of great consequence in the creation of the Catholic intellectual community in England after the war. Gill provided what Belloc and McNabb could not, a sense of beauty to match Belloc’s focus on truth and McNabb’s example of goodness. For those Catholic writers who were motivated primarily by aesthetic concerns, and there were several of significance, Gill became the primary influence. The move to Chichester also produced a shift in Gill’s own interests. As a boy he was absorbed with art, and drawing was his particular passion. At Brighton, ironically given his later loathing of industry and technology, he took as his subjects the locomotives, bridges, signals, and tunnels of the local railway. In Chichester he turned to architecture, sketching the churches, doorways, and towers of the town and its surrounding countryside. When his family moved from Brighton, Gill abandoned his formal schooling. His father, hoping to find a career for his son and recognizing his skill at

The Greater Servants

91

drawing, enrolled him at the Chichester Technical and Art School, thinking that he might make a good architect. In 1900 a friend, a prebendary of the cathedral, obtained a place for Gill as an apprentice in the office of W. D. Caröe, architect to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in London.36 London proved a revolutionary place for this son of a provincial Victorian clergyman. Not only the older draftsmen but also his fellow apprentices treated Gill’s accepted religious beliefs with contempt. Soon the irreligion of the architect’s office trumped his family’s evangelical Anglicanism. To his coworkers, traditional Christianity seemed irrelevant. “We were all,” Gill observed, “more concerned about social affairs than religion.” The Church of England came to offend both his sense of social justice and, more important, his aesthetic sensibilities: Nothing in the outward show of that Christianity could possibly hold me—the frightful church, the frightful music, the apparently empty conventionality of the congregation. And nothing that the parson ever said seemed to imply any realization that the Church of England was in any way responsible for the intellectual and moral and physical state of London. The Anglican Church, he had come to believe, “taught people a lot of palpable nonsense about the nature of things and did nothing whatever to defend them from the rapacity of landlords and commercial magnates, or to oppose the ugliness and filth and disorder of the world around.” It was, of course, given his heightened aesthetic sense, the ugliness and the disorder that especially troubled Gill.37 Unable to find in religion a cure for the ills that he had begun to detect in society, Gill turned to the secular critics of industrial England. He devoured Carlyle—Sartor Resartus and Past and Present—Ruskin— especially The Seven Lamps—and William Morris, along with the sixpenny pamphlets of the Rationalist Press Association. He donned a red tie and red socks and called himself a socialist. “My socialism,” Gill later noted, “was from the beginning a revolt against the intellectual

92

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

degradation of the factory hands and the damned ugliness of all that capitalist-industrialism produced.” He maintained later, however, that his socialism, inspired as it was by Ruskin and Morris, had been different from that of the contemporary socialist clubs and political parties. He called it a socialism of humanity, one that focused on the workingman as an individual rather than as a member of a class, and that was concerned not with how much the worker obtained for his labor in wages but rather with what he did to earn that pay. For Gill, it was the factory itself that was the problem, not the conditions therein, and what he objected to was the very fact that a man worked for a wage, paid to him by another, rather than that the wage was an inadequate one.38 The ideas about art that Gill brought with him from Chichester lasted not much longer than his religious beliefs. The architectural profession, Gill began to believe, was as much a perversion as the factory system. He despised the ornamental church architecture in which his firm specialized and disliked the fact that contemporary architecture had divorced the creation of buildings from the actual making of them. “It was hateful,” he recalled, “to be employed drawing carvings and mouldings and ironwork for other people to make—other people who ought in the nature of things to be able to do it much better without our drawings.” The architectural profession contributed to the very separation of labor from responsibility and craftsmanship from creation that Gill loathed: “Even the grand conception of architecture as a sort of humanized engineering depended upon the acceptance of the present degradation of the workman and the regarding of him as a person existing only to do what he was told.”39 In 1901, dissatisfied with what he was learning at the architect’s office, Gill began to take evening classes in practical masonry at the Westminster Technical Institute and in lettering and illumination at the Central School for Arts and Crafts. The latter institution was only several years old, having been founded in 1896 to promote William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement, which emphasized the use of traditional materials and the employment of old-fashioned methods of handcraft. The classes at the Central School were taught by Edward Johnston, and Gill became his disciple.40

The Greater Servants

93

The Central School had a profound effect on Gill. He now devoted himself to lettering. In 1902 he moved into Edward Johnston’s rooms in Lincoln’s Inn, which became a gathering place for the scribes and illuminators associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. At first Gill put what he was learning to use at the office, establishing himself as the in-house designer and cutter of inscriptions. At the same time he began to accept independent commissions, on which he worked after office hours, designing and producing tombstone inscriptions. Connections he made through the Central School with the Arts and Crafts movement soon led to a steady stream of clients. Finally, in 1903, Gill gained his first major commission when the architect Edward Prior asked him to cut some of the inscriptions on the new medical school he was building for Cambridge University. It was not the type of job he could do while still employed with Caröe, and so, after less than three years, Gill opted to leave the architect’s office. “I would be a workman,” he decided, “and demand a workman’s rights, the right to design what he made; and a workman’s duties, the duty to make what he designed.”41 In 1904, soon after his career began to take off, he married Ethel Moore, daughter of the sacristan at Chichester Cathedral, and, at twenty-six, four years older than Gill. The couple moved the following year to Hammersmith, at that time the focal point of the London bohemian set. It was there that Gill first befriended Douglas Pepler,42 a Quaker, who was a social worker for the London County Council. Gill began writing and lecturing about art and craftsmanship as well, and became involved in numerous societies—the Housemakers, the Calligraphers, the Art Workers’, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, and not least the Fabian Society. He was by 1905 quite well known for his work as an inscriber in stone and for his association with the Arts and Crafts movement and the Fabians. In March 1907 he founded the Fabian Arts and Philosophy Group with Holbrook Jackson and A. R. Orage, editor of the avant-garde journal, the New Age, to which Belloc and Chesterton also contributed.43 Gill’s attachment to both progressive politics and the Arts and Crafts movement soon soured, however. His break with socialism

94

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

stemmed from the realization that Fabian ideals were in significant respects antithetical to those of the Arts and Crafts movement. He had become a socialist, Gill later wrote, because of his “antipathy to the control of the world by men of business.” Yet socialism, he had now come to believe, though it was “a revolt or reaction against the widespread tyrannies and injustices and cruelties of those who possess property,” was not radical enough. “Both capitalists and victims were convinced, as they still are,” he recalled, “that mass-production is the solution of the problem of poverty.” The problem for the socialist was merely that of the distribution of wealth, but for Gill, who as a participant in the Arts and Crafts movement hated mass production, it was the factory system itself.44 Gill’s frustration with Fabian socialism was part of a general disillusion with the British political system. Much like Belloc during the same period, he came to reject the possibilities of reform from within. But the final break for Gill with parliamentary politics came earlier than that of Belloc. In late spring 1907 he attended a mass meeting in Trafalgar Square with some socialist friends. The object was to protest the Anglo-Russian alliance. The meeting was to end with a march down Whitehall to Downing Street to present a petition to the prime minister. Before the marchers reached Downing Street, however, hundreds of police appeared from the side streets and scattered the crowd. For Gill, this proved “the futility of placing any reliance on what is called ‘peaceful demonstration.’” In fact, the experience led to his disillusion with the political process and set him on the road to Ditchling Common and his flight from modern society.45 As for his philosophy of art, Gill’s attachment to the Arts and Crafts movement did not long survive his belief in Fabian socialism. Arts and Crafts, he had come to believe by late 1909, was a failure. The cost of producing the aesthetically pleasing and exquisitely crafted pieces that the movement favored made these impossible for any but the wealthy to afford. Even worse, there had proved nothing to prevent the manufacture of shoddy factory-made knock-offs. By September 1909 Gill was writing to his brother Romney, “I spend all my spare time doing all I can to smash the arts and crafts ‘movement.’”

The Greater Servants

95

That November he observed to his friend William Rothenstein, the noted portrait painter, that he would now “avoid placing [himself] again under the A.& C. [sic] banner.” Finally, in the December issue of the Socialist Review, Gill broke publicly with the Arts and Crafts movement with an article on its failure.46 Although disillusioned with the Arts and Crafts movement, a disillusionment that his move from Arts and Crafts–dominated Hammersmith to Ditchling Village in 1907 epitomized, Gill continued to frequent bohemian circles. Until 1909 he continued to make his living by his stone inscriptions and by lettering and wood engraving for the publishing trade. In that year, however, he became a sculptor as well, carving first the erotic figure of a young woman, which he titled Estin Thalassa, the “Maid of the Eternal Seas.” His friends were impressed with this first effort, and one, Count Kessler, who had sent a number of commissions Gill’s way, showed it to the influential art critic and Bloomsburyite Roger Fry, who proved very enthusiastic. Although Gill would later become known for his theory of the artist as workman—for his refusal, that is, to acquiesce in what he believed was the post-Renaissance error of separating art from craftsmanship—the consequence of his first foray into sculpture was that he now began to move in what a biographer has called “high bohemian circles”— the world of Art, capital A, not craft. His new friends included the painter Augustus John, the sculptor Jacob Epstein, and many of the luminaries of the Bloomsbury group, including Leonard and Virginia Woolf. He contributed pieces to Fry’s famous first and second Post­Impressionist Exhibitions (1910 and 1912).47 During these years in Ditchling Village, from 1907 into 1913, Gill was searching for a philosophy that could replace his artistic attachment to the Arts and Crafts movement and his political predilection for Fabian socialism. In his description of this period in his memoirs, Gill would have his readers believe that he was “inventing” a new religion that he then discovered was actually Roman Catholicism. This was not the case. Gill’s “new religion,” according to Augustus John, at whose Chelsea studio Gill and Epstein often met to discuss their ideas, bore more resemblance to “a Neo-Nietzschean cult of super-­humanity.”

96

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

It was to this that Gill referred when he wrote to Rothenstein in December 1910: “There is a possibility that religion is about to spring up again in England. A Religion [sic] so splendid and all embracing that the hierarchy to which it will give birth, uniting within itself the artist and the priest, will supplant and utterly destroy our present commercial government and our present commercial age.” By November 1911, however, Gill had retreated from this religion of the artist as priest and superman and was considering converting to Catholicism.48 In May 1912 Gill visited a Benedictine monastery, the abbey of Mont César in Belgium, near Louvain. He stopped at the abbey on his way to an exhibition of religious art, to which he had contributed, in Brussels. Although he found the place unfriendly at first, the way the monks lived impressed him, and the beauty of the plainchant especially delighted him. In retrospect, Gill explained that in the monastery he had found “something alive, living, coming from the hearts and minds and bodies of living men.” “I knew,” he observed, “infallibly, that God existed and was a living God.” One of the Belgian monks gave him an introduction to Abbot Ford of Downside Abbey in England, and within six months Gill wrote to him, asking for instruction in the Catholic faith. It was only several months later, in February 1913, that he and his wife were received into the Roman Catholic Church, and their three daughters soon after.49 Gill’s conversion was not motivated by theological concerns. “When I was ‘under instruction,’” he explained later, “they told me all sorts of things that seemed pretty rum, but I was past that sort of worrying.” Although he answered “yes” to the question, “Do you believe all that the Holy Church teaches?” this assent was a complete act of faith on his part. Gill chose to ignore theological questions, recalling, “As to what she [the Church] teaches on all the multiplication of funny subjects that we worry ourselves about, well, at the great risk, or, rather, certainty of being thought both lazy and unscrupulous, I made up my mind to confine my attention to things that seemed fundamentally important and things that intimately concerned me.”50 Gill, like many of the converts who were to contribute to the English Catholic intellectual community, was attracted instead to Catho-

The Greater Servants

97

licism because of what he understood to be the social and political implications. “I could not but believe,” he observed later, “that the way of life and work represented by the remains of medieval Europe was mainly a product of the influence of the Catholic Church, and I could not but believe that that way of life and work was not only Christian but normal and human.” Following Belloc, he maintained that this was especially true with regard to economics: The factory-system and the medieval system of production are at opposite extremes. The modern method is one in which the individual workman counts merely as a hand—a tool—a cog in the machine. The medieval method was like that of a football team. Everyone was bound by the rules and played for his side and not for himself merely, but at the same time everyone counted as an individual with special talents and capabilities. In contrast to medieval European society, Gill concluded, the contemporary world “was obviously neither human nor normal nor Christian.”51 If medieval society was the product of Catholicism, then for Gill the modern world and all its injustices represented the consequences of the Catholic Church’s loss of authority. “The modern way,” he argued, “had only come into existence subsequently to the decay and defeat of the power of the church to influence men’s minds, and the modern way flourished in inverse proportion to the degree of catholic [sic] influence.” For Gill, however, as for Belloc, social Catholicism was not to be relegated to the medieval past: As to what is permanent—that must be re-discovered and, as it was Christianity and the Church which was ultimately the destroyer of the physical slavery upon which the civilizations of antiquity were built, so it will be Christianity and the Church which will destroy the even worse and more devilish slavery of the mind and of the soul upon which are built the commercial empires of to-day.

98

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

The Church was indeed applicable to the problems of the modern world, and it could transform contemporary society just as it had the pagan societies of the classical world. Gill had come a long way since his first days in London, when his architectural coworkers had so quickly and easily convinced him that Christianity was irrelevant.52 Not surprisingly, given Gill’s dislike of industrial capitalism and his disillusion with parliamentary politics, Belloc was a major influence. Indeed, allusions to Belloc’s writings were strewn throughout Gill’s letters and essays. As it had Belloc, contemporary politics appalled Gill, who borrowed directly from Belloc’s Party System in describing English government as marked by a “sham fight” between political parties both of which were dedicated to preserving the property rights of plutocrats. The work that most influenced Gill, however, was The Servile State. He adapted Belloc’s thesis that the recent social welfare acts were servile in that they separated laborers and employers into two separate legal classes, and applied it to the relationship between a man and his work. “That state is a state of Slavery,” Gill asserted in one of his most famous essays, “in which a man does what he likes to do in his spare time and in his working time that which is required of him.” “That state is a state of Freedom,” he added, “in which a man does what he likes to do in his working time and in his spare time that which is required of him.” For Gill, the essence of the servility of the modern worker was that another person provided him with the materials and tools with which to work and then directed that work and took its product, in exchange for a wage. To be truly free, a worker had to be an owner—that is, he had to own his tools, workshop, home, and land. This was effectively a craftsman’s extension of Belloc’s argument in The Servile State.53 Likewise, Gill closely followed the interpretation of modern European history that Belloc articulated in The Servile State. He too blamed the ills of contemporary society on the “rise of the moneyclasses to power and to social domination after the breakdown of the feudalism and spiritual rule at the end of the Middle Ages.” His emphasis, however, was somewhat different. Instead of focusing on property, he stressed the role of the worker and the attitude to labor,

The Greater Servants

99

arguing that work had previously been “a sacred and holy activity” but that it had been secularized as it had become mechanized. Because his subjects were primarily art and aesthetics, Gill’s historical analysis was somewhat different as well. Whereas Belloc believed that the Reformation had been the turning point, Gill pointed to the Renaissance, observing that it was then that man had become the measure of all things, that art had become divorced from work, and that the artist had become a critic of nature and society rather than a maker of things.54 Gill’s conversion to Catholicism and his developing social thought made him a natural ally not just of Belloc but of McNabb as well. In fact, he and the Dominican friar turned out to have even more in common, intellectually, with each other than either had with Belloc. What they shared was a rejection of modern, industrial, urban, capitalist society that was even more radical than that of Belloc. That McNabb and Gill became friends was the result of the latter’s notoriety as a sculptor. Soon after Gill’s 1913 conversion, Cardinal Bourne had commissioned him to carve the Stations of the Cross at Westminster Cathedral, a project that Gill would not complete until 1918. The fourteen five-foot panels, depicting episodes on Christ’s journey to Calvary, crucifixion, and burial, carved in low relief, caused quite a stir. Contemporary critics charged that the panels were too crude, too primitive for their setting in the new Byzantine-inspired brick cathedral. Although Gill and McNabb had first met at a luncheon in Edinburgh at the home of one of Gill’s patrons, André Raffalovich, in June 1914, it was the Westminster Stations controversy that led to the invitation to lecture at Hawkesyard in March 1917 that was the real beginning of their association.55 When he went to speak at Hawkesyard, Gill had been living at Ditchling Common for several years. He had moved to Sussex origi­ nally in 1907 to escape London—to raise his daughters in a more agreeable environment and to escape from the industrial world to build what he later called “a cell of good living in the chaos of our world.” In November 1913, the year of his conversion, Gill moved his family from Ditchling Village two miles north to the western edge of

100

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Ditchling Common, where they had bought a house and several acres of land. In a manifesto describing the move, he later wrote: In 1913 a Catholic family bought a house and two acres of land at the southern end of Ditchling Common, one mile from S. George’s Retreat. Their object was to own home and land and to produce for their own consumption such food as could be produced at home, e.g. milk, butter, pigs, poultry and eggs, and to make such things as could be made at home, e.g. bread, clothes, etc. While Gill later maintained that he had not intended to establish a community at Ditchling Common, friends and colleagues, notably Douglas Pepler (as he still called himself ), who had been a ­neighbor in Hammersmith, and Desmond Chute, who came to learn stone carving in 1918, followed him there. Pepler, who contributed an additional seven acres to the Ditchling holdings, established what would eventually be called St. Dominic’s Press, a publishing enterprise that used an eighteenth-century hand-printing press and handmade paper. Gill himself provided the woodcuts and engravings used for illustration and later designed a variety of typefaces for the press. Already by 1917 Gill and Pepler had conceived of themselves as a guild of craftsmen, united by “a common desire to further the interests of [their] work.” For Gill, guilds, associations of free workmen—that is, those who owned their own workshops and tools—were the alternative to modern industrialism. Only through such an association could the worker remain independent of the “middle-men” who, he believed, were the parasites of modern society.56 At Ditchling Gill and Pepler were thus already hard at work at their respective crafts, with the help of apprentices, before their visit to Hawkesyard. The Ditchling community was self-consciously Spartan: water was drawn from a pump, there was no indoor plumbing, and cooking was done over an open fire. Manual labor was the rule. The families’ clothing was homespun, and on the farms they did every­thing by hand—mowing the hay with a scythe, cutting the grain with a swophook, and threshing the barley for their beer with a flail.

The Greater Servants

101

Their wives and children attended to the housekeeping, the cooking and baking, and did much of the backbreaking farm work while the men worked at their crafts. The goal was a completely self-­sufficient community.57 For McNabb, Ditchling proved a revelation. There he discovered the living example of many of the ideas he had arrived at himself under the tutelage of Belloc and Leo XIII. “I found it,” McNabb recalled some years later, referring to Ditchling, “doing as well as preaching the things I could only preach to be done.” McNabb admitted that he had “loved Ditchling with the intensity of a first love,” concluding, “I gave it something of the love I never gave a woman.” “You ask ‘Is Ditchling practicable?’” McNabb once observed. “In the Irish fashion I answer by a further question, ‘Is anything else practicable?’”58 McNabb himself was no less of a revelation for Gill. Of the Dominican friar, he later observed: Fr. Vincent McNabb was, and for that matter is, a very great man, a philosopher, a theologian and a man of heroic virtue, a man, moreover, so very much our teacher and leader in our views on social reform and industrial-capitalism, on life and work, on poverty and holiness, that it was natural that we should consult with him on the matters which were concerning us. These matters involved in particular the role of religion in the Ditchling community as it was developing. With Pepler’s conversion to Catholicism in October 1917 and the arrival in April 1918 of Desmond Chute, who was already a devout Catholic, Catholicism became an integral part of the community. Chute recalled the “almost monastic life” at Ditchling, where the Angelus bells tolled each morning, noon, and evening, to be followed before bed by Compline and the Rosary. “We believed,” Gill later explained, “that a good life and a good civilization must necessarily be founded upon religious affirmations and therefore that such affirmations and a determination to live in accordance therewith, were the first necessity, for individuals, for societies, and for nations.”59

102

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Into this already pious setting stepped McNabb, who introduced the Dominican order to Ditchling. Gill and his associates had aimed, independently of McNabb, at being the “thing apart,” “the self-­sufficient, self-supporting kingdom,” that the Dominican friar had advocated in his “Call to Contemplatives.” To this ideal was now added the idea of the monastic. The Ditchlingites had already decided to form a guild that would be explicitly Christian, but under McNabb’s influence, Gill recalled, “it soon seemed to stand out clearly that it would be far better to ask to be received as members of the Third Order of St. Dominic and to found our guild with that rule of life than to set up a new rule of our own.” In January 1919 Gill and his wife, Chute, Pepler, and Herbert Shrove, who had a small farm at Ditchling, joined the Third Order of St. Dominic—became, that is, lay Dominicans. Gill himself designed the chapel that became the center of the community’s workshop complex, and in 1921 they founded the Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic. Ditchling as the embodiment of the radical Distributist ideal predated McNabb’s involvement, but it was McNabb who suffused it with the Catholic religion. As one of Gill’s biographers has put it, Ditchling had already been conceived before Gill lectured at Hawkesyard, but its birth occurred through the midwifery of McNabb.60 Ditchling, thanks to the publicity that St. Dominic’s Press provided and to the tireless preaching of McNabb, became a showpiece for the anti-industrial and anti-urban values that ultimately underlay Bellocian Distributism. Indeed, in the first years after the war, the New Witness, under G. K. Chesterton’s editorship, published a ­number of pieces in praise of Gill’s Sussex community. Theodore Maynard, a regular contributor, even composed an ode to Ditchling: If, after having lived in many towns, Such goodness comes to me That I might house beneath the noble Downs Beside an apple tree; Then would I find in moon and candle light A supper table spread

The Greater Servants

103

With Ditchling ham and ale for my delight, And honest Ditchling bread; And open to the kindly Sussex air My heart and window wide, That gentle thoughts might find me sleeping there, And I be satisfied. Maynard’s poem was all too typical of the treacly treatment given to Ditchling by Bellocians in the first years after the Great War.61 With this publicity, a number of disaffected and emotionally unsettled young men, many of them veterans of the Great War, found their way to Ditchling. Among these were many who converted to Ca­ tholicism, most notably the painter and poet David Jones, who stayed with Gill for four years and who was to contribute notably to the Catholic intellectual community. Such refugees were housed in a small cottage that the Ditchlingites referred to as the “Sorrowful Mysteries” because of the gloominess of its inhabitants. By 1922 the population of Ditchling numbered forty-one, none of whom had resided there before 1913, and visitors were constantly coming and going, intrigued by the tales of McNabb and others. Tom Burns made a pilgrimage to Ditchling in the company of his friend Henry John, the son of Gill’s friend Augustus John, when they were schoolboys at Stonyhurst.62 Ditchling, however, was hardly an unqualified success. Financial troubles plagued the community from its inception, as they would other Catholic back-to-the-land schemes in the 1930s. In fact, Ditchling was never as self-sufficient as its members would have liked, and indeed it owed its survival to the outside society the Ditchlingites condemned. They relied on Pepler’s private income and, of course, on what Gill earned selling his work to the very people he attacked so sharply in his essays. In 1924 Gill himself left Ditchling for good, moving his family and two other families to an abandoned monastery in the Welsh mountains in an effort to find an environment even more removed from the modern world. He had quarreled with Pepler over finances too—although he would write in his autobiography that

104

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

he had gone because Ditchling had become too much of a spectacle. Pepler and many of the others remained, however, and a community lasted there at least through the 1960s.63 Although Gill’s Ditchling was short-lived, this did not mean it did not make a significant contribution to the making of the English Catholic intellectual community. Ultimately, it represented an ideal. It only had to be there, to exist, in order to influence the writers and artists coalescing into a community during the years after the war when Ditchling was most famous. The Bellocian Distributism that provided the intellectual foundation for the Catholic intellectual community was and remained vague in its prescriptions for the reform of contemporary society. Ditchling became the embodiment of Distributist principles. If someone asked what Distributism was, McNabb and others only had to point to the example of Gill, Pepler, and their associates. Gill’s Ditchling community would provide Catholic writers and artists, in particular the more romantic-minded among the younger generation for whom Gill was for a time a guru of sorts, with an example of Distributism in action.64 Apart from the idea of Ditchling, Gill’s contribution to the English Catholic intellectual community was aesthetic. Gill believed that what he was articulating was the Distributist theory of art—the aesthetic counterpart to Belloc’s economic and political ideals. When Chesterton established G.K.’s Weekly in 1925 as the successor to the New Witness, Gill invested all his savings in the journal—a 7 percent share. Arguing that “what I’m saying is what is in harmony with your propaganda,” Gill urged Chesterton, rather heavy-handedly, “you’ve got to accept my ‘doctrine’ as the ‘doctrine’ of G.K.’s Weekly in matters of art.” “I am sure that the two ground notions for us ‘Distributists,’” he explained, “are the ones I’ve put into the article I’m sending herewith—viz: ‘a work of art is simply a thing well made’ & ‘Look after Goodness and Truth, and Beauty will take care of itself.’”65 These two ideas were indeed fundamental to Gill’s philosophy of art. That a work of art, a thing of beauty, was nothing more than an object well made followed from his belief that the artist was essentially a craftsman. This tenet, like the notion that the artist ought

The Greater Servants

105

to concentrate on the quality or goodness of his work and beauty would follow, was reinforced by Gill’s introduction to the French philosopher Jacques Maritain’s Art et Scholastique (1920), in which Maritain, a leading light in the contemporary neo-Scholastic revival, sought to articulate a Thomist philosophy of art. Gill was so enthusiastic about Maritain’s aesthetics that he had his friend Fr. John O’Connor, who was famously the model for Chesterton’s fictional detective, Father Brown, translate Art et Scholastique into English and published it as The Philosophy of Art at St. Dominic’s Press, Ditchling, in 1923. As a result, in part, of Gill’s promotion of his ideas, Maritain was to have a great influence on the younger generation of English Catholic writers and artists with whom Gill came into contact in the 1920s.66 As influential as Gill was among English Catholic intellectuals in the first years after the Great War, however, his ascendancy was shortlived. While Gill believed that his ideas about art were fundamentally Distributist, leading figures like Belloc and Chesterton—and even McNabb himself after the breakup of Ditchling—remained somewhat suspicious of him. Belloc, though he met Gill when McNabb brought him to Kingsland in 1918, did not seem to have had much to do with him subsequently. As for Belloc’s greatest disciple, G. K. Chesterton, he and Gill were in less than complete agreement. To a degree, this was because Chesterton disliked modernist art, which Gill championed. Another factor was the content of Gill’s own art, which was often quite erotic, indeed, increasingly so after 1920.67 Although the eroticism of Gill’s art in itself might not have disturbed Belloc or Chesterton, Gill in fact imported it into his religion. A 1922 Gill wood engraving titled Nuptials of God, which appeared the following year in the Game, the journal of St. Dominic’s Press, was typical of Gill’s sexualization of Catholic theology. The engraving featured Christ crucified being embraced and kissed passionately by a woman, her back to the viewer, whose long hair, flowing to the ground, obscures both Christ and herself. Her arms are outstretched along the cross to clasp Christ’s hands; only her hips, both their arms, and the top of Christ’s head are visible beyond the curtain of the

106

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

woman’s hair. For Gill, the engraving represented the union of bridegroom and bride, Christ and his Church. It was entirely characteristic that he was incapable of viewing this relationship in other than erotic terms. An acquaintance of his observed with much truth that Gill displayed “in his art a pseudo-religious attitude towards copulation, and a pseudo-copulatory attitude towards religion.”68 Gill in fact never completely purged himself of the bohemian ideas of “free love” he had imbibed in Fabian and Arts and Craft circles. In sexual matters he was anything but orthodox. This was not a matter merely of human sinfulness, because Gill attempted to justify his practices by appealing to his distorted and self-serving interpretation of the Christian theology of sin. In his Autobiography Gill explained that he had learned to cast all his sins and troubles “on the rock that is Christ”—“as upon one who is strong enough to bear them and willing to do so.” So far, so good, but he added: Suppose you place at his feet, not as trials and troubles, but as offerings which his love will purify and redeem from the egotism in which they perhaps had their birth, all the wayward sensualisms of thought and secret action which otherwise burden and torment you? Is not that also good? Thus, instead of being occasions of self-condemnation and distrust and self-reproach and self-dislike, they become occasions of thanksgiving. There can be no movement of the flesh or of the imagination which cannot thus be sanctified and turned to sweetness.69 Gill thus twisted the theology of penitence to justify his own questionable sexual practices, such that any of these, he believed, might be “sanctified.” This was nothing more than a mask for hedonism. Belloc and Chesterton need not have been necessarily aware of the shocking revelations in Fiona MacCarthy’s biography of Gill to be somewhat wary of him.70 Gill’s erotic art, his sexualized theology, and his droit de seigneurism with the female inhabitants of his series of self-sufficient communities were not the only reasons that many English Catholic

The Greater Servants

107

intellectuals began to hold him suspect in the years following his 1924 departure from Ditchling. Whereas the majority followed Belloc in apologizing for the authoritarian dictators in the traditionally Catholic nations of the continent, Gill drifted left in his politics. He became outspoken in his condemnation of Fascism, and some of his former acolytes, such as Tom Burns, objected that his critical eye did not extend to Communism. Indeed, he even embraced pacifism. In addition, his interpretation of Distributism proved too radical even for many Bellocians.71 Subsequent differences between Gill and the Bellocian majority ought not to obscure his significance contribution to the nascent English Catholic intellectual community during the 1920s. Gill’s insistence on the nobility of work and the dignity of the laborer was important to many Catholic intellectuals. His creation of Ditchling as the embodiment of Bellocian ideals proved of even greater consequence. In the final analysis, Gill’s eccentricity prevented him from becoming more influential. His political transformation in the 1930s took him out of the mainstream of English Catholic thought. Gill, like his erstwhile friend McNabb, had a significant role in the making of the English Catholic intellectual community. They helped establish and popularize Bellocianism in the first years after the Great War, transmitting it to an enthusiastic younger generation. What they both lacked, however, was the ability and the intellectual resources to meet Belloc on his own plane and contribute as equals to Belloc’s crusade. The one individual who could do so was Belloc’s old friend from the Boer War days, G. K. Chesterton.

“Be You Not Much Afraid”: G. K. Chesterton and Distributism Among those whom Belloc inspired, chief in influence, in intellect, and in sheer talent, was Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936).72 If Belloc’s ideas formed the foundation for the Catholic intellectual community in England, it was Chesterton who played the most significant

108

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

role, greater even than that of Belloc himself, in popularizing Bellocianism. Chesterton in fact provided the community, as it formed, with what Belloc could not. Although their message was similar in its most significant elements, Chesterton’s cheerfulness attracted those whom Belloc’s confrontational style alienated. Chesterton’s interest in theology and philosophy acted also as a counterbalance to Belloc’s focus on the political and the historical. While the contributors to the English Catholic intellectual community looked to Belloc for his critique of both contemporary politics and Protestant Whig interpretations of history, the converts among them in particular often found in Chesterton’s writings one of the main impetuses for their attraction to the Catholic Church. Although Chesterton had much in common with Belloc intellectually, there were pronounced differences in terms of family, religion, and education. In contrast to the Bellocs, who had shuttled between France, London, and Sussex, Chesterton was raised under more settled circumstances, both geographically and financially, having been born and raised in Kensington, in west London, where his father was involved with the family real estate business. In his Autobiography (1936), Chesterton presented his father, uncle, and grandfather as typical small businessmen of the Victorian middle class. “My people,” he quipped in his characteristic style, which alternated paradox and epigram, “belonged to that rather old-fashioned English middle-class; in which a business man was still allowed to mind his own business.” “They had been granted,” Chesterton explained, “no glimpse of our later and loftier vision, of that more advanced and adventurous conception of commerce, in which a business man is supposed to rival, ruin, destroy, absorb, and swallow up everybody else’s business.” Here, Chesterton’s veneration of the local small businessman was as evident as his disdain for unfettered competition, for the national (or, even worse, the international) corporation, and for the financiers who provided the capital for such conglomerates.73 Chesterton’s political pedigree was similar to Belloc’s, though his family inclined to Liberalism rather than the Radicalism of Belloc’s English forebears. The families’ religious beliefs, however, differed dra-

The Greater Servants

109

matically. Belloc’s faith was built on the firm Catholic foundation his convert mother had provided, but the Chestertons, like so many of the Victorian commercial middle class, were as liberal in their religion as they were in their politics. Such was their latitudinarianism that the more orthodox and conservative parents of one of Chesterton’s closest school friends, Lawrence Oldershaw (who was later to introduce him to Belloc), warned their son of the Chestertons’ agnosticism. G. K. Chesterton would react conspicuously against the liberalism of his family’s religious beliefs.74 Firmly middle class, financially comfortable, and politically and religiously liberal, the Chestertons were also, again in contrast to the mixed heritage of Belloc, very English. “If I made a generalisation about the Chestertons, my paternal kinsfolk,” he declared, “I should say that they were extraordinarily English,” in the sense of possessing “a perceptible and prevailing colour of good nature, of good sense not untinged with dreaminess, and a certain tranquil loyalty.” In fact, it was these qualities that Chesterton possessed in abundance himself and that he greatly valued. And, in contrast to Belloc, whose surname and service in the French military made him seem foreign, Chesterton was utterly English and presented himself as such. This fact was significant with regard to the creation of the Catholic intellectual community. For centuries Catholics in England had labored under the charge that they were aliens, Roman, not English, servants of a foreign despot, an Italian pope, rather than freeborn Englishmen. The new group of Catholic writers and artists coalescing in postwar England, however, because it included individuals like Chesterton, the self-conscious embodiment of the roast beef and beer of old England, attempted to present Catholicism as truly English. In so doing they aimed at a radical redefinition of English identity. Chesterton’s close friend and fellow convert, Maurice Baring, noted after Chesterton’s 1922 conversion that while the “ordinary English agnostic” believed that the convert to Catholicism was abandoning his nationality, “it would be difficult for anyone to make out a case for the Unenglishness of Manning.” The same applied to Chesterton. That so many educated and articulate English men and women converted to the Catholic

110

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Church during the first decades of the twentieth century was evidence at least of some slight success in this effort to unsettle the traditional associations between Protestantism and Englishness, Catholicism and the foreign.75 Chesterton began his formal education at Colet Court, a preparatory school for St. Paul’s, just down the Hammersmith Road from his family’s Kensington home, and in January 1887, at the age of twelve, he duly entered St. Paul’s itself, the alma mater most famously of Milton, Marlborough, and Pepys. In his memoirs Chesterton downplayed the role of his formal education in fashioning his mind and his character, dismissing his schooldays as “the period during which I was being instructed by somebody I did not know, about something I did not want to know.” While Chesterton was hardly a success academically, he managed, despite his best efforts, to impress several of his teachers, who recognized in him both talent as a writer and knowledge of literature, particularly after he won the Milton Prize for a poem on St. Francis. Perhaps for this reason, though he only made it to the sixth form (St. Paul’s had eight forms), he was accorded the privileges of the highest form. Chesterton’s classmates, of course, were well aware of his abilities. One of his closest friends at St. Paul’s, E. C. Bentley, maintained that he had “never seen or heard of another school-boy like G. K. C.” While “absence of mind was remarkably well-developed in G. K. C.,” it was also, he noted, “equally obvious that absence of mind in his case stood for presence of brain-power, together with imaginative dreaminess, in a very unusual degree.” Indeed, a group of friends of uncommon ability surrounded Chesterton at St. Paul’s, many of whom, Bentley among them, won prestigious scholarships to Oxford and Cambridge Colleges. It is revealing that these classmates looked on Chesterton as their intellectual superior.76 As a result of his less than stellar career at St. Paul’s, Chesterton took a different path from these friends once he left the school. While his closest friends claimed scholarships and went up to university, where Oldershaw and Bentley both became closely acquainted with Belloc, Chesterton enrolled first, in 1892, at the St. John’s Wood art

The Greater Servants

111

school and then the following year at University College, London, principally in order to study at the Slade School of Art, a department of the college, but also to study English and French literature. Chesterton later presented this period in his life as one of aimlessness. “I could not settle down to any regular work,” he recalled. “I dabbled in a number of things.” He was interested in drawing, but he did not enjoy the technical aspects that formed the focus of the curriculum and therefore abandoned these studies after just a year. A friend remembered that while at the Slade School ostensibly studying art Chesterton seemed always to be writing, but when he was attending literature lectures he was constantly drawing. He left the university in 1895 without taking a degree.77 This period in Chesterton’s life was marked by what he later diagnosed as a type of madness, marked by “doubts and morbidities and temptations.” The nihilistic ethos that dominated the 1890s, particularly at Slade, “threw a shadow over my mind,” he explained. And as a result “[I took the] scepticism of my time as far as it would go.” “At this time,” Chesterton recalled, “I did not very clearly distinguish between dreaming and waking; not only as a mood, but as a metaphysical doubt, I felt as if everything might be a dream.” There was even a time during these years, he added, “when I had reached the condition of moral anarchy within”—“I had an overpowering impulse to record or draw horrible ideas and images: plunging deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide.” While many Chesterton biographers downplay this episode in his life, Adam Schwartz has convincingly argued that this crisis was of central importance. His experiences at Slade, similar to Gill’s experience in the architect’s office in London only a few years later, destroyed the values and beliefs he had acquired at home and at school. In particular, what he came to view as the cynical pessimism and decadence prevalent at Slade and in 1890s England in general destroyed his youthful, complacent, Victorian faith in progress.78 Chesterton emerged only slowly from this intellectual and spiri­ tual crisis. When he left university in 1895, he began working as an editorial assistant for a publisher. The move from art school to the business world proved cathartic, and he soon managed to cast off the

112

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

despair that had plagued him. “When I had been for some time,” he recalled, “in these, the darkest depths of the contemporary pessimism, I had a strong inward impulse to revolt; to dislodge this incubus or throw off this nightmare.” Without the aid of established philosophies or religion, although partially under the influence of Walt Whitman, whose poetry he characterized as exuberant and lifeaffirming, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s “belief in the ultimate decency of things,” Chesterton “invented” what he referred to later as “a rudimentary and makeshift mystical theory” of his own: It was substantially this: that even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits, was extraordinary enough to be exciting. Anything was magnificent as compared with nothing. Even if the very daylight were a dream, it was a day-dream; it was not a nightmare. The mere fact that one could wave one’s arms and legs about (or those dubious external objects in the landscape which were called one’s arms and legs) showed that it had not the mere paralysis of a nightmare. Or if it was a nightmare, it was an enjoyable nightmare. On this foundation of optimism and sheer delight in being alive, Chesterton built a more stable philosophy to replace his doubt and pessimism, discovering ultimately that what he was stumbling toward was actually Catholic Christianity.79 It was at this time also that Chesterton began seriously to write. He tried his hand at poetry, short stories, even a novel, and most important, he launched his career as a journalist. By 1900, when he first met Belloc, Chesterton was contributing both poetry and essays to the Speaker, Outlook, the Daily News, and the Manchester Sunday Chronicle, among other weekly and daily newspapers and journals, and was making his living solely with his pen. In his earliest work Chesterton presented to the public the optimistic philosophy that he had “invented” to replace the nihilism that had earlier troubled him. “When I did begin to write,” he recalled, “I was full of a new and fiery resolution to write against the Decadents and the Pessimists who

The Greater Servants

113

ruled the culture of the age.” Even so, he was as yet merely writing in reaction to what he perceived to be the pernicious intellectual trends of the age. Only gradually did he come to conceive of, and articulate, a positive philosophy beyond this elementary optimism. Over the course of the following decade, the first of the twentieth century, Chesterton came to a more sophisticated understanding of the world, and he did so under the influence of two individuals who had only recently entered his life. Frances Blogg, who in 1901 became his wife, converted Chesterton to what he called orthodox Christianity, and Hilaire Belloc introduced him to that radical brand of politics—and the social and historical thought that was its foundation—that became political Catholicism.80 Frances Blogg had been raised in Bedford Park, a garden-city suburb of London with a bohemian reputation, but had been educated at an Anglo-Catholic convent school. When Chesterton first met her in 1896—introduced by his friend Oldershaw, who was courting one of Frances’s sisters—he was struck especially by the fact that she “practised a religion.” “This was something,” he explained, “utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived.” To Chesterton, who had been “brought up,” as he later wrote, “among people who were Unitarians and Universalists, but who were well aware that a great many people around them were becoming agnostics or even atheists,” Frances’s faith in orthodox Catholic Christianity was startling. “Any number of people proclaimed religions, chiefly oriental religions, analysed or argued over them,” he recalled, “but that anybody could regard religion as a practical thing like gardening was something new to me and, to her neighbours, new and incomprehensible.”81 Frances acquainted Chesterton with this avant-garde practice as well, and he considered himself in her debt thereafter. Indeed, it was the sacramental Christianity to which she had introduced him that Chesterton would so successfully articulate and defend in Orthodoxy (1908), a volume essential to understanding his intellectual and religious development. Chesterton famously explained in Orthodoxy that he had attempted “to found a heresy of my own,” but “when I

114

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.” His “heresy” was the “natural religion” that he had arrived at based on his observations concerning human beings and the world around him. The first principle on which he established his natural religion was that the world was a magical place in which life was both “precious and puzzling.” Scientific laws failed to account completely for this belief, or intuition rather, of Chesterton, so he reasoned that “this world does not explain itself” but rather must have a cause or explanation outside of itself. Second, the world was “fragile,” and human happiness was particularly fleeting. Therefore, all good “was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin,” and, because of this, one ought necessarily to give thanks, via humility, restraint, and obedience, both for one’s very existence and for any happiness and good one found. Obedience, then, to what or to whom? “To whatever made us,” Chesterton affirmed. “There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art,” he explained, and there was something beautiful in the design of the world, whatever its apparent defects. Thus there must be a meaning to the world and a designer or creator of this work of art. “I had always believed that the world involved magic,” Chesterton concluded, “now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.”82 Much of what Chesterton advanced thus far in the volume would not have troubled his latitudinarian Victorian parents, or, for that matter, an eighteenth-century Deist. In this sense, it truly was a “natural religion,” especially with its emphases on the argument by design for God’s existence. What began to convince Chesterton of the more specific truth of orthodox Christianity, however, was the attacks of its most combative nineteenth-century critics. “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian,” he thought after reading such militant atheists and agnostics as Charles Bradlaugh, Thomas Huxley, and Herbert Spencer. “As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti­Christian accounts of the faith,” Chesterton recounted, “a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind—the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing, more extraordinary than its critics had been willing to admit.”83

The Greater Servants

115

As yet, however, Chesterton had not determined that the attacks on Christianity were completely in error. “I only concluded,” he maintained, “that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed.” As he compared what the Church taught with what he found most inadequate about modern thought, it dawned on him that it was Christianity that was correct. The catalyst occurred when Chesterton compared what certain modern writers had argued concerning suicide with the very different attitude of the Christian martyrs to human life and sacrifice. When he read the “solemn flippancy of some free thinker” that “the suicide was only the same as a martyr,” the “open fallacy” of the statement made it clear that he stood in the same camp as Christianity. The suicide was the antithesis of the martyr for him. “A martyr,” Chesterton explained, “is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life,” whereas a “suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything.” “Here it was,” Chesterton recalled, “that I first found that my wandering feet were in some beaten path.”84 From this first revelation of the similarity between his own thinking and Christianity, Chesterton then began to realize that there existed many more such correspondences. “Perhaps, after all,” he thought, “it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad.” And when he continued to compare modern thought to Christianity, he became convinced that this was the case. It was the Christian religion that possessed in abundance the balance and sanity that the contemporary world lacked. Chesterton realized that everywhere he looked, in example after example, the theology of traditional Christianity agreed with his own thinking. His heresy had indeed turned out to be orthodoxy.85 Chesterton did not limit himself in Orthodoxy merely to detailing how he came to accept the sacramental Christianity to which his wife had introduced him. For him, traditional Christianity had significant social and political implications. Just as orthodox theology corresponded to the religious beliefs that he had arrived at independently, so too did these implications match the social and political convictions he had come to hold in recent years.

116

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

For Chesterton, Christian conceptions both of society and of human nature represented a matchless combination of the ideal and the practical. Orthodox Christianity provided human beings with an ideal at which to aim, as individuals and as a society, while simultaneously acknowledging human frailty. It was the Christian God who had provided “a subject, a model, a fixed vision” toward which human society needed to progress. Insofar as human societies failed to correspond to this “complete city of virtues and dominations where righteousness and peace contrive to kiss each other,” the individual Christian strived to transform them. The Christian was, therefore, necessarily a radical. Indeed, Chesterton maintained that to “the orthodox there must always be a case for revolution.” In contrast, contemporary, secular notions of progress and evolution were incoherent in that they possessed no fixed vision of an end or telos toward which society was progressing or evolving. Modern man, he maintained, was “a Marxian one day, a Nietzscheite the next day, a Superman (probably) the next day; and a slave every day.” As a result: “As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.” At the same time that Christianity possessed this God-given ideal at which to aim, the orthodox Christian understood that human beings were imperfect. The doctrine of Original Sin provided an awareness of the weakness of both individuals and institutions. Because Christians thus accepted that human institutions were inevitably imperfect, they understood that vigilance was needed in order to achieve and maintain their ideal society.86 “Christianity,” Chesterton argued, was, therefore, “the only thing left that has any real right to question the power of the well-nurtured or the well-bred.” In contrast, socialism and other supposedly revolutionary modern political creeds, in claiming that “the physical conditions of the poor must of necessity make them mentally and morally degraded,” actually served to defend oligarchy. “The earnest Socialist industriously lays the foundation for all aristocracy,” he noted, by

The Greater Servants

117

“expiating blandly upon the evident unfitness of the poor to rule.” Christianity, however, had maintained always that “the danger was not in man’s environment, but in man.” Indeed, the church had ever emphasized that insofar as environment was dangerous, it was not the harsher but rather the more comfortable environment that held the greater chance of corruption.87 Christian theology, Chesterton maintained, provided the justification for democracy, which he associated not necessarily with elected or representative government but rather with egalitarianism. In making this claim, he was not ignoring the fact that democracy predated Christianity, nor did he deny that for most of the Christian era Europe was not democratically governed. Instead, Chesterton was asserting that the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, to which all human beings were equally subject, was conducive to egalitarian principles. Thus he noted that while Christian Europe “had aristocracy,” “it had always at the back of its heart treated aristocracy as a weakness.” Because of the Christian suspicion of wealth and high birth, rooted both in the egalitarian understanding of Original Sin and in the belief that worldly goods were peculiarly liable to corrupt, aristocracy in Europe had not hardened into a caste system as it often had in the non-Christian world.88 In orthodox Christianity Chesterton had thus discovered a theological justification for the populist, egalitarian, and democratic political creed he had come to profess. Just as his “heresy” had turned out to be orthodox Christianity, so had his political “utopia” been anticipated. “In short,” Chesterton maintained, “I had spelled out slowly, as usual, the need for an equal law in Utopia; and, as usual, I had found that Christianity had been there before me.” “My own conception of Utopia,” he concluded, “was only answered in the New Jerusalem.”89 Orthodoxy, for Chesterton when he wrote of his conversion experience, meant the Anglo-Catholic Christianity to which his wife had introduced him. Ultimately, however, his wife’s religion was to prove inadequate for him. In Orthodoxy Chesterton had made an effort to avoid sectarian disputes, especially regarding authority. As he explained:

118

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

These essays are concerned only to discuss the actual fact that the central Christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles’ Creed) is the best root of energy and sound ethics. They are not intended to discuss the very fascinating but quite different question of what is the present seat of authority for the proclamation of that creed. This question, however, he could not continue to ignore. Although Chesterton did not join the Catholic Church until 1922, he was seriously contemplating conversion as early as 1915. Indeed, when he fell critically ill in December 1914, remaining bedridden for the first months of 1915, his wife, who had been reluctant to support her husband’s interest in the Catholic Church, contacted Fr. John O’Connor—the friend of both Gill and Chesterton—regarding his possible desire to convert.90 Chesterton continued to delay his decision after he recovered from his illness, in part because he hesitated to leave his wife behind in the Church of England. A postwar journey to the Holy Land moved him to the brink. Writing to Maurice Baring from Alexandria in winter 1920, while en route back to England, he observed that his thoughts on the Church had “come to an explosion in the Church of the Ecce Homo in Jerusalem.” On his return to England, he had all but made up his mind, as he again explained to Baring: As you may have possibly guessed, I want to consider my position about the biggest thing of all, whether I am inside it or outside it. I used to think one could be an Anglo-Catholic and really inside it; but if that was (to use an excellent phrase of your own) only a Porch, I do not think I want a Porch, and certainly not a Porch standing some way from the building. A Porch looks silly, standing all by itself in a field. He was eventually received into the Church on 20 July 1922. Many English Catholics, friends such as Belloc and Baring, as well as the mass of others who avidly read his journalism, novels, and poetry, had long believed Chesterton was one of them. This sense Vincent

The Greater Servants

119

McNabb accurately described a number of years later, writing to Chesterton after Pope Pius XI had bestowed on him the Knighthood of the Order of St. Gregory. “I think there never was a time when your heart was not a Catholic heart,” McNabb explained. “You were an ‘anima naturaliter catholica.’”91 While Chesterton owed to his wife, Frances, the introduction to orthodox Christianity that eventually led him to the Catholic Church, it was Belloc to whom he was indebted for much of his political education. The two became friends as a result of their shared opposition to Britain’s imperial adventures in South Africa. Before the series of events that culminated in the Boer War of 1899–1902 Chesterton had characterized himself as a “reluctant Imperialist.” “I was willing to accept colonial adventure,” he later acknowledged, “if it was the only way of protecting my country.” It was the 1895 Jameson raid, Chesterton recalled, that facilitated his movement away from this “reluctant” imperialism, which was completed with the onset of the Boer War in 1899. Chesterton was definitely aware by then that his patriotism was something distinct from imperialism. He became a Pro-Boer, believing that the Boers were “perfectly entitled to take to horse and rifle in defence of their farms, and their little farming commonwealth, when it was invaded by a more cosmopolitan empire at the command of very cosmopolitan financiers.” He realized then that his patriotism was of England, not of the British Empire.92 It was as a result of his opposition to the war that Chesterton became associated with the group of like-minded young Liberals, among them his former schoolmates Bentley and Oldershaw, who wrote for the Speaker, and it was through the Speaker group that he met Belloc. Chesterton had first seen Belloc when the latter addressed a meeting of pro-Boer Liberals in London in spring 1900. He had been immediately impressed, observing to his future wife that the moment Belloc began to speak, “one felt lifted out of the stuffy fumes of forty-times repeated arguments into really thoughtful and noble and original reflections on history and character.” Several months later Oldershaw introduced Chesterton to Belloc over dinner in a small French restaurant near Leicester Square, and their famous friendship began. At this

120

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

first meeting Chesterton’s initial reaction to the “sturdy man with a stiff straw hat of the period tilted over his eyes” was amusement. He quickly became “conscious of a curious undercurrent of sympathy” between himself and his confident, loquacious dinner companion. Both he and Belloc, Chesterton later explained, were “Pro-Boers who hated other Pro-Boers.” By this Chesterton meant that they believed the Boers were right to fight, as opposed to the pacifist “Pro-Boers” who opposed war in general.93 While he had thus moved away from his “reluctant” imperialism at the time he met Belloc, it was Belloc who helped Chesterton reconsider his equally “reluctant” socialism. Chesterton had earlier identified with socialism because it was fashionable and, even more, because antisocialism certainly was not: “I call myself a Socialist; because the only alternative to being a Socialist was not being a Socialist. And not being a Socialist was a perfectly ghastly thing. It meant being a small-headed and sneering snob, who grumbled at the rates and the working-classes; or some hoary old Darwinian who said the weakest must go to the wall.” Chesterton’s reluctant socialism, like his reluctant imperialism, was rooted in his awareness that each of these creeds “believed in unification and centralisation on a large scale.” This, as such, was antithetical to his “own fancy for having things on a smaller and smaller scale.” “Something inside of me,” he recalled, “was always subconsciously burrowing in the very opposite direction”—away from socialism and imperialism, away from the fashionable creeds of the age.94 In 1900 Belloc’s populist political ideals had been fixed for some time (although he had yet to lose his faith in the ability of parliamentary democracy to enact these ideals). He had already arrived at ideas toward which Chesterton was still struggling. Both Chesterton and his biographers, who have made a detailed study of his unpublished, pre-Belloc writings, have credited Belloc with greatly influencing his political philosophy. In his memoirs Chesterton himself noted that he was already, just before he met Belloc, experiencing “the first faint beginnings of [his] own divergence from the merely Communist to what is called the Distributist ideal.” This divergence, he acknowledged,

The Greater Servants

121

however, was “solidified by Belloc, my Irish friends, and my French holidays.” Belloc provided the intellectual foundation for Chesterton’s transformation from, as he put it, Communist to Distributist, while Ireland and France (as both he and Belloc believed) provided working examples of Distributist societies. Indeed, in a 1919 letter Chesterton affirmed that Belloc had “invented” the beliefs articulated each week in the New Witness, which Chesterton was then editing. He summed up his intellectual debt to Belloc in an “Open Letter” published in 1923 in the New Witness: “You were the founder and father of this mission; we were the converts but you were the missionary.”95 The subsequent amendments to Chesterton’s political philosophy also closely followed the postparliamentary transformation of Belloc’s opinions. Soon after Belloc lost his faith in the British political system, Chesterton, though he was naturally more of an optimist, also became disenchanted. As with Belloc, it was personal experience that soured him. In Chesterton’s case, however, it was not intimate knowledge of parliamentary politics that led to his disillusion but rather the Marconi scandal. In his memoirs, Chesterton dissented from the convention of dividing recent history at the Great War, arguing that Marconi was in fact the true dividing point. “It was during the agitations upon that affair,” he maintained, “that the ordinary English citizen lost his invincible ignorance; or, in ordinary language, his innocence.” “I think it probable,” Chesterton concluded, “that centuries will pass before it is seen clearly and in its right perspective; and then it will be seen as one of the turning-points in the whole history of England and the world.” While he was clearly overreacting to the Marconi scandal—from the perspective of one century it hardly seems of consequence—for Chesterton himself it was momentous. For “ordinary English citizen,” one can read “Chesterton.” It was his innocence that was lost.96 Even after the war, however, Chesterton was still more hopeful than Belloc about the possibility that Parliament could reform itself. He too had given up on the Liberals and Conservatives after Marconi and detested Lloyd George’s coalition government, reelected overwhelmingly in December 1918. He hoped, however, that the Labour

122

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Party could transform British politics. The Labour members, Chesterton’s New Witness urged in 1919, needed to denounce corruption in Parliament without the concern for social etiquette that the Bellocians believed had previously hampered radicals in the House of Commons. Indeed, the New Witness called for the Trades Unions themselves to “strike hard and strike often.” Although Labour had embraced, with its famous clause 4 advocating “common ownership of the means of production,” a socialism antithetical to their beliefs concerning welldistributed private property, for Chesterton and his fellow Bellocians the party remained above all a potential ally in the battle against capitalist plutocracy.97 Bellocian hopes that the Labour Party within Parliament, combined with the action of the Trades Unions without, would break the financial hold of capital on English politics were soon dashed. When the Trades Unions themselves accepted in 1919 the report of the “provisional Joint Committee of the National Industrial Conference,” Chesterton’s New Witness charged that its recommendations—“a minimum wage, shorter hours, the extension of Trade Boards, and the creation of a National Industrial Council to bring employers and workmen into friendly relations”—were intended merely to make the workers “happy in slavery.” “Joint control” was but an “insolent subterfuge,” the weekly objected. “What the workmen must realize is that a poor peasant is better off than a highly paid factory slave, and that the working class can only achieve freedom by becoming ­owners of the means of life.” “There is one thing wrong with the Labour extremists,” the New Witness concluded, “and that is that they are not really extreme at all.”98 Disillusioned with the British political system, Chesterton focused on promoting Bellocian political economy. Stung by critics who charged that he and Belloc had no plan for creating their Distributist society of small property holders, Chesterton became in fact a much more active and articulate spokesman for their ideals in the postwar era than Belloc. In 1925 he relaunched the New Witness as G.K.’s Weekly; the following year he established the Distributist League, of which he was president, and published his Outline of Sanity (1926). In the Outline, he elaborated the program of economic reform that

The Greater Servants

123

Belloc had presented before the Great War and prioritized the goals of the movement. He argued that the first task was to slow the modern world’s mad race toward monopoly, which would allow the Distributists, as the second task, the time to inspire the people of England with their ideal and so begin to reverse the tide of consolidation. As a first step toward the Distributist goal of more equitable distribution of property, Chesterton urged a boycott of retail chains and department stores. The resulting patronage of smaller, family-owned businesses would, he hoped, both impair the power of the large retailers and encourage more people to venture into the retail trade, stemming the tendency toward business consolidation that had left a handful of firms dominating the high street.99 For Chesterton, however, the problem of monopoly in the retail trade was, in the long run, a relatively minor one. The major problem was, as Belloc, McNabb, and Gill had all pointed out, industrial and financial capitalism—the mammoth manufacturers and the bankers and brokers who made it easier for them to devour their smaller competitors. Chesterton maintained that both the government and small owners themselves could act in ways that would allow the minnows to compete more equally with these sharks. On the government side he called for: (1) The taxation of contracts so as to discourage the sale of small property to big proprietors and encourage the break-up of big property among small competitors. (2) Something like the Napoleonic testamentary laws and the destruction of primogeniture. (3) The establishment of free law for the poor, so that small property could always be defended against great. (4) The deliberate protection of certain experiments in small property, if necessary by tariffs and even local tariffs. (5) Subsidies to foster the starting of such experiments. In addition, Chesterton advocated a reform in the libel laws to allow journalists more leeway to criticize the wealthy and powerful by name, in order to facilitate attacks on the creators of the great trusts.

124

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

He asserted as well that these monopolists ought to be brought to heel by stronger laws directed against the cornering of markets. As for the small businessman, Chesterton maintained that he needed to follow the lead of industrial workers and combine, forming guilds that would help to offset the advantages of larger concerns and to prevent them from being swallowed one by one. For their part, those who labored for the great trusts ought to continue to work to extend profit sharing.100 Like Belloc, Chesterton of course had more than the small businessman in mind with regard to property reform. He too called for land redistribution, and indeed agreed with McNabb and Gill in advocating a return to the land. He was convinced that many urban and suburban dwellers would do so if given the chance, pointing out that many residents of London slums kept chickens and rabbits in their yards and that suburban commuters exhibited a passion for gardening. While reiterating the plans that Belloc had put forth a decade before for land reform, he attempted to encourage the spark he perceived within the “wage-slaves” of the cities, echoing McNabb in calling for volunteers to return the land: We want to find out how many peasants there are, actual or potential, who would take over the responsibility of small farms, for the sake of self-sufficiency, of real property, and of saving England in a desperate hour. We want to know how many landlords there are who would give or sell cheaply their land to be cut into a number of such farms.101 The government could play a central role not only in subsidizing a buyout of the large landlords by prospective peasants, as Belloc had proposed, but also in inspiring these volunteers. Previously, Chesterton observed, politicians had sponsored an education system whose purpose was the teaching of town things to country folk. Now, he urged, they could reverse this unnatural situation and educate city dwellers in the rural things, preparing them for an agricultural life.102 Chesterton’s enthusiasm for the back-to-the-land movement made him more radical than Belloc, whose focus was on a general

The Greater Servants

125

redistribution of all forms of property, not just land. He joined Belloc, however, in distancing himself from the even more extreme Distributism of Gill and McNabb. Chesterton maintained that what he aimed at was balance. “We should certainly not say,” he observed, “that the meaning of a peasant state is that all people are peasants.” Instead, “We should mean that it had the general character of a peasant state; that the land was largely held in that fashion and the law generally directed in that spirit; that any other institutions stood up as recognizable exceptions, as landmarks on that high tableland of equality.” He concluded: Even my Utopia would contain different things of different types holding on different tenures; that as in a medieval state there were some peasants, some monasteries, some common land, some private land, some town guilds, and so on, so in my modern state there would be some things nationalized, some machines owned corporately, some guilds sharing common profits, and so on, as well as many absolute individual owners, where such individual owners are most possible. Chesterton explained not only that he remained open to other forms of property besides the small agricultural plots that were his ideal but also that he was not entirely opposed to large towns, machines, or commerce. “We do not propose that every acre should be covered with cows,” he emphasized, and “do not propose to eliminate townspeople as they would eliminate rustics.” Chesterton maintained that it was not his intention to make each and every person or family selfsufficient farmers, growing only what they themselves needed and selling no surplus at market. As he put it, even in his ideal society, “there would doubtless be people selling turnips to other people.”103 As for machines, Chesterton maintained, again in contrast to the radical Distributists such as McNabb and Gill, that it was not that machines were in and of themselves a problem but that the ownership of industrial machinery had become “concentrated to the point of monopoly.” Rather than merely abolish machinery, he argued,

126

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Distributists ought to focus on reducing its concentration, promoting for example the common ownership of manufacturing equipment by guilds. Indeed, Chesterton believed also that certain modern machines, the automobile for instance, might actually aid the Distributists. Inexpensive cars, by making it possible for the urban populace to visit the countryside in a way that the railroads never had, would lead to more and more people abandoning the city for the rural life that they would now glimpse in their touring. Man, he concluded, could actually use modern machinery “to escape from modern society.”104 Although it was significant that Chesterton joined Belloc in distancing himself from the more revolutionary Ditchlingites, there was an element of disingenuousness in his proposals for a “people’s capitalism.” Chesterton emphasized that not everyone in his ideal society would be a farmer or craftsman, yet there remained in his political and social thought a stern moralistic streak, almost puritanical (ironic considering his distaste for residual Nonconformist Puritanism in contemporary England), exemplified in his continued disdain of commerce. Only the self-sufficient peasant–sustenance farmer, Chesterton held, was truly “whole,” because he alone was the consumer of only what he himself produced. Any involvement in production for exchange, he believed, destroyed not only this “wholeness” but also the “simplicity” of the farmer—another of the mythic virtues he ascribed to his peasant. If the peasant becomes “a mere producer” and not just a consumer of his own harvest, Chesterton argued, “his position does become as partial as any Cockney clerk; nearly as narrow and even more servile.” This was much more Gill than it was Belloc.105 Distributists would respond to such criticism in the same way that Chesterton had responded to contemporary faultfinders. Writing in the 1920s—a disastrous decade economically in a Britain rocked by industrial strikes, deeply in debt to the United States from the war, and plunged into deflation by the decision to return to the Gold Standard in early 1925—he emphasized that he was obviously not advocating the replacement of a successful economic regime. “We are not choosing between a possible peasantry and a successful commerce,” he observed. “We are choosing between a peasantry that might suc-

The Greater Servants

127

ceed and a commerce that has already failed.” The only option his contemporaries offered was a socialism that was, he charged, equally as “impersonal and inhuman” as industrial capitalism. Distributism was on the contrary a viable alternative to the “wilderness of standard­ isation” offered alike by “Bolshevism and Big Business.” Critics had attacked Distributism as impossible, yet a Distributist society had once existed throughout Europe and continued to exist in peasant nation­states such as Ireland and Poland.106 Chesterton’s defense of Distributism in his Outline of Sanity was a typical example of his contribution to the English Catholic intellectual community. Belloc had already presented many of the ideas in outline, but Chesterton expanded on them and addressed the concerns of critics of Bellocian political economy in the process. Belloc was the original thinker, but it was Chesterton who popularized his ideas. This ability, as well as his more agreeable personality, which made its way into his writing just as Belloc’s more abrasive disposition was reflected in his, made Chesterton the more effective apologist. Distributism, however, was not the only aspect of Bellocianism that Chesterton adopted. Given the convergence of Chesterton’s economic thought with that of Belloc and their joint promotion of Distributism beginning in the mid-1920s as a palliative for the contemporary economic ills of England, it ought to be unsurprising that the development of Chesterton’s political thought also mirrored that of Belloc. Like his ally, Chesterton grounded his political philosophy in a revisionist, anti-Whig reading of English history that promoted the power of monarchy and denigrated the influence of parliament. “It need not be repeated,” he argued, with reference to the authority of medieval kingship, “that the case for despotism is democratic”: As a rule its cruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak. An autocrat cannot be judged as an historical character by his relations with other historical characters. His true applause comes not from the few actors on the lighted stage of aristocracy, but from that enormous audience who must always sit in darkness throughout the drama. The king who helps numberless helps nameless men,

128

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

and when he flings his widest largesse he is a Christian doing good by stealth. This sort of monarchy was a medieval ideal, nor did it necessarily fail as a reality. Chesterton’s praise for the autocrat in his Short History of England in 1917 was not merely homage to an ancient form of government. Like Belloc, when modern dictators strode onto the stage (to continue his metaphor) only a few years later, Chesterton applauded.107 Chesterton’s New Witness enthusiastically greeted the Fascists’ accession to power in autumn 1922. “This is a nationalist movement,” the author of an unsigned editorial opined. “It stands for private property, and it has shown in the best of all possible ways its intention to make government clean.” “We admire its method,” the editorialist maintained, “as much as its aims.” The New Witness rejected the idea—dominant, it claimed, in the British press’s reaction to ­Mussolini—that a “voting machine is democracy,” claiming instead that “everybody in Italy recognizes that this has been a popular revolution,” despite the fact that “Mussolini would have had no chance at the polls.” To Chesterton’s newspaper, then, the Fascists’ rise represented the triumph of the popular will over undemocratic parliamentary election procedures. Indeed, after Mussolini’s first month in power, the New Witness concluded that the Fascist leader’s apparent reduction of government departments and slashing of expenses alone “makes us long for the rise of Fascismo at home.”108 Although these early editorials were unsigned, it would have been unlikely for the opinions expressed on such a significant event to have differed radically from those of the editor, and, indeed, the New Witness’s stance toward Italian Fascism did in fact correspond closely with what Chesterton himself subsequently expressed on the subject. Criticism of Mussolini in the British press particularly irritated him, just as it had the author of his newspaper’s editorial. While admitting that if he lived in Italy he might not be a supporter of the dictator (for reasons explored below), he noted that he had “precious little sympathy” with those who suffered under Fascism. The liberal victims of Mussolini’s dictatorship, Chesterton observed, like the capitalist

The Greater Servants

129

victims of the Bolsheviks in Russia, had received “no worse than they deserved.” The Fascists, he asserted, echoing both Mussolini’s own rhetoric and that of Belloc, had substituted an “aristocracy of courage and public spirit” for that “unreal and artificial monopoly of false suggestion run by our parliamentary papers and parties.” “Even if I came to think that the blow of Mussolini was reactionary and regrettable,” Chesterton concluded, “I should still think that the modern Parliamentarian had offered insults to God and man that could only be answered with a blow.” This defense of the Fascists was the more notable in that Chesterton presented his case more than three years after the March on Rome.109 Like Belloc, Chesterton had an audience with the Fascist dictator in Rome, and he found Mussolini if anything even more charismatic than had Belloc. In contrast to the crude, blustering strongman that Mussolini’s enemies had depicted, Chesterton claimed that there was “a great deal more fun in him.” Praising the Fascist leader’s intellect, he remarked that he had not so much interviewed Mussolini as Mussolini had interviewed him—and in much better French, Chesterton effused, than his own. This interest of the Italian leader in his own views, Chesterton believed, gave the lie to the idea that he was merely a self-obsessed demagogue. Of “one thing I am certain,” he concluded, “that if the Dictator has used violence, it is not because he cannot use wit; and if he has narrowed his appeal to his own nation, it is not because he lacks an intelligent interest in the philosophy of the world.”110 Much of the optimism regarding Italy’s future that marked Chesterton’s Resurrection of Rome stemmed from his delight with the recent Lateran Treaty between the Italian state and the papacy. The 1929 concordat effectively ended the enmity between the papacy and the Italian state that dated from the unification of Italy some seventy years before. Under its terms the papacy recognized the Italian state, with Rome as its capital, while Italy acknowledged papal sovereignty over Vatican City, a 109-acre state in the middle of Rome itself. Chesterton, whose visit to Rome occurred just after the parties had ratified the pact, was elated. Mussolini, he observed, in

130

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

negotiating with the Church and making concessions, had implicitly admitted, despite his authoritarian rhetoric, that his power was limited. He therefore praised the Fascists for being the first truly secular government on the continent, by which he meant that they were neither clerical nor anticlerical but truly neutral toward religion. Unlike previous liberal governments in Europe’s Catholic nations, all anticlerical in his estimation, the new Italian regime had acknowledged the rights and authority of the Church. For Chesterton, the Lateran Treaty represented a new dawn for Europe and the Church. The future of Italy and of Europe, he optimistically believed, lay not with the Blackshirts but with the Swiss Guard, not with Mussolini but with the pope.111 Although Italian Fascism and its leader had thus exerted an undeniable influence on Chesterton, his was not a blind adulation. He remained complimentary concerning Italy’s new government, but he also voiced some ambivalence about both the methods and the aims of the Fascists. He expressed concern, for example, that Mussolini’s Italy was overregimented, that the Fascist regime had made the “old light-hearted Italian rather too responsible,” and he admitted that it was “fairly certain” that the Fascist revolution had been “stained by many infamous crimes and indefensible acts of violence.” These were, however, minor misgivings. What most bothered Chesterton was Mussolini’s acceptance of industrial capitalism, of wage labor, of machines—in short, of the modern world. Fascism, he asserted, had the “disadvantage” of “accepting a little too automatically the assumption of the modern relations of employer and employed.” The Fascists, like the Socialists, according to Chesterton, had adopted economic policies that merely aimed at “patching up” “our declining and perhaps dying industrial world.” Although both political regimes had the benefit in his opinion of exerting their authority over the owners of industry— Fascism by compelling the capitalists to pay higher wages, Socialism by seizing their industries—neither provided, in his estimation, a permanent solution. Mussolini, Chesterton concluded, “seems to me to believe rather too much in new things and new methods, in science, machinery and modern experiment.”112

The Greater Servants

131

While Chesterton also echoed Belloc’s belief that the Fascist leader had confused Liberalism’s principles with the failures of Liberal governments to live up to these principles—the end result of which was that Mussolini was too much of a “reactionary” for his taste—his final and most serious criticism of Fascism concerned the basis of its authority, and ultimately its stability. Fascism, Chesterton concluded, was but another minority rule, just as the previous regime in Italy had been, and the control of government by a minority necessarily produced “doubt” and “disorder” because it invited attack from other minorities eager for power. Just as Mussolini had claimed that Fascism was superior to Communism, so another political sect could assert that it was more legitimate than his Blackshirts. In contrast, Chesterton observed, both democratic majority rule and monarchy remained stable forms of government under which there were no disputes concerning ultimate sovereignty. As he put it, “the Czar’s son is the Czar,” and the “man with most votes is President.” Authority remained clear under such political systems. Not so, Chesterton predicted, for very long in Fascist Italy.113 Given these doubts, Chesterton took care to emphasize that the Fascist program was not his own. “I think it well to state,” he explained, “that I doubt whether in the actual original Italian conflict I should have been for the Fascists.” He stressed that before Mussolini’s putsch he had been a supporter of the Catholic Popular Party in Italy, and his New Witness had in fact praised both the Popular Party and its leader, Luigi Sturzo, in glowing terms before the March on Rome— noting with particular approval the party’s independence from the “violent Fascisti.” Although Mussolini had suppressed it, Chesterton concluded that the Popular Party had been “assuredly a most glorious and Christian failure” and predicted that “in the long run” it would be “counted as a Christian triumph.” Here, it would seem, Chesterton meant that Sturzo’s party, however short-lived it had been, could, in the non-Fascist future, inspire Christian democracy.114 Chesterton’s criticisms of the Mussolini regime were weakened considerably, however, by his refusal to concede the stark differences between parliamentary democracy and Fascism. Instead, the tone

132

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

of his Resurrection of Rome was that of moral equivalence. On the one hand, he acknowledged that Fascism was not the government he would have chosen; on the other, he intimated that the English were not in a position to criticize the injustices of the Italian regime. Indeed, Chesterton himself was more interested in attacking the British political system than the Italian one. To paraphrase the Gospel of Matthew, he confused the beam in Italy’s eye for a mote, and mistook the mote in England’s eye for a beam. Chesterton highlighted what he believed to be the hypocrisy of the English with regard to the Italian regime by comparing the contrasting attitudes toward Mussolini’s Fascists and the nearly contemporaneous revolution in Ireland. He noted that “readers of the Morning Post”—a Tory newspaper—“would denounce the Fenians and excuse the Fascists, while the readers of the Daily News”—a Liberal publication­—“would denounce the Fascists and excuse the Fenians.” Referring to his own support for the Irish cause, Chesterton observed, “I can hardly in honesty play the Pharisee over Mussolini when I refused to do it over Michael Collins.” “The fact is,” he concluded, “that they both did a number of things that nobody would think of defending except on the ultimate theory of national self-defence; that is, the theory that society was in dissolution and the fatherland at the point of death.” In fact, Chesterton was unwilling to condemn revolutionary violence. Just as “Danton was not a gory baboon because he made the Terror or the guillotine,” he maintained, the “Irish rebels were not dirty assassins because they conducted a guerrilla war, in the only way in which it can be conducted, against a much more powerful army.” This refusal was a reflection of Chesterton’s revolutionary impulses with regard to contemporary society. “If we proceed as at present in a proper orderly fashion,” he asserted, “the very idea of property will vanish.” “It is not revolutionary violence that will destroy it,” he concluded, it “is rather the desperate and reckless habit of not having a revolution.”115 The perceived hypocrisy of his countrymen was a consistent theme in Chesterton’s apologies for Italian Fascism. He was convinced that liberty was a “good deal more trampled in London than she is

The Greater Servants

133

in Rome.” In his estimation, the ordinary Italian citizen had not the day-to-day restrictions on his freedom under which the Englishman suffered—“that network of nonsensical regulations and restrictions about drinking and eating and buying and selling.” Two of the leading constraints under any dictatorship, Chesterton asserted, those on freedom of the press and the franchise, existed also in England. The British press, he claimed, was dominated by two or three men, the press lords, who frequently censored the news. As if this was not a great enough limitation, English libel law made it virtually impossible to criticize a politician. Chesterton charged that the wealthier and more powerful the person bringing a libel suit, the more likely he would win his case and the heavier the damages imposed on the defendant. No one who was not wealthy himself could hope to attack the powerful in print.116 Just as the celebrated English freedom of the press was an illusion, according to Chesterton, so too was political freedom in England. Chesterton reiterated Belloc’s belief that the enormous expense of a political campaign, combined with the fact that only candidates from the major parties had any chance of winning a seat in Parliament, had severely limited political liberty. In England, Chesterton explained, again echoing the thesis of The Party System, the “average voter sees two men in top-hats, distinguished only by rosettes of different colours, two men he never saw before and never bothers about again; selected by somebody else for some reason unknown and often unmentionable; and between these, like a poor enslaved Italian, he makes his free and fearless choice.” “The Fascists,” he argued, “limit the choice and say so; we limit the choice and do not say so.” “Mussolini,” he concluded, therefore, “does openly what enlightened, liberal and democratic governments do secretly.” By instinct and tradition Chesterton acknowledged that he preferred “English liberty,” but he lamented that this liberty was nowhere to be found in contemporary England.117 Of course, Chesterton was guilty here of gross overstatement. Was there not a significant difference of degree between the Liberal state’s libel laws and a dictatorship under which a person could be

134

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

imprisoned or executed for any statement disagreeable to those in power? Was there no distinction between even the limited choice that one had in electing one’s representative in Parliament and the complete lack of political options the citizen had in an authoritarian state? Was there no difference between the regulation of public-house hours and the systematic use of physical force against one’s political opponents? That he ignored such distinctions spoke not only to his overweening desire to criticize England’s political and economic regime but also, ultimately, to a fundamental failure of judgment. For all his objections to Fascism, to argue that “liberty was more trampled in London than she is in Rome” was to conflate the two nations and their governments. In effect, by doing so Chesterton was minimizing the transgressions of Mussolini’s regime; he was apologizing for Fascist Italy.118 Given the similarity of Chesterton’s views on Italian Fascism to those of Belloc, it ought not to surprise that he indulged also in the same sort of anti-Semitism as Belloc. Again, as with Belloc, most if not all of the objectionable views he expressed about the Jewish people were confined to the years immediately after the Great War. Like Belloc, Chesterton penned a book treating the “Jewish problem” in the early 1920s—in his case it was New Jerusalem (1921)—and after its publication desisted from further exploration of the topic. What he did contribute between 1918 and 1922 was, however, even more unjust than Belloc’s public writings dealing with the Jewish people. The vitriol of the New Witness’s anti-Semitic attacks has already been addressed in the treatment of Belloc’s anti-Semitism. While one cannot necessarily blame the editor for everything that appears in his or her publication and while he eventually demoted his brother’s widow, who had written some of the most scurrilously anti-Semitic articles, Chesterton contributed a number of objectionable pieces himself. Jews, in Chesterton’s opinion, were a cosmopolitan people. “Moving from town to town,” he claimed, “they have no notion of those little patriotisms of property and liberty which attach a man to one town, or still to one country-side.” “Rightly resenting tyranny, without rightly understanding liberty (which is protected by

The Greater Servants

135

property),” Chesterton maintained, “they are Socialists.” Indeed, he concluded, they possessed an “irritating habit of interfering in the religious and national quarrels of other people”—by “other people” he meant their fellow citizens in the nation-states of Europe—“generally on the side of what we regard as a dusty and dreary scepticism.”119 Cosmopolitanism, socialism, skepticism—one can hardly imagine three more invidious ideologies for Chesterton, the very antitheses of his own strong faith in local patriotisms, well-distributed private property, and orthodox Christianity. Of this troika, the first, patriotism, was the most significant to him. To comprehend fully Chesterton’s attitude toward Jews, one must understand the importance of place in his thought. He had supported the Boers at the turn of the century because he saw them as patriots, fighting against what he believed to be a cosmopolitan, commercial empire in defense of their own lands and community. Likewise he had embraced the French, the Irish, and the Poles and their own particular patriotisms. Indeed, he himself was a Little Englander, an English patriot rather than a British imperialist. The root of the “Jewish problem” for Chesterton was that Jews lacked a place, a tangible piece of land to call their own, a land that would claim their loyalty and love. Instead, they resided in the lands of other peoples, ultimately loyal, he charged, not to any of the many nation-states that they inhabited but only to their coreligionists. The significance of place to Chesterton was not merely political; it was also a reflection of his Distributist understanding of political economy. Land for him was not only necessary for loyalty, both to community and to nation; it remained the foundation of economic life. The antithesis of landed property was capital, money, the movable wealth associated with commercial and financial capitalism. Because the Jewish people did not possess their own land, in the sense of a nation-state, Chesterton believed, they had been obliged to eschew landed property, to focus instead on movable property, on commerce and finance. For Chesterton, it was the prevalence of movable wealth that had undermined local patriotisms and contributed directly to the economic inequalities of the modern world. As a direct result

136

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

of this mobility, the need for possession of, or residence on, a specific plot of land had disappeared, attachment to place had collapsed, and with it loyalty and patriotism. Money, credit, salable goods—all, to Chesterton, had eroded that which he prized most: custom, tradition, the small, the local. Thus he observed that “the most genuine of Englishmen­”—“Shakespeare, Dryden, Dr. Johnson, Cobbett, even Dickens”—had opposed “cosmopolitan commerce.”120 The Jewish people, Chesterton believed, embodied therefore the rise of commercial society and the subversion of that which he held dearest. “Something has happened to the ancient land of Israel,” he claimed, “whereby it has been uprooted from those realities that made men at once creative and contented; the soil, the shrines, the landscape, the local affections.” “This produces certain abnormalities,” Chesterton observed, “and notably two; the habit of exchanging and not producing, with its temptation to usury; and the habit of living half in and half out of national groups, with its temptation to treason.” Ultimately, then, Chesterton’s anti-Semitism had its roots in an English patriotism that in turn had its basis in an economic bias against the finance and commerce of modern capitalism and in favor of a rural and agricultural society.121 Not surprisingly, Chesterton supported Zionism immediately after the Great War in the hope that the establishment of a Jewish nation-state in Palestine would provide the Jewish people with a land to which they could connect themselves. “We know the genuine sense in which the Jewish internationalist supports liberal ideas, which we also support,” Chesterton observed. “We also know the limit of his liberality, which stops at the limit of the land; it shuts out all the sentiment of something sacred or glorious in a soil, and all the things grown from it.” “The Jews,” Chesterton concluded, “are so far unnatural, for the quite natural reason that they are a nation without a native land.” Perhaps once possessed of a native land, was his hope, Jews would become patriots instead of conspirators, soldiers instead of pacifists, farmers instead of financiers.122 A visit to Palestine in 1920, however, aroused in Chesterton a new ambivalence toward the Zionist project. The native Arabs, he found,

The Greater Servants

137

recognized “the Jew as something quite different from the Englishman or the European” and intensely disliked the Jewish settlers. There existed in Palestine, as on the European continent, Chesterton noted, a popular belief that the Jew was a usurer, exploiting the poor for his own gain. Citing a conversation with an “honest Moslem Arab” who had informed him that a “Jew does not work; but he grows rich,” Chesterton argued that “experience” has shown that “we have not known personally many patient Jewish ploughmen, many laborious Jewish blacksmiths, many active Jewish hedgers and ditchers, or even many energetic Jewish hunters and fishers.” The indigenous peoples of the region, in his estimation, therefore “fear the coming of the Jews as they fear the coming of the locusts.” While Zionist leaders claimed that the Palestinian peasants needed the “knowledge,” the “experience,” and the “money” that Jewish settlers would bring with them, Chesterton asserted, this was precisely what the Arabs suspected, that Jewish knowledge was that of “financial trickery,” that their experience was that of “political intrigue,” and that their money was that of other ­ peoples whom the Jews had duped just as they would the Palestinians.123 Chesterton reiterated that he had supported Zionism because if “it is our whole complaint against the Jew that he does not till the soil or toil with the spade,” then “it is very hard on him to refuse him if he really says, ‘Give me a soil and I will till it; give me a spade and I will use it.’” In Palestine, however, he believed, based on the testimony of his “honest Moslem Arab,” that Jews were not working as farmers or craftsmen but were rather paying the Arabs to do the physical labor for them and then exploiting Arabs through usury in the same way, Chesterton believed, that they had Europeans. A nation in which none of the citizens engaged in physical labor, a nation of “Prime Ministers and Chief Justices” alone, he argued, was not viable. In the attempt to bring such a Jewish nation into existence in Palestine, in thus “taking risks to settle the Jewish problem,” Chesterton worried that Britain was merely creating an “Arab problem” and leaving the “Jewish problem unsolved.”124 Chesterton proposed an alternative, a compromise, to the single Jewish nation-state in Palestine that he had until his visit supported.

138

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Noting with approval that Chaim Weizmann, president of the Zionist Organization at the time (and later the first president of the state of Israel), had advocated the establishment of a nation-state in Palestine that would consist of a federation of smaller states, Chesterton took this idea a step further. Such a commonwealth, he observed, would be divided between Jewish cantons and Arab cantons, and this arrangement would necessarily defuse the tensions between the Jewish settlers and the indigenous Arab population. If such a plan could succeed in Palestine, Chesterton pointed out, then it could be extended elsewhere as well in order to alleviate the antagonism between Jew and Gentile throughout the world. The Jewish people, he maintained, would no longer be scattered across the earth as individuals but rather as groups, as a commonwealth of cantons on different continents, all linked perhaps to a central government in Jerusalem.125 This scheme, Chesterton believed, was merely an extension of the Zionist enterprise, the logical solution to the dilemma posed by the enmity that he had observed between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. “It seems possible,” he concluded, “that by some such extension of the definition of Zionism we might ultimately overcome even the greatest difficulty of Zionism, the difficulty of resettling a sufficient number of so large a race on so small a land.”126 The issue for Chesterton was that Jews might choose to remain citizens of the nations in which they already resided. What he desired ultimately, he admitted, was an exodus of Jews from Europe, to “leave as few Jews as possible in other established nations.” This would give Europe what its peoples wanted, according to Chesterton, the emigration of an alien minority. He argued that the alien status of those Jews who chose to remain in other nations ought to be explicitly recognized. They ought to be given a “special position best described as privilege; some sort of self-governing enclave with special laws and exemptions”—from conscription for instance. What Chesterton was advocating here was no less than a system of apartheid.127 There is little to add to the conclusions drawn about Belloc’s antiSemitism in chapter 1. Neither Belloc nor Chesterton could accept that Jews could be loyal, assimilated citizens of a non-Jewish state.

The Greater Servants

139

One cannot but conclude that this was anti-Semitism. It was true that Chesterton, like Belloc, opposed violence against Jews, as their apologists have often pointed out, and that they warned in their books on the “Jewish question”—Chesterton in 1921 and Belloc in 1922—that Europe’s Jews were in physical danger. Their refusal to accept Jews as fellow citizens, however, was part of the problem. Their intellectual attacks on the Jewish people helped create the climate in which physical violence could, and of course did, occur. Chesterton joined Belloc in shouting “fire” in the proverbial crowded theater and then had the temerity to be aghast when the patrons stampeded. The best that can be said was that much of their most objectionable writing on the “Jewish question” was confined to a handful of years after the Great War and that after that they desisted from further exploration of the topic. In the last analysis, Resurrection of Rome and New Jerusalem were Chesterton at his worst. In this sense it is somewhat unfair to judge him on such works. One must distinguish between Chesterton the propagandist who wrote the above volumes and the Chesterton whose greatness can be found in poems such as The Ballad of the White Horse (1911) and Ballad of Lepanto (1912), in strikingly original novels such as Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and The Man Who Was Thursday (1907), in Christian apologetics such as Orthodoxy and Everlasting Man (1925), and in erudite contributions to the history of ideas such as Victorian Age in Literature (1912) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1933). The last volume in particular was a testament to what may have been the key to Chesterton’s genius, his extraordinary powers of sympathetic imagination. According to his secretary, Chesterton had dictated the first half of the book to her at a furious pace and had then sent her to London to procure secondary sources, which he had “flipped” quickly through before dictating the remainder. Despite this apparent carelessness, Chesterton’s St. Thomas has been acclaimed by leading scholars. Étienne Gilson famously observed that “Chesterton makes one despair.” “I have been studying St. Thomas all my life,” he noted after first reading it, “and I could never have written such a book.”

140

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

In 1936 he added that he still considered it “as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas.” “Nothing short of genius,” Gilson exclaimed, “can account for such an achievement.” Thirty years after its publication, he still held the same high opinion: “The worst for me is that I shall never be with Thomas in the same kind of intimate communion G. K. was after just looking at him in the way he did.” It was this ability to reach this “intimate communion” with his subject matter that typified Chesterton at his best, but it was absent from his more overtly political writing on contemporary affairs. Was it Chesterton the genius or Chesterton the propagandist whose influence was to be felt most strongly on the English Catholic intellectual community? To answer, one must look to the next, postwar generation.128

— The first generation of Bellocians, the “greater servants,” were Belloc’s contemporaries. Born in the heyday of Liberalism, they reached adulthood at a time, the 1890s, when economic liberalism was being questioned. Each of them flirted to some extent with socialism in its stead, but they ultimately advocated not the socialism that so many of their intellectual peers in Edwardian and early Georgian England had come to profess but Belloc’s political economy, which Chesterton popularized as Distributism. Indeed, each of these first disciples of Belloc went further than their leader in endorsing an anti­modern, back-to-the-land vision of Bellocian economics. McNabb, Gill, and Chesterton, not least because of the romanticism of their critique of both Liberalism and Socialism, helped popularize Bellocian Distributism to the younger generation. This was their contribution to the foundation of the English Catholic intellectual community, and their primary legacy. The secondary legacy of these first Bellocians was the contribution of Chesterton more than Gill or McNabb. While all three shared Belloc’s critique of contemporary parliamentary democracy in Britain, it was only Chesterton who embraced Belloc’s politics in addition to his economics. It was only Chesterton who shared, as a result, Belloc’s

The Greater Servants

141

admiration for the authoritarian regimes that began to emerge on the continent beginning with Mussolini’s Italy (though, given Belloc’s loathing for modern Germany, their philo-Fascism was not to extend to Nazi Germany). Ultimately then, the prejudice of Belloc and Chesterton against the Jewish people was less significant in the making of the English Catholic intellectual community than was their philoFascism. Their followers, whether they included the older generation of McNabb and Gill, or the younger writers to whom I now turn, were almost to a person immune from the anti-Semitism that had been a distinctive feature of Belloc’s and Chesterton’s work in the early 1920s. Their preference for authoritarian regimes, on the other hand, proved very influential. Not all their disciples expressed the admiration for Mussolini and Italian Fascism of Belloc and Chesterton, but many of them were to exhibit the same tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to autocrats, particularly those ruling the traditionally Catholic nations of the continent. The suspicion of parliamentary democracy and the consequent preference for authoritarian rulers was one of the principles that, with Distributist economics and Belloc’s anti-Whig interpretation of English history, bound the community together. It would also prove its undoing.

C h a pt e r 3

The Lesser Servants The Next Generation and the Maturation of the Bellocian Orthodoxy

The five subjects of this chapter—Douglas Jerrold, Douglas Woodruff, Christopher Hollis, Evelyn Waugh, and Arnold Lunn—formed the hard core of the new generation of Catholic intellectuals who came to prominence in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Four of the five were converts, with Jerrold being the exception. Three attended prestigious public schools. Jerrold and Hollis were scholars at Westminster and Eton respectively, while Lunn was a Harrovian. All subsequently went up to Oxford, Jerrold, Hollis, Woodruff, and Waugh on scholarships—although because of the Great War (Jerrold) or their own delinquency (Lunn and Waugh), only Hollis and Woodruff took degrees. With the exception of Waugh, all excelled as Union debaters at university. Although none of the five came from exceptionally wealthy or aristocratic families, in their education they were among England’s elite. All five became strong proponents of Belloc’s ideas. With the exception of Waugh, they embraced Distributist economics, while all of them shared Belloc’s suspicion of contemporary parliamentary democracy and his accommodating attitude toward the authoritarian regimes of the Continent. Despite their admiration for Belloc, however, they were not his slavish imitators. Rather, they refined Bellocianism, with Hollis and Waugh, in particular, producing a more 142

The Lesser Servants

143

sophisticated account of English history. All five became writers, and Jerrold and Woodruff were to prove exceptionally influential, the former as a publisher, the latter as an editor. Through their work, these five Catholic intellectuals helped to extend Belloc’s influence and to ensure that Bellocianism became the operating political philosophy of the English Catholic intellectual community. Indeed, their contributions, through the medium of Catholic journalism, were instrumental in bringing Belloc’s ideas to the mainstream of English Catholics.

Douglas J errold: Bellocian Distributist and Tory Radical Douglas Jerrold (1893–1964), writer, editor, and publisher, was one of the most significant figures among the new generation of Catholic intellectuals. One of those “minute little Victorians” whose first memory was of that “full meridian of the English glory,” the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee (1897), and who “grew up in homes fortified and dignified by a long epoch of secure continuity,” Jerrold never quite recovered from the deluge that swept away that world. In dress and habits, he remained throughout his life “characteristically pre-War,” as one friend put it, and “rather Forsyte,” as another observed. He continued to dress throughout his life in the Edwardian uniform of black coat, striped trousers, and stiff collar. The novelist Graham Greene, who was to work with him in publishing, amused himself imagining that Jerrold wore a hair shirt under his custom-made Hawes and Curtis shirt. If in his person Jerrold refused to leave the security of the world he had known as a child, in his ideas he became a vehement critic of Victorian Liberalism and its heirs. He not only embraced Distributism, but transformed Belloc’s concept of the servile state and his prescriptions for political reform into an idiosyncratic Tory radicalism. Ultimately, it was to be in his role as a publisher during World War II that Jerrold was to have his greatest impact on the English Catholic intellectual community.1

144

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Jerrold was born in Scarborough in 1893, the only son of Sidney Dominic Jerrold, a district auditor for the Local Government Board, and his wife, Maud Frances Goodrich. On his father’s side were noted members of Victorian literary society. His great-­grandfather and namesake was a successful playwright and one of the earliest contributors to the humor magazine Punch; his other paternal great-­grandfather, Laman Blanchard, was a poet, a journalist, and an intimate of Dickens and Thackeray. His grandfather, Blanchard Jerrold, was also a man of letters, succeeding his father as editor of Lloyd’s Weekly News. As a boy Douglas Jerrold lived, intellectually, almost entirely out of his own time. “My father’s many stories of the early and mid-Victorian writers,” Jerrold recalled, “provided me not only with those early memories which form the starting-ground of a boy’s conscious thinking, but they inevitably influenced the books I asked permission to read.” He devoured the works not only of Dickens and Thackeray but also of their less illustrious contemporaries, such as Harrison, Ainsworth, and Bulwer Lytton, who were much neglected by Jerrold’s own generation. “The inevitable result of all this,” he reminisced in 1937, “was that I grew up in unusual detachment from the contemporary world, that it possessed for me an air of unreality which to this day it has never wholly lost.” Indeed, it was not only the literature and ideas of the mid-Victorian era but also its politics and its middle-class comforts that would remain touchstones for Jerrold.2 Jerrold was raised primarily in London, his family having moved to the capital in 1902 when his father took a position at the Local Government Board. In contrast to Gill, Chesterton, and so many other contributors to the English Catholic intellectual community, he was not a convert, although his family’s religion, he recalled, had been Liberalism as much as Catholicism. If in the religion of his youth he therefore stood in contrast to his fellow contributors to the English Catholic intellectual community, Jerrold’s public school education was similar to that of Chesterton and many other Catholic writers yet to be introduced. After studying at a preparatory school in South Kensington, he attended Westminster, where he was a King’s Scholar and eventually captain of the school. As was the traditional right of

The Lesser Servants

145

a Westminster scholar, he not only attended the 1911 coronation of George V but also took part in the regalia procession up the nave of Westminster Abbey. Although, in contrast to Belloc and to Christopher Hollis, both Brackenbury scholars, Jerrold failed to obtain the coveted history scholarship to Balliol College, he did win a scholarship to New College and went up to Oxford in autumn 1912.3 At New College Jerrold took the path blazed by Belloc and later followed by Hollis and Douglas Woodruff, devoting much of his intellectual energy to debating at the Oxford Union. The Union proved but one of many refuges that Jerrold sought from what he regarded as the stifling conformity of New College, dominated as it was in his estimation by a particularly parochial set of Wykehamists.4 In his memoirs Jerrold expressed his surprise that his fellow students had been so “very much in earnest about their lectures, their tutors and their degrees.” His own studies, in contrast, seem not to have much concerned him. Instead his attention at Oxford turned to what ultimately became his career, writing and publishing.5 In his second term Jerrold established a magazine, the Oxford Fortnightly, which treated literary affairs. Unusually for the proprietor of a student periodical, he decided while still an undergraduate to move it to London, where he transformed the fortnightly into a monthly and renamed it the New Oxford Review. Not surprisingly, he began to spend more and more time in the capital, where he came into contact with a group of avant-garde artists and intellectuals that included the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis, who was founding the abstract Vorticist movement at the time, and especially the philosopher and poet T. E. Hulme.6 Jerrold rated Hulme, a polymath whose interests included poetry, literary theory, epistemology, and political philosophy, “one of the most considerable minds of the day.” A brilliant talker and facilitator of conversation, Hulme presided from 1911 until the war over a weekly salon in Frist Street, near Soho Square, to which much of literary and artistic London found its way. Jerrold frequented this salon, as well as the Café Royal, where Hulme also held forth and where Jerrold first met him in 1913. Given Jerrold’s interests, it was Hulme’s

146

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

political theories that he found especially stimulating. In A Tory Philosophy (1912) Hulme had distinguished between what he dubbed the “romantic” and the “classical” conceptions of human nature. Hulme’s classicists emphasized human weakness and consequently held that discipline was needed for human beings to thrive, whereas his romantics believed that human beings were naturally good and that they therefore needed to break the bonds of tradition in order to achieve their full potential. Hulme clearly sided with the more conservative classical view and lamented that the romantic view was predominant in the modern world. Like Eric Gill, he also criticized the humanistic belief, dating from the Renaissance, that man is the measure of all things. Although Jerrold’s personal politics did not change until after the war, Hulme’s antiromantic and antihumanist stances were to have a profound effect on him. By 1937 he held that Hulme could have been, had he not been killed in the Great War, a leader of what Jerrold came to call the “counter-revolution.” Jerrold’s experience in prewar London thus prepared him for his own postwar reaction to the Liberalism that had been his intellectual inheritance.7 One wonders if Jerrold would have taken his degree from Oxford, or if his London interests in the end would have trumped his academic pursuits. In any event the war intervened, and Jerrold, like so many of his university contemporaries—though unlike most of the other contributors to the English Catholic intellectual community, who were, with very few exceptions, either physically unfit or too old or young to serve—immediately enlisted. On 7 August he joined a motorcycle dispatch battalion in London because this proved to be his quickest and easiest way into the armed services. He soon found what he considered a better post, however, and on 6 October was commissioned as a sublieutenant in the Royal Naval Division, which was to become one of the most famous divisions of the war.8 The Royal Naval Division (RND) was an ad hoc division assembled in September 1914 from the surplus of some thirty thousand men who had formed the reserves of the Royal Navy before the war. There were no ships on which these men could serve, so they were deployed as infantry. Ill equipped and looked at askance by the professional officers

The Lesser Servants

147

of both the navy and the army as neither fish nor fowl, the men of the division participated in some of the most hazardous campaigns of the war. Jerrold himself served as the adjutant to a battalion commanding officer in the RND’s two most notable deployments, first at Gallipoli and then at the Somme. In November 1916 during the Battle of Ancre, a part of the Somme campaign, Jerrold was severely wounded. He was supposed to accompany his commanding officer and establish a forward “report centre” once the battalion had overrun its objective. When no one in the battalion returned for some time after the first advance, the commanding officer decided that he and Jerrold would act as their own reconnaissance. Jerrold’s arm was shattered, nearly blown off, as they made their way across no man’s land. He spent all of 1917 recovering in a London hospital. When he finally returned to active duty in January 1918, instead of rejoining his battalion in France, he was appointed commander at the Naval Division Officers’ School at Aldershot. He was to suffer from the effects of this wound for the remainder of his life, and one longtime friend attributed Jerrold’s notoriously bad temper and acerbic tongue to the chronic pain.9 Jerrold was to invest Gallipoli and the Somme with world historical significance. Just as Chesterton’s personal experience with the Marconi scandal led him to conclude that it was the turning point in modern English history, so Jerrold believed that the two campaigns in which he had fought were similarly transformative events. Rather than interpret Gallipoli as the last gasps of the “sick man of Europe,” the soon to be dismantled Ottoman Empire, Jerrold was convinced that the failed campaign “marked the end of the long eclipse of the Mediterranean powers, the end of that long domination of the Atlantic seaboard.” Similarly, Jerrold characterized the Somme not just as the tragic waste of tens of thousands of lives, but as the “doom of the democratic regime in Western Europe.” To him, the Somme campaign illustrated the bankruptcy of parliamentary democracy in France and Britain. The democratic nations may have won the Great War, but the future was not to be theirs.10 In June 1918 Jerrold took a position at the Ministry of Food as director of the rationing and distribution division. He intended the

148

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

position to be a sojourn, planning to sit for the All Souls’ Fellowship as Ernest Barker, one of his tutors at New College, had urged. He opted instead to take the Civil Service Examination in late 1919, the first offered since 1914, after which he joined the Treasury, where he spent the next three years. It was not until 1923 that Jerrold would leave Whitehall, exchanging government for publishing. He was hired by Ernest Benn to help transform the book department at Benn Brothers—a firm noted primarily for its publication of trade journals­—into an “independent and active publishing business.” Publishing would remain his career, first at Benn, then from 1928 at Eyre and Spottiswoode, where he was a director before the next war and chairman following it. Jerrold’s influence during World War II as director of Eyre and Spottiswoode and chairman of its subsidiary, Burns & Oates, would significantly affect not only English Catholic propaganda efforts but also, ultimately, the stability of the English Catholic intellectual community.11 The five-odd years that Jerrold spent in the civil service proved the intellectual turning point for him. Heretofore he had retained at least a loose allegiance to the liberalism of his father and to the Liberal Party. There had always been, it was true, a measure of the contrarian to his politics. As a schoolboy he had vociferously supported the Liberal Party during the divisive years 1910–11 at least in part because his teachers at Westminster were diehard Tories and he enjoyed tweaking them. Of course, Jerrold also acknowledged that as a young man he had avidly read Belloc and Chesterton during this same period when they were themselves breaking with the Liberal Party. Even so, as late as 1923 Jerrold appeared “on the Liberal platform” for the meeting at Queen’s Hall, London, where Asquith and Grey “launched the reunited Liberal party’s election program.” That same year he also spoke at Leicester many times on behalf of Churchill (then still a Liberal) during his election campaign, in order “to refute the iniquitous lies which were being told about [Churchill’s role at] Antwerp and the Dardanelles.”12 Jerrold’s liberalism was, however, very Victorian, indeed Glad­ stonian in the fiscal sense, and thus nearly a quarter century out of

The Lesser Servants

149

date. This fiscal conservatism was a reflection of his nostalgia for the England he remembered as a boy, when the state’s frugality reflected the frugality of its citizens. His family had lived in a substantial house, fourteen large rooms, on Redcliffe Square in South Kensington. His parents, he recalled, had been able to maintain this household, complete with servants, because of the parsimony that Jerrold believed had been characteristic of the Victorian upper middle class. Jerrold’s autobiography was very much a lamentation at the passing of this world.13 Liberty and retrenchment remained for Jerrold the key tenets of his political faith. The state, he was startled to discover when he entered the civil service, had become gargantuan both in fiscal terms and in the reach of its authority. Liberty for Jerrold meant negative liberty, that is, freedom from government. The powers and responsibilities of the state needed to be strictly limited in his estimation. In the England he knew as a boy, “the moral enthusiasm of Liberalism was fired not by a desire to extend but by a determination to restrict the powers of government.” It was not surprising, then, given his understanding of liberalism and given the expansive role that contemporary Liberal leaders such as Lloyd George advocated for the state—the so-called New Liberalism—that Jerrold broke with the Liberal Party. The only surprise was that he had remained in its fold as long as he had. It was his experience in the Treasury that finally led him to recognize that Liberalism and the Liberal Party no longer served the same political gods as he. The “chief problem of to-day,” he came to understand, was the “restriction of the growth of the positive state,” but nothing was being done to solve this problem. The bloated bureaucracy of the war years was no longer an expedient in a national emergency. There would be no retrenchment.14 Although Jerrold found his coworkers at the Food Ministry and the Treasury to be more often than not of great ability, he grew increasingly suspicious of the ever-increasing responsibilities of civil servants. It was not merely the size of the state, therefore, that was the problem but also the fact that unelected bureaucrats such as himself wielded enormous power. As a civil servant, he discovered that he had “become part of that vast busy machine of modern government,

150

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

which has no cares because it is omnipotent and no rest because it is omni-competent, which enjoys power without responsibility and exercises authority without being required to bring the gifts of leadership.” Jerrold believed, in contrast, that the civil servant ought only to advise the cabinet ministers on questions of policy, with ultimate power residing with the elected ministers of the government. He found that in practice, however, it was Whitehall rather than Westminster that made the great decisions of state. Such a situation, he concluded, was “supremely unconstitutional.”15 Jerrold’s work within the postwar bureaucracy was but one cause of his break with his political past. If his experience in government had led him to renounce the Liberal Party, it was, more broadly, the failure of Liberals to denounce Bolshevism that had caused him to condemn liberalism as a political philosophy. Jerrold believed that the new regime in Moscow was an affront to liberalism and that it had been the failure of leaders, including Lloyd George, to challenge the Bolsheviks that had finished not only the Liberal Party but liberalism as well. “The support of Moscow, expressed or implied,” Jerrold maintained, “became the creed of every Liberal writer and teacher from 1923 onwards.” The failure to confront the Communists was “a betrayal of every Liberal principle.” It represented for him the “moral collapse of Liberalism,” and with it “the collapse of the foundation of all that had seemed for nearly a century the best and most wholesome in our public life.” Following the “first judicious and careful advances of the Liberal press towards Moscow,” Jerrold concluded, liberalism had so degenerated that by the mid-1930s “men sufficiently impudent or venal to call themselves Liberals wax[ed] openly enthusiastic over the burning of churches, the murder of priests, and the massacre of Christian statesmen and writers.”16 When one considers Jerrold’s transformation from liberal civil servant to radical publisher and writer, one influence stands out—that of Hilaire Belloc. It is unclear exactly when he read Belloc’s Servile State, but it was evident that this volume dominated his conception of contemporary British government. In a festschrift for Belloc to which many other English Catholic intellectuals contributed, Jerrold dubbed

The Lesser Servants

151

him a “man of genius, who alone among his contemporaries foresaw and defined the servile state.” For Jerrold, The Servile State remained the “most penetrating and prophetic piece of political pamphleteering of the century.” Observing that the great nineteenth-century legal historian Sir Henry Maine had distinguished between premodern societies based on status and modern societies based on contract, Jerrold noted that what Belloc had done was to illustrate how “the contractual basis of civilized society was, in the name of social progress, being steadily undermined,” creating once again a status-based society in which a man was either a property owner or a dependent of his employer or the state. Only Belloc had understood that Lloyd George’s Insurance Act represented the “first step on the road to the regimentation of the working class.” “Everything that has happened to the modern world,” Jerrold concluded, “was foreseen, explained, and challenged by Hilaire Belloc long before the war broke out.”17 Jerrold also became devoted to that second great pillar of Bellocian political philosophy, The Party System, albeit with a caveat. Before Belloc attacked the party system, Jerrold observed, “the weakness of middle-class parliamentary democracy had been concealed behind an imposing façade.” Belloc’s diagnosis of the “corrupt bargain” between the major parties in Parliament “for the defence of privileged or personal interests” had therefore been “revolutionary.” He dealt the “prestige of the Parliamentary system,” Jerrold concluded, a “blow from which it has never wholly recovered whether here [in England] or elsewhere.” This was not to say that Jerrold accepted entirely Belloc’s thesis. He argued that while Belloc had been correct in noting that there was no significant difference between the parties in Parliament, he had been mistaken in his belief that this was conscious and therefore corrupt. Jerrold was realistic enough to recognize that in a two-party parliamentary democracy the parties had to agree on a number of principles. Belloc, in mistaking such agreement for collusion, had exhibited the “time-honoured suspicion of the Radical for the Whigs.”18 In the final analysis, however, whatever his disagreements with parts of Belloc’s analysis of the party system, Jerrold agreed with him in substance. Just as Belloc had argued that the Liberals and the Tories

152

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

had agreed to shelve the issue of the House of Lords before the war, so Jerrold maintained that Labour and the Conservatives exhibited a troubling unanimity concerning the great issues of postwar Britain. The only difference was that the former saw malevolence, the latter ineptitude when looking at the two sets of benches in the House of Commons. Primarily, Jerrold railed against the uncritical acceptance by both parties of “state capitalism,” by which he meant Belloc’s servile state. Both parties, in Jerrold’s estimation, had agreed to use the power of the state to maintain the current dominance of a handful of industrial and financial magnates over British society, while in exchange these business concerns paid the government to provide health care, education, and other social services. Jerrold might have disputed aspects of Belloc’s thesis regarding the “parliamentary system,” but in his own denunciation of the intellectual conformity of Labour and the Conservatives, and the inability, in his view, of either to provide an alternative to the “servile state,” the influence of Belloc’s “party system” was evident.19 Jerrold, like many other contributors to the English Catholic intellectual community, did not limit his analysis to contemporary affairs but also presented an interpretation of England’s history. Not surprisingly, here too Belloc’s influence was clear. Like Belloc and Chesterton, Jerrold diminished the Anglo-Saxon influence on ­England. As they had, he emphasized instead the lasting impact of the Roman occupation, interpreting the subsequent influence of Christian missionaries, such as St. Augustine, as a return to Roman roots and viewing the Norman Conquest as a further strengthening of ­England’s Latin ties. Thus, as with Belloc and Chesterton, for Jerrold the AngloSaxon invasion had been only a brief Germanic interlude in Latin dominance. Of course, Jerrold agreed with them also in emphasizing the achievements of high medieval civilization in England. The Norman Conquest, he argued, had laid the foundation for a society of “free men secure in their livelihood,” a successful society that in his estimation had lasted more than three centuries.20 While Jerrold’s account of the subsequent destruction of a socially and economically just medieval English society during the ­sixteenth

The Lesser Servants

153

century differed in some details from that of Belloc, the tenor was the same. The great landowners had under the Tudors usurped the traditional land rights of the peasants, inaugurating a “capitalist agri­ culture” that represented the “first decisive triumph in our history of the money power over human dignity.” These great landlords had then provoked in the next century the constitutional crisis that had cost Charles I his head and seized for Parliament—that is, for themselves—the traditional prerogatives of the Crown (though Jerrold was generous enough to acknowledge that the parliamentarians were sincere when they evoked liberty as their cause). In so doing, Jer­rold argued, they destroyed the traditional balance of the constitution. Whereas the prerogatives of the Crown had remained limited by its reliance on Parliament to raise revenues, by the end of the seventeenth century Parliament had emerged with unprecedented powers, encompassing both the executive and the legislative authority.21 From 1688 English history was for Jerrold, as for Belloc and Chesterton, the story of the “growth of economic oppression.” The unjust economic system that the Whigs built after 1688 had culminated in the Liberal political economy of the nineteenth century: “an economic order which had an imposing appearance of efficiency, but which lacked all the essentials, because within its structure was no place where plain men could walk with dignity, within the repertory of its philosophy no obligations could inspire humility in the proud, set bounds to deceptive speculation or impose justice on the strong.” In its basic outline, then, Jerrold’s history of England was indistinguishable from Belloc’s. In his interpretation of English history, as in his attacks on the servile state and the party system, Jerrold was following in Belloc’s steps.22 Jerrold’s transition from the civil service to publishing coincided not just with his political transformation from liberal to radical but with his writing career as well. He began contributing to two radicalright periodicals, Gilbert Frankau’s short-lived Britannia and Francis Yeats-Brown’s Everyman. Despite his Bellocian attitude toward party politics, however, Jerrold had not written off entirely the British political system. Surprisingly, though he considered himself a radical

154

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

like Belloc and though he detested Baldwin and referred to the Tories as asphyxiating the “liberties of free men,” Jerrold found in the Conservative Party his hope for reform.23 In 1931 Jerrold became editor of the English Review, to which he had already been contributing, intending to use it to make the case for “true conservatism.” As he recalled: Labour had just come into office, and the usual search for scapegoats had begun at the Conservative Headquarters. Mr. Baldwin had offered to help everyone at some one else’s expense “from the cradle to the grave” and had been defeated for his pains. Was there no alternative, we asked ourselves, to the slow drift towards Socialism on the tide of competitive benevolence? Was it impossible to re-state the Conservative case in terms which would appeal to the man in the street and the man on the land; to offer them not a deferred path to the Socialist gaol but a new path to another goal? The current economic and political systems, he believed, were already collapsing. “The post-war economic solution (State capitalism), and the post-war international solution (pacifist internationalism),” Jerrold asserted, “have alike broken down.” Conservatism represented to his mind the only realistic British alternative to the servile state. Jerrold hoped that his English Review would prove the catalyst for his new conservatism. To that end he established a fortnightly luncheon club, in imitation of the liberal Nation whose lunches he had attended years earlier. To these lunches he invited Conservative members of Parliament in an effort to persuade them to adopt the platform of the English Review.24 Jerrold’s conservatism, however, was idiosyncratic. By “true conservatism,” he meant, primarily, Bellocian Distributism. Small businesses and farms were to be privileged and property, especially land, more widely distributed. “Conservatism stands to-day for the defense of liberty,” Jerrold explained, “by which is meant not mere liberty of speech (important though that is), but economic liberty, without

The Lesser Servants

155

which all hope of freedom is in vain.” “It accepts,” he observed, in very Bellocian terms, “as the condition of economic liberty, the need for a redistribution of property, and the defence of the small against the large property owner.” His aim was to “kill the ridiculous notion that Conservatism stands for big business, high profits, low wages and the defence of vested interests and class privileges,” which, he claimed, represented in actuality the program of “Whiggery and its spiritual heir, which is bureaucratic planning.”25 If Jerrold then wholeheartedly supported Bellocian Distributism, he also went beyond Belloc and Chesterton when it came to political change. He was more vociferous than they had been in arguing for “constitution reform.” For Jerrold this meant the establishment not of Bellocian monarchy but of a corporate state. Belloc had of course touched on introducing functional representation, and government by committees drawn from the various trades and professions, in his House of Commons and Monarchy. Jerrold, however, had more faith that such a radical reform was possible. Under his corporatist scheme, the electorate would vote based on their occupation rather than their place of residence, and representatives would therefore represent occupational blocs rather than geographic units. As he explained: The Conservative Party must turn its back on the present parliamentary system in favour of a system which will restore the reality of self-government in the appropriate spheres and enable a strong central government to speak for the nation, and not merely for a class, on national issues. This means the adoption of functional and not regional representation. Thus alone can Labour be given a proper political status and a true equality. For Jerrold functional representation would be a return to Parliament’s medieval roots. “The early Parliaments,” he maintained, “were assemblies of representative nobles, representative clergy, and representatives of the smaller landed properties, (the knights of the shires) and of the merchants (the burgesses).” Only as these functional groups had become outmoded had the modern system of regional representation

156

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

developed. The older method needed to be revived, with the functional groups of industrial, urban society replacing the geographic units of modern Parliament.26 Jerrold’s conservative program included a number of other items, chiefly economic in nature. He emphasized that England needed to regain its economic self-sufficiency. Thus he urged that English agriculture be rebuilt and the coal industry restored by a transition away from oil. By meeting its own food and energy needs, Jerrold believed, many thousands of Englishmen on the dole would be able to find work again on the land and in the mines. He was also a strong advocate of monetary reflation. As for foreign policy, a central concern of the English Review, Jerrold was a persistent critic both of the international order created after the Great War and of Britain’s approach to international relations under recent governments, both Conservative and Labour. The postwar settlement had been a farcical attempt to return to the “fool’s paradise of 1914,” he charged, that had succeeded only in maintaining all the prewar tensions. What passed for statesmanship in the first postwar years Jerrold dismissed as an “orgy of political folly and corruption.” The peace treaties that were signed then and in subsequent years he rejected as lacking “either moral or political sanction.” Ultimately, therefore, they were no more than a “mountain of scrap paper.” As for Britain, “our readiness to compromise every issue is leading Europe to the brink of catastrophe.” Indeed, while Britain and the other Great Powers were “shirk[ing] every decision to secure the appearance of unanimity,” other nations were concluding that the postwar settlement was no longer in their best interests and that there would be no consequences if they ignored it. International stability, Jerrold emphasized, was not necessarily international order. What Britain needed to do, he was arguing as early as 1934, was to rearm, and particularly to reestablish the nation’s naval supremacy.27 Given Belloc’s influence on him, his advocacy of the corporate state, and his evocation of “order” as the guiding principle of both domestic and foreign policy, it was no surprise that Jerrold shared the apologetic Bellocian attitude toward Fascism. In some cases, it was true,

The Lesser Servants

157

he remained more critical of Fascism than Belloc and Chesterton. Indeed, he acknowledged that the Fascist state was nothing less than the servile state. Like Belloc and Chesterton, however, he could not stop there. He was compelled to note in the process the failings of Britain and allude to the advantages of Fascism. Thus he maintained that the Fascist state, in contrast to “state capitalism”—his term for the “servile state” as it existed in Britain—was at least “broadly based.” This was of course a typical Bellocian populist apology for dictatorship. Indeed, Jerrold argued repeatedly that Fascism was a genuinely populist movement, the “reaction” of the “unorganized majority” against the “politically-organized classes” who “find no difficulty under a democratic system in achieving a dictatorship.”28 As with other Bellocians, Jerrold therefore consistently elided the differences between dictatorship and democracy. Jerrold was at least honest enough to admit that his work as a writer and editor would have led to his imprisonment or execution in a totalitarian state. He likewise accepted that “liberties of speech and of public meeting” were genuine liberties in Britain and that the British government was better than “most of its rivals.” Yet he maintained that “basic liberty”—by which he meant “economic independence”—was moving “even more rapidly in the democracies than elsewhere—towards its extinction.” Indeed, he argued that “all people alike live under the shadow of a governmental system which they cannot escape and on which they are being compelled increasingly to rely, and which our own people no more than those of Italy or Russia can change without a social and political revolution.”29 Jerrold, like Belloc and Chesterton, was therefore guilty of moral equivalence in his inability to recognize the significant difference between living under a totalitarian regime and in a democratic society. Certainly it would take a “revolution” to change Britain’s parliamentary democracy, but was this the only way in which political or economic transformation could occur? Jerrold, with the other Bellocians, had examined a small sample of recent political history in Britain and had concluded that choosing between two candidates for Parliament was scarcely better than being a citizen of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany,

158

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

or Soviet Russia. Could not political parties and candidates for office change their programs and beliefs? Indeed, had they not often done so in the past? Could not a new party arise, as the Labour Party so recently had? Merely because neither political party advocated the program of Jerrold and his fellow Bellocians did not make British politicians collectively dictators. In one significant respect, Jerrold exceeded the radicalism of his fellow Bellocians. Whereas even Belloc himself, despite his advocation of monarchism and his apologies for Mussolini, had shied away from Oswald Mosley’s British Fascists, Jerrold examined seriously whether Fascism might not be a viable political alternative not just on the Continent but in England as well. His hope that the Conservative Party could counter the “state-capitalism” and bureaucracy of contemporary Britain had quickly faded. By June 1934 Jerrold was noting the “success” of the British Fascists’ Albert Hall demonstration and considering whether Mosley could be an ally in the battle against state capitalism. Jerrold, however, maintained some qualms about the Mosleyite project. He wondered, for example, whether a system of government that depended on “self-appointed leaders”—as Mosley’s seemed in his estimation to do—could be successful in the long run. While Mosley spoke of establishing a corporate state, Jerrold asked what this state would look like. Would it merely preserve the “present system of political-economic bureaucracy,” or would it “restore the property state?” Would a Fascist regime in Britain abuse the machinery of functional representation merely to maintain the authority of “big business and the powerful unions” at the “expense of the public”? Or would British Fascism be “prepared to insist on shop as opposed to craft unions, on the local as opposed to the centralized organization of employers,” and “the equality for purposes of voting of the small business and the large”? Likewise, Jerrold wondered where precisely sovereignty would reside under such a regime. Would it be a one-party dictatorship, or would a chamber or ministry of corporations (Jerrold’s preference), subject to plebiscite, be the ultimate authority? Mosley, Jerrold concluded, had not provided

The Lesser Servants

159

enough information­ to enable one to judge whether a “British Fascist State is to be Christian or secularist, whether it is to be free trade or protectionist, rationalizing or distributist, deflationist or expansionist.” While others—particularly, he lamented, the leaders of the Conservative Party—had condemned Mosley’s movement out of hand, he wanted to hear Mosley’s answers to these questions before he reached his conclusions.30 The better to understand the British Fascists’ political and economic program, Jerrold therefore invited Mosley to speak to his English Review luncheon club. At the meeting Mosley assured Jerrold that he would only seek power constitutionally, that is, by winning seats in Parliament; that if successful he would substitute functional for regional representation in the House of Commons; and that he would hold to the tradition that a government that failed to obtain a vote of confidence would have to resign. Jerrold pronounced himself satisfied with these answers. He reserved his criticism for the Conservative Party. If the Conservatives refused to take seriously popular opposition to socialism in contemporary Britain, Jerrold maintained, Mosley’s party might well replace it. “The National Government,” he concluded, “must either become a constructive force for the building of a healthy social order based on economic and spiritual freedom or give place to those who have really got a constructive programme alternative to Socialism.”31 Ultimately, Jerrold was to decide that Mosley’s movement lacked “the creative impulse.” It had no substance. British Fascism in his view was “simply a party machine without a party.” Jerrold, however, liked and admired Mosley himself. He had a “disarming simplicity” and was a “great orator,” but most of all he was a man who was “telling the truth as he sees it” and who had sacrificed as a result “the certainty of office for the certainty of a life in the political wilderness.” Mosley was, however, neither a “great thinker” nor a talented “organiser.” Jerrold had demanded of him, “What kind of world are you going to build, once you have mobilised enough energy and enough integrity to build it?” To this question, he concluded, Mosley and his British Fascists had no answer. As he had the Tory Party, to which he

160

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

had also tried to harness his “new conservatism,” Jerrold therefore judged the Fascists failures.32 Jerrold’s search for a “new conservatism,” like his close interest in Mosleyism (a political movement that his fellow Bellocians, despite their apologetics for Italian Fascism, wanted to have little to do with), was a reflection of his hostility to socialism in general and to communism in particular. Indeed, Jerrold’s political transformation from liberal to radical was the consequence of his conviction that Soviet Communism represented a serious threat. In contrast, his fellow Bellocians—particularly Belloc, Chesterton, and the circle of Distributists they gathered at the New Witness in the early 1920s—had not been concerned about the revolution in Russia. To the extent that the New Witness had mentioned the Russian revolution at all, it was to rail, characteristically, at the number of Jews among the Bolsheviks. For the Bellocians, communism had remained, into the 1930s, much less important than their campaign against plutocratic capitalism and corrupt parliamentary democracy at home. Communism was for them, echoing Marx, the logical development of this unjust economic and political system. Jerrold was therefore ahead of his fellow Bellocians in this regard, but where he led, they would follow during the Spanish Civil War.33 Although Jerrold was sui generis among Bellocians for his interest in Mosley and ahead of them in his anticommunism, he was more representative of the younger generation of Catholic intellectuals than he was of Belloc, Chesterton, or Gill. Nourished as schoolboys on The Servile State and Orthodoxy, many came to the Church through the political and economic thought of Belloc and Chesterton. Though not a convert himself, Jerrold, with his Liberal roots and his idiosyncratic Toryism, had in background and ideas much in common with the new generation. His English Review became for several years a forum for some of this younger generation of Bellocians. Indeed, Jerrold had decided to take on the editorship of the English Review at the urging of one influential young Bellocian, Douglas Woodruff, then an editor at the Times, and another, Christopher Hollis, Woodruff’s friend and Oxford classmate, became a contributor to the journal. Both were

The Lesser Servants

161

converts, as was their friend Evelyn Waugh. Each of them, unlike Belloc and Chesterton, shared Jerrold’s Tory sympathies, though, like Jerrold, none thought much of the contemporary Conservative Party. Woodruff and Hollis would join Jerrold as particularly effective advocates of Bellocianism, and both became, like Jerrold, influential contributors to the English Catholic intellectual community.34

Postwar Oxonians: Douglas Woodruff, Christopher Hollis, and Evelyn Waugh Douglas Woodruff (1897–1978), Christopher Hollis (1902–77), and Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) met at Oxford in the early 1920s. Although admirers of Belloc, they were not simply his acolytes. Like Jerrold, they took Belloc as their starting point but reinterpreted his ideas in order to address the emerging problems of the 1930s. Of the three, Woodruff was the éminence grise. Cultivating a Samuel Johnsonesque persona, he helped, through his journalism, to refine the radicalism of Belloc and to present it to the broader English Catholic audience. Christopher Hollis, on the other hand, was more exuberant in his promotion of Bellocianism. Although more sophisticated in his historical analysis than Belloc, he was in other areas more radical, zealously challenging what he called “the money-power.” Of the three, Waugh was without doubt the most talented and ultimately the most successful, becoming an accomplished novelist. During the 1930s, however, when he was just emerging as a novelist, he also addressed English history and the contemporary world crisis from a very Bellocian standpoint. The three friends—Woodruff through his journalism, Hollis in his work on English history, contemporary foreign affairs, and monetary theory, and Waugh in both his novels and his nonfiction—were to prove significant contributors to the English Catholic intellectual community. Oxford in the years immediately following the Great War was a university attempting to return to the status quo ante bellum. For the veterans of the war, however, traditional strictures such as college

162

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

curfews appeared absurd and academic pursuits seemed insignificant. Indeed, Hollis maintained that both the antinomianism of the returning soldiers and their indifference to scholarship infected younger colleagues. The result was an unprecedented period at Oxford, during which not only academics but also traditional extracurricular activities such as athletics gave way before the pursuit of pleasure and a new emphasis on the aesthetic. The university, Hollis remembered, merely provided his contemporaries with an environment in which they could enjoy themselves to the utmost. For Waugh, Hollis, and many of their contemporaries, their undergraduate days were a ­period of “folly.”35 In January 1922 Evelyn Waugh went up to Hertford College from his public school, Lancing, as the senior history scholar. From the beginning, he focused not on his studies but on capturing the “quintessential Oxford” of his imagination. Literature had defined the university for Waugh, especially the poems of Belloc, with their emphasis, as in “To the Balliol Men Still in Africa” and the “Dedicatory Ode to the Republican Club,” on the intimate friendships to be formed at Oxford. Following Belloc’s example, Waugh tried to make his reputation first at the Union but with much less success than his hero. He had fancied himself a gifted debater, but the tactics that had been effective at Lancing—mostly his ability to shock his audience with outrageous statements—proved unsuccessful against the more accomplished university debaters, led by Woodruff and Hollis. When the Union failed to live up to his expectations, Waugh turned to Oxford’s political associations and social clubs in his continued search for Belloc-inspired comradery. Although he considered himself a Tory, Waugh paid little attention then, or later, to the party program, and at Oxford he joined both Liberal societies such as the New Reform and Conservative clubs such as the Carlton and Canning, and even became a member of the White Rose, which romantically advocated the restoration of the Stuarts and claimed to be under a university ban since the ’45. He devoted most of his social energies to what were, in effect, drinking clubs. Most notable was the Hypocrite—so named for the hypocrisy of its motto, “Water is best”—which Waugh and his

The Lesser Servants

163

friends established as an irreverent alternative to the more pretentious dining clubs of the university. The Hypocrite’s chief attractions were its inexpensiveness, the plentifulness of its drink, and the fact that the don responsible for supervising the club, a scholar of modern Greek, did not attend to his responsibilities.36 The Hypocrite had been created by a hard-drinking group of Rugby and Winchester old boys, but it was taken over by a circle of “wanton” Etonians, who made it, in Waugh’s description, “notorious,” not only for “drunkenness,” but also for a “flamboyance of dress and manner” that was “in some cases patently homosexual.” Harold Acton and Brian Howard were the aesthetic leaders of the group, inculcating in its members at Eton a taste for modernism—Picasso, Matisse, and the Ballets Russes—and then at Oxford a campy devotion to early Victorian fashion and furnishings. The dart boards on the walls in the Hypocrite’s rooms gave way, under their influence, to modernistinspired wall murals, while the folk songs played on the club’s piano were replaced with a mixture of contemporary jazz and nineteenthcentury drawing-room ballads that exemplified both the modernism of the Acton set and the simultaneous fascination with the Victorian. Although short-lived—the university authorities, led by the dean of Balliol, “Sligger” Urquhart (a persistent target of Waugh’s invective for many years), closed the club—it became for Waugh representative of that mythic Oxford he had first sought at the Union. “It was,” he recalled of the Hypocrite, “the stamping-ground of half my Oxford life and the source of friendships still warm today.”37 If Waugh therefore represented one extreme of postwar undergraduate life, that of hard-drinking dilettantism, Douglas Woodruff represented the other, that of studious sobriety. Woodruff was the second of the three children, and the younger son, of Cumberland Woodruff, a barrister employed at the Public Record Office and a fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, and his wife, Emily Louisa Hewett. Like so many contributors to the English Catholic intellectual community, Douglas Woodruff was a convert. Although both his parents came from Protestant families, his mother had become a Catholic early in her marriage, and he had followed her into the Church at

164

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

the age of thirteen. Woodruff was educated first at St. Augustine’s, Ramsgate, and then at the Benedictines’ Downside Abbey. In 1916, after being rejected for military service because of a weak heart, he had joined the Foreign Service and served as vice-consul in Amsterdam, where he helped with the repatriation of wounded soldiers and prisoners of war from 1917 through 1919.38 Sobered by his experiences during the war years, Woodruff went up in 1920 to New College, where he had won an exhibition in history, primed for the scholarship that had been deferred for some four years. He engrossed himself in his studies, winning the prestigious Lothian Prize in history in 1921. In 1922 he was elected president of the Union—Hollis believed Woodruff to be “by far” the best debater among their contemporaries—and the following year he took a first-class degree. Waugh has provided the best description of the undergraduate Woodruff and the esteem in which his peers held him, particularly the younger set to whom he “seemed an ancient”: Douglas had a gift of speech which was witty and unemotional. If he had ambitions they were for influence not for fame. He liked, in our small world, to be behind the scenes, intriguing for others; a wholly benevolent grey eminence. In his mature wisdom he was tolerant of the extravagances of Christopher and myself but did not share them; a sober man who found no one and nothing beneath his notice and very little indeed to command his respect. Indeed, Waugh, who was only to become a close friend after their university days, regarded him with “remote awe.”39 Straddling Waugh’s world and Woodruff’s was Christopher Hollis. The son of an Anglican bishop, Hollis possessed an impeccable academic pedigree. He had attended Summer Fields, the preeminent preparatory school for the Eton scholarship examination, and had duly won a King’s Scholarship to Eton, where he was elected to Pop, the famous public school’s elite society. Like Belloc, he had then gone up to Balliol College, where he too had won a Brackenbury scholarship. At Oxford, however, Hollis did not live up to his great potential.

The Lesser Servants

165

Like his friend Waugh, he spent his time at the Hypocrite Club and other drinking establishments with his Etonian friends and was too much a stranger to the library and lecture hall.40 As a result of their indulgences, both Waugh and Hollis not surprisingly performed dreadfully on their final examinations. According to Waugh, he and his friends had soaked up the legend of Belloc’s old Union nemesis, F. E. Smith (Lord Birkenhead), who had ignored his studies for his first eight terms, crammed during his final weeks, and still won a brilliant first-class degree. They believed that any intelligent student could do the same. They were wrong. Hollis took a thirdclass degree, his examiners noting that he seemed intelligent but that he had obviously not acquired the necessary knowledge. Waugh too received a third-class on his examination but went down without the degree: he needed another term of residence, and his father decided that, given his son’s poor performance, it was worth neither the expense nor the time.41 Despite his academic failures, Hollis had been a great success at the Union, to which he was elected president in 1923, and it was through the Union that he became a close friend of Woodruff. Although Hollis believed that Woodruff was the best debater among their contemporaries, Waugh maintained that it was Hollis and that of all those he had ever heard at the Union, including past greats such as Belloc and his rival F. E. Smith, only Ronald Knox, the prominent convert Catholic priest, had excelled Hollis. Waugh was certain that Hollis’s triumph at the Union was the harbinger of future greatness. If their contemporaries, Waugh later observed, had been asked which of their fellow undergraduates was most likely to make their mark, they would have named Hollis. By virtue of his success as a debater, Hollis therefore had one foot in the arena of high achievement even as he had his other foot in the dissolute world of the Hypocrite Club.42 Hollis, like Woodruff and the majority of aspirants for Union office at the time, considered himself a Liberal. Although both he and Woodruff were defenders of free trade, still a Liberal plank, they were concerned chiefly with the cause of Irish independence. As a result, once the treaty establishing the Free State was signed in December

166

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

1921, and after dancing in the Oxford streets in celebration, Hollis in particular was left with only a loose attachment to the ailing Liberals. Although he campaigned with Woodruff for the Liberal Party even as late as the general election of 1923, in reality he could no longer see any distinction between the Liberals and the Conservatives after the Irish issue had been put to rest. Nor had he a reason to support the rising Labour Party, though Malcolm MacDonald—the son of Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour leader who became the party’s first prime minister in 1924—was one of his Union friends. Into this breech rushed Belloc and his political philosophy, drawing Hollis during his final year at Oxford (1923–24) not only to Bellocian politics and history but also to the Catholic Church.43 Hollis had first encountered Belloc’s political views when, as a student at Eton, he had written a prize essay on the party system. Belloc’s volume on that subject was one of the recommended texts, and Hollis with the other competitors for the prize had been so enamored of Belloc’s attack on English parliamentary politics that the examiner had taken them all to task for uncritically accepting his assertions. He had then read, during his final year at Eton, Emmanuel Burden and the other volumes in Belloc’s quartet of political satires. Hollis’s first appearance in debate at the Union the following year cemented his attachment to Bellocianism. The president at the time asked him to speak on a motion in support of the wide distribution of property, a subject on which Hollis had admitted he possessed no clear views. Again, Belloc was recommended—this time The Servile State—and Hollis soon became, as he acknowledged, a “hero-­worshiper” of Belloc.44 At the same time that Hollis was looking for a convincing new political creed, he was searching for ultimate, metaphysical truth. Raised in a clerical family, Hollis had for the early part of his youth—first at his father’s Leeds parish, subsequently at Summer Fields, and even for most of his time at Eton—accepted without pause such basic tenets of orthodox Christianity as the Virgin Birth, the divinity of Christ, and his Resurrection and Ascension. Hollis’s years at school, away from his parents’ conscientiously religious household, had eroded his faith. Characteristic adolescent contrariness and the irreligion of his

The Lesser Servants

167

teachers and lessons had finally led him to an agnosticism that Hollis remembered as quite typical of his schoolmates both at Eton and at Oxford. The consensus among them was that “obviously the orthodox story was not true,” but “beyond that, what may or may not have happened was not very important.” So much did Hollis share this viewpoint that he was shocked when on a bicycling trip with a former classmate before his final year at Eton his friend had knelt to say his prayers before bed.45 Hollis thus encountered Bellocianism at a time in his life when, as he later put it, “agnostic in religion, disillusioned in political liberalism,” he was “in search of a new faith.” He was searching for an all-encompassing faith, one that would satisfy not only his religious impulse but also his deep interests in contemporary politics and English history. What he desired was, he recalled, “a pattern for secular life.” If Belloc’s The Servile State provided him with the political philosophy he needed, his Europe and the Faith convinced him of the greatness of the Catholic Church and the civilization it had done so much to create. Hollis became attracted to the Church because he believed it to be a “Society which had been . . . the sustainer of civilization throughout the nations and throughout the ages.” Here, Hollis decided, was a “Society which took part in the affairs of this world which was different in kind from any other Society and which it was reasonable to believe was of divine origin.” He became a Catholic, therefore, because he found in the Church “the great creative force of western civilization—incomparably the highest achievement of Man.” As had been the case with Eric Gill when he converted, theological issues did not concern Hollis. He was impressed with the Church as an institution and because of this was willing to accept those other truths that it taught.46 For an Oxford undergraduate such as Hollis the Church also held other attractions apart from its role as the font of Western civilization. Just as Belloc led him to consider the civilizing influence of Catholicism, so too did both Belloc and Chesterton convince him that Catholics were freer in ways especially important to a rebellious undergraduate. Waugh credited Belloc and Chesterton with instilling in

168

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

his friends an emphasis on the “convivial swilling of beer and wine.” Hollis agreed that “the influence of Belloc and Chesterton was potent in giving an appearance of consecration to Catholic alcohol consumption”—what Woodruff referred to in jest as “Cathalcoholism” in a Union speech. Indeed, their Oxford friends, Hollis reminisced, would often cite Maurice Baring’s statement, made after checking a manual of Catholic moral theology to discover precisely what level of drunkenness constituted a mortal sin, that “it takes a very able man to be in mortal sin.” At a time when the United States had enacted Prohibition and when some feared that the Nonconformists would succeed in foisting the same policy on Britain, Catholics seemed, according to Hollis, “to stand for greater freedom than the generality of society.” Likewise, Hollis viewed Catholics as less puritanical in their stances toward two other bête noires of evangelical Protestants, gambling and off-color language. The Catholic, Hollis concluded, “seemed to me to live a freer and more careless life than other people and the Church did not appear to have any objection to his doing so.”47 Hollis’s belief that the Catholic Church represented both civilization and freedom helps to explain why he chose to become a Catholic rather than return to the Anglican Church. His father had responded to his son’s increasing interest in Rome by pointing out the flexibility available in the Church of England. One could, the bishop argued, go to confession if one wanted, abstain from meat on Fridays, and believe in the Real Presence just as in the Roman Catholic Church. Hollis, however, thought of Anglicanism only as the dying faith of an older generation. Few of his peers were practicing Anglicans, nor were any of the Anglican clergymen he encountered at Oxford impressive figures. He contrasted both his lay contemporaries and his clerical elders in the Church of England with the Catholics whom he met at Oxford. Catholics such as Woodruff, he found, were entirely serious in the practice of their faith, while he discovered that Oxford priests such as C. C. Martindale (of the Jesuits’ Campion Hall) and the university’s Catholic chaplain, “Mugger” Barnes (at the Old Palace), compared more than favorably—morally, spiritually, and intellectually—with their Anglican counterparts. Hollis, with many of his peers who con-

The Lesser Servants

169

tinued to shy away from religion, was convinced that if one was to accept Christianity, one ought to become a Roman Catholic: “if any of it was true, they felt, it was logical to accept it all as true.”48 With the theological teachings of the Church, Hollis embraced as of a piece the political and social thought of Belloc and Chesterton. As he subsequently acknowledged: I, certainly, did at that time fall a victim to the theories of the ‘Chesterbelloc,’ to Belloc’s theses of the Catholic church as Europe’s creative force and of the coming of the Servile State, to Chesterton’s proclamation of ‘God’s scorn for all men governing,’ to his rhetorical verse and the vision of the Distributist society in which men of small property bade defiance to the overweening claims alike of capitalists and of Government officials. For Hollis, even more than for the other convert contributors to the English Catholic intellectual community, Bellocianism not only went hand in hand with Catholic religious teaching, but it was in fact what led him to the Church in the first place.49 In 1924 Hollis decided to convert to Catholicism and sought instruction from Mugger Barnes. Although somewhat skeptical about the strength of Hollis’s faith, the monsignor took him through the catechism. Satisfied that he was prepared to accept the teaching of the church, Barnes agreed to receive Hollis in late summer of that year, sooner than might otherwise have been the case, because Hollis was about to sail for America to begin a yearlong world tour with a Union debating team consisting of himself, Woodruff, and Malcolm MacDonald. The only one among his friends to protest his conversion vigorously was, ironically, Waugh.50 Hollis and Woodruff left for the United States in August 1924, returning to England in September of the following the year. They first spent several weeks traveling throughout the American South, becoming particularly enamored of Kentucky, before meeting MacDonald to begin the debating tour, which took them to some fifty colleges in the country. From America they traveled via Hawaii to

170

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Australia and New Zealand, returning to England via the South Asian subcontinent. Hollis accepted a teaching position at Stonyhurst, the Jesuit public school in Lancashire, which Sligger Urquhart had arranged for him, and Woodruff began a journalism career at the Times and within the year was appointed colonial editor.51 The time Hollis and Woodruff spent in America was more than just a youthful lark. Both keenly observed American society, interpreting both the history and the rapidly growing power of the United States through a Bellocian lens. Indeed, on their return to England both wrote books on America. Woodruff’s reflection on contemporary American society was published in 1926, and Hollis’s interpretation of American history from the nation’s founding through the Wilson presidency appeared in 1928. These two works revealed the extent to which Belloc’s ideas had influenced the new generation of Catholic writers. Organized as a Platonic dialogue, Woodruff’s slim volume, Plato’s American Republic, presented Socrates, having returned to Athens from a disastrous lecture tour of the United States, discoursing to his disciples on American politics and culture. Although the dialogue was often amusing, Woodruff pulled no punches. At the heart of his critique was the familiar Bellocian attack on commercial and industrial capitalism. In fact, Woodruff found dominant in America precisely what Belloc and Chesterton had warned was overwhelming English society—a commercial and financial plutocracy. Worldly success was the sole goal of Americans, their very definition of happiness, and this success they measured entirely in terms of the accumulation of wealth, for them an end in itself rather than a means to some greater end. The citizens of the United States, Woodruff’s Socrates observed to his fellow Athenians, “engag[ed] of their own will in the most heavy and degrading employments of commerce, long after they have accumulated for themselves and their families not a sufficiency only but an extreme abundance both of those things that may be called necessities and those that are plainly luxuries.” The problem, as the Woodruffian Socrates explained to his interlocutors, was that the Americans worshiped a strange god called Progress, with whom they associated

The Lesser Servants

171

their prosperity, and as a result they confused quantity with quality and possessed an acquisitiveness with regard to wealth that knew no bounds.52 The American emphasis on quantity—biggest is best—and acquisitiveness, Woodruff argued, was not merely a question of materialism. It also had catastrophic effects on the political and economic liberties of the nation’s citizens. The most talented individuals devoted themselves entirely to commercial enterprise, leaving politics to those of lesser ability. At the same time, and in great part as a result of the Union’s victory over the Confederacy in the Civil War, local government—whether town, city, or state—had increasingly ceded its powers to the federal government. The war, according to Woodruff’s Socrates, had given the central government “new duties and new powers,” “fixing all men’s eyes upon it,” “and accustoming them to think its needs and acts of greater importance than the concerns of their own localities.” Indeed, because the war had been “in support of the government’s claim to authority” and had been “waged successfully,” the prestige of the federal government had increased exponentially while that of the localities had accordingly diminished.53 Not only had the federal government emerged from the war with enormous power, but this stronger central government had become entirely dominated by the wealthy commercial class. The Civil War, Woodruff’s Socrates maintained, had resulted in the triumph of the commercial and industrial Northern states over the agricultural South. Before the war, the individual citizen had been able to pay close attention to politics because of the proximity of the local government. Washington was much farther afield, however, and as the scope of the federal government had increased during and after the war, so had the individual citizen turned his attention to his business, becoming “absorbed in the pursuit of his private gain” and effectively allowing his political participation, and with it his political liberty, to wane. Only the wealthiest and most powerful citizens, in this account, could focus their attention on national politics, and it was they who had therefore become preeminent in the last half of the nineteenth century.

172

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

At the same time that they had become the dominant political authority, the leading manufacturers and bankers had also succeeded in annexing for themselves the nation’s newspapers. Americans were slaves to public opinion, Woodruff’s Socrates argued, always seeking to think and act with the majority, but this majority opinion was in fact created by the leading men of commerce. Not only did the average citizen become, according to Woodruff, a political slave to the central government and an economic slave to the commercial class that dominated that government, but he even lost his liberty of thought and expression as all his opinions became manufactured for him by these same plutocrats. The great example of this dominance was Prohibition, enacted with overwhelming support, he argued, because the manufacturing class had desired it and created this mass support. The aim of Prohibition was, his Socrates argued, to ensure that the laboring classes would devote themselves entirely to their work, being less able to enjoy themselves away from it.54 In the final analysis, Woodruff’s book was not merely an expression of English superiority to the powerful nation that had emerged from Britain’s former humble colonies but also a warning to the English themselves. The final chapter dealt directly with the similarities between the two nations, emphasizing the resemblance of the industrial north of England and the commercial lowlands of Scotland to America. The English, his Socrates observed, had “sacrificed their old and pleasant life to attain mechanical efficiency” and had “made the northern half of their little island dreary with factories and blotted out its sky with smoke.” “In the name of wealth,” he argued, they “desecrate the land,” but now their factories have “grown a burden to them, and a problem and source of quarrels and poverty.” While he maintained that the English still viewed commerce and the wealth it brought only as a means to an end, that of a leisured life, and observed that they did not “admire size or reverence bigness” as Americans did, Woodruff feared that England was becoming too similar to the United States for its own good.55 The Bellocian roots of this critique of American society were quite evident. Although one certainly need not have been a disciple

The Lesser Servants

173

of Belloc either to attack industrialism and commercial capitalism or to argue that wealth was not an end in itself but a means to an end, Woodruff returned consistently in Plato’s American Republic to a number of themes that make Belloc’s influence even clearer. His focus on the plutocratic domination of the American political system paralleled Belloc’s own views concerning the lack of true representation in the British Parliament. Likewise, Belloc’s attack on the English press as the mouthpiece of wealthy financiers, rather than the expression of true freedom of speech, found its echo in Woodruff’s emphasis on the American magnates as manufacturers not only of tradable goods, but of public opinion itself. Last, the rhetoric of slavery and freedom, used by Belloc to great effect in his Servile State in particular and amplified by McNabb and Gill in their persistent references to “wage-­slavery,” Woodruff also employed consistently throughout his volume: Ameri­ cans were economically, politically, and intellectually enslaved to their plutocratic masters. Where Woodruff’s debt to Belloc, and to Chesterton, was most evident, however, was in his idealization of the agrarian South and its plantation gentry. The several months that he and Hollis had spent traveling there before their debating tour greatly influenced both young men. The best of the southerners, Woodruff had his Socrates explain, were the very best of Americans and “the nearest to civilization.” “They measure things by other standards,” he maintained, “and they do not think meanly of leisure.” In his description of the South and its people, Woodruff’s Bellocian veneration for a landed and resolutely anticommercial, anti-industrial society was therefore quite evident.56 Like Woodruff, Hollis too found in the South “a solid, sane, property­-loving anti-urban rural America,” and Kentucky in particular he had found to be “a great cut above the rest of the United States.” Indeed, for Hollis also, the Civil War represented the triumph of the worst aspects of American society. Whereas Woodruff focused on the contemporary United States, Hollis expanded in his American Heresy on the southern-influenced interpretation of American history that Woodruff sketched earlier. Hollis’s thesis, articulated in

174

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

c­ hapter-essays on Jefferson, Calhoun, Lincoln, and Wilson, was that the American War of Independence had brought into being an admirable Jeffersonian state that was destroyed in the Civil War. The hallmarks of this Jeffersonian state were freedom and equality, the former a negative liberty, the freedom from interference by the government, the latter not merely the political equality of one-man-one-vote but also a thoroughgoing social equality whereby “no prestige of rank should prevent any one citizen from freely speaking his mind to any other citizen.” Freedom and equality, Hollis argued, citing Jefferson, depended on the existence of such an agrarian and property-owning society. In an industrial society the “complexity of factory organization made it necessary that men should be divided into masters and servants.” In an agrarian society, however, in which each individual, or rather family, owned some land, economic self-sufficiency ensured both freedom and equality.57 The foe of Jefferson’s vision had been Hamilton, with his northern, New York–oriented dream of a commercial America. For the first half of the nineteenth century, according to Hollis, the commercial classes of the northern cities, following the Hamiltonian vision, had vigorously opposed Jefferson’s vision and, by organizing politically as the Republican Party, had “captured the government, fought the Civil War and eventually smashed the Jeffersonian state.” Before the war, the doctrine of states’ rights had ensured the “independence of the agricultural interest” by preventing either Washington or New York from dominating the rest of the nation, but the independence of the individual states had been destroyed in the Civil War. “As a result of that destruction,” Hollis concluded, “power has largely shifted away from its nominal holders and passed into that of wealth.” The United States he had visited was therefore a plutocracy, albeit one, like that of his native England, that worked “through an apparently democratic mechanism.”58 As with Woodruff’s American volume, the influence of Belloc on Hollis’s interpretation of U.S. history was quite evident. Indeed, what else was Belloc’s political philosophy other than a promotion of a Jeffersonian republican ideal, together with a diagnosis of its demise

The Lesser Servants

175

via the infection of urban, industrial, and commercial capitalism? In fact, Belloc not only had a greater effect intellectually on Hollis than he had on any of Hollis’s contemporaries of the postwar generation, but Hollis also became closer personally to Belloc than did any of his peers. While Woodruff became a friend of Belloc and remained an admirer, he was much more “cautious” and “circumspect,” as Hollis acknowledged in his memoirs, concerning Bellocianism. Other Catholic intellectuals, such as Jerrold and Arnold Lunn, became even more Bellocian than Belloc himself, but Belloc remained personally at a much greater distance from them. Hollis, on the other hand, was not only much taken with Belloc’s political and historical thought; he was also befriended by the great man. From at least 1931 he and Belloc had begun to correspond and to meet when Hollis came down to London from Stonyhurst. Indeed, Belloc respected his young disciple’s historical judgment enough to send the proofs of the fourth volume of his history of England to Hollis for his evaluation. For Hollis’s own work, Belloc had high praise, writing to his protégé of one volume in particular, Foreigners Aren’t Fools (1936), that it was “quite admirable” and that its author possessed the “gifts of judgment and economy which are both rare but are far rarer in combination even than in themselves.”59 Although Hollis remained an admirer of Belloc’s political views and Belloc the man, he became somewhat critical of his work as a historian. One can glean his criticism of Bellocian history from Belloc’s responses to Hollis’s comments on his History of England. Hollis questioned Belloc’s employment of Lady Shrewsbury as a source regarding Queen Elizabeth. To Hollis she was “untrustworthy and spiteful,” but Belloc maintained that Lady Shrewsbury “was only writing of things that were fairly notorious.” Hollis also took him to task for his interpretation of the Gunpowder Plot, in particular for his assertion, without proper evidence, that Cecil and his agents had created and nurtured the plot. At the heart of Hollis’s dissent was his objection to Belloc’s practice of history as apologetics. Even as an undergraduate, Hollis recalled, he had been skeptical of the Bellocian approach to history, admitting that although the majority of the history

176

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

dons had exhibited an anti-Catholic prejudice, a number of others were pro-Catholic. Belloc’s “continual sneers at academic historians” had in Hollis’s estimation only set back the attempts of these latter dons to have their work accepted in the profession, and his sympathies had been with these historians rather than Belloc. As Belloc’s friend, however, Hollis also had access to the private man rather than the public controversialist. He knew, therefore, that Belloc himself laughed at the “bluff and bluster” of much of his history. Indeed, Belloc explained to the young Hollis that the proper way to write history was to make an outrageous claim—“Write, ‘William the Conqueror then got out of his airplane’”—and then when “all the Dons write in and say that there weren’t any aeroplanes in William’s day,” “you write back and say that that’s their anti-Catholic prejudice.” For Hollis, who believed that Catholic historians no longer needed to resort to the outrageous to publicize their work, this was not the way to write history.60 Hollis’s Monstrous Regiment, a volume treating the ecclesiastical upheavals and political maneuvers in Tudor England, exemplified both his intellectual debt to Belloc and his desire to transcend his mentor’s practice of history as apologetics. Despite their disagreements, Belloc’s interpretation of the Reformation in England had a profound influence on Hollis. Like Belloc, he emphasized an economic cause for the success of Protestantism in England, arguing that the greed of England’s leading families for papal dues and monastic lands had meant that there was no turning back once Henry VIII decided to break with Rome. Like Belloc as well, Hollis maintained that Protestantism had remained unpopular with the vast majority of English men and women well into the reign of Elizabeth. With Belloc, he also asserted that the Spanish Armada, far from being the invincible flotilla of English national myth, had actually been inferior to Elizabeth’s navy.61 Hollis’s indebtedness to Belloc was most evident in his attacks on the Whig interpretation of English history, indeed on the great Whig historians themselves. He savaged J. A. Froude in particular, maintaining that though the Victorian historian had been “a brilliant man” and “one of the great masters of our prose,” he had also been “incapable

The Lesser Servants

177

of truth.” Froude, Hollis charged, “consciously falsified his evidence.” Close examination of Froude’s sources demonstrated, in Hollis’s estimation, not only an inability to quote accurately from the documents but also a habit of misquotation that twisted the very meaning of the passages he offered as evidence. Even the other great Victorian Whig historians, such as Macaulay and Stubbs, with whom Hollis’s quarrels concerned interpretation rather than outright misrepresentation, remained obstacles to what he regarded as the proper understanding of the nation’s past. “I remember the old schoolboy version of Elizabethan times,” Hollis observed, “the proud Virgin Queen, lover of England, brave sea-dogs, gallant courtiers, wise statesmen, a nation which was feeling the first stirrings of its greatness, the whole world a young man’s world.” Against this popular view of Tudor England, which Froude and other Victorians had done so much to advance, he contrasted the antithetical vision of a poor, weak, badgered Queen—a gang of crooks, who by a dirty chance had made themselves masters of England and the Queen, and who were playing a desperate and panicky game in order that they might be able to keep that which they had pillaged in sacrilege—the rich atheist, the poor, starving and landless—God banished from English altars, and the gallows of three counties [following the failed Northern Rising of 1569] creaking with the corpses of the last men who have died for English freedom. “Is not the second picture,” Hollis concluded, “as nearly true as the first?”62 While Monstrous Regiment thus exhibited Hollis’s intellectual debt to Belloc, it also illustrated crucial differences between pupil and teacher. Indeed, although Hollis agreed with Belloc that the desire of Henry VIII and many leading families for church property had contributed greatly to the Protestantization of England, he refused to reduce the English Reformation to mere greed. “We condemn, and rightly condemn, the Reformation as the ramp of the nouveaux riches,” Hollis observed, but he added:

178

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Yet it is in nature that old aristocracies should die and new aristocracies should replace them. The old medieval society had been a closed society. The discovery and colonisation of the new lands, Europe’s bursting of her old bonds, must inevitably have led, even without any religious complication, to a redistribution of wealth. The overthrow of religion was not wrong merely because it went hand in hand with a change in the ownership of English land. In effect Hollis argued that the rich will always be with us. New wealthy families had emerged in the early sixteenth century, but they had not undermined a medieval egalitarian society, as Belloc and Chesterton would have had it, nor did the rise of this new oligarchy in itself serve to explain a complex series of events such as the ­English Reformation. Although Hollis agreed with Belloc that Catholicism had remained the religion of the masses of English through the 1560s, he realized, unlike Belloc, that if this had been the case, then surely a cabal of the newly enriched, no matter how powerful their political pressure on the Crown or how brutal their persecution of the old religion, could not alone have succeeded in making England a Protestant nation. For Hollis, the influence of those enriched by the sale of church lands was but one piece of the puzzle.63 For Hollis, to understand how and why the Reformation had succeeded in England by the 1590s it was first necessary to grasp not the economic motives of England’s nouveaux riches but rather the diplomatic and political machinations of Elizabeth and her leading minister, William Cecil. The driving force behind the Protestantization of England in Hollis’s estimation was their desire to establish England as the preeminent nation in Europe. Cecil himself, Hollis observed, had consistently trimmed his religious sails to suit his ambition, ostentatiously displaying his rosary and consorting with Cardinal Pole during the Marian interlude, devoted to the Protestant cause under Elizabeth. As for the queen herself, she detested the zealots on both sides, Calvinist and Catholic alike, and was concerned chiefly with consolidating her own power. The result was a diplomatic policy whereby Elizabethan England supported international Protestantism in order to increase its

The Lesser Servants

179

influence on the Continent at the expense of France and Spain, the dominant powers, but only insofar as such support did not threaten these ambitions. England thus supported the Huguenots in order to prolong France’s civil wars and keep its longtime rival impotent. Likewise, Cecil convinced Elizabeth to support the Dutch in their rebellion against Spain. With its more powerful continental rivals thus preoccupied, England could expand its power and influence.64 Not only were international politics of the utmost significance in cementing Elizabeth’s allegiance to the Protestant cause, but it was ultimately these same foreign policy factors that Cecil exploited in order to portray England’s residual Catholics as traitors and to identify Protestantism with loyalty and patriotism. Pius V’s bull deposing Elizabeth, the 1569 Northern Rising, the 1580 papal expedition to Ireland, and the advent of the Jesuit mission to England were each used by Cecil to establish that English Catholics were traitors. The execution of Mary Queen of Scots in early 1587 and the subsequent war with Spain, according to Hollis, allowed Cecil to complete this work. Mary had been the final hope for English Catholics, and supporting her claim to succeed Elizabeth had not smacked of disloyalty. Now, however, Philip of Spain was presenting himself as the Catholic candidate for the throne, and he was at war with England. Cecil had succeeded, Hollis concluded, “in erecting an opposition between Catholicism and patriotism.” It was this manipulation of national identity that finally, a half century after Henry VIII’s break with Rome, turned the English people away from the Catholic Church.65 While Hollis thus differed from Belloc in his interpretation of the English Reformation, emphasizing foreign policy concerns and questions of patriotism and national identity as opposed to his mentor’s focus on the economic, on one issue they remained in agreement. The Protestantization of England for Hollis, as for Belloc and Chesterton, had severed the nation from its past. It was Protestantism, not Ca­tholi­ cism, that was the foreign thing. Indeed, those who had maintained the Catholic faith, enduring Cecil’s persecution and penal laws, were the most English of the English, and, of these, the English missionary priests, many of whom gave their lives so that the dwindling number

180

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

of Catholics in England could receive the sacraments, were the truest patriots. Among these missionaries, Edmund Campion in particular was in Hollis’s estimation “one of the noblest and most lovable, one of the most honest and most English of all Englishmen,” so much so that even Cecil himself had been forced to admit that Campion was “one of the diamonds of England.” Indeed, Hollis used Campion’s speech at his sentencing (he was executed for treason in 1581) to illustrate his point perfectly: In condemning us you condemn all your own ancestors, all the ancient priests, bishops and kings—all that was once the glory of England, the island of saints and the most devoted child of the see of Peter. For what have we taught, however you may qualify it with the odious name of treason, that they did not uniformly teach? To be condemned with these old lights not of England only but of the world by their degenerate descendants is both gladness and glory to us. For Hollis it was this break with tradition, and the historical amnesia under which England had suffered as a result for four centuries, that was the great tragedy of the Reformation.66 Hollis was not alone in expressing his belief that England’s true national identity was Catholic, nor was he alone in using Campion as evidence of this thesis. Evelyn Waugh too turned to the Jesuit martyr, writing a biography of him that in effect marked Waugh’s own, belated entry into the English Catholic intellectual community following his 1930 conversion. Indeed, Waugh’s biographer has argued that he wrote the Campion volume to establish his bona fides, both with English Catholics in general and, specifically, with the family of Laura Herbert, whom he would marry in 1937.67 Unlike Woodruff and Hollis, Waugh had little idea of what he wanted to do with his life when he left Oxford in summer 1924. With neither money nor prospects, with Hollis on his round-the-world debating tour and other friends still up at university or in the midst of postgraduate travels of their own, Waugh’s first year after leaving

The Lesser Servants

181

Oxford was, as both his biographer and his diary entries make clear, a period of despair. The following years brought little solace. Between 1924 and 1928 he enrolled briefly at art school, taught at several undistinguished schools, tried his hand at journalism, studied cabinet making, and even considered a vocation in the Church of England (the Anglican clergyman whom he consulted decided immediately that Waugh was not suited for such a career). The nadir was his disastrous 1928 marriage to Evelyn Gardner, the daughter of Lord Burghclere and niece of the earl of Carnarvon.68 Waugh’s failed marriage—it lasted scarcely more than a year— had one benefit, however. It obliged him to settle on a career. He turned naturally to the one trade for which he had already served his apprenticeship—that of writer. Waugh already possessed some experience in the field, having published in 1926 a short story in a collection, edited by his brother, Alec, to which such notables as Aldous Huxley, Liam O’Flaherty, and Gertrude Stein had also contributed. A volume on Dante Gabriel Rossetti (coinciding with the centenary of his birth) had followed the next year. Waugh’s decision to devote himself to writing bore immediate fruits. He completed his first novel, Decline and Fall, in April 1928, and with its publication in September critics rated him an up-and-coming young novelist.69 Waugh skillfully exploited the attention his first novel brought him. Invited by the Evening Standard to contribute an article on the new generation of writers, he called for the older generation, the veterans of the Great War, to step aside and allow their talented younger brothers to move to the front of the queue—raising a storm of protest that brought him even more attention. He led an energetic social life as one of London’s “Bright Young Things,” the partygoers whose exploits drew the frequent attention of a press eager to catalog the glamorous goings-on. Moreover, Waugh’s friendships with two of the leading gossip columnists of the London tabloids, Tom Driberg, a Lancing schoolmate, and Patrick Balfour, an Oxford drinking companion, ensured him vital publicity. The result was an eager audience anticipating his second novel, Vile Bodies, written in summer 1929, just as his marriage collapsed, and published in January 1930. Not

182

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

only did Vile Bodies become a best-seller, but it lifted Decline and Fall to the same status.70 The significance of Vile Bodies, in regard to Waugh’s intellectual development, lay in the profound disillusionment with contemporary English culture and society that it reflected. In his second novel, as in his first, Waugh set a central character, a young man, adrift in a chaotic world, becoming the helpless pawn of forces beyond his control and his understanding. The hero of Vile Bodies, Adam Fenwick-Symes, is a young writer and man-about-town. As he returns from France on the channel ferry at the opening of the novel, customs officials seize his manuscript on charges of obscenity. As Adam was depending on the proceeds from the book in order to marry Nina, the daughter of an eccentric country gentleman, the rest of the plot focuses on his unsuccessful attempts to raise the money some other way. Although he wins £1,000 in a parlor game while drinking at the bar of the London hotel where he resides, he immediately gives this found money to a fellow reveler, a mysterious “drunken Major,” to place a bet on a horse that the Major claims is a sure thing. The horse does in fact win, earning Adam some £35,000, but he is unable to find the Major to claim his winnings. The Major reappears throughout the novel but each time disappears before Adam can obtain the money he is owed. Ultimately, Nina spurns Adam, whom she loves, for another suitor, whom she does not. The novel climaxes with the onset of another world war, this one even more devastating than the Great War, during the course of which Adam finally catches up with the drunken Major (now a drunken Colonel) on a postapocalyptic battlefield, by which time the pound has lost its value and Adam’s winnings are worthless. Although Waugh’s protagonist forcefully attempts to counter various disasters and injustices that befall him, in the end all Adam’s frenzied activity, like that of his fellow Bright Young Things, is revealed as pointless. “Oh, Nina, what a lot of parties,” Adam exclaims midway through the novel, regarding the bustle of their lives: (. . . Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties

The Lesser Servants

183

where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St. John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and nightclubs, in windmills and swimming baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris—all that succession and repetition of massed humanity . . . Those vile bodies . . .) Adam finally concludes, in an exchange with Nina toward the end of the novel: “Nina, do you ever feel that things simply can’t go on much longer?” “What d’you mean by things—us or everything?” “Everything.” Ultimately in Vile Bodies there is no answer to the moral and spiritual dissolution of contemporary society. Adam’s and Nina’s attempted response is to seek refuge in marriage, but marriage itself turns out to be subject to the same decay as the rest of society. Not only do Adam and Nina fail to get married, but she returns from her honeymoon to begin an adulterous affair with him during, of all times, the Christmas season. Waugh’s juxtaposition of the traditional manorial Christmas celebrations at Nina’s father’s estate with Adam and Nina’s adultery illustrates the depravity of contemporary England.71 Waugh made this contrast between an older, saner England and contemporary England more explicit in describing Nina’s bird’s-eye view from an airplane. In gazing from the plane, her husband, Ginger, refers (without, tellingly, knowing the author) to Shakespeare’s vision of (in Ginger’s words) “this royal throne of kings, this earth of majesty, this something or other Eden.” In contrast, what Nina sees when she looks down is “a horizon of straggling red suburb; arterial roads dotted with little cars; factories, some of them working, others empty and decaying; a disused canal; some distant hills sown

184

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

with bungalows; wireless masts and overhead power cables; men and women were indiscernible except as tiny spots; they were marrying and shopping and making money and having children.” “I think I’m going to be sick,” she concludes.72 The only characters in Vile Bodies who manage to swim against the tide of English decay are the Jesuit priest, Rothschild, and the American evangelist, Mrs. Ape. Significantly, these are the only two characters who remain composed during the channel crossing at the opening of the novel, a crossing that leaves everyone else seasick but that the captain and chief officer characterize as calm. Significantly as well, both the priest and the evangelist are removed from the moral and spiritual anarchy of England—Ape as an American, and, presumably, Rothschild through his foreign associations (given his Catholicism and non-English last name). Neither, however, is a sympathetic character. Ape’s name says it all, while Waugh indulged himself in presenting Rothschild as the mythical Jesuit bogeyman, manipulating English politics for the good of Rome. What both the Jesuit and the evangelist share, obviously, is religion. Indeed, that these are the only two characters in the novel with some anchor amid the flux illustrates the extent to which Waugh himself was becoming more sympathetic to the claims of religion. Vile Bodies was published in January 1930. In July of the same year Waugh asked a Catholic friend to recommend a priest who could instruct him in the faith. The friend recommended Fr. Martin D’Arcy, S.J., who received Waugh into the Catholic Church on 29 September.73 Waugh had not decided hastily to become a Catholic, nor had he sought instruction for emotional or even aesthetic reasons. He had approached the Church primarily through a rational engagement with its doctrines and dogmas. “He had come,” D’Arcy recounted, “to learn and understand what he believed to be God’s revelation, and this made talking with him an interesting discussion based primarily on reason.” Emotionally and aesthetically, Waugh’s connection had been to Anglicanism. Reflecting on his conversion some twenty years later, Waugh emphasized that it was the Church of England that was the repository of the cultural achievements of the English past, of the

The Lesser Servants

185

great medieval churches and cathedrals, the traditional parishes and dioceses, the music and the liturgy. In converting, he was turning his back on this rich tradition, and it was quite a sacrifice for a man of his aesthetic sensibilities. Indeed, that this was the case was evident in Waugh’s characteristically acerbic comments after meeting D’Arcy at the “superbly ill-furnished” “clergyhouse at Mount Street” for instruction. “Anglicans,” Waugh concluded, “can never achieve this ruthless absence of ‘good taste.’” Not for Waugh, then, an easy choice between stark Calvinist Protestantism and Latin Baroque splendor.74 What drew Waugh to Catholicism was his firm belief that the Church was not only the repository of truth but also the foundation of European civilization, and as such the bulwark against the moral and spiritual desolation that he had diagnosed and portrayed in Vile Bodies. In Waugh’s pessimistic estimation, civilization “is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all.” “The danger,” he argued, “comes not merely from habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy.” Waugh had come to the conclusion not only that life was “unintelligible and unendurable without God” but also that civilization itself was impossible without God, and indeed that European civilization in particular was untenable without the Catholic Church.75 Waugh’s pessimism regarding human nature and society was not just the typical conviction of the confirmed conservative. He believed that European civilization faced a critical choice. “It seems to me,” Waugh observed in explaining his conversion, “that in the present phase of European history the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on one side, and Protestantism, on the other, but between Christianity and Chaos.” Referring to the loss of faith that had occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Waugh concluded: Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that western culture has stood for. Civilization—and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of

186

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Europe—has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance. The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a material, mechanized state, already existent in Russia and rapidly spreading south and west. It is no longer possible, as it was in the time of Gibbon, to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests. While he believed that the Catholic Church was of divine foundation and that Christianity existed most fully in the Church, Waugh emphasized that he had also been attracted to Catholicism because it alone of the various versions of Christianity was capable of marshaling the forces of civilization. He contrasted the “coherent and constant” teachings of the Catholic Church with an Anglican Church beset by doctrinal squabbles and indecision. In the Church of England he found disobedience—of bishops to traditional Christian orthodoxy and of lower clergy to bishops—but among the Catholic clergy he discovered organization and discipline. Only the Catholic Church, Waugh observed, made the claim to universality, and only the Catholic laity practiced their faith with a devotion that was natural, rather than affected, and did not smack of the moral superiority of the elect.76 While Waugh converted after more sober reflection and with greater attention to doctrine than Hollis, for example, he too possessed political and historical motivations for becoming a Catholic. Indeed, like Hollis, Waugh had reflected on the political and religious history of England. As with Hollis, his study of history bore fruit in the form of a book treating the Protestant Reformation in England. In 1935 Waugh took on the task of writing the biography of the English Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion. He did so primarily out of gratitude to Martin D’Arcy for instructing him in the faith. One of D’Arcy’s fellow Farm Street fathers had done a great deal of research for a new biography of Campion but had died before he could actually write it. In addition, the Jesuits’ lease on the building housing their Campion

The Lesser Servants

187

Hall at Oxford had lapsed and, rather than renew the lease, the order had decided to build a new hall and needed the capital to do so. Although he did not advertise the fact, Waugh donated in perpetuity all royalties from the biography to Campion Hall.77 Waugh presented Campion as one of the leading intellects of his day, a man who heroically sacrificed worldly success and acclaim for the sake of truth, and who in return was unjustly and brutally sacrificed at the altar of the Elizabethan regime. Campion became a fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford, in 1557, at the age of seventeen. His talents as a scholar soon drew the attention not only of the earl of Leicester, one of Elizabeth’s leading ministers, but also of the queen herself during her 1566 visit to the university. A deacon in the new Church of England, Campion became convinced of the truth of the old faith and therefore balked at full ordination, which would have been necessary to continue his ascendant scholarly career at Oxford. Instead he resigned his fellowship and left the university in autumn 1569. He eventually made his way to the newly established English College at Douai in France, a seminary for English exiles, and began studying for the priesthood. In January 1573, after receiving his degree in divinity, however, he left for Rome, where he entered the Society of Jesus. When the Jesuits decided to help the new priests from the English College in their mission of restoring Catholicism to their homeland, his superiors dispatched Campion to England, where he arrived in June 1580. From his landing he was a fugitive, traveling in disguise from Catholic home to Catholic home, saying mass, preaching, and administering the sacraments to those who maintained the old faith in the face of growing persecution. He avoided capture for scarcely a year before he was arrested, charged with fomenting ­rebellion, tortured, and executed for treason—hanged, drawn, and quartered­—­despite a paucity of evidence that he had ever done more than carry out his duties as a Catholic priest. Waugh’s Campion was significant not for the details of the Jesuit’s life but for its distinctly Bellocian interpretation of sixteenth-century English history. That Waugh’s portrayal of Elizabethan England was so similar to Belloc’s was not surprising, given that he cited Belloc’s

188

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

How the Reformation Happened among only a handful of secondary sources he employed in the writing of Campion. Waugh followed Belloc particularly in emphasizing the pernicious influence of the new class whom the dissolution and sale of monastic lands had enriched. In fact, Waugh’s detestation of this new order, and his admiration for those older, gentler folk who had continued to adhere to the Catholic faith, was if anything stronger than Belloc’s was. Waugh, for example, portrayed the penal laws enacted during the first twenty years of Elizabeth’s reign as a concerted attempt not only to ruin financially the dwindling number of Catholics but also to benefit directly the nouveaux riches. Although he acknowledged that the most vicious statutes had rarely been enforced, he pointed out that from 1580 the government had applied regularly a fine of £240 per year to those who refused to attend Protestant services—a sum large enough to bankrupt all but the wealthiest families within a few years. Such fines for recusancy were to be divided in three parts, one to the Crown, another to the informant, and the third to the poor of the parish, “but,” Waugh remarked dryly, “there is no single instance of this last humane provision having been put into effect.” “These were the conditions of life, always vexatious, often utterly disastrous,” Waugh concluded, “of the people to whom the Jesuits were being sent, people drawn from the most responsible and honourable class, guilty of no crime except adherence to the traditional faith of their country.”78 Waugh drew a stark contrast as well between the recusants and those who were forcing the Protestant settlement on England. Not only had the usurpers cruelly thrust aside the old Catholic squireocracy, but they had also just as brutally abused the lower orders. The following was Waugh’s vision of the England that Campion would have beheld during the year he spent in the country before his arrest: Along his road the scenes were familiar enough, but he was seeing them with new eyes; the scars of the Tudor revolution were still fresh and livid; the great houses of the new ruling class were building, and in sharp contrast to their magnificence stood the empty homesteads of the yeomen, evicted to make way for

The Lesser Servants

189

the “grey-faced sheep” or degraded to day-labour on what had once been their common land; the village churches were empty shells, their altars torn out and their ornaments defaced; while here and there throughout his journey he passed, as, with a different heart, he had often passed before, the buildings of the old monasteries, their roofs stripped of lead and their walls a quarry for the new contractors. Throughout the biography Waugh contrasted this destructive new class and the common criminals whom they employed as informers with their moral and spiritual betters, the old gentry and nobility whose power had been destroyed as a prelude to the stripping of their wealth and dignity.79 Even where Waugh differed from Belloc, it was largely in what he chose to emphasize. While for the latter the tragedy of the English Reformation had been economic, for the former it was cultural and intellectual. In Waugh’s telling, the Reformation represented a victory for the forces of obscurantism against those of humanist enlightenment. He most forcefully presented this view in his comparison of pre-Reformation Oxford to the university after successive Tudor governments had exerted their influence. England before Henry VIII broke with Rome had been at the forefront of a Europe-wide community of humanist scholars: At the beginning of the [sixteenth] century Erasmus had placed English scholarship above that of France or the Germanies, second only to Italy in its breadth of culture. It was to England that the University of Leipsic had turned for its professor of Greek; Colet, Grocyn, Lynacre and More were able to converse on terms of equality with the leading men of Padua, and under their temperate and profound influence Oxford was emerging gradually, steadily, by a process of organic growth, from the cloistered formality of the Middle Ages into the spacious, luminous world of Catholic humanism­. . . . Close correspondence was kept with the great teachers of Italy, and the foundations were laid of a Renaissance

190

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

which, illuminated by the poetic genius native to the country, might, in a generation, have been one of the glories of Europe. Not all of what followed was the fault of the Protestants, Waugh acknowledged, noting that once the Church found itself under siege, it could no longer afford to “wink at” “a little speculative fancy in her philosophers” or “a pagan exuberance of taste in her artists,” and therefore scholarship in Catholic countries also suffered. But, he emphasized, what had occurred in England was out of all proportion to the effects of the Counter-Reformation on the Continent.80 English grammar schools had depended on monastic and cathedral foundations, so once the Church’s land and revenues had been seized many of these had been forced to close. The universities had not been immune to these effects, as abbeys and priories had provided a large percentage of the students, while the colleges themselves had survived only because Henry VIII had resisted the efforts of his courtiers to seize their lands. According to Waugh, however, it was not merely the greed of those who wished to strip the colleges of their wealth that posed a threat. It was the iconoclasm and anti-­intellectualism of the most fervent of the Protestant Reformers, particularly during the reign of young Edward VI, which swept away the humanistic achievements of the pre-Reformation university: The College chapels were ransacked of Popish ornaments; the great reredos of All Souls was destroyed, and New College windows only survived on the Fellows’ promise to have them out, as soon as they could afford to replace them with plain glass; but it was upon books that the Anglicans particularly turned their disapproval. The whole of the Duke Humphrey’s library was gutted and the shelves sold in the streets; the illuminated office books in Magdalen choir were hacked up with choppers, and from every College cartloads of books were removed to be burned or sold as waste paper; a coloured initial was enough to convict the contents of Popery; a mathematical diagram of magic. When the [Edwardian] visitors left, the collections of centuries had been irretrievably ruined.81

The Lesser Servants

191

While Elizabeth had curbed the book-burning excesses of the Edwardian Calvinists, her regime also had aims for the universities antithetical to scholarship. Oxford in particular had retained its medieval role as, primarily, a seminary. Elizabeth and Cecil could not afford, therefore, to allow those who might have harbored Catholic sympathies to remain in authority at the university. For the new Church of England in its “infancy,” Waugh explained, Elizabeth needed “a new kind of cleric”—“sober, decently educated, men, with a proper devotion to the crown and the Council, men of common sense who could see where their advantage lay.” Many from the old Catholic and humanist university lost their chairs and fellowships, as politics and ideology replaced genuine scholarly achievement as the criteria for academic advancement. A new “provincial, phlegmatic and exclusive” Oxford emerged, Waugh lamented, cut off from the past, separated from the contemporary intellectual culture of Europe, and interested subsequently only in providing the Tudor regime with loyal clerics who would support the new Protestant settlement without resorting to supposed extremes, whether Catholic or Calvinist.82 In Campion Waugh thus launched himself into the Bellocian tradition of English Catholic apologetics, following the lead of Belloc and Chesterton in particular by rewriting the history of the English Reformation. In so doing he joined them in taking on the shibboleths of Protestant Whig history. Where Belloc had attacked the Whig historians’ belief that the Reformation had ushered in economic advancement and political liberty, Waugh assailed another article of the Whig faith—that Protestantism had inaugurated freedom of thought and had consequently been responsible for great intellectual achievements. Rather the opposite had been the case, Waugh concluded. The Reformation had closed minds, substituted political jobbery for genuine talent as the sine qua non for scholarly advancement, and replaced a true catholicity of intellectual endeavor with a narrow parochialism. Waugh, however, differed in other respects not only from Belloc but also from friends like Hollis and Woodruff, who were more apt to accept almost the entire Bellocian orthodoxy. Unlike them,

192

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

he was not interested in Belloc’s political philosophy and economic theory. Distributism did not attract him, nor was a society centered on the village and the farm necessarily his ideal, though he did come to detest ­cities, London in particular. Certainly, Waugh was not attached to parliamentary democracy—even as late as 1959 he would acknowledge, only somewhat tongue in cheek, that he had never voted in a parliamentary election because he did not “aspire to advise [his] sovereign in her choice of servants”—but he remained too much of a conservative to desire the kind of radical tax schemes and property redistribution for which Belloc and the other Distributists had called.83 Waugh believed, in fact, that Hollis’s and Woodruff’s Bellocian political Catholicism had rendered them too sure of themselves. Following a visit by the pair in August 1930, during the period in which he was receiving instruction from Father D’Arcy, Waugh observed critically that they were “very settled in their minds on all debatable topics,” adding that although Woodruff retained his sense of humor, Hollis was shocked when Waugh lampooned the Catholic press and individual Catholics. As for Waugh’s attitude to Belloc, however, Belloc was and remained an idol. Although Waugh privately poked fun at Belloc and in print admitted that he had never understood how Belloc could have reconciled the revolutionary and traditionalist sides of his character, he maintained, even many years later, that Belloc’s had been an immense talent. “Lines of Belloc’s,” he observed, reviewing a posthumous collection of his verse, “sing a multitude of memories.” “The wonder is,” Waugh concluded, “in finding them all collected, how profuse and how pure a genius is here displayed.”84 Despite his differences with Hollis, Woodruff, and Belloc, after his conversion Waugh had become an integral part of the most Bellocian wing of the English Catholic intellectual community. He may not have subscribed to the entire package of Distributist economic reforms, but in his historical judgment and in his analysis of contemporary political problems Waugh was at one with his friends. This was especially true when it came to Fascist Italy. Waugh, like the other Bellocians, became an active apologist for the Mussolini regime. Although he did

The Lesser Servants

193

not share Belloc’s admiration for the Fascists’ rejection of parliamentary democracy, he did view Italy as the representative of civilization against the anarchy and barbarism of the contemporary world. Nowhere was this more apparent than in his support for Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia.85 Abyssinia was a nation with which Waugh had some familiarity. In 1930, thanks to the patronage of Douglas Woodruff, he had covered the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie for the Times. This made him a natural choice to report on the war between Italy and Abyssinia. Indeed, Waugh sought to position himself in the market for Abyssinia experts with a February 1935 article in the Evening Standard. Waugh’s intent, as it had been in 1930, was to dispel the romantic view of Abyssinia that, he maintained, most Europeans held. The European sees the Abyssinians’ “lion’s mane headdresses and the elaborate ritual of their ancient Church,” he argued, “and feels that it will be deplorable if all this is standardized and brought up to date.” But such picturesque attractions, Waugh insisted, were only superficial. At heart Abyssinia remained a barbarous country. “By this I do not mean that it is simple,” he explained. “I mean that it is capriciously and violently governed and that its own government machinery is not sufficient to cope with its own lawless elements.”86 To those who argued that Europeans had no right to interfere in Abyssinian affairs, Waugh replied that what Europeans now called Abyssinia Emperor Menelik had in fact bloodily conquered scarcely a generation before. The conquerors, he argued, continued to hold, by “force of arms,” “a vast population differing absolutely” in “race, religion, and history.” Mussolini had therefore as much right to govern what Waugh called the “Ethiopian Empire”—to distinguish it from the much smaller historical territory of the Abyssinians—as Haile Selassie did. Indeed, he maintained that Italian rule would in fact be less brutal and therefore “would be for the benefit of the Ethiopian Empire and for the rest of Africa.” Although he was not convinced that the Italians would be able to conquer Abyssinia, Waugh hoped that they would be successful. He advised his English readers that they could, “with clear conscience,” “await the news on the wireless.”87

194

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Waugh’s views on Abyssinia and Italy proved out of touch not only with those of the editors from whom he sought employment but also with those of the English public whose consciences were manifestly not clear about permitting Italian imperialism in East Africa. Waugh did not, therefore, have a surplus of suitors for his services. By July 1935, when most other correspondents were already established in the Abyssinian capital, Waugh was still searching for employment. In the end, one of only two English newspapers supporting Italy, the Daily Mail, having lost its star war correspondent when Sir Perceval Smith fell out with Lord Northcliffe, the newspaper’s proprietor, hired Waugh. He arrived in Abyssinia on 21 August 1935.88 Waugh was from the first, by his own account, perhaps slightly exaggerated, something of a pariah in Addis Ababa. Both the Abyssinian government and the vast majority of his fellow journalists distrusted him because he worked for a pro-Italian newspaper, and the British diplomatic legation in the capital remained irate over their thinly disguised portraits in Black Mischief, the novel that Waugh based on his experiences in Abyssinia in 1930. As a correspondent, Waugh was not a success. Soon after his arrival in the country he missed the biggest “scoop” of the war—that an American consortium had purchased the rights to develop oil and minerals there (the deal came to nothing in the end). For the next few months there was little to report, as Western journalists were confined to the capital, forced to base their dispatches on propaganda from Abyssinian government sources and rumors collected from a handful of individuals who claimed they were privy to inside information. His editors finally replaced Waugh in early December 1935, by which time many newspapers had already evacuated their correspondents because of the lack of newsworthy events.89 Although a journalistic failure, Waugh’s second Abyssinian adventure provided the material for two books, one fiction and one ­nonfiction. Waugh’s novel Scoop was a devastating satire of the newspaper business. His Waugh in Abyssinia—the title a terrible pun forced on an embarrassed Waugh by his publisher—also attacked his fellow journalists, presenting them as little more than charlatans, duplicitously

The Lesser Servants

195

regurgitating the propaganda of the Selassie government. The latter volume was also a history of Abyssinia, in which Waugh expanded on the views set forth in his February 1935 Evening Standard article. In addition, and most significantly, Waugh in Abyssinia provided an entirely sympathetic account of Italian efforts there after the war. Waugh had left Abyssinia in December 1935 unsure if Italy would prevail. In fact, he had told Mussolini himself of his doubts when he passed through Rome the next month during his return to England. The Italian dictator had been eager to learn about the troubles facing his military from someone who had been in Abyssinian territory. Waugh provided him with a “very gloomy account” but was impressed with Mussolini. When Haile Selassie fled the country in May 1936 Waugh was therefore as surprised as the rest of the world. He had already written more than two chapters of Waugh in Abyssinia and decided that he needed to return to Abyssinia to find out how Italy was progressing in its occupation. In early June he sought a visa. The Italians were loath to allow the European or American press back into the country, rightly believing the journalists hostile, but they granted him permission in late July. This in itself meant that Mussolini’s regime likely considered Waugh someone whom they could trust.90 There can be little doubt that the Italian government was satisfied with its investment. Waugh’s account of his return to Abyssinia was nothing less than a paean to the conquerors, and the infamous final chapter, titled “The Road,” was an outright celebration of the new Italian Abyssinia. In this chapter he recounted his two-week journey from Massawa, in Eritrea, to Kworam, in Abyssinia, on the road that the Italians were building from the Red Sea to Addis Ababa and from there to Mogadishu in Italian Somaliland. For Waugh this massive project was the undeniable proof that his opinions about Abyssinia and Italy had been correct. “In all the years of external peace,” he gloated, “with European advice and unlimited native labour, the Shoan government, whose chief need and avowed aim was the improvement of communications, had only succeeded in making the pathetic tracks from Addis Ababa to Dessye, and from Diredawa to Jijiga.” The Italians, in contrast, had built in just a few months what the Abyssinians

196

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

had failed to build over decades. The road was evidence to Waugh that Italian imperialism was beneficial to the conquered. By providing the means for commerce and communication, it would bring “order and fertility.” From the hub of Dessye, new roads would radiate from this main road: And along the roads will pass the eagles of ancient Rome, as they came to our savage ancestors in France and Britain and Germany, bringing some rubbish and some mischief; a good deal of vulgar talk and some sharp misfortunes for individual opponents; but above and beyond and entirely predominating, the inestimable gifts of fine workmanship and clear judgment—the two determining qualities of the human spirit, by which alone, under God, man grows and flourishes. And thus, in a passage that could have come directly from a Fascist propagandist in Rome, the book ended.91 Waugh’s extravagant praise for the Italian conquerors has left at least one subsequent commentator surprised that Waugh had not joined the Fascist Party himself. However much he supported the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and however much he may have admired the character of the “new” Italians, though, Waugh felt no attraction to the Fascist Party or its leader. In private he confided on his return to Abyssinia in 1936 that while during the war it had been “fun being pro-Italian when it was an unpopular and . . . losing cause,” after the war he had “little sympathy with these exultant fascists.” Likewise, Waugh’s public optimism about the new Abyssinia did not match his private concerns. He found Asmara, in Eritrea, a filthy town and observed in his diary that when he criticized them the Italians had replied, “We are in Africa.” He took this to be a “bad omen,” and it “reminded” him that the Italians had “inhabited and created the slums of the world.” In Aksum too, where he praised in his diary the indigenous architecture, he discovered the Italian military camp to be “filthy”—“elementary Boy Scout precautions of hygiene ­neglected”—and the soldiers unshaven and slovenly.92

The Lesser Servants

197

In his published writing too Waugh could be critical of the Fascists. His disgust with what he called their “nonsense” was at times clear: The morning before I had been present when the German Consul­General paid a visit to the fascist headquarters. The officer-­incharge—a blackshirt political boss from Milan—had straddled before us, thrown out his chin, flashed his gold teeth and addressed his audience of half a dozen upon the resurgence of Rome, the iniquity of sanctions and the spirit of civilisation and the Caesars, in a manner carefully modelled upon that of the Duce speaking from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia. As for Mussolini, though Waugh had found the dictator impressive when he met him in January 1936 at the Palazzo Venezia, this was in part because he expected to find him ridiculous, having heard the ­stories of how Mussolini liked to receive his guests in the “theatrically designed setting” of an enormous room in which the writing table at which he sat lay many yards from the door. In Scoop too Waugh applied his satirical eye to Fascism, lampooning one of the sides in the civil war that forms the backdrop to the novel as the “Whiteshirts” and sending up especially well the rhetoric of the Fascists.93 In the final analysis, then, Waugh was guilty of what was, one could argue, worse than being a Fascist himself. It was one thing to be a true believer in Mussolini and his Fascists, especially if one was ignorant of their nature. It was quite another to conclude that they were pompous, preening thugs and yet not only cynically take their side but also maintain that they represented civilization against barbarism. The best that can be said for Waugh is that he was ignorant of the true savagery that the Italians were subsequently to inflict on the Abyssinians. This was, however, not good enough. He knew better than to believe that the Italians would improve the lot of ­Abyssinians—indeed, he expressed his low opinion of the Fascists often in private, less so in public—and yet he had continued to act, in effect, as their propagandist.

198

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Waugh’s public views on the conquest of Abyssinia were shared by Hollis who indeed credited Waugh with forming his opinion on the Italo-Abyssinian War. “I knew nothing about Abyssinia save what I heard from Evelyn Waugh,” he recalled, adding that the account in Waugh in Abyssinia was “highly amusing, and, I was prepared to believe, true.” Indeed, the Italo-Abyssinia War and the political passions it inflamed across Europe inspired Hollis to write Foreigners Aren’t Fools, a collection of dialogues between an Englishman and representatives of the world’s major nations—Italy, Germany, France, Russia, Japan, and the United States—in which the foreign policies of the respective governments were the topic of discussion. In the chapter treating Italy Hollis gave the Italian interlocutor much the better of the argument, laying out all of the pro-Italian, anti-Abyssinian, anti– League of Nations arguments, many of them familiar from Waugh’s work. Mussolini provided order, preventing Italy from descending into anarchy. Italy lacked the tradition of parliamentary government of an England, and therefore Mussolini’s dictatorship was hardly at odds with Italian culture and not to be lamented. English opinion was shaped by the press, which continually quoted Mussolini out of context, making him seem a blustering madman. As for Abyssinia, it was not a true nation. Selassie represented an alien, barbaric regime that the mass of Abyssinians had never accepted. In fact, more Abyssinians fought for the Italians against the regime. Selassie was not a modernizer but merely imported the worst of the contemporary West, birth control and anticlericalism, while he otherwise allowed Abyssinia to wallow in traditional tribal violence. Italy therefore represented civilization in its never-ending campaign against anarchy.94 The English character’s one response—that Italy had acted illegally in invading Abyssinia because it had acted against its obligations as a member of the League of Nations as well as the various treaties it had signed with Abyssinia—was parried by Hollis’s Italian with a barrage of objections. The League of Nations merely represented stability, not justice. Nations such as Italy that had not benefited from Versailles had, unlike Britain or France, a particular grievance with the status quo created in 1919. Its allies in the Great War had ignored Italy’s

The Lesser Servants

199

territorial claims. In any event, Abyssinia, not Italy, had broken their 1928 treaty. In fact, Abyssinia represented a direct threat to Eritrea to which Italy could not fail to respond. Why was the league sanctioning Italy when it had stood aside when Japan had invaded Manchuria? Ultimately, was not Soviet Russia the true enemy of civilization, particularly because its goal was the destruction of religion?95 Hollis’s Italian also took great delight in pressing the argument that Italy was only following in the imperial footsteps of Britain. Like Britain, Italy was using its military power against slavery. In augmenting its colonial holdings in East Africa, Italy was merely acting as Britain had in India—expanding its rule when its periphery was threatened. Indeed, the British were therefore not only hypocrites, according to Hollis’s Italian; they were also ingrates. Italy had sent troops to help the British in China in 1922–23, but now Britain was hindering rather than helping her former ally. As for the charge that Italy had committed war crimes, the Italian argued that his nation’s use of native troops, its employment of poison gas, and its bombing campaign had been intended to end the war as quickly as possible and thus to save lives.96 While Hollis might have maintained that the Italian interlocutor’s position was not his own and that he was merely attempting to explain the rationale for Italian policies to an ignorant English public, the cumulative effect of the Italian’s unrebutted arguments was that of an apology for Fascist imperialism. Hollis never fully developed the opposing view, and what was supposed to be a dialogue was in fact a series of harangues punctuated by the leading questions of the English interlocutor. There was little doubt, therefore, where Hollis’s sympathies lay.97 That Hollis exhibited the same apologetic attitude to Italian Fascism as Belloc, Chesterton, and Waugh was also demonstrated by the suspicions that a colleague at Notre Dame had of him. Waldemar ­Gurian, a Catholic convert from a Russian Jewish family, had fled Germany soon after the Nazis took power. A political philosopher of high repute, Gurian eventually made his way to the United States, where he found a teaching position at Notre Dame in 1937. Although he remained an aggressive opponent of Soviet Communism, Gurian

200

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

nonetheless vehemently criticized those who apologized for Nazism and Fascism in the belief that Germany and Italy were allies in the battle against Bolshevism. Indeed, Gurian was appalled that so many Catholics were swayed by the propaganda of these regimes and seduced by their attacks on excessive individualism, their appeal to authority, and their seeming suppression of the anticlericalism that had marked previous liberal governments on the Continent. The anti-Communist dictatorships in Germany and Italy, he argued, were just as great a threat to the Church, indeed to civilization, as the Soviets. In fact, in the short run the Nazis and Fascists were even more dangerous.98 Hollis too taught at Notre Dame during this period, having been appointed in 1935 by the president of the university, Father O’Hara (later archbishop of Philadelphia), after his work on money and finance had caught the attention of an influential donor. Hollis’s writing on monetary history and theory consisted of two volumes, Breakdown of Money (1934) and Two Nations: A Financial Study of English History (1935). While criticism of “financiers” had been a staple of Bellocianism, Hollis surpassed Belloc himself in this regard. He had come under the influence of McNair Wilson, a physician and the medical correspondent for the Times who had become the friend and roommate of Douglas Woodruff. “A gigantic Scotsman of high good humour and tempestuous eloquence,” who “would hold forth exhaustively with all the thunder of a Hebrew prophet,” Wilson was also a crank of the first order. Once a Liberal who had stood for Parliament, by the time Hollis first encountered him, presumably at some point in the late 1920s, Wilson had become an obsessive opponent of what he called the “money-power.”99 In part, Hollis’s economic work was a straightforward analysis of the failure of the gold standard of 1925–31. His explicit solution to the terrible deflationary problems of the era—that central governments needed to exercise control over the money supply—was modest, but his implicit solution was much more radical. The entire modern system of fractional reserve banking—whereby banks held in their vaults only a portion of their wealth, usually around 10 percent, loaning the rest at interest—needed to be scrapped. For Hollis bankers had been

The Lesser Servants

201

since the late seventeenth century the root of Western civilization’s afflictions. If in his previous historical works he had blamed the Reformation, now he looked to banks for his scapegoat. Hollis believed that fractional reserve banking took control of the money supply away from the state. Banks created money by extending credit and by calling in loans reduced the amount of money in circulation. To Hollis, this influence over the money supply by private entities was unacceptable. Only the central government, led, he hoped, in typical Bellocian fashion, by a strong executive, ought to possess such power.100 Gurian suspected Hollis of Fascist sympathies. Hollis’s reactions to the events of 1938—the German annexation (Anschluss) of Austria in March and the Munich agreement that September allowing Germany to occupy the Sudetenland of western Czechoslovakia—appalled him. Although he informed Hollis repeatedly that Hitler would never be satisfied until he dominated all of Europe, Hollis remained unconvinced. A March 1938 letter to Douglas Woodruff aptly summarized his position. In it Hollis railed against the American press and public for being “almost insanely anti-Hitler” and for “grotesquely overstat[ing] the case against him.” The Americans, he scoffed, talked of “Austria as if it was quite a different country from Germany,” ignored the “genuine grievances” that the Sudetenland Germans had against the Czechoslovakian government, and assumed that there was no difference between a “composite” country such as Czechoslovakia and a “natural” country such as France (the one less legitimate in Hollis’s view and thus presumably ripe for Hitler to dismember). Not surprisingly, Gurian, based in part most likely on his acquaintance with Hollis, surmised that Britain would never stand up to Hitler and believed that Oswald Mosley would eventually become prime minister.101 Hollis, in his apologetic attitude toward continental Fascism, was following in Belloc’s footsteps as well as striking out on his own. Belloc was of course a veteran defender of Mussolini’s Italy, but he detested the Germans no matter what the regime and opposed the policy of appeasement no less than Gurian. Hollis’s position was more characteristic of the younger generation of Bellocians. They accepted the basic tenets of Belloc—Distributist economics, ­suspicion if

202

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

not hostility to parliamentary democracy, and a triumphalist Ca­tholi­ cism that viewed the Church as the font of civilization—but sometimes, as in the case of Hollis and the Munich crisis in September 1938, they drew different conclusions from these principles. By the time Hollis, Woodruff, and Waugh began contributing to the English Catholic intellectual community, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Belloc’s work had largely been accomplished, and his invective was no longer necessary. Writing to Woodruff concerning the criticism in the English press of the concordat between Mussolini’s Italy and the Vatican, Hollis observed that “the old stage in which Belloc and Chesterton were so valuable and when it was important just to shout so as to keep Catholic courage up is now past.” Catholics had obtained a voice in England, he believed, thanks in great measure to the “shouting” of Belloc and Chesterton, but their love of exaggeration, and their dependence on shocking their readers, was, Hollis implied, now more of a hindrance. Woodruff, Hollis, and Waugh tempered the shrillness while continuing to advance Belloc’s ideas. Waugh through his growing fame as a novelist, Hollis as a regular contributor to English Catholic journals and newspapers, and especially Woodruff, who in 1936 became editor of the Tablet, the most significant of England’s Catholic newspapers, became very effective champions of Bellocianism. Their prominence ensured that Bellocianism would remain the operative philosophy of the English Catholic intellectual community.102

A rnold Lunn: From Skeptic to Catholic Apologist In 1921 Arnold Lunn, writer, alpine enthusiast, and dogmatic agnostic in religion, became obsessed with what for him seemed an impene­trable problem: why had the Catholic Church in England been attracting, for the better part of the past hundred years, converts of conspicuous talent and intelligence? Lunn had begun to ponder this question after the prominent conversion of Ronald Knox; the subsequent conversion of Chesterton in 1922 only increased his fascination with the Church’s appeal. He spent the next three years examining the

The Lesser Servants

203

lives of such eminent converts as Newman, Manning, George Tyrrell, Knox, and Chesterton. His admitted failure to “find some satisfactory explanation for the fact that a Church, committed to beliefs which seem untenable, still continues to win converts from men not inferior in genius and in acuteness of thought to the heretics who remain outside her fold,” did not prevent Lunn from publishing in 1925 a volume attacking the intelligence, and in some instances the good faith, of the men whom he had studied. Ronald Knox’s mannered response to Lunn’s criticism, however, and his subsequent patient answers to Lunn’s queries about Catholicism in a correspondence between the two men that they published as Difficulties (1932), helped to make Lunn a Catholic. He would convert in 1933 and become the leading popular apologist for Catholicism in England.103 Arnold Lunn was born in 1888 in Madras, India, the eldest child— two sons and a daughter would follow—of an Anglo-Irish mother, Ethel Moore, and Sir Henry Lunn, a Methodist medical missionary at the time of his son’s birth who subsequently founded a highly successful travel agency in England. Henry Lunn’s travel agency would open the Swiss Alps to sporting enthusiasts from Britain, in particular skiers, and transform the village of Mürren into one of Europe’s premier resorts. His father’s business would inculcate in Arnold Lunn a love for Switzerland and an enthusiasm for mountain sports, including climbing and skiing.104 Lunn attended Harrow before going up to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1907. After Easter of his second year, however, he was sent down for failing the preliminary examination in Holy Scripture, a vestige of the university’s seminary roots, which all students still had to pass in order to maintain their residency. Although he returned the following winter term, his lack of interest in his studies led to failure in his final examinations in history, and, like Evelyn Waugh, he left Oxford without a degree. Yet, as would be the case with Christopher Hollis, the lack of academic achievement had not meant that Lunn went down from the university without some measure of accomplishment. Like Belloc, Hollis, and Woodruff, he had been a success at the Union. He was elected secretary and would perhaps have been president had he

204

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

not missed the autumn term of his third year with a broken leg sustained climbing in the Welsh mountains. He had also edited the Isis, and founded two clubs, the Oxford University Mountaineering Club and the Alpine Ski Club. If he had neglected his studies in history, he had devoted himself to other fields, particularly philosophy—William James was a favorite—and theology. He read widely among modernist theologians both from England and the Continent and took special interest in the Higher Criticism of the Bible. After briefly reading for the bar at the insistence of his father, Lunn turned to his two great loves, writing and the mountains. Prior to Roman Converts (1924), Lunn had already published some dozen books, almost all on aspects of skiing and mountaineering. Rejected for military service during the Great War because of the leg he had broken while climbing in Wales, he threw himself after the war into the promotion of alpine skiing, inventing the modern slalom race in 1922 and organizing with an Austrian friend the first international downhill ski race. He arranged the premier world alpine skiing championships in 1931, and, as a result of his lobbying, alpine skiing was added to the Olympics in 1936. For these accomplishments alone Lunn remains justly famous, but it was for his contributions to Catholic apologetics that he was, for my purposes, most significant.105 Lunn, like Hollis and Waugh, had abandoned the Christianity of his parents during his public school years. At Harrow, he recalled, he had become, in effect, a pagan. He had focused on “placating the gods,” and therefore his “religious observances” had been “inspired not by a passion for righteousness but by a practical desire to obtain solid benefits from the gods.” He had said his prayers, “explaining in a business-like way,” he wrote, “what I wanted.” Like most of his classmates, he concluded, “I was only nominally a Christian.” In reality their moral code had been humanistic rather than supernatural in focus, avoiding certain actions “not because these actions offend God but because they injure other people.” Although the school was supposedly Anglican, Lunn would lament, “I never heard while I was at Harrow a single sermon which suggested that my fate in the next world would depend on my behaviour in this.”106

The Lesser Servants

205

Lunn was subsequently to condemn Harrow for criminal negligence in the religious education of its charges. The utter lack of Christian apologetics, when combined with exposure to the best arguments of the agnostics and atheists who dominated the literature of the day, had meant that Lunn and his contemporaries were unable to defend intellectually the faith of their parents. The bishop at his confirmation had observed that they would meet “young men at the University who do not believe in God,” yet his advice was only: “As I was coming up the hill to-day I heard a bird sing. . . . Tell them that.” Underwhelmed with this advice, Lunn had concluded that if “this was the best that could be said for Christianity, then clearly it was time to discover what could be said for atheism.” He turned to Leslie Stephen, whom he already admired for Stephen’s love of the Alps, read his Agnostic’s Apology, and was converted: “I found myself defenceless—thanks to the miserable deficiency of my Anglican education—against his onslaught.” His evangelical father, naturally concerned about his son’s disbelief, urged him to pray for strength, but Leslie Stephen had taught him that prayer was only “a form of auto-suggestion,” so Henry Lunn’s advice went unheeded.107 Lunn’s anger at the delinquency of his teachers led to his championing of apologetics once he had converted to Catholicism. It was, in his estimation, “a crime against the rising generation to send young men into the world unprovided with any defence against the attacks of militant atheism,” and he took it upon himself therefore to mitigate the effects of the crime. He proved unable, however, to overcome the results of his miseducation for a number of years, remaining an agnostic not only as an Oxford undergraduate—where his reading of modernist theologians convinced him that essential doctrines of orthodox Christianity could not be proved—but through the war as well. It was not until a chance meeting on a train with a Catholic priest from Ireland that Lunn realized that he had heard only the case for the prosecution and nothing of the defense. In this state of mind, he had begun to read Christian apologetics, which led to his interest in Chesterton and the other Catholic converts of whom he treated in Roman Converts.108

206

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Roman Converts consisted of an introductory chapter in which Lunn took aim at Catholic doctrine, followed by chapters on each of the five converts, Newman, Manning, Tyrrell, Knox, and Chesterton. Given Chesterton’s importance to my book, it is Lunn’s treatment of him that is of most interest. Although his portraits of his other subjects were often quite hostile, particularly that of Ronald Knox, Lunn was fairer in his portrayal of Chesterton. Indeed, he even scored some points. He acknowledged that Chesterton’s critique of the dogmatism of contemporary skeptics and agnostics was quite powerful, and he admired the way in which Chesterton turned their weapons of choice—ridicule and irony—against them. Lunn concluded, however, that Chesterton the critic of modern philosophical “fads” was much superior to Chesterton the Catholic apologist. Indeed, he charged that if Chesterton had turned upon himself the same powerful critical apparatus he employed against others, then he would never have become a Catholic.109 The focus of Lunn’s criticism was Chesterton’s views on history, politics, and economics. He reduced to four principles the Chestertonian (Bellocian) political philosophy familiar from my first two chapters: first, the Middle Ages were happier than the modern world, and the cures for modern ills could be found there; second, Catholicism had always been opposed to capitalism and had promoted the widest distribution of property; third, in the medieval guild lay the solution to modern industrialism; and fourth, the Church was the opponent of Puritanism, and a Catholic revival would therefore lead to the return of “Merrie England.” Each of these Lunn set out to prove wrong. “Chesterton,” he argued, “grossly over-estimates mediaeval happiness and greatly underestimates mediaeval gloom.” Members of guilds may have been better fed and clothed than many of the modern proletariat, but guildsmen were the exception, the privileged few. Despite the terrible conditions under which modern industrial workers suffered, they were still, according to Lunn, better fed, clothed, and housed than their medieval predecessors, with many things once considered luxuries now within their reach. Of the guilds so praised by Chesterton, Lunn observed that they had been beneficial for a time but had

The Lesser Servants

207

long outlived their usefulness. In the chaos of the early Middle Ages, guilds had allowed traders to defend themselves and to win prerogatives from their feudal lords, but their system, built on “protection and monopoly,” was the relic of an insecure age. By the High Middle Ages, the guilds had “developed into privileged corporations in which membership tended to become hereditary,” and they had thus become an impediment to economic improvement and the enemy of the very egalitarianism that Belloc and Chesterton championed.110 Even in his dissection of Chesterton’s historical exaggerations, however, Lunn went too far. If when criticizing Chesterton’s rosetinted view of the average medieval laborer’s material position Lunn was convincing, when he turned to religion he squandered his capital, relying on a historian notorious for his inveterate antagonism to the Catholic Church. G. G. Coulton could not have been faulted for his work in the archives, but it was in his analysis of the evidence that he too often acted as the prosecutor rather than the judge. For example, subsequent historians have interpreted the numerous attacks of reform-minded medieval churchmen on incompetent or immoral clergy as reflective of improving intellectual quality and increasing piety in the Church. Bad priests and monks had existed for centuries, but they were finally being rooted out. Coulton, however, employed the records left by the reformers to portray the Church as incurably diseased. Lunn, in his zeal to expose Chesterton, echoed him. Ultimately, Lunn’s portrait of Chesterton foundered because he refused to accept that Chesterton could have converted for genuine religious conviction based on rational examination of the Church’s claims. To Lunn, Chesterton could only have become a Catholic for other motives, whether conscious and not explained or unconscious. Indeed, Lunn concluded that Chesterton had been led to the Church by his desire to shock, to appear the rebel against the skeptical, agnostic, and materialist shibboleths of his day. If his age had been an orthodox one, Lunn implied, Chesterton, a “born hesiarch,” would have reacted against orthodoxy to some form of heterodoxy. It was “his urgent desire to agree with Belloc and disagree with Dons” that had brought him into the Church. In Lunn’s final analysis, Chesterton’s

208

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

conversion was the result of his attraction to the historical-political beliefs of Belloc and his fellow “Merry Englanders.”111 Lunn’s treatment of Chesterton, though much more balanced than his portraits of his other subjects, was nonetheless indicative of what he himself would later acknowledge was a patronizing attitude toward Catholicism. In the first chapter of Roman Converts, Lunn struggled to express his dissatisfaction with Catholic doctrine. He found it impossible to reconcile man’s free will with divine omniscience, concluding that free will was “a mere legal fiction, invented in order that God may send us to Hell with a clear conscience for committing those sins which he foresaw that we should commit.” As for Hell, Lunn railed at a Church whose God condemned “unnumbered millions” to pass “eternity in excruciating agony.” He was especially angry that those ignorant of Christianity, including the “noblest of the ancients,” should suffer such a fate. From there, Lunn went on to attack the belief that the Bible was the direct word of God and that its human composers had operated under “verbal inspiration.” This was a “theory,” he countered, that “every scholar outside the Roman Catholic Church rejects with incredulous contempt.” He reserved his highest scorn for the notion of infallibility, and for anyone foolish enough to accept it. Would a Church that was truly infallible, Lunn asked in effect, have not only countenanced but also caused by her persecution “more unmerited suffering than any other institution in the history of the world”?112 Infallibility presented the biggest obstacle to Lunn’s understanding of Catholicism. In fact, it was the issue of infallibility that allowed Lunn in Roman Converts ultimately to dismiss out of hand the converts he was studying. “The problem which this book attempts to solve,” he observed, “would not exist if I could pretend that the five converts whose conversion is the subject of the following chapters had all adopted Catholicism with a mental reservation on the subject of infallibility.” Lunn, based on what he thought was his demolition of Catholic doctrine in the first chapter, dismissed Catholicism as irrational. This allowed him, in his chapters on the five converts, to ignore their self-professed reasons for conversion—after all, how could

The Lesser Servants

209

reason or reasons have been valid in the profession of an irrational creed—and to choose instead to focus on “the influences of temperament, heredity, environment, and education” that he concluded were “more potent than reason in determining a man’s religion.” Such a stance also allowed Lunn, of course, to assume a position of moral and intellectual superiority to his subjects. As Lunn would discover, however, his understanding of what the Catholic Church meant by infallibility, for example, was rudimentary at best. As a few perceptive readers of Roman Converts recognized, it was precisely this fundamental ignorance that would lead to Lunn’s conversion once he became acquainted with the Church’s defenses of its doctrines.113 The reaction to Roman Converts surprised Lunn. Although he believed that he had been evenhanded to all concerned in the book, he had expected a more aggressive response from English Catholics. He recalled that while some reviewers in the Catholic press had been “intensely irritated by the patronizing tone of the book,” others had discerned “latent signs of sympathy for Catholicism” and treated him with a measure of compassion. More troubling to Lunn at the time, however, was that many non-Catholic friends began to predict his conversion. Cumulatively, Lunn’s various admissions of admiration for Catholicism and the Church, though strewn among his protestations that the Church’s claims were nonsensical, had led the discerning few to conclude that Lunn would eventually become a Catholic.114 The first inkling that he might have to reexamine what he believed to be the Church’s arguments occurred when Lunn read a book by the Benedictine scholar Cuthbert Butler in which Butler “courteously” dismissed the thesis of Roman Converts—“that all religions being irrational and Catholicism the most irrational of all, and that therefore the most intransigent expressions of Catholicism are the truest”—with the single phrase, this “will not readily be accepted by Catholics.” “I began to see,” Lunn observed, “that those criticisms of Catholicism which had seemed to me so formidable were familiar to Dom Cuthbert, who had considered them and dismissed them as unimportant.” Some eight years later Lunn became a Catholic. Lunn’s conversion was conspicuous because it represented the complete reversal of nearly

210

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

every position he had taken in Roman Converts. In particular, his conversion disproved one of the main points of that volume, that “no man is converted by logic.” Lunn became a Catholic because the arguments of the Church convinced him of its divine origins and supernatural mission.115 In recounting in its immediate aftermath the steps leading to his conversion, Lunn acknowledged not only that he had been less than fair to Chesterton and the other converts he had portrayed but also that, although he had “read widely” in preparing Roman Converts, he had in fact never encountered a “straightforward coherent and complete statement of the Catholic case.” The first step on Lunn’s path to Rome was his realization that the underlying difficulties he had were not with Catholicism specifically but with Christianity in general. That is, the chief obstacle was not the Catholic Church’s claim to be the one church established by Christ but rather whether Jesus was indeed the Son of God.116 The second step toward Lunn’s conversion occurred when he read Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (1926). Whitehead argued that the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, rather than representing a turn toward reason, had in fact been, in Lunn’s words, “through and through an anti-intellectual movement,” a reaction not against medieval superstition but against the “inflexible rationality of medieval thought.” Indeed, Whitehead located the origins of what was most valuable in modern science, the method of arriving at knowledge through observation and the creation and examination of hypotheses, in medieval scholasticism and its rigorous use of logic. It had been medieval theologians who were responsible for “the faith in the possibility of science”—Lunn quoted Whitehead—and this faith was the result of their “inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner.” Whitehead concluded, however, according to Lunn, that the worldview promulgated following the Scientific Revolution, in particular the reflexive and increasingly inveterate hostility of many scientists to metaphysics, represented a corruption of the more modest aims of the scientific method. Lunn agreed with

The Lesser Servants

211

Whitehead’s conclusion that “to this day science has remained an antiintellectualist movement based on a naive faith.” The Middle Ages, in contrast, for Whitehead “formed one long training of the intellect of Europe in the sense of order.”117 That a mathematician and philosopher of Whitehead’s caliber, a man who had collaborated with that archatheist of contemporary England, Bertrand Russell, had discovered in medieval Scholasticism an intellectual effort worthy of his highest admiration convinced Lunn to take another look at the great medieval Catholic theologians, Aquinas in particular. If these medieval churchmen had so elevated the use of reason, then Catholicism was perhaps not so irrational after all. Lunn contrasted the thoroughgoing logic he found in Aquinas with the ideas of the modern intellectuals from whom he had heretofore taken his lead. Now, after a renewed study of Catholic theology, Lunn was ready to abandon the “environmental determinism” of Marx and the “psychological determinism” of Freud. It was they, not the theologians of medieval Europe, who had abandoned reason for the irrational. He needed to reconsider the thesis of Roman Converts. Perhaps Chesterton had in fact been convinced by an intellectual case for Catholicism. Maybe the explanations for his subjects’ conversions were not to be found in their subconscious psyches after all.118 What happened to Lunn was, ironically, precisely what he had claimed in Roman Converts could never occur. Of his own conversion he would write, “I entered the Church along the road of controversy and by the gates of reason.” “I did not become a Catholic,” he explained, “till I had satisfied myself that I had found a satisfactory answer to the worst that could be said against the Church.” Through his examination of the intellectual defenses for the claims of the Catholic Church, from the Church Fathers through the medieval Scholastics to contemporary apologists, Lunn not only became convinced that the Church was the infallible institution of divine origin, the very claim that he had previously considered ridiculous, but he made it his subsequent mission to present the case for the Church. The primary issue troubling Lunn before his conversion was whether Jesus was God, God the Son of God the Father. He began

212

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

to tackle this question by examining the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ life. Since his Oxford undergraduate days Lunn had accepted the views of the most radical Higher Critics of the Bible. The Gospels, he believed, had not been written by the four traditional evangelists; neither did they date from the first century, nor had they been divinely inspired. Now, however, Lunn was convinced that the Gospels did exhibit marks of divine inspiration and that they dated from the first century. The tale the four evangelists narrated, Lunn maintained, could not have been the work merely of unlettered Jewish peasants. The language in which they composed their narrative betrayed their lack of literary skill, but the story that they told was too marvelous, with too many unexpected twists, not to have been the work of divine inspiration. Regarding the Passion and the Crucifixion alone of the events that the evangelists portrayed, Lunn asked, “Is there anything like that in human tragedies before or since? Does Sophocles strike this note? Does Shakespeare?” Lunn concluded that nothing in all the masterpieces of human literature could match the Gospels.119 From a similar literary analysis, Lunn concluded that the Gospels must have been the work of men who had been eyewitnesses. Lunn was struck in particular not by what the evangelists had chosen to describe but by what they had passed over. While the “Gospels are full of homely details which an eye-witness would have recorded,” he observed, they also “are full of gaps which a fiction writer would have filled in.” Lunn referred, as an example, to the story from St. John’s Gospel of the woman taken in adultery. “The great masters of the short story might have invented that sublime touch, ‘Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground,’ but,” Lunn concluded, “they would not have been content to leave us ignorant of what Christ wrote on the ground.” For Lunn, this continual lack of embellishment precisely where one would most expect a writer who was not present at the event to have filled in a description, meant that John’s Gospel must have been the work of someone who had been there. Lunn concluded that if the Gospels were the work of men who had been with Jesus, as he believed, then the miracles described in the Gospels could not be explained away as, he charged, modernist theologians and scriptural critics had attempted to do.120

The Lesser Servants

213

The same literary detective work Lunn applied to Scripture he applied to what had long troubled him—the Resurrection. What could have caused the same apostles who had, in fear of their own lives, abandoned Jesus the night before the crucifixion to undergo such a radical transformation that they were soon willing to die preaching that Jesus was the living God come to redeem humanity? Lunn considered several possible explanations. Could the apostles or one of Jesus’ other followers have removed the body from the tomb? Not likely, he concluded. Moving the stone and getting the body out without anyone seeing would have been a difficult task. Jesus’ enemies, the Pharisees and the other community leaders, would have been ready to expose any plot. In fact, Lunn wondered why if the disciples had removed the body, they had subsequently been so willing to sacrifice their own lives proclaiming that Jesus had risen from the dead? Who would go to their deaths for something they knew to be false? There was, Lunn decided, no convincing explanation for the empty tomb on Easter morning other than the one that Jesus’ disciples had proclaimed.121 Having established to his satisfaction that the Resurrection had occurred, Lunn turned to the question of whether Jesus had in fact been God. Leaving aside the more ambiguous allusions of Jesus to his divinity in the Gospels, Lunn noted that St. Paul’s epistles had taken as fact that Jesus was God and that because the epistles had preceded the Gospels, the evangelists, if they had not in fact believed that Jesus was God, would certainly have taken issue with Paul. The statements in the Gospels that alone could have been interpreted as something less than conclusive on this issue of Jesus’ divinity, could therefore, in Lunn’s estimation, be taken as evidence not only of the evangelist’s belief that Jesus was God but also that he had clearly proclaimed his divinity. Of course, Jesus could have been wrong in this assertion, but Lunn argued that if that had been the case then he would have been guilty of blasphemy on a colossal scale. Would God have allowed such a person to be resurrected from the dead and thus to appear truly divine?122 Thus far in his argument, Lunn had addressed tenets that all orthodox Christians shared. Now he addressed the Catholic insistence that Christ had in fact founded a visible church, that this church represented infallibly the will of God, and that the Catholic Church was

214

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

this church. Responding to the criticisms of Protestant sects such as the Quakers, Lunn maintained that Christ had been neither antiauthoritarian nor antinomian. Jesus may have attacked the Pharisees but he had also explicitly stated that he had come to fulfill the law rather than destroy it. Jesus had distinguished, according to Lunn, between the office and the man who held it: he had attacked individual Jewish priests, not the priesthood as an institution. Lunn went on to argue, citing the passages from the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John that the Church had often employed to buttress its claims, that not only was Jesus therefore not opposed to the idea of a church, but that he had explicitly founded such an institution, granted it authority, and directed the apostles, Peter specifically, to lead this Church. Indeed, Lunn acknowledged that even when he himself had attacked the claims of the Church he had been unable to accept the Protestant attempts to explain away Christ’s statements to Peter that he was the rock on which he would build the church and that it was to Peter that he was giving the keys of the kingdom of heaven.123 This Church that Christ had established, the Church of the apostles, Lunn now also accepted as the Catholic Church. First, he observed, the true Church would be known by an external mark of unity and by its adherence to the teachings of Jesus. Only the Catholic Church, however, possessed this unity, as the Protestant sects had become so fractured that clergymen in the Church of England and elsewhere were allowed to deny openly such essentials of orthodox Christianity as the divinity of Christ. Likewise, the other churches continually flaunted the teachings of Jesus. The Christ of the Gospels, Lunn noted, had spoken of Hell, had believed in the existence of devils and evil spirits, and had been militant enough to exclaim that “he that believeth not is condemned.” Yet contemporary Protestantism had rejected Hell, jettisoned belief in evil spirits as superstitious, and presented a passive Jesus stripped of any notion that he commands us or that there would be consequences if we turned away from him. Indeed, not only did the Catholic Church thus bear the marks of unity and adherence to the Gospel, but it also was historically continuous with the church that Christ had established. The “essence of the

The Lesser Servants

215

Catholic system,” Lunn maintained, was evident as early as the very beginning of the second century. That contemporary observers such as St. Ignatius, who had furnished the best information concerning the Church of that time, were themselves old enough to have known the apostles provided further evidence of historical continuity. “We can,” Lunn concluded, “only evade the Catholic conclusion by assuming that the Church went wrong in the first eighty years of its existence, and that the Holy Ghost, from the first, signally failed to guide the Church into all truth.”124 Lunn was therefore left with only the final hurdle of establishing to his own satisfaction that this Church that Christ had founded he had also endowed with infallibility. Previously, Lunn had rejected infallibility as the most irrational of all the Church’s irrational doctrines, yet given all the above he found that infallibility quite easily followed. If Jesus was God, and if he indeed had founded a Church, which was the Catholic Church, with the authority to teach in his name, then surely that Church would necessarily be infallible. Jesus, Lunn observed, had told the apostles that the Holy Ghost which he was sending to them “shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you,” and further that this Holy Ghost “will guide you into all truth.” What else had this been, Lunn asked, than Christ guaranteeing the apostles from error and ensuring that they would correctly elucidate his teachings? If indeed, as Lunn was now convinced, the Catholic Church was the church of the apostles, then the Catholic Church had inherited this infallibility with the apostolic succession. Lunn discovered he had erred previously in his notion of infallibility. It did not mean that the pope had some sort of crystal ball that would tell him the answer to all problems. According to Lunn’s new understanding, “Christ, in effect, said to the Church, ‘Here is the deposit of Faith. You must use natural methods to develop the contents of this deposit. You must use your brains. You may have to debate and argue and weigh one view against another. All I guarantee is that neither the Pope nor the episcopate will be allowed to proclaim as true a doctrine which is not true.’” Infallibility was therefore negative in

216

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

nature, not, as Lunn had thought, positive. That is, the Holy Ghost did not necessarily provide the Church at any given moment with the correct solution to a problem; rather the Holy Ghost prevented the Church from preaching false doctrines. Lunn had leaped his last hurdle. He had now completely abandoned all the opinions he had expressed with such confidence in the Roman Converts.125 Lunn had overcome his difficulties with Catholicism, but what then of the hostility to Bellocian history and political philosophy that he articulated in his chapter on Chesterton in Roman Converts? Personally, Lunn had begun to form very close ties with a number of his fellow English Catholic intellectuals even before he joined the Church. It was Douglas Woodruff who had helped him onto the path toward conversion, and it was Woodruff also who introduced Lunn to Martin D’Arcy, who was to receive him into the Church just as he had Waugh. Lunn credited both of them, as well as Ronald Knox, with contributing the “reasoned replies to the controversial points” that he had raised, allowing him to realize the strength of the Church’s positions. Indeed, it was to these three that he dedicated Now I See, his account of his conversion. More important to a consideration of Lunn’s place in the community of English Catholic intellectuals, however, was the fact that his acceptance of the very doctrinal claims of the Church that he had earlier rejected was accompanied by a simultaneous conversion to the Bellocianism that he had also previously belittled. It had been Lunn’s reading of Belloc’s Path to Rome and Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and Heretics that had first begun to erode his antiCatholic prejudices. The former critic of Chesterton’s rose-tinted view of the Middle Ages had also developed, even before his conversion, a romantic attachment to medieval Europe. He found himself acknowledging that with the dawning of the Renaissance had passed from the world “something very beautiful.” In a passage that Eric Gill would have applauded, Lunn concluded that beauty in medieval Europe had not been “the monopoly of a class or a clique” but had “found expression in the common things of common men, in the carving of a table for the poor man’s house no less than in the carving of a statue for the rich man’s hall.”126

The Lesser Servants

217

As with Gill, these aesthetic concerns were accompanied by the typical Bellocian economic and political reactions against the modern world. Lunn too came to promote Distributism: Distributism is at once more radical and revolutionary than the servile creed of Socialism and more conservative than modern Conservatism. The Distributist believes in the distribution of property and the means of production. He insists that the love of property, particularly property in land, is a sane and enduring instinct which needs to be both fostered and controlled. Fostered with the object of increasing the number of people who own property; controlled to prevent the concentration of property into the hands of the few. He is opposed to the subordination of the producer to the financier, and of the countrymen to the townsmen, and he would agree with Burke and Spengler that modern democracy is too often a mask for securing the dominion of the urban proletariat over the peasant. He is convinced that the health of a nation depends very largely on the proportion of men owning their own land or their own small business, and he resents the tendency to transform the small owner into the employee of the State or of chain stores. By the time of his conversion, Lunn, the man who had mocked Bellocianism not ten years earlier, differed from Belloc and Chesterton only in where he located the Distributist ideal. Whereas they looked to Poland and Ireland, he found it in the valleys of his beloved Switzerland.127 In the final analysis what made Lunn an integral member of the Catholic intellectual community was his attitude. Lunn observed proudly following his conversion that he had not entered the Church in search of peace. What had appealed to him instead was the Church militant. Even in Roman Converts it had been the Church’s willingness to engage with the modern forces of progress and secularism and materialism that Lunn had admired. “One of the things which first drew me to the Church,” he maintained, “was the fact that the Church was uninfected by sentimental ‘dawnism.’” “Whatever might be the case with Protestants,” he noted approvingly, “the Catholic Church remained serenely contemptuous of these modern prophets.” By the

218

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

time he was ready to convert he had come to believe that the Church in fact was the only institution in the modern world capable of resistance to the forces that he joined his fellow Bellocians in decrying. In language similar to Waugh’s concerning his own conversion, Lunn likened the Church to an army, or a fortress, besieged by barbarians: The Catholic looks out from the walls of his citadel and sees a world relapsing into that paganism from which Christianity emerged. Once more the Hun is knocking at the gate. It is not only the traditional creed of Europe which is threatened. The new pagans attack with even greater enmity the traditional morality and culture of our race. The old barbarian was conquered by beauty and tamed by the culture which the Church imposed on the invaders from the north. The new barbarian, sated by a beauty which he no longer understands, turns in sheer weariness of soul from the spirit which found expression in the stones of Chartres and the canvases of Bellini. It is only within the citadel of the Church that the greatest of all cultures can be preserved from decay. Lunn may have been convinced by the theological claims of the Church, and his subsequent contributions to the work of the Catholic intellectual community in England may have focused on doctrinal apologetics, but the Bellocian historical, political, and economic project had played a significant role in his conversion as well.128 In a final delicious irony, marking the complete reversal of everything Lunn had professed in 1924 when he wrote Roman Converts, one of his first forays into the arena as a Catholic champion came against G. G. Coulton, the very historian whose work he had employed to attack the Bellocian vision of the Middle Ages. In an exchange of increasingly hostile letters, published as a Critic and a Convert, Lunn turned against Coulton the same charges he had earlier leveled at Chesterton. “You are,” he observed of Coulton, “a moralist rather than an historian.” “You collect facts not to present a picture of the past,” Lunn continued, “but to provide propaganda for the ene­ mies of the Faith.” Indeed, he concluded:

The Lesser Servants

219

You have devoted your life to collecting evidence against the Church. In the English Historical Review, in the course of a very favourable notice of your book, Mr. E. W. Watson makes this point: ‘We want a synthesis, and Dr. Coulton is content to pile up, with monumental labour and accuracy, the evidence for one side only of the life. And sometimes his horizon is not quite broad enough in his survey of details.’ It is significant that your name does not figure among the list of distinguished scholars who were invited to contribute to the ‘Legacy of the Middle Ages.’ Everybody gives you credit for your industry, but I have yet to meet a competent historian—and I have discussed you with many historians—who would give you credit for your judgment, or who, indeed, regards you as a historian.129 Lunn clearly brought to his work as a Catholic apologist the same pugnaciousness with which he had earlier attacked the Church. Previously, he had been certain of the irrationality of Catholicism, now he was just as convinced that the Church was, first, the champion of reason against the anti-intellectualism of the modern world and, second, a fortress from which European civilization could be defended from the barbarian hordes without. Lunn’s subsequent contributions to the English Catholic intellectual community would continue to present and defend these twin convictions.

— Belloc himself had laid the foundation for the English Catholic intellectual community in the eight years between the 1912 publication of The Servile State and the 1920 appearance of his House of Commons and Monarchy and Europe and the Faith. His first disciples, the older generation of McNabb, Gill, and Chesterton that came of age between 1890 and 1900, had forged the community in the first years after the Great War. Only in the late 1920s, however, as the second generation nurtured on the ideas of Belloc came to prominence, led by the five subjects of this chapter, was the community firmly established. Only with the appearance of the younger generation on the

220

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

stage did ­ Bellocianism enter the mainstream. No longer could it be dismissed as the stridency of a political radical past his prime, or as the old-fashioned epigrams of an Edwardian literary giant, or the eccentricities of an Irish-born priest or an avant-garde artist. Some of England’s brightest young talents­—old boys of the nation’s most prestigious public schools, sons of its best Oxford colleges—had converted to Catholicism and taken up the standard from Belloc, Chesterton, Gill, and McNabb. For Jerrold, Woodruff, Hollis, Waugh, and Lunn, the Catholic Church represented civilization. They revised Belloc. No longer by the early 1930s was it the old sectarian question of Catholic and Protestant. The stakes were now higher. Waugh in particular emphasized that Catholicism represented civilization in the looming battle against chaos and barbarism. The irony was that this conviction made the younger generation more likely, not less, to seek accommodation with the authoritarian governments of the Continent, as the example of Waugh with regard to Italy’s conquest of Abyssinia aptly demonstrated. For the second generation of Bellocian Catholic intellectuals, anticommunism was to become central in the struggle on behalf of civilization. Jerrold recognized it before the others, but where he led they followed. Arnold Lunn in particular would become with Jer­ rold one of the most significant propagandists in this battle, and Spain would be the battlefield. Before turning to their intervention in Spain, however, it will be necessary to examine another group of Catholic writers who emerged during the late 1920s and early 1930s as well, a group also nurtured on Belloc but one whose intellectual interests diverged significantly from those of the orthodox Bellocians.

C h a pt e r 4

The Dawsonite Challenge

In October 1926, Frank Sheed and his wife, Maisie Ward, established in London a Catholic publishing house, Sheed & Ward.1 Less than two years later, in May 1928, Tom Burns, managing editor of the young firm, produced anonymously an influential, albeit short-lived, new journal, Order: An Occasional Catholic Review. That same year, a previously little-known Catholic historian, Christopher Dawson, entered the arena with the publication of his Age of the Gods, the first volume of what he ambitiously planned to be a multivolume treatment of the history of culture from the prehistoric to the present. Sheed & Ward would not only provide a platform for a new generation of English Catholic intellectuals but also introduce its English readers to the work of innovative Catholic authors from the Continent. Burns hosted a salon at his Chelsea home that helped to circulate the ideas of Sheed & Ward authors, both English and continental. Looming over both Sheed & Ward and Burns’s Chelsea group was Dawson, a 1914 convert, who became the intellectual mentor to Frank Sheed, Maisie Ward, and Tom Burns and his friends. Neither Sheed nor Ward nor the contributors to Burns’s salon began as critics of Bellocianism; on the contrary, like Jerrold, Woodruff, Hollis, Waugh, and Lunn, they had been very much influenced by Belloc and Chesterton, Gill and McNabb. Yet under the tutelage of Dawson, during the ten years following the creation of Sheed & Ward, the English Catholic intellectuals associated with the new publishing house—including the proprietors—moved steadily away from the Bellocian orthodoxy with 221

222

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

consequences that would only become apparent after the outbreak of World War II.

A t the Sign of the Stag Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward met during winter 1920–21 as members of the Catholic Evidence Guild. Ward was already an established guild speaker when Sheed first began speaking on the guild’s platforms in late 1920. According to Sheed, his introduction to his future wife occurred when she rescued him from oratorical disaster. Although he had been successful in his first guild efforts, Sheed recalled: I was soon cut down to size. It was at Finsbury Park. The senior speaker, a woman, had a vast crowd. She came down. I got up. In five minutes I had lost them all. She got me down, got up herself, and won the crowd back. I touched a low point in misery. I was able to balance things up later by marrying her: but the wound still throbs faintly. Ward’s memory of their first meeting was different. She remembered an earlier encounter at a fund-raising bazaar for the guild at which Sheed had tried to sell her a clearly defective pair of scissors. Even then the consummate salesman and charmer, he had replied to his future wife’s objection and plea for a better pair, “Madam, there are no better scissors.” Of their first encounter on the speaking platform, she recollected that far from having had to rescue an ineffectual neophyte from catastrophe, Sheed had actually increased the crowd she had left him and that he had impressed her not only with his ability as a speaker but also with his intelligence.2 Sheed and Ward were an unlikely couple. He was a lower-middleclass Australian; she hailed from the English gentry. He was outgoing by nature; she remained, despite her public speaking, retiring. He was well educated, recently arrived in England on what he had planned to be a yearlong sabbatical from postgraduate legal studies at Sydney

The Dawsonite Challenge

223

University, but she, as typical for a woman of her status at that time, had been formally educated only to the secondary level. Most no­­t­ably, Maisie Ward was some eight years the senior of Frank Sheed. Frank Sheed was born in 1897 in Sydney, Australia, to an IrishCatholic mother, Mary “Min” Maloney, and Jack Sheed, a Scots­Irishman of Presbyterian heritage but Marxist faith. Although baptized a Catholic, the combination of his father’s Marxism and the unabashed Orangeism of his father’s parents made Sheed’s practice of the faith as a boy difficult. Jack Sheed, according to Frank Sheed’s son Wilfrid, was a violent alcoholic who was frequently away from home. It was these absences, however, that allowed Mary Sheed to raise her sons as Catholics. Indeed, it was during one absence of more than two years—Frank was six when his father left and eight when he returned—that Frank Sheed made his first Communion, reception of the sacrament being expedited in his case because the priests knew that his father might return and try to prevent it. When their father was at home, their mother took the boys to Confession once a month in secret, but Mass and Communion were consigned to the periods when their father was absent. During the two weeks of his annual vacation, for example, Frank Sheed and his brother were daily communicants. As for the rest of the year, their father took the boys every Sunday to the Methodist chapel around the corner from their home, where they attended Sunday school in the morning and afternoon, in addition to the main service at eleven—Methodism being presumably preferable to papism for their Presbyterian grandparents. Sheed and his brother attended under protest, but he was to remain grateful to the Methodists, who despite the boys’ utter lack of participation in the prayers and hymns, not only never proselytized but also refrained from criticizing the Catholic Church.3 Sheed’s Presbyterian grandparents and aunts, on the other hand, never missed an opportunity to present, albeit indirectly, to Frank and his brother the hoariest anti-Catholic propaganda. Their grandfather was a member of the Orange Lodge, and the dining room at his home was dominated by a painting of “King Billy” perched on a rampant charger celebrating victory at the Battle of the Boyne. Anti-­Catholic

224

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

pamphlets, including that legendary example of antipopery, the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, were left where Sheed and his brother could not fail to notice them.4 Neither attendance at Methodist Sunday school nor his father’s diatribes at the dinner table on the delights of dialectical materialism, nor even the Orange prejudices of his paternal relations, could dampen Sheed’s Catholic faith. The Marxism he ignored, the Orangeism he dismissed as bigotry, while he felt sorry for the Methodists because they “didn’t seem to have any angels or saints, and almost never mentioned Our Lady.” So firm did Sheed’s religious convictions remain that he was taken aback, and indeed wondered if he was intellectually inferior, when one of his teachers informed him that anyone “worth his salt intellectually would have religious doubts in his later teens.”5 The teacher’s comments contributed to Sheed’s “unstated feeling,” shared, he recalled, by his fellow Catholics in Australia, that the intellectual currents of the contemporary world were too powerful for the Church to navigate. Methodism, his father’s Marxism, and the Orangeism of his grandfather might not have had the better of the argument, but what of Darwin, or the Higher Critics of the Bible, or the scholars of comparative religion—all of whom seemed to be undermining the Church’s claims? His fellow Catholics, Sheed believed, possessed a “siege mentality” that dictated that one did not venture outside the walls to contest with the “gigantic intellects” of the modern world. Thus it was with elation that the sixteen-year-old Sheed first encountered Belloc and Chesterton when the English master at Sydney High School handed him the former’s biography of Danton and the latter’s Heretics.6 Belloc and Chesterton turned Sheed’s “mental world upside down.” In contrast to the timid who refused to sally forth from the fortress, Sheed discovered two Catholic intellectuals who “said whatever they felt like, and they not only got away with it but found their Catholicness taken seriously.” “For lots of us,” Sheed explained, “Belloc and Chesterton meant an end to the three-century-old siege mentality.” He elaborated:

The Dawsonite Challenge

225

Back in the thirteenth century, King Louis IX had offered two simple rules for discussion with a heretic: ‘If you are a learned cleric, reason with him. If you are a plain man-at-arms, thrust your sword into his belly as far as it will go.’ Some of us may have longed for those dear dead days: but the swords not being in our hands, silence was the obvious alternative. Belloc and Chesterton ended all this, not only by what they had to say but far more by the total devil-may-careness with which they said it, the sheer high spirits with which they took on anybody and everybody. Later Catholics criticize Chesterton’s immoderate fooling and Belloc’s aggressiveness, without realizing the battle they fought and won against a world which thought Catholics not worth listening to, and against unnerved Catholics who did not try to speak to it. They were indeed immoderate, but battles are not won by moderation—as Chesterton said: ‘You can’t be moderate with a battle axe.’ Belloc and Chesterton provided Sheed with the confidence to take on the secular world and the high spirits with which to do so.7 Inspired by the Bellocian vision of the Age of Faith, Sheed studied medieval languages at Sydney University, where he had won a state scholarship, intending to become a scholar of the Middle Ages. He began his university career ready for controversy, intent on battling the anti-Catholic prejudice he had been prepared to find in his professors but instead had discovered that the study of languages called for no “utterance on doctrine.” Contrary to the hopes that Belloc had engendered, there were no close-minded dons to assail. Although he graduated with first-class honors, Sheed lost interest in an academic career and enrolled instead in the university’s law school. Law, he admitted later, had not been a vocation, but being “naturally talkative” and “having none of the talents” necessary for such other professions as medicine or engineering, he opted unenthusiastically for the bar. It was after completing the first two years of the four-year course of legal studies that Sheed had decided to spend a year in Europe before finishing his training.8

226

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

When Frank Sheed first encountered Maisie Ward in early 1921 he was twenty-three years old, she thirty-one. Born to Wilfrid Ward and Josephine Hope, both her father’s and her mother’s families were exceptionally distinguished, the former by virtue of brains, the latter by blood. Her paternal grandfather, William George Ward (known as W.G.), had been a tutor of mathematics and logic at Balliol College, Oxford. He had not only lost his fellowship but had also been stripped of his degree when he converted to Catholicism, one of the first contributors to the Oxford movement to do so. Ward became a vociferous Ultramontanist, and went on to edit the Dublin Review and to spar intellectually with such Victorian heavyweights as Newman (on papal infallibility) and John Stuart Mill (on free will). Maisie Ward’s father, Wilfrid Ward, was also the editor of the Dublin Review, as well as the biographer not only of his father but also of Wiseman and Newman. Indeed, it was Newman, rather than his own father, whom Wilfrid Ward venerated, finding in him the ideal of the Catholic intellectual.9 From her mother’s family, in contrast, Maisie Ward inherited not brains but the bluest of blood. Josephine Ward’s maternal grandparents were the fourteenth duke and the duchess of Norfolk, her uncle the fifteenth duke. The dukedom having been in the Howard family continuously since 1483, longer than any other, the duke of Norfolk was therefore the leading peer in Britain. In fact, not only was Josephine Ward’s grandmother the dowager duchess, but when her parents both died while she and her siblings were still young, the children had gone to live at Arundel, the magnificent Howard family seat in Sussex, to be raised by the duchess and her daughters, their aunts. It was there, and at another family estate, Heron’s Ghyll at Uckfield, also in Sussex, that Josephine Ward grew up and where Belloc, who was a friend of her brother James Hope at the Oratory, often visited. Belloc was as a schoolboy enamored of the eldest of the three Hope sisters, Minna, some eight years his senior, and he remained a lifelong friend of Josephine.10 Maisie Ward was educated at a local convent at Dorking, in Surrey, south of London, where her family lived, and for a final year at a convent in Cambridge. Although she earned a distinction in Latin on the

The Dawsonite Challenge

227

Cambridge Senior Certificate examination in 1906, she did not try for a university place. The next decade of her life was largely uneventful. As became a young lady of her status, she was presented at court and endured a number of awkward, for her, London seasons. Unskilled in small talk and uninterested in fashion, yet conscious of being poorly dressed, Ward was hardly a social success. She soon discovered that young men were disconcerted by her. Apparently her dance partners did not expect to discuss Gladstone’s moral character.11 When the war began Ward became a nurse’s aide at a Sisters of Charity hospital for Italian soldiers in London. After her father died in April 1916, however, she had an epiphany. Ward decided that she had become consumed with personal and family problems. Her spiritual life, she believed, had become dormant. Although she attended mass regularly and received the sacraments, trivial disputes and petty ambitions had taken the place of God in her life. She left the relatively easy work at the Italian hospital and took on more serious responsibilities at a hospital for incurable soldiers in Littlehampton. Following her departure from Littlehampton, however, the danger was that she would fall back into her former rut. The Catholic Evidence Guild therefore was for Maisie Ward an opportunity avidly to be seized. It was not merely something to occupy her, but a cause to be embraced, for it combined her desire for public service with her newfound evangelical zeal.12 From the beginning Ward threw herself into the work of the guild. What became apparent to her, and to Sheed when he became involved, was that even the most knowledgeable and intelligent guild speakers, herself and Sheed included, were not only deeply uninformed when it came to theology but also ignorant of what it was that their audiences needed. To remedy the first problem, Ward and a small group of early guild members devised a proper system of training. All prospective new speakers were to pass an examination, and neophytes were first to speak on more remote platforms before being thrown into the cauldron of Speaker’s Corner. Veteran guild speakers now provided trainees with examples of acceptable outdoor speeches and taught them the sort of questions a typical Hyde Park audience would ask.13

228

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

The second problem proved more complicated. The guild’s early slogan had been “to go out and defend the faith.” Guild speakers had envisioned themselves defending Catholicism against the traditional objections of Protestants. The focus had been on demonstrating that the Catholic Church was the one, holy, and apostolic church of the creed and that Protestant objections to the papacy, purgatory, sacramental confession, and the like were erroneous. In their view, therefore, the typical audience was composed of individuals similar to Arnold Lunn before his conversion. Yet despite a marked improvement in the ability and knowledge of its speakers, the audiences were not responding as the guild had hoped. The guild speakers seldom lost arguments with hecklers anymore, but it was still difficult to get and keep an audience outdoors, particularly amid the competition in Hyde Park, where a listener could quickly move to the next, more entertaining soapbox.14 The comments the guild members received from their audiences helped them to realize what the problem was and how to go about solving it. “‘All right,’ said a heckler one day,” Maisie Ward recalled, “‘you say Christ claimed to be God and proved His claims were true. So what?’” Ward and the leading guild organizers concluded, based on remarks such as this, that their focus had been entirely wrong. They could rationally argue, even demonstrate, that Christ was God, that he had founded a church, and that this church was the Roman Catholic Church, but what did that mean to the individual listening at Speaker’s Corner? As Ward recollected: It was useless to prove Christ’s claim to Godhead to men who knew nothing about the God He was claiming to be, and whose whole idea of Christ Himself lay in some odd line of a hymn they had learned in childhood such as, ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.’ We must show them the Christ of the Gospels as He spoke to the Pharisees and overturned the tables of the moneychangers as well as when He looked on Peter or Magdalen to forgive them. This man was God. It was useless to tell people about papal infallibility when they had not even begun to take in what revelation meant or how

The Dawsonite Challenge

229

infallibility was its guardian—when most of them set no value on truth at all in the religious sphere, which was for them only a matter of sentiment. The guild had begun by addressing an audience, it believed, of convinced Protestant Christians, but had found that its audience consisted, at best, of agnostics with little knowledge of Christianity, let alone Catholicism. Addressing their park audiences in the sophisticated scholastic terminology of their theology textbooks was useless. Their listeners needed to have the very basics of Christianity explained to them in their own vernacular before Catholic claims could be advanced.15 The lessons that Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward learned at the Catholic Evidence Guild were to influence their lives and work outside of the guild. In contrast to the Bellocian concentration on Protestantism and Protestant interpretations of history as the nemesis, Sheed and Ward confronted the secular world. Instead of the Bellocian emphasis on politics, history, and economics as the battleground, they helped to foster a new focus on theology and spiritual concerns. Just as they had learned to do on the guild platform, they addressed a modern audience that consisted of those ignorant of Christianity rather than Protestant partisans. Absorbed in his work for the guild, the one year that Sheed had intended to stay abroad quickly turned into four. He decided not to abandon his degree, however, and set autumn 1924 for his return to Sydney. Although he remained unenthusiastic, he still planned to practice law in Australia. In August 1924, shortly before he left England, he asked Maisie Ward to marry him. Josephine Ward was less than delighted at the thought of losing her daughter to the other side of the world, and Maisie Ward herself would have preferred that she and her husband-to-be remain in England. While Sheed was finishing his studies, Josephine Ward came up with a solution. If Sheed was to return to England after completing his degree, he would need an alternate career. Josephine Ward not only wanted to keep her daughter in England; she also hoped to find an occupation for her son Leo, who

230

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

had tried his vocation as a Jesuit but had left the order. If they were to establish a Catholic publishing house, Josephine Ward decided, the problems of her family would be solved. Sheed was delighted with the suggestion. “The only thing I knew about publishing,” he was to recall, “was that it was not Law.” As Maisie Ward recalled, a new Catholic publishing house had long been a dream of her mother: She felt keenly that each author was at present working on his own and was, moreover, almost compelled to publish with a nonCatholic firm. The existing Catholic houses dealt almost exclusively with prayer-books and works of piety, or else, like Herder’s, with immense books for the specialist. She and my father had been well served by Longmans, but she was convinced that intelligent Catholic books would be multiplied, that their impact would be far greater, if a Catholic publishing house could emerge with a mind behind it. The whole field needed surveying, with writers encouraged to fill the obvious gaps. Continental writing should be examined for books worthy of translation. The quality of a book must be the first consideration, whether it would pay the second. Originally the Ward of Sheed & Ward was meant to be Leo. Sheed was to supply the flair necessary to manage a business as risky as a new publishing house, while Leo Ward was to provide the family’s connections with both English Catholic writers and the continental Catholic intelligentsia. In the end, Maisie Ward became the Ward in the partnership, as Leo turned to the secular priesthood. Frank Sheed completed his degree and married Maisie Ward on his return to England in April 1926.16 The fledgling publishers faced long odds. Sheed & Ward not only launched during economic hard times in England, and with only £2600 capital, but also decided to eschew the traditional book-balancing sales of statues, rosaries, medals, and prayer books that had sustained older Catholic firms such as Burns & Oates. Even more problematic, neither partner had any knowledge of the business. Belloc, who was very excited about the new venture, advised the neophytes on the proper

The Dawsonite Challenge

231

­ anagement of a publishing house. Unfortunately, most of his recomm mendations, both Sheed and Ward were to recall, proved impractical. In the end, Sheed was forced to fall back on a book, Truth about Publishing by Stanley Unwin, and trial and error. More useful than Belloc’s management advice, however, were the manuscripts that he provided—both of them, characteristically, attacks on H. G. Wells’s version of world history, Mr. Belloc Still Objects and A Companion to Wells’ Outline of History. It was Belloc’s fervent desire that Sheed & Ward publish these two books that led the new publisher to begin operations much earlier than anticipated, before even the end of 1926. Sheed & Ward had just taken offices in London’s publishing center on Paternoster Row opposite St. Paul’s, but these first volumes went to press before the firm was equipped with telephone, electricity, or staff. As a result, Belloc’s books were distributed from the trunk of Leo Ward’s car.17 What made matters still more difficult for Sheed & Ward was its intention to publish volumes expressive of “the whole Catholic mind,” and, to add salt to the soup, the conviction that significance, rather than profitability, ought to be the overriding concern. By the “whole Catholic mind,” Sheed meant that the firm would eschew mere apologetics and hagiography and focus instead on innovative work in philosophy and theology. This the new publisher began to do as soon as it had established itself. While the first-year catalog consisted almost entirely of Belloc and Chesterton—which surely helped to make the house’s name—Sheed & Ward began to branch out almost immediately, publishing the following year not only new English Catholic authors such as Christopher Hollis but also a number of the works of the avant-garde French Catholic playwright Henri Ghéon, who was attempting to recreate the popular theater of the Middle Ages for a contemporary audience. McNabb contributed a volume on infallibility, and the prominent Jesuit priest C. C. Martindale added a selection of his sermons—his wedding gift to the husband-and-wife publishers—as well as a study of Aloysius Gonzaga, the Counter-Reformation Jesuit saint. Before the firm had been in business two years, Sheed & Ward had begun to realize its ambition of bringing to the English public both new English Catholic writers and innovative continental Catholic­ ­authors,

232

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

particularly theologians and philosophers. Within three years, Sheed & Ward was able to add to its lists the contributions of two continental writers, one German and the other French, the former a theologian and the latter a philosopher, who were to be among the most influential Catholic thinkers of the century. In 1928 the firm published a translation of the German theologian Karl Adam’s Spirit of Catholicism and the following year it added the first of the many volumes that it would publish from the French neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, his Three Reformers. Adam’s Spirit of Catholicism was Sheed & Ward’s “first enormous success.” Many years later Maisie Ward could still recall the excitement with which she had first read in manuscript Fr. Justin McCann’s translation. Adam, who held the chair of dogmatic theology at Tübingen, fit perfectly Sheed & Ward’s intention not only to focus on first-rate theology and philosophy but also to continue its proprietors’ work with the CEG and render “the spirit of Catholicism intelligible to the contemporary mind.” Indeed, because the volume meshed so well with the new publisher’s mission in both these respects, Frank Sheed recalled that he and his wife had greeted the Spirit of Catholicism as the “nourishment for which [they] were craving.”18 According to a biographer, Adam’s goal from his earliest doctoral research had been “to reconcile the permanence of the church’s doctrines with the historicity of these teachings.” Of course, this was the challenge facing any Catholic theologian, but what was significant in Adam was his conviction that the two most prominent contemporary approaches to Church history and dogma, that of the modernists and that of the neo-Thomists, had failed to meet it. Adam believed, as his biographer explained, that the former had “forfeit[ed] the church’s claim regarding the permanence of its teachings,” in effect forcing “all of reality into the mold of modern historiography’s presuppositions,” while he found the reliance of the latter on Aristotelian terminology inadequate for the task of explaining the Church’s dogmas to the contemporary world. Theologians and other scholars of Church doctrine needed to address the contemporary world in its own intellectual vernacular, not in that of the medieval schools.19

The Dawsonite Challenge

233

Adam’s Spirit of Catholicism was notable, in the context of this study, both for its criticism of Catholic triumphalism and for its ecumenical attitude toward Protestantism. Adam rejected the partisanship that marked Bellocianism. In the introduction he criticized those of his contemporaries who triumphantly pointed to what they believed was the coming collapse of Protestantism. Adam disapproved of what he dubbed their “assurance of victory”: The phrase is a profane and unholy one. It degrades religion and makes it a party affair. When we are treating of religion we should have humility, reverence, thankfulness, and joy, but no dogmatic assurance of victory. The future of Protestantism: that is God’s business. And it rests with him whether the West is to return from its diaspora, from its dispersion and disintegration, home to the mother Church in whose bosom all were once united as one family. Adam here did not conflate Catholicism and Protestantism. He did not argue that the Church should cede theological or doctrinal ground and meet its Protestant critics halfway but rather that charity entailed that one not revel in the misfortunes of fellow Christians and fellow human beings and that humility demanded that one not tread on God’s plan for those Christians who remained outside the Church. Sheed agreed with this approach. “He was not trying to prove other religions wrong,” Sheed recalled of Adam, “he was not even trying to prove the Church right, only to make it intelligible,” and he “was not stating the case for Catholicism, he was only showing Catholicism.”20 Adam’s charity on this point stemmed in part from his understanding of the nature of the Church. Insofar as he affirmed the Church’s claims to be “the Church of humanity, the exclusive institution wherein all men shall attain salvation,” there was obviously nothing remarkable in Adam. When he came to discuss the idea that, in the words of St. Paul, “outside of the Church there is no salvation” (Ep. 73.21), however, Adam carefully qualified the church’s exclu­sivity. He noted that the declaration of exclusive salvation was aimed not at individuals but rather at “non-Catholic churches and

234

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

c­ ommunions, insofar as they are non-Catholic communions.” NonCatholic communions, Adam noted, however, were “not merely nonCatholic and anti-Catholic.” Despite having “set themselves up against the original Church of Christ,” they had not only “maintained a considerable amount of the Catholic inheritance” but also retained “certain Catholic means of grace, in particular the sacrament of Baptism.” “Their churches,” Adam averred, “are built not only of their own unCatholic materials, but also of Catholic stuff from the original store of salvation.” Therefore, he maintained, “insofar as they are genuinely Catholic in their faith and worship, it can and will and must happen that there should be, even outside the visible Church, a real growth and progress in union with Christ.” “Wherever the gospel of Jesus is faithfully preached,” Adams concluded, “and wherever Baptism is conferred with faith in his holy name, there his grace can operate.”21 Sheed and Ward discovered in Adam’s writing a new focus for the engagement of Catholic intellectuals with modern society. In the conclusion to the passage quoted earlier, in which Adam took to task those who rejoiced at Protestantism’s recent hard times, he made clear his own hopes for a Christian-led renewal of Western civilization: All we can do is give testimony to the truth, pray God to open all hearts to this truth, and make it ever more manifest to the best minds among us, that the great and urgent task of the West is to close at long last the unwholesome breach that has divided us for centuries, to create a new spiritual unity, a religious center, and so to prepare the only possible foundation for a rebuilding and rebirth of Western civilization. While Adam failed to detail how this was to be accomplished, beyond prayer, he believed not only that a crisis had engulfed Europe but also that both the root of this crisis and the necessary foundation for recovery were spiritual.22 Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward had found in Adam’s work confirmation of their own beliefs. His criticism of the neo-Thomists in particular corresponded with their own experience with the CEG, where

The Dawsonite Challenge

235

they had discovered that scholastic terminology prevented them from getting through to a contemporary audience. It was not, however, neo-Thomism per se to which they took exception but rather a certain type that found in Aquinas and subsequent schoolmen all the answers. For Frank Sheed, too many neo-Thomists had retreated to the medieval past, seeking answers not merely through the scholastic method, but rather in the ready-made conclusions of Thomas and his followers. Sheed feared that Thomist “philosophy was already being turned into a theology, not to be examined by reason but swallowed as dogma.” In his estimation: The Catholic jungle was full of man-eating Thomists (a phrase invented I think by Algar Thorold, the editor of the Dublin Review). I made a point of asking each one I met, What is the next step? What are the questions un-met by Aquinas that the Thomists are about to work on? They invariably seemed puzzled. And in a book by a learned Spanish Thomist I came upon the astounding statement that he was not going to discuss a particular problem because Aquinas had not written on it! In this statement of Sheed’s, however, lay the answer to why someone suspicious of neo-Thomism became such an ardent admirer, and publisher, of one of its leading proponents, Jacques Maritain. Maritain, as Sheed later observed, was also apt to believe that all the answers were to be found in the writings of St. Thomas, but he did not avoid, as had Sheed’s unnamed Spaniard, those issues on which Aquinas had not commented. Aesthetics, for example, had not been a concern of the medieval schoolmen, yet Maritain had employed their methods, and built on certain statements of Aquinas, to create a neo-Thomist philosophy of art in his Art and Scholasticism, a volume that had great influence on Eric Gill and his fellow Ditchlingites. For Maritain, then, neo-scholasticism was an intellectual tool, a method to be applied, rather than a set of conclusions to be memorized.23 Jacques Maritain was born in Paris in 1882 to a distinguished family. The Maritains were liberal Protestants, which in their case

236

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

meant that their true faith was in the republic. Educated at one of the most prestigious schools in the French capital, the Lycée Henri IV, Maritain had gone on to the Sorbonne, where he studied the sciences and philosophy. At university he met his future wife, Raïssa Oumansoff, a Russian-born Jewish woman who was also studying science. Although they were interested in biology, both became increasingly concerned with ultimate questions that they concluded scientific materialism had proved unable to answer. Their interest in metaphysics and their skeptical attitude toward materialism led them to convert to Catholicism in June 1906.24 In 1909 Maritain, at the urging of his wife, began to read Aquinas. Before he encountered St. Thomas, Maritain had believed himself caught between science and religion, and he had been convinced that the chasm separating the two was unbridgeable. In Aquinas, however, he found the solution to his intellectual difficulties. As a biographer has concluded, reading St. Thomas confirmed Maritain “in his belief that reason could be trusted, that it could be reconciled with religion and expanded toward experimental science, that the mind was lit by the five windows of the senses, and that the intellect had the right to feed on facts.” In Aquinas, he had found, not necessarily all that could be said philosophically, but rather a set of established, true principles that could be applied to modern philosophy and the contemporary world. Maritain began studying Thomas intensively and soon made a name for himself in French intellectual circles with his own philosophical work. By 1920 he had established the first of what became a number of centers for the study of Thomism, each of which held regu­ lar seminars and an annual spiritual retreat. The Maritains also held a famous Sunday salon at their home in Meudon, outside Paris.25 Maritain’s Three Reformers (originally Trois Réformateurs, 1925) was a blistering indictment of modern thought in which he took on Luther, Descartes, and Rousseau, the three reformers, respectively, of religion, philosophy, and morals, who, he charged, lay behind “all the problems which torment” the modern world. Luther and Rousseau, Maritain dismissed as book-end extremists. Luther, on the one hand, was convinced that human nature was entirely depraved, so beyond

The Dawsonite Challenge

237

saving that even Christ’s redeeming merits merely acted as cloak to cover, but not heal, humanity’s essential corruption. Rousseau, on the other hand, believed that human nature was inherently good and so in no need of saving.26 In both instances, according to Maritain, the result was an anthropocentrism that verged on solipsism. “By refusing to admit that man can share really and within himself, in the justice of Jesus Christ and in His grace, which according to him, is always external to us and cannot produce in us any vital act,” Maritain argued of Luther, “he shuts himself up forever in his self, he withdraws from himself all support but his self, he builds up into a doctrine what had first been nothing but a personal disorder, he places the center of his religious life not in God but in man.” In Rousseau this anthropocentrism was even more evident. Rousseau in Maritain’s estimation was the first of the modernists, stripping Christian virtue of the supernatural. To Rousseau, “Nature was absolutely good in every way,” “conscience infallible,” and the “human person of such worth and so divine that it can validly obey nothing but itself.” Luther loathed humanity, and Rousseau exalted it, but in the end for both, Maritain concluded, human beings were imprisoned in the self.27 For Maritain, however, Luther and Rousseau merely represented the consequences of making man the measure of all things. Much more dangerous had been Descartes, for it was the seventeenth­century Frenchman who had provided the intellectual justification for this anthropocentric turn, and indeed for the modern world. Whereas Aquinas and the Scholastics had established human beings as a composite of body and soul, matter and spirit, Descartes had reduced men to thinking or spiritual substance. Existence for Descartes depended on thought—“I think therefore I am”—so that only thinking substance was truly real. Thought was independent of things, of material substance, in this view, in contrast to Aristotle and Aquinas, for whom human knowledge was dependent on sensory perception of the material world. According to Maritain, for Descartes therefore all human knowledge was innate and intuitive—an epistemology that Maritain dismissed as angelism. “The Cartesian ideas come from God, like angelic ideas,” he concluded, “not from objects.”28

238

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

The consequences of Cartesian epistemology, Maritain argued, had been devastating. If all that one could truly know was what existed as a “clear and distinct” idea, then what was not “clear and distinct” could not be an object of knowledge. This posed an existential threat to theology in particular as an intellectual discipline. After all, could doctrines such as that of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Redemption be considered “clear and distinct”? In the Cartesian universe, such concepts were relegated to the realm of faith, now opposed to knowledge rather than its integral partner. Whereas for the Scholastics theology had been the queen of the sciences, at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of human knowledge, its place not only had been ceded to the physical and mathematical sciences of which Descartes had been such an ardent proponent, but it was no longer a science at all, no longer the object of true and certain knowledge. “Descartes,” Maritain argued, “finally reversed the order of human cognition, and made Metaphysics an introduction to Mechanics, Medicine, and Ethics.” The term science, Maritain, the former biology student, lamented, “is to-day hardly applied to anything but the knowledge of matter, and science, par excellence, is regarded by most modern thinkers as belonging to a museum. In the modern world, reason turns its back on eternal things and is ordered to the creature. It rates the mathematics of phenomena above theology, science above wisdom.” Indeed, this toppling of theology and its replacement with modern science mirrored the replacement of God with man as the proper object of human knowledge. Descartes in Maritain’s estimation therefore had torn the knower from the known and separated men from the sensible world; even worse, he had overturned the proper priorities of human beings. This revolution in intellectual priorities, Maritain concluded, was the root of all the subsequent ills of Western civilization.29 What is significant about Adam and Maritain for this work was not that Maritain had written his scathing attack on modern philosophy, or that Adam had composed his volume on Catholicism, but that Sheed & Ward were publishing their work and that Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward shared their concerns, concerns that increasingly diverged from those of Belloc and his disciples. They greeted enthusiastically Adam’s

The Dawsonite Challenge

239

call to rearticulate Catholic truths to the contemporary world in the modern vernacular, and though they remained suspicious of Maritain’s reliance on Scholastic terminology, both Sheed and Ward welcomed his willingness to use the Scholastic method to attempt to raze the anti-Christian edifice of modern philosophy. Indeed, both Adam, the antagonist of neo-Scholasticism, and Maritain, a leading exponent, could agree with Sheed and Ward that spiritual renewal was the necessary precursor to any restoration of Western civilization. This was a far cry from the Bellocian focus, carried over from Belloc’s own roots in radical politics, on the political and the economic. In fact, it was to be on this theme of Adam that an influential segment of English Catholics, including Sheed and Ward, but led by Christopher Dawson, was to expand. Maisie Ward’s biography of her parents, especially the second of the two volumes, Insurrection versus Resurrection, best summarized her and her husband’s view of Catholic intellectual life. Primarily, the biography was an apology for her father, in which she vehemently defended Wilfrid Ward against the lingering suspicion that he had sided with the modernists during the crisis of the first decade of the twentieth century. More important for the purposes of this study, the biography was also a manifesto for a Catholic intellectual revival. For Maisie Ward the modern world and the Catholic Church were in conflict. In her analogy, one was a lion and the other a rabbit. The question, however, was which was which. Was the Church the lion that “eats and digests the rabbit, getting rid in the process of the really indigestible rabbit-elements,” by which Ward meant processing modern thought so as to exclude what could not be reconciled with Church doctrine? Or was the modern world in fact the lion, jettisoning those elements in Catholic doctrine that could not be reconciled with modern thought? In Ward’s estimation, the modernists had taken the latter position, discarding from Christianity whatever modern science and history had failed to verify. The supernatural, including miracles, they had dismissed, according to Maisie Ward, the sacraments they had presented as mere symbols, and Jesus, they had concluded, was just a man. Modernism was the “insurrection” of her title.30

240

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

In contrast, the “resurrection” to which Ward referred in her title was the Catholic intellectual revival that had begun, she and her father agreed, in the mid-nineteenth century, and of which Newman had been the leading light. The nineteenth-century Church had needed new, inventive theological thinking to supplant the centuries of rote memorization of scholastic theology, the regurgitation not of Aquinas himself but of textbooks that merely summarized the work of the schoolmen. This Newman and others had begun to provide, but the modernists’ attacks on traditional Church dogma, their disingenuousness about their project (Maisie Ward essentially accused Loisy, the leading French modernist, of being a liar), and the subsequent suspicion under which nearly all Catholic theologians fell following Rome’s suppression of modernism in 1907 had withered the flower on the vine before it could bear fruit. The modernists, rather than win for Catholic intellectuals “greater freedom and fullness of thought,” as their apologists argued, had according to Maisie Ward set back the revival of Catholic intellectual life by “at least a generation.” Sheed & Ward hoped to help restore the continuity that modernism had ruptured.31 What was needed, Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward believed, following Wilfrid Ward, was a new St. Thomas, not just the repetition of Scholasticism. Wilfrid Ward had observed in 1910 that he had sympathized in the 1890s with what he understood to be the project of those who came to be called the modernists. He had believed that they wanted “to present Catholic doctrine in such a form as to make it clearly consistent with the scientific researches of the day, and to attract the deeper religious thinkers in England who are looking for truth and would not see it in ancient forms of thought and expression quite incomprehensible to them.” Wilfrid Ward had concluded of this project: I considered this endeavour to be exactly that of St. Thomas in the 13th century, when, though censured by many for the novelty of his method, he translated Catholic theology into the dialectical form which the intellectual habit of the day demanded, and assimilated it to the philosophy of Aristotle which, though the

The Dawsonite Challenge

241

Fathers had denounced it, had gained such a hold on the western intellect in the 13th century. Maisie Ward was quick to add to her father’s statement that it was not the truths of the Church that had changed in the thirteenth century but rather the manner in which these had been expressed: The revelation of eternal truth made by God to man has to be explained in human language. The Greek and Latin Fathers, the Mediaeval Schoolmen, the men of the Nineteenth Century all had to explain it to the world around them in language that the world understood. But the divine reality remained substantial, unalterable. “In other words,” she concluded, “the theologian learns his dogma from the Church; he accepts his view of the physical universe from the scientists and philosophers and the general opinion of the time; he forms a synthesis in which dogma and physical universe are fused in one complete picture.” The modernists had failed to provide a true synthesis, capitulating entirely to contemporary science and philosophy. It remained urgent that a new generation of theologians step into the breach and produce one.32 The corollary to this search for a new Aquinas was the belief of Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, following the lead of another of their firm’s authors, the Russian exile Nicholas Berdyaev, that what was needed ultimately was a new Middle Ages. By this they did not mean that the contemporary world should necessarily ape either the social or the political forms of medieval Europe—the guild, the manor, feudalism, or monarchy—but rather that the dynamism that had marked the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was needed in the present to restore a civilization that had become exhausted. Ultimately, they believed, this restoration needed to center on a turn away from man, away from the humanism and materialism of the modern world, and back toward God—the underlying message of Maritain’s Three Reformers. The Sheed & Ward project therefore certainly represented

242

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

a changed emphasis from that of Belloc and his followers. Where the latters’ emphasis had been the political and the economic, rather than the spiritual or religious, Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, with authors such as Adam and Maritain, believed not that the political and economic were necessarily insignificant but that these could not be changed without a prior spiritual and philosophic revolution, indeed a revolution in the original sense of the word as a return, a turn away from man as the measure of all things and back to God. By the early 1930s Sheed & Ward had already succeeded in publishing the work of authors who were contributing to what the proprietors regarded as a Catholic intellectual revival not just in England but throughout Europe. Their neophyte firm remained solvent, although, given its emphasis on quality over popularity, it was not thriving. Sheed & Ward was, however, beginning to make a contribution to English intellectual life. In 1932 the Manchester Guardian, hardly the house organ of the Catholic intelligentsia, recognized the contributions of the new publishers: The firm of Sheed & Ward is devoted to ‘penetrating obscurities’ mainly in fields of philosophy, theology, history, criticism and theology. This work is done almost exclusively by Roman Catholic writers but with benefits far beyond the boundaries of that communion. The firm has, in fact, been largely instrumental in bringing the fruits of the intellectual renaissance among Catholics in Europe to the English public. Even in a decade which has seen the rapid rise of many new firms, the progress of Sheed & Ward has had something of the phenomenal. Indeed, Sheed & Ward had succeeded already in drawing to itself authors whose talents and contributions were such that even the Guardian could not fail to notice; it had also managed to attract a talented editor of uncommon vitality, Tom Burns, whose speaking on behalf of the Catholic Evidence Guild had caught the eye of Frank Sheed. Burns, both at Sheed & Ward and after he had left the firm, was to make unique contributions to the English Catholic intellectual community.33

The Dawsonite Challenge

243

Burns, Ch elsea, and Order Tom Burns was a remarkable figure in the English Catholic intellectual community. Unlike the other major contributors, Burns was not a writer. He was an editor for book publishers, first for Sheed & Ward and then for Longmans. For a brief period, less than two years, he edited his own journal, Order, and he helped to edit a series of essays by Catholic philosophers, theologians, and historians that Sheed & Ward published. Perhaps most significantly, Burns also hosted a salon at his Chelsea home, where the ideas of writers such as Maritain and Dawson were discussed. He would go on to play a key role in the purchase of the Tablet in 1936 from the Archdiocese of Westminster. His role was to encourage, to produce, and to promote. In a word, he was a gifted impresario. For Tom Burns, Sheed & Ward in its first years was a “sweatshop and a university rolled into one.” In 1926, when the new publishing venture was inaugurated, Burns, only some twenty years old, was working in the City. His weekend days were occupied with the activities of the CEG, his evenings with the round of nightclubs, cocktail parties, and balls that Evelyn Waugh also found so absorbing. Burns later acknowledged that he had felt superior to his suburban, middleclass officemates because of his interest in contemporary literature, art, philosophy, and theology. He was eager for more noble pursuits and was thus delighted with the opportunity his guild acquaintance Frank Sheed offered him at the nascent publishing house. Many years later, in his memoirs, Burns still acknowledged the great debt that he owed to Sheed for taking him out of the world of ledger books and into that of ideas.34 Tom Burns came from a stock more exotic than that of any of the other members of the Catholic intellectual community. He was born in 1906 in Viña del Mar, Chile, just north of Santiago. His father, David Burns, a Scot, worked for the same City firm that Tom Burns later joined. His mother, Clara Swinburne, the daughter of an English father and a Spanish Basque mother, had been born and raised in Chile. Burns was the youngest of their seven children, all of whom

244

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

were raised Catholic, the religion of their mother. In Chile David Burns had apparently done quite well and moved in the highest of social circles. According to his son, the family possessed the table on which the Chilean treaty of independence had been signed, a gift from the president of Chile to the Swinburnes.35 The Burns family moved to England when Tom Burns was quite young and settled in Wimbledon. Burns was educated first at the local Jesuit college and then from 1920 at Stonyhurst, the Jesuit school in Lancashire at which Christopher Hollis would begin teaching history only a few years later. At Stonyhurst his closest friend was Henry John, the son of the noted painter Augustus John. Burns and John met on the school train from London, the one reading Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, the other his Heretics. In 1923 the order dispatched Martin D’Arcy to Stonyhurst to look after John, who was considering entering the Society of Jesus, as well as Burns and another student. The Jesuit provincial had informed D’Arcy that they were “three very exceptional and interesting boys who could profit greatly by studying” with him. D’Arcy became a friend and counselor to these young men, as much as their teacher. They discussed Joyce’s Ulysses, only recently published and still banned in Britain but smuggled to Stonyhurst from Paris by Henry John, as well as the poetry of D’Arcy’s fellow Jesuit, Gerald Manley Hopkins, then still relatively unknown, and even the work of such theologians as Baron Frederick von Hügel, still suspected for his association with modernism. While at Stonyhurst Burns also came to be influenced by Frank Sheed, who had visited the school on behalf of the Catholic Truth Society. Sheed recruited the schoolboys for the CEG, which Burns enthusiastically joined.36 The combined influence of D’Arcy and Sheed encouraged Burns to begin reading Maritain and other contributors to the French Catholic revival. His interest in literary modernism and his new admiration for contemporary French Catholic writers inspired Burns to eschew Oxford and Cambridge on leaving Stonyhurst in 1924 and move to France, ostensibly to study at the Université de Paris but in reality to experience firsthand the Catholic revival. Burns’s account in his

The Dawsonite Challenge

245

memoir of the time he spent in Paris before returning to London in 1925 exhibited still, so many years later, the romanticism (and the affectation) of the boy scarcely out of school. He could still recall the thrill he had felt when after buying a volume of Maritain from his “favourite bookshop,” he had taken it to a “sunny bench in the Luxembourg Gardens.” So exhilarating was the reading that he had needed to retire to a café for a pernod à l’eau to “steady himself.” Perhaps emboldened by the pernod, Burns wrote to Maritain, who invited him to his Sunday salon at Meudon. Burns took advantage of the opportunity to meet his hero and was delighted to find himself, at least for one Sunday, at the epicenter of the French Catholic revival. When he returned to London and entered the world of commerce, it was little wonder that Burns jumped at the chance to join Sheed & Ward and help to bring the work of the French Catholic authors to the English reading public.37 Like Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, Tom Burns had not been influenced solely by French Catholic intellectuals. Chesterton had been Burns’s “idol” at Stonyhurst, and indeed Burns acknowledged in his memoir that his admiration for Chesterton had “survived every cross-current in [his] thought for 60 years.” Not surprisingly, Belloc had also been a hero—Path to Rome in particular having been Burns’s “call to adventure.” Once he joined Sheed & Ward and met him, Burns was as entranced as any of Belloc’s friends and acquaintances. Among the other Bellocians he met and admired while at Sheed & Ward was Arnold Lunn—“a tempestuous but ever welcome intruder at the office,” “nothing shoddy about Arnold’s mind.” It was Eric Gill, however, even more than Belloc and Chesterton, who had the greatest influence on him. While Burns described Chesterton and Belloc as his “idol” and his “hero,” respectively, he referred to Gill as his “guru.” While still at Stonyhurst, he had accompanied Henry John, whose father was a longtime friend of Gill, to Ditchling, where he had met Gill, Hilary Pepler, and the other craftsmen and artists of the community, including a young war veteran who would later become one of Burns’s closest friends, the painter, poet, and novelist David Jones. Gill too became a friend, with Burns later helping to

246

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

­ istribute through Sheed & Ward the books that Gill and his associd ates published at Pigotts, near High Wycombe, where Gill had eventually settled after his sojourn in Wales.38 Although Burns was less interested in the economic and political pronouncements of Gill, he shared Gill’s philosophical and especially aesthetic concerns. As one friend was to recall, Burns “wanted to find out what it was that connected the neo-Thomism of Maritain with the painting of Modigliani and Matisse.” In this respect, Mari­ tain’s Art and Scholasticism was a central text for Burns, as it had been for Gill and his fellow Ditchlingites, providing a bridge between neo-scholastic philosophy and modernist art and literature. Maritain himself was an enthusiast of contemporary art, particularly cubism. His criteria for artistic beauty—integrity, radiance, and proportion (which he distinguished from balance, which led to classicism, precisely what Maritain wanted to avoid)—had allowed him to embrace modernism. Burns was attempting to reconcile his own interests in contemporary art and literature with his faith, and in this Maritain proved a great help.39 Burns, though not a writer, played a significant role in the English Catholic intellectual community not only through his position at Sheed & Ward but also through the salon that he hosted nearly every night from the late 1920s at the Chelsea home he shared with his brother Charles. A succession of friends boarded with Burns at St. Leonard’s Terrace, the longest tenants being Alick Dru, who was working at Sheed & Ward with Burns and teaching himself Danish in order to translate Kierkegaard, and Francis Howard (later Lord Howard of Penrith). Frequent visitors included René Hague, who married Eric Gill’s daughter Joan in 1930 and subsequently operated the Pigotts Press with Gill, and Harman Grisewood, a friend of Hague from Ampleforth (the Benedictine public school), who was beginning what would be a very successful career at the BBC. Others who found their way to the “never ending party,” as Grisewood called it, were Howard’s brother Edmund, Bernard Wall, who would go on to found the journal Colosseum, and, of particular note, David Jones. Martin D’Arcy, at Oxford from 1927, brought a number of undergraduate

The Dawsonite Challenge

247

protégés down from the university, including Robert Speaight, who became a notable actor and an author.40 Grisewood’s and Speaight’s accounts of their introductions to Burns’s Chelsea salon illuminated both the enthusiasm of the participants and the high level of the conversation—at least for those unfamiliar with continental neo-Thomism and modernist art. Hague introduced Grisewood to Burns in 1928. The meeting, Grisewood was to reflect in his memoirs, proved to be as “important to [him] as anything that has happened before or since.” The immediate effect of his first visits to Burns’s salon was to send him scurrying to the British Museum Reading Room in an attempt “to understand the talk going on . . . at St. Leonard’s Terrace.” A less positive reaction was that of Speaight, who was first brought to Burns’s home by Father D’Arcy, most likely in late 1930 or early 1931 (D’Arcy had received him into the Church in October 1930). Although he became friends with Burns and many of the other participants, he only attended one of the Saturday lunches at which much of the action took place. Intimidated by the talk of “Maritain and Meudon”—with Alick Dru throwing Kierkegaard into the mix as well—Speaight had to work up the courage to contribute. He asked one question and received the reply, “It’s quite impossible to say without knowing the context,” at which he retreated into silence for the remainder of the afternoon.41 The Chelsea group found its starting point in St. Thomas. Burns was fond of the Thomist aphorism, “the proper end of everything is something good.” He and his friends applied this notion to the art of the period—the plays and films of Cocteau, Joyce’s novels, and the paintings of the postimpressionists alike—arguing that “since the expressions of good are related in the celestial order, there should in the terrestrial order be no estrangement.” To Grisewood these ideas were entirely novel. “Whereas the Catholic world around us tended to judge all art works according to their conformity with Christian precept,” he observed, “we did not accept the distinction between ­sacred and profane. . . . We did not believe that the art of Salvator Rosa was ‘religious’ because he painted so many pious Madonnas and the art of Renoir was not because he painted none.”42

248

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

The social and political questions that Belloc and Chesterton had emphasized were, at Burns’s salon, of secondary importance. According to Grisewood, such matters were discussed only insofar as they “arose as an inference from aesthetic and philosophical beliefs.” Burns, in his memoir, used Edmund Burke to explain what he and his friends had sought: Burke, writing of the “moral imagination,” saw it as a power which “aspires to the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth.” That was what we were after. It is, after all, the basis of the philosophia perennis which Mari­ tain had revealed to me as a living tradition, over and against materialism in its myriad forms. What Burns meant was that they would not focus on “right order in the commonwealth”—because one could not achieve that without knowing what it was, without being able to recognize “right order,” and this was not possible without first training the intellect, or, more broadly, the “moral imagination,” to do so. In their view it would have been useless to discuss political and social questions without first addressing the philosophical and spiritual problems at the heart of the contemporary political and social disorder. The Chelsea group was convinced that the sacred needed to be restored to everyday life. As Burns recalled, “It seemed to us that the Reformation, the Age of Revolution and Industrialism had eroded the territory of the sacral in daily living: modern man was losing a vital dimension in his life, the utilitarian motive was self-sufficient; a culture without religion was no culture—and scarcely civilized.” This view was not only popularized among the Burns set by Christopher Dawson, about whom much more below, but it was also confirmed by many of Sheed & Ward’s continental authors, including Adam and Maritain but also Adam’s fellow German theologians and philosophers such as Romano Guardini, Peter Wust, and Theodore Haecker.43 Grisewood himself described Burns’s Chelsea group as a rightwing, Catholic version of Bloomsbury. To both groups “conversation

The Dawsonite Challenge

249

was more important than written texts,” in the sense that “leading ideas were developed out of discussion rather than from books.” But there the resemblance ended: Bloomsbury was fashionable and trendy; we were relatively unknown and espoused unpopular causes. Bloomsbury was leftist; we were decidedly rightist. Bloomsbury was late Victorian English; we were twentieth-century European. We were tenaciously Catholic; Bloomsbury was confidently agnostic. In the words of Samuel Butler, they regarded the end of Christianity as “virtually settled”; we looked forward to a renaissance. He and his friends, Grisewood concluded, were “avant garde” but in a “rightist, Catholic, European style, not only in the arts but in politics, religion, economics, social and personal relationships.”44 One of the curious things about the group of friends who had begun meeting at the Burns brothers’ home was that despite their abiding interest in philosophy and their fascination with aesthetics, only one turned his talents to writing or art. Burns remained a publisher, presenting the philosophy and literature he loved to the public and facilitating conversation among his friends with his infectious enthusiasm. In a letter to Dawson in 1930 he admitted that he had considered writing a novel but that he had decided instead to “chain up the imagination, but loose the intellect, working in a certain order of practical affairs and attend to the teaching of men of tradition, knowledge and principles quite clear, who will write economically and to the point.” He had decided, that is, to remain a publisher, a “porter of other people’s goods.” Grisewood’s path lay first in acting, then announcing, and ultimately in producing programs for the BBC, while other salon regulars such as Dru and Hague focused, respectively, on translating the work of others and publishing it.45 The one exception, and it was a very notable one, was David Jones, who produced one outstanding piece of literature, his great war poem/novel, In Parenthesis (1937), and a stream of accomplished water­colors between the late 1920s and the onset of World War II. A

250

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

decade older than the others in the Chelsea group, Jones had a great influence over his younger friends by virtue of his age, experience, and talent as an artist and writer. Burns observed that his friendship with Jones was “the deepest and most lasting of [his] life.” Grisewood recalled that the seemingly endless conversations on art, religion, and history at St. Leonard’s Terrace had in fact often ended when Jones departed to catch the last train from Blackfriars to Brockley, where he stayed with his parents when in London. Jones’s “talk had a special authority which only a working artist can give,” Grisewood observed. Indeed, he maintained that Jones was the leader of their group, for he “played a Socratic role, asking the difficult questions and criticizing the tentative answers.” René Hague agreed, observing that Jones “acted as a leaven to activate the intelligence of his friends.”46 David Jones was born in Brockley, then in Kent, now a part of London, in November 1895. His father, James, originally from northeastern Wales, was a typesetter for a Nonconformist weekly, the Christian Herald, while his mother, Alice Bradshaw, was the daughter of a Thames-side master mast-and-block maker—the type of craftsman whom Eric Gill venerated. Jones’s forebears, though certainly comfortable, were far removed from the upper-middle-class families of friends such as Grisewood and Burns. In his background, therefore, Jones was closer to Gill, whose father would have ministered to families similar to Jones’s.47 Central to Jones’s identity was his Welsh roots. “From the age of about six,” he recalled, “I felt I belonged to my father’s people and their land, though brought up in an entirely English atmosphere.” As an adult he came to identify more strongly with this side of his heritage, absorbing Welsh history and legends and using them in his writing. His, however, was a mythic Wales. As Hague observed, the “Wales he loved ended with the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffyd on 11 December 1282.”48 From an early age, Jones had also possessed a compulsion to draw and a conviction that he would be an artist. His studies at the Camberwell School of Art, however, were interrupted by the Great War. Jones enlisted as a private in the 15th (London Welsh) Battalion of

The Dawsonite Challenge

251

the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in January 1915 and fought in the Somme campaign in 1916, where he was wounded in the attack on Mametz Wood on the night of 11–12 July. Hague claimed that “the months in the trenches and the bloody battle of the Wood” had left Jones “spiritually and psychologically unscarred and even invigorated,” and in the short run this may have been the case. Jones seemed to have put the war out of his mind for the next ten years, but when he began in 1928 to work on In Parenthesis, he was forced to recall his experiences in the months leading up to the Somme, and this may have contributed—though Jones himself denied it—to the series of nervous breakdowns that beset him after 1932, indeed that struck him soon after he finished the draft of In Parenthesis.49 After the war Jones enrolled at the Westminster School of Art, where he studied until 1921, a year that proved a turning point in his life. In September he was received into the Catholic Church by Fr. John O’Connor, the friend of Chesterton and Eric Gill. Unlike many of the other converts among the contributors to the English Catholic intellectual community, Jones never explained in any detail the events that led to his conversion. His fragment of an autobiography ended with his demobilization, and the biographical sketch with which he provided the Tate Gallery merely noted that he became a Catholic in 1921. Even a close friend such as Hague was left wondering about the circumstances. One can, however, explain Jones’s conversion based on comments to friends and surviving letters. Jones did tell Hague that “he had from early childhood been drawn towards the sacramental teaching of the Church” and explained that he had been a “Catholic at heart” during the war. Jones had come across a Catholic Mass in a barn near the front lines, and what he had witnessed, he later explained to Hague, had made a “big impression.” “I felt immediately,” Jones recalled, “that oneness between the Offerant and those toughs that clustered round him in the dim-lit byre—a thing I had never felt remotely as a Protestant at the Office of the Holy Communion.” Hague also noted that Jones had greatly admired the Catholic chaplain for his battalion, Fr. Daniel Hughes, S.J., and that Jones had “hinted” that Hughes might have influenced him in the direction of the Church.50

252

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Jones’s wartime experiences must therefore have predisposed him toward the Church but not moved him enough to have seriously considered conversion yet. According to Hague, it was Jones’s continued study of art after the war, and his new interest in the philosophy of art, that had pushed him further toward Catholicism. At Westminster Jones discussed with his fellow art students his suspicion “that post-Impressionist theory in the arts fitted in with what he saw in the Church’s teaching about the Mass as a making of a real thing, of the liturgy as an artifact, of the sacraments as effectual signs.” This notion that there could be a similarity between concepts of symbolism in contemporary aesthetic theory and sacramental theology was to become a central tenet of Jones—one that he discussed at St. Leonard’s Terrace and on which he was to expand in an essay titled “Art and Sacrament” (1955). Jones’s conversion was facilitated by one of his Catholic friends at Westminster. Frank Wall was a Yorkshireman, and on a 1919 visit to Bradford he first took Jones to see Father O’Connor. Jones returned to Bradford a number of times, staying with Wall’s aunts and meeting with O’Connor for instruction. O’Connor would place a bottle of whiskey with two glasses and two Bibles on the table, and the two of them would discuss Scripture and the Church late into the night.51 In “Art and Sacrament,” Jones also provided a further clue regarding his conversion. He recalled that although this analogy between contemporary aesthetics and the sacraments had first come to him when he was discussing postimpressionist theory at Westminster, it had been his introduction to Gill’s Ditchling community early in 1921 that led him to develop the idea. It was O’Connor who had recommended that he visit Gill, perhaps because his instruction of Jones had not progressed. While Jones was to credit Gill for convincing him of “the truths of the Church,” O’Connor provided a final push as well. In summer 1921 Jones was still beset by doubts. O’Connor wrote to him several times, explaining that this was normal for someone in Jones’s position, that such doubts always “attack a man who is casting off from his ancient moorings” and that “anyone making his way from the wreck to the shore is naturally nervous about what is in between.”

The Dawsonite Challenge

253

O’Connor distinguished, however, between mere nervous misgivings and serious doubts about significant Catholic teachings, noting that only the latter ought to prevent Jones’s “submission.” Above all, he warned Jones not to “make the capital error of requiring mathematical certitude.” O’Connor’s argument must have been effective, because by 3 August 1921 he was preparing to receive Jones into the Church, which he did on 7 September at St. Cuthbert’s, Bradford.52 Around the time of his conversion, Jones went to live at Ditchling and became an apprentice in the Guild of St. Joseph and Dominic as well as a Dominican tertiary. An art student whose primary talent lay in watercolor painting was hardly ideal material for Gill, whose penchant was of course for the artist as craftsman. Gill vowed to keep Jones “up to the mark and knock some corners off him”—by which he meant, according to Hague, that he would disabuse Jones of all that he had learned at art school and instead make him a “workman.” This was a project destined to fail. Jones did not prove to be made of the malleable clay that the ever-domineering Gill liked to shape, though he did manage to teach Jones one craft worthy of the workman. At Ditchling Jones learned the art of wood engraving. Wood engraving was to prove a valuable trade, enabling him to eke out a living in the 1930s while he was painting and writing. Jones was to provide Sheed & Ward with the woodcut of a stag that became the firm’s colophon.53 During Jones’s three years at Ditchling he lived in a barn adjacent to Desmond Chutes’s house. Through these quarters passed a number of what another Ditchlingite, Philip Hagreen, called the “misfits and rolling stones” who had found their way to the community—many of whom were in fact sent by Vincent McNabb. Conditions were primitive. Hagreen remembered the barn as constructed of bricks, with a sloping brick floor through which water incessantly seeped. “David’s mattress,” Hagreen recalled, “grew mildew and I don’t know why he did not get rheumatic fever.” The workshop in which Jones etched, drew, and painted was a simple hut with neither insulation nor a proper ceiling, and the wind blew straight through it. Hagreen remarked on Jones’s “utter goodness” despite the situation: he “had an awful lot to

254

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

put up with and he never blamed anyone or complained,” though “the discomfort amounted almost to torment.” While the wind howled through their hut, Jones just “pulled his belt tight to make his clothes hug and kept on working,” producing what Hagreen remembered as an “astonishing quantity” of engravings, drawings, and carvings.54 Jones’s serenity was even more remarkable considering his sometimes strained relationship with Gill, who was convinced that everybody had to work according to his own methods. Thus a “workman’s” table was to be “the altar on which he offered his work to God,” and the worker or “priest” was to have nothing on it but the tools necessary for his task, laid out in regular order. Jones’s work table, in contrast, was covered not only with tools but also with brushes, papers, and a paint box, as well as numerous cigarette butts. To make matters worse, Jones was also too disorganized to keep an account of how many hours he spent on each job, what materials he used, and how much they cost. This of course also offended the hyperorganized Gill—though with more reason. Given Gill’s exasperation with the disorganized painter he was trying to transform into a craftsman, it was surprising that he approved Jones’s engagement to the second of his three daughters, Petra, in June 1924. When two months later Gill broke with Pepler and left Ditchling for the daunting retreat of Capely-ffin in the Welsh Black Mountains, Jones accompanied him.55 Jones was only to remain in Wales for the winter of 1924–25, an especially brutal one in the mountains, recalled Hague, who was already living at Capel-y-ffin when the renegade Ditchlingites arrived. For the next several years, Jones lived a nomadic life. Petra Gill broke off their engagement early in 1927 to marry another man. Though this caused obvious pain, Hague argued, his friend had not been devastated, having realized that his vocation as an artist would not have allowed for marriage and a family. Hague surmised that Eric Gill for his part was probably relieved that his daughter had not married Jones, who, Gill had probably concluded, would only with difficulty, if at all, be able to support a wife and children.56 At Ditchling and Capel-y-ffin Jones had essentially completed an apprenticeship. He had not only learned a valuable craft but had also

The Dawsonite Challenge

255

obtained priceless introductions into the English art world from Gill, which stood him well as he began to focus on his watercolors. In 1925 Arthur Howell, a friend of Gill and the proprietor of St. George’s Gallery in London, near Hanover Square, included several of Jones’s paintings in an exhibition of the English Watercolour Society. In 1927 Howell mounted a successful exhibition of Jones’s work at which nearly all the paintings were sold. The years immediately following were filled for Jones with work, some engraving but primarily painting, which was where his true talent lay. The Tate Gallery would hold an acclaimed exhibition of his drawings and paintings in 1981, seven years after his death. For the purposes of this study, however, Jones’s most significant work of these years was neither his painting nor his engraving but rather his writing. In 1928, while staying with his parents in their seaside bungalow near Brighton, he began writing what would be published some ten years later as In Parenthesis.57 Not surprisingly, considering that Tom Burns and the other St Leonard’s Terrace regulars were neither writers nor artists themselves, Jones’s In Parenthesis has been the most enduring achievement of the Chelsea group. A novel (or is it an epic?) written in prose for the most part but with long passages of verse, In Parenthesis is a fictionalized portrait of Jones’s experiences in the Great War. It followed the soldiers of “B Company” from their battalion’s embarkation for France in early December 1915 through their participation in the Somme offensive the following summer, during which the rifleman private whom the novel most closely follows, John Ball, was wounded. That the common soldier is the hero of Jones’s work is clear from the way he presented John Ball and his fellow privates and also from his depiction of the officers and even the civilians on the home front. The enlisted infantryman holds a place equivalent to that of the workman for Eric Gill. Indeed, Jones compared his soldiers to workmen in the following passage describing the battalion’s night march to the front: Cloud shielded her bright disc-rising yet her veiled influence illumined the texture of that place, her glistening on the saturated

256

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

fields; bat-night gloom intersilvered where she shone on the mist drift, when they paraded   at the ending of the day, unrested          bodies, wearied from the morning,   troubled in their minds,        frail bodies loaded over much, ’prentices bearing this night the full panoply, the complex paraphernalia of their trade. The ritual of their parading was fashioned to austerity, and bore a new directness. They dressed to an hasty alignment, they did not come to the slope; by a habit of their bodies, conforming to monosyllabic, lowvoiced, ordering. They moved rather as grave workmen than as soldiers from their billets’ brief shelter.58 Here Jones presents the soldiers not only as apprentices bearing the tools of their trade and possessing a gravity that fit their status as workmen or artisans—all of which Gill no doubt appreciated—but also as monks. Their parading is a “ritual”; the “monosyllabic, lowvoiced, ordering” recalls the chanting of the divine office; and the word habit is redolent of Scholasticism, as well as a nod to clerical costume. Throughout Jones refers to parades and marches as “ritual” and “liturgy,” and he consistently compares night marches to the night office of monks. Jones also alludes to the “harsh novitiate” of his riflemen, calling them “catechumens” and referring to their “baptisms.” Encompassing this scene is the radiance of the moon—“bright,” “illumined,” “glistening”—and recall that radiance was one of the Maritain’s artistic criteria.59 Jones dedicated In Parenthesis to the memory of those with whom he had served and also “to the enemy front-fighters against whom we found ourselves by misadventure.” The Germans in the trenches opposite at least shared a way of life with Jones’s soldiers, but from

The Dawsonite Challenge

257

those back home in Britain they felt entirely isolated. Describing how a soldier might occupy himself during the largely tedious days in the trenches, the narrator refers derisively to the magazines received from home, to the illustrations “in last week’s limp and soiled Graphic, of Christmas preparations with the Fleet, and full-page portraits of the High Command; to be assured that the spirit of the troops is excellent, that the nation proceeds confidently in its knowledge of victory, that Miss Ashwell would perform before all ranks, that land-girls stamp like girls in Luna.” The implication is of a well-meaning but entirely ignorant populace with which the soldier in the trench shares nothing.60 In such a situation the only recourse of Jones’s soldiers was to themselves. In Jones’s war, therefore, the cardinal virtue was loyalty to one’s comrades at the front, and the chief mitigator of the harsh conditions was fellowship. Ball, put on sentry duty in the pitch darkness as soon as the battalion was inserted into the trenches for the first time, found such fellowship in an unknown corporal he met while searching the nearby trenches for a friend in another company. New to the front, Ball’s platoon mates had been forced to brew their tea with tepid water and to eat a lukewarm breakfast in the damp, cold trenches. The corporal, however, gave him a steaming cup—“Give the poor little sod some char” (slang for tea)—and allowed the neophyte to warm himself over the charcoal brazier on which he had brewed the tea. Small acts of kindness such as this cemented the ties of fellowship between those in the trenches, veteran and neophyte, private and noncommissioned officer alike.61 For Jones, the front lines represented, as Ball realized that first night when the battalion was inserted, a “folk-life”—“a people, a culture already developed, already venerable and rooted.” This culture was, however, one of the many casualties of the Somme. Jones, who was in England recuperating from July 1916 until late that October, returned to his battalion and believed something had changed, “a change in the character of our lives in the Infantry on the West Front.” Before the Somme, Jones maintained, the age-old literature of war—Malory, the Song of Roland, the Welsh sagas—had at least

258

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

been understandable. After summer 1916, he argued in his preface to In Parenthesis, all that had made the war bearable was gone: From then onward things hardened into a more relentless, mechanical affair, took on a more sinister aspect. The wholesale slaughter of the later years, the conscripted levies filling the gaps in every file of four, knocked the bottom out of the intimate, continuing, domestic life of small contingents of men, within whose structure Roland could find, and, for a reasonable while, enjoy, his Oliver. In the earlier months there was a certain attractive amateurishness, and elbow-room for idiosyncrasy that connected one with a less exacting past. The period of the individual rifleman, of the ‘old sweat’ of the Boer campaign, the ‘Bairnsfather’ war, seemed to terminate with the Somme battle. A “rubicon” had already been crossed, Jones observed, “between striking with hand weapons as men used to do and loosing poison from the sky as we do ourselves,” but after the Somme this process accelerated.62 What Jones was concerned about was not just how modern science and technology were affecting warfare, the “folk-life” of the trenches, but also how science and technology were influencing all of society. Just as after the Somme there had still remained glimpses of an older form of warfare, he argued, there remained at home “glimpses in our ways of another England—yet we know the truth.” “Even while we watch the boatman mending his sail,” Jones concluded, “the petroleum is hurting the sea.” It was this contrast between traditional folk-life—whether the recently constructed culture of the trenches or the older culture of the farm and the village—and modern living that formed an essential theme of In Parenthesis.63 Throughout Jones juxtaposes the modern and the traditional. At the beginning of part 2, when the battalion was being trained before moving to the front, the soldiers were billeted on French farmland where, on days too wet to drill outside, lectures were held in a barn, “with its great roof, sprung, unpreaching, humane, and redolent of a vanished order.” Jones contrasted this barn sharply with the lectures

The Dawsonite Challenge

259

themselves. The Bombing Officer told them of “the efficacy of his trade,” of the “important future” of the latest Mills grenade—“just on the market”—comparing the “elementary, amateurish, inefficiencies” of older bombs with the invention of Mr. Mills, “to whom his country was so greatly indebted.” Jones compared this instructor to a “commercial traveller,” and the contrast with the traditional culture of the farm is made all the more striking by relating how the Bomb Officer “took the names” of all those soldiers who were good cricket bowlers. Cricket, the leisurely amateur game, taking place iconically on the village common, the traditional game of England, stands, like the barn, in stark antithesis to the market, to commercial travelers, and to the “efficiencies” of modern technology.64 Jones concludes part 2 with a similar study in contrast. As B Company huddled in another barn before beginning its night march to the front lines, Ball lingered for a moment in the courtyard of the farm, when the German artillery took aim at a British battery down the road: The exact disposition of small things—the precise shapes of trees, the tilt of a bucket, the movement of a straw, the disappearing right boot of Sergeant Snell—all minute noises, separate and distinct, in a stillness charged through with some approaching violence— registered not by the ear nor any single faculty—an unrushing pervasion, saturating all existence; with exactitude, logarithmic, dial-timed, millesimal—of calculated velocity, some mean chemist’s contrivance, a stinking physicist’s destroying toy. The German artillery shell landed fifty yards away, and “the sap of vegetables slobbered the spotless breech-block of No. 3 gun.” Here Jones scorns the exact, the mathematical, the timed, the scientific, the spotless—the tools of modern civilization; and the juxtaposition of the vegetables, the product of the earth, of the farm, with the “physicist’s destroying toy” only serves to emphasize his derision, and his concern about the passing of the one and its replacement by the other.65 In Jones’s In Parenthesis the Bellocian veneration of the land and the traditional folkways of the farm and the village is combined with

260

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Ditchling’s suspicion of modern science and technology and married to the Chelsea group’s emphasis on modernist aesthetics and focus on restoring the sacred in everyday life. Where Jones departed from Belloc and Gill was in his eschewing of any political program. In this, as in his modernism, he was therefore closer to Chelsea than to Ditchling. Burns and his friends may have agreed with many of the Bellocians’ diagnoses of what was wrong with contemporary civilization, but they shared neither their inveterate hostility to modern parliamentary democracy and capitalist economics nor their prescriptions for radical reform. In this, Jones’s In Parenthesis represented the finest artistic expression, and given its late publication date, not more than two years before the outbreak of the next world war, the culmination of the hopes that Chelsea had placed in the aesthetic as opposed to the political. To understand fully, however, not only the ideals of Burns’s Chelsea group, but also its influence on English Catholicism, beginning in the late 1920s, long before the publication of In Parenthesis, one must look to the first expression in print of the mind-set of Burns and his friends, the periodical Order.66 Burns took the title Order from a passage in Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles: “According to established popular usage, which the Philosopher considers should be our guide in the naming of things, those are called wise who put things into their right order and control them well.” In his memoirs he was careful to note that Order therefore had nothing to do with the “new orders” of either Italian Fascism or German National Socialism. In fact, when Burns referred to “order” he was addressing specifically the Catholic Church in England. “We are to discuss among ourselves Order—that is, arrangement in English Catholic affairs,” Burns explained in his introductory essay in the first number. The task of Order, he asserted, was to provide “criticism and examination, a good deal of shaking and kicking, and an agonizing scrub” to the grime that Burns and his comrades believed was obscuring the English Church. They had decided to call attention to the Church’s problems in order to stimulate reform. David Jones provided a wood engraving of a prancing unicorn for the cover—a reference to the medieval myth that the unicorn’s horn would cleanse the waters.67

The Dawsonite Challenge

261

Burns published Order anonymously. He claimed that he wanted the focus to be on the ideas of the contributors (who also remained anonymous) rather than their names and reputations. It was also likely that the desire for anonymity stemmed in part from the fact that Burns and his contributors were attacking quite fiercely what they regarded as the deplorable state of the institutional Catholic Church in England. Objects of their odium included the liturgy, music, art, and architecture of the English Church, what Burns called the “hideous aesthetic expressions of modern religion.” Neither did Order spare other facets of Catholic life for which the higher clergy could be held responsible, including religious education and particularly Catholic journalism. All of this was a reason to seek the cover of anonymity—and indeed Cardinal Bourne was subsequently to call Burns a “very dangerous young man.”68 Burns hoped that Order would provide a platform for new voices in English Catholicism. Some of the most critical articles in the journal were aimed at Catholic journalism, which Burns believed was unrepresentative of the entire community of English Catholics. “There is a dislocation,” the author of “Our Contemporaries” maintained, “between Catholic Press sentiment and genuine Catholic Public sentiment.” The object of Order’s most sustained criticism in this regard was the Tablet. In his memoirs Burns recalled that he and his friends had dismissed the venerable weekly as “sectarian and puritanical, pompous and parochial.” In a piece titled “Catholic Press and Non-Catholic England,” the author criticized the monomania of the Catholic weeklies—with the Tablet clearly in mind—concerning the Anglican Church. There was a tendency to view Catholics as “forever sane and holy, learned and happy,” and Anglicans as “perennially lunatic, malicious, uneducated, miserable, inartistic,” and “wracked by anti-Catholic complexes.” The article concluded that Catholic journalists not only were wrong about the supposed strengths of the Catholic Church but exaggerated the Anglican problem as well. Citing Ronald Knox, the author noted that the vast majority of Anglicans were merely baptized and married in the Church of England and otherwise had nothing to do with it. Why expend so much energy on such a nonthreat?69

262

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

The most significant, and blistering, of the articles in the first number of Order was titled “Ecclesiastical Materialism,” which the author defined as the overemphasis on the visible, corporate Church at the expense of the Church’s spiritual “soul.” Ecclesiastical materialists focused on the “Church militant”—“the Church of medieval persecution,” of “bulls of deposition and invasions and plots in Reformation England that nearly killed Catholicism”—but ignored “faith and charity,” “spiritual education,” and “prayer, preaching, and suffering.” “Devotion to the Church as a visible organization,” the article lamented, had been “allowed to cover neglect of the spiritual life.” Even worse, this neglect of the spiritual had contributed to a “righteous indignation” against the “theological and doctrinal short-­comings of non-Catholics” that ignored the “devotion and self-sacrificing goodness which marks so many among them and indicates a living membership of Christ which no intellectual error can destroy.” In this last charge in particular, one detects the influence of Karl Adam, whose Spirit of Catholicism Sheed & Ward was publishing at the time. It also seems evident that not only Bellocianism but also Belloc himself was a target of the article.70 That Burns’s Order had Belloc and his disciples in its sights was further demonstrated by the article in its fourth number (November 1929) titled “On the Teaching of Mr. Belloc.” Denis Brogan, subsequently a longtime professor of political science at Cambridge, was the author. Belloc, Brogan argued, was still fighting the battle of his youth, maintaining in 1929 the same French nationalist views that he had imbibed nearly a half century earlier. Thus Belloc had continued to write as if Germany could be dismantled and to hold onto a romantic partisanship regarding all the “Latin” nations of the Continent. Belloc and his disciples were prepared to “mock magniloquent nonsense when it emanated from Berlin,” Brogan lamented, yet they remained “silent when the same rubbish is talked in Rome.” Their faith in the “Latin genius,” Brogan concluded, was in the end as difficult to maintain as the Teutonic racialism they rightly derided.71 Even more erroneous in Brogan’s estimation were Belloc’s theories of economics and government, which, he worried, were much

The Dawsonite Challenge

263

more influential than Belloc’s hatred of Germany and Latin apologetics. While Brogan acknowledged that there was something admirable in the goal of well-divided property, he argued that Distributism was “an ideal, not a policy.” Brogan feared that the Catholic working classes, having recognized the impracticality of Distributism, would dismiss Catholic social thought altogether and turn instead to socialism. As for Belloc’s political philosophy, Brogan lamented his descent into philo-Fascism. Belloc had allowed his zeal against political corruption in democracies to “blind him to the errors on the other side.” In the final analysis, Belloc’s recognition of parliamentary democracy’s weaknesses, Brogan concluded, had wrongly led him to “justify all things in the opponents of the system.” In the end Brogan was careful not to attribute too much to Belloc himself. He acknowledged that “the debt of English Catholics to Mr. Belloc is immense” and observed that “no writer has done so much for their life and health since Newman’s day.” In Brogan’s view, however, Belloc’s towering stature among English Catholic writers had become a problem. He overshadowed lesser, younger writers, who became either disciples or fell silent. His ideas had hardened into an orthodoxy to which, Brogan suspected, Belloc himself objected. It was the Bellocians, then, of whom there were many among Catholic writers and the younger clergy, more than their master, who were the problem. These “overzealous” and “not very clever disciples” of Belloc produced work marred by cynicism and conspiracy theories. “It is behind his shield,” Brogan bemoaned, “that the zealots fight.” As for Belloc himself, Brogan concluded that a “little less enthusiasm for the new religion of Fascism, an occasional remembrance that ‘Gesta Dei Per Francos’ is not enough for modern history nor the Pax Romana enough for ancient, a resolve, even if he does not like Lord Lambeth, to admit rather more cordially that Israel is at least as much our ancestral home as Rome or Athens . . . would gratify those Catholics who are proud of him.” Order was successful beyond expectation. Burns noted in the second number (August 1928) that the first print run of 500 copies had quickly sold out, and he was to recall in his memoirs that some 2,000

264

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

copies of the first number were eventually sold. These copies were bought, it seems, by the right people. In the second number, Burns observed that Ronald Knox had referred to Order’s criticism of Catholic education in a speech before the English bishops, including Cardinal Bourne, at St. Edmund’s College. The Catholic press had also taken notice of their fledgling competitor and critic. The Universe received Order with lukewarm praise, acknowledging the new review’s attack on the press but noting that at least it had refrained from attacking “authority.” The Jesuits’ Month expressed its admiration, while the Dominicans’ Blackfriars applauded the opinions expressed but took Order to task for the anonymity of its editor and contributors. G.K.’s Weekly, though it recognized that the editor of the new review disagreed with it on a number of issues, had the good humor to welcome a new voice in English Catholic affairs. In an article written before Brogan’s piece on Belloc, G.K.’s Weekly noted that though Order “deals out some unemotional insults to ourselves,” it also “attacks so many things worth attacking in the Catholic body to-day—­Repository Art, for instance; the Catholic Press[;] . . . an occasional bigotry and lack of common sense.” Vincent McNabb, however, was less than pleased with Order. “I can judge of the group that are behind Order only by hearsay,” he observed, “because their anonymity preference makes an impenetrable veil.” “Now, from what I hear of their views of Art, Morality, etc.,” McNabb concluded, “I think I would as soon commit a canary to a cat as commit my name to the men (the young men?) behind Order.” The chief target of Order’s assault, the Tablet, did not seem to have recognized the existence of its new foe.72 Despite the journal’s success, Burns decided to cease publication after the fourth number. “I thought,” he noted in his memoir, “that I had reached the limit of my perception at various points.” He needed more time to assimilate the ideas of the Catholic intellectual revival on the Continent, which had provided the impetus for his Chelsea salon and for Order. His duties at Sheed & Ward, Burns believed, precluded his being able simultaneously to edit a journal. In effect, Burns had said not only all that he had wanted to say but indeed all that he was able to say at this time. Despite its brief life, Order had accomplished

The Dawsonite Challenge

265

the goals that Burns set for it. Ironically, although the short-lived journal had taken aim at Belloc, its technique was very much that of Bellocian confrontation. As Grisewood was to note, “Order was a bombshell—as it was meant to be.” Indeed, Grisewood acknowledged that the review’s significance was not in the “explosion” but in the “crater which remained,” a crater that drew to its rim a group of people, primarily those who continued to congregate at St. Leonard’s Terrace but others as well, who continued its work.73 For the purposes of this study, the significance of Order lay not only in its subsequent influence, but in its willingness to take on the Bellocian orthodoxy. Burns’s journal expressed the dissatisfaction of a number of young Catholic writers with the solutions that Belloc and his disciples had provided to the problems of contemporary society. To be sure, this did not represent a wholesale turning of the new generation’s back on the ideas of their intellectual fathers. The Chelsea group had been nurtured on Belloc, Chesterton, and McNabb—and even more so on Gill—and they shared the Bellocian reverence for the land, for the farmer and the artisan, and if not the Bellocians’ antagonism to parliamentary politics, then certainly their suspicion of it, as well as their antipathy to industrial capitalism. Burns and his friends were merely less certain that Distributism held the answers, that Belloc’s version of history remained valuable, or that Protestantism per se was the problem. Order, then, was only a starting point. The defunct review was soon succeeded, and not at first by another review, but by a series of pamphlets published by Sheed & Ward and edited by Burns and a new voice in English Catholicism, Christopher Dawson, whose first two books were published during the year and a half of Order’s brief life. At approximately seventy-five pages, the Essays in Order were more concise and thus more digestible for the average educated English Catholic reader than a Sheed & Ward book. As a result they served to introduce to those who might not otherwise have read them the work of continental authors such as Maritain, as well as new English writers, including Dawson himself. As with the old review, the Essays in Order featured on their covers David Jones’s wood etching of a unicorn.74

266

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

The Tiger Christopher Dawson, in comparison to Frank Sheed or Maisie Ward or to Tom Burns and Chelsea, owed less to Belloc and Chesterton. If Burns’s Order represented dissatisfaction with the Bellocian orthodoxy, Dawson stood for a distinct turn away not only from Bellocian solutions to contemporary ills, but in large part from the Bellocian diagnosis of these ills. Under Dawson’s influence, Sheed and Ward and the Chelsea group were gradually weaned from their former diet of Belloc and Chesterton and introduced to a contrasting interpretation of the European past, a different assessment of the present problems, and a new prescription for the renewal of European civilization. Christopher Dawson was born in 1889 at Hay-on-Wye, on the Welsh side of the border with Herefordshire, the second child and only son of Henry Dawson and his wife, Mary. Henry Dawson was an officer in the Royal Artillery, and Mary Dawson was the eldest daughter of William Bevan, an archdeacon in the Church of England. Mary Dawson and her children spent most of Christopher’s first seven years with the Bevans at Hay Castle, a picturesque Tudor manor house built amid the remains of a twelfth-century castle. Archdeacon Bevan was a formidable figure, an exemplar of muscular, mid-Victorian Evangelical Protestantism, and as such a vigorous defender of the established church in Wales and a vociferous opponent of the Romanizing influence of the Oxford movement. Hay, even as late as the 1890s, might have been the setting for a Trollope novel, the province of the landed, Anglican gentry. The local clergy were either prominent landowners themselves or the brothers of such landowners. Dawson remembered it as an Anglican theocracy, “a complete unification of political, religious, economic and social authority and influence.”75 Dawson’s early childhood in this very Victorian environment had a profound effect on him: What I felt most at Hay was the feeling of antiquity—the immense age of everything, and in the house the continuity of the present with the remote past, and this feeling was reinforced by

The Dawsonite Challenge

267

the fact that nothing had changed since my mother had been a child in the same house and that all the family relations existed in duplicate, so that alongside of my parents, my nurse and my uncles and aunts, I saw my mother’s parents and her nurse and her uncles and aunts. This sense of historical, cultural, and familial continuity, stretching back generations if not centuries, was the starting point for Dawson’s subsequent fascination with history, and the basis for his conservatism. As he was to note of his early childhood at Hay Castle, “It was then that I acquired my love of history, my interest in the differences of cultures and my sense of the importance of religion in human life, as a massive, objective, unquestioned power that entered into everything and impressed its mark on the external as well as the internal world.”76 In 1896, after Colonel Dawson resigned his commission and retired, the family moved from Hay to isolated, rural, northern Yorkshire, to the manor near Skipton that the Dawsons had owned since the seventeenth century and that Henry Dawson had recently inherited. For the seven-year-old Dawson, Yorkshire “was a new world.” The “whole aspect of the country,” he recalled, “with the stone walls climbing the hills and the naked rock thrusting itself out in great scars and promontories, like sea cliffs, was entirely unlike anything I had seen before.” “Even the houses with their grey stone walls and roofs were different,” Dawson explained, “and I could hardly understand the northern speech which was then far more strongly differentiated from southern English than it is to-day.” The family estate, on the dales between Bolton Abbey and Burnsall, lay only twenty-five miles northwest of the urban centers of Bradford and Leeds but had remained a part of another, preindustrialized world.77 Most imposing to Dawson was the spirit of the place. That part of Yorkshire, he maintained, had been dominated by the old monasteries, so much so that even though the people had long since abandoned Catholicism, they had never embraced the Church of England or any of the various Non-Conformist sects. The ruins of the old abbeys and

268

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

priories cast a spell over the area. Bolton Abbey lay only a few miles down the River Wharfe from their home, Hartlington Hall, and the Dawsons passed it when leaving and returning. Indeed, the abbey was Dawson’s “earliest impression” of his new home, and he recalled it some fifty years later as the “true expression of the genius loci which has survived the religious revolution of the sixteenth century and the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century.” If Hay Castle and its inhabitants had brought to Dawson an awareness of the continuity of family tradition, then the Yorkshire dales and their abandoned religious houses reminded him of a past and culture from which most of England had been cut off by the successive revolutions of the modern era.78 Dawson’s formal schooling began at the age of ten, when his parents sent him to Bilton Grange, a preparatory school in the Midlands near Rugby. Dawson felt as if he had been thrown in among a tribe of savages. Not only did he never acclimatize to his new surroundings, but his health began to decline as he developed the bronchitis that was to become chronic. His lung trouble became much worse at Winchester College, where he went in spring 1903, and it forced him to leave little more than a year later. He completed his secondary education with a succession of private tutors and went up to Oxford for the Michaelmas term of 1908. He had won a scholarship to Trinity—Newman’s old college—which he accepted after failing to get the Brackenbury.79 Oxford proved only slightly more congenial than Winchester to Dawson. As he explained in 1925, “I got nothing from school, little from Oxford, and less than nothing from the new post-Victorian urban culture; all my ‘culture’ and my personal happiness came from that much-derided Victorian rural home life.” Although he studied history, Dawson preferred his own idiosyncratic explorations in religion and the philosophy of history to the standard curriculum. Whereas the history syllabus prescribed large doses of Stubbs’s Constitutional History, Dawson was most likely already reading the French and German sociologists—Le Play and Troeltsch, for example—who were to have such an influence on his subsequent work. As at Winchester, he led a solitary existence. In addition to his habitual shyness, lack

The Dawsonite Challenge

269

of spending money prevented him from joining in all but the most economical entertainments.80 Oxford, however, was not entirely unprofitable for Dawson. He was very fortunate in his tutor. Ernest Barker, a scholar of Greek political philosophy who became a professor of political science at Cambridge after World War II, was at the time a young don, scarcely a decade removed from his undergraduate studies. Barker encouraged Dawson in his intellectual pursuits, and he became in later years not only a close friend but also one of Dawson’s biggest champions within the academy. Barker remarked subsequently that he had begun to learn history the day he became Dawson’s tutor, and concluded of him: I can safely say, without any exaggeration, that I eventually learned more from my pupil than ever he learned from me. There was far more in him than he was able to show to the examiners; and indeed the academic world has never yet understood, or at any rate recognized, his quality. Already in his undergraduate days he had the interest, and the range, of which his writings have since given such abundant proof. . . . [A]s he grew in his scope and his stature, I began to see that I had once taught unawares a man who was of the company of Acton and Baron von Hügel. Dawson for his part maintained that the only thing of value he obtained in his three years at the university was the training that Barker provided.81 As Barker gently hinted, Dawson took only a second-class degree in his examinations in summer 1911. Barker clearly thought his student deserved better, and it is not evident why Dawson failed to take a first. Perhaps his shyness affected him in the viva voce, or, more likely, his own budding theories on the history of culture crept into his written papers and put off examiners more used to a less imaginative analysis of, for example, medieval manorial charters. The secondclass degree prevented Dawson from pursuing an academic career, a first-class degree having been a prerequisite for a fellowship at an Oxford College. Although his biographer has argued that Dawson had

270

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

never aspired to such a life, it would seem to have been the logical path for him to take. Dawson had already decided that he would be a historian, and a fellowship would have provided valuable financial support for his work. In addition, the more intimate tutorial system at Oxford was ideal for someone of his general diffidence. In contrast to Belloc, who had been saved from a career for which he was wholly unsuited when he was denied a fellowship, Dawson was entirely suited for the life of a don. Dawson’s Oxford career was marked also by his increasing dissatisfaction with the Church of England, and his first years after university by his developing interest in the Catholic Church. Dawson had been raised in a very religious household. While his mother had inherited the Low Church sympathies of her father the archdeacon, his father had admired the Catholic Church, if from a distance. Henry Dawson owned a copy of Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, his son recalled, and preferred Catholic devotional books—“Horstius, the Spiritual Exercises, Avrillon, Surin and the like”—to Protestant ones. Indeed, Colonel Dawson went so far as to substitute for the traditional Anglican daily family prayers Terce in the morning and Compline in the evening from the Catholic Office. His sympathies lay with the AngloCatholics, and in fact he was a friend of that group’s guiding light, Lord Halifax, and a member of Halifax’s Church Union party.82 As for Dawson himself, by the time he went up to Oxford, he had found the religion of his mother’s family unconvincing. The Church of England had been central to the provincial life of places like Hay, but Dawson was coming to believe that this rural culture was in its “last autumnal stage.” The problem was not only the encroachment of urbanism and industrialism. At the heart of Protestantism was the belief in the Bible as an “absolutely infallible supernatural authority.” This foundation had, however, been undermined in the last half of the nineteenth century by the Higher Critics, Dawson observed, in whose “hands the infallible Scriptures became a collection of historical documents of varying degrees of authenticity.” Even more damaging, Dawson believed, was the fact that so many of these innovative scriptural scholars were “often men of high standing in Protestantism.”

The Dawsonite Challenge

271

They were in effect undermining the faith from within. As he grew up, Dawson himself had “felt the effects of this change of atmosphere.” Like Hollis, another product of an Anglican clerical family, Dawson was surprised to discover a very different attitude toward religion at his preparatory and public schools as compared to that of his parents’ home. It had particularly bewildered him to see Christianity reduced to ethical precepts by his schoolmasters. “It was,” he remembered, “more ethics than religion, and a haze of uncertainty hung around the more fundamental articles of Christian dogma.”83 A brief period of adolescent agnosticism was followed by an interest at Oxford in his father’s Anglo-Catholicism. At university, Dawson began attending mass during the week at Pusey House and on Sundays at the church of the Cowley Fathers. Although he loved the ritual and the plain chant of the mass as the Cowley Fathers celebrated it, he found himself only half-hearted in his Anglo-Catholicism. The problem, Dawson came to understand, was that “the Anglo-Catholic position was weak in the very point where it claimed to be strongest.” “It was,” he explained, “lacking in authority” because it “was not the teaching of the official Church, but of an enterprising minority which provided its own standard of authority.” “All one’s official pastors and masters—bishops, headmasters, clergymen and tutors—looked askance at it,” he concluded, “and this naturally weakened one’s confidence.”84 During the Easter vacation of 1909 Dawson had traveled to Rome for Holy Week with his friend E. I. Watkin (a convert to Catholicism in 1908). The tour had two consequences of enormous significance. On the one hand, it was in Rome that Dawson acquired his vocation to write the history of culture. On Easter Sunday he visited the Church of the Ara Coeli on the Capitoline hill, one of the oldest churches in the city, built on the site of a temple of Jupiter. There Dawson was struck by the juxtaposition of the classical and the Christian, and meditated on the dynamic power of religion, especially on how Christianity had transformed the dying civilization of imperial Rome into a brilliant new civilization. He sat on the steps of the Capitol, just as Gibbon had famously done a century and a half earlier when he had been inspired

272

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

to compose his Decline and Fall, and made a vow to write his own historical epic. On the other hand, it was the trip to Rome that prompted Dawson’s conversion to Catholicism. For Dawson, Rome “opened up a whole new world of religion and culture.” He realized that during the sixteenth century, while England had been stumbling through a Reformation, on the Continent the Counter-Reformation was creating a bold new culture. Dawson found in Baroque art “pure joy,” and this led him to the literature of the Counter-Reformation, to St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross, “compared to whom even the greatest of non-Catholic religious writers seem pale and unreal.”85 Dawson’s interest in Catholicism was further piqued when, the summer following his Roman vacation, he met and fell in love with a Catholic girl, Valery Mills. In July 1913 he and Mills became engaged. The engagement, which turned into a long one as a result of the war, provided further impetus for Dawson to consider conversion. Characteristically, he threw himself into the study of the Church, reading Scripture closely and focusing on the Church Fathers. The writings of Adolf Harnack, a nineteenth-century liberal Protestant, brought him in autumn 1913 to the brink. Harnack, in his colossal History of Dogma, made it clear that Luther and the other Protestant leaders who had followed in his wake were not merely conservatives reacting against the medieval Church but were in fact revolutionaries who had broken not with the medieval Church but with Christianity as it had developed since the early second century. The final straw occurred through his study of the Pauline epistles and St. John’s Gospel, which convinced him of the “fundamental unity of Catholic theology and the Catholic life”: I realized that the Incarnation, the Sacraments, the external order of the Church, and the internal working of sanctifying grace were all parts of one organic unity, a living tree, whose roots are in the Divine Nature and whose fruit is the perfection of the Saints. Thus the life of the Saints is not, as the ecclesiastic student of mysticism believes, the independent achievement of a few highly-gifted individuals, but the perfect manifestation of the supernatural life

The Dawsonite Challenge

273

which exists in every individual Christian, the first fruits of that new humanity which it is the work of the Church to create. “This fundamental doctrine of Sanctifying Grace,” Dawson concluded, “as revealed in the New Testament and explained by St. Augustine and St. Thomas in all its connotations removed all my difficulties and uncertainties and carried complete conviction to my mind.” Not for Dawson, then, the political or economic reasons for conversion of Hollis. He sought instruction that autumn. The priest with whom he met decided he was ready after their second meeting, and he was received into the Church in January 1914 at St. Aloysius, Oxford.86 Obviously too unhealthy for military service, Dawson spent the first part of the war teaching at a Franciscan school outside Oxford. In August 1916 he married Valery Mills. A physician’s opinion that he would never be strong enough for full-time occupation led his father to grant him a modest income, facilitating the much-delayed wedding. He spent the last year of the war in the Admiralty Intelligence Department. After the war Dawson’s assured income allowed him finally to concentrate on his scholarship. The first fruits of his research into the history of culture began to appear in the Sociological Review in 1920.87 Dawson intended his first book, The Age of the Gods: A Study in the Origins of Culture in Prehistoric Europe and the Ancient East, to be the first in a multivolume series titled The Life of Civilizations, detailing the relation of religion to European civilization from its prehistoric beginnings to the present day. The volume was the product of at least a decade of research, nearly two if one dates its germination to Dawson’s visit in 1909 to the Church of the Ara Coeli. Dawson hoped with The Age of the Gods to inaugurate a new type of history. In the first decades of the new century, Dawson observed in his preface, archaeologists and ethnologists treating the ancient world had laid the foundation for this new conception of history: In the present work I have attempted to make a brief survey of the whole problem of the origins of our civilization from the

274

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

standpoint of the new methods. Although these methods are still young, the labours of specialists have already provided rich materials for a cultural interpretation of history—materials which are, however, widely scattered in learned periodicals and monographs. It is unnecessary to emphasise my debt to these scholars, since my whole work is entirely dependent upon them. In contrast to the historical scholarship that had become predominant in the nineteenth century—the story of the political affairs of indi­ vidual nation-states—the object of Dawson’s new history was “the manifestation of the growth and mutual interaction of living cultural wholes.”88 The Age of the Gods was, broadly, an expression of Dawson’s strongly held belief that the key to the history of human culture lay in religion. It was also, more narrowly, an explanation of the foundations of subsequent European civilization. Dawson examined both Neolithic peasant culture and the more advanced Near East city-state civilizations that ultimately were to provide the basis for the development of classical civilization in Greece and Rome. He intended to treat the classical period in the Rise of the World Religions, medieval civilization in The Making of Europe, the later Middle Ages and the transformation to the modern in a fourth volume, and the period from the Enlightenment to the present in a final volume. In the event, Dawson was able to complete, of the later volumes, only The Making of Europe, though fragments of the other, unwritten, books appeared in essay form.89 Dawson’s second published book, Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry, was intended to be an introduction to his projected history of culture, as well as a summary of the whole scheme. Progress and Religion was Dawson’s most significant and original book, and the one that made his name. In it Dawson was presenting more than just a history of European civilization in outline. The volume was also the history of an idea—the modern notion of “Progress”—as well as a diagnosis of the ills of contemporary European society and an attempt to find the cure for these ills. Progress and Religion was therefore an

The Dawsonite Challenge

275

expression of Dawson’s developing engagement with contemporary Western civilization, as well as history. It was this engagement that would lead him to abandon his Life of Civilizations project and turn to contemporary social criticism almost exclusively by the mid-1930s as Europe’s crisis deepened. Progress and Religion is the one volume that provides insight into both Dawson’s sweeping vision of European history and his perception of the present problems. As such, it demands a detailed examination. “Progress” was for Dawson, it cannot be emphasized enough, the modern religion. Under normal circumstances, he maintained, a culture’s sustaining spiritual dynamic was provided by a religion, defined most basically as belief in a supernatural power. In extraordinary times, however, the “religious impulse may disguise itself under philosophical or political forms.” The modern era—from the eighteenth century to the present—was such a time. According to Dawson, there had been two intellectual foundations for the idea of progress. The Enlightenment philosophers, and the leading nineteenth-century social reformers who were their heirs, had subscribed to what he dubbed the “sociological” or rationalist conception of progress. To the rationalist, progress was a “sudden advance of the human spirit,” a leap of humanity “to perfection and enlightenment in a single bound.” “Reason was preparing the way for a true Millennium,” when, as Condorcet, the high priest of progress, had explained, “the human race, freed from all its fetters, withdrawn from the empire of chance as from that of the enemies of Progress, would walk with firm and assured step in the way of truth, of virtue and of happiness.” The rationalist conception of progress had, however, been undermined in the nineteenth century by the theory of evolution. Reason itself was now considered merely an adaptation to the environment by human beings rather than an all-powerful liberating force.90 The acolytes of the new religion could, however, turn to another foundation for their faith—what Dawson called the “historical” or romantic conception of progress. This view of progress had its roots in Hegel’s view of history as a life process, the progressive manifestation

276

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

of living spirit. The romantics, in contrast to the rationalists, had not placed their faith in science but had denigrated it. For Hegel, physical science represented an inferior type of knowledge, because it could only explain “the eternal cyclic repetition of phenomenal change.” In history, however, one could discover the Absolute, the World Spirit, as it unfolded. Unfortunately, Dawson argued, the German historians whom Hegel had inspired had, like their master, linked their historical notion of progress to the nation-state, which they had deified. After the Great War it was left to a contemporary German historian to articulate the disillusion and pessimism of those who had placed their faith in a defeated political system. Spengler, in his Decline of the West (1920–22), was to the Hegelian notion of progress what Darwin had been to the rationalist-scientific conception. Although he had followed Hegel in recognizing in history a cosmos distinct from that of Nature, Spengler saw history as cyclical, not progressive, the story of the birth, development, decline, and eventual death of cultures, a process governed by immutable laws. In such a conception of history there obviously remained no room for any progress that transcended the life cycle of a particular culture.91 Although both the rationalist and the historical conception of progress had failed, Dawson believed that there was a third, successful foundation for progress, and he found it not in science or history but in another intellectual discipline, anthropology. Spengler had believed that cultures were determined by their environment, but ­Dawson maintained that a people could transform its environment so that it was a conditioning, rather than a determining, factor of its culture. Indeed, for Dawson it was religion, the “spiritual dynamic” of a culture, that was responsible for a culture’s development, for the manner in which a people responded to its physical environment. Thus for Dawson the social progress of a culture was intimately tied to the maintenance of its religion.92 In Europe it was Christianity that had been the spiritual dynamic of the culture for a thousand years. Christianity, Dawson argued, had not only been behind the social progress of European civilization; it had also been peculiarly suited for this task. Most important, in

The Dawsonite Challenge

277

Dawson’s view, Christianity had inherited from Judaism an “affirmation of the significance and value of history,” an affirmation that went hand in hand with an appreciation of the physical world and an engagement with the social order. Judaism, like other world religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, had distinguished between the existing and the ideal, between what was and what ought to be. Such a distinction, by providing for an ideal toward which the individual and the society could work, had allowed for progress. Unlike Judaism, however, Hinduism and Buddhism had gone beyond this fundamental distinction and embraced notions of an absolute reality so transcendent of the temporal order as to make this world meaningless. They had reduced life to spirit alone, denigrating the material world in arguing that only by renouncing it could one reach the Absolute. In the cultures dominated by these new religions, Dawson argued, it became impossible to attach much importance to the natural and temporal world, with the predictable consequence that the possibility of social progress was ignored.93 For the Jews, in contrast, Dawson emphasized, “history possessed a unique and absolute value such as no other people of antiquity had conceived.” History was not only the site of the revelation of divine will; it was in fact moving toward an end or consummation—“the revelation of the power and glory of Jahweh in his servant Israel.” In Christianity, Dawson explained, this “Jewish affirmation of the significance and value of history found a yet wider development,” because the new religion believed that its mission was the “progressive extension of the Incarnation by the gradual incorporation of mankind into this higher unity.” Just as Buddhism and Hinduism, in Dawson’s view, had tended to inhibit social progress because of their asceticism, so Christianity’s acceptance of human history and the physical universe had contributed directly to the early Church’s expanding social role in Europe. While realizing the supremacy of the transcendent, the new faith had not shirked its duties in this world but rather had begun to provide dynamic moral and social leadership on the Continent following the fall of Rome’s western empire. The Church, and the Benedictine monks in particular, rather than retiring from the

278

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

world into asceticism, had engaged in social activity that embraced all aspects of life, so that by the time Europe began in the eleventh century to rebuild from the social dislocations of the Dark Ages, the Church was the leader in education, art, care for the sick and the destitute, and even politics.94 The dynamic medieval culture that Christianity had engendered had however degenerated, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as developing, independent, sovereign nation-states began to erode the power of the Church. Dawson maintained that medieval civilization in Europe had depended on the religious unity that the Church provided. The Church had united in one civilization what had been two distinct cultures—that of the Mediterranean south and that of the formerly tribal north—the boundary between which followed the borders of the Roman Empire. In the sixteenth century these two cultures diverged. For Dawson, the Renaissance in the south and the Protestant Reformation in the north were social revolutions that divided Europe. In the former the Latin south had revolted from the Gothic north in an attempt to return to its classical roots; in the latter the Gothic north had revolted against the Latin foundations of medieval civilization. Of the two revolutions, Dawson believed the Renaissance had been the more consequential. The Reformation was significant only in that it shattered the ecclesiastical unity of the Middle Ages, allowing the two disparate cultures of north and south to go their own ways. In the Renaissance, however, lay the roots of the modern world. The Renaissance represented “a reaction from the cloister to the world— from the monastic ideal of religious contemplation to the active life of lay society.” Catholicism did not disappear in southern Europe, but it no longer dominated the society. The artist replaced the monk as the ideal type. “Life was regarded,” Dawson observed, “not as a pilgrimage towards eternity, but as a fine art in which every opportunity for knowledge and enjoyment was to be cultivated.”95 The “aesthetic point of view” became during the Renaissance “dominant in every aspect of life.” Renaissance art was not, however, the work of the dilettante but rather an art “based on observation and experiment.” Dawson argued that this new art had a profound impact

The Dawsonite Challenge

279

on the subsequent development of European civilization. Because of their interest in observation and experiment, Renaissance artists had a direct impact on nonartistic fields such as anatomy. For all its emphasis on aesthetics, the Renaissance therefore had a direct influence on the development of modern science—a science that was no longer “abstract and speculative” as Hellenic science had been but rather focused on “experiment and applied knowledge” in order to “give man the complete mastery of nature.”96 It was this new science first emerging in the sixteenth century that had bid to replace Christianity as the dynamic and unifying force of European culture. Dawson argued, however, that modern science, though it had provided unparalleled material progress, had ultimately been unable to replace religion as the “spiritual dynamic, which provides the energy necessary for that sustained social effort which is civilization.” The new science, because it viewed the universe as a closed mechanical order governed by mathematical laws, threatened to push human beings “out of the intelligible order altogether.” Were human beings a part of this mechanical universe? If so, then what place did moral and spiritual values, previously the ultimate reality, have in this new universe? Indeed, did they have any real existence at all? Science by itself, in Dawson’s account, could not in the end satisfy the spiritual needs of humanity.97 Dawson blamed the perilous state of contemporary Europe on the failure of modern industrial society to provide a substitute for the moral and spiritual unity on which European civilization had been established. Science had failed as a unifying force because it could not replace religion. It was an intellectual principle, Dawson observed, but lacked, crucially, a moral dynamic. Science was in itself indifferent to moral considerations, serving any power that could harness it. Indeed, science had become, Dawson concluded, increasingly “devoted to purely ephemeral objects, without any consideration for their ultimate justification.” The result was a society that acknowledged “no hierarchy of values, no intellectual authority, and no social or religious tradition,” one in which, in the final analysis, people increasingly “lived for the moment in a chaos of pure sensation.”98

280

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Dawson’s Life of Civilizations project thus involved more than an examination of the past. For him, it also had, from the beginning, profound implications for the present. Western society needed to return to the Christian religion. “Great religions,” he maintained, “are the foundations on which the great civilizations rest.” A society that “has lost its religion,” he argued, “becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.” European culture had been established on the double tradition of Greek science and Christianity. Science had been a powerful force for material progress, but it needed not only the dynamic social power of Christianity to complement it but also the moral purpose of Christianity to direct it. Only by once again harnessing science to Christianity could the material progress sustained by modern science be transformed into true social progress. For this “work of social restoration” to succeed, however, a “reconstitution of our intellectual and spiritual conditions” was needed. Dawson’s model for such an undertaking was St. Augustine.99 In 410 the city of Rome had been sacked for the first time in eight hundred years, prompting the pagans to attack Christianity as the source of imperial weakness. Augustine had responded to their assault with his epic City of God, in which he posited the existence of two cities, the City of God and the City of Man, the one a transcendental and timeless reality, the other entirely temporal—the former, in Dawson’s words, the domain of the “spiritual man who lives for God and seeks a spiritual beatitude and a peace which is eternal,” the latter that of the “‘natural man’ who lives for himself and desires only a material felicity and a temporal peace.” In this world, Augustine noted, the citizens of the two cities mingled with one another, not to be separated until the last judgment, but the citizens of the City of God remained no more than aliens in the City of Man.100 In perhaps the most famous section of the massive work, book 19, Augustine had taken on Roman civilization and its most noted political philosopher, Cicero. The kingdoms of this world, including Rome, Augustine maintained, were founded not on justice, as Cicero had argued of the ideal state in his Republic, but on injustice, and they prospered on bloodshed and oppression. As Dawson explained it, for

The Dawsonite Challenge

281

Augustine even the “vaunted blessings of Roman law,” the highest achievement of the civilization, were “secured only by an infinity of acts of injustice to individuals by the torture of innocent witnesses and the condemnation of the guiltless.” What classical Rome called virtues were in fact vices, Augustine had concluded, and the peace and justice that were the raison d’etre of the empire were but a sham.101 Augustine’s abandonment of the civilization that had spawned him could be taken to mean that he had rejected human society and government entirely and that those who would be citizens of the City of God ought therefore to abjure involvement with the kingdoms of this world. Dawson was not of this opinion, however, nor, crucially, was it what he himself was advocating with regard to contemporary civilization. Augustine, he pointed out, had redefined the state as founded on love rather than Ciceronian justice—and love considered in a nonmoral sense. That is, a state was defined by the object of the love, or common will, of its citizens. The object of that common will could be either good or bad, the love of the eternal peace of God, for example, or the temporal peace of the City of Man. According to Dawson, Augustine was not, therefore, rejecting the potential of human society but affirming it. A civilization could be good so long as its citizens were directed to the proper object of their love, God, rather than the material prosperity that had moved Rome. In fact, because Augustine had inherited from the Greeks a conviction that a universal rational order existed that bound all of creation together, he had acknowledged that ultimately even the Earthly City had its place in this order and that “the social virtues of the worldly” that he had attacked in book 19 as nothing but “splendid vices” had possessed “a real value in their own order,” and bore their “appropriate fruits in social life.”102 Dawson did acknowledge that for Augustine the visible Church, for all its manifest imperfections, was not only the most perfect society in this world but also in fact the only true society, because only the Church had its “source in the divine will.” This did not mean, Dawson emphasized, that the Augustinian political state lacked moral authority or that Augustine had deprived “ordinary social life of

282

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

spiritual significance.” Certainly, in Augustine’s conception the state was subordinate to the Church, but though it was at worst “a hostile power, the incarnation of injustice and self-will,” at its best the state remained for Augustine a “perfectly legitimate and necessary society.” Indeed, in contrast to the surviving eastern portion of the old Roman Empire, where the state was “exalted as a superhuman power against which the individual personality had no rights,” in the West, Dawson observed: St. Augustine broke decisively with this tradition by depriving the state of its aura of divinity and seeking the principle of social order in the human will. In this way the Augustinian theory, for all its other-worldliness, first made possible the ideal of a social order resting upon the free personality and a common effort towards moral ends. And thus the Western ideals of freedom and progress and social justice owe more than we realise to the profound thought of the great African who was himself indifferent to secular progress and to the transitory fortunes of the earthly state, for he looked for a city that has foundations whose builder and maker is God. For Dawson then, the subordination of the state in Augustinian political theory had in fact provided the foundation for the subsequent dynamic society that emerged in medieval Europe.103 Augustine therefore represented in Dawson’s estimation not withdrawal from society but engagement with it in an effort to transform it. Augustine may have abandoned the Roman Empire to its fate, but in the process he had contributed immeasurably to the creation of the culture that Dawson sought to restore. In this sense, Dawson’s critique of contemporary European civilization was the corollary to Augustine’s attack on Rome. Like classical civilization, the modern Europe that had emerged out of the Renaissance and Reformation was for Dawson a “great experiment in secular civilization,” and, as in the case of late imperial Rome, a return to spiritual principles was the solution to its troubles. For Dawson, as for Augustine, “the one

The Dawsonite Challenge

283

remedy for the ills of society is to be found in the same power which heals the moral weakness of the individual soul.” Dawson, however, unlike the bishop of Hippo, had no need to create a new civilization. He had the culture of medieval Europe, the civilization that Augustine had done so much to establish, to fall back on. If in the face of the unprecedented economic, political, and social crisis of the post–Great War world, contemporary Europe could only be convinced to return to the principles of Christianity, then the dynamic, and indeed progressive, civilization of Europe could be revitalized and restored. Dawson’s writing, essays such as “Augustine and His Age” and especially Progress and Religion, proved particularly influential. It was Sheed & Ward that published Progress and Religion—John Murray had published The Age of the Gods, but Leo Ward, a friend of Dawson from Oxford, persuaded him to change to the new firm—and it would be difficult to overestimate the effect that Dawson had on the husband­-and-wife publishing partners. Sheed himself credited Dawson with awakening in him the understanding that it was the social order, and not merely the Church, that demanded one’s attention. He acknowledged that before reading Dawson he had accepted the old adage ecclesia est patria nostra—the Church is our country. Dawson made him realize that the “social order must not be abandoned as not worth repair.” “The world,” Sheed learned from Dawson, “was entrusted to man by God and we shall not serve God by neglecting it.”104 Maisie Ward recalled that Progress and Religion had caused an “immense sensation.” She too acknowledged, Dawson was the “most powerful influence on the thinking of both myself and my husband.” Indeed, she thanked Dawson for saving both her and Sheed from the provincialism of Belloc’s belief that “Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe.” Dawson made them realize the other, not necessarily European, influences on Christianity—its roots in Athens and Jerusalem and the subsequent influences of German and Arab culture on Christianity as it had developed in the medieval era. Such was Ward’s admiration for Dawson that when she herself began writing in the 1930s she invariably had him read her manuscripts to save her from embarrassing mistakes.105

284

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Tom Burns was the editor at Sheed & Ward who dealt with Dawson regarding publication of Progress and Religion. Burns would travel up to Dawson’s Yorkshire home to “play midwife”—as he put it—to that and subsequent volumes. Burns too acknowledged that Dawson was a “formative influence” on him. Indeed, of Sheed & Ward’s authors it was perhaps Dawson who helped most to establish the firm’s reputation not only among English Catholics—for whom its early publication of Belloc and Chesterton had probably been enough—but with non-Catholic intellectuals as well. Thus the 1932 Guardian piece praising the new publishing house singled out Dawson for having done much “to bring Catholicism within the orbit of the modern Englishman.”106 Among the other regulars at St. Leonard’s Terrace Dawson also had a great impact. David Jones expressed his debt to Dawson in the preface to his Anathemata for the guidance he had given him regarding the Welsh literature, Celtic mythology, and Greek and Roman history that played an even larger part in that poem than they had in the earlier In Parenthesis. As for Harman Grisewood, it was his reading of Dawson’s Progress and Religion and the discussions of the volume at Burns’s Chelsea home that had sent him scurrying to the British Museum Reading Room in search of remedial education. For his part, Bernard Wall acknowledged that Dawson was his “closest associate” when he was editing Colosseum. Indeed, when Wall began in the late 1930s to disagree politically with writers he had previously admired, such as Gill and Maritain, Dawson became his lodestar. Dawson’s “vast knowledge” of world cultures and history, Wall decided, better equipped him to analyze the contemporary crisis than Maritain’s understanding of philosophy or Gill’s skill as a sculptor.107 Dawson influenced Sheed, Ward, and the Chelsea group not only through his books but also through his personality and the erudition that was even more evident in conversation. All his friends possessed treasured anecdotes concerning the range and depth of his knowledge. Maisie Ward noted the awe with which acquaintances would respond to Dawson’s ability to discourse at length and with deep understand-

The Dawsonite Challenge

285

ing on an array of subjects—“from Chinese dynasties to American Indians, from prehistory to the Oxford movement, from Virgil to the latest novel or even ‘Western.’” Her husband maintained that “there was nothing you could count on his not knowing.” When Sheed was studying Hegel for a book on Marxism he observed in passing to Dawson that a “book could be written on the way the Church both attracted and repelled some of Hegel’s predecessors like Fichte and Schelling,” and Dawson had responded with a lengthy lecture on the topic, complete with extensive quotations. When Sheed mentioned Freud to him on another occasion, Dawson developed for him a theory of a super-id that he argued Freud had overlooked. On another occasion, Dawson explored for Sheed the differences between English and American Puritanism—a commentary that Sheed recalled “could have been published as it came from his mouth.” Tom Burns too never ceased to be amazed at Dawson’s learning, noting that he “could talk about the Fathers of the Church as if they were the familiars of a senior common room.” Dawson, Burns acknowledged, had never been known to be “short an answer to any question under the sun.”108 At times Dawson’s mastery of even the most arcane intellectual topics was off-putting even to his admirers, particularly as he had a habit of assuming that they shared his erudition. Thus Burns was consternated when the question, “Origen is really not quite right about the Fall, is he?” was addressed to him without warning at one meeting. Sheed was also surprised when Dawson greeted him at the door by asking him if he had noticed “how strange were the similarities between the religions of the Hairy Ainu and the Northern Siberian nomads”—“similarities all the stranger,” Dawson observed, “because they are ethnologically quite distinct.” Sheed had to admit that he had not noticed. Indeed, to many of his fellow Catholic writers, Dawson became known simply as “Tiger,” an affectionate nickname of which he was never aware. Jones began calling him “Tiger” in 1935, when, after Jones and a friend had dined with Dawson and his wife, Jones’s companion had exclaimed, “My God, what a tiger!” apparently in response to Dawson’s ferocious intellect. It stuck.109

286

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

These anecdotes illustrated the respect and admiration in which friends such as Frank Sheed, Maisie Ward, and Tom Burns held Dawson. It was this respect that accounted for Dawson’s great influence on them. Although Maritain and Adam greatly contributed, Dawson was as responsible as any one person for weaning Sheed, Ward, and Burns’s Chelsea set from Bellocianism. To grasp Dawson’s role, then, we need to look at his relation to Bellocianism. There were considerable dissimilarities between Dawson and Belloc, not only ideological, but also personal and temperamental. First, Dawson, as a scholar, was particularly troubled by the influence of Bellocian history on English Catholics. This was not surprising given that he was suspicious of anyone who employed “history as a weapon against the modern age.” Such an abuse of history could take two forms, Dawson observed, either the “romantic idealization of the past”—what one might call myth—or the use of the past in the service of “religious or national propaganda”—what one might call the ideological approach. The former could be relatively harmless, in Dawson’s view, and in some cases even beneficial if it led people to examine past ages and civilizations for their own sakes. The latter, ideological approach to history, however, was much more problematic: The propagandist historian, on the other hand, is inspired by motives of a non-historical order, and tends unconsciously to falsify history in the interests of apologetics. This is a danger to which Catholic historians of the Middle Ages are peculiarly exposed, since the romantic revival first brought in the conception of the Middle Ages as “The Ages of Faith,” and of mediaeval culture as the social expression of Catholic ideals. . . . [F]or the last century and more there has certainly been a tendency among Catholic writers to make history a department of apologetics and to idealise mediaeval culture in order to exalt their religious ideals. While Dawson was not criticizing Belloc directly in this passage, he appeared to have him in mind. For Dawson, such an exploitation of

The Dawsonite Challenge

287

history was wrong not only because it distorted the past but also because it was self-defeating. A conscientious reader would soon ­become suspicious of the author’s motives and then discount the “truth of everything he reads.”110 Dawson’s interpretation of European history stood also in stark contrast to Belloc’s, and nowhere was this more the case than in their views regarding that defining event of modern European history, the French Revolution. Belloc, of course, had linked the Revolution to the ideals of Catholic Europe, discovering in its idealization of liberty, equality, and fraternity an attempt to restore a medieval equilibrium. For Dawson, however, the Revolution was neither a “revolt against misgovernment or oppression” nor an effort to reestablish a Bellocian medieval equilibrium. It was instead an attempt to “restore the unity of European society on the foundation of new ideas.” For Dawson, therefore, while the memory of the medieval unity of European culture was involved, the goal of the Revolution had not been to re­create Christendom but to replace it with a new civilization founded on ideas secular in nature and hostile not only to Christianity, but to the entire European past.111 These contrasting reactions to the French Revolution reflected a fundamental difference in political philosophy. As Dawson accurately observed, the Revolution had divided subsequent European society into two opposed camps, “on the one side the adherents of the Liberal revolutionary principles, on the other the followers of the Catholic and Conservative tradition.” Despite his latter-day monarchism, Belloc, ironically, with his frank admiration for the Revolution and for Rousseau’s political philosophy, with its mystique of the popular will, held views much closer to Dawson’s liberal revolutionaries. Dawson, on the other hand, with his antipathy to the Revolution, belonged just as surely to the Catholic and Conservative tradition.112 This is not to say that Dawson’s conservatism was that of the nineteenth-century continental reactionaries. He had no desire to reestablish the monarchies of the Continent. In fact, unlike Belloc’s, Dawson’s hopes for the revitalization of Europe were not political. The spiritual, rather than the political or economic, was his focus. In

288

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

part this was because Dawson thought in international terms, considering the revival of European civilization, not of England or any other nation. Even when he did focus on the affairs of one country, as in his essay “World Crisis and the English Tradition,” he stopped short of promoting any specific political or economic program. Dawson was adamant that the “work of social restoration” needed to be preceded by the “reconstitution of our intellectual and spiritual traditions.” Dawson and Belloc also brought different approaches to religion. When discussing the contemporary world Dawson tended to speak of Christianity rather than the Catholic Church. Indeed, insofar as he criticized Protestantism, it was for what he regarded as its tendency, from the nineteenth century, to compromise with secular society and to jettison orthodox Christian doctrine. As Dawson later noted in approving of Pascal, Pascal had realized that it was not Protestantism but rather “easy-going, light-hearted scepticism” that was the greatest danger to Catholicism—and, Dawson believed, to Europe.113 Dawson’s dissimilarities to Belloc involved more than ideas. The two men possessed entirely diametric personalities. Whereas Belloc was gregarious and charismatic, which had helped to attract several generations of disciples, Dawson was retiring and reclusive. He seldom left his home when he lived in the southwest in the early 1930s, and after moving to the Yorkshire estate in 1933 he rarely came south to London. Dawson was also prone to periods of depression, which he referred to as “Uncle Paul” after a character in a Belloc poem who “suffered from excessive gloom,” and he in fact suffered a nervous breakdown in 1936. Physically too Belloc and Dawson were opposites, Belloc stout and robust, Dawson hollow-cheeked and sickly. After visiting Dawson in Yorkshire in 1935, even David Jones, subject himself to repeated nervous breakdowns during this period, observed that compared to Dawson he seemed a “regular bruiser with a fine swagger . . . and a pipe in the hat.”114 The philosophical gulf between Dawson and Belloc was nowhere more evident than in the former’s veneration of Newman. Whereas Belloc had not found in the cardinal a compatible intellect at all, he was, with Augustine, one of the most significant intellectual influences

The Dawsonite Challenge

289

on Dawson. In particular, Dawson praised Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine for its conception of a dynamic rather than a static Catholicism. In a slim volume that he composed for Sheed & Ward, Spirit of the Oxford Movement, he also applauded Newman and his comrades for their fierce fight to “preserve the spiritual identity of Christianity” against the view that a “theological dogma was not the infallible definition of a revealed truth” but was instead “the expression of the thought of a particular age, and reflected the passing fashions of the dominant philosophy.” Dawson’s Newman had accepted the “Liberal challenge” and stood for “Authority and Tradition against Liberalism,” and for “Supernaturalism against Rationalism and Naturalism.” He had stood “pro causa Dei against the apostasy of the modern world,” and this was a cause with which Dawson wholeheartedly agreed.115 Ultimately, Dawson’s differences with Belloc were also personal. Dawson blamed Belloc for what he asserted was the “loss of cohesion and intellectual intercourse” and the lack of “collaboration” among English Catholic writers. Dawson wanted a more philosophically minded community of Catholic intellectuals but believed that Belloc had worked against this. As he wrote to Maisie Ward in 1937 lamenting the situation: Of course there is Belloc whom neither of us have mentioned. And I certainly think he is the leading personality and the most influential mind in Catholic letters to-day. But his influence is partly responsible for the state of things I am speaking of. For he is not only not a philosopher himself, he is definitely an anti-philosophic influence and has done a lot to make the younger generation of Catholics hostile and contemptuous towards modern thought. This quotation provides a valuable summation of Dawson’s antipathy to Belloc. Frank Sheed was critical of Dawson on this account. He believed that Dawson was isolating himself intellectually by “shrinking from meeting people with whose views [he was] not fully in sympathy.” Indeed, Sheed pointed out that Belloc for his part was eager

290

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

to meet Dawson. Dawson, however, had continually avoided being introduced to Belloc.116 The view of a divided Catholic intellectual community in England with which Dawson had provided Maisie Ward was not entirely accurate. In his letter to Ward, Dawson had lamented the paucity of philosophically inclined English Catholic intellectuals and the lack of personal contact among the few who were. Yet just because the predominant interests of English Catholic intellectuals remained in history, politics, and economics, rather than philosophy and theology, it did not mean that a community of Catholic intellectuals did not exist. Common agreement, despite Dawson’s objections, on these subjects still united Catholic writers in England, and there remained close personal bonds among them, even including those who were more philosophically inclined than the Bellocians. Although Sheed, Ward, Burns, Jones, and others might be drifting out of the Bellocian orbit under Dawson’s influence, there had not been a full break. It would be remiss, indeed, not to acknowledge the similarities and personal links even between Dawson himself and the Bellocians. There was of course an overlap between the admirers of Dawson and those of Belloc. Sheed, Ward, and Burns were first influenced by the Bellocians and remained close personally not only to Belloc but also and particularly to Chesterton, Gill, and McNabb. Nor were Dawson’s ideas entirely unrelated to those of the Bellocians. In fact, much of his diagnosis of the maladies of contemporary Europe were so similar to those of Belloc, Chesterton, and Gill that even the most orthodox Distributists greeted his work approvingly, passing over the differences. The erosion of local culture by international commerce and industry, the instability of capitalism, the agrarian nature of England’s traditional culture, and the evils of urbanism were as common in Dawson’s writings as in those of Belloc and his disciples. Urbanization was in fact for Dawson what industrialization was for Gill, cosmopolitanism for Chesterton, or the political machinations of the plutocracy for Belloc— his particular bête noire. Indeed, Dawson was a valuable and frequent contributor to the English Review during Douglas Jerrold’s tenure as editor, and Jerrold believed that he and Dawson were of the same

The Dawsonite Challenge

291

mind. What this means is that there was no absolute dichotomy either between Bellocians and Dawsonites or between Belloc and Dawson.117

— The vital links between Dawsonites and Bellocians spoke to the continued integrity of the English Catholic intellectual community. Indeed, the events of 1936–37 were to illustrate just how united English Catholic intellectuals remained, as Catholics writers nearly to a person agreed about the Spanish Civil War, the defining event of the decade for them. Most significantly for the purposes of this study, Dawson himself was, in March 1936, to join Tom Burns and the Bellocian Douglas Woodruff on the board of the newly established Tablet Publishing Company, created after Burns and a syndicate he had formed bought the Tablet from the archdiocese of Westminster. In the long run, the differences noted in this chapter were to prove corrosive, but for the remainder of the 1930s bridges for dialogue between Bellocians and those who were gravitating to Dawson’s way of thinking remained open.

C h a pt e r 5

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

By 1935 the English Catholic intellectual community faced an incipient threat to its cohesiveness. The first group of Bellocians had been followed after the Great War by another, younger generation. By the early 1930s these two cadres had formed the core of the community. At the same time, however, contemporaries of this younger generation had begun to question some of the central tenets of Bellocianism. Certainly in intellectual heritage they remained closely related to the Bellocians. They too had been raised on The Servile State and The Party System, on Belloc’s attack on “Protestant” history, and his veneration of the High Middle Ages, and they too accepted the fundamentals of Distributism. Most of them, moreover, were personal friends of Belloc and Chesterton, Gill and McNabb. Though there were developing differences, then, they still formed a coherent community. Tom Burns, Frank Sheed, Maisie Ward, and their friends had begun, however, to look to Christopher Dawson rather than Belloc for intellectual sustenance, and Dawson was hostile to Belloc and many of his ideas. In effect, the community had developed two hubs, and the discord between these two hubs threatened its stability. Could the Bellocians and Dawsonites continue to work together, or would the strain increase and divide the community as the European political crisis came to a head?

292

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

293

Arthur Hinsley and the Tablet Arthur Hinsley succeeded Cardinal Bourne as archbishop of Westminster on 29 April 1935. Born in Yorkshire in 1865 to an English father who was a carpenter on one of the duke of Norfolk’s estates and an Irish mother, Hinsley had been educated at St. Cuthbert’s College seminary at Ushaw, near Durham, before being sent in 1890 to the English College in Rome to study at the Gregorian University, where he earned a doctorate in theology. He was sixty-nine years old when he became archbishop, and he had been out of England since 1917. From 1917 until 1926 Hinsley had served as rector of the English College in Rome, and he had subsequently spent eight years as the apostolic delegate to the British colonies in Africa. In 1934 Hinsley was made a canon of St. Peter’s and retired to Rome, where he expected to live out his days. It had come as a great surprise, then, when his friend Pius XI asked him to become archbishop of Westminster. Despite his relatively short tenure at Westminster, Hinsley was to prove an extraordinarily effective archbishop, not least during World War II. The strong bonds he formed with the English Catholic intellectual community were a significant reason for his success.1 One of Hinsley’s first important decisions as archbishop of Westminster involved the Tablet. In October 1935 its co-owners—­Hinsley and the superior general of the missionary college at Mill Hill, Fr. Stephen O’Callaghan—instructed the trustees to offer the weekly Catholic newspaper for sale. The decision was primarily financial. As Joseph Weld, one of its trustees, explained to Ernest Oldmeadow, editor since 1923, the proprietors had decided that “they could not spend Diocesan funds and trust funds for the Missionary Society running The Tablet at a loss.”2 In the estimation of Weld and his fellow trustees, the problem with the Tablet was its editor. Oldmeadow had been a Nonconformist minister at Halifax, Nova Scotia, before converting to Catholicism in 1897. Although one sympathetic observer has described him as “a genial, humorous man of the world with wide interests,” these qualities

294

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

were not reflected in the Tablet under his editorship. Weld believed that Oldmeadow remained “too much of the Nonconformist minister.” His sermonizing alienated not only readers but also contributors, and as a result Oldmeadow began writing more and more of the copy himself. Circulation had in fact been falling, and this meant that advertising revenues began to decline sharply as well. A vicious circle developed. Even as Oldmeadow’s moralizing drove away readers and advertisers, his domination of the Tablet’s pages increased and thus made it ever more unlikely that it could afford to bring in the new voices that alone could help to halt the decline.3 English Catholic intellectuals had long derided the Tablet. Even before Oldmeadow’s tenure, Belloc had dismissed it as the organ of the “old English Catholic gang” who “instinctively do the wrong thing always.” Tom Burns had abused the Tablet relentlessly in Order. The animosity of Catholic intellectuals to the Tablet had, if anything, increased since Burns and his friends criticized the weekly in the late 1920s. The final straw for many was Oldmeadow’s January 1933 condemnation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Black Mischief (1932).4 Oldmeadow’s broadside appeared in the 7 January 1933 Tablet, under the heading “New Books and Music, To Buy or Borrow or Leave Alone”: A year or two ago, paragraphs appeared in various newspapers announcing that Mr. Evelyn Waugh, a novelist, had been received into the Church. Whether Mr. Waugh still considers himself a Catholic, The Tablet does not know; but, in case he is so regarded by booksellers, librarians, and novel-readers in general, we here-by state that his latest novel would be a disgrace to anybody professing the Catholic name. We refuse to print its title or to mention its publishers. Indeed, this paragraph is not to be read as a review. We are mentioning Mr. Evelyn Waugh’s work only because it would not be fair on The Tablet’s part to condemn coarseness and foulness in non-Catholic writers while glossing over equally outrageous lapses in those who are, or are supposed to be, our co-religionists. One of the worst features of this nasty

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

295

business is that Mr. Evelyn Waugh has enough satirical wit and invention to write an attractive novel without following vile fashions or without setting new fashions which are viler still. Waugh was in South America for the first months of 1933 and thus ignorant of the Tablet’s criticism. Within three days, however, a group of twelve prominent Catholics, organized by Tom Burns, sent a letter of protest that the Tablet published in the 21 January number. Such distinguished clergy as the Dominican Bede Jarrett and the Jesuits Martin D’Arcy and C. C. Martindale joined laymen including Eric Gill, Christopher Hollis, and Douglas Woodruff in condemning the attack on Waugh: Sir,—In a paragraph in your issue of January 7 you say of Mr. ­Evelyn Waugh that “his latest novel would be a disgrace to anybody professing the Catholic name.” You refer to “outrageous lapses in those who are, or are supposed to be, our co-religionists,” with evident references to Mr. Waugh. We think these sentences exceed the bounds of legitimate criticism, and are in fact an imputation of bad faith. In writing, we wish only to express our great regret at their being published and our regard for Mr. Waugh. The attack on Waugh provided a good measure of Oldmeadow’s intellectual isolation. He had believed his voice to be that of Cardinal Bourne and indeed of English Catholicism and was therefore astonished at the response. Not only did Oldmeadow fail to anticipate the criticism, but he certainly did not expect well-known clergy to come to the novelist’s defense.5 Oldmeadow, pressured by the remonstrance, responded with an explanation of some eight hundred words, printed immediately below Burns’s letter, enumerating the passages in Waugh’s novel that he found offensive. Oldmeadow’s response only further angered the remonstrants. Indeed, Martindale, who was no firebrand, advised his colleagues to send a letter of protest to the hierarchy regarding Oldmeadow’s conduct. While Martindale acknowledged that Waugh’s

296

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

novel was “coarse,” he charged that the Tablet had “given a perfectly false view of its harsh and quite unsensuous satire” and maintained that in the letter to the bishops the remonstrants ought to “respectfully declin[e] to accept Oldmeadow’s wildly insulting remarks whether addressed to priests or laymen.” Martindale objected in particular to Oldmeadow’s “facade of unanimous applause” for his stand, observing that it was an “absolute fake” and that both secular priests and religious, including Benedictines, Dominicans, Redemptorists, as well as Martindale’s fellow Jesuits, had “used language . . . of extreme indignation with regard to Oldmeadow and his running of The Tablet.”6 As the remonstrants’ intervention and Martindale’s recommendation illustrated, it was one thing for the editor of the Tablet to be on a perpetual moral crusade but quite another to be a moral crusader who erred so egregiously in his choice of targets. All that Oldmeadow really accomplished in his unfortunate critique of Waugh was to ensure that there would be few tears when the opportunity finally arose to take the editorship of the Tablet from him. It was the death of Cardinal Bourne in 1935 that finally provided the occasion. Hinsley, however, neither knew Oldmeadow nor apparently read the Tablet for many years. Selling the newspaper was an administrative necessity for the new archbishop rather than a product necessarily of any disagreement with Oldmeadow. The question of a prospective buyer remained very much an open one. Hinsley first considered selling the Tablet to the bishops of England and Wales in equal shares and then operating it as the organ of Catholic Action, of which he was the enthusiastic new president, but the bishops had no interest in joining in either the management or the financial losses of the newspaper. Surprisingly, considering his unpopularity, the trustees then turned to Oldmeadow. One suspects, however, that this was a courtesy and that Weld knew that Oldmeadow would be unable to finance the purchase, which indeed proved the case.7 By 6 November, with Oldmeadow eliminated, Weld proposed to Hinsley that they try to assemble a group of “young Catholics who are interested in literary matters.” According to Tom Burns, Hinsley then approached Woodruff, who was still a colonial desk editor at the

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

297

Times. Woodruff, recognizing that his expertise lay in the content side of journalism, turned to Burns, who knew more about the business side. Burns at first attempted to arrange for the sale of the Tablet to the publishing house of Longmans Green, where he was then an editor, having left Sheed & Ward in 1934. The trustees, however, would not sell to a non-Catholic firm. By December Burns had found an alternative, bringing together a syndicate consisting of himself, Woodruff, F. W. Chambers, a former Church of England clergyman who was prominent in various Catholic charities and boards, and Arthur Hungerford Pollen, an Oxford-educated barrister and engineering entrepreneur of Hinsley’s generation.8 In early January 1936 the group led by Burns met with Hinsley at Archbishop’s House. Hinsley appointed Joseph Keating, S.J., editor of the Jesuits’ journal Month, to the new editorial board to act as his liaison. Fr. David Mathew, then the Catholic chaplain at London University, subsequently a suffragan bishop of Westminster (and very much Hinsley’s confidant), and Ronald Knox were named ecclesiastical advisers to the newspaper. Longmans contributed some of the capital—Burns informed Dawson that its share, at £500, amounted to some 6 percent—but was not to have any say in the operation of the newspaper. The Tablet was to be located in the same premises in Paternoster Row as Longmans. The board of the newly established Tablet Publishing Company first met on 5 March 1936. The directors were Burns, Pollen, Chambers, and Woodruff, whom they appointed editor. On 17 March Christopher Dawson, whom Hinsley himself was particularly eager to have included, was added to the board.9 The sale of the Tablet to Burns’s syndicate was significant for two reasons. First, Hinsley had been willing to sell the newspaper to laymen, two of whom—Burns and Woodruff—were considered young Turks and another of whom—Dawson—though of a more conservative temperament and closer to fifty years of age than to forty, had only recently made a name for himself. This decision illustrated that the new archbishop not only recognized the real talent at his disposal in the English Catholic intellectual community; he also realized that he could place his confidence in men such as Burns, Woodruff, and

298

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Dawson. Heretofore the Catholic intellectuals in England had found their main patrons in the Church among the regular clergy, in particular the Jesuits and Dominicans. Now they possessed a champion at the head of the English Church. Hinsley’s ability to recognize talent and his willingness to delegate significant responsibility was in part the product of his own difficulties as a young priest. After earning his doctorate in Rome, he had returned in 1893 to England and taken up a professorship to teach classics and philosophy at Ushaw, where he soon clashed with his superiors over his ambitious plans for curricular reform. Although there was, according to his biographer, John Heenan, “no open breach with the authorities,” the future archbishop left the seminary after four years when his superiors decided that he could “do better work elsewhere.” Two years later Hinsley was appointed the first headmaster of St. Bede’s Grammar School in Bradford, but there he embarked on a policy of school expansion that again brought him into conflict with his superiors. After the governors, led by Bishop Gordon of Leeds, balked at his plans, he resigned in frustration. When some years later the bishop of Clifton was considering Hinsley for a headmaster’s position, Bishop Gordon informed his colleague, “If you were my worst enemy I might advise you to take him.”10 The qualities that had been liabilities for the young Hinsley proved assets once he had achieved a position of responsibility. At the English College, far from the supervision of the English bishops, he had proved not only a successful administrator but also an adept manager of his students, not least because he allowed them a measure of independence. He trusted his students and even consulted them before making important decisions. It was this combination of liberty and consultation that became the model for his later work in Westminster. When in a subordinate position himself Hinsley had chafed at the bit, but once in a position of command he was secure enough in his authority to seek the counsel of his own clerical subordinates, of the Catholic laity, and even in some instances of non-Catholics. As Heenan explained: He had all his friends divided in his mind according to their usefulness to the Church of God. . . . His choice of adviser was one

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

299

of the most reliable pointers to his intense humility. He would choose whomever he considered to be the best qualified to judge an issue. It might be a priest ripe in experience and years. It might be a young man who had shown himself equipped in a certain direction. It might not be a priest but a layman whose judgment he had learned to value. On occasion he sought advice from nonCatholics. It never occurred to him that his dignity would suffer by his seeking help from those who were his inferiors. During his rectorship of the English College, on the one hand, he had consulted his students. As apostolic visitor to Africa, on the other hand, he had mediated between British officials, eager to establish a system of education in Britain’s African colonies, and the Catholic missionaries, largely non-British, who had established and ran most of the schools. In the process he learned the benefits of seeking advice and delegating responsibilities.11 Significantly, the confidence that Hinsley displayed in the English Catholic intellectuals by entrusting the Burns group with the Tablet was soon to be repaid in kind. They quickly developed a deep respect for Hinsley, which Evelyn Waugh accurately reflected in the following description of the new archbishop in his biography of ­Ronald Knox: The succession of Archbishop Hinsley in April 1935, though he was an old and ailing man, was grateful refreshment to English Catholics inside and outside the archdiocese. There was now at the head of the hierarchy a man amenable to suggestions, of deep human sympathies, who was also a shrewd judge of men, able and willing to recognize diversities of character and talent in his subordinates. Although Waugh was of course referring specifically to his recognition of Knox’s abilities, Hinsley’s patronage of Knox was but one example of his support for the English Catholic intellectuals whose talents, they themselves believed, Bourne had ignored. During the first years of World War II, both Hinsley’s confidence in them and their trust in him would be put to the test.12

300

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Second, the composition of the group that purchased the Tablet meant that the Bellocians and their critics, despite their differences, remained a viable community. Burns, the archcritic of Belloc, and Woodruff, for whom Belloc remained a hero, were at the center of the new enterprise, and each brought in like-minded friends. Burns convinced Dawson to join the Tablet’s board; Woodruff invited Hollis and Waugh to become regular contributors, and Hollis later sat on the board of the Tablet. If there was a sign of possible dissension, it lay in Dawson’s resignation from the board the following year. While Dawson was worried from the beginning about the amount he had been asked to contribute—Burns wanted him both to review books and to comment on foreign affairs—it was his limited say in editorial matters that led him to resign. “What I feel,” Dawson explained to Woodruff in July 1937, “is that if I cannot take any active part in the direction of the paper or the determination of policy, I do not want to give the public any ground for thinking that I do.” Was Dawson’s resignation merely the product of his characteristic fussiness, or was it the result of serious disagreement with the Bellocian Woodruff and a harbinger of future trouble for the English Catholic intellectual community? Given the date of Dawson’s letter to Woodruff, the obvious question was whether it was the Tablet’s stance on the Spanish Civil War that had caused Dawson to resign.13

The Spanish Civil War The newly cemented unity of the Catholic intellectual community was soon put to the test. When the Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 it had the potential to split English Catholic writers. It was certainly no surprise that the Bellocians, habitually suspicious of parliamentary democracy and confirmed apologists for authoritarian regimes elsewhere on the Continent, supported Franco’s insurgents against the Republic. It was certainly not a foregone conclusion, however, that either Dawson or his admirers would join the Bellocians in supporting the so-called Nationalist cause. On the Continent, particularly in

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

301

France, Catholic intellectuals were divided. Many European Catholic writers associated with Dawson, Burns, and Sheed & Ward were in fact quite critical of Franco’s Nationalists. Jacques Maritain, Luigi Sturzo, and Hollis’s Notre Dame nemesis Waldemar Gurian—the first and last of these were Sheed & Ward authors—staked out a neutral position on the war. Though few actively supported the Republicans, they denied that the rebellion was justified and remained very critical of the Spanish Church’s support for the Francoists. The question was whether the Dawsonites would agree with Maritain and his allies and divide the English Catholic intellectuals as the continental Catholic intellectuals had been divided, or whether the cohesiveness of England’s Catholic intellectual community would hold.14 In January 1930 Primo de Rivera, military dictator of Spain since 1923, had resigned at the insistence of King Alfonso XIII. In April 1931 Republican and Socialist candidates swept the municipal elections in Spain’s largest towns and cities, leading to the abdication of the king, and the Spanish Republic was born. There remained, however, influential segments of the population, on both the right and the left, who did not support the new regime. The new regime’s treatment of the Church in particular aroused the enmity of the anti-­Republican right. The controversial Article 26 in the new constitution led even pro-­Republican Catholics, including Miguel Maura, minister of the interior, and Alcalá Zamora, prime minister, to protest. Both resigned their offices (although the latter agreed to return as president).15 The government did not fall, but thereafter it became a coalition of anticlerical parties, led by Manuel Azaña, a Left-Republican and the new prime minister, who was himself a bitter anticleric, and the Socialists. In effect, the religious clauses of the new constitution broke the power of the center right. Men such as Alejandro Lerroux Garcia, leader of the center-right Radical Party, Maura, and Zamora lost their constituencies, as Catholics began to look elsewhere for someone to defend their cause. Ultimately they settled on Gil Robles and the Acción Nacional, which eventually, in 1933, became CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas), the major party of the right in subsequent parliaments. Robles and CEDA, however, were to

302

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

prove much less committed to the republic than their more moderate predecessors. As one recent historian of Spanish Catholicism has observed of the new government, “In their clumsy attempt to undo the influence of the institutional Church, they rode roughshod over the beliefs of many people who would otherwise have had little reason to suppose ill of the Republic.” “The assault on religion,” the same historian has concluded, “allowed erstwhile monarchists like Gil Robles and Lamamié de Clairac to pose effectively as the true defenders of the people.”16 The consequence of the constitutional right’s decline, and the resultant rise of Robles, was the further radicalization of the left. The right’s victory at the polls in late 1933 radicalized the moderate left in the same way that the anticlerical provisions of the constitution had radicalized the center right. Having believed that the Republic would lead to a bourgeois revolution that would sweep away the old Spain of Church, army, and landed grandee, they now had their hopes dashed as the parties dedicated to rolling back reform took power. In October 1934 miners in the Asturias region seized factories and occupied the provincial capital of Oviedo. The government brutally suppressed the rising, imprisoning some forty thousand in the aftermath, many of them having had no relation to the violence, including the Socialist leader Largo Caballero and the Left-Republican leader Azaña. The events of October 1934 convinced many on the right, on the one hand, that the left was politically unreliable, and that the Socialists, like the Anarchists, would resort to violence if their goals could not be achieved through constitutional means. The savage measures taken against the rebels in the Asturias and the subsequent mass arrests, on the other hand, played into the left’s belief that the right was Fascist, intent on destroying opposition. Their increasing mutual distrust led to civil war.17 When a Popular Front government of Socialists and left Republicans was elected in February 1936, Robles began canvassing the army regarding a military intervention, and by spring 1936 the right was looking for any excuse to justify a military intervention. They found it in the disorder that had become endemic throughout the nation. Strikes were prevalent, as were violent clashes between the rival trade

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

303

unions of the Socialists and the Anarchists (respectively, the UGT and the CNT). Militant youth gangs affiliated with parties across the political spectrum battled each other in the streets of the cities, while in the provinces the rural poor occupied estates. Two assassinations on 12 July provided the final justification for the uprising—the murder of a Socialist member of the Assault Guards, a civil defense force, and the revenge killing during the early hours of the next morning of Calvo Sotelo, a monarchist leader. On 19 July General Franco arrived in Spanish Morocco from Tenerife in the Canary Islands, where he had been exiled by the nervous Popular Front government, and took command of the Army of Africa.18 Douglas Jerrold became the leading apologist among English Catholic intellectuals for the so-called Nationalist uprising. Indeed, Jerrold had actively abetted Franco. In June 1936 Luis Bolin, a Spanish journalist for the monarchist newspaper ABC who subsequently became a leading figure in Franco’s press and propaganda department, had sought Jerrold’s help in procuring machine guns and ammunition for the prospective uprising, and Jerrold had obliged as best he could. The following month Bolin asked Jerrold to recommend a man and two or three women willing to fly a chartered airplane to the Canary Islands posing as tourists. Jerrold contacted his friend Hugh Pollard, a fellow writer who spoke Spanish and who had experience with revolutions, having visited Morocco, Mexico, and Ireland during previous upheavals. On 11 July the plane, which would be commandeered in the Canaries to fly General Franco to his army in Morocco, left England.19 Jerrold’s chief contribution to the Nationalist propaganda campaign was his “Spain: Impressions and Reflections,” which originally appeared in the review Nineteenth Century and After (April 1937) and was subsequently republished as a pamphlet. Jerrold’s goal in this essay was to convince the broad English public, rather than just English Catholics, that it was the Nationalists, not the Republicans, who deserved its support. Jerrold argued that the government elected in 1936, though a moderately left coalition when it took office, had been hijacked by extremists and proved incapable of running the country.

304

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Indeed, Jerrold charged that Franco’s rising had preempted a Communist revolution that the government would not have stopped and in which it might actually have been complicit.20 Jerrold emphasized the popularity of Franco’s Nationalists with the Spanish people. During the first days of fighting, before the troops from North Africa could be airlifted to Spain, the rebels had taken Seville and Pamplona with only a handful of men. They could only have accomplished this, Jerrold maintained, if the people of those cities supported their cause. Indeed, he pointed out that the Nationalists lines of supply and communications subsequently stretched for hundreds of miles, “wholly unprotected” but for the civil guard and, in large towns, the municipal police. “If nationalist Spain were not unquestionably and pretty well unanimously behind General Franco,” he argued, “it would be impossible for him to find, from a bare 500,000 men under arms, fighting troops to conduct offensives on four disconnected fronts.” In contrast, the Republican forces remained bottled up in Madrid and Barcelona, unable to expose themselves. The vast majority of Spanish, Jerrold concluded, were more than eager to “put an end by their own free choice to a shameful period of license and disorder,” and so supported the Nationalists.21 This popularity of Franco’s forces stemmed, in Jerrold’s telling, not only from the misgovernment of the Republicans but also from the Nationalists’ support for social justice. Jerrold acknowledged the social ills that plagued Spain but argued that the five-year republican experiment had solved neither the “apathy nor corruption of the political classes,” nor the “landlord absenteeism,” nor the “lack of leadership from the Church.” The Nationalists, however, represented a new Spain of young men and young women, a Spain of “vigorous social policy,” of the “separation of Church and State and the break-up of the big estates, the restoration of agriculture and the improvement of working conditions and the legal limitations of profits.” The Nationalists, according to Jerrold, “were working back, not to the evils of Victorian finance-capitalism, but forward to a Christian social order based on human rights.” The new Nationalist Spain would be marked, Jerrold concluded, citing a speech of Franco himself, by

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

305

the “positive doctrines of social justice based on the unchanging principles of Christian morality.”22 Jerrold blamed the English press and English intellectuals for uncritically accepting Republican propaganda. In actuality, there was no Republican Spain, according to him, merely a loose alliance of revolutionary governments in Bilbao, Valencia, and Catalonia, each one a mishmash of local separatists, anarchists, and communists. Propaganda was the only weapon of these anti-Franco forces, and English intellectuals naively believed all of it. Republicans had massively inflated the number of German and Italian troops involved in Spain and had exaggerated the influence of the Moors in Franco’s army. They invented atrocities and pretended that they represented legitimate constitutional government when they represented only mob violence. Jerrold pointed out the hypocrisy of English writers in defending these inventions. The same English intellectuals who had applauded the Asturias revolt claimed two years later to be defending the principle of elected government. “Professors, pacifists, League of Nations men, politicians in exile,” Jerrold observed, “joined in 1934 with the professional revolutionaries to pour abuse on a genuinely constitutional government, with an unchallengeable parliamentary majority and an overwhelming preponderance of votes, which was engaged in suppressing an armed rebellion.” If British journalists and intellectuals were the knaves in this regard, it was the Foreign Office that played the fool. The diplomats wanted a weak Spain that would provide harbors for Britain’s fleet while not threatening Britain’s influence in the Mediterranean. This was a short-sighted policy, in Jerrold’s estimation. A Republican victory was unlikely, but if it occurred it would be a victory for Russia, and Moscow would provide no such assistance to the Royal Navy. Britain’s refusal to recognize the new government in Spain only prolonged the war—by convincing the Republicans that Britain or France might intervene on their behalf—and angered the inevitable victors.23 In his support for Franco’s insurgency, Jerrold went so far as to deny that the Nationalists had committed any atrocities at all. Prison­ ers were executed only after “a fair and public trial,” one of which

306

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Jerrold witnessed, and prison conditions, he maintained, were “good.” Shops and cafés remained open and did a brisk trade, while “Reds” remained unmolested in Nationalist-held towns and cities. In Nationalist Spain, according to Jerrold, one could say what one wanted and go where one pleased. The following passage was emblematic of his adoration not only for the new Spain but also for its leader: I had first seen [Franco] ten days before at a splendid ceremony where, a glittering figure surrounded by his generals, he had received the Italian Ambassador. The sun was streaming in through the window from the great square at Salamanca where there was a brilliant parade of banners borne by representative detachments of all the volunteer associations and in the background a squadron of Moorish cavalry in full ceremonial order, but it was the light shining through from within that dazzled. Words like “glittering,” “brilliant,” “light,” and “dazzled,” combined with references to the sun “streaming in,” fit right in with Jerrold’s portrayal of the youthfulness and vigor of the “new” Spain. The passage deserves its place alongside the evocation of the “new” Italian Abyssinia in the concluding chapters of Waugh in Abyssinia.24 Jerrold was joined in his admiration for the Francoists by Arnold Lunn, whose Spanish Rehearsal Sheed & Ward published in 1937. With his book, based in part on his tour of Nationalist-held territory in Spain, Lunn, like Jerrold, attempted to convince the non-­Catholic majority in the English-speaking world of the justice of Franco’s rebellion. Just as Jerrold had, Lunn began by delegitimizing the Republican government. Revolutionary violence, according to Lunn, rather than a reaction to Franco’s rebellion, had been a feature of the Spanish Republic since its inception. The May 1931 “iconoclast fury,” during which churches had been destroyed, had been, he observed, the beginning of the “conspiracy against law and order.” In Asturias in 1934 leftist rebels had then destroyed cultural treasures such as the Oviedo University Library, murdered the clergy, and once again burned churches. During the 1936 election, the Popular Front had

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

307

intimidated voters, seized ballots, and sent in false returns. Once in power, Lunn asserted, the left had quickly proved itself incapable of governing. The Communist- and Anarchist-led violence had only increased, the right had responded, and lawlessness had ensued. “A Government which is powerless to maintain order,” Lunn concluded, “and which can neither prevent outrages from the Left nor reprisals from the Right, has lost its moral right to rule.”25 Whereas Jerrold made social justice the center of his argument in favor of Franco, Lunn emphasized the Communist threat. Like Jerrold, Lunn charged that Franco’s rebellion in July 1936 had preempted a Communist revolution planned for the following month. For Lunn, Communist influence extended far beyond the actual numbers in the Spanish Communist Party. Those who called themselves Socialists, including Caballero, prime minister of the current Republican government, he insisted, also took their “orders from Moscow.” Indeed, Lunn asserted that the Russians had directed not only the anticlerical violence but also, crucially, the Asturias rising of 1934, during which, he pointed out, the rebels had set up a self-styled Soviet Republic. Citing the Bulgarian Communist leader Georgi Dimitrov, chief of the Comintern, Lunn argued further that the Popular Front itself had in fact been a Trojan horse by which the Communists in Spain and elsewhere used ostensibly independent and moderate political parties of the left for their own end, which was revolution. The Soviet Union, Lunn believed, had intruded from the Republic’s first days and intended to set up a satellite state.26 Lunn emphasized the Communist threat to Spain in order to mobilize opinion in the English-speaking world. If the Communists won, he argued, they would not stop there but would turn to France and eventually to Britain itself. Whereas liberals in Britain interpreted the battle as between fascism and democracy in Spain and viewed the international threat as coming ultimately from Germany and Italy, Lunn warned that the true danger was from the Soviet Union and international communism, which therefore could not be allowed to triumph in Spain. This was the meaning of his title, Spanish Rehearsal. Spain, according to Lunn, was providing the Comintern with a model

308

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

for its policies of infiltration and revolution, which would then be applied across Europe.27 Lunn was at his most persuasive in Spanish Rehearsal when he employed the testimony of former Republicans who had turned against the regime. Perhaps his most convincing witnesses to the injustices of the Republic and the righteousness of the Nationalists’ cause were the so-called founders of the Republic, such intellectual and political luminaries as the classics scholar and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, the Radical leader Lerroux, former president of the Republic Zamora, and the eminent physician and author Gregorio Marañón. Indeed, it was Marañón’s bitter attacks on Republican Spain that formed the coda to Lunn’s Spanish Rehearsal. For Marañón: The present situation allows of no half-way house. For one thing, the die is cast. Franco is certain to win, and his victory will give me the greatest satisfaction. In any case, there can be no comparison between the two régimes. Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, from which I suffered personally and bodily, was, compared with the Red tyranny, an amiable dictatorship. The intellectuals who were fortunate enough to be residing in the territory under Nationalist control have neither had their lives threatened nor been obliged to go into exile. The Spanish left, he claimed, had established “a system of bloodshed, an institution of murder.” With few exceptions, Marañón concluded, “all the intellectuals of Spain think as I do, speak as I do and, like me, have had to flee from Republican Spain to save their lives.”28 While this powerful conclusion represented Lunn at his most convincing, much of the volume was far less persuasive. Rightly critical of Republican propaganda—which, it has subsequently become evident, thanks in part to Arthur Koestler, was brilliantly managed from Paris by the Comintern—Lunn was, however, willfully naive concerning Nationalist claims. To him, all the atrocities in Spain had been committed by the Republicans, while the Nationalists were nearly blameless. Lunn devoted page after page to debunking each and every

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

309

report of Nationalist massacres, from that at Badjoz in August 1936 to that which had followed the capture of Toledo in September 1936 to the notorious destruction of the Basque city of Guernica by German aircraft in April 1937. Lunn’s unwillingness to question Nationalist propaganda while at the same time attacking relentlessly that of the Republicans leads the reader to question the reliability of his account. Given that Lunn had attempted in the Spanish Rehearsal to convince the pro-Republicans in the English-speaking world of the justice of the Nationalist cause, this was a fatal flaw.29 Their fellow Bellocians followed Jerrold and Lunn in expressing their support for Franco. Belloc himself had been critical of the Spanish Republic since its very inception, and was convinced from the beginning that the civil war in Spain was fundamentally religious. During the latter phase of the war, Belloc even toured the battlefields and had a ten-minute interview with Franco, whom he described as the “man who saved us all.” Of the other leading Bellocians discussed in earlier chapters, Vincent McNabb supported Franco, but Eric Gill, who was by 1936 associating openly with Communists to the frustration of Archbishop Hinsley, was one of the very few English Catholic intellectuals to support actively the Republican cause. From the younger generation of Belloc’s disciples, Douglas Woodruff, Christopher Hollis, and Evelyn Waugh all joined Belloc in his support for Franco.30 Though in his memoirs Hollis avoided stating outright whether or not he had sided with the Spanish rebels, he did criticize what he presented as the dominant position in America—that the war was between proponents of democracy and modernity and the defenders of feudalism. He also noted with some satisfaction that his Notre Dame colleague Gurian (who, according to Hollis, had opposed Franco because anyone whom Hitler supported had to be opposed) had been wrong about Franco becoming a Nazi puppet. As was the case with the Italo-Abyssinian war, Hollis gave the character in his dialogues on foreign affairs who took the pro-Franco position much the better of the argument.31 Although Waugh’s interest in political debate declined sharply after the Italo-Abyssinian fiasco—in part, it has been suggested,

310

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

­ ecause his political postures had proved bad for his book sales—he b was one of the very few English Catholic intellectuals to respond to the notorious questionnaire on the Spanish Civil War promoted by the author Nancy Cunard, the results of which were published in summer 1937 as Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War. Cunard had posed the loaded questions, “Are you for or against the legal Government and the People of Republican Spain? Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism? For it is impossible any longer to take no side.” Waugh replied: I know Spain only as a tourist and a reader of the newspapers. I am no more impressed by the “legality” of the Valencia government than are English Communists with the legality of the Crown, Lords, and Commons. I believe it was a bad government, rapidly deteriorating. If I were a Spaniard I should be fighting for General Franco. As an Englishman I am not in the predicament of choosing between two evils. I am not a Fascist nor shall I become one unless it were the only alternative to Marxism. It is mischievous to suggest that such a choice is imminent. The editors, who categorized the responses as “For the Government,” “Neutral,” and “Against the Government,” put Waugh in the last of these categories. Waugh, like almost all other Catholic intellectuals in England, particularly the Bellocians, ultimately sided with Franco, even as he viewed the general as the lesser of two evils.32 As for Woodruff, he had actually tempered Oldmeadow’s hos­ tility to the Spanish Republic and as late as May 1936 had hoped that Robles and a social justice–centered Catholic Action could still win the day. As a result, when the rebellion began in July 1936, the Tablet greeted it with ambivalence. The war would not end quickly, the Tablet predicted, and it would lead to untold misery for Spain. Franco would probably end up dictator if his rising succeeded, Woodruff’s newspaper concluded, but if he failed a Marxist state would replace the Republic. The best that could be hoped for then would be a swift Franco victory, followed by a brief military dictatorship that would

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

311

give way to an authoritarian but non-Fascist government along the lines of the Salazar regime in Portugal. Perhaps such a regime, the Tablet hoped, would govern according to Catholic principles and so provide for social justice, as it had earlier hoped a Robles government could have done under the Republic. By August the Tablet had decided that the survival of the Church in Spain depended on Franco’s victory, and by the end of the year it believed that the Spanish Civil War had become a broader war to defend civilization against communism.33 The counterpart to Woodruff’s Bellocian-minded Tablet was the Catholic Herald, which was edited by Michael de la Bedoyère, who had close ties to the Dawsonites. Bedoyère, whose father was a French viscomte and his mother the daughter of the Anglican bishop of Rochester, was the nephew of Algar Thorold, a former editor of the Dublin Review. He had been educated at Stonyhurst and then entered the Society of Jesus. After completing his novitiate, Bedoyère went up to the Jesuit’s Campion Hall, Oxford, and in 1928 he took a first-class degree in the new School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. A crisis of faith, however, then led him to leave the Society of Jesus. He soon regained his Christianity and served as assistant editor under his uncle at the Dublin Review, before becoming editor of the Catholic Herald in 1934. A particular admirer of Dawson, Bedoyère had contributed to the first collection of the Dawson and Burns–edited Essays in Order, and he shared the Dawsonite interest in theology as opposed to politics, being particularly devoted to the work of Baron von Hügel.34 Even several weeks into the rebellion, the Catholic Herald continued to promote Robles, who had fled Spain, as a moderate, and to believe that the CEDA leader could yet revive constitutional government. In contrast, the Catholic Herald was much more equivocal toward Franco, concerned that his army consisted of monarchists and Fascists, both groups hostile to Robles and his Catholic party. Indeed, Bedoyère’s newspaper feared that the Church would be the big loser in the rebellion whether it succeeded or not. If it failed the Church would bear the brunt of the left’s revenge, but if it succeeded the association between the Church and dictatorship in the minds of many would only

312

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

be strengthened to the Church’s ultimate detriment. By August 1936, however, the Catholic Herald, despite continuing reservations concerning Church dependence on a potential Franco dictatorship, argued that the battle in Spain was that of communism versus humanity. The issue was not democracy versus fascism as the English press erroneously held. Citing the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano, Bedoyère’s newspaper concluded that democracy and the rule of law had ceased to exist in Spain. The Republic was no longer a viable option.35 The Catholic Herald’s reaction to the war in Spain was indicative of the attitude of the Dawsonites. In contrast to so many of their intellectual allies on the Continent, they joined the Bellocians almost to a person in supporting the Nationalist cause. Frank Sheed’s opinion was representative. “We did not know much about conditions in Spain,” Sheed admitted in his memoir, “but as between people who murdered priests and nuns and people who didn’t, we preferred those who didn’t.” Although he maintained that he had little admiration for Franco, whom he assumed would be an archetypal military dictator, he had supported him, as had most of his “Catholic friends,” many of whom accepted that Franco was “leading a crusade.” Maisie Ward, for her part, recalled that she and her husband viewed Franco as the lesser of two evils. This ambivalence was not, however, reflected in their booklist. Sheed & Ward published a number of books on the war in Spain, including Lunn’s Spanish Rehearsal, which were uniformly pro-Nationalist.36 Tom Burns and his Chelsea-set friends were likewise supporters of Franco. Burns observed in his memoir that the war in Spain had “put up a barricade” between himself and friends such as Gill and Maritain. He pointed to Roy Campbell, a South African–born, Oxford-educated poet who had converted to Catholicism, as reflecting his own beliefs concerning the war in Spain. Campbell (1901–57) had moved to Spain in 1933 and settled in Toledo, a city he came to regard as the “whole embodiment of the crusade for Christianity against Communism.” As evident in the chapters on Spain in his autobiography, and in his verse, particularly his Flowering Rifle, a poem that runs to some one hundred pages in his collected works, Campbell’s support for Franco

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

313

and loathing for the Spanish left was at least as strong as that of Jerrold and Lunn. Burns’s position on Spain was therefore similar to that of the staunchest Bellocians.37 During the war, Burns drove an ambulance, donated by English Catholics, over the Pyrenees to Spain and delivered it to the Nationalists (accompanying him was Gabriel Herbert, Waugh’s sister-in-law, who subsequently married Alick Dru). In his memoir Burns maintained that the civil war in Spain was not the result of a larger international conflict. It was not the prelude to World War II and would have occurred without the intervention of the Russians, Italians, and Germans. It was, Burns concluded, the product of a “radically Spanish social sickness,” of “something endemic to Spain.” Nor were the Francoists necessarily Fascists, in his opinion. The genuine Fascists in Spain, the Falangistas, lacked influence according to Burns, most important, with Franco. Fascism was “not in the Spanish nature,” he concluded, and even the Falangistas were only “playing” at being Fascists. Burns’s subsequent career in Spain further convinced him that the Nationalists had been justified. During World War II, he worked for the Ministry of Information and was posted to the British embassy in Madrid as press attaché. There he met his wife, a daughter of the same Dr. Marañón whose condemnation of the Republicans Lunn had used to such effect. Burns’s association with this prominent Spanish family confirmed, as he recalled in his memoirs, the views that he had come to independently in 1936 and 1937.38 Christopher Dawson agreed with Frank Sheed, Maisie Ward, and Tom Burns about the war in Spain, and like them he parted company with those such as Maritain, Sturzo, and even his good friend E. I. Watkin, with whom he had shared common ground on many other issues. Indeed, when Sturzo contributed an article to the Catholic Herald in September 1936 arguing that Franco was meeting evil with evil, Dawson replied in a lengthy letter, published the following week, in which he maintained that the insurgency was justified because the government had “grossly” failed to “safeguard their elementary human rights.” For Dawson, the conflict in Spain was between Communism and Catholicism. As he explained the following March:

314

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

The victory of Communism in Spain would be a victory for Communism in its most dangerous aspect, for it would not be a victory over capitalism, which is relatively unimportant in Spain, but over Catholicism, which is the very root of the Spanish tradition. And Spain is not a country for half measures; if she abandons Christianity, she will do it passionately and thoroughly. On the other hand the recovery of Christian Spain might well mark the turning point in her own history and that of Europe. Dawson, like his admirers, therefore had much more in common with Belloc, Jerrold, and Lunn than with Sturzo or his other erstwhile intellectual allies on the Continent.39 If there still existed a substantial difference between Dawsonites and Bellocians when it came to the Spanish Civil War—and indeed the broader political crisis of the late 1930s—it centered on their respective approaches to the intellectual issues. The same curiosity that the Dawsonites had earlier brought to Catholic theology and avantgarde art and literature they applied to the political disputes of the era. They remained open to dialogue with those who disagreed. Even into 1937, there was much more of a debate among Dawson and his friends about what, for example, the proper response to the Spanish situation ought to be, and a willingness to engage those such as Maritain who had come to different conclusions. To understand exactly why this was so, and how it played out, it is necessary to examine what became in the late 1930s the representative journal for the Dawsonites, Colosseum, and to introduce the man who edited it during its relatively brief existence (1934–39), Bernard Wall. Born in 1908, Wall was two years younger than Tom Burns and the youngest of the Catholic intellectuals introduced so far. Like Burns, he was not a convert, and also like Burns, he had been educated at Stonyhurst. During his final two years at the Jesuit school, after Burns had left, he came under the influence of Christopher Hollis, who taught him history “with both the argumentation of a former President of the Oxford Union and a fairly wholesale devotion to Belloc’s ideas.” Wall became an enthusiast of Bellocian history and a believer in the

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

315

thesis of the servile state. At Oxford, where he had won an exhibition in history at Brasenose College, Wall was president of the Distributist Society. While at university, however, neo-­Scholasticism gradually replaced Bellocianism as his intellectual passion.40 In about 1930, after taking his degree, Wall moved to London, where he became involved with the Chelsea group and lived for a time with Burns. Wall’s association with Burns and his friends only whetted his appetite for philosophy. He enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, a center of neoThomism. Wall, however, soon became disillusioned with his studies. At Fribourg he found “plenty of learning but it was dead learning, a form of bookish archeology.” Neo-Thomism there lacked the “imaginative sweep” that Wall had found in Maritain and Étienne Gilson. He was especially disappointed, given the adoration of Maritain and the interest in art and literature that he shared with the rest of the Chelsea group, that Fribourg ignored the aesthetic dimension. It was in 1934, while still living in Fribourg, though apparently no longer matriculated at the university, that Wall followed Burns’s example and established Colosseum.41 As with Burns’s Order, Wall intended his journal to be confrontational. “The Colosseum,” he observed in its very first sentence, “will not be a polite review.” The stakes, as Wall understood them, were high. “We have before us,” he maintained, “the life and death struggle of a civilization.” Modern civilization, by which Wall meant the civilization that had emerged from the Renaissance, was in its death throes. In such a situation one could not sit on the sidelines. Colosseum represented Wall’s engagement with the contemporary crisis.42 In much of what Wall argued in his “Programme” for Colosseum, Dawson’s influence was obvious. Wall agreed with Dawson’s diagnosis that Europe’s crisis was spiritual rather than material. He shared with Dawson the belief that Christianity, instead of being conservative or reactionary, was in fact progressive. Wall recalled in his memoir that Dawson was his “closest associate at this tragic time.” Wall’s loyalty to Dawson, he acknowledged, eventually “eroded” his “friendship with Eric [Gill] and Maritain.” Wall’s break with Gill and

316

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Maritain was not to come, however, until after the onset of the Spanish Civil War. In 1934, and for the next three-odd years, Maritain and such other veterans of Dawson and Burns’s Essays in Order as Nicholas Berdyaev and Peter Wust were key contributors to Colosseum.43 That Wall could count on the contributions of the very continental Catholic intellectuals whose ideas Burns and Sheed & Ward had helped to introduce to England was evidence of their success in making English Catholicism less intellectually parochial. In this sense Wall was indeed standing on the shoulders of those who had preceded him. In another sense, however, Wall departed from the foundation that they had laid. Aesthetic and theological ideas had largely been Burns’s focus. Yet while Wall was sympathetic to the arts, the pages of Colosseum were increasingly given over to political concerns. This was the result of the developing political crisis on the Continent, which by 1934 could not be ignored. Colosseum’s great strength during its first few years, even as politics became a preoccupation, was that Wall provided an open forum for the debate among Europe’s Catholic intellectuals, whether English or continental. Viewpoints different from Wall’s own were often published, though this was to change as a result of the Spanish Civil War. In the December 1936 number of Colosseum, the lead editorial (unsigned but presumably written by Wall) defended Franco’s revolt as a “heroic effort to save something of Christendom” and concluded that “it would have been criminal and sinful negligence if General Franco had failed to act.” Wall emphasized that Colosseum stood for two things above all, religion and tradition. Given this, he maintained, “it is hard to see how it is possible to reject the armed interference of the nationalist movement, which arose in the name of religion and tradition, without throwing over a good deal of the past history of Christendom.”44 For the next nine months after the December 1936 editorial, Wall to his credit did remain open to differing opinions on the war in Spain. The March 1937 Colosseum, for example, included a symposium titled “Christianity and War,” the subtext of which was whether one could support Franco’s rebellion according to Catholic

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

317

just war theory. E. I. Watkin, Gerald Vann, O.P., Gill, and Maurice Reckitt (an Anglo-Catholic, the one non–Roman Catholic participant) all took a pacifist position toward war in general, arguing that the Christian conception of a just war could not hold under the conditions of twentieth­-century total warfare. Dawson, Jerrold, and Bedoyère differed with them. Watkin’s contribution was the most significant, in that he openly disagreed with the Colosseum’s editorial position, taking the same position regarding the Spanish war as he did with modern war in general. Passive resistance, “organized non­cooperation,” was in his view the proper response to anti-­Catholic aggression from the Spanish left. The war in Spain, according to Watkin, would lead to much more evil than good, and therefore it had to be opposed. This did not mean, however, that he supported the Republican side. On the contrary, he acknowledged that since the war was now a fait accompli, he hoped that “Franco’s twilight will defeat the black night of his opponents.” He believed nonetheless that even were Franco to win, the interests of Catholics would be harmed, because the “Church will inevitably be reduced to a most unhealthy dependence on the government as her bulwark against red atheism, and will have little chance of converting the hearts and minds of the defeated red proletariat.”45 The December 1936 editorial was evidence of how far Wall had moved politically in the nearly three years since he had established Colosseum. By the close of 1937 there was little to choose from between Wall and the most vehement Bellocians. Increasingly, it was not political authoritarianism that he opposed but political liberalism. Indeed, in Spain of the Spaniards (1938), he made his beliefs explicit. As with the work of Lunn and Jerrold, the book was the product of a visit to Nationalist-held territory. Much of what he argued was already familiar to English Catholic readers. The Nationalists were the popular side; Nationalist Spain was not a tyranny; people in Nationalist-held territory lived normal lives; food was plentiful; prisoners were well treated; the Nationalists were inaugurating economic reforms that would lead to social justice. More than his fellow Francoists, however, Wall emphasized that the battle in Spain was a

318

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

cultural one. “Spanish traditional culture and Catholicism,” he maintained, “are one and indivisible.” If the anticlerical Republican left was correct, Wall noted, “if the Church is evil, then Spanish culture is an evil, Spanish history is a retrograde deformation of truth, Spanish architecture is an overpowering monstrosity that must be destroyed.” The Republicans were, in contrast, if not foreigners themselves, then inspired by foreign ideas, by “the infiltration of French liberalism and Russian Bolshevism.” In Spain, Wall had found a “war of two worlds,” a war of “Catholic civilisation against liberal civilisation and its Marxist product.” Again, as in the December 1936 editorial, Fascism was, strikingly, much less of a problem for Wall than liberalism.46 Wall’s pro-Franco stand seriously damaged the intellectual quality of Colosseum. Its great strength had been Wall’s openness to viewpoints other than his own, but by the end of 1937 Colosseum had begun to resemble the Tablet in the final years of Oldmeadow’s editorship, with few, if any, dissenting voices. The final contributions of Maritain and Gurian appeared in the September 1937 number. Gurian objected, in a letter to the editor, to the notion, advanced in the December 1936 pro-Franco editorial, that authoritarian regimes of the right posed less of a threat to Christianity than socialist or even liberal governments. Gurian pointed out that the “renewal of Catholicism in many lands, the fact that it is again possible for Catholics to practise their religion and develop their institutions freely and openly, is due to Liberal-democratic ideas and conceptions.” Fascism, in contrast, rather than stand in opposition to the process of secularization—a key factor in Wall’s increasing hostility to liberalism—“absolutely continues” it. In the Fascist state, there was not “any question of a renewal of Christian culture, but only a process for the centralisation of authority.” “The Fascist restoration of authority and renewal of culture,” Gurian concluded, “has nothing to do with the renewal of true authority and Christian culture.” Maritain’s final piece was explicitly critical of Franco. The war in Spain could lead only to destruction, and therefore he could support neither side. A Republican triumph would continue the violent anticlericalism that had marked the last days of the Popular Front government in Spain. A victory for Franco would result in state domination of the Church.47

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

319

As Wall’s political opinions became much more strident, his willingness to tolerate dissenting views evaporated. His correspondence with Dawson, for example, was marked by his increasing bitterness toward Maritain. Wall accused Maritain of “stirring up trouble among Catholics” in the United States, advised Frank Sheed to publish translations of Maritain’s French critics, and urged Dawson to challenge Maritain in print. The French Catholic intellectuals of the left—defined simply as those who refused to support Franco—Wall dismissed as allowing “traditional French politics,” that is, hatred and fear of Germany, to affect their judgment. He also charged, inconsistently, that those in Maritain’s circle were “unrepresentative of French culture” because of their Protestant and Jewish backgrounds (Maritain’s roots were Protestant, his wife’s Jewish). For Wall, therefore, the Maritain circle was both too French and not French enough. By 1939 he was even expressing his hope to Dawson that the new pope, Pius XII, would take Action Française off the Index and put Maritain on it.48 To Dawson’s credit, Wall’s antagonism to Maritain apparently left him bewildered. He wondered at one point why Wall kept bringing up the French philosopher in their correspondence. Dawson, however, as his own attitude toward the Spanish Civil War demonstrated, shared Wall’s political position and had parted ways with Maritain. Dawson was in fact one of six signers of a letter in support of the December 1936 editorial to which Gurian and Maritain had objected. Not only Dawson but also Frank Sheed—Sheed & Ward took over the publication of Colosseum beginning with the June 1937 number—continued to work closely with Wall. Indeed, when Wall decided for financial reasons in 1938 that he could no longer edit the quarterly, there was an interminable discussion among Wall, Dawson, and Sheed as to what should be done with the journal. At first it was suggested that Dawson might assist Wall as coeditor of the quarterly. Subsequently, they decided at Dawson’s insistence to transform Colosseum into a new journal, to be called Europe, which would eschew the Catholic emphasis of the former in favor of a more ecumenical, Dawsonite, historical and sociological approach to the contemporary crisis. In any event, the war intervened.49

320

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Dawson’s own writings of the period in many respects confirmed his agreement with many of the political positions that Wall had staked out in Colosseum. Religion and the Modern State (1935), culled from essays he had published in a number of journals during the previous two years, including Colosseum, was the best selling of Dawson’s writings on the contemporary crisis. It was also his most controversial, and it is easy to understand why many people, perhaps having read the volume less than carefully, misunderstood Dawson. One could without difficulty misinterpret Religion and the Modern State to be a Bellocian attack on liberal democracy and a defense of Fascism. Algar Thorold, former editor of the Dublin Review, writing to Dawson in 1934, referred to rumors that Dawson had “gone Fascist”—rumors likely based on a much-discussed series of essays that Dawson had contributed to the Catholic Times, essays that became the core of Religion and the Modern State.50 In Religion and the Modern State, Dawson further developed his central belief, expressed earlier in Progress and Religion, that the process of secularization, by sapping European civilization of Christianity, its vital spiritual principle, had led directly to the contemporary crisis. He pointed out that though religion had been forced to withdraw from public life, the modern nation-state in particular had not been satisfied to leave it at that. “The new secularized civilization,” Dawson asserted, “is not content to dominate the outer world and to leave man’s inner life to religion; it claims the whole man.” Christianity, in his estimation, now confronted “a world”—not only a handful of dictatorships—“which will accept no appeal from its judgment, and which recognizes no higher power than its own will.” “The modern State, not only in Russia and Germany, but throughout the world,” Dawson argued, “claims to dominate and control the whole life of society and the individual.” Even in parliamentary democracies, he feared, the state had begun to exhibit totalitarian tendencies. “It may, I think, even be argued,” he concluded, “that Communism in Russia, National Socialism in Germany, and Capitalism and Liberal Democracy in the Western countries are really three forms of the same thing, and that they are all moving by different but parallel paths to the same goal, which

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

321

is the mechanization of human life and the complete subordination of the individual to the state and to the economic process.”51 Much of the criticism of Religion and the Modern State, both contemporary and subsequent, stemmed from Dawson’s first chapter, in which he warned that the continental dictatorships of the right represented a real threat and that Mussolini’s Fascists in particular could not simply be dismissed. Dawson diagnosed Fascism as revolutionary Sorelian syndicalism purged of its Marxist emphasis on class struggle. In his estimation, it was this rejection of class conflict that made Fascism particularly formidable, because it placed the Fascists “on the side of solidarity and social unity, thereby appealing to the sentiment of national patriotism which still remains a very real force in every European country.” The Fascist economic system of “national syndicates and corporations” also contributed to its effectiveness as a political movement. “The advantage of this system,” he observed, comparing it to Marxist socialism, “is that it establishes national control and prepares the way for a planned system of national economy without involving the immense wastage and suffering that must inevitably accompany any attempt to destroy the existing economic machinery and to ‘liquidate’ one class for the benefit of another.” Instead of “outlawing the middle classes and treating them as public enemies,” Fascism, according to Dawson, “brings them into its system and makes them co-partners with the proletariat in the corporate state.” This economic system also in his view had advantages over liberal capitalism. It put an “end to unrestricted competition and to the economic anarchy of the laissez faire system” and protected industry from being strangled by the “competing selfishness of capitalists and trade unionists,” yet still managed not only to maintain “individual responsibility and initiative” but also to allow industries largely to govern themselves.52 When one took into account Dawson’s description of the advantages of fascism and his criticism of liberalism, as well as his belief in the need for a strong leader, unfettered by the “party machine” and “departmental bureaucracy,” it was easy to understand why ­rumors had circulated that Dawson had become a Fascist sympathizer. ­Dawson

322

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

himself later maintained, however, that “Religion and the Modern State was fundamentally anti-totalitarian.” “Its essential thesis,” he pointed out, “is that totalitarianism is not merely a matter of political instrumentality . . . but that it represents the inevitable culmination of the secularization of Western culture through the mass order of the modern state: a process of which the earlier phases are to be seen in the revolutionary movement and in the types of 19th century liberalism described in the encyclicals of Pius IX and Leo XIII, and which has now been fully realized in the new post-1917 party dictatorships.” His critics, Dawson argued, had mistaken his “statement of the totalitarian position” for his own position.53 Dawson’s defense was convincing, at least when it came to the charges of philo-fascism. The first chapter of Religion and the Modern State was not an argument in favor of authoritarianism but a warning to the remaining democracies of Western Europe that totalitarianism represented a dire threat. Likewise, his call for a strong leader with a personal relationship to his countrymen was a recognition that it was just this sort of personal loyalty to a political leader that had made Fascism such a powerful force on the Continent. Nor was it manifestly antidemocratic per se. Noting that Roosevelt in the United States had established himself as just such a governor, Dawson argued that such a leader need not be a dictator, that it was only by such personal leadership that “democratic institutions can be vivified and raised from the level of political machinery to become organs of a truly free society.”54 Religion and the Modern State was in fact Dawson’s consideration of how a Christian ought to respond to the challenge of the modern collectivist state in all its forms. Faced with governments that increasingly encroached on the traditional provinces of the family, the church, and other voluntary associations, and confronted by nation-states that increasingly refused to accept any alternative claims of spiritual allegiance for its citizens, Dawson argued that it was one’s duty to oppose actively the idolization of the state throughout the modern world. He cautioned that Christianity ought not to tie itself to any one political or economic system. Fearing that this would reduce religion to a

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

323

secular idealism associated with whatever political cause was popular, he maintained instead that the Church needed to establish itself as the “natural frontier” (here he was quoting Karl Barth) beyond which the state could not pass. This was scarcely the argument of an authoritarian apologist.55 Where Religion and the Modern State was weakest, however, was in Dawson’s failure to distinguish clearly enough between liberal democracies and dictatorships. Throughout, he conflated democracies and authoritarian regimes as contributing alike to the coming collectivist state. In defending himself against charges of moral equivalence, Dawson subsequently maintained that he had pointed out “again and again that the problem has reached a much more acute phase in the dictator states than it has in the liberal democracies.” He clearly believed, however, that the modern nation-state, whether democratic or dictatorial, was becoming totalitarian. The “movement towards State control in every department of life is a universal one,” he maintained, “and not to be confused with the political tenets of a party.” However much Dawson may have protested, these were hardly the words of a supporter of liberal democracy, nor were they those, in the final analysis, of someone who distinguished sharply enough between democratic government and dictatorship. While Dawson was critical of Fascism, he was ambivalent at best about liberal democracy. It was easy to understand, despite his protestations, how critics could have accused him of moral equivalence.56 Despite the incipient differences between the followers of Dawson and the disciples of Belloc, the two groups thus remained in agreement on the substantial issues. Indeed, in the second half of the 1930s the viewpoints of the Bellocians and Dawsonites had converged in many respects. Anti-Communism became of much greater significance to almost all English Catholic intellectuals, whether they gravitated to Dawson or Belloc. The Spanish Civil War became the central issue in the struggle against Communism and on behalf of the Church, both for Bellocians and for Dawsonites. That both groups within the English Catholic intellectual community ultimately, and unambiguously, supported Franco’s Nationalists, almost to a person,

324

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

illustrated not only what they shared with each other but also the extent of the gulf that separated them, and indeed the majority of England’s Catholics, from England’s non-­Catholic intellectuals and also from their non-Catholic fellow countrymen and countrywomen. Whatever their differences in focus and in their understanding of history, or theology, or art and literature, England’s Catholic intellectual community retained its cohesiveness.

World War II The continued unity of the English Catholic intellectual community centered not only on anti-Communism but also on a shared criticism of parliamentary democracy and enmity to liberalism in both its nineteenth­-century and contemporary manifestations. The predominance of such antidemocratic views among English Catholic intellectuals presented a problem. Admiration for authoritarianism abroad and criticism of parliamentary democracy at home were not the recipe for patriotic support of Britain in a war that was becoming increasingly likely. English Catholic writers had rejected the idea that the Spanish Civil War represented a battle between democracy and Fascism. How would they react to war involving Britain if it were to be framed in those terms? How would England’s Catholic writers respond to a potential wartime alliance with the Soviet Union? What would their reaction be to a war against any or all of the traditionally Catholic nation-states of the Continent, those such as Italy, or Portugal, or Spain, or even, eventually, Vichy France, which professed to govern according to Catholic principles? Would the English Catholic intellectual community consider parliamentary democracy worth defending? Could the Bellocian and Dawsonite wings of the community hold together, or would each group take a different position? Could these wings even sustain their own integrity, or would England’s Catholic intellectual community be shattered by the pressure of war into so many isolated individuals? In the event, English Catholic intellectuals strongly supported Britain’s declaration of war against Germany on 3 September 1939. To

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

325

some extent this was because they had never apologized for Nazism as they had for Italian Fascism. Belloc’s own hostility to Germany was partially responsible for this. Although Belloc himself had misdiagnosed Nazism as just another manifestation of Prussian militarism, he and Chesterton had consistently condemned the new regime for its racism and anti-Semitism and had criticized the Nazis’ antiCatholicism from the beginning. The English Catholic press, for its part, had continually chronicled the Nazi persecution of the Church in Germany. While it was true that many English Catholic writers, Belloc excepted, had been supporters of appeasement, Poland’s status as an iconic Catholic nation among the Bellocians in particular meant that English Catholic intellectuals approved of a war in defense of its borders, when they had not wanted to go to war on behalf of Czechoslovakia the previous year.57 Most significantly, the Nazi-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939 freed English Catholics from their earlier concern that a war against Germany would necessarily benefit the Communists. As the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms, the first novel in his Sword of Honour trilogy depicting World War II, explained of the pact: “The enemy at last was in plain view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off.” Although previously a strong supporter of appeasement, Christopher Hollis could now define the choice as between Britain on the one hand and Hitler and Stalin on the other. Even the Catholic Herald, heretofore as earnest as Hollis had been to avoid confrontation with Germany, was forced to acknowledge the justice of the struggle. Jerrold, who was a columnist for the Catholic Herald, was jubilant that the Soviets would not be an ally in the war against the Nazis, and he expected that Russia’s pact with Germany, by revealing the extent of Soviet perfidy, would disillusion English supporters of the Soviet Union and therefore destroy Communist influence in Britain.58 The question confronting English Catholic intellectuals in September 1939, then, was not whether they could support the war but how best to contribute. Although support for the war was strong, active military service was not a consideration for most of them. The remaining members of the older generation—Belloc, Gill, and

326

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

McNabb—were to prove incapable of contributing much at all. Both Gill and McNabb died during the war, the former in 1940 and the latter in 1943, while Belloc himself was dealt a severe blow when his son Peter died of pneumonia in April 1941 while on active duty in Scotland. Belloc suffered a debilitating stroke in January 1942 and never regained his powers of mind. This was to be the younger generation’s war. Even its members, however, were all over thirty years of age, with most nearer forty. Waugh would serve as an officer in a number of commando and special service units, and Hollis would serve part of the war as an intelligence officer with the Royal Air Force. As for the rest, most remained at their prewar posts. Their talents as writers, speakers, and publishers, however, were to make them ideal propagandists, as the Ministry of Information recognized.59 The consensus of September 1939 did not endure. The so-called phony war that lasted until the Nazi invasion of the Low Countries in May 1940 provided the opportunity for Catholic intellectuals to consider more fully the war and their own role in it. Most contributors to the English Catholic intellectual community had concerns about both the way the war would be fought and the world that would emerge after the war. Was it a war in defense of Western civilization? Was Christianity an element? Who was the enemy? Was it merely Germany and Japan, or was the Soviet Union also a foe? What about the still supposedly neutral Italians? How was the war to be won? Would a negotiated peace be possible, or would invasion of Germany and the destruction of the Nazi regime be necessary? A chief articulator of such questions was Barbara Ward, a significant new contributor to the English Catholic intellectual community, who began to achieve attention only in 1939. Born in 1914, Ward was the daughter of an Ipswich solicitor with Quaker roots and a devoutly Catholic mother who raised her daughter in her faith. She was educated first at a local convent school and then at a lycée in France. After subsequently studying for a year at the Sorbonne, Ward had returned to England and matriculated in autumn 1932 at Sommerville College, Oxford, where she earned a first-class degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics three years later. She then began

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

327

studies, under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (informally known as Chatham House after its location at St. James Square, London), for a doctorate dealing with the economic and political situation in contemporary Austria.60 It is unclear when exactly Ward discontinued her postgraduate studies, but her association with Chatham House led directly, once the war began, to a position at the Foreign Research and Press Service (FRPS), which was in effect Chatham House relocated to Balliol College and expanded. The goal of the FRPS was to analyze open-source data from abroad, primarily news media. Ward worked first for R. W. Seton-Watson, the diplomatic historian, in the southeastern Europe section, before moving to the Italian section later in September 1939. Although she was dismissed in early October—it remains unclear why—she eventually contributed several essays, including Russian Foreign Policy (1940) and Italian Foreign Policy (1941) to the Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs (a series that was one product of the FRPS’s research), and wrote another volume, Turkey (1942), which must also have been, in part, the fruit of her labors there. When she left Oxford she quickly found new employment as an assistant editor at the Economist, to which she had already been a contributor, and later in 1940 was appointed its foreign editor. At some point early in the war she also began working for the Ministry of Information, most likely supporting in some capacity the ministry’s propaganda efforts.61 Ward considered herself a liberal. The first entry in her extant diary, dated 17 September 1936, deplored that “Mussolini got away with Abyssinia,” lamented the “bloody civil war” in Spain, and attacked that “State worship,” whether Communist or Fascist, that had seemingly taken over the entire world. Although Ward did not flinch from attacking Communism, which she described as “materialism apotheosized into a religion,” neither did she apologize for Fascism, which was equally repellent to her. Mussolini she found odious, nor did she side with the Francoists in Spain. Indeed, she explicitly opposed the idea that the Church had to ally with Fascists against the Communists. To Ward, it was repugnant that the “Church is apparently smiling on one brand of [state] worshipers to combat the others.” “Christianity,”

328

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

she lamented, “seems to find itself everywhere on the side of the fortunates, the possessors, the haves of this life.”62 But Ward was not without crises regarding her political beliefs, as a January 1937 diary entry illustrated. Previously she had held to the “dogma that a man can only come to fullest and best self-­expression when he is left to himself and allowed to think and do what he is convinced is best for him.” She had believed strongly, therefore, in a “liberty that assures to each one a reasonable degree of . . . of noninterference in his private personal ideas, behavior and relations with other men.” Her political faith, she acknowledged, therefore lay in “nineteenth-century liberalism proper, the consummation of humanism, the enthronement of man as an end in himself.” Now she wondered if this political philosophy was not hackneyed and ultimately useless in the contemporary world. What good was it, she asked, to be “freed from the yoke of injustice and oppression if the new liberty is only a means to further oppression”? Reflecting on laissez-faire economic liberalism, she considered that perhaps the authoritarian regimes of the Continent were correct in attacking such freedom as the “freedom to bring about evil.” “So of course argue the Fascists,” Ward observed, “and create an ethical state—but damn it, an ethical state run by an ethical man wouldn’t be so bad, not half so bad as a democracy run by the lowest common denominator.” Like Belloc, Chesterton, and even Dawson, Ward seemed in danger of succumbing to the siren song of the scions of the new order.63 Ward’s reflections illuminated the tenuous grip of liberalism even on someone who had considered her political philosophy settled. The same despairing tone manifest in this early diary entry was also evident in her thoughts on the war in its first months, as her diary of 7 and 8 October demonstrated. She wondered what it was that Britain was fighting for. She lamented that the likely result would only be to make “Europe safe for Stalin.” There could be no just war, in her view, or any peace, “until we take on Russia too.” “How can you get a passionate feeling about your cause,” she despaired, “when you are fighting Hitler so as to lighten Stalin’s task.” Indeed, of the two, she found Stalin the “more repellent.”64

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

329

While it remains unclear from her diary exactly how she dealt with her despair, Ward’s attitude toward the war changed dramatically between early October and mid-November 1939. Her Economist article, “The Liberal Tradition,” which was the fruit of her reflection on the reasons for fighting, demonstrates the conclusions she reached. In this essay Ward put the case for a “break away from the mortmain of ideology and return to our secular British tradition.” Both right and left in Britain, she argued, had abandoned this tradition and looked instead abroad for political solutions to contemporary ills. The right was ready to “see Bolshevism behind every lamp-post” and, consequently, “to forgive almost any villainy to an anti-­Communist.” While the British right remained “good democrats provided there is no threat to the status quo,” Ward observed, “tenderness for Fascist restorers of order in foreign countries might, in changed circumstances, lead to something other than democracy at home.” The left, on the other hand, had, in Ward’s estimation “taken over, more or less uncritically, the Marxist creed.” Among the British left, she lamented, “admiration for and belief in Russia and loose acceptance of the Marxian categories had become general.”65 The recent pact between Hitler and Stalin, Ward emphasized, had, however, exposed the ideological fantasies of both the right and the left in Britain. Solutions to political and economic troubles, it was now clear, were not to be found in revolutionary doctrines imported from the Continent, whether Marxist or Fascist. Britain needed instead to look to its own indigenous political tradition, namely, liberalism. Liberalism had successfully fused Christian-based notions of the “dignity and liberty of the human person, the rule of law as the basis of society and the subordination of Government both to law and to the purposes of the citizen,” with Enlightenment “respect of reason and the belief in objective truth.” Ward pointed out that liberalism had translated these principles “into terms of social fact and actual government,” and the impressive results had been “self-government (nationally and locally), legal reform, universal education, international co-operation.” Liberalism’s great accomplishments had, however, been forgotten, “because of the incompleteness of economic Liberalism.” Its failure to

330

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

“cure the evil of social inequality” had led many, wrongly, to dismiss liberalism in its entirety. Ward argued that liberalism needed to be readapted to the contemporary world. For Ward, the war was thus to be fought on behalf of a new and reinvigorated liberalism, for a liberalism with firm roots in Christendom, and ultimately therefore for a restoration of the “spiritual and intellectual tradition of the West.” Once Ward had established to her own satisfaction Britain’s reason for fighting, she began to search for others of a like mind, to help define the war in these terms and to bolster Britain’s war effort. She was already associated with the small and heretofore uninfluential group of democratic-minded Catholics associated with Fr. Leo O’Hea, S.J., the Catholic Worker’s College at Oxford, and the Catholic Social Guild. She recognized, however, that she and her friends would need allies among the more powerful and well-known Catholic intellectuals, and she turned, therefore, to Dawson and to Cardinal Hinsley.66 In November 1939, a few weeks after losing her position with the FRPS, Barbara Ward met with Fr. Victor White, O.P., and Manya Harari to discuss transforming the Dublin Review into an organ to “expound the ideas of Christian humanism.” Christopher Dawson would be the “nominal editor,” but Ward would act as subeditor and do much of the work. Two weeks after first broaching the topic with White and Harari, Ward lunched with Dawson at Oxford, where he was then living. She found him “very anxious indeed to see a review started representing his line of Catholic liberalism­”—which she acknowledged sharing, though on a “lower and less cultivated plane.” By the end of their discussion Dawson asked her to be his assistant editor should he succeed in launching such a journal, and Ward was “ready to sell [her] head for the chance of being his collaborator.” When they met again four days later, they spoke not about a new journal but rather, as Ward had already discussed with White and Harari, about making the Dublin Review their vehicle. Dawson and Ward agreed that the new Dublin Review ought not to be a “purely Catholic official organ” but must include, as Dawson explained to her, “men of good faith from all shades of opinion.” “His ideas are so exactly mine (hardly extraordinary since so much of them are derived

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

331

from his writings),” Ward concluded, “and his designs for the Review are drawn on exactly the lines I would have chosen.”67 Although he had begun to consider turning the Dublin Review into the type of ecumenical journal he had hoped to launch since the demise of Bernard Wall’s Colosseum, Dawson remained uncertain as to whether establishing a new journal might still be the better option. David Mathew, bishop auxiliary of Westminster and leading adviser to Cardinal Hinsley, joined Ward in persuading him to take the Dublin Review editorship rather than attempt to found his own review. In a 14 December 1939 letter to Mathew, Dawson reiterated that he was more “attracted” to a new journal but that he did not “wish to press this scheme against the judgment of those who are in a better position to know what is possible and what would be most useful to Catholic interests.” He remained hesitant, however, about accepting the Dublin editorship, because he was “doubtful” of his “ability to make something of the Dublin under war conditions.”68 In part, Dawson was skeptical about the Dublin Review’s publishing situation. The journal was owned by the Archdiocese of Westminster but published by Burns & Oates, which by the beginning of the war had become a subsidiary of Eyre and Spottis­woode. Throughout 1939 Cardinal Hinsley had attempted to sell the journal to the publishers, but he had ultimately decided to retain ownership and to allow Burns & Oates to continue to publish it on a yearby-year rolling contract for the duration of the war—after which he hoped to sell it, perhaps to Douglas Woodruff. The gift of the editorship therefore remained in the hands of Cardinal Hinsley, but the publishers possessed some influence over the journal as well, a situation that was to pose problems, not least because Douglas Jerrold was a director at Eyre and Spottiswoode and chairman of Burns & Oates, and he attended closely to the affairs of the Dublin Review.69 David Mathew met several days after his discussions with Dawson with Barbara Ward and Oliver Eyre, a young director at the publisher, to consider further the Dublin Review project. At issue was the direction the journal would take. Ward pleaded for a journal “on

332

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

the lines of Liberal reconstruction, European tradition, and the rest,” and maintained that Dawson and Harari were in her camp. Mathew and especially Eyre, whom Ward dismissed as a “tedious youth with crudely Right-wing views—Spain and Italy can do no wrong,” countered, pushing for a conservative Catholic quarterly.70 During the first months of 1940, negotiations continued among Dawson and Ward, Jerrold representing the publishers, and Mathew on behalf of the Archdiocese of Westminster. Ward became better acquainted with Dawson and found him increasingly difficult. The least setback in their plans for the Dublin Review left him depressed and often suspicious, fearing that what Ward called the “orthodox Catholicism” of Jerrold and Hollis (whom Jerrold had recently appointed a director at Burns & Oates) was scuttling his efforts. Ward shared Dawson’s concerns if not his despair. On meeting Jerrold, she observed, “I dislike him instinctively.” In his assurance of his own rectitude, she was reminded of “Cromwell and the Covenanters.” Indeed, Ward began to wonder if the “Jerrold-Hollis Right-wing pressure” would be too powerful to overcome and at one point lamented, “Shall we do anything with this dead weight against us?”71 Ward discovered also that it required incredible effort on her part to keep up Dawson’s spirits. She found him a “very loveable character” but recognized that as his assistant she would need to be “mother, friend, co-adjutor, angel, dynamo, devil’s advocate” rolled into one. It was affection for him and respect for his ideas that inspired her. “What is most fortunate,” Ward noted in early January 1940, “is the extent to which his idea of what he wants to do and mine tally—we want the Review to be a place where Right and Left can be drawn together—the bond being an intelligent and affectionate attempt to revive Liberal principles and apply them to modern conditions—Christopher is to the Right of Centre and I am to the Left.”72 By the time Ward returned in late April 1940 from a three-week trip to Rome for the Economist, Dawson had decided to accept the editorship of the Dublin Review, and Ward was cajoling him into contacting potential contributors, including T. S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain, and Nicholas Berdyaev. Though he tried, characteristically, to back

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

333

out in late April, the first issue of the Dawson-edited Dublin Review went to the printers on 22 June 1940. “If you had suggested to me a month ago that it would be possible,” a relieved Ward exclaimed, “I should no doubt have laughed.” As for Jerrold, in the end he convinced himself that, whatever Ward might believe, Dawson would ultimately agree with him. He informed Ward that he trusted Dawson, “because he’d known Dawson for many years and Dawson was probably more of a crusted old Tory than we might imagine.” When she countered that Dawson had “respect for Liberalism,” Jerrold replied, yes, but in his “own specialist sense of the word.” By the time Jerrold realized his mistake it was too late.73 Dawson introduced the first issue of the new Dublin Review with an “Editorial Note” defining the war as a defense of Western civilization and ultimately “a battle for the possession of the human soul.” Britain and France, he maintained, were “defending our civilization against the blind assault of mass despotism and the idolatry of power.” It was, not surprisingly, for Dawson a spiritual conflict. Just as in his historical scholarship he had argued that religion was the root of culture, so now he maintained that neither “political means” nor “military victory” would carry the day. Only intellectual forces, united in “defence of the spiritual foundations of our civilization,” could defeat the totalitarian foe.74 In order to meet this existential threat, Dawson believed, Britain, France, and whatever allies they could muster needed to unite intellectually for common action. Divisions between right and left had allowed the totalitarian threat to metastasize and therefore had served, and continued to serve, only the purposes of the enemy. Both ideological camps, Dawson argued, failed to grasp that they had much more in common with one another in a democratic society than they had with the totalitarian extremes—Fascist or Communist. Yet when Fascists tried to “form a common front” with conservatives, or Communists with liberals, they had unfortunately all too often been accommodated. European civilization could not fight this enemy by borrowing its ideology, but that was what had occurred when the right apologized for the Fascists and the left applauded the Communists. “All the

334

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

positive intellectual and spiritual forces of Western culture,” Dawson urged instead, “should come together in defence of their common values and traditions against their common enemies.”75 The Dublin Review, Dawson believed, was uniquely positioned to consider the “fundamental issues in the light of the Christian principles from which they have sprung.” Catholics could see beyond political ideology. They were not “involved in the immediate issues of the conflict in the same way as are the political parties,” he argued optimistically, “for they belong to a supranational spiritual society, which is more united than any political body and which possesses an autonomous body of principles and doctrines on which to base their judgements.” Dawson explicitly referred to recent French Catholic reviews as an example—given his recruitment of Maritain, it seemed clear he had Sept and the other more liberal journals in mind—and hoped for increased collaboration between the Catholic intellectuals of the two nations. He emphasized, however, that his appeal was addressed not only to Catholics, or, even more broadly, Christians. “The Christian cause,” he maintained, was now the “cause of all who are defending our civilisation.” The immediate aim of the Dublin Review, then, would be to “make public opinion alive to the issues that are at stake and to develop the consciousness of Western culture and the spirit of loyalty to the Western tradition.”76 If Jerrold had been reading closely Dawson’s first contribution to his new Dublin Review he must have detected several causes for concern. First, Dawson had defined the war in absolute terms as a “battle for the possession of the human soul.” There could be no compromise with the Nazi regime if this was the case, no negotiated peace. Second, Jerrold’s “crusted old Tory” was pleading for solidarity between right and left and arguing that ideological differences were insignificant given the stakes. Third, Dawson was explicitly taking as his model contemporary French Catholic reviews, a number of which had opposed the Francoists during the Spanish Civil War and had thus become anathema to Jerrold. Fourth, Dawson was reaching out to non-Catholics, with the implication that he would welcome their contributions to the journal. All these views were objectionable to Jerrold, but it was the last that would cause the most trouble.

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

335

Dawson’s Dublin Review stood in stark contrast to the journal under his predecessor, Lord Clonmore. If there had been a unifying theme in the final numbers of the pre-Dawson Dublin Review, it was that of a last desperate attempt to defend the notion that Mussolini would inspire a Catholic political revival in Europe, turning on his Nazi allies and leading a crusade against Communists in the bargain.77 A glance at the title pages of the first numbers of Dawson’s Dublin Review, on the other hand, sufficed to reveal the extent of the changes. European contributors, particularly Frenchmen, vied with the English for predominance, where before there had been only English, and many contributors now hailed from the left of the political spectrum rather than the right. Dawson’s inaugural issue included, for example, a thoughtful essay by Paul Vignaux, a scholar of medieval philosophy and director of studies at the prestigious École des Haute Études in Paris, on the political divisions among French Catholics. ­ Vignaux posited two “main types of Catholic opinion”: on the one hand, that which “conforms to the political opportunism of the Right,” and, on the other, “a living movement of thought which represents a free reflection on actual events.” There was no ambiguity as to which side he favored. Another Frenchman, Stanislas Fumet, editor of the liberal Catholic journal Temps Présent added his views in “What Is France?” The first number also included a piece by the leading anti-Nazi Hermann Rauschning, who was joined in subsequent numbers by other prominent German and Austrian anti-Nazi exiles, including the political philosophers J. P. Mayer and Franz Borkenau. Borkenau had been until recently a Communist, and his Spanish Cockpit, an eyewitness account of the Spanish Civil War, was decidedly sympathetic to the Republicans.78 If the first number of Dawson’s Dublin Review was thus at least a shot across Jerrold’s bow, the second left no doubt that Dawson was serious about his desire to include not only a broad range of Catholics but also non-Catholics. Maritain contributed an article titled “Christian Equality,” Dawson’s friend E. I. Watkin, a longtime critic of the Bellocians, added a piece titled “Christianity and Humanism,” and A. D. Lindsay, Master of Balliol, supplied “Christian Individualism and Scientific Individualism.” Lindsay’s contribution was of ­particular

336

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

note, for not only was he not a Catholic, but he was also a well-known supporter of left-wing causes, having gained notoriety during a famous October 1938 by-election, when he had stood, unsuccessfully, as the Independent Progressive candidate for Oxford City, running against appeasement and Munich. Perhaps the most remarkable inclusion among the new Dublin Review’s first contributors was George Bernanos. A French Catholic intellectual considered a man of the right, indeed a royalist, before the Spanish Civil War, Bernanos had responded to the savagery of the Francoists on Majorca, which he had witnessed, with Les grands cimetières sous la lune (1938)—published as the Diary of My Times in English—a devastating condemnation not only of the Spanish Nationalists and their Italian allies for committing the atrocities but also of the Church, which he believed had abetted the Nationalists. The second number of Dawson’s Dublin Review included Bernanos’s “A French Catholic to Herr Hitler,” in which he promised Hitler from the French people, “we shall get the better of you and yours.”79 Jerrold, then, had evidently misunderstood Dawson. Dawson had remained true to his promise to publish all those “men of good faith” who could contribute to the defense of Western civilization against totalitarianism, whether they were Catholic like Maritain or non­Catholic like Lindsay. Those Catholic writers on the right who advocated accommodation with Nazism, or who retained the Bellocian idealization of Italian Fascism and hostility to parliamentary democracy, he either excluded outright or banished to the book review pages. Those on the left, defined, basically, as those Catholic intellectuals who had not supported Franco, Dawson welcomed to the journal. How could Jerrold have confidently predicted to Barbara Ward that Dawson was a “crusted old Tory” and yet have turned out to be so utterly wrong? Little more than a year before becoming editor of the Dublin Review, Dawson had been planning to launch what he himself had described as a conservative journal. Had his opinions changed so radically in the intervening period? How could the onset of a war that he had in fact foreseen have caused such a sea change in his political philosophy? To answer these questions one must exam-

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

337

ine carefully Dawson’s post–Religion and the Modern State writings on the contemporary crisis. Although in Religion and the Modern State Dawson had exhibited a Bellocian tendency to conflate the authoritarian governments of the Continent with parliamentary democracies, in his final volume published before the war, Beyond Politics (1939), he began to adjust his views to the changed circumstances. As in the earlier volume, Dawson continued to worry that even democracies such as Britain were in danger of becoming totalitarian states, but in the new book he defended liberal parliamentary democracy even as he remained concerned about its weaknesses. Recognizing that Britain would soon have to confront the totalitarian regimes of the Continent and that both government and society would need to be reorganized to do so effectively, Dawson warned his fellow countrymen that they needed to maintain their traditional values of individual freedom and toleration while they transformed in order to meet the threat from abroad. He was particularly concerned that the British state, in combating the dictatorships of the Continent, would become authoritarian like its enemies. Dawson promoted, therefore, the concept of the voluntary association—the traditional foundation of a liberal polity—as the means to mobilize Britain effectively while retaining traditional British liberties. The political party and the state bureaucracy, Dawson stressed, could not be allowed to become the sole basis of political and social organization. There had to be a great voluntary organizational effort among citizens to establish and maintain cultural and intellectual organizations independent of the state.80 In Beyond Politics, therefore, Dawson was emphasizing not the weakness of liberal parliamentary democracy compared to the dangerous totalitarian states, as he had in Religion and the Modern State, but its strength through freedom and individual initiative as reflected in voluntary associations. In this sense Dawson had moved much closer to Barbara Ward than to Douglas Jerrold even before the war. He had begun to defend liberalism but in a way that was not in conflict with his fundamental conservatism, for he grounded his notion of liberalism in tradition, a British tradition of individual freedom and

338

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

tolerance. In this way there was continuity between Dawson’s earlier social criticism and his subsequent work during the war. In his own writings for the Dublin Review during the war, the first two years of which were collected in his Judgment of the Nations, Dawson elaborated on the ideas he had introduced in Beyond Politics, emphasizing even more the importance of liberal democracy. Central to Dawson’s project was his belief that the foundation of modern liberal democracy was authentically Christian. Democratic government, Dawson crucially argued, was neither un-Christian nor the product of modern secularization. Its “roots,” he maintained, “lie deep in the soil of Western Christendom so that it is impossible to understand it aright apart from its religious and cultural background.” The Western “ideal of liberty,” he emphasized, “which is the inspiration of the whole democratic tradition is not a mere consequence of the new political institutions” of the modern world. This ideal “derived its strength from the Christian belief in the absolute and unique value of the human soul.” Democracy, for Dawson, rather than a departure from Christendom, a consequence of secularization, was the outgrowth of Christianity.81 Dawson expanded on this notion of the Christian roots of modern democracy in his subsequent discussion of liberalism. “At the roots of the development of Western freedom and Western democracy,” he argued, “there lies the medieval idea that men possess rights even against the state and that society is not a totalitarian political unit but a community made up of a complex variety of social organisms, each possessing an autonomous life and its own free institutions.” In his analysis this “medieval tradition of political liberties” had combined in seventeenth-century England with the “Christian ideal of spiritual freedom” to produce “the new liberal ideology which was the main inspiration of Western civilization for more than two centuries.” Though political liberalism failed in the twentieth century—in part, according to Dawson, because it had become identified, too narrowly, with laissez-faire economic liberalism—he believed that liberalism remained central to the “immense task” of “social and intellectual reorganization” that would be needed to defeat totalitarianism. It would

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

339

therefore be “impossible to exaggerate the value of the liberal tradition in Western culture and the importance of a liberal renaissance.”82 This is not to say that Dawson had jettisoned his Catholicism for secular faith in liberal democracy. Liberalism would be essential to the task at hand, but ultimately he continued to maintain that the crisis of civilization required a spiritual solution, “a spiritual re-orientation of Western society and a recall to the essential values.” In fact, insofar as liberalism could be identified with secular humanism, Dawson still argued that it had contributed greatly to the contemporary disaster. Modern liberalism’s great weakness, in his estimation, was its lack of properly grounded authority. The League of Nations, that great monument of liberal idealism, had appealed to international law, but it had been a law lacking a proper metaphysical foundation. The league had thus been powerless when faced with nations such as Nazi Germany that refused to recognize any law that transcended the positive law of the state. Dawson advocated a restoration of the notion of a natural law, accessible to human reason, which was ultimately a reflection of divine law. Liberalism, for Dawson, needed to remain true to its religious foundation in order to remain effective.83 Even admiring critics noted of Dawson’s war writings that the renewal of natural law theory and the return to Christian unity were not entirely convincing substantial proposals for winning the war and rebuilding Europe. Despite this critique, what is striking about Dawson’s Dublin Review essays is not only his strong emphasis on the connections between Christianity and democracy but also his promotion of liberalism. In comparison to Religion and the Modern State, let alone the Bellocian hostility to liberal democracy that had dominated English Catholic political thought for some two decades, this represented a sea change.84 The very day that Dawson’s first number of the Dublin Review went to the printers, 22 June 1940, the French and the Germans concluded an armistice dividing France into occupied and unoccupied zones. Ward had hoped that the journal would provide the vehicle through which she and Dawson could explain why Britain was fighting and provide a vision for the postwar world. After the Nazis overran

340

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

France and the Low Countries in a matter of weeks, driving the British army off the Continent, the stakes changed. A quarterly journal had become inadequate, on its own, to the task at hand. The events of May and June 1940 had demonstrated just how quickly the situation could change in wartime, making the articles laboriously written months earlier obsolete by the time they were published. Furthermore, a period of twelve weeks was too long to let views that the Dubliners found a threat to the war effort go unchallenged. This was especially problematic because the English Catholic consensus of September 1939 was fracturing in the wake of France’s fall. During the Munich crisis, the Catholic Herald had been a leading voice of appeasement in the Catholic press. Although its editor, Bedoyère, had tacitly acknowledged the Nazi regime’s repression, he had argued in 1938 that “the triumph of Totalitarianism would be no worse, and probably better, than the internal anarchy in many great Powers likely to result from war, an anarchy that will lead either to a new and more terrible Fascism or a Sovietisation of Europe.” While the Nazi-Soviet pact had led the Catholic Herald to accept grudgingly that the war was necessary and just, Bedoyère became more and more concerned during the first months of 1940 at the potential effects of a total war. Even in September 1939, the Catholic Herald had worried that the war would be fought to impose liberalism—“a word that often covers atheism, socialism, the hidden rule of the money power, moral anarchy”—and to end all dictatorship, even that of neutral nations such as Portugal. Bedoyère’s newspaper considered this overreaching and worried that such a war would transform nondemocratic neutrals and potential allies such as Turkey, Spain, and Portugal into enemies.85 Although Bedoyère had continued to reject the idea that the war was unjustifiable, his ambivalence was apparent in the first months of 1940. In February he expressed his concern that its “inevitable object” would be the “strengthening of the nationalist State” and the “capitalist system.” By March the Catholic Herald was endorsing a peace plan that represented nothing less than capitulation to German demands. After the fall of France and the entry of Italy into the war on the German side in June, Bedoyère’s newspaper only tepidly

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

341

reaffirmed its support for the war. Indeed, it took delight in pointing out that Britain was now fighting against nations whose avowed enemies—Bolshevism, Freemasonry, and Liberalism—were also the enemies of Catholicism. That same month, Bedoyère promoted the moral equivalence of Britain and her totalitarian enemies on the Continent. Reflecting on the events leading up to the war, he argued that it could have been prevented by the “common realisation of the danger equally inherent in the Liberal-Socialism of the Western Powers” and in the “National-Socialism of Germany and Italy.” There was little hope for Europe in the victory of either, Bedoyère asserted, and a danger that the war would only lead to a Communist triumph. Any true liberation of Europe could only come through the “common realisation of the falsity” not only of National Socialism but also of Liberal Socialism, for only through the “fusion” of these ideologies could Europe be restored. Astonishingly, Bedoyère was still convinced that there existed “constructive authoritarian and economic ideas” in Nazism and Fascism and that these could be separated from the “sheer paganism” of the German and Italian regimes.86 Bedoyère’s ambivalence to the war did not go unnoticed by his fellow English Catholic intellectuals. But earlier criticism was dwarfed by the controversy that followed the publication of “A Latin Catholic Bloc” in the Catholic Herald of 12 July 1940. In this editorial the paper expressed its hope that the traditionally Catholic triumvirate of France, Italy, and Spain could help to establish an “anti-Bolshevik, Christian authoritarian bloc” to act as a Catholic counterweight to the “liberal-secularist-protestant-popular front tendencies of Great Britain, American, Russian, and even Prussia.” Catholics in the three “Latin” nations, Bedoyère‘s newspaper advocated, could encourage their coreligionists in Germany and Austria so as to Christianize the Nazi regime and so bring Germany into the bloc. Britain, the Catholic Herald hoped, could eventually move into the bloc as well, and it would be the task of England’s Catholics to facilitate this. Above all, English Catholics needed to maintain ties with their coreligionists in Italy, France, and Spain to help them battle pro-Nazi elements in those nations. It was the “patriotic duty” of English Catholics, therefore,

342

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

to warn their fellow citizens of the dangers of alienating the peoples of these nations. For the Catholic Herald, then, Germany and Italy might be the enemy of the moment, but the true enemy remained secular-liberal-socialism.87 By any reckoning, July 1940 was a singularly unpropitious time to be promoting the idea of an authoritarian Latin Catholic bloc. Of the nations Bedoyère included in his bloc, Italy was at war with Britain, Spain was tenuously neutral and much more inclined to the Nazi side, and France had surrendered to Germany and, it was not inconceivable, might yet reenter the war as a German ally. Indeed, Britain faced a potential German invasion and was in real danger of losing the war, yet Bedoyère was still apologizing for Germany’s actions and attempting to ally English Catholics with nations at the moment intent on defeating their homeland.88 Bedoyère’s fellow English Catholic intellectuals were quick to recognize in his response to the current crisis errors that needed to be quickly combated if not entirely discredited. The Catholic Herald’s portrayal of the war not only aroused the concern of Cardinal Hinsley; it caused anxiety at the Ministry of Information. The worry was that what the Catholic Herald’s critics labeled a defeatist view would become predominant among English Catholics and that this would hamper the war effort of the entire nation. The Catholic response to Bedoyère’s “defeatism” was the Sword of the Spirit. One contemporary remembered the new movement as having been “launched by Cardinal Hinsley, animated by Manya Harari, put into operation by Barbara Ward, and intellectually nourished by Christopher Dawson.” This description was accurate, as long as one understands that Hinsley was officially launching a movement that owed its genesis to others. The Sword of the Spirit was the brainchild of Ward and her liberal Catholic friends. If before the fall of France Ward had already worried about the level of support among English Catholics for the war, in June 1940 she became even more concerned. Meeting Jerrold and Hollis later that month, Ward acknowledged that Hollis was a “patriot” but deplored the attitude of Jerrold. “Better stop the war,” she mimicked him, “one best hope to tack onto the

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

343

Latin Bloc—Spain, Italy, France,” “Churchill unjust to Petain . . . and so on.” “It made my hair stand on end,” Ward concluded. Views such as his, she recognized, had to be countered before they could influence English Catholics.89 A week before meeting with Jerrold, Ward had addressed the Plater Society, a mostly female group of democratically minded Catholics associated with the Catholic Worker College at Oxford. Her goal was to “try and produce some enthusiastic Catholic support for the war and the defence of Christianity.” Some eighty individuals attended, including Dr. Letitia Fairfield, who argued that English Catholics had been responsible for “encouraging Hitlerism.” In her diary Ward agreed, commenting that “this is a thing we are seeing all too painfully in France—a sort of spurious Catholicism who [sic] spittle licks the dictators because they are autocrats and loathes England for being a democracy.”90 The Plater Dining Group met on 8 July, after which its chairperson forwarded to Cardinal Hinsley a seven-page memorandum, composed by Barbara Ward, and requested “that your Eminence would graciously consider the setting up of a committee of representative and expert Catholics to undertake what we believe to be an important Catholic activity at the moment—a wide scale effort to bring home now to the people of this country the Christian values which are at stake in this war, so that a Christian victory and a Christian peace may be ensured.” The memorandum advocated a campaign of prayer, study, and action. Ward emphasized the use of “leaflets, pamphlets, and other publications,” as well as “talks and lectures,” group meetings to discuss the issues, and a widespread press campaign. The local press in particular, she observed, “should be flooded with letters and articles setting out the need for a general re-examination of the Christian values at stake in this war, and of the importance of a living Christianity both in wartime and in the peace that will follow.” Ward noted that the Ministry of Information had helped them with their plans for this new movement, and she urged “close co-operation with the Catholic section of the Religious Department of the Ministry of Information.”91

344

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

On 10 July Ward met with Hinsley to present the plan to him in person. Ward, who had never met the cardinal, found him “an old sweet—old, bent, tired, and worried but charming, good, sympathetic and courageous.” “I outlined to him the scheme for propaganda,” she noted in her diary, “and he agreed completely in the need but asked time to consider the scheme I had put before him.” Two days later she received a “letter from the Cardinal offering to be president of the campaign” and asking her to be “secretary and suggesting a committee.” Over lunch, Ward and Harari met with Bishop Mathew and his brother Gervase, a Dominican priest and scholar, to thresh out the details. Hinsley, she observed, supported her plan for two reasons: because “we need to remain a loyal body” and “to check an anti-popery campaign.” The cardinal was therefore concerned not only to rebut the likes of Jerrold and Bedoyère within the English Catholic community but also to counter non-Catholics, who, he feared, would use Catholic criticism of the war effort to discredit Catholicism, further dividing Britons in a perilous time when national unity was critical.92 The patronage of Cardinal Hinsley was central to the response of Catholic intellectuals during the war. It had been Hinsley who had effectively given the Tablet to Douglas Woodruff, and Woodruff rewarded the decision with his support for Hinsley’s position during the war. That Dawson became editor of the Dublin Review was due primarily to Ward’s initiative, but Hinsley, through David Mathew, deserved credit as well. Indeed, as Mathew informed Ward, the main purpose of putting the Dublin Review in Dawson’s hands was to force him regularly to write. In the case of both the Tablet sale and the Dublin Review editorship, Hinsley’s willingness to cede control over periodicals that the archdiocese owned was an example of his unique ability to recognize talented individuals who could help the Archdiocese of Westminster and the Catholic Church in England and to trust these individuals enough to delegate significant responsibility to them. His decision to heed Ward’s advice and to establish the new movement, the Sword of the Spirit, was yet another example of the cardinal’s strength in this regard.93

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

345

By the time Dawson took over the Dublin Review, spring 1940, Hinsley had already established himself as the most prominent promoter of the war effort among British clergy, Protestant or Catholic. Advised by Woodruff and Dawson, Hinsley had become a frequent speaker for the BBC and a regular correspondent to the Times, attaining through his radio addresses in particular popularity far beyond the Catholics of Britain. According to his biographer, John Heenan, at “the beginning of the war the Cardinal was hailed as a discovery” because of his talks for the BBC. Cardinal Hinsley was able “to make a unique contribution by broadcasting to Europe and South America, where the majority of the thinking population is Catholic, and to the United States of America.” “He was particularly effective,” Heenan concluded, “in sustaining allied morale and disturbing the complacency of neutrals.”94 The common theme of Hinsley’s orations and letters, whether addressed to the people of Britain or to those of enemy and neutral nations, was the justness of Britain’s cause. As he explained in his 10 December 1939 “Sword of the Spirit” address, one of his earliest BBC broadcasts and perhaps his most famous: I am convinced that Britain has engaged in this war in the main for the defence of the things of the spirit. She has taken up arms in the cause of justice and freedom. They who take the sword from lust of power or for racial and party aims shall perish. Against such, armed force may justly defend and protect our country and rights of nations. Yet in the end the “sword of the spirit” will alone convert unjust assailants and re-create peace and good will. For Hinsley, Britain’s cause was ultimately the cause of Christianity. In the same address he emphasized that there could be “be no compromise between Christianity and the rival brands of anti-Christian tyranny.” Indeed, no nation could stand aloof from such a struggle. As Hinsley explained in his 4 August 1940 broadcast to the United States, “This war is in the deepest significance a defence of ­Christian

346

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

civilization” against “the new pagan philosophy,” and therefore “neutrality of the heart is impossible in this struggle.”95 If Hinsley thus patiently exhorted his audience in neutral nations, Hinsley fiercely denounced the Nazi and Fascist regimes. Following the German invasion of the Low Countries in spring 1940, he contributed a letter to the Times in which he referred to the “merciless Nazi hordes,” who would allow “no race, save that imagined by the German Nordic fable, the right to exist except in slavery.” Nazism was the “arch-enemy of mankind,” and Britons must “Awake! or be crushed by the unleashed forces of evil.” Hinsley was just as outspoken in his condemnation of the Italian regime the following month when the Fascists entered the war. “The leaders of Fascism,” Hinsley charged, “have with brutal ‘realism’ broken with the Christian civilisation which built up Europe.” “If for a while there was a hope of securing freedom of conscience for the faithful under such a system,” Hinsley observed, “now there is no longer a possibility of a modus vivendi with this open enemy of the faith of the majority of the Italian people.” Fascism had revealed itself to be no different from Nazism, the cardinal concluded, and “is now committed to the task of aiding and abetting the Hitler programme—to pillage and to grasp, to dominate and then enslave.”96 Hinsley’s indictment of the Italian regime in June 1940 was the culmination of five years of increasingly strong criticism of Fascism. One of his first controversial acts as archbishop had been his denunciation of Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in a widely publicized sermon delivered at the Church of St. Edward the Confessor in Golders Green, 13 October 1935. This was only Hinsley’s first salvo in his battle against Fascism. In reply to a 15 March 1938 letter from an English Catholic requesting that he explain his position on Fascism, Hinsley argued that if Fascism means the doctrine that the “whole man—body and soul—must belong to the State,” then this was “pure unadulterated totalitarianism.” As such, he noted, it had been “condemned by the Pope, because opposed to the Catholic doctrine of the dignity of the human person or individual.” “No Catholic can be a Fascist,” Hinsley concluded, “if he holds that the State is the be all and end all in Society.”97

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

347

Hinsley made his opposition to Fascism public in a famous address, “Liberty—True and False,” given at the Town Hall in Birmingham in February 1939. In part, no doubt, because of letters such as the one referred to in the paragraph above, the Cardinal had become particularly troubled by Fascism’s influence among English Catholics. He therefore urged: Catholics calling themselves Fascists or National Socialists should read Pius XI’s Non abbiamo Bisogno, and the joint Lenten Pastoral of the Bishops of Holland, written in 1934. This pastoral letter shows that, although Fascism and National Socialism have uprooted materialism and individualism, yet such systems are pagan in principle, denying the Church’s right to regulate the moral life of men and claiming to absorb all the rights and duties of the individual. The common good can only be secured by the wellbeing of “free personalities each with his own destiny.” If the State claims to be the only source of rights, morality and liberty, the common good is not helped, but destroyed. Dictatorship and state worship destroy the common good. Hinsley was clearly concerned that Fascist propaganda had led too many Catholics to believe that Fascism represented a legitimate alternative to “godless” Communism. Ultimately, he insisted, Fascism was a totalitarian system, just like Nazism and Communism, standing in direct opposition to the Catholic Church. “Because the Church is anti-Communist,” he stressed, “she is not, therefore, pro-Fascist.” Just as no Catholic could be a Communist, so no Catholic could be a Fascist, whether that Fascist party was Italian or British. “It is inexplicable,” Hinsley concluded, “how English Catholics can wisely and safely adopt the label ‘Fascist,’ no matter how they modify its meaning as made clear by leaders of Fascism in other lands.”98 By virtue of his early public opposition to Italian Fascism, and not merely to Nazism and Communism, Cardinal Hinsley was in a unique position to respond forcefully to the war. On the one hand, his opposition to the Republicans in Spain during the Civil War had

348

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

established to the vast majority of English Catholic intellectuals, the Bellocians in particular, that he was sympathetic to their views. On the other hand, his outspokenness about the Mussolini regime had set him apart from the Bellocians and made him more amenable to the liberal-democratic faction among English Catholics. Although he had clashed during the Spanish war with what one might call the Christian Democrats on the English Catholic left, his subsequent criticism of Fascism gained the trust of those such as Ward and Harari who were associated with the Catholic Worker College and the Catholic Social Guild. They knew that they could bring their ideas to the cardinal, as Ward did with regard to, first, the Dublin Review and then the Sword of the Spirit, confident that he would consider them.99 After Hinsley had approved the Sword of the Spirit, the first action of Ward and the Mathew brothers was to inform Dawson of their plans. Obviously, given his reasons for accepting the editorship of the Dublin Review, Dawson was not averse to such a project. Indeed, Dawson had already expressed to Ward his fears that Nazi propaganda was attempting to divide the British people: Christopher explained to me the Catholic plot—how we are all, honest and dishonest alike being used by Hitler. His argument was freely illustrated from France and very convincing. He wanted to find a group of honest and instructed men to help him meet the menace. I said we had to create them. He said, in that case, we had better give up. The exchange exemplified the two personalities. Ward, the optimist, was prepared to fashion what was needed; Dawson, the pessimist, believed the task impossible. Dawson had initiated the idea for the Sword, but she had created the plan and had then taken it to the cardinal. Some three weeks after their original discussion, she returned to Dawson, encouraging him to help her create these “honest and instructed men” through the new movement.100 The Sword of the Spirit intrigued Dawson in spite of his earlier pessimism. Once Mathew and Ward had informed him of the scheme,

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

349

he quickly drew up his own memorandum detailing his thoughts on the project and sent it to Hinsley. The great need for Britain, Dawson argued, was unity. As he had in his discussion with Ward the previous month, he observed that the enemy was “attempting to defeat us, as they have defeated so many other peoples, by dividing us, by exploiting party differences and class conflicts and by fomenting every possible source of conflict and suspicion.” “The favoured method of causing division and strife,” he explained, “is the exploitation of the ‘ideological’ conflict between Left and Right.” The goal was to replicate the situation in Spain four years earlier, where “the nation is divided into two hostile camps with no common ground between them.” To sow this division, Dawson noted further, the enemy wanted “English Catholics identified with ‘The Right’ and all the anti-Christian or anti-Catholic forces fused together as ‘The Left.’” The enemy, Dawson warned, was trying similarly to represent Catholicism as an antinational force. This was what, in his estimation, lay behind the recent talk of a Latin Catholic bloc. “I think that there is a real danger here,” he concluded, “and that we need to do all in our power to insist on our community with other Englishmen in this struggle.”101 After thus explaining the threat that enemy propaganda posed, Dawson developed what he believed the new movement needed to do to counter it. He advised that “any elaborate statement of war aims or of what we intend to do with the world after the war” would be counterproductive. The reason for the war was simple—to resist unjust and violent aggression. “The real question, therefore,” Dawson maintained, “is not that of peace aims, but of how Catholics can best contribute to the national resistance and to national unity.” In Dawson’s view France had fallen the previous month not because of the military defeat but because of a “spirit of defeatism, loss of faith, division and confusion of mind.” Political organization was not enough to prevent this. “A nation’s strength depends,” he insisted, with Finland’s recent stand against the Soviets as his example, “not so much on its material resources as on its unity of purpose and its moral courage.” The defeatism and the loss of faith that had led to the fall of France were “moral and spiritual defects” and as such could “only be met by

350

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

spiritual means.” It was, in the final analysis, not through political activism or Catholic political programs that the salutary end could be achieved “but by strengthening the moral basis of unity which underlies political action.” This was what Dawson hoped the new movement could accomplish.102 On 7 August Cardinal Hinsley informed his fellow bishops in England and Wales of the new movement. “Urged on by prominent lay people in my diocese,” he explained, “I have a started a movement entitled The Sword of the Spirit to secure more united and intense prayer and study and work among Catholics in the cause of the Church and of our country.” The reasons he provided for launching the movement were profoundly Dawsonite. “After the collapse in France,” Hinsley noted, “it seemed urgently necessary to show that we in this country were loyal, in spite of the entry of Italy into the war and in spite of other ‘Catholic’ peoples actually or possibly being hostile to Britain.” He emphasized that he feared enemy propaganda efforts aimed at British Catholics and wanted therefore to forestall such attempts to sow division. The cardinal also hoped that the movement would allow Catholics in England and Wales to contribute to the “work of reconstruction after the war.” Concerned perhaps that the hierarchy would be suspicious of any overly ambitious lay-­influenced movement, however, Hinsley emphasized that “prayer and spiritual endeavour” would be “given first place in the scheme.” He concluded by asking the bishops to consider implementing the Sword of the Spirit in their own dioceses and promised that they would be given representation on the executive committee.103 Attached to Cardinal Hinsley’s letter to the bishops was the twopage manifesto of the Sword of the Spirit, which included lists of the executive committee and general members. The fundamental aim of the movement was “the restoration of a Christian basis for both public and private life by a return to the principles of international order, and Christian freedom.” These principles were “rooted in the Law of Nature which is common to all mankind and recognises No superi­ority of race or colour.” It was these very principles of international order and Christian freedom, the document made clear, that

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

351

were at stake in the current conflict, because the Nazis denied “all the rights that Christianity upholds—the rights of God, of man, of the ­family, of minorities, of dependent peoples.” As a result, the manifesto implied, compromise was not possible: “We will therefore fight for our cause till victory.” Following the war, the reconstruction of Europe needed to be based also on the principles of international order and Christian freedom. The executive committee, of which Hinsley was president, included Barbara Ward, as secretary, and Dawson, appointed vice president within the month. The rest of the committee and the general members were culled almost entirely from the list of prospective members that the Plater Dining Group had originally submitted to the cardinal.104 Hinsley, Dawson, and Ward became the three leading spokespersons for the Sword of the Spirit. Hinsley presented an inaugural address, emphasizing the need for unity and pointing out, in the example of France, the consequences of disunity. “There should be no extremists among us,” he maintained. “Eyes neither right nor left: eyes front.” He reminded his audience that the name of the movement had been taken from St. Paul, who, as he lay chained between “two Roman soldiers in their war-like array,” counseled in effect that “the gross panoply of warfare or material armaments count for little against the spirit, for the word of God is not bound down.”105 While Hinsley thus emphasized the spiritual roots of the movement, Dawson stressed the unique ability of Catholics, the builders of Christendom, to defend Western civilization in the current struggle “for the possession of the human soul.” Ward for her part penned a piece for the Clergy Review (the professional journal for the British clergy) clearly intended to assuage any clerical concerns about the Sword. After emphasizing that the new movement would not super­ sede existing Catholic organizations, she detailed why the Nazis were no better than the Soviets and explained that they represented an existential threat to Britain. At the same time, in pointing out the evils of Nazism, she took a conciliatory tone toward those who, before 1 September 1939, might have viewed the German regime as a preferable counterweight to the Russians.106

352

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

The first test of the Sword of the Spirit came in October 1940 when the influential left-wing journal New Statesman and Nation published an article aggressively responding to the “myth” of the Latin Catholic bloc. The author, Horsfall Carter, praised Hinsley, Dawson, and Ward for the Sword of the Spirit but severely criticized the Catholic press in England. Despite the “patent fact” that the new French regime was “entirely under Nazi domination,” Carter charged, Catholic newspapers in England had continued to apologize for the Vichy government. He accused English Catholics of being preoccupied with Russian Communism instead of Nazism and maintained that it had been exactly such a view among French Catholics that had led to France’s surrender. “M. Laval and his clique” had persuaded French political and military leaders that “‘Communism’ was only just around the corner,” Carter asserted, referring to the longtime French minister, and that only capitulation to Germany could prevent its triumph. Carter identified Laval’s defeatism with his promotion of the Latin Catholic Bloc. Laval believed, in Carter’s account, that the Catholic nations of Europe could allow the Nazis to defeat the Communists, confident that they could subsequently convert the Germans, just as their Latin ancestors had converted the Teutonic tribes, leading to a new “Catholisation of Europe.” For Carter this was “hyperbolic twaddle,” “the Southern counterpart of the Nazis’ Nordic nonsense.” It was nonetheless dangerous in his estimation. Believers in the Latin Catholic bloc not only excused Nazism but also were anti-British, resenting Britain for her Protestantism, liberalism, and parliamentary democracy. English Catholics, Carter intimated, were proving all too susceptible to such propaganda.107 One of the Sword of the Spirit’s chief advantages was the ­ability to respond quickly when its ends of unifying English Catholics in support of the war and affirming their patriotism to the rest of the ­nation were threatened. The Dublin Review was a quarterly; the new movement published an inexpensive biweekly “bulletin” consisting of articles by Dawson, Ward, and others of like mind, as well as summaries of recent Sword speeches and meetings and notices of future activities. The Sword of the Spirit Bulletin of 19 October 1940 in-

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

353

cluded a letter to the New Statesman from one of the Sword’s secretaries, A. C. F. Beales, a professor of education at the University of London, protesting Carter’s insinuations regarding Catholic loyalty. Beales disagreed emphatically with Carter’s characterization of the English Catholic press, noting that the same week that Carter’s article appeared, the Tablet was attacked for being anti-Vichy, while the Catholic Times warned its readers against the Latin Catholic bloc idea. English Catholics, Beales affirmed, whether they were politically of the right or the left, were “solidly behind the Cardinal in his Catholic, British, patriotic stand.”108 The next number of the Bulletin contained an even stronger reaction to the Latin Catholic bloc controversy. In a front-page article Dawson argued that although it might seem at first glance a welcome alternative to the Fascist Axis or the Communist International, on reflection there were “many reasons why we must feel doubtful of both the practicability and the desirability” of the Latin Catholic bloc. Dawson maintained that the “freeing of religion from its subordination to political frontiers” was one of the great achievements of the past two centuries. The Catholic Church was no longer the “established Church of the Hapsburg and Bourbon Monarchies but a free and universal religious society,” and much the better for it. The proponents of the Latin Catholic bloc, however, would once again make the Church subservient to the state and indeed would bind the universal Church to the whims of a handful of southern European nations. “It would be treason to Christ the King,” Dawson concluded, “to return to the ‘weak and needy elements’ of the confessional state from which we have been freed by such immense sacrifices.”109 If the Latin Catholic bloc controversy between Catholic writers and their non-Catholic countrymen represented one threat to Hinsley’s emphasis on a patriotic and unified Catholic citizenry, then continuing friction within the Catholic community between the prodemocratic English Catholic left and the right, which remained suspicious of democracy, was another. In December 1940 the Tablet published a piece by a “Frenchman with General de Gaulle” titled “A French Dilemma.” The author responded to Catholic sympathy for the Vichy

354

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

regime, arguing that Vichy supporters ignored the patent fact that the Nazis dominated all France, occupied and unoccupied alike. Vi­ olently racist and anti-Semitic propaganda, similar to that with which the Germans had bombarded Poland, had become the norm throughout France. In occupied France the Nazis had closed Catholic schools, deported the bishop of Metz, and intimidated all clergy who dared to oppose them, yet the supposedly Catholic government in Vichy had remained silent. He warned that if the Church associated itself with the government of unoccupied France, it would suffer. Vichy was a sham government that would not survive the war no matter who won. Were the Allies to win, the left within France would lead a strong, anticlerical reaction. “Whoever wishes to restore the prestige of the cross of Christ in France,” the author wrote, “must begin by driving out of France the crooked cross of Hitler.”110 The article from the de Gaulle supporter prompted an approving letter from Dr. Letitia Fairfield, published two weeks later. She observed that it had been “badly needed” given that there existed “far too much tenderness for the Government of Vichy among Catholics in England.” Encouraging “the wholly false notion that this ramshackle structure is in any sense Catholic” would only lead to renewed anticlericalism and the loss of authority and influence by Catholics throughout Europe both during and after the war. “The ‘Sword of the Spirit,’” Fairfield concluded, “has need of its cutting edge.”111 Fairfield’s letter sparked an immediate controversy. Woodruff published it but included a response in the same number. An unsigned editorial affirmed that the “great prerequisite for the future of Europe is to find common ground between the European Liberal and Catholic traditions.” The editorialist was concerned that Fairfield and others believed that democracy was the only truly Catholic form of government. The Tablet responded that “both Christian Monarchy and Christian Democracy are good forms of government, and it is a matter of time and place, and relative to the historical moment, which is best.” As for the Sword of the Spirit, which Fairfield had evoked in closing as an ally, the editorialist observed that it was a movement supported by “men and women who differ widely in their political

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

355

programmes, but who agree on the urgent need for the spiritualizing of public life, national and international.” The Sword would “make a tragic error,” the editorial concluded, “if it seemed to commit itself to the view, as unhistorical as it is untheological, that the Christian can only be really satisfied with Parliamentary Democracy.”112 This type of Catholic infighting was exactly what Hinsley and Dawson had tried to avoid by establishing the Sword of the Spirit. Hinsley was particularly incensed at Fairfield. Although the Catholic right, as represented by Jerrold, had caused most of the concern for Hinsley in his campaign for Catholic unity, the left too had troubled Hinsley. In April 1940, for example, the Catholic Worker had intimated that Catholics might on grounds of conscience decline to fight. In response the cardinal had warned Father O’Hea that he might ban the publication, as he had done with Eric Gill’s journal Pax, if it continued to promote pacifism. Barbara Ward apologized for Fairfield’s letter, though she added that she had not liked the “way in which Mr. Woodruff chose to take it up.” Ward informed the cardinal that she had spoken to Woodruff about his reaction and that he had “agreed to cooperate.” Despite Ward’s objection, however, it was not Woodruff who concerned Hinsley. The Tablet editor had become one of the cardinal’s closest confidants, and while Hinsley had immediately sent Fairfield a letter critical of her comments, his correspondence with Woodruff in early January 1941 contained no such rebuke but rather a plea for the Tablet editor’s help in composing speeches for broadcast and a request that Woodruff act as a Catholic representative to the BBC.113 Woodruff’s Tablet had in fact become, like Dawson’s Dublin Review, a place where Catholic right and left could meet. This had not been the case for the first three years of his tenure, when the Tablet too had apologized for the Italian regime and supported the appeasement of Germany. With the onset of the war, however, Woodruff had become vociferously anti-Nazi, so much so that Hollis, believing Churchill’s anti-German rhetoric over the top, had objected in March 1940 to the Churchillian line that the Tablet had begun to take. Indeed, it was Woodruff’s support for a change in the British government in spring 1940 that had endeared him to Barbara Ward who until then

356

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

had been suspicious of his politics. After having coffee at Woodruff’s Westminster flat with the editor, his wife, and a “liberal-minded prelate,” Ward had reflected on the “further remarkable agreement of Right and Left except that The Tablet is far less Right than it was.” “Woodruff,” she concluded, “is a liberalising element.”114 For the next year, Hinsley and his allies were to an extraordinary extent successful in their efforts. By mid-1941, nearly a year after France had fallen, the Sword of the Spirit had managed to rally English Catholics in support of the war and to demonstrate their patriotism to the rest of the nation. Dawson’s Dublin Review, Hinsley’s public broadcasts, the various Sword of the Spirit speeches and publications, and Woodruff’s Tablet had together neutralized what they termed the defeatism of Jerrold and Bedoyère on the right as well as the pacifist tendencies of the Catholic left. A new test of the Sword’s vitality came with the 22 June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union. It had been the pact between the Nazis and the Soviets that originally had done so much to turn the Catholic press in particular from champions of appeasement into supporters of the war in September 1939. If the fall of France in June 1940 had caused a vocal minority of Catholic intellectuals to preach accommodation and the virtues of the Latin Catholic bloc, how would these same critics react to Britain’s alliance with the Soviet Union? Dawson and Ward led the effort to forestall criticism of the Soviet alliance. They each contributed a front-page article to the first Sword of the Spirit Bulletin following the German invasion. Dawson urged Catholics not to be misled because Hitler was once again posing as the “defender of European civilization against Asiatic barbarism and Bolshevist atheism.” The Nazis, he argued, were not attacking Communism but rather Russia “as an independent centre of world power.” Their goal was conquest of Europe, not defense of the Continent against the Communists, and their invasion of Russia was just the next step. “The question for Catholics therefore,” Dawson concluded, “is not whether Nazism is preferable to Communism, but whether there can be any truce with a regime which admits no limits and no restrictions on its power.”115

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

357

Ward agreed with Dawson that the invasion was about German domination of Europe rather than an anti-Communist crusade. Russia had the grain and oil that the Nazi war machine needed, and the Soviet military had to be dealt with in any case before Hitler could turn his attention to Britain and the West. As the Sword of the Spirit had warned since its inception, Ward counseled Catholics to beware of German propaganda. Reminding her readers again of the example of France, she pointed out that Hitler was speaking already of a “holy war” against Bolshevism and claiming that Britain, by allying with Russia, had committed itself to atheism and world revolution. Germany, she warned, was clearly targeting religious people, particularly Catholics, with a new propaganda campaign that would seek to establish a “peace front” in Britain. Catholics must not, she urged, allow themselves “to be used as the spearhead of an infiltration of Nazi propaganda.”116 If a challenge came to the Sword of the Spirit campaign for Catholic unity, it would come from the Catholic Herald. Heretofore, one could argue, Bedoyère had tolerated a war to destroy Nazism—that is, a war with no prospect of a negotiated peace—because of the accommodation between the Germans and Soviets, the true enemy. How would he react, then, to a confederacy with the Soviets that could only, it would seem from Bedoyère’s previous statements, throw the morality of the war into question? In the event, Bedoyère was only as ambivalent about Britain’s alliance with the Soviets as he had been about the war in general. The headline in the Catholic Herald illustrated the influence of the Sword of the Spirit: “Germany’s Attack on Russia Will Not Divide Christians.” The emphasis of Hinsley and Dawson on unity had evidently struck home. The Catholic Herald went so far as to acknowledge that “we have a moral right to welcome Russian military aid and to make it as effective as possible.” But this was as far as Bedoyère would go. The Catholic Herald warned that Britain must be on its “guard against” the Soviets. It also could not resist similarly observing that the new alliance “weakens considerably any pretence that we are fighting for a Christian Europe.” Indeed, the Catholic Herald advocated that “individuals in the Allied countries” needed to do all that they could to

358

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

“raise our actual end (which is self-defence and resistance to a criminally aggressive enemy) to a positively Christian one in fact and deed, and not in mere name for propaganda programmes which have become out of date.” Here, the Catholic Herald was clearly referring derisively to the Sword of the Spirit. The tone was petulant, with the editorialist explicitly accepting Hinsley’s insistence on English Catholic unity but implicitly criticizing as obsolete the organization that the cardinal had created to secure this unity.117 The Catholic Herald’s not so veiled attack on the Sword of the Spirit, while at the same time it paid lip service to the movement’s originating principle of unity, pointed both to the Sword’s success and to the obstacles it faced. Hinsley, Dawson, and Ward had succeeded in imposing consensus—at least in public—on English Catholic intellectuals, even if it was only grudging for some. Britain had not been torn asunder, as the leaders of the Sword believed France had, by German propaganda aimed at Catholics. In this they had succeeded. In July 1941, however, the nation’s prospects were much brighter than they had been in the bleakness of July 1940. If it had been difficult then to convince those whose views Bedoyère and Jerrold represented of the necessity of total war to destroy the Nazi regime, now, with Britain’s back no longer against the wall, consensus would be even more difficult to sustain. In the last analysis the Sword of the Spirit had been an effective propaganda campaign, but it had never gained a mass following. Even at the height of its success—the meetings at the Stoll Theatre in London, 10 and 11 May 1941, were attended by some four thousand ­people—A. C. F. Beales observed to Hinsley’s private secretary, Val Elwes, that the organization had only consisted of himself, his wife, and an assistant. The ecumenical makeup of the speakers at Stoll—including, among non-Catholics, George Bell, Anglican bishop of Chichester; Hugh Lyon, headmaster of Rugby; Sidney Berry, acting moderator of the Free Church Federal Council; and the Anglican writer Dorothy Sayers, with Cosmo Lang, archbishop of Canterbury in the chair for the 11 May session—convinced the Sword leaders, including Hinsley, to try to bring Protestants into the organization.

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

359

This ambitious effort foundered on the anxieties of the theologians, who in late September 1941 voiced their opposition to ecumenical public prayer, and the mistrust of the Catholic hierarchy. The movement never truly recovered from this setback.118 The Sword’s difficulties reflected deeper divisions among English Catholics. Thomas Williams, archbishop of Birmingham was one of the few bishops to support the movement, yet when Hinsley informed the hierarchy of his plans in August 1940 even he had expressed reservations. In a letter to Hinsley Williams had called the Sword a “magnificent idea,” but he had been concerned about its ideological thrust and especially its leadership. Observing that the official statement had only mentioned “one danger,” “the Nazi way of life,” Williams wondered why it did not “mention the other danger of world revolution which many people are trying to promote under cover of opposing Nazism.” The archbishop’s concern with the makeup of the executive committee was directly related to this worry that Hinsley was sacrificing antiCommunism in his zeal to strengthen Catholic support for the war against Germany. The names on the executive committee, Williams informed Hinsley, “do not impress me very favourably.” He noted that “few of its members are familiar figures in public life or in the domain of scholarship,” and he pointed in particular to the overrepresentation of women on the committee. Most significantly, however, the archbishop expressed surprise that “a prominent Catholic layman such as Douglas Jerrold” not only was not among the members but had not even been invited to the Sword’s organizational meeting. “This causes a suspicion in my mind,” Williams concluded, “that Catholics who stood up for Franco and tried hard to explain the meaning of the civil war in Spain to English audiences will not be welcome.”119 The archbishop’s letter reflected the extent to which deep divisions remained open among English Catholic intellectuals. The Sword had been organized by the small and heretofore uninfluential cadre of Christian Democrats, many of them women, associated with Leo O’Hea, S.J., the Catholic Worker College at Oxford, and the Catholic Social Guild. As Williams had pointed out, this group, conspicuously, had not been among Franco’s supporters in England. Clearly Jerrold

360

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

and Bedoyère were not entirely isolated. Others, some such as Archbishop Williams in high positions, shared their concerns. Two years after the crisis of 1940, despite the seeming success of the efforts of the cardinal and allies such as Dawson and Woodruff, this discord remained, if out of the public eye. For the sake of the war effort, this lack of unanimity was no longer a problem. Britain had survived the emergency situation of 1940, and Germany no longer looked likely to divide and conquer as Dawson believed the Nazis had done with France and feared that they might do with Britain as well. For the continued vitality of the English Catholic intellectual community, however, the dissension presented trouble. The key sources of friction remained the Spanish Civil War specifically and, more generally, the Communist threat. Jerrold continued to hold the Spanish Civil War as a litmus test and to focus on the Soviet threat rather than the ongoing war against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The propaganda offensive that Hinsley had led, using the Sword, with the assistance of Dawson’s Dublin Review and Woodruff’s Tablet, had been largely successful in quieting the dissent of Jerrold and his few allies in the last half of 1940 and well into 1941, such that even the Soviet alliance had led only to some grumbling from the Catholic Herald. It was the American entry into the war in December 1941 that emboldened the dissenters. Much of the English Catholic intellectual community’s war effort had focused on the United States. Hollis’s 1939 Clergy Review article and his subsequent trip to America to gauge Catholic views, Hinsley’s radio addresses aimed at the United States, Frank Sheed’s work on behalf of the Ministry of Information, Barbara Ward’s efforts, with the help of Denis Brogan, to shift American Catholic opinion—all spoke to the significance of the United States for Britain and the important role that English Catholics had in trying to influence their coreligionists. Once the Americans joined the fight against Nazi Germany and its Axis allies, momentum shifted decisively in Britain’s favor. Catholic unity became less of a necessity.120 What became evident after the entry of the United States into the war was the extent to which this effort to counter Jerrold had relied on

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

361

the authority of Cardinal Hinsley. Hinsley, however, was seriously ill with heart trouble for at least a year before his death in March 1943. Jerrold took the opportunity to launch a counteroffensive and in April 1942 began a campaign to take command of the Dublin Review. On 7 April Dawson informed Cardinal Hinsley that Burns & Oates had contacted him claiming that they would have to shut down the Dublin Review after July 1942, “owing to increasing war difficulties.” On 10 April Hinsley wrote Jerrold “to urge continuance of publication.” Jerrold replied ten days later, noting that he had already informed the cardinal at the beginning of the war that there would be “difficulties of staff, labour, materials and communications,” which would make it difficult to publish in “numbers sufficient to justify the expenditure of time and energy,” and that Hinsley had at that time “left the question of suspension to us.” Since then, Jerrold argued, the Dublin Review had proved a disappointment. Both the publishers and the Ministry of Information had hoped that the review under Dawson would become more influential, particularly in the United States, but this had not been the case, in Jerrold’s estimation, though he acknowledged that Richard Hope at the Ministry of Information disagreed. Jerrold believed that the problem was the journal’s “unrepresentative character.” Dawson and Ward, he maintained, had excluded “from the colums [sic] of the Dublin a large number of well-known Catholic writers.” As for Dawson, Jerrold explained that though he had the “highest opinion” of his talents, his health was preventing him from being an “effective sole editor.” Although he proposed that publication cease for the duration of the war, after which the journal could be “reconstituted under an editorial board,” Jerrold would “recommend to my colleagues that they bowed [sic] to your wishes” if Hinsley insisted that it be continued.121 On receiving Jerrold’s justification for ceasing publication of the Dublin Review, Hinsley sought Woodruff’s advice. Woodruff drafted a reply to Jerrold and sent it to Val Elwes, with a cover letter dated 22 April 1942 explaining what he proposed. In the letter to Elwes he agreed with the cardinal that it would be “a pity for the Dublin to be wound up.” Contra Jerrold’s claims that the Dublin Review was no longer an influential journal, Woodruff noted that Walter Starkie, head

362

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

of the British Institute in Madrid, had informed him that it remained vital to his propaganda work. He empathized with Jerrold, on the one hand, noting that Dawson was difficult to deal with and that Barbara Ward was an “individualist not naturally inclined to take anybody’s advice.” It had been a mistake, Woodruff acknowledged, to publish such non-Catholics as the “Master of Balliol” and Stephen Spender, and he suggested that Hinsley hint as much to Dawson. On the other hand, Woodruff observed that Jerrold was “extremely autocratic,” that he did not “like the Dawson-Ward regime,” and that he was therefore using as an excuse “war-time difficulties which would not otherwise be allowed to loom so largely.” If Jerrold insisted that Burns & Oates could no longer publish the Dublin Review, Woodruff concluded, then Hinsley could “offer to relieve him” of the burden. Although Woodruff added that he had not hinted at this in the draft he provided, he assured Hinsley that the Tablet could take over publication should Jerrold persist.122 As for the letter to Jerrold that Woodruff drafted on behalf of the cardinal, it emphasized that the Dublin Review ought to continue because, though it might be improved, there existed no other Catholic journal with its pedigree. The draft informed Jerrold of Professor Starkie’s praise for the journal and noted that it was vital to the cardinal’s plans for the Sword of the Spirit as well. In an attempt to appease Jerrold, Woodruff explained that Dawson would be advised that the publication of non-Catholic contributors was to be “exceptional and for some clear reason.” The draft letter concluded that if publication was as difficult as Jerrold maintained, then the Dublin Review could be issued as a semiannual rather than a quarterly.123 Jerrold, however, continued to force the issue. He next informed Dawson that he could either cease to publish non-Catholics altogether or publish them only with the approval of Jerrold himself. Jerrold represented this new policy as originating from Westminster. Dawson appealed to Hinsley, in a letter dated 22 May 1942, asking if these were indeed his wishes. It would appear that Jerrold had either misread or was intentionally misrepresenting Hinsley’s position, because Hinsley’s subsequent proposal included neither an injunction against publishing non-Catholics nor an order that Dawson cede editorial de-

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

363

cision making to Jerrold. Hinsley instead suggested a compromise: “The Dublin should retain its distinctively Catholic character. The Editor should have his proper province. He should be at liberty to accept contributions from non-Catholics, provided there be no danger of the Review becoming a forum for all kinds of opinions. But what I want is that you as editor should be able to consult an authority within easy reach.” The authority he suggested was Fr. Martin D’Arcy, S.J. As master of Campion Hall, Oxford, D’Arcy lived near Dawson’s home on Boar’s Hill just outside Oxford, and would thus be easily accessible for any necessary editorial consultation.124 Judging by the confidence Hinsley had placed in him with regard not only to the Dublin Review but also to the Sword of the Spirit, it is obvious that he was providing Dawson with cover. If Jerrold were to complain that Dawson had published a contribution from a nonCatholic, Dawson merely had to observe that the disputed article had been approved by the clerical adviser whom the cardinal himself had appointed. Jerrold, recognizing that Hinsley had outmaneuvered him, not surprisingly objected to the scheme. Despite his illness, however, the cardinal remained a man who was not to be challenged. According to Barbara Ward, he responded “very strongly to Jerrold,” warning him that unless Dawson’s position as editor was secured, “he intended moving the Dublin to another publisher.” Hinsley had finally played the card that Woodruff had provided in April when he had assured him that the Tablet would publish the Dublin Review if Jerrold proved difficult.125 Later in July 1942 Ward left for the United States, apparently on a speaking tour on behalf of the Ministry of Information. Once she had departed, Jerrold, no doubt provoked by the cardinal’s intervention, took the opportunity to try to sever her connection to the Dublin Review. Robert Speaight, the actor and author, then working at the BBC, had in recent months been taking on some of Ward’s duties as assistant editor while she was engaged with her commitments to the Sword, the Economist, and the Ministry of Information. Before she left for the United States, she encouraged Dawson to rely on Speaight and D’Arcy to help maintain control of the journal in her absence. It

364

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

was Speaight, however, whom Jerrold wanted to replace Ward permanently as Dawson’s assistant.126 When Speaight broached the question of “sacking” Ward, Dawson strongly objected and refused to discuss the issue until she returned to defend her position. He noted that he had taken the editorship with the understanding that Ward was to be his assistant editor. He emphasized that he had explained to Jerrold from the beginning his “ideas on editorial policy” and that Jerrold had, with Bishop Mathew and the others who had attended the original meetings, expressed his “full agreement.” Dawson maintained that he had been “assured of a completely free hand and plenty of cooperation” but that these had been “notably lacking.” To Jerrold himself, Dawson responded that he was “unwilling to make a new arrangement for a permanent assistant during Barbara Ward’s absence” and that the arrangement with Speaight was a “purely temporary one” to which he had agreed without any understanding that “any permanent change was contemplated.”127 Speaight informed Dawson that he agreed with his stand against making a change while Ward was absent. His reply, however, shed additional light on the views of Jerrold and Hollis, particularly their antipathy to Ward, whom they apparently believed was the real force behind the Dublin Review. Speaight seemed to share this view, noting that if Dawson chose not to “defend Barbara altogether,” then his choices were either to “take much more complete control” or to “find an assistant editor who enjoys both your own confidence and that of Burns and Oates.” Indeed, Speaight also shared the opinion of Jerrold and Hollis that Dawson remained fundamentally attached to their point of view, maintaining that he did “not think there is any really essential difference between your principles and theirs.” Rather, what Jerrold and Hollis objected to, Speaight explained to Dawson, was what they “imagine are Barbara’s tactics in putting those principles into practice.”128 Jerrold and Hollis had evidently taken the traditional stance that it was not the king who was the problem but his minister. What access to Dawson’s personal correspondence reveals, however, is that Jerrold’s belief that Ward was foisting Bernanos, Maritain, and the

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

365

Master of Balliol on Dawson was fantastic. Ward may have done much of the work in running the Dublin Review, but she was only acting, in effect, as the managing editor to Dawson’s editor in chief. Any author whom they published, they published because Dawson wanted to present that person’s ideas. As Dawson explained sharply to Speaight, “I do not think you quite recognize the divergence between myself and Jerrold on the question of policy.” Jerrold, he lamented, was “quite determined that the Dublin should be the organ of his own rather die-hard type of conservatism.” This was not what Dawson wanted. Perhaps Jerrold understood this in August 1942 but realized that separating Dawson from Ward would make it easier to convince Dawson to mend his ways or to replace him as editor should he prove recalcitrant. In the event, it was the latter option on which Jerrold ultimately decided.129 Despite Jerrold’s attempts to take the Dublin Review from Dawson in 1942, or at least influence his editorial policies, Dawson managed to continue as editor into 1944—though he succeeded in retaining Ward as his assistant only until March 1943. That month, Ward was sent by the “government” (presumably the Ministry of Information) at short notice to Sweden. Her letter informing Dawson of this unexpected trip and urging him to “get the working arrangements with Bobbie [Speaight] sorted out” was her last letter in Dawson’s papers until 1954. Given their frequent correspondence regarding the Sword and the journal during the previous three years, it seems likely that Ward discontinued her work for the movement and the journal at this time. This would not have been surprising. She was traveling often on behalf of the Ministry of Information, and she remained an editor of the Economist. She may well have believed that the need for Catholic propaganda had passed, that Jerrold and his friends no longer posed a threat to Britain’s war effort. Even in 1940 she had lamented that her work for the Dublin Review had impeded her contributions to the Economist. On the other hand, Cardinal Hinsley died on St. Patrick’s Day 1943, less than a week after Ward left for Sweden. Without Hinsley’s patronage, Ward may have decided that the Dublin Review would no longer be worth the effort, that without Hinsley to put him

366

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

in his place, she and Dawson would be powerless to prevent Jerrold from eventually assuming editorial control. That the new archbishop was not appointed until December 1943 may have helped to extend Dawson’s editorship, with Burns & Oates unwilling to make such a significant change during the interregnum.130 It was appropriate that Ward and Hinsley should leave the stage together. The two had worked in tandem for some three years, one not even thirty years old and the other called out of retirement, and had been responsible for much of the success of the Dublin Review and the Sword of the Spirit. It was they who had persuaded Dawson to take the Dublin editorship and to help lead the Sword campaign. Each in his and her own way exhibited a measure of heroism during the war. Ward was a dynamo, not only coming up with the idea to have Dawson edit the Dublin Review but also conceiving of the Sword of Spirit. Her work for both was only in addition to her contributions to the Economist and the Ministry of Information. Hinsley gave the last of his health to the war effort. It is hard to imagine a Dawson-edited Dublin Review or a Sword of the Spirit without Hinsley’s leadership. Indeed, without Hinsley at Westminster, without his great authority, it is difficult to believe that Jerrold and his allies would have been so effectively marginalized. Although, as with so many of the quotations attributed to Churchill, it might well be apocryphal, one wants to believe that the prime minister really did say, when he had to appoint a new archbishop of Canterbury in 1942, that he would have liked to have appointed “the old boy at Westminster.” In the last analysis, Hinsley, like Barbara Ward, was a patriot par excellence. Indeed, as Churchill’s comment illustrated, their efforts reverberated far beyond the narrow confines of English Catholicism.131 Dawson continued to edit the Dublin Review during the first half of 1944, but his subsequent departure was facilitated by the new agreement between Burns and Oates and Hinsley’s successor at Westminster, Bernard Griffin. Burns and Oates would publish the Dublin Review for thirty-three years. The publishers, rather than the Archdiocese of Westminster, would appoint the editor, though the archbishop had a veto over the choice. The editor would in addition be

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

367

responsible to Burns and Oates and not the archdiocese, though the latter could remove the editor with six months’ notice. Dawson was not privy to the negotiations, and only learned of them at ­ second hand. Bernard Wall informed him, after speaking with Speaight, that Jerrold intended to make the Dublin Review a monthly, to create an editorial board to manage it, and to allow Dawson to remain as “editor­-in-chief.” Jerrold had won.132 For his part, Speaight, who had remained close to Jerrold while assisting Dawson as editor, explained in his memoir that Jerrold had ousted Dawson “from the editorial chair in a manoeuvre that was anything but pretty.” According to Speaight, the Dublin Review had never been what Jerrold had “intended it to be,” for he had expected Dawson to “echo the sentiments of the Catholic Right.” Jerrold, Speaight recalled, “was still fighting the Spanish Civil War” and therefore could not abide the “appearance in the Dublin Review of articles on Maritain and Bernanos who did not share his view on the ‘last Crusader’”—meaning Franco. Speaight, however, neglected to acknowledge his own ignominious role in Jerrold’s coup. Not only had he functioned as Jerrold’s man at the journal, but he had clashed with Dawson during his last months in charge. In August 1943 Dawson had refused to publish an appreciation of Eric Gill. When Speaight demanded an explanation, Dawson replied: Personally I admired Eric’s work and I would gladly publish an objective appreciation of it. But it did seem to me that some of his views on social and political questions were definitely wrongheaded and unfortunately it is just these views that Shewring goes all out for in this article. You may say that 95% of them are obvious deductions from Catholic principles but that is just what I deny and it is just this identification of extreme and paradoxical views with essential Catholic principles which is the difficulty. . . . These issues are tremendously important at the present time, and it would be disastrous if English Catholics should take a line in these matters which is intrinsically unsound and out of relation with the best Catholic social thought on the continent.

368

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

It was Speaight who replaced Dawson as editor. The article on Gill appeared in the second number that he edited.133

— The conflict between Dawson and Jerrold at the Dublin Review was indicative of the internal stresses on the cohesiveness of the English Catholic intellectual community. Thanks in large part to the leadership of Cardinal Hinsley, the incipient divisions that had become apparent in June 1940 had been for a time masked, but in the end they were too significant to bridge. Without Hinsley, Dawson and Ward lacked the influence and the charisma to oppose Jerrold and those who shared his die-hard Bellocian beliefs. The crisis of summer 1940 had led to a realignment of Catholic intellectuals in England. Previously the fault line within the community had run between Bellocians and Dawsonites. The war, however, had empowered the previously insignificant minority of liberal democrats among English Catholics. Led by the heretofore unknown Barbara Ward, this small group, free from the blot of Bellocian philoFascism, had joined with Dawson and the Bellocian Woodruff, under the patronage of the cardinal, to affirm Catholic patriotism and promote the war as the Churchill government had determined it. This new coalition countered and isolated both pacifists on the Catholic left and the Latin Catholic bloc devotees on the right in an effort to forge a unified Catholic community in the interest of winning the war. In the short term they succeeded, but in the long term it was not enough to reconsolidate the prewar English Catholic intellectual community. The crisis of 1940 had refocused the community, but as the deadly German threat dissipated so too did Catholic unity. What the Hinsley-led support for the total war against Nazi Germany had demonstrated, however, was the bankruptcy of Bellocianism. Prominent followers of Belloc, such as Woodruff and, to a lesser extent, Hollis and Lunn, had contributed to Hinsley’s efforts.134 Yet in the process they compromised many of the central tenets of the Bellocian orthodoxy. Increasingly absent were the denunciations of the sinister “money-power.” The fulminations against “Protestant”

The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

369

history and the assertion of moral and economic decline from the halcyon High Middle Ages had become irrelevant. Even the condemnations of parliamentary democracy for its weakness and corruption, the very hallmark of Bellocianism since the publication of the troika The Party System, The Servile State, and House of Commons and Monarchy had dissipated. The acute embarrassment when Italy joined Germany in fighting Britain and the painful sense of betrayal evident in the pages of the Tablet and the Catholic Herald played a vital role in this shift away from an antidemocratic and proauthoritarian posture. Above all, Britain’s victory in the war had validated its parliamentary democracy. The very system that Belloc and his acolytes had dismissed as corrupt and ineffectual compared to its continental rivals had demonstrated that it remained functional. Dawson understood this, as his explanation to Speaight that Gill’s “views on social and political questions were definitely wrong-headed” illustrated. Bellocianism had been eclipsed. It had, however, provided the foundation for the English Catholic intellectual community, and without its unified theory of Catholic politics, economics, and history, the community fragmented.

Ep i l o g u e

The eventual decline of the English Catholic intellectual community had been assured even before World War II. As George Orwell had pointed out, by the late 1930s it was Communism, rather than Bellocianism, that had become the fashionable ideology for young intellectuals. The community had ceased to replenish itself after the early 1930s, adding few if any contributors of significance. The handful of Catholic writers who came of age, or converted, later in the decade had more Christian Democrat than Bellocian in them—Barbara Ward and Manya Harari, for example. Bellocianism had already, before the war, proved less convincing than it had been for those who came of age in the 1920s. Without a younger generation of contributors the vitality of the community must have necessarily weakened over time.1 What was not predictable was the dramatic dissolution of the English Catholic intellectual community in the 1940s. In order to understand what happened, it is necessary to review the community’s foundation and development, to clarify how Bellocianism was exposed as untenable by the end of World War II, and to explain why no new ideology emerged that could have healed the divisions between Catholic intellectuals in England after the war and reconsolidated the community. It will then be possible to draw some conclusions about the significance of the English Catholic intellectual community of the interwar era. In 1910 Hilaire Belloc, disillusioned with the political system in Britain, had decided not to seek reelection to Parliament. Over the course of the next ten years Belloc formulated a unified and self­consciously Catholic political philosophy, dismissing parliamentary democracy as corrupt and charging that the liberal political economy predominant in the nineteenth century had created a parasitic class of plutocratic capitalists and impoverished the masses. Subsequent efforts 370

Epilogue

371

at economic reform in the interest of social justice had, in his estimation, only solidified the power of the plutocrats over the people. The nascent welfare state that Lloyd George and the Liberals had begun to construct just before the Great War had, Belloc believed, impelled workers to trade liberty for security when they ought to have had both. He proposed instead what came to be called Distributism, which emphasized the wide distribution of landed property and amounted to a restoration of the medieval economy of commercial guilds, village crafts, and self-sufficient peasant farms. Connecting this political philosophy and economic vision was his radically revisionist reading of English history. England, Belloc argued, was fundamentally Latin, founded by the Romans, nurtured by the Catholic Church, reaching its apogee in the High Middle Ages. The Reformation therefore had severed the trunk from its roots, and England, rather than progress as the dominant Whig historiography would have it, had declined. The political dysfunction and the economic failures that he ascribed to subsequent English history were, ultimately, the manifestations of England’s sixteenth-century apostasy. Belloc had proved especially persuasive, convincing a number of talented young writers not only that Catholicism stood with the downtrodden against the plutocracy but also that England itself was fundamentally a Catholic nation. These admirers formed an intellectual elite, the crème de la crème of English Catholicism, often graduates of the finest public schools and scholarship winners at the best Oxford colleges, many of whom converted to Catholicism under Belloc’s influence. Like Belloc himself, many of his most significant followers were former Liberals who became disillusioned with Liberalism and the Liberal Party. For these disaffected former Liberals, Bellocianism filled a political and intellectual vacuum, particularly after the collapse of the Liberal Party in the early 1920s. The charisma of the first generation of Bellocians, Vincent McNabb, Eric Gill, and G. K. Chesterton, as well as the manifest talent of Gill as an artist and Chesterton as a writer, proved invaluable in advancing Belloc’s ideological agenda. After the Great War the baton had been taken by a succession of young writers, editors, and publishers­,

372

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

i­ncluding Douglas Jerrold, Douglas Woodruff, Christopher Hollis, Evelyn Waugh, and Arnold Lunn. This quintet had provided new energy, refining Bellocianism and updating during the 1930s the ideas that Belloc had first promulgated two decades earlier. While they had proclaimed the virtues of Bellocian history and the excellence of Distributism, what became most apparent was their devotion to Belloc’s political philosophy. At best, they had no use for parliamentary politics; in most cases, they harbored the same animus toward Britain’s political system as Belloc and similarly apologized for the authoritarian states of “Catholic” Europe, Mussolini’s Italy in particular and later Franco’s Spain. The associates of Christopher Dawson, led by Frank Sheed, Maisie Ward, and Tom Burns, had been greatly influenced by the first generation of Bellocians, but their interests in aesthetics, Scholastic philosophy, and contemporary theology had taken them in a different direction. Given the sustained criticism of Bellocianism in Tom Burns’s Order, as well as Dawson’s personal dislike of Belloc, it would be tempting to believe that these Dawsonites were a community apart from the Bellocians, that there were in effect two competing groups of English Catholic intellectuals. Sheed, Ward, Burns, and their friends, however, had not only been influenced by the Bellocians but had also maintained such close personal ties to them that it would be inaccurate to conclude that they represented separate communities. Indeed, as the crisis unfolded on the Continent in the 1930s, the Dawsonites, including Dawson himself, had moved closer to the Bellocians. Dawson became a contributor to Jerrold’s English Review, and he too criticized liberal parliamentary democracy in a way that left him vulnerable to charges of moral equivalence with respect to the continental dictatorships. Contemporaries had wondered whether indeed he had gone over to Bellocian philo-Fascism. During the Spanish Civil War, the Dawsonites took positions indistinguishable from the Bellocians. As reflected in Bernard Wall’s Colosseum, with which both Dawson and Sheed were closely associated, there had been little to choose between the two groups. Not only in intellectual roots and personal friendships, but by then also in political ideology, the English Catholic intellectuals had remained one community.

Epilogue

373

It was World War II that brought about the reformation of the English Catholic intellectual community. The fall of France and the establishment of the Vichy regime had led to profound divisions among English Catholic writers. These divisions had not simply been between Bellocians and Dawsonites, as one might have expected. Although the Bellocian Jerrold was in the vanguard seeking a negotiated peace with Germany and advocating, as he informed Barbara Ward, that Britain “tack onto” the Latin Catholic bloc, he had not been alone. Michael de la Bedoyère, heretofore an admirer of Dawson, had allied with Jerrold, and Bedoyère’s Catholic Herald provided their platform. Not all of Jerrold’s fellow Bellocians had accepted his views concerning the war, however. Woodruff, whose influence was extensive as editor of the Tablet, had opposed the Latin Catholic bloc accommodationists. In fact, he had joined with Dawson and Barbara Ward to marginalize Jerrold and his friends for much of the war. Cardinal Hinsley was instrumental in their effort. Without his influence and authority as archbishop of Westminster, it is unlikely Dawson and Ward could have succeeded. After Hinsley’s death in March 1943, Jerrold was finally able to get the upper hand. By that time, however, the period of greatest peril had passed, and Britain had gained the Soviet Union and the United States as allies. By then as well the idea that Britain could coexist with a Nazi-led Germany or needed to affiliate with the Latin Catholic nations of the Continent was no longer to be taken seriously. In the end, therefore, Jerrold’s victory over Dawson for control of the Dublin Review was pyrrhic. He was among the last holdouts of a compromised ideology. Bellocianism had dismissed liberal, parliamentary democracy as corrupt and had flirted with continental authoritarianism, but Britain had defeated the Italian Fascism that Belloc and many of his followers had praised, vindicating parliamentary democracy in the process. Of the three tenets of Bellocianism—monarchism, Distributism, and triumphalist Catholic history—the first had therefore died the quickest. Few English Catholic writers any longer considered it a viable alternative to parliamentary democracy. Bellocian political economy had fared no better than monarchism. The Distributists’ maxim of smaller is better had been overwhelmed as

374

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

the war occasioned a bureaucratic buildup that dwarfed that to which Jerrold had objected following the previous war. This was only the beginning. In 1942 Sir William Beveridge produced his famous report on Social Insurance and Allied Service, which became the blueprint for the postwar welfare state. Such was the popularity of the Beveridge Report that when Conservatives in the wartime coalition government received its recommendations cautiously, the popular demand that they be implemented vaulted the Labour Party well ahead of the Conservatives in polling, and on its way to an overwhelming victory in the July 1945 general election, in which Labour won 393 seats to the Conservatives’ 213. In 1946 Parliament passed the National Insurance Act, based on the Beveridge Report, creating what Churchill famously called “national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave.” Bellocian political economy had been, in part, a reaction to the compulsory nature of the 1911 Insurance Act, yet the new welfare state was not only much grander and, in Bellocian terms, more intrusive, but it was also, manifestly, what the people of Britain wanted. The Distributist economy of village craft and peasant farming was further away than ever.2 A growing segment of Catholic intellectuals had begun to recognize the inadequacy of Bellocianism in the postwar world. The reconciliation of English Catholic intellectuals with the political and economic consensus of the broader society had been presaged in Dawson’s wartime writings. His emphasis on the strength of liberalism and his conclusion that parliamentary democracy, far from being unChristian, was a direct outgrowth of Christianity had represented a sea change from Bellocianism. Dawson’s rethinking with regard to liberalism and democracy was to prove influential. In this respect, Bernard Wall’s correspondence with Dawson in the immediate aftermath of the war is of particular value in illustrating the transformation of English Catholic political thought. Wall became as antiauthoritarian and prodemocracy after the war as he had been antidemocracy and proauthoritarian before it. He therefore provides a measure of English Catholic reaction to postwar social democracy. As a political intelligence agent in Italy following the

Epilogue

375

1943 allied invasion, Wall had attempted to get the Christian Democrats and the Democratic Socialists to work together. As he explained to Dawson, “moderate democratic governments,” on the Continent especially, needed to be encouraged. “Western democracy is now the only alternative to communism,” Wall insisted, “and therefore one must support it.” On his return to Britain, Wall accepted the new, expanded welfare state as the “principle alternative to Russia.” “Traditionalism,” he concluded, referring to continued suspicion of liberal democracy, “has become bogus as such and sidetracks things—what we want is to preserve as many traditions as we can in Western pluralist states.” Even a former enthusiast for authoritarian politics and Distributist economics such as Wall had concluded that these were at odds with postwar realities, if indeed they had ever been practical. While Dawson’s replies focused on Wall’s plans for a new cultural journal, he did not dispute Wall’s political assessment.3 The third pillar of Bellocianism, the triumphalist Catholic revision of English history, Catholic intellectuals had likewise begun to recognize as problematic. Again, it had been Dawson’s reflections during the war—in this case his argument during the Latin bloc crisis that the contemporary Catholic Church was the stronger for being “a free and universal religious society” rather than an established church—that had heralded the end for Bellocian history and its idealization of the medieval. The idea that the “Age of Faith” represented the standard to be aimed at and the notion that “Catholic” societies were necessarily morally superior to “Protestant” or secular societies were no longer taken as axiomatic. In part, this was the result of the manifest failures during the war of the Latin Catholic countries, not least Italy, which the Bellocians had hoped, some even right up to the eve of Italy’s entry into the war (and the Latin Catholic bloc supporters even after that), could provide an alternative to the supposedly decadent and corrupt parliamentary democracies. An exchange between Douglas Woodruff and Alick Dru, a former contributor to Burns’s Chelsea group, illustrated the developing conviction among English Catholic writers after the war that Bellocian history, like Belloc’s politics and economics, was to be rejected. Dru

376

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

objected to a 1948 review in the Tablet defending the use of “organized pressure” by Catholics—which Dru interpreted as the belief that a society in which the Church was the dominant authority, both privileged and endowed, was the ideal. Writing to Woodruff, he scoffed, “I was sure you would start talking about the ‘Christian Emperor’ (from the wrong point of view!) and now I have dropped the ‘phrase’: Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe, to see whether you will not pick it up.” “It is fearful nonsense,” Dru observed of Belloc’s maxim, “so I recommend you not to.” Woodruff’s error, in Dru’s diagnosis, was that he continued to hold the Bellocian belief that “Christianity is civilization.” Civilization, Dru pointed out, “existed long before Christianity and exists apart from it at all times.” Indeed, Christianity and civilization had only come together “for a relatively short period within a certain part of the world,” medieval Europe.4 In his criticism of Woodruff, Dru therefore emphasized the failings of Bellocian history. To take the medieval society of Pope, Emperor, Church “as the norm,” he maintained, “is to take a static view of history.” Ultimately, the Bellocian view was utopian, Dru argued, and yet “you can no more discover a Utopia than you can discover the perfect poem or painting or symphony.” What was necessary, he stressed, was a “shift of emphasis, away from an idealisation of the past, or if not an idealisation at least a feeling that we are to look to the forms of the past.” “The natural order,” Dru observed, “can take a hundred different forms, and with any of these, so long as they are healthy, Christianity can establish links.” In his response to Woodruff, therefore, Dru clearly presented the disenchantment of many English Catholic intellectuals with Bellocian history.5 Dru’s criticism of Woodruff and the Tablet pointed, however, to the fact that not everyone had entirely abandoned Bellocianism. Indeed, Dru was not the only Catholic intellectual disappointed with Woodruff’s supposed failure to readjust his thinking after the war. Wall, for example, lamented that the Tablet remained critical of social democracy and maintained that this had made his task in Italy at the end of the war, when he was working toward a “closer association between the Christian Democrats and the Socialists,” “very

Epilogue

377

difficult,” as the Italians had assumed that his views were identical to those of the Tablet. “I always feel,” Wall concluded, “with The Tablet chaps that if they could fish out any nasty old man on the continent who was against totalitarianism and liberalism they would like him instinctively, and think he was a barrier against communism.” The exchange between Dru and Woodruff and Wall’s objections to the Tablet were evidence then of the splintering of the English Catholic intellectual community. Had all the contributors to the Catholic intellectual community agreed on the need for an accommodation with new political and social realities, then perhaps it would have been possible to reconstitute the community on the basis of this new consensus. As it was, Bellocianism, which had formed the ideological foundation of the English Catholic intellectual community, now became divisive, and its residual influence prevented the reformation of the community.6 Anti-Communism remained the leading candidate around which a new consensus might have formed. The Bellocians in particular were outspoken in their opposition to Communism. Evelyn Waugh had served, during the latter part of the war, as an intelligence officer in southeastern Europe, in which capacity he had urged the British government to support the Catholics of Croatia against Tito’s Communist partisans. When the Foreign Office decided otherwise, the subsequent sense of betrayal permeated Waugh’s trilogy of novels treating the war, the Sword of Honour, believed by many, including the eminent historian A. J. P. Taylor, the finest fictional portrayal of the British experience in World War II. Arnold Lunn also became a prominent anti-Communist after the war, turning into as ardent a cold warrior as he had been a Francoist and contributing to the opinion journal of a young American Catholic, William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review. The anti-Communism of Waugh and Lunn was reflected as well in Woodruff’s Tablet.7 Even though anti-Communism was shared by most of the Catholic intellectuals who endured into the postwar era (with, perhaps, the exception of Maisie Ward, who became involved with the Marxist “Worker-Priest” movement in postwar France), it too proved divisive.

378

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

The dilemma, as Wall’s objections to Woodruff’s Tablet demonstrated, was how best to oppose Communism, with Wall supporting social democracy and Woodruff demurring. Not only did anti-Communism become contentious in this way, but, as even Woodruff came to recognize, it was not necessarily a Catholic movement. While Lunn, for example, was eager to continue the Spanish Civil War–era crusade against Soviet influence, Woodruff warned him that they needed to avoid turning every issue into a Catholic one. “Catholic writers and publicists should make a great distinction,” he advised, “and only put their defence of themselves or each other on a Catholic ground, when it is a definite matter of defending the Church, not when it can more conveniently be treated as a matter of politics or patriotism, as all our criticism of the Soviets and the Soviet supporters can.” Anti-Communism, Woodruff recognized, was best portrayed as a British or European cause rather than a Catholic one. This stance, even more than the divisions over how best to oppose Communism, prevented a reconstitution of the English Catholic intellectual community on anti-Communist lines.8 Ultimately, the remnants of the English Catholic intellectual community lacked not only a body of ideas to replace those of Belloc but also a charismatic individual to inspire and lead. Belloc in his prime had been a magnetic figure, and his personality had complemented his ideology to draw two generations to Bellocianism. Intellectually, the only individual capable of supplanting him was Dawson. But Dawson was as withdrawn as Belloc had been gregarious. Dawson’s chronic ill health, his suspicious disposition, bordering occasionally on paranoia, and his geographic isolation, outside of London and seldom venturing to the capital, made it impossible for him to play the role that Belloc had. The moment of Dawson’s greatest influence had come thanks largely to the actions of others. During the war, Barbara Ward had impelled him to intervene forcefully in the debates among Catholic intellectuals, and, even more important, Cardinal Hinsley had granted Dawson the critical forums from which to do so, the Dublin Review and the Sword of the Spirit movement. After he lost both Ward, his necessary catalyst, and Hinsley, his crucial patron, Dawson became

Epilogue

379

less engaged with contemporary affairs. Following the war, he took refuge in his scholarly work, composing his Gifford Lectures, which he delivered in 1947 and 1948. When he did return to the present, Dawson began to focus on education as the means to revitalize the Christian roots of Western civilization, a study that culminated in his Crisis of Western Education (1961). Such a scheme was necessarily a long-term project, however, one that would take generations to succeed, if ever. Above all, it was not the type of project to inspire the fervor of Belloc’s radicalism. With neither the leadership to succeed Belloc nor the ideology to replace Bellocianism, English Catholic intellectual life suffered in the immediate aftermath of the war. Dawson lamented the impoverished intellectual environment. “One has to face the fact,” he explained to Wall in August 1946, “that there has been a kind of slump in ideas during the last ten years.” Wall’s assessment was similar. He had discovered on his return to England that the “violence and energy of the thirties had gone,” and the “tone was muted.” Even more significant than the decline in intellectual activity were the divisions that Wall identified. Catholic intellectuals, he believed, had become isolated from one another into “closed compartments.” They were, Wall concluded, divided into “so many groups and sects with axes to grind against each other.” Moreover, when he attempted to establish a new journal similar to Colosseum, he found colleagues such as Robert Speaight suspicious of anything that smacked of confessionalism. The Bellocian triumphalism that had celebrated the superiority of Catholic ideas and promoted a distinctive Catholic voice had gone the way of consensus among English Catholic intellectuals.9 Although the English Catholic intellectual community ultimately dissolved, in the final analysis it was the manner of the dissolution that provides the real measure of the community’s significance. The reactions of English Catholic writers and artists during and after World War II both contributed to and reflected important transformations not only in English Catholic intellectual life but also in English Catholicism as a whole, in European Catholicism, and ultimately in the universal Church.

380

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

Bellocianism had been the culmination of an intellectual revival within English Catholicism that had begun in the mid-nineteenth century when the Oxford Movement converts, led by John Henry Newman, began to gain from the wider English society an unprecedented respect for Catholic intellectual efforts. The hope, reflected in Maisie Ward’s biography of her parents, had been that Newman’s influence would spark an abiding intellectual revival. The defeat of Lord Acton and his fellow Liberal Catholics in the 1860s by the Ultramontane party of Cardinal Wiseman and Manning, his successor as archbishop of Westminster, had dealt a setback to these expectations, narrowing the scope of English Catholic intellectual efforts. Manning’s continued opposition to Catholic matriculation at Oxford and Cambridge had likewise represented a further obstacle. Finally, the modernist crisis in the first decade of the new century had diverted Catholic intellectual efforts away from theology, providing more disappointment for Maisie Ward and those of a like mind.10 With avenues of theological and philosophical speculation limited after Rome’s suppression of modernism in 1907, it was the social— ­particularly the political, economic, and historical—that became the focus of English Catholic intellectual activity. Belloc was the pioneer, and Bellocianism became the dominant ideology. Although Bellocianism had possessed certain advantages in the short term for English Catholics, in the long term the disadvantages had proved crucial. In the short term Bellocianism had forged the English Catholic writers and artists active between the world wars into a close-knit community, building an esprit de corps. It was, literally, they against the (modern) world. In the long term, however, the problem was that Bellocianism had segregated Catholic intellectuals from the rest of English society and even from continental Catholic intellectual activities. Tom Burns, Maisie Ward, and Frank Sheed had all begun to recognize by 1930 that Bellocianism was problematic in this regard, and had, in response, tried to expose English Catholics to contemporary continental theology and philosophy. By 1937 Dawson too was lamenting the antiphilosophic influence of Belloc, which he believed had caused the younger generation to become “hostile and contemptuous towards modern thought.” The political

Epilogue

381

crisis­ of the late 1930s, however, had precluded the type of Newmanite intellectual revival for which Dawson and his friends had hoped.11 In the end, it was World War II that had revealed Bellocianism to be an intellectual blind alley. The postwar realization that Catholic intellectuals had to transcend the Bellocian intellectual ghetto was built on the wartime ecumenism of Dawson and his friends at the Dublin Review and the Sword of the Spirit. As Wall put it in his correspondence with Dawson, the dilemma they faced after the war was whether to continue to separate themselves from the greater society or to “collaborate.” The first option led in his estimation to “sterility.” Where the second led Wall admitted he was not sure, but there was, he believed, no alternative.12 Bellocianism, however, had represented more than the reaction of English Catholic intellectuals against parliamentary democracy, capitalism, and Protestant Whig history. In many respects it had been the ideological culmination of the antimodern and illiberal intervention of Pope Pius IX (1846–78). This brand of Catholicism had affected more than English Catholic intellectual efforts. Under the leadership of Cardinal Manning (1865–92), Belloc’s boyhood hero, it had come to dominate the English Church with substantial consequences for the relation of English Catholicism with the broader society. For some four hundred years, English Catholicism had existed as a subculture. For much of that time it was English intolerance of Catholicism that had resulted in Catholic segregation. As tolerance for Catholicism had increased in the eighteenth century, with the state gradually annulling the legal disabilities against Catholics, there was less need to keep apart from the broader society. The “fortress” Catholicism of Manning, however, had resulted in the maintenance of the distinct Catholic subculture in England. Catholics were different. They stood in opposition to a suspect modern world, from which they had to keep their distance, or risk corruption. Bellocianism had been the intellectual expression of antimodern Catholicism and had thus assisted in the continued segregation of English Catholics.13 The failure of Bellocianism, therefore, contributed to more than just the breakdown of an intellectual community. It allowed, ultimately,

382

Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

for the assimilation of Catholics into the broader English society. Bellocianism had been the ideology of this distinctive Catholic subculture. The war, in exposing the deficiencies of Bellocianism, had breached the defenses that separated English Catholics from the wider English society. The distinctive Catholic subculture in England was finally to break down in the decades after World War II. By 1980 Catholics had largely been assimilated into the greater English society. The rapprochement that English Catholic intellectuals had reached with modern English government, political economy, and history in the aftermath of the war facilitated the general process of assimilation. It is difficult to imagine that a real assimilation could have occurred if such an articulate and influential section of the English Catholic elite had remained so resolutely opposed to modern England.14 If the breakdown of Catholicism as a distinctive subculture was a significant development of postwar English history, there was yet another transformation with reverberations beyond England. Bellocianism had been a real reflection of the antimodern siege mentality common to Catholicism throughout Europe. In the twentieth century, in particular, this mentality resulted in a broad effort to establish a distinctly Catholic political philosophy, one that stood in opposition to the modern world, to liberalism, parliamentary democracy, and capitalism. The war, however, had demonstrated the viability of parliamentary democracy not just to English Catholic intellectuals but also to Catholics throughout Europe. After the war the success of Christian Democrat parties on the Continent reflected a transformation similar to that which had occurred among English Catholic intellectuals. Continental Catholics too had abandoned both the militant Catholic triumphalism that had insisted that Catholics were superior to the rest of society and the political authoritarianism of the interwar period. Democracy was to be embraced, as was the reformed capitalism of the welfare state. Most important of all, there was a recognition of religious pluralism, and a new understanding that Catholics must work with their fellow, non-Catholic, citizens, in the interest of a shared Christian common good. The dissolution of the English Catholic intellectual community, as well as the ­development of

Epilogue

383

­ hristian Democrat parties on the Continent, particularly in Germany C and Italy, was therefore a reflection of a broader transformation. Ultimately, the recognition that the political and economic institutions of the modern world could not readily be dismissed represented the repudiation of fortress Catholicism.15 This postwar rapprochement of Catholic intellectuals and statesmen with modernity was to have even greater consequences, not only for European Catholics but also for universal Catholicism. Although the Second Vatican Council would not convene for another twelve years, by 1950 the foundation was being laid for the aggiornamento of Pope John XXIII. It would be overreaching, perhaps, to attempt to establish in this study a direct connection between the intellectual evolution of a group of writers and artists in what had always been a relatively minor outpost of Catholicism and the transformation that was to occur in the universal Church more than a decade later. It seems evident, however, that it had taken the bureaucracy of the institutional Church longer to come to terms with what English Catholic intellectuals and many of their continental contemporaries had come to realize by the late 1940s. The postwar rejection of Bellocianism by the English Catholic intellectuals was thus part of a much more significant development. The reconciliation of English Catholic intellectuals with modern English society had been a step in the direction of the Church’s subsequent advocation, in Gaudium et Spes, “The Pastoral Constitution on the Modern World” (1965), of active engagement in contemporary society, of dialogue with modernity rather than reflexive opposition to it. The real significance of the English Catholic intellectual community, in the last analysis, then, lay less in its prominence during the interwar period and more in the accommodation it reached with the modern world after World War II, an accommodation that heralded not only the assimilation of Catholics into the greater English society but also subsequent developments in the universal church.16

Notes

Prologue 1. George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” originally published in Inside the Whale (1940), republished in Orwell, My Country Right or Left and Other Selected Essays and Journalism (London, 1998), 179; “Notes on Nationalism,” originally in Polemic, no. 1 (October 1945), republished in Funny, but Not Vulgar and Other Selected Essays and Journalism (London, 1998), 124, 128. For other essays in which Orwell mentioned Ca­tholi­ cism in this political context, see his “The English People,” written in May 1944 and originally published in Collins’s Britain in Pictures series in August 1947; also “The Prevention of Literature,” originally in Polemic, no. 2 (January 1946), and “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels,” Polemic, no. 5 (September–October 1946), all of which were also republished in Funny, but Not Vulgar: 30–72, 150–65, and 184–205 respectively. For another notable non-Catholic intellectual of the period who took these Catholic writers seriously, see Hannah Arendt, “Christianity and Revolution,” Nation, 22 September 1945, as cited in Adam Schwartz, The Third Spring: G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones (Washington, DC, 2005), 11. 2. Adrian Hastings, “Some Reflexions on the English Catholicism of the 1930s,” in Bishops and Writers: Aspects of the Evolution of Modern English Catholicism, ed. Adrian Hastings (Wheathampstead, 1977). 3. The scholars mentioned in the following brief historiographical presentation may rightly object that the cardinal sin of the critic has been committed, that what has been criticized is not the book or article that each scholar has written but rather the book or article that each did not write. Mea culpa. It has been necessary to do this in order to explain why this book needed to be written. 4. The most recent biographies have included A. N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc (New York, 1984); Christina Scott, A Historian and His World: A 385

386

Note to Page xv

Life of Christopher Dawson (London, 1984); Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill: A Lover’s Quest for Art and God (London, 1989); Joseph Pearce, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton (London, 1996); Dana Greene, The Living of Maisie Ward (Notre Dame, 1997); Douglas Lane Patey, The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography (Oxford, U.K., and Cambridge, MA, 1998); Joseph Pearce, Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc (San Francisco, 2002); and Keith Alldritt, David Jones: Writer and Artist (London, 2003). Articles on interwar Catholic organizations and opinion have included Thomas Greene, “The English Catholic Press and the Second Spanish Republic, 1931–1936,” Church History 45 (1976): 70–84; Michael Walsh, “Ecumenism in War-Time Britain: The ‘Sword of the Spirit’ and ‘Religion and Life,’ 1940–1945,” Heythrop Journal 23 (1982): 243–58, 377–94; Stuart Mews, “The Sword of the Spirit: A Catholic Cultural Crusade of 1940,” Studies in Church History 20 (1983): 409–30; Peter Doyle, “The Catholic Federation: 1906–1929,” Studies in Church History 23 (1986): 461–76; James Flint, “‘Must God Go Fascist?’: English Catholic Opinion and the Spanish Civil War,” Church History 56 (1987): 364–74; Francis Mason, “The Newer Eve: The Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society in England, 1916–1923,” Catholic Historical Review 72 (1986): 620–38; Debra Campbell, “The Catholic Evidence Guild: Towards a History of the Laity,” Heythrop Journal 30 (July 1987): 306–24; Thomas Greene, “Vichy France and the Catholic Press in England: Contrasting Attitudes to a Moral Problem,” Recusant History 21 (1992): 111–33; Peter Doyle, “Charles Plater, S.J., and the Origins of the Catholic Social Guild,” Recusant History 21 (May 1993): 401–17; and Joan Keating, “Making of a Catholic Labour Activist: The Catholic Social Guild and the Catholic Worker’s College, 1909–1939,” Labour History Review 59 (Winter 1994): 44–56; Elaine Clark, “Catholics and the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage in England,” Church History 73 (2004): 635–65; Kit Elliot, “‘A very pushy kind of folk’: Educational Reform, 1944, and the Catholic Laity of England and Wales,” History of Education 35 (2006): 91–119; Frederick Hale, “Fighting over the Fight in Spain: The Pro-Franco Campaign of Bishop Peter Amigo of Southwark,” Catholic Historical Review 91 (2005): 462–83; Frederick Hale, “From Pacifism to Neutrality to Advocacy of Francisco Franco: The Case of Michael de la Bedoyère,” Chesterton Review 29 (Winter 2003); and Youssef Taouk, “‘We Are Alienating the Splendid Irish Race’: British Catholic Response to the Irish Conscription Controversy of 1918,” Journal of Church & State 48 (2006): 601–22.

Notes to Pages xvi–xvii

387

5. For example, see Ian Ker, The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961 (Notre Dame, 2003); Joseph Pearce, Literary Giants, Literary Catholics (San Francisco, 2005); and also Calvert Alexander’s Catholic Literary Revival (Milwaukee, 1935). 6. Joan Keating, “Discrediting the ‘Catholic State,’” in Catholicism in Britain and France since 1789, ed. Tallet and Atkins (London, 1996); Tom Buchanan, “Great Britain,” in Political Catholicism in Europe, 1918–1965, ed. Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway, 248–74 (Oxford, 1996). Other notable recent treatments of the English Catholic intellectuals of the period include Aidan Nichols, “Christopher Dawson’s Catholic Setting,” in Eternity in Time: Christopher Dawson and the Catholic Idea of History, ed. Stratford Caldecott and John Morrill, 25–50 (Edinburgh, 1997) (Nichols also covers the same ground, though in less detail, in his Dominican Gallery: Portrait of a Culture [Leominster, 1997]); Jay Corrin, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (Notre Dame, 2002); and Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1980–2001). Nichols’s article provides an authoritative account of Dawson and his set, though not of Belloc and his ascendant followers. Although Nichols quotes Adrian Hastings to the effect that postwar Catholic intellectual contributions were largely “the autumnal maturity of a generation formed well before the Second World War,” he does not attempt to explain why no new generation emerged to succeed them. Corrin’s ambitious volume treats not only English but also continental and American Catholic intellectual contributions in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but crucially concludes with the Spanish Civil War and therefore does not treat the transformative effects of World War II on Catholic thought. Cowling’s intellectual history centers on the conflict between Christianity and its opponents. He argues that in the twentieth century it was Catholics, including many of those treated here, who led the counterrevolutionary charge against the enemies of Christianity, and he describes the subsequent waning of Christianity’s power and influence, as later Christian intellectuals sought accommodation with modern thought. There is a parallel between Cowling’s argument concerning the ultimate failure of these Catholic intellectuals to halt the spread of what he refers to as indifference to Christianity and the argument in the epilogue of this volume concerning the dissolution of the English Catholic intellectual community. 7. See Patrick Allitt, Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Ithaca, 1997), 233–36, for postwar disillusion.

388

Notes to Pages xviii–xix

8. It should be explained that Greene, alone among the four figures whom Schwartz treats, is not included here beyond a passing mention. This is because it was Bellocian ideas about government, political economy, and history that defined the Catholic intellectual community of these years, and Greene, while Schwartz is certainly correct in characterizing him as a rebel against modernity, never shared these sympathies. (Dawson in general did not either, but he was much more engaged with the political crises of the 1930s and 1940s, as will be explained, and he was also more influential.) Nor, despite the fact that he worked with Tom Burns and later Douglas Jerrold, and was a friend of Waugh, was Greene closely connected personally to this community. For a recent discussion of Greene’s ambivalent relationship with his fellow English Catholics, see Ian Thomson, “Graham Greene, Uneasy Catholic,” Times Literary Supplement, 22 ­August 2006. 9. Schwartz, Third Spring, 13–14. With regard to the selection of his subjects, Schwartz notes, “In the fields of history and poetry, no Roman Catholic seedlings grew so tall as Dawson and Jones.” His inclusion of Greene (rather than Waugh) would seem, however, to have less to do with Greene being the best convert Catholic novelist and more to do with his “rebellion” against modernity being “more radical” than that of Waugh. 10. For the Catholic population numbers in this paragraph and below, see The Longman Handbook of Modern British History, 1714–1995, 3d ed., ed. Chris Cook and John Stevenson (London, 1996), 240. For total populations, see Cook and Stevenson, p. 151. For Catholicism in eighteenthcentury England, see E. R. Norman, The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1984), “Introduction.” Although Catholicism was in decline for most of the eighteenth century, this was not necessarily the result of penal laws or persecution. John Bossy has pointed out that a feature of English Catholicism by 1800 was patriotism and rightly noted that “such patriotism would be a strange consequence of a century of persecution”: Bossy, “English Catholics after 1688,” in From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, ed. Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford, 1991), 386–87. For the characterization of Catholics as timid and isolated, see Norman, English Catholic Church; Ellen Leonard, “English Catholicism and Modernism,” in Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context, ed. Darrell Jodock, 248–73

Notes to Pages xix–xxi

389

(­Cambridge, 2000), in which Leonard describes English Catholicism prior to 1850; and Eric Tenbus, “‘We Fight for the Cause of God’: English Catholics, the Education of the Poor, and the Transformation of Catholic Identity in Victorian England,” Journal of British Studies 46 (October 2007): 861–83, in which Tenbus argues that it was the education battles of the late nineteenth century that united English Catholics and transformed them from timid to bold and confident in their interactions with the broader society. For Jeffrey Von Arx too, “That Catholics started to become involved in public life in England was a consequence of the decision of Pius IX to restore the hierarchy 1850.” Indeed, Von Arx maintained that it was only during Cardinal Wiseman’s tenure as the first archbishop of Westminster that the Catholic Church was transformed from “the hidden Church in England that was still a legacy of penal times” into “one of the great religious forces of the Victorian age”: Von Arx, “Catholics and Politics,” in From without the Flaminian Gate: 150 Years of Roman Catholicism in England and Wales, 1850–2000, ed. Vincent Alan McClelland and Michael Hodgetts (London, 1999), 250–52. It is worth noting, however, that historians have also long characterized seventeenth-century English Catholics as timid and isolated but that recently such views have come under attack: see Ethan Shagan, “Introduction: English Catholic History in Context,” in Catholics and the “Protestant Nation”: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England, ed. Ethan Shagan, 1–21 (Manchester, 2005). 11. Norman, English Catholic Church, chap. 1, “Emancipation.” 12. For the Irish, see Denis Gwynn, “Irish Immigration,” in The English Catholics, 1850–1950: Essays to Commemorate the Centenary of the Restoration of the Hierarchy of England and Wales, ed. G. A. Beck, 279–80 (London, 1950); Philip Hughes, “The English Catholics in 1850,” also in Beck, English Catholics, 45. For the Manning quotation, see Robert Gray, Cardinal Manning: A Biography (New York, 1985), 280. 13. For the churches and clergy, see Cook and Stevenson, Longman Handbook, 240; Norman, English Catholic Church, 204. For education, see A. C. F. Beales, “The Struggle for the Schools,” in Beck, English Catholics, 366–71; as well as Tenbus, “‘We Fight for the Cause of God.’” 14. Norman, English Catholic Church, chap. 2, “Ecclesiastical Administration.” 15. John Henry Newman, Sermon preached 13 July 1852, St. Mary’s College, Oscott, at the First Provincial Synod of Westminster, before

390

Notes to Pages xxii–xxiii

­ ardinal Wiseman and the bishops of England. In Newman, Sermons C Preached on Various Occasions (London, 1874). For Wiseman and the conversion of England, see Norman, English Catholic Church, chap. 5, “Church Expansion,” 207–10. 16. For the influence of the events in Italy between 1848 and 1860 see Norman, English Catholic Church, chap. 3, “Cardinal Wiseman: Catholic Consolidation,” and chap. 4, “Catholics, Government, and Society.” Norman has observed of Wiseman that “the real nature of his success” lay in “his ability to turn a scheme of local ecclesiastical government (originally promoted by those seeking less centralized control) into an instrument for the diffusion of Ultramontanism” (127). See also Dermot Quinn, Patronage and Piety: The Politics of English Catholicism, 1850–1900 (Palo Alto, 1993), chap. 1, “Liberal Catholics and Catholic Liberals, 1850–1874,” and chap. 2, “Catholics and Tories, 1850–1868: A Natural Alliance?” for English Catholic reaction to Liberalism and the Liberal Party. For Liberal Catholics and the Vatican Council, see Joseph Altholz, The Liberal Catholic Movement in England: The ‘Rambler’ and Its Contributors, 1848–1864 (London, 1962), “Epilogue: Roman Triumph,” 235–44. 17. Though for another view of Manning, see Von Arx, “Catholics and Politics,” in From without the Flaminian Gate, 263–64, where he argues that with regard to politics at least Manning consolidated the Church in Britain on a “path of constructive engagement with the liberal State,” by “providing Catholics with a clear rationale for their participation in the democratic politics of the liberal secular State.” One could argue that with regard to engagement with the political system Manning exhibited a pragmatism that was not evident in his decision to ban Catholics from Oxford and Cambridge. 18. For the transformation of English Catholicism in the second half of the nineteenth century, see Tenbus, “‘We Fight for the Cause of God’”; Vincent Alan McClelland, “The Formative Years, 1850–92,” in From without the Flaminian Gate. McClelland argues that by the late nineteenth century English Catholics were “less inward looking, better educated, more socially aware and more loyally Roman” than earlier in the century (27). Though for an emphasis on the continuity, at least as regards devotions, between late-nineteenth-century English Catholicism and earlier English Catholicism, see Mary Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (Oxford, 1995).

Notes to Pages 1–5

391

Chapter 1.  From Political Radicalism to Political Catholicism 1. Hilaire Belloc, from the Dedicatory Ode to the Republican Club, in his Lambkin’s Remains (Oxford, 1900). For the Republican Club, see Robert Speaight, Life of Hilaire Belloc (London, 1957), 92–93. For the quotation on monarchy, see Hilaire Belloc, House of Commons and Monarchy (New York, 1922; originally London, 1920), 14. 2. For the first Hilaire Belloc and Louise Swanton Belloc, see Marie Belloc Lowndes, “I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia”: A Record of Love and of Childhood (New York, 1942). (Mrs. Belloc Lowndes was our Hilaire Belloc’s older sister.) Also see their respective entries in the Dictionnaire de Biographie Française, ed. M. Prevost and Roman D’Amat, vol. 5 (Paris, 1951), 1366–67. Louise Swanton Belloc’s father had been an Irish colonel in the Berwick Brigade—one of the old Stuart-Irish brigades—of the French army. See Speaight, Life, 2–3, for Colonel Swanton. For Belloc’s English grandparents, see Speaight, Life, 4–5; Belloc Lowndes, Arcadia, 29–32. Parkes was closely connected with the Reform Bill of 1832, and his contribution to the battles over the bill led to his appointment in 1833 as secretary of the commission for municipal reform. He went on to help found the Reform Club. See his entry in the original Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, vol. 15 (rpt. Oxford, 1967–68), 304–5, as well as his entry in the new DNB (Oxford, 2004): Philip J. Salmon, “Parkes, Joseph (1796–1885).” 3. For Bessie Belloc, see Belloc Lowndes, Arcadia, 1–3, 10–12, 35–36; also see her entry in the new DNB: Joanne Shattock, “Parkes [Belloc], Eliza­ beth Rayner [Bessie] (1829–1925).” For the quotations regarding her conversion, see Marie Belloc Lowndes, The Young Hilaire Belloc (New York, 1956), 7. 4. For Belloc’s ambiguous position, not quite French, not quite English, see Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911–1947, ed. Susan Lowndes, with a foreword by Elizabeth Iddesleigh and Susan Lowndes Marques (London, 1971), 10. 5. Belloc Lowndes, Arcadia, 102. Also Bessie Belloc, “A Chapter of War,” in her In a Walled Garden (London, 1896). 6. Belloc Lowndes, Arcadia, 145, 148, 260–61. 7. See Marie Belloc Lowndes, Where Love and Friendship Dwelt (New York, 1943), 46.

392

Notes to Pages 5–13

8. Peter Rutkoff, Revanche and Revision: The Ligue des Patriotes and the Origins of the Radical Right in France, 1882–1900 (Athens, OH, 1980), 22–23. The lines may be translated if not elegantly: “A most beautiful destiny it is to die for one’s country/And if I must fall someday in battle/It is on Prussian soil that I want my grave.” 9. Ibid., 121, 125. 10. Hilaire Belloc, The Cruise of the Nona (New York & Boston, 1925), 50; Belloc Lowndes, Where Love and Friendship Dwelt, 49–50, 59, 66. 11. See Belloc Lowndes, Young Hilaire Belloc, 62, for Bessie Belloc’s estimation of Newman. 12. See Speaight, Life, 18–33 for Belloc’s career at the Oratory and for the comment on Newman. 13. Speaight, Life, 33–40; A. N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc (New York, 1984), 21–28. 14. See Bessie Belloc, “Dr. Manning of Bayswater,” in her Walled Garden, 209–21. Manning had also blessed the child she had with her when she called on him during the war, though she did not reveal whether it was Belloc or his sister. See Belloc Lowndes, Arcadia, 202, for Manning’s advice when Bessie Belloc was grieving; and also Marie Belloc Lowndes, “How I Began My Writing in Life,” in Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911–1947, 7, for Manning’s assistance to her. 15. Belloc, Cruise of the Nona, 52. 16. Ibid., 221–22. 17. Manning, The Rights and Dignity of Labour, an address delivered to the Leeds Mechanics’ Institute in 1874 (London, 1874), cited in Vincent Alan McClelland, Cardinal Manning: His Public Life and Influence, 1865– 1892 (London, 1962), 134–36; E. R. Norman, “Cardinal Manning,” in English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1984), 277–81; Robert Gray, Cardinal Manning: A Biography (New York, 1985), 300, 311. 18. Belloc Lowndes, Young Hilaire Belloc, 102–5. 19. See Hilaire Belloc, “The First Day’s March,” in his collection of essays, The Hills and the Sea (London, 1927), 89, cited in Speaight, Life, 70, for his realization that he was not a Frenchman; and Speaight, Life, 68–69, for Belloc’s experience in the French army confirming his egalitarian republicanism. 20. The ban on Catholic attendance at Oxford and Cambridge was not formally lifted until 1895. See Sheridan Gilley, “The Years of Equipoise,

Notes to Pages 14–24

393

1892–1943,” in From without the Flaminian Gate: 150 Years of Roman Catholicism in England and Wales 1850–2000, ed. Vincent Alan Mc­Clelland and Michael Hodgetts (London, 1999). Given this, either Bessie Belloc sent her son to Oxford in 1893 in the expectation that the ban would be lifted or the Bellocs’ attention to the ban earlier was out of obedience and respect to Manning himself. 21. E. C. Bentley, Those Days (London, 1940), 85–86; Eccles, preface to the French edition of Hilaire Belloc’s Essay on the Nature of Contemporary England (London, 1937), quoted in Speaight, Life, 80. Speaight’s translation. 22. See the Oxford student magazine the Isis, 19 January 1895; quoted in Wilson, Belloc, 57, for Belloc’s dress; and see the Isis, quoted in Speaight, Life, 90, for his likes and dislikes. 23. For Eccles, see Speaight, Life, 84–85; for Matthews, 86; for the Isis, 89–90. 24. In Essays in Liberalism by Six Oxford Men (London, 1897), vii–viii. The six were Belloc, J. S. Phillimore (later a professor of classics at Glasgow University), P. J. Macdonell (subsequently a colonial magistrate), J. L. Hammond (historian), F. W. Hirst (longtime editor of the Economist), and J. A. Simon. 25. Speaight, Life, 100–103. 26. Belloc to Phillimore, 28 May 1896, as quoted in Speaight, Life, 103. 27. Belloc, Path to Rome, 142. Ellipses in the original. 28. For Hammond and the Speaker, see Stewart Weaver, The Hammonds: A Marriage in History (Stanford, 1997). 29. Hilaire Belloc, Emmanuel Burden (London, 1904), 89. 30. Hilaire Belloc, Danton: A Study (London, 1899), 36–39. 31. Ibid., 1–9. 32. Speaight, Life, 198–200, 206. 33. John McCarthy, Hilaire Belloc: Edwardian Radical (Indianapolis, 1978), 101–3. 34. McCarthy, Hilaire Belloc, 87–93; also R. K. Webb, Modern England, 2d ed. (New York, 1980), 455–56; Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–1990 (New York, 1997; originally 1996), 22–23. 35. See V. Alan McClelland, “Bourne, Norfolk and the Irish Parliamentarians: Roman Catholics and the Education Bill of 1906,” Recusant

394

Notes to Pages 24–31

History 23 (October 1996): 229; and also the 1906 Lenten Pastoral of the Bishop Casartelli of Salford, quoted in E. Oldmeadow, Francis Cardinal Bourne (London, 1940), 1:285–86. For Belloc’s position as a candidate, see Speaight, Life, 190. 36. Speaight, Life, 190–91, 211–13. 37. Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 4th ser., vol. 186 (4 May 1908): 1748–50, cited in McCarthy, Hilaire Belloc, 132–33. 38. Goodwin to Belloc, 2 December 1908; Belloc to Goodwin, 3 December 1908, both in the Belloc Papers; Belloc to Goodwin, 1 January 1909, in Belloc, Letters, selected and ed. Robert Speaight (London, 1958), 19. 39. The letter to the Guardian was quoted in Speaight, Life, 219–20; for his raising of the issue in Parliament in 1908, see McCarthy, Hilaire Belloc, 133–35; and Speaight, Life, 225–26. Also see Hilaire Belloc, “On Licensing,” English Review 2 (June 1909). 40. Asquith had replaced the ailing Campbell-Bannerman as prime minister in April 1908. Belloc won by only 314 votes. 41. Lewis Harcourt, colonial secretary in the reshuffled cabinet, eldest son of Sir William (1827–1904), who had been leader of the House of Commons from 1894 to 1898 and longtime Liberal cabinet minister. 42. Belloc to Goodwin, 18 February 1910, 5 March 1910, 22 March 1910, in Belloc Papers. 43. Webb, Modern England, 465. 44. The members of the conference were Asquith, Lloyd George, Crewe, and Birrell from the Liberal cabinet; Balfour, Landsdowne, Austin Chamberlain, and Cawdor for the Unionists. McCarthy, Hilaire Belloc, 152–54. 45. Belloc was vociferously antisuffragette: see Goodwin to Belloc, 30 May 1908; Belloc to Goodwin, 3 December 1909, both in Belloc Papers. 46. G. K. Chesterton to Belloc, 16 July 1916, in Belloc Papers; Belloc to Wyndham, 11 August 1911, in Letters, 45–47. 47. Hilaire Belloc, French Revolution, 2d ed. (London, 1970), 9–10, 13–14. 48. Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton, Party System (London, 1911), 15–18. That under this definition, an absolute monarchy, or any form of despotic government, could be considered a “democracy” so long as popular laws were enacted did not seem to bother either of the authors, for they were more concerned with critiquing representative government than with providing a satisfactory definition of democracy.

Notes to Pages 32–48

395

49. Ibid., 127, 102–3. Emphasis theirs in the quotation from p. 127. 50. Ibid., 38–42, 65–89. 51. Ibid., 168–81. 52. Ibid., 187–95. 53. See Webb, Modern England, 463; and Clarke, Hope and Glory, 59–60, for the Insurance Act. 54. Eye-Witness, 13 July 1911, 97–98; 19 October 1911, 545–46; 6 June 1912, 784–86. Cited in McCarthy, Hilaire Belloc, 240–41. 55. Belloc to Wyndham, 18 June 1911, in Belloc Papers. 56. Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (Indianapolis, 1977; originally London, 1912), 39, 49–50. Emphases are his. 57. Ibid., 89–96. 58. Ibid., 96–100. Emphasis his. 59. Ibid., 107–10. 60. Ibid., 142–43, 50. 61. Ibid., 172–74, 183–84. 62. Ibid., 144, 152–57. 63. Ibid., 70–78. 64. Ibid., 78–80. 65. Ibid., 70–71, 81, 85, 199–201. 66. Belloc to Baring, 31 August 1916, in Letters, 73. 67. Hilaire Belloc, A Shorter History of England (London, 1934), 7, 21, and chap. 1, “Roman Foundations.” 68. See chap. 3, “The Conquest,” of Belloc’s Shorter History; and chap. 2, “England under Foreign Kings, 1013–1204,” of John Richard Green’s A Short History of the English People, new ed. (London, 1888; 1st ed., 1874). 69. Belloc, Shorter History, chap. 3, “The Conquest”; Europe and the Faith (London, 1920), 201–2. 70. Belloc, Shorter History, chap. 4, “Plantagenet.” 71. Belloc, Europe and the Faith, 244. 72. Belloc, Shorter History, chap. 9, “The Building of Protestant England.” 73. Ibid., chap. 10, “The Breakdown of Kingship”; and chap. 11, “The Death of Monarchy.” 74. Belloc, Europe and the Faith, 141, 241. 75. Compare, e.g., the first chapter of Green’s Short History of the English People with the carefully argued first section of Peter Hunter Blair’s

396

Notes to Pages 49–55

classic Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, first published in 1956 and reissued in its second, 1977, edition as recently as 1995. 76. See Thurston, The Month, July 1925, cited in Speaight, Life, 420; Belloc to Fisher, 7 February 1925, Belloc/Fisher correspondence, folder 14, Belloc Papers. 77. For a recent dismissal of the idea that Cecil himself had fostered the plot, see Pauline Croft, “Cecil, Robert, first earl of Salisbury (1563– 1612),” DNB (2004). Barry Coward, Stuart Age (London and New York, 1980), 111, has pronounced the evidence against Cecil “slight.” For Gerard and Gardner, see John Gerard, S.J., What Was Gunpowder Plot? (London, 1896); and S. R. Gardiner, What Gunpowder Plot Was (London, 1897). And see the unsigned review in English Historical Review 12, no. 48 (October 1897): 791–95, for an account of the arguments of Gerard and Gardiner: the reviewer concluded that the latter had much the better of it. 78. Belloc to Maurice Baring, 21 February 1913, quoted in Speaight, Life, 311. 79. The chapter on Marconi in Maisie Ward’s Gilbert Keith Chesterton (New York, 1943), 331–62, a chapter actually written by her husband, Frank Sheed, remains a fair and accurate narrative of the scandal, though some might disagree with Sheed’s conclusions. For Belloc and the Marconi affair, see Speaight, Life, 308–13. See also Belloc’s preface to Cecil Chesterton, The Perils of Peace (London, 1916), 10–12. 80. Fr. Vincent McNabb, O.P., to Belloc, 20 November 1918; Belloc to McNabb, 24 November 1914, both in Belloc Papers. 81. Belloc, introduction to Chesterton, The Perils of Peace, 17–18. 82. Chesterton, The Perils of Peace, 228–239. 83. Belloc to McNabb, 27 August 1920; Belloc to McNabb, 1 December 1919, both in Belloc Papers. 84. Hilaire Belloc, “Reform III: The Restoration of Property,” Oxford and Cambridge Review (October 1912). This article was part of a series of five “Reform” essays of his published in that journal between August and December 1912. See McCarthy, Hilaire Belloc, for a valuable discussion of Belloc’s Oxford and Cambridge Review articles. Belloc would expand during the interwar period on this early advice in his Restoration of Property (1936). The quotation comes from p. 93 of this volume; the emphasis is Belloc’s. 85. See chap. 5 of Restoration of Property for Belloc on the need for the government to ensure low interest rates for small farmers.

Notes to Pages 57–65

397

86. Belloc, Restoration, 98, 100–101. 87. See the outline of his argument that Belloc provided in chap. 1 of the House of Commons and Monarchy, 9–14. For the quotation, see p. 115; see also 102–5, 109, for the breakdown of the governing class. 88. Belloc, House of Commons and Monarchy, 152, 168, 176–77; and, for Belloc’s “subsidiary bodies,” chap. 11, “Councils.” 89. Ibid., 173–74, 185. 90. Ibid., 173–74, 182, 184–85. 91. Ibid., 152–53, 168–69, 182–83. 92. Belloc to Mrs. Balfour, 28 June 1922, in Belloc, Letters, 122; New Witness, 3 November 1922, 278–79. 93. Belloc, Cruise of the Nona, 154–55. 94. Ibid., 155–58. Emphasis Belloc’s. Majority rule was for Belloc effective and morally necessary under the following conditions: when it took place within a homogeneous community, when there was an active popular demand for the settlement of the issue at question, when the matter to be decided was reasonably familiar to all, when it concerned nearly all in the community and in “much the same degree,” and when the majority was substantial. Whether all these conditions could ever actually be met was a question Belloc failed to address. 95. Belloc to Baring, 24 September 1935; Belloc to Baring, 21 March 1939. Both in Belloc Papers. 96. See Belloc to Baring, dated 1913, on Marconi and Cecil Chesterton, in Belloc, Letters, 53–54; see Belloc to Baring, 31 August 1916, in Letters, 72–73, for his criticism of the New Witness during the war. For Belloc convincing G. K. Chesterton to quarantine Prothero, see Chesterton to Belloc, 3 May 1919, 25 August 1919, and subsequent undated letter, all in Belloc Papers. For the New Witness’s anti-Semitism, see, e.g., “The Great Dope Scandal,” unsigned article, New Witness, 16 August 1918, 301–2, which argues that Jewish-owned businesses were attempting to subvert the war effort; “A Cosmopolitan Conspiracy,” New Witness, 24 January 1919, 245–46; and “The Betrayal of France,” New Witness, 18 April 1920, 401–2, which propose that Jewish interests were preventing the proper punishment of Germany. For Prothero, see her “Letter to the Editor,” New Witness, 5 July 1918, 193–94; also her articles on Poland: New Witness, 29 August 1919, 26 September 1919, 24 October 1919, 6 August 1920, 11 April 1921.

398

Notes to Pages 65–71

97. For Belloc’s objections to the New Witness’s anti-Semitism during the Marconi affair and for comments on “cosmopolitan influence,” see Belloc to Maurice Baring, 21 February 1913, cited above in the paragraphs on the scandal. For Belloc on the Boer War, see Belloc, The Jews (Boston and New York, 1923), 50. For his political novels, see Mr. Barnett in Emmanuel Burden and its successors—Mr. Clutterbuck’s Election (1908), in which Barnett has been raised to the peerage as Lord Lambeth and then made Duke of Battersea; A Change in the Cabinet (1909); and Pongo and the Bull (1910). For the Missing Masterpiece, see Belloc to Chesterton, 25 January 1929, folder 73190, Chesterton Papers, British Library. Belloc wrote that to accomplish this he would call the Jewish characters “foreigners” who spoke English “excellently” and “all [of them] doing what Jews do.” 98. Belloc, Cruise of the Nona, 204. 99. Belloc, The Jews, 301–7. 100. Ibid., 141, 147–48, 153, 157, 160. 101. Ibid., 158–59. 102. For the various apologies for Belloc’s anti-Semitism, see Speaight, Life, 363, 452–57; and Wilson, Belloc, 82–83, 188, 257–60. For an example of Belloc’s reputation as an anti-Semite, see Speaight, Life, 453, on the reaction of Jewish readers to Belloc’s The Jews, and 456, for the uproar that occurred when a Jewish friend in New York tried to give a luncheon for him at his club. Of course, much of the argument in The Jews centered on the notion that Jews constituted a nation of their own and were aliens in other nations, but a succinct presentation of this view can be found in Belloc’s letter to Maurice Baring of 25 November 1913, from which Speaight, Life, 453–54 quotes extensively. 103. William Rubinstein, “The Devil’s Advocate,” review of John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, in First Things 99 (January 2000): 39–43. 104. Published in the “Letters to the Editor,” New Witness, 15 November 1918, 57, under the heading “The New Witness and the Jews.” The editor failed to take the bait and respond.

Chapter 2.  The Greater Servants 1. The phrase “Greater Servants” in the chapter title refers to Chesterton’s “Open Letter,” published in 1923 in the New Witness, in which

Notes to Pages 72–76

399

he noted of Belloc, “You first revealed the truth both to its greater and its lesser servants.” The five subjects of the next chapter are “lesser” relative to the “greater” servants of this chapter by virtue of their age, not necessarily their talents or accomplishments. 2. McNabb’s biographer, and fellow Dominican, Ferdinand Valentine, notes that some within the order had wondered whether the Dominicans were letting loose yet “another Savonarola upon a hapless world,” referring to the radical Dominican preacher (1452–98) who was the guiding spirit behind the late-fifteenth-century Florentine Republic and who was eventually burned as a heretic. See Ferdinand Valentine, O.P., Father Vincent McNabb, O.P.: The Portrait of a Great Dominican (London, 1955), 154. McNabb himself believed that Savonarola had been wrongfully accused, that his execution was a crime for which Pope Alexander VI, who had excommunicated him, was largely responsible, and that he had died a saint. See Edward Siderman, A Saint in Hyde Park: Memories of Vincent McNabb, OP (Westminster, MD, 1950), 57. 3. McNabb was baptized Joseph but took the name Vincent when he entered the Dominican order. To avoid confusion, he is referred to here as Vincent. Biographical information on McNabb has been taken primarily from Valentine’s McNabb. For the McNabbs’ position as Catholics in Ulster, see Valentine, McNabb, 36–37. For his relation to Ireland and to England, see McNabb to G. K. Chesterton, 9 November 1935, Chesterton Papers, British Library, Folder 73196. 4. Valentine, McNabb, 18–24. 5. Ibid., 84. 6. Ibid., vii–x, xiii–xvii, 153–56. 7. McNabb, “A Call to Contemplatives,” in The Church and the Land (London, 1926), 2. 8. Valentine, McNabb, 78–79. 9. For Aeterni Patris and Louvain, see Gerald McCool, The NeoThomists (Milwaukee, 1994), 34–38. 10. It is unclear who precisely the “we” to whom McNabb refers was, but one might surmise that he was speaking of the Louvain Thomists. The passage is quoted in Valentine, McNabb, 86, and comes from a transcript a friend had compiled of McNabb’s “autobiographical asides.” 11. Valentine, McNabb, 81–82; and see 129–31, for more on McNabb’s intolerance and lack of intellectual humility and its effect on his fellow Dominicans, students and peers alike.

400

Notes to Pages 76–83

12. For the quotation on St. Thomas, see paragraph 29 of Aeterni Patris; the quotation regarding the modernists comes from one of their leading figures, Albert Loisy’s Simples reéflexions sur le decret ‘Lamentabili’ et sur l’encyclique ‘Pascendi’ du 8 Sept. 1907, 13, which is cited in the article on modernism in the Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1911). 13. For Belloc and modernism see Speaight, Belloc, 250–51. 14. Valentine, McNabb, 88–103. 15. McNabb to Belloc, 3 March 1906; McNabb to Belloc, 1 December 1908, Belloc Papers. 16. Valentine, McNabb, 114–15, for McNabb’s time in London and subsequent transfer to Leicester. 17. For their relationship, see McNabb to Belloc, 24 May 1910; Belloc to McNabb, 19 June 1910; McNabb to Belloc, 14 November 1911; and McNabb to Belloc, 31 October 1911, all in Belloc Papers; and see Valentine, McNabb, 258, for Belloc’s daughter Eleanor’s reminiscences about her father’s friendship with McNabb. She recalls that McNabb had often urged Belloc to consider the priesthood after his wife died. 18. Siderman, Saint, 65–66, 78–79, 83. 19. Valentine, McNabb, vi; Belloc to Lady Phipps, 8 November 1933, in Belloc, Letters, 241–42. 20. Belloc to McNabb, 31 July 1911, Belloc Papers. 21. McNabb, “Toward Social Thinking,” originally published in the Tablet, 3 January 1914; reprinted in Valentine, McNabb, 400–403. 22. McNabb to Belloc, 14 November 1911, Belloc Papers. See also Valentine, McNabb, 133, 402–3. Ellipses and italics are McNabb’s. 23. Thomas F. Burns, letter in the Tablet, 10 January 1914, quoted in Valentine, McNabb, 136. 24. Valentine, McNabb, 111, 125–26. 25. Ibid., 132, 155, 193. McNabb remained, however, a divisive figure among his fellow Dominicans long after his death, with some feeling that living with him had been like “living with a resident inspector” and complaining that there was a “fine line between austerity of life and exhibitionism”: Malcolm McMahon, O.P., “The Relevance of Father Vincent McNabb, O.P.,” Chesterton Review 22 (February–May 1996): 34–36. His contemporaries were indeed divided between those who “revered him as a most holy man, and those who thought him an actor, a poseur, a charlatan or a bully”: see Bede Bailey, O.P., “Father Vincent McNabb, Dominican,”

Notes to Pages 84–96

401

also in Chesterton Review, 46. It is worth noting, however, as Bailey does, that Valentine himself began his research for the McNabb biography as one who had disliked McNabb, but he not only “came to see why so many admired him,” he also became an ardent admirer. 26. McNabb, “The End of the Wage-System,” in Church and the Land, 78. 27. McNabb, “A Call to Contemplatives,” 1–6. 28. Valentine, McNabb, 156–57, 162–65. 29. Maisie Ward, Unfinished Business (New York, 1964), 81–82. 30. Siderman, Saint, 50. Siderman remained an agnostic, though he admitted that intellectually he was attracted to the church’s teachings. 31. Ward, Unfinished Business, 93–94. 32. Siderman, Saint, 50. 33. Valentine, McNabb, 139–46. 34. Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill: A Lover’s Quest for Art and God (New York, 1989), 5. 35. Gill, Autobiography, 70–73, 77–78. 36. Ibid., 79–90. 37. Ibid., 107–9. 38. Ibid., 110–11. 39. Ibid., 112–14. 40. Ibid., 114–15; MacCarthy, Gill, 38–42. 41. Gill, Autobiography, 114–17. 42. Pepler changed his name from Douglas to Hilary in 1920 when he became a Dominican Tertiary. For more on this, see below. 43. MacCarthy, Gill, 67–73. 44. Gill, Autobiography, 140–42. 45. Ibid., 147–51. 46. Ibid., 283–85; Eric Gill to Romney Gill, 6 September 1909, quoted in MacCarthy, Gill, 93; Gill to Rothenstein, 25 November 1909, in Letters of Eric Gill, ed. Walter Shewring (London, 1947), 26. 47. Gill, Autobiography, 162–63; MacCarthy, Gill, 96–98, 106–15. 48. MacCarthy, Gill, 102; Gill to Rothenstein, 5 December 1910, in Letters, 34–36. In claiming that he had invented a new religion that turned out to be Catholicism, Gill was borrowing G. K. Chesterton’s description of his own conversion to orthodox Christianity. For Chesterton, see the discussion of his Orthodoxy below.

402

Notes to Pages 96–103

49. Gill, Autobiography, 191–94. His wife took the name Mary when she was baptized. 50. Ibid., 198. Emphasis Gill’s. 51. Ibid., 173–74; Gill to Joseph Cribb, 6 August 1917, in Letters, 95–96. 52. Gill, Autobiography, 174; Gill, “Indian Sculpture,” in his ArtNonsense and Other Essays (London, 1929), 107–8 (the essay was originally published in 1922). 53. Gill, Autobiography, 108; Gill, “Slavery and Freedom,” in ArtNonsense, 1–2 (the essay was originally published in 1918), and Gill, “A Grammar of Industry,” in Art-Nonsense, 12 (originally published in 1919). 54. Gill, Autobiography, 289; Gill, “The Criterion in Art,” in ArtNonsense, 286. 55. Valentine, McNabb, 139; MacCarthy, Gill, 134. 56. Gill, “Memorandum of Guild of SS Joseph and Dominic,” February 1922, quoted in MacCarthy, Gill, 116; Gill, Autobiography, 287–88, 299; Gill, ”A Grammar of Industry,” in Art-Nonsense, 13. 57. MacCarthy, Gill, 127, 140. Although see Barbara Wall, “Eric Gill, Hilary Pepler, and the Ditchling Movement,” Chesterton Review 5 (Spring–Summer 1979): 165–87, for some amusing anecdotes concerning the Ditchinglites’ amateurish farming efforts; and Conrad Pepler (Hilary’s son), “In Diebus Illis: Some Memories of Ditchling,” Chesterton Review 8 (November 1982): 333–52, for the gradual abandonment of the ancient farm equipment they had started with. 58. McNabb to Pepler, undated, quoted in Valentine, McNabb, 146; Donald Attwater, A Cell of Good Living (London, 1969), quoted in MacCarthy, Gill, 134. 59. Desmond Chute to Mother Mary Teresa Jocelyn, 9 June 1918, quoted in MacCarthy, Gill, 137; Gill, Autobiography, 214–15. 60. Gill, Autobiography, 210–11, 219; MacCarthy, Gill, 144–46; Robert Speaight, Life of Eric Gill (New York, 1966), 88. McNabb also introduced Gill to Thomism, with less than impressive results, as Gill took to parroting the scholastic method of St. Thomas. His essay “Of Things Necessary and Unnecessary” (1921), published in Art-Nonsense, was a particularly excruciating example. 61. Thomas Maynard, “Ditchling,” New Witness, 30 August 1918, 351; see also articles in New Witness, 21 November 1919 and 5 December 1919.

Notes to Pages 103–106

403

62. MacCarthy, Gill, 148–52; Tom Burns, Use of Memory: Publishing and Further Pursuits (London, 1993), 35. 63. MacCarthy, Gill, 120, 171–75; Gill, Autobiography, 219, 225–27. 64. The terms Distributism and Distributist to describe Bellocian political economy were just coming into common use in the early 1920s. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Ernest Barker, in his Political Thought in England (London, 1915), 223, first applied the word Distributivism to Belloc’s ideas. It came into wider use in 1925 and 1926 through G.K.’s Weekly, the establishment of the Distributist Society, and the publication of G. K. Chesterton’s Outline of Sanity, of which more below. 65. Gill to Chesterton, 5 June 1925, in Gill, Letters, 190–91. 66. Speaight, Gill, 124–26. 67. See Gill to Chesterton, 5 June 1925, in Letters, 190, for Gill’s objection to Chesterton’s differences with him; for Gill’s criticism of Chesterton’s attitude to modern art, see Gill to Chesterton, 8 June 1924, in Letters, 176–80. For McNabb bringing Gill to Kingsland, see Speaight, Gill, 92. 68. For Gill’s Nuptials of God and his understanding of the relationship between Christ and the church, see MacCarthy, Gill, 161–65. Not surprisingly, as MacCarthy notes, the engraving “set alarm bells ringing around Ditchling and the adherents of Ditchling.” It is worth noting as well that Gill was quite explicit about his interpretation of the relationship between Christ and the church, as elsewhere he observed, “Speaking analogically, we are fucked by Christ, and bear children to him”: Gill to Reyner Heppenstall, 12 September 1934, quoted in MacCarthy, Gill, 162. For the last comment, see John Fothergill, An Innkeeper’s Diary (London, 2000; originally London, 1931), 246. Fothergill ran a popular inn, the Spreadeagle, at Thame, near Oxford, which Gill visited. He was something of an artist himself, having studied at the Slade School, and an art historian, contributing the essay on drawing to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. 69. Gill, Autobiography, 234. Emphasis mine. 70. MacCarthy, based on entries in Gill’s diaries, has detailed sexual practices that included not only the less scandalous extramarital affairs— usually with his servants and models—but also incestuous relationships with several of his sisters, one of which went on for years, and several encounters with two of his daughters when they were in their teens. There were also experiments in bestiality. Robert Speaight had passed over this conduct of Gill when writing his biography some twenty years earlier.

404

Notes to Pages 107–117

MacCarthy’s candidness caused great controversy, both from those who believed that Gill’s sexual activities were better left unreported and from those who thought that she had been too lenient in her treatment of Gill. For MacCarthy’s own account of the furor, see her essay “Baptism by Fire,” in Lives for Sale: Biographer’s Tales, ed. Mark Bostridge (London and New York, 2004). 71. For Burns’s subsequent differences with Gill in the 1930s—in particular, regarding Gill’s economic radicalism—see Burns, Memory, 36–39. 72. The line in the section head is from G. K. Chesterton’s “To Hilaire Belloc,” the dedicatory ode to Chesterton’s novel Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904). The last four line of the second stanza run: “So it is with the heroic thing; / This shall not end for the world’s end / And though the sullen engines swing, / Be you not much afraid, my friend.” 73. G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (London, 1969; originally London, 1936), 10–11. 74. Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (New York, 1943), 23. 75. Ibid., 42; Baring to Chesterton, 25 August 1922, Chesterton Papers, Folder 73189, British Library. 76. For this paragraph and the one above, see Chesterton, Autobiography, 58, 70–72; E. C. Bentley, Those Days (London, 1940), 45–47, 51–52, 56; Ward, Chesterton, 32; Pearce, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton (London, 1997), 22; and William Sarjeant, “G. K. Chesterton at St. Paul’s School,” Chesterton Review 21 (August 1995): 315–41. 77. For this paragraph and the one above, see Chesterton, Autobiography, 81–82; Schwartz, Third Spring, 34. 78. Chesterton, Autobiography, 91–93; Schwartz, Third Spring, 34–35. 79. Chesterton, Autobiography, 93–94. 80. Ibid., 95. 81. Ibid., 171, 152–53. 82. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York, 1943; originally London, 1908), 18–19, 93–97, 101, 110, 117–18. 83. Ibid., 155. 84. Ibid., 131–35. 85. Ibid., 164–68. 86. Ibid., 194–98, 211. 87. Ibid., 212–22. 88. Ibid., 220–25.

Notes to Pages 117–127

405

89. Ibid., 226. 90. Ibid., 20; Mrs. Chesterton to Fr. O’Connor, 12 January 1915, Chesterton Papers, Folder 73196. There was considerable discussion among many of Chesterton’s friends as well during his illness concerning the possibility of his conversion. See Mrs. Wilfrid Ward to Fr. O’Connor, 30 December 1914, Chesterton Papers, Folder 73196; Belloc to McNabb, 10 January 1915, and McNabb to Belloc, 15 January 1915, Belloc Papers. 91. Chesterton to Baring, undated, and Chesterton to Baring undated, both in Chesterton Papers, Folder 73189. The former letter, written from Alexandria, was certainly written on his return from the Holy Land to England; the latter was most likely written in the eight months between his return to England in April 1920 and his departure for a lecture tour of the United States early the following year. For the last quotation, see McNabb to Chesterton, 25 May 1934, Chesterton Papers, Folder 73196. Frances Chesterton converted to Catholicism only a few years after her husband. 92. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 112–15. 93. Ibid., 116–19. For Chesterton’s comment to his wife, see A. N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc (New York, 1984), 97. 94. Chesterton, Autobiography, 111–12. 95. Ward, Chesterton, 128–34; Chesterton, Autobiography, 162; Chesterton to Belloc, 16 July 1915, and Chesterton to Belloc, 3 May 1919, Belloc Papers; New Witness, 27 April 1923, cited in Pearce, Wisdom and Innocence, 324. 96. Chesterton, Autobiography, 202. 97. “The Future of the Labour Party,” New Witness, 3 January 1919. 98. “Comments of the Week,” New Witness, 11 April 1919; “The Dangers of Industrial Peace,” New Witness, 22 August 1919. 99. G. K. Chesterton, Outline of Sanity (New York, 1927; originally London, 1926), 42, 79. 100. Ibid., 88–93, 114–18. 101. Ibid., 133. 102. Ibid., 132. 103. Ibid., 66, 122, 60, 146. 104. Ibid., 170–73, 202. 105. Ibid., 150–55. 106. Ibid., 12, 22, 33–38, 81–82.

406

Notes to Pages 128–138

107. G. K. Chesterton, Short History of England (London, 1924; originally 1917), 81. 108. New Witness, 3 November 1922, 275; 1 December 1922, 339. 109. G. K. Chesterton, “Our Critics: The Case against Mussolini,” G.K.’s Weekly, 6 March 1926, 618–19. 110. G. K. Chesterton, Resurrection of Rome (New York, 1930), 199–204. 111. Ibid., 267–72. 112. Ibid., 207–8, 210–11, 219–20, 231. 113. Ibid., 233–35, 248–49. 114. Ibid., 208–9; John McQuillan, “Italian Popular Party,” New Witness, 25 August 1922, 120–21. 115. Chesterton, Resurrection of Rome, 211; Chesterton, Outline of Sanity, 241. 116. Chesterton, Resurrection of Rome, 236–39. 117. Ibid., 237, 243–45. 118. This interpretation of Chesterton’s attitude toward Fascism will no doubt be controversial. Chesterton, in contrast to Belloc, it seems, has not lacked for his defenders, who emphasize his critical statements about Fascism. For a recent and important debate concerning the relationship of Chesterton, Belloc, and their fellow Catholic intellectuals to Fascism, see Chesterton Review 25 (February–May 1999), an issue devoted to a symposium on the topic. 119. G. K. Chesterton, “Where is the Fanaticism?” New Witness, 15 August 1919, 328–29. 120. G. K. Chesterton, “An Englishman’s Friends and Foes,” New Witness, 11 July 1919, 214–15. 121. G. K. Chesterton, “The World and the Wandering Jew,” New Witness, 18 July 1919, 238–39. 122. G. K. Chesterton, “The Red Fox and the Revolution,” New Witness, 18 April 1919, 500–501. 123. G. K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem (New York, 1921), v, 288, 293–95. 124. Ibid., vi, 297. 125. Ibid., 300–302. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid., 303.

Notes to Pages 140–147

407

128. For the account of how he wrote the book and for Gilson on Chesterton’s St. Thomas Aquinas, see Ward, Chesterton, 619–20; as well as Pearce, Wisdom and Innocence, 432–33.

Chapter 3.  The Lesser Servants 1. Douglas Jerrold, Georgian Adventure: The Autobiography of Douglas Jerrold (London, 1938; originally London, 1937), 11; Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, vol. 2: The Infernal Grove (London, 1973), 236–37; Robert Speaight, Property Basket: Recollections of a Divided Life (London, 1970), 155–57. 2. Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, 28–37. 3. Ibid., 27, for his preparatory school; 50, 54, for the details on his time at Westminster; and 55–57, for the Balliol and New College scholarships. 4. Students of Winchester College, the prominent public school in the eponymous cathedral town. 5. Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, 63–65. 6. Ibid., 70–71, for the Oxford Union; 66, 77, 86, for his magazine; and 91–92, for his association with Hulme. 7. Ibid., 91–97, for the London literary and artistic scene before the war. For a discussion of Hulme’s thought, see Karen Csengeri, “Hulme, Thomas Ernest (1883–1917),” in DNB. For more on Hulme see Robert Ferguson, The Short Sharp Life of T. E. Hulme (London, 2002). 8. For Jerrold’s military career see chapters 4–6 of his Georgian Adventure. Jerrold’s first book was a history of the Royal Naval Division (1923) that included an introduction written by Churchill himself, of whom Jerrold was a great admirer long before World War II. Indeed, Jerrold predicted Churchill’s subsequent rise to greatness when he observed in 1937 that Churchill was of the type to whom a nation could turn in crisis, noting that if disaster had struck in 1917 Churchill might have emerged as another Cromwell, Marlborough, Chatham, or Pitt (268–69). 9. Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, 190–92, for the Somme and his wound; 202, for Aldershot. For Jerrold’s lifelong chronic pain from the wound, see his entry in the original Dictionary of National Biography (1961–70 vol.), 585–86, which Jerrold’s longtime friend Sir Charles Petrie contributed.

408

Notes to Pages 147–159

10. Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, 196. 11. For Barker and the All Souls’ Fellowship, see Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, 225; for his experience as a civil servant, see 209–60. For Benn Brothers and Ernest Benn, see 260–61, 264, and 276–77 in particular. 12. Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, 16–17, 58, 77, 267–68. 13. Ibid., 18–19. 14. Ibid., 25, 68, 252–53, 257. 15. Ibid., 223–24, 250–51. 16. Ibid., 255–60. Here Jerrold was referring to recent events in Spain and Mexico. 17. Jerrold, “Hilaire Belloc and the Counter-Revolution,” 4–6, in For Hilaire Belloc: Essays in Honor of His 71st Birthday, ed. Douglas Woodruff (New York, 1942); Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, 97–98, 270. 18. Jerrold, “Hilaire Belloc and the Counter-Revolution,” 4–5; and Georgian Adventure, 72, 97. 19. Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, 323. 20. Douglas Jerrold, England (Bristol, 1935), chaps. 1, 2, esp. p. 17. 21. Ibid., chaps. 3, 4, esp. pp. 39, 56–57. 22. Ibid., 72–73. 23. Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, 293–300, for these two periodicals. Frankau was primarily a novelist. His weekly, Britannia, lasted all of ten numbers. Yeats-Brown was the soldier-author of the autobiographical Bengal Lancer (1930), a best-seller. And see Georgian Adventure, 73, for Jerrold’s opinion of Baldwin; 290, for his views on the Tories and liberty. 24. Ibid., 332; and see Jerrold’s “Current Comments” column in English Review (October 1932): 343–49. 25. Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, 340. For Jerrold’s explanation of conservatism, property, and economic liberty, see English Review (December 1935): 655. 26. Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, 340; Jerrold, “Current Comments,” English Review (December 1933): 574–75; (July 1934): 10–11. 27. For this paragraph and the one above, see Jerrold, “Current Comments,” English Review (July 1933): 8–9; (October 1932): 343–48; (July 1934): 13–14; also Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, 227, 247. 28. Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, 90, 323. 29. Ibid., 387–88. 30. For this paragraph and the one above, see Jerrold, “Current Comments,” English Review (June 1934): 647–49.

Notes to Pages 159–169

409

31. Jerrold, “Current Comments,” English Review (July 1934): 7–10. 32. Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, 323–26. 33. For one example of the New Witness’s take on the Russian Revolution see the lead editorial, “A Cosmopolitan Conspiracy,” in the 24 January 1919 edition, 245–46. For the view of Belloc himself, see “Capitalism and Communism—The Hellish Twins,” English Review 54, 122–34. 34. See Jerrold, Georgian Adventure, 332, for Woodruff’s influential role in Jerrold taking the editorship of the English Review. 35. Evelyn Waugh, A Little Learning: The First Volume of an Autobiography (London, 1983; originally 1964), 115, 171, 191; Christopher Hollis, Along the Road to Frome (London, 1958), chap. 4, “The Union and All That.” 36. Waugh, Learning, chap. 8, “Never a Palinode,” 163–208. 37. Waugh, Learning, 171, 179–81, 191; Hollis, Frome, 59–62. The Hypocrites subsequently took over the New Reform Club, which Lloyd George himself subsidized, amassing, according to Hollis, a mountain of debts that George was forced to pay—much to the delight of the students. For Brian Howard, see Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster, ed., Brian Howard: A Portrait of a Failure (London, 1968). 38. Auberon Waugh, “Woodruff (John) Douglas (1897–1978),” rev., in DNB. 39. Waugh, Learning, 186–87; Christopher Hollis, The Seven Ages: Their Exits and Their Entrances (London, 1974), 44. 40. For Hollis’s family and early education, see T. F. Burns, “Hollis, (Maurice) Christopher (1902–1977),” rev., in DNB. 41. Waugh, Learning, 171–72, 207–8; Hollis, Frome, 65; Seven Ages, 43. Hollis noted that not only Waugh but also a number of other men of subsequent distinction from their generation of Oxford undergraduates, such as the poet laureate John Betjeman, went down without taking a degree. 42. Waugh, Learning, 186. 43. Hollis, Frome, 75; and Seven Ages, 42–45. 44. Hollis, Frome, 76–77; and Seven Ages, 51. 45. Hollis, Frome, 52–56; and Seven Ages, 6, 50–51. 46. Hollis, Frome, 77–82; and Seven Ages, 125–26. 47. Hollis, Seven Ages, 60–62; Waugh, Learning, 191. 48. Hollis, Frome, 87–88; and Seven Ages, 58–59. 49. Hollis, Frome, 80–81. 50. Ibid., 81–82; Seven Ages, 65.

410

Notes to Pages 170–175

51. Hollis, Frome, 89 passim; see also Seven Ages, chap. 7, “Sighing Like a Furnace”; and Woodruff’s entry in the DNB. 52. Douglas Woodruff, Plato’s American Republic (New York, 1926), 1–17. 53. Ibid., 22–24. 54. Ibid., 20–21, 25–26, 54–57, 59–60, 62. 55. Ibid., 100, 103. 56. Ibid., 28–30. It should be noted, however, that both Belloc and Chesterton had only recently written books that were much less critical of the United States. Chesterton, for instance, in his What I Saw in America (1922), argued that despite rampant commercialism and industrialism the United States actually retained much that England had lost—including not only the ideal of equality but also a functioning and economically free agricultural peasantry in the Midwest. Belloc, for his part, while arguing as Woodruff would do that Americans were focused on the pursuit of wealth, observed in his The Contrast (1923) that this was not to be wondered at, given that they had spent the better part of the past three centuries exploring and developing their vast continent and its many resources. Indeed, Belloc concluded that in terms of their attitude toward money, Americans actually had the upper hand on Europeans, for in the States the rich man was not worshiped for his wealth while in Europe he certainly was (see 74–79). 57. For Hollis’s comments on the South and Kentucky, see Hollis to Woodruff, 24 December, Woodruff Papers, Georgetown University. Although the letter was dated only with the month and day, it must have been written between 1935 and 1939, because it was written at the University of Notre Dame, where Hollis taught during this period. For the comments on the Jeffersonian state, see Christopher Hollis, American Heresy (New York, 1930, originally London, 1928), 3–5. The volume was dedicated to Woodruff. 58. Hollis, American Heresy, 290. 59. Hollis, Frome, 81, regarding Woodruff and Belloc; for Belloc’s relations with Jerrold, compared with Hollis, see Belloc’s papers: his letters to Hollis were addressed to “my dear Hollis,” while those to Jerrold, which treated business matters entirely (Belloc’s contributions to Jerrold’s English Review), were addressed to “Mr. Jerrold”; see Belloc to Hollis, 16 July 1931, for Hollis’s help with Belloc’s History of England; and Belloc to Hollis, 27 October 1936, for Belloc’s praise of Hollis’s book (both in Belloc Papers).

Notes to Pages 176–183

411

60. See Belloc to Hollis, 16 July 1931, Belloc Papers. As only Belloc’s replies to Hollis survive among Belloc’s papers, one must deduce from them what Hollis’s objections were. Belloc promised to rewrite the section on the plot but stood by his interpretation. See Hollis, Frome, 79, for Belloc’s comment regarding William and his airplane. 61. Christopher Hollis, Monstrous Regiment (London, 1929), 16–17, 63, 168–69. 62. Ibid., 147–49, 70–71. 63. Ibid., 66–67. 64. Ibid., 29–41, 117–18; and see 82–83 and 160 for Hollis’s similar arguments regarding the foreign policies of France and especially Philip II’s Spain. 65. Ibid., 22–26, 153, 171, 195. 66. Ibid., 103, 108–9. 67. Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh, 2 vols. (London, 1986, 1992), 1:385–86, on the Herberts and Waugh’s Edmund Campion (London, 1935; Boston, 1946). There were many reasons for her family to oppose the match and for Waugh to curry favor: Herbert was only eighteen, he thirty-one, when Waugh began courting her; she was a first cousin of Waugh’s first wife; his marriage was not yet annulled. 68. Stannard, Waugh, chap. 4, “Poverty and Obscurity: 1924–1927,” 1:97–136; Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Michael Davie (Boston, 1976), 161–301. Waugh titled the chapter in his memoir treating the first year after Oxford, “In Which Our Hero’s Fortunes Fall Very Low.” He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn, as they were called, opted to divorce in July 1929, after she began an affair. See Stannard, Waugh, ­1:181–85, for the marriage. 69. See Stannard, Waugh, 1:111, 127–28, 135, 137, 147–49, 158–59, for Waugh’s previous writing experience and the writing and publication of Decline and Fall. 70. Ibid., 160–61, 179, 190–91. For Waugh’s criticism of the war generation, see the Evening Standard essay of 22 January 1929, “Too Young at Forty: Youth Calls to the Peter Pans of Middle-Age Who Block the Way,” republished in Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London, 1983), 45–47. Waugh included Hollis among the five writers who “sum up the aspirations and prejudices of my generation.” 71. Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (Boston, 1958; originally London, 1930), 170–71 (italics and ellipses are Waugh’s), 273.

412

Notes to Pages 184–193

72. Ibid., 282–84. Ginger refers of course to John of Gaunt’s lines from the beginning of act 2 of Richard II. 73. Waugh, Vile Bodies, 11–12; Waugh, Diaries, 2 July, 8 July 1930, 319–20; Stannard, Waugh, 1:225–27. 74. Martin D’Arcy, “The Religion of Evelyn Waugh, in Evelyn Waugh and His World, ed. David Pryce-Jones (London, 1973), 64, quoted in Stannard, Waugh, 227–28; Waugh, Diaries, 8 July 1930, 320; Waugh, “Come Inside,” originally published in Road to Damascus, ed. John O’Brien (New York and London, 1949), reprinted in Essays, 366–68. 75. Waugh, “Come Inside,” 367; Evelyn Waugh, Robbery under Law (London, 1939), 278–79, republished as “Appendix: Conservative Manifesto,” in Essays, 161–62. 76. Evelyn Waugh, “Converted to Rome: Why It Has Happened to Me,” originally published in the Daily Express, 20 October 1930, reprinted in Essays, 103–5. 77. Stannard, Waugh, 1:385, 388–89. 78. Waugh, Edmund Campion, 104–5, 110–13. 79. Ibid., 132–33. 80. Ibid., 13–15. Ellipses mine. John Colet, dean of St. Paul’s and founder of St. Paul’s School, was a theologian and biblical scholar whose work on the Pauline epistles had influenced Erasmus himself. William Grocyn and Thomas Lynacre (also spelled Linacre) were instrumental in the Renaissance revival of the study of classical Greek. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 16–18. 83. For his refusal to vote, see Waugh, “Aspirations of a Mugwump,” in Essays, 537; originally in the Spectator, 2 October 1959. 84. Waugh, Diaries, 325, 9 August 1930. For Waugh on Belloc as an idol of his, see his account of a 1929 dinner party at which he met Belloc, Baring, and Max Beerbohm, “Max Beerbohm: A Lesson in Manners,” in Essays, 516 (originally published in the Sunday Times, 27 May 1956); for Waugh’s later evaluation of Belloc the writer, see “Here’s Richness,” in Essays, 456–58 (originally in the Spectator, 21 May 1954); and “Belloc Anadyomenos,” in Essays, 472–74 (originally in the Spectator, 26 August 1955); and for his private jibes at Belloc, see Waugh, Diaries, 4 November 1936, p. 412, and 28 September 1952, pp. 703–4. 85. The nation-state now called Ethiopia was widely known during the interwar period as Abyssinia. In order to maintain consistency with quota-

Notes to Pages 193–199

413

tions from contemporary sources, Ethiopia will be referred to as Abyssinia, though this would appear to be the exception rather than the rule among historians. 86. For Waugh’s earlier trip to Abyssinia and Woodruff’s role, see Stannard, Waugh, 1:234–55; Waugh, “We Can Applaud Italy,” in Essays, 162–64, originally published in the Evening Standard, 13 February 1935. 87. Waugh, “We Can Applaud Italy.” 88. For Waugh and the Daily Mail, see Stannard, Waugh, 397; as well as Donat Gallagher’s introduction to part 4 of Essays, 156. 89. Stannard, Waugh, 1:403–4, 408, 414. Although the oil and mineral concession deal came to nothing, especially after the State Department emphasized that the United States would not intervene in Abyssinia, when it broke the news was considered of great import. Not only was it embarrassing to the British (the deal had been negotiated by an Englishman) and American governments, the concession seemed to have given the United States a reason to support Haile Selassie against Italy, perhaps heading off Mussolini’s invasion. 90. For a brief account of Waugh’s interview with Mussolini, see Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (Boston, 1975), 158. The dictator had granted the interview on condition that Waugh not publish an account of it. Sykes was a friend in whom Waugh had confided the details of the interview soon after his return to England. For the decision to return and the wait for his visa, see Stannard, Waugh, 1:418, 422. 91. Waugh, Abyssinia, 243–44, 253. 92. The commentator was Michael B. Salwen in his Evelyn Waugh in Ethiopia: The Story Behind “Scoop” (Lewiston, NY, and Queenston, Ont., 2001). For Waugh’s contrariness, see Waugh to Katherine Asquith, from Assisi, Italy, 4 August 1936, in Letters; and see Waugh, Diaries, 31 August 1936 and 1 September 1936. 93. Waugh, Abyssinia, 129. 94. Christopher Hollis, Foreigners Aren’t Fools (London, 1936), 3–7, 25. 95. Ibid., 3, 11, 13, 16, 20. 96. Ibid., 6–7, 21, 24. 97. See also Hollis’s Italy in Africa (London, 1941), in which he reiterated much of what Waugh had argued in 1935–36 and which he himself had put in the mouth of the Italian character in Foreigners Aren’t Fools. And in fact Hollis made his defense of Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia and his

414

Notes to Pages 200–210

admiration for Mussolini explicit in several speeches in 1936 delivered at the University of Notre Dame: see Patrick Allitt, Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Ithaca, 1997), 221–22. 98. For Gurian’s life and career, see articles in the January 1955 number of the Review of Politics, which was devoted to an appreciation of him (he had edited the journal and had died the previous year). 99. For the position at Notre Dame, see Hollis, Frome, 151–52; and Hollis, Seven Ages, 131. For Wilson, see Hollis, Frome, 138–40, 145–47. Hollis dedicated his Two Nations: A Financial Study of English History (London, 1937; originally London, 1935), to Wilson. 100. Hollis, Two Nations, 22, 77–79, 99, 157, passim. 101. For Hollis and Gurian, see Hollis, Seven Ages, 136–45; and Frome, 160–64. For Hollis’s letter to Woodruff, dated only 30 March but surely from 1938 given the contents, see Woodruff Papers, Box 4, Folder 4. 102. Hollis to Woodruff, 11 June, in Woodruff Papers, Box 4, Folder 2. The letter was only dated with the day and month, but given that the Lateran Treaty was discussed it must have been written in 1929. 103. Arnold Lunn, Roman Converts (New York, 1925; originally London, 1924), v; and Now I See (London, 1938; originally 1933), 86. 104. Stella Wood, “Lunn, Sir Henry Simpson (1859–1939),” in DNB; T. F. Burns, “Lunn, Sir Arnold Henry Moore (1888–1974),” rev., in DNB; Arnold Lunn, Come What May: An Autobiography (Boston, 1941), 3–13, 81–90. The Lunns had returned to England in 1888 due to Henry’s poor health. Arnold Lunn was knighted in 1952 for his contributions to British skiing and to Anglo-Swiss relations. His younger brother Hugh, who wrote under the pen name Hugh Kingsmill, was a prominent novelist and biographer. 105. Burns, “Lunn,” in DNB. 106. Lunn, Now I See, 10. 107. Ibid., 12–14. Ellipses are Lunn’s. 108. Ibid., 23, 30–31, 37; Lunn, Come What May, 72. 109. Lunn, Roman Converts, 218–19, 223–24. 110. Ibid., 226, 252–54. 111. Ibid., 225–29, 244. 112. Ibid., 8–11, 15–23. 113. Ibid., 24–25. 114. Lunn, Now I See, 42–43. 115. Ibid., 14, 42–43.

Notes to Pages 210–226

415

116. Ibid., 87, 90. 117. Ibid., 127–28; Lunn, Come What May, 138–39. 118. Lunn, Come What May, 140–41. 119. Lunn, Now I See, 145–48, 161–62. 120. Ibid., 168, 173. 121. Ibid., 180–86. 122. Ibid., 70–71, 192–93. 123. For example, Matt. 16.18–19; Luke 22.31–32; John 21.15–18; Lunn, Now I See, 206–9. 124. Lunn, Now I See, 187, 196–97, 216–19, 222; Mark 16.15, 16. 125. Lunn, Now I See, 210–11, 242–43. 126. Ibid., 51, 56, 93, 120. 127. Lunn, Come What May, 49–50. 128. Lunn, Now I See, 114–15, 117, 236–37. 129. Arnold Lunn, A Critic and a Convert: or, A Challenge and Its Sequel (Taunton, 1935), 81, 93 (from a letter dated 27 October 1933).

Chapter 4.  The Dawsonite Challenge 1. In an attempt to avoid confusion, Sheed & Ward is used to refer to the publishing house, whose colophon was a stag, and Sheed and Ward to refer to the husband-and-wife team, Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, who owned and managed the firm. 2. Frank Sheed, Church and I (Garden City, NY, 1974), 43; Maisie Ward, Unfinished Business (New York, 1964), 86–87. 3. Wilfrid Sheed, Frank and Maisie: A Memoir with Parents (New York, 1986), chap. 2; Sheed, Church and I, 12–14. 4. Sheed, Church and I, 15–16. 5. Ibid., 16–18. 6. Ibid., 27, 30–31. 7. Ibid., 30–33. 8. Ibid., 35–40. 9. Ward, Unfinished Business, 4–5; Dana Greene, The Living of Maisie Ward (Notre Dame, 1997), 9–12. 10. Ward, Unfinished Business, 14–16; Greene, Living of Maisie Ward, 13–14; Speaight, Belloc, 25–28.

416

Notes to Pages 227–237

11. Ward, Unfinished Business, 29–30, 32, 34–41. 12. Ibid., 68–78. 13. Sheed, Church and I, 42; Ward, Unfinished Business, 82–86. 14. Ward, Unfinished Business, 85. 15. Ibid., 88–89. 16. Sheed, Church and I, 78–86, 108; Ward, Unfinished Business, 97–103, 107–8. Incidentally, while finishing his law degree, Sheed met Woodruff and Hollis. He was on the university team that debated the Oxonians on their tour. Sheed (Church and I, 108) recalled that the sharp wit of the Oxford team “revolutionized debate in Australia.” 17. Sheed, Church and I, 86, 93; Ward, Unfinished Business, 107, 112–15. 18. Ward, Unfinished Business, 125; Sheed, Church and I, 191. 19. For Adam’s early career, see Robert Krieg, C.S.C., Karl Adam: Catholicism in German Culture (Notre Dame, 1992), especially chap. 1, “Making of a Theologian (1976–1919)”; also Justin McCann’s foreword to Sheed & Ward’s 1954 edition of Adam’s Spirit of Catholicism, which was reprinted in the Franciscan University Press (Steubenville, Ohio) 1996 edition of Spirit of Catholicism, xi–xiii; and see also Sheed’s discussion of Adam in his Church and I, 191. For Adam on the neo-Scholastics and the modernists, see Krieg, Adam, 10–13. Krieg quoted from Adam’s Son of God (1933), from his Christ and the Western Mind, and from his 1925 review of a volume by Christian Pech, a leading contemporary neo-scholastic theologian. 20. Adam, Spirit of Catholicism (1996), 5; Alan Schreck emphasizes this passage in his afterword to the Franciscan Press edition of Spirit of Catholicism, 245. Sheed, Church and I, 191 (italics are Sheed’s). 21. Adam, Spirit of Catholicism, 168–69. 22. Ibid., 5–6. 23. Sheed, Church and I, 104. 24. Julie Kernan, Our Friend, Jacques Maritain: A Personal Memoir (Garden City, NY, 1975), 15–34. 25. Ibid., 35–59. 26. For Maritain, of course, the truth lay between the two extremes; man had indeed suffered a fall and original sin had left its imprint on his soul, but his corruption was not complete and salvation was both possible and necessary.

Notes to Pages 237–247

417

27. Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers: Luther—Descartes—Rousseau (London, 1928), 4, 11, 142. 28. Ibid., 63. 29. Ibid., 72–76, 79, 82; and see Charles A. Fecher, Philosophy of Jacques Maritain (Westminster, MD, 1953), 237, on the consequences of Descartes’s angelism on theology. 30. Maisie Ward, The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition, vol. 2: Insurrection versus Resurrection (London, 1938), 170–95. 31. Ibid., 328, and 162–64 especially for Maisie Ward on Loisy’s “deceit,” as well as 165–71. 32. Ibid., 236–37, 322. For an excellent recent account of Wilfrid Ward and his thought, see Paschal Scotti, Out of Due Time: Wilfrid Ward and the “Dublin Review” (Washington, DC, 2006). 33. Tom Burns, Use of Memory: Publishing and Further Pursuits (London, 1993), 53, for the Manchester Guardian quotation. 34. Ibid., chap. 4, “First Steps in Publishing,” 32 passim, 53; “Tom Burns, Obituary,” The Times, ed. 1, Saturday, 9 December 1995, 23. 35. Burns, Memory, chap. 1, “The Vanished World of Wimbledon”; Burns, “Obituary.” David Burns was a member of the Church of Scotland, though he would convert to Catholicism on his deathbed, received into the Church by one of his sons, a Jesuit priest. 36. Burns, Memory, chap. 2, “A Jesuit Education”; Burns, “Obituary”; Martin D’Arcy, Laughter and the Love of Friends: Reminiscences of the Distinguished English Priest and Philosopher, ed. William S. Abell (Westminster, MD, 1991), 36–41. 37. Burns, Memory, chap. 3, “A Student in Paris.” 38. Ibid., 32–36. Burns, however, was to diverge from Gill intellectually during the 1930s. He came to reject in particular Gill’s radically antediluvian economics, and even as early as 1933 he took Gill to task for his despisal of technology and for his tirades against international commerce and finance. See esp. Burns to Gill, 12 December 1933, quoted in Speaight, Gill, 240–41. 39. Burns, Memory, 36–40; Harman Grisewood, One Thing at a Time: An Autobiography (London, 1968), 79. For more on Maritain and Gill, see chap. 2 above. 40. Burns, Memory, 41–43; Grisewood, One Thing, 78–83; Speaight, Property Basket, 161–64. Grisewood began his career as a radio actor in

418

Notes to Pages 247–251

1929–33, then turned to announcing and subsequently rose to assistant controller (1941) and then acting controller for the BBC’s European Division. After World War II he was director of the Third Programme. In 1955 he was appointed chief assistant to the director general. For Grisewood see, in addition to his memoir, Thomas Dillworth’s introduction to Grisewood, “Remembering David Jones,” Journal of Modern Literature 14 (Spring 1988): 565–66; also, in the new DNB, Paul Donovan, “Grisewood, Harman Joseph Gerard (1906–1997).” 41. Speaight, Property Basket, 161; Grisewood, One Thing, 81. 42. Grisewood, One Thing, 79–80. 43. Burns, Memory, 46, 52. 44. Grisewood, “Remembering David Jones,” 568. 45. Burns to Dawson, September 1930, quoted in Burns, Memory, 50. 46. Burns, Memory, 35; Grisewood, One Thing, 83–84; Grisewood, “Remembering David Jones,” 569; René Hague, ed., Dai Greatcoat: A SelfPortrait of David Jones in His Letters (London and Boston, 1980), 40. 47. Hague, Dai Greatcoat, 19–20; David Jones, “In illo tempore,” in Jones, Dying Gaul and Other Writings, ed. and introd. Harman Grisewood (London and Boston, 1978), 19–23; Elizabeth Ward, David Jones Mythmaker (Manchester, 1983), 7–8, 12. Ward pointed out the similarities between the Gills and Joneses. 48. Jones, “In illo tempore,” 23; Hague, Dai Greatcoat, 23. Llywelyn ap Gruffyd was the son of Llywelyn the Great, the legendary Welsh king who in the early thirteenth century succeeded not only in defeating the AngloNormans but also in unifying a Wales heretofore divided among competing princes. The son led the Welsh to victory over Prince Edward, the son of the English King Henry II, and in 1267 won from the English the right to be called prince of Wales. Unfortunately for Llywelyn and the Welsh, when Prince Edward became King Edward I he returned to Wales seeking revenge and crushed the Welsh resistance under Llywelyn in 1282. 49. Hague, Dai Greatcoat, 20, 25–28; and Jones to Hague, 2 July 1935, 72; Jones, “In illo tempore,” 23–29. Jones’s most recent biographer, Keith Alldritt, blames exhaustion for the breakdown, noting that in the first years of the 1930s Jones not only wrote the nearly complete draft of In Parenthesis but also produced a “profusion of portraits, animal paintings, interiors, still lifes, landscapes, and seascapes.” See Alldritt, David Jones Writer and Artist (London, 2003), 81–83.

Notes to Pages 251–261

419

50. For this paragraph and the one above, see Jones to Hague, July 1973, in Hague, Dai Greatcoat, 248–49; also Dai Greatcoat, 28. 51. For Jones, Wall, and O’Connor, see Thomas Dilworth, “The Letters of John O’Connor to David Jones,” Chesterton Review 23 (February and May 1997), 57–63. This piece includes three letters from O’Connor to Jones: 9 June, 12 July, and 10 August 1921. 52. Dilworth, “The Letters of John O’Connor to David Jones”; also Alldritt, David Jones, 47–52; Schwartz, Third Spring, 302–3. Schwartz provides a particularly strong account of the role that his understanding of sacrament had played in Jones’s conversion. 53. Hague, Dai Greatcoat, 29–30; Ward, Mythmaker, 41. For the colophon, see Sheed, Church and I, 107–8. In explaining the colophon, Sheed referred to St. Bernard, for whom the stag symbolized in its “leaps and bounds” “the ecstasies of the speculative mind; it is able to thread its way through the densest thickets of forests, as such a mind penetrates obscurities of meaning.” 54. Hague, Dai Greatcoat, 29. 55. Ibid., 29–31. 56. Ibid., 31–33, 36, 39–42. 57. Ibid., 43, on Jones’s early successes with his painting. See Jones, “In illo tempore,” 29, for the genesis of In Parenthesis. 58. Jones, In Parenthesis (London, 1955; originally London, 1937), 27. 59. Ibid., 3–4 and 28 for ritual and liturgy; 28–29, 63, and 153 for night office and divine office; and 42, 44, and 70 for references to a soldier as a catechumen or to his baptism. 60. Ibid., 95. 61. Ibid., 74–75, 137. 62. Ibid., 49, ix, xiv. 63. Ibid., xiii, ix. 64. Ibid., 13. 65. Ibid., 24. 66. Burns, Memory, 52. 67. Ibid., 44–45; Order: An Occasional Catholic Review 1, no. 1 (May 1928): 2. 68. Burns, Memory, 44–45; Speaight, Property Basket, 161, for Bourne’s remark, made to Speaight’s brother. 69. Order 1, no. 1 (May 1928): 20, 27, 45.

420

Notes to Pages 262–273

70. Ibid., 9–11. 71. For this paragraph and those below, see Order 1, no. 4 (November 1929). And see Burns, Memory, 45, for the acknowledgment that Brogan was the author. 72. Order 1, no. 2 (August 1928): 40, 61; Burns, Memory, 45; G.K.’s Weekly, 2 June 1928, 178 (ellipses here are mine, replacing the parenthetical phrase “here he is both impartial and constructive”); for the McNabb quotation, see Speaight, Gill, 200. 73. Burns, Memory, 47–48; Grisewood, One Thing, 79. 74. There were some fourteen Essays in Order published between 1931 and 1934. Dawson contributed two, and other notable authors included Maritain, Peter Wust, and Nicholas Berdyaev. 75. Christina Scott, A Historian and His World: A Life of Christopher Dawson, 1889–1970 (London, 1984), 13–19. Scott was Dawson’s daughter. Also Christopher Dawson, “Tradition and Inheritance: Memories of a Victorian Childhood,” part 1, in Wind and the Rain 5, no. 4 (1949): 213–14. 76. Dawson, “Tradition,” 1, 213–14; Scott, Historian, 15–16, 22. 77. Dawson, “Tradition,” 1, 216–17; and “Tradition and Inheritance,” part 2, Wind and the Rain 6, no. 1 (1949): 12–14; Scott, Historian, 23–27. 78. Dawson, “Tradition,” 2, 7–8, 13. 79. Scott, Historian, 34–39. 80. Ibid., 34, for the quotation, citing a 1925 letter from Dawson to his closest friend, E. I. Watkin; and chap. 3, “Oxford in the Golden Age,” for Dawson’s university career. 81. Ibid., 39, 41–43. For Barker on Dawson, see Barker, Memories of Three Universities (Oxford, 1953), 59–60; and Scott, Historian, 44 (she cites Barker’s review of Dawson’s The Judgement of the Nations in Spectator 170 (1943): 152. 82. Dawson, “Tradition,” 2, 14; Scott, Historian, 28–29. 83. Christopher Dawson, “Why I Became a Catholic,” Catholic Times, 21 May 1926, 11. 84. Ibid. 85. Dawson, “Why I Became a Catholic”; Scott, Historian, 49. 86. Scott, Historian, 42, 50–51, 57–65; Dawson, “Why I Became a Catholic,” 11. 87. Scott, Historian, 72–76, 108–9. Before the appearance in 1928 of his first book, Age of the Gods, the Sociological Review had published ten articles of his (four other articles appeared in other journals).

Notes to Pages 274–289

421

88. Christopher Dawson, Age of the Gods (London, 1928), v. 89. Ibid., 359–62; for the projected series, see Scott, Historian, 82–83. 90. Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion (London, 1937; origi­ nally 1929), viii, 12–13, 19–22. 91. Ibid., 24–36, 39. 92. Ibid., 70–95. 93. Ibid., 149, 125–27, 129, 133–34. 94. Ibid., 149, 155–56, 165–66. 95. Ibid., 182–83. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid., viii, 185–87, 190. 98. Ibid., 208–9, 228. 99. Ibid., 233; Christopher Dawson, “The World Crisis,” in Enquiries into Religion and Culture (New York, 1933), 46. 100. Christopher Dawson, “Saint Augustine and His Age,” in Enquiries, 222, 200. 101. Ibid., 242–43. 102. Ibid., 243–46. 103. Ibid., 257–58. 104. Sheed, Church and I, 123. And see Scott, Historian, 87, for Leo Ward’s persuasion. 105. Ward, Unfinished Business, 117–19. 106. Burns, Memory, 48, 53. 107. Grisewood, One Thing, 81–83; Wall, Headlong into Change, 89. 108. Sheed, Church and I, 123–24; Ward, Unfinished Business, 117. 109. Burns, Memory, 48; Sheed, Church and I, 124; for Jones’s nickname for Dawson, see Hague, Dai Greatcoat, 70, footnote to Jones to Hague, 29 April 1935. 110. Christopher Dawson, Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity (London, 1932), xvi–xvii. 111. Dawson, Progress and Religion, 194–95. 112. Ibid., 216–17; and see Speaight, Belloc, 130–32, for a discussion of Belloc and Rousseau. 113. Christopher Dawson, Gods of Revolution (London, 1972), 13. 114. Scott, Historian, 42, 127–28; Jones to Hague, 2 July 1935, in Dai Greatcoat, 72–73. 115. Dawson, “St. Augustine,” in Enquiries, 244; Christopher Dawson, Spirit of the Oxford Movement (New York, 1934), 134–37.

422

Notes to Pages 290–295

116. Dawson to Ward, 3 December [1937], in Sheed and Ward Personal Papers, Box 5, Folder 4, Archives of the University of Notre Dame. Dawson did not provide the year when he dated the letter, but he wrote it from the “White House, Durrington Hill, Worthing, Sussex,” where he lived in 1937 according to Scott, Historian, 130. See also Sheed to Dawson, 2 November 1939, Dawson Papers, Box 14. 117. For the Distributists and Dawson, see, e.g., G.K.’s Weekly, 28 June 1933; for a characteristic example of Dawson’s criticism of urbanism, see his Progress and Religion, 211–12. Dawson’s contributions to Jerrold’s English Review included “New Decline and Fall,” 52 (1931): 413–21; “Significance of Bolshevism,” 55 (1932): 239–50; and “World Crisis and the British Tradition,” 56 (1933): 248–60.

Chapter 5.  The Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community 1. For Hinsley’s career, see his entry in the original DNB (1941–50), 394–95; as well as Michael Gaine, “Hinsley, Arthur (1865–1943),” in the new DNB; and John Heenan, Cardinal Hinsley (London, 1944); and ­Thomas Moloney, Westminster, Whitehall, and the Vatican: The Role of Cardinal Hinsley, 1935–1943 (London, 1985). 2. Weld to Oldmeadow, as quoted in Michael Walsh, The Tablet, 1840–1990: A Commemorative History (London, 1990), 42. Cardinal Vaughn had owned the Tablet. When he died in 1903 it was bequeathed to the Archdiocese of Westminster and to Mill Hill. The archdiocese and the missionary college were to share the profits. A board of trustees managed the newspaper. 3. Walsh, Tablet, 32–34, 39–41. 4. For Belloc’s comment, see Belloc to McNabb, 3 March 1915, in Belloc Papers; for Burns, see the discussion of the first issue of Order, Memory, chap. 6. 5. For the criticism of Waugh, see the Tablet, 7 January 1933, 10; for the remonstrance, see the Tablet, 21 January 1933, 85. The signatories were D’Arcy, Burns, Billy Clonmore (the convert heir to the earl of Wicklow and an Oxford friend of Hollis, Woodruff, and Waugh), Letitia Fairfield (about whom more below), Gill, Hollis, Jarrett, D. B. Wyndham Lewis, Martin­-

Notes to Pages 296–297

423

dale, R. H. J. Steuart, S.J., Algar Thorold, and Woodruff. The letter was dated 10 January 1933. 6. See the Tablet, 21 January 1933, 85, for Oldmeadow’s response to the remonstrants. And for Martindale’s recommendation, see Martindale to Woodruff, 4 February 1933, Woodruff Papers, Box 5, Folder 24. The letter that Martindale had advocated was never apparently sent to the hierarchy. The remonstrants let the matter rest, though Oldmeadow continued his campaign against Waugh. See the Tablet, 18 February 1933, in which Oldmeadow spent four columns, some 3,000 words, responding to another defender of Waugh. When he returned to England, Waugh himself responded to Oldmeadow’s charges, in “An Open Letter to His Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster,” May 1933, in Letters of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Mark Amory (New Haven and New York, 1980), 72–78. Waugh never sent the letter to the cardinal, though he had a copy printed and bound for himself, a measure of his depth of feeling regarding the attack. “Clerical friends,” according to one of his biographers, probably led by D’Arcy, convinced him that it would be wiser not to take the battle to the cardinal, particularly as Waugh was trying at the time to have his first marriage annulled: Stannard, Waugh, 1:337–38. 7. Walsh, Tablet, 42. It is difficult to believe that Hinsley did not receive copies of the Tablet in Rome and Africa, but Walsh cites a letter of Weld to the superior general of Mill Hill regarding Hinsley’s lack of knowledge about Oldmeadow and the Tablet. 8. Burns left Sheed & Ward after being told he would never become a partner, Frank Sheed having resolved that it would remain a family firm: Burns, Memory, chap. 5. For the Weld quotation, see his letter to Hinsley of 6 November, as quoted in Walsh, Tablet, 42; for Burns’s account of the sale, see Memory, chap. 12. For Chambers, see his entry in Catholic Who’s Who (London, 1936). Chambers came from a prominent provincial family. His father had been justice of the peace for Staffordshire and a director of Bullers, a pottery manufacturer. Chambers earned an M.A. from Clare College, Cambridge, and was subsequently ordained in the Church of England and served as a vicar in Birmingham from 1907. He converted to Catholicism in 1919, was secretary of the Converts’ Aid Society from 1922, and sat on the Universities Catholic Education Board from 1929. He, like his father, became a director at Bullers. For Pollen, see J. T. Sumida, “Pollen, Arthur Joseph Hungerford (1866–1937),” rev., in DNB. Born in 1866, Pollen took an M.A. from Oxford

424

Notes to Pages 297–301

in 1888, was called to the bar in 1893, and served as managing director of the Linotype Company and as a director, first of the Birmingham Small Arms Company and then of the Daimler Motor Company, which had bought the former company. His greatest achievement was his invention of the Argo auto­ matic fire control system for British naval gunnery, which the Royal Navy only adopted in part and which historians such as Sumida have argued was far superior to the Dreyer system that the Royal Navy adopted instead. 9. Walsh, Tablet, 42–43, 47; Burns, Memory, chap. 12; Burns to Dawson, 20 December 1935, Burns to Dawson, 6 January 1936, and Burns to Dawson, 4 February 1936, all in Dawson Papers, Box 8. 10. Heenan, Cardinal Hinsley, 28–29, 40. 11. Ibid., 20, 31–36, 41–45. Heenan, one presumes, did not mean “inferiors” in a pejorative sense but rather as the opposite of “superiors.” 12. Waugh, Life of Ronald Knox (London, 1959), 243–44, 253–58, 264–70. In contrast to Bourne, who, Waugh believed, had failed to employ Knox properly, Hinsley had offered Knox the presidency of Westminster’s seminary of St. Edmund’s, Ware, and though Knox had refused, Hinsley was instrumental in then obtaining for him commissions to revise the Westminster Hymnal and the Manual of Prayers and was a promoter of the hierarchy’s decision that Knox head the monumental project of a new English translation of the Vulgate Bible. 13. See the Burns correspondence with Dawson, esp. Burns to Dawson, 18 February 1936, 24 February 1936, and 20 April 1936, Dawson Papers, Box 8. For his subsequent resignation from the Tablet board, see Dawson to Woodruff, 21 July 1937, Woodruff Papers, Box 2, Folder 16. 14. See Tom Buchanan, Britain and the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge, 1997), 181; as well as Jay Corrin, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (Notre Dame, 2002), 360–61; and Speaight, Property Basket, 204–5, for the way the Spanish Civil War shattered French Catholic intellectual life, particularly among Maritain’s circle. 15. For the establishment of the Republic, the reformist agenda of the new government, and ambivalence about the new regime from anarchists and communists on the left and monarchists on the right, see esp. Paul Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War: Reform, Reaction and Revolution in the Second Republic, 2d ed. (London and New York, 1994), 8, 27–28; Harry Browne, Spain’s Civil War, 2d ed. (New York, 1996), 1–2, 5, 8–13, 19–22; Hugh Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 3d ed. (London, 1977,

Notes to Pages 302–306

425

reprinted 1990), 28–32, 49–56, 65–70, 78–85, 91–97, 120–22. For the details of Article 26 and the reaction of Spanish Catholics, see Browne Spain’s Civil War, 9, 89; Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 75; and esp. Mary Vincent, Catholicism in the Second Spanish Republic: Religion and Politics in Salamanca, 1930–1936 (Oxford, 1996), 177–78. Vincent’s is a first-rate regional study of how the new regime, through its anticlerical policies, squandered the goodwill of the Catholic masses, leading them to align with the reactionary element on the right. 16. Browne, Spain’s Civil War, 9; Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 76–77; Preston, Coming of the Spanish Civil War, 91–92; Vincent, Catholicism, 173, 257–58. The quotations are Vincent’s. 17. Browne, Spain’s Civil War, 13–19; Preston, Coming of the Spanish Civil War, 66, 70, 74, 126, 131–32, 140. 18. Browne, Spain’s Civil War, 32–37. 19. For Jerrold’s opposition to the Spanish Republic, see his Georgian Adventure (London, 1938; originally 1937), 357–60; for Bolin, see Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 202, 504 n. 2; for Calvo Sotelo, whose murder led directly to the Franco rising, see Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 7–11; Browne, Spain’s Civil War, 21–23; for Jerrold’s role in chartering the airplane to take Franco from the Canaries to Morocco, see his Georgian Adventure, 367–68; Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 203–4. 20. Jerrold, “Spain: Impressions and Reflections,” originally published in the Nineteenth Century and After, no. 712 (April 1937): 470–92; republished as a pamphlet (London, 1937). The notion of the planned Communist revolution was based on what are now dismissed as forged documents. The Nationalists claimed to have discovered these documents, which they then disseminated as part of their propaganda campaign. Jerrold was certainly not the only one to believe this hoax; even Hugh Thomas acknowledged that until the publication of Herbert Southworth’s Le Mythe de la croisade de Franco in 1964 he too had fallen for the documents. See Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 180 n. 2. 21. Jerrold, “Spain,” 6–7, 13. 22. Ibid., 14–15. 23. For his criticism of British intellectuals, the British press, and the Foreign Office, see Jerrold, “Spain,” 9, 13, 16, 18, 22–23. 24. Jerrold, “Spain,” 9–10, 15, 17. Much of this was of course very exaggerated, particularly with regard to freedom of movement in Nationalist

426

Notes to Pages 307–309

Spain; see Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 504 n. 2, for the way in which Bolìn and others with Franco’s press bureau intimidated journalists. 25. Lunn, Spanish Rehearsal (New York, 1937), 130–33, 135–36, 138, 141. Lunn took the phrase “conspiracy against law and order” from an article in the Times, 2 June 1932. 26. Lunn, Spanish Rehearsal, 133, for the quotation from the Communist International, 5 November 1934, 807; 121–24, for the Popular Front; 145, for Dimitrov; 113–14, for Communist methods; 116–20, for the brutality of the Stalin regime, e.g., the Ukrainian famine and the purges of the intellectuals. Lunn, like Jerrold, was basing his belief in the supposed Communist plot on the forged documents. 27. Ibid., xi. 28. Ibid., 247–48. Lunn does not cite the source of his quotations from Marañón et al., but a pamphlet titled Spanish Liberals Speak on the Counter-Revolution in Spain (San Francisco, 1937), translated, edited, and published by the Spanish Relief Committee, included statements by these individuals that were nearly identical to the quotations in Lunn. It would seem, therefore, that Lunn was using the same remarks but relying on a different translation from the Spanish. Unamuno, rector at Salamanca University, had been a leader of the Generation of 1898, that group of intellectuals which, appalled at Spanish backwardness in the wake of the disastrous war against the United States, had led a cultural renaissance in Spain. (See Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 35 n. 3, for the Generation of ’98.) ­Marañón, who was president of the Academy of Medicine at Madrid, had with friends such as the social philosopher José Ortega y Gasset formed in 1930 a “movement for the service of the republic,” thus earning recognition as a “father of the Republic” (Thomas, 30). Indeed, Marañón, Unamuno, and Ortega were all deputies in the first Cortes in 1931 (Thomas, 73). Thomas, 500–501, has noted the change in sympathies of Marañón and Ortega from the Republic to the Nationalists. 29. For Koestler and the Comintern’s propaganda activities from Paris, see Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 262, 341. For Lunn’s comparison of Republican violence and atrocities to the Nationalists, see Spanish Rehearsal, 37–39, 89–90. For Lunn on Guernica and the other claims of Nationalist atrocities, see Spanish Rehearsal, 160, 229–32. For what seems to be the consensus view among historians regarding Guernica, see Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 624–30; and the contemporary letter of the British consul relat-

Notes to Pages 309–311

427

ing what he had seen at Guernica, which Thomas published as an appendix, 986–88. 30. For Belloc’s early attacks on the Spanish Republic, see his article in G.K.’s Weekly, 23 May 1931, 164; and his “Spanish Catastrophe,” in the Universe, 7 July 1931, 7. For his view that the civil war was primarily religious, see Belloc to Philip Macdonell, 29 December 1937, in Belloc ­Papers, where he argued that the central motive of the Communists and anarchists in Spain was the hatred of religion. For his trip to Spain and meeting with Franco, see Speaight, Belloc, 463–65. For McNabb, see Catholic Herald, 11 September 1936. Gill had decided, in the words of his biographer, Speaight, “Christian morals demanded collective ownership in an industrial society.” He was granting interviews to the Daily Worker and associating with what Hinsley explained to him were known Communist front organizations, as when he exhibited with the Artists International in 1934. Of anticlerical violence in Spain, Gill even went so far as to argue, with black humor, that the destruction of churches was “an excellent move”: “Do you know of any church in this country that would not be better in ruins?” See Speaight, Gill, 273–83, for Gill’s views and the reaction to them by critics such as D’Arcy and Cardinal Hinsley. 31. For Hollis, see his Frome, 160, 162–64; and We Aren’t So Dumb (London, 1937), 105–6, his second volume of dialogues concerning world affairs. One of the characters, an Italian, took a pro-Franco position, though he noted that Franco was wrong in his opposition to regionalism and in his support for industrial capitalism. Given that Hollis himself supported regionalism and opposed industrial capitalism, it seems likely that the Italian character was voicing Hollis’s own opinions and that Hollis too was a Franco supporter. 32. For Waugh’s new aversion to taking public political stands, see Donat Gallagher’s introduction to part 4 of Waugh, Essays, 158–59; for a discussion of Cunard’s Authors Take Sides, see Buchanan, Britain and the Spanish Civil War, 158–61. Buchanan notes that George Orwell called the survey “bloody rot.” For the full text of Waugh’s reply, see Waugh, Essays, 187. 33. Tablet, 2 May 1936, 552–53; 25 July 1936, 101–2; 1 August 1936, 136; 5 December 1936, 765. 34. For Bedoyère, see Andrew Boyle, “Bedoyère, Michael Anthony Maurice Huchet de la, Count de la Bedoyère in the French Nobility (1900– 1973),” rev., in DNB.

428

Notes to Pages 312–318

35. Catholic Herald, 24 July 1936, 1, 8; 31 July 1936, 1, 8; 7 August 1936, 1, on Communism and Spain, 8, for editorial reservations about the rebellion. For a longer treatment of Bedoyère’s Catholic Herald and the Spanish Civil War, see Frederick Hale, “From Pacifism to Neutrality to Advocacy of Francisco Franco: The Case of Michael de la Bedoyère,” Chesterton Review 29 (Winter 2003): 529–43. 36. Sheed, Church and I, 199–200; Ward, Unfinished Business, 193; Sheed & Ward’s conspicuously pro-Franco publications included, in addition to Arnold Lunn’s Spanish Rehearsal, Florence Farmborough, Life and People in Nationalist Spain (1938), Edward H. Knoblaugh, Correspondent in Spain (1937), and Bernard Wall, Spain of the Spaniards (1938)—the last of which is discussed below. 37. Burns, Memory, 73; Roy Campbell, Light on a Dark Horse: An Autobiography (1901–1935) (London, 1951), 324–25; Campbell, Flowering Rifle, in his Collected Works, vol. 1, edited and with an introduction by Peter F. Alexander, Michael Chapman, and Marcia Leveson (Craghall, South Africa, 1985). 38. For this paragraph and the paragraph above, see Burns, Memory, 82–83, 85–87, 93, 100. 39. For Sturzo, see Catholic Herald, 11 September 1936, 3; for Dawson’s reply, see Catholic Herald, 18 September 1936, 6; for the block quotation, see Dawson, “Spain and Europe,” Catholic Times, 12 March 1937, as quoted in Scott, Historian, 129. 40. Bernard Wall, Headlong into Change: An Autobiography and a Memoir of Ideas since the Thirties (London, 1969), 19, 22–23.; also chap. 2, “Oxford.” 41. Ibid., 48, 54–55. 42. Wall, “Programme,” Colosseum, no. 1 (March 1934): 5–10. 43. Wall, Headlong, 89. 44. “Editorial,” Colosseum 3, no. 12 (December 1936): 247. 45. “Christianity and War: A Symposium,” Colosseum 4, no. 13 (March 1937): 7–35. 46. Wall, Spain of the Spaniards (London, 1938), 28–29, 64, 98. 47. For Gurian’s letter to the editor, see “Correspondence,” Colosseum 4, no. 13 (September 1937): 174–78. For Maritain, see his “Question of Holy War,” also in the September 1937 number. Gurian had also expressed his conviction that Catholics were being duped by Fascist propaganda into

Notes to Pages 319–321

429

believing that the Fascists shared their beliefs and concerns in his “Bolshevism and Anti-Bolshevism,” Colosseum 4, no. 14 (June 1937): 16–19. 48. See Wall to Dawson, 12 December 1938, 26 December 1938, and 3 March 1939, all in Dawson Papers, Box 9. For the decline of Colosseum by its last year, see Barbara Wall, “Bernard Wall and the Colosseum, 1934–1939,” Chesterton Review 7 (August 1981): 198–224. She notes that by 1939 Wall and Jimmy Oliver were writing almost the entire journal themselves, and explains that each used multiple pen names. Wall, for example, wrote under “BW,” “Viator,” “Odysseus,” and “Civis.” Barbara was Bernard’s wife and wrote a number of novels herself under her maiden name, Barbara Lucas. 49. Dawson’s bewilderment was evident in Wall to Dawson, 7 March 1939, Dawson Papers, Box 9, in which Wall responded to Dawson having asked, “What has Maritain to do with all this?” For the letter in support of the December editorial, see Colosseum 4, no. 13 (March 1937): 80–81. Among the signers also was Robert Speaight. For Dawson becoming coeditor of Colosseum and the subsequent plan to create a new journal with Dawson and Wall as coeditors, see Wall to Dawson 26 December 1938 (Dawson Papers, Box 9), and Wall’s voluminous correspondence with Dawson in 1939 up to the eve of war. Also see Frank Sheed’s correspondence with Dawson during this same period: Dawson Papers, Box 14. As early as Sheed to Dawson, 23 March 1937, there was talk of Dawson becoming coeditor of Colosseum. Interestingly, Sheed to Dawson, 13 December 1938 and 23 December 1938, discuss the possibility that the successor to Colosseum would be a Tory-oriented journal involving such prominent conservative historians as Arthur Bryant and G. M. Young. 50. For the sales of Religion and the Modern State, see Sheed to Dawson, 19 July 1935 and 5 June 1936, Dawson Papers, Box 14. One of the first scholars to examine Dawson’s ouevre, Bruno Schlesinger, who did so in a 1950 University of Notre Dame Ph.D. dissertation, believed that Religion and the Modern State represented a defense of Fascism. For Schlesinger’s criticisms, see Scott, Historian, 126. For contemporary criticism of Dawson on this account, particularly in response to his four-part series of articles titled “Church and the Dictators,” published in the Catholic Times in April and May 1934, also see Scott, 122–23. 51. Dawson, Religion and the Modern State, x–xii, xx–xxii, xv; also chap. 3. 52. Ibid., 8–10, 12–14.

430

Notes to Pages 322–325

53. Ibid., 39–42, on the strong personal leader, a call that was of course very Bellocian. Dawson’s defense of Religion and the Modern State is taken from the draft of a letter he wrote to Schlesinger, undated, most likely from 1950, which was when Schlesinger’s dissertation appeared, in Dawson Papers, Box 9. The ellipses are my own, and the elided passage ran as follows: “as is claimed by the writers to which you refer.” 54. Dawson, Religion and the Modern State, 20, 40. 55. Ibid., chaps. 6 and 7, esp. 126–28. 56. Ibid., xiii–xiv; chap. 3, esp. 51–54. 57. For Belloc’s misinterpretation of Nazism, see Speaight, Belloc, 435–36. For his criticism of the Nazis, see, e.g., Belloc to Duff Cooper, 14 March 1932, in Speaight, Letters, 226–27. For Chesterton, see his series of columns in G.K.’s Weekly in 1933: 20 April 1933 on the “heresy of race,” 4 May 1933 against the persecution of the Jews, and 18 May 1933 on Hitler’s “raving appeals to racial pride and hatred and contempt.” For the criticism of Nazi anti-Catholic policies by the Catholic press, see “Peace or War,” Universe, 30 September 1938, 7; “German Bishops Defy Nazis,” Catholic Times, 2 September 1938, 1 and 12, for an editorial stating that the limits of Catholic patience with the Nazi regime had been reached. For English Catholic support for Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, and particularly for the September 1938 Munich agreement, see “Justice, Peace and Charity,” Universe, 7 October 1938; also Catholic Herald, 30 September 1938, 8; as well as Douglas Jerrold’s “Catholics and World Affairs” column in Catholic Herald, 30 September 1938 and 7 October 1938; and Hollis to Woodruff, 30 March (no year given), Woodruff Papers, Box 4, Folder 4. Hollis criticized the Americans for having “grossly exaggerated the case against [Hitler], talking of Austria as if it was quite a different country from Germany and a peaceful little democracy and hardly ever letting it out that the Sudetendeutsch have any genuine grievances against the Czech government.” English Catholic intellectuals, of course, were hardly alone in approving of the Munich agreement, which had been greeted with near-unanimous acclaim by the British press and the vast majority of the public. See, e.g., A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1992; originally 1965), 430. 58. Evelyn Waugh, Men at Arms, the first novel in his collected Sword of Honour Trilogy (London, 1984; originally 1952), 11; Hollis, “Catholics and the War,” Clergy Review 18, no. 6 (June 1940); Jerrold, “Week by

Notes to Pages 326–329

431

Week,” Catholic Herald, 1 September 1939, 6; and see Catholic Herald, 8 September 1939, 6, for the newspaper’s editorial on the war as a just one. 59. For English Catholic propaganda efforts, see Hollis’s Clergy Review article of June 1940, mentioned above in n. 58, which was directed at American Catholics; and also Hollis, Frome, 165–78, for his work in America during 1939 for the Ministry of Information. For Frank Sheed, see Wilfrid Sheed, Frank and Maisie: A Memoir with Parents (New York, 1985), chap. 6; also Greene, Living of Maisie Ward, 106–8. Ostensibly traveling between New York and London to attend to his firm’s business affairs, Sheed was also working for the Ministry of Information, reporting on antiBritish attitudes among American Catholics and attempting in particular to counter both the isolationism of the Catholic right led by Father Coughlin and the pacifism of some on the Catholic left, such as his and Maisie’s friend Dorothy Day of the New York Catholic Worker. Sheed did not mention his wartime intelligence work in his memoir. For Barbara Ward’s contributions on behalf of the Ministry of Information, see below, esp. n. 109, discussing how the ministry was able to get the articles of English Catholics published in American periodicals. For Hinsley’s BBC addresses, also see below. 60. For her early life and education, see Michael J. Walsh, “Ward, Barbara Mary, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth 1914–1981,” in DNB. For Chatham House, see William H. McNeill, Arnold Toynbee: A Life (Oxford, 1989), esp. chap. 6. 61. For the Foreign Research and Press Service, see McNeill, Toynbee, 180–82; for Ward’s employment there, see her War Diary, 12 September– 7 October, 1939, Box 11, Folder 24, in her papers at Georgetown University; and see her War Diary, 10 January 1940, for her hiring as assistant editor at the Economist; her entry in the new DNB mentions her contributions to the Ministry of Information. 62. Diary, 17 September 1936, Box 11, Folder 18, Barbara Ward Papers. 63. Diary, 24 January 1937, Box 11, Folder 19, Barbara Ward Papers. Ward did recognize that finding the “ethical man” to run this “ethical state” was the problem. The ellipses in the quotation are Ward’s. 64. Ibid., 7 October and 8 October 1939. 65. “Liberal Tradition,” Economist, 30 December 1939, 495–96. Although the article is unsigned, Ward’s diary indicates she was working on such a piece at this time, and the opinions expressed concur with her thinking on the subject as expressed there.

432

Notes to Pages 330–332

66. On the Catholic Worker College and those associated with it, see the work of Joan Keating, including “Making of a Catholic Labour Activist: The Catholic Social Guild and the Catholic Worker’s College, 1909–1939,” Labour History Review 59 (Winter 1994): 44–56; “Discrediting the ‘Catholic State’: British Catholics and the Fall of France,” in Catholicism in Britain and France since 1789; “Looking to Europe: Roman Catholics and Christian Democracy in 1930s Britain,” European History Quarterly 26 (1996): 57–79; “The British Experience: Christian Democracy without a Party, 1910–1960,” in Christian Democracy in Europe: A Comparative Perspective, edited by David Hanley (London, 1994). 67. For the meeting with White and Harari, see Ward, Diary, 18 November 1939, Box 11, Folder 24, of her papers; and for the meetings with Dawson, 28 November and 2 December 1939, also in Box 11, Folder 24. She could not have known Harari very well for she referred to her as a “French-Catholic devotée of Maritain.” In fact, Harari (née Benenson) had been born into a wealthy Russian Jewish family that had emigrated to London in 1914 when she was nine years old. She was married to Ralph Harari, the son of a leading member of Egypt’s Anglo-Jewish community, and in 1932 she had converted to Catholicism. White too was a convert, having joined the church in 1921 at the age of eighteen. He was a lector in theology at Blackfriars, Oxford, the Dominican house of studies at the university, and had been influenced by Vincent McNabb and Eric Gill. For White, see Adrian Cunningham, “White, Gordon Henry (1902–1960),” in DNB. For Harari, see P. J. V. Rolo, “Harari, Manya (1905–1969),” rev., and “Harari, Ralph Andrew (1893–1969),” rev., in DNB. 68. Dawson to David Mathew, 14 December, in Dawson Papers, Box 9. Although Dawson did not provide the year, given the context it must have been 1939. 69. In Dawson to Mathew, 14 December, Dawson asked whether Eyre & Spottiswoode were likely to keep publishing the Dublin Review, and he expressed bewilderment that the publishers had not answered any of the queries he had sent them. For the Archdiocese of Westminster’s negotiations regarding the journal, see AAW, Hinsley Papers, 2/68: Hinsley to Weld, 20 February 1939, Val Elwes (Hinsley’s private secretary) to Weld, 27 March 1939, Weld to Elwes, 26 October 1939, and Weld’s letter of 5 July 1940. 70. Ward, Diary, 19 December 1939, Box 11, Folder 24.

Notes to Pages 332–335

433

71. Ibid., 9 January, 10 February, 8 March, and 16 March 1940, for Dawson’s depression and fears and for Ward’s discussion of how their ideas matched; also see 13 June 1940, for Frank Sheed’s confirmation of Ward’s estimation of Dawson’s personality and of her instinctive understanding of how to soothe and motivate him; for Ward’s own concerns regarding Jerrold and the Dublin Review, see 31 January 1940; and for her antipathy to Jerrold, see 1 February 1940. 72. Ibid., 9 January 1940. 73. Ibid., 22 June 1940, Box 11, Folder 26, for Ward’s comment when the first number of the Dawson-edited journal finally went to the printers. Maritain and Berdyaev were contributors to Dawson and Burns’s Essays in Order series from the early 1930s, and later to Wall’s Colosseum. Maritain become a frequent contributor to Dawson’s Dublin Review; Eliot declined, sending Dawson into another depression from which Ward again had to rescue him (see Ward, Diary, 13 May 1940); Berdyaev never contributed. For Ward’s discussion with Jerrold, see her diary entry of 1 February 1940. And see the 1 February 1940 entry as well for Harari financing the Dublin Review. Harari was to pay the salaries of the journal’s staff. 74. Dawson, “Editorial Note,” Dublin Review 207, no. 414 (July 1940): 1–3. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. For Clonmore, see note 4 above, treating the remonstrants’ letter to the Tablet defending Waugh. For examples of the continued apologies for Mussolini, see Robert Sencourt, “The Intrigues of Moscow,” Dublin Review 206, no. 412 (January 1940): 20–34; F. R. Hoare, “Europe Divided against Itself,” Dublin Review 206, no. 412 (January 1940): 35–49; Humphrey J. T. Johnson, “The Foreign Policy of United Italy 1861–1939,” Dublin Review 206 (April 1940): 281–99. Hoare expressed his bewilderment that Mussolini had made a pact with the “pagan Nazis” and had thus “missed his chance to place Italy at the head of the Catholic nations of Europe,” while Humphrey J. T. Johnson, after noting how classical Rome had brought order to the chaos of the Hellenistic Mediterranean world, expressed his hope that out of “the chaos reigning today it may well be in the Providence of God that it will be Italy’s mission, through her incomparable sense of realism, to lead the world back once again to the paths of order.” The exception was Barbara Ward’s “Revolution from the Right,” Dublin

434

Notes to Pages 335–341

Review 205, no. 411 (October 1939): 310–26, in which she condemned Fascism as a cult of violence. 78. Dublin Review 207, no. 414 (July 1940): Paul Vignaux, “French Catholics and the Foreign Policy of France,” 52–69; Staninslas Fumet, “What Is France?” 32–38; Hermann Rauschning, “The Regeneration of Germany,” 17–31. Fumet continued to publish his weekly clandestinely after the fall of France in June 1940, establishing a new journal after it was banned and eventually spending time in prison for his efforts. 79. For Lindsay, see Gary McCulloch, “Lindsay, Alexander Dunlop, first Baron Lindsay of Birker (1879–1952),” in DNB. For George Bernanos, see his “A French Catholic to Herr Hitler,” Dublin Review 207, no. 415 (October 1940). This was not to be his last contribution to the Dublin Review either, as Dawson published in April 1941 his “Letter to the English,” Dublin Review 206, no. 417 (April 1940): 150–74, a brutal indictment of the French leaders who had surrendered to the Nazis and formed the servile Vichy government. 80. Christopher Dawson, Beyond Politics (New York, 1939), 23–25, 50–52, 67. 81. Christopher Dawson, Judgement of the Nations (New York, 1942), 21–22. Of the twelve chapters of this volume, five had appeared earlier in the Dublin, and all but one of the essays contributed to the Dublin through January 1942 were republished in the Judgement. Of course, Chesterton had argued along similar lines with regard to Christianity, democracy, and equality, and the young Belloc would have agreed. For too many of their disciples, however, and even for Chesterton and Belloc in their later years, this had been forgotten amid the disillusion with parliamentary politics. 82. Ibid., 64–65, 70–71. 83. Ibid., 70, 91–92. 84. For contemporary criticism, see Dawson’s Oxford tutor, Ernest Barker, writing in the Spectator 170 (12 February 1943): 152; and the anonymous reviewer for Thought 18 (1943): 12–24. 85. For the Catholic Herald and the Munich crisis, see the edition of 30 September 1938, 8; for the Catholic Herald’s concerns about a war for democracy and against authoritarianism, see the edition of 8 September 1939, 6. 86. For Bedoyère’s concerns regarding the state and capitalism, see his “Week by Week” column in Catholic Herald, 16 February 1940, 4; for the Catholic Herald’s endorsement of the peace plan that would call for,

Notes to Pages 342–344

435

among other things, a general disarmament, a small Poland, the creation of a triune state of Czechs, Slovaks, and Hungarians “under German protection,” the return of Germany’s colonies, the establishment of a Danube confederation under German influence, the redress of Italian grievances, and free trade in raw materials, see Catholic Herald, 21 March 1940; and see Catholic Herald, 21 June 1940, 4, for its comments after the fall of France and Italy’s entry into the war, and Bedoyère’s column in Catholic Herald, 28 June 1940, for his comments regarding “National-Socialism” and “Liberal­-Socialism.” 87. “A Latin Catholic Bloc,” editorial in Catholic Herald, 12 July 1940, 4. 88. It was only at a 24 October 1940 meeting with Hitler at Montoire that Marshall Pétain, the French head of state since 10 July 1940, finally refused Hitler’s demand that France enter the war on the Nazi side, assuaging British fears. 89. See Speaight, Property Basket, 218, for the description of the movement’s genesis. For Jerrold, see Ward, Diary, 25 June 1940, Box 11, Folder 26. 90. For the meeting and Fairfield’s speech see Ward, Diary, 19 June 1940, Box 11, Folder 26. Letitia Fairfield (1885–1978) was a prominent Catholic physician who had worked for many years in public health for the London County Council. She had been an active suffragette and a member of the Fabian Society before being received into the Catholic Church in 1922. She subsequently became a noted campaigner against birth control and a regular contributor to the Catholic press on medical issues. During World War II she became the senior woman doctor in the military, with the fully commissioned rank of lieutenant colonel, and assistant directorgeneral for medical services. Her younger sister, Cicily Isabel, was the cele­ brated writer Rebecca West. For Fairfield’s life, see M. A. Elston, “Fairfield, (Josephine) Letitia Denny (1885–1978),” in DNB. The Plater Society was named after the Jesuit social worker Charles Plater. 91. For the undated cover letter, signed by the chairperson of the Plater Dining Club, Dorothy Retchford, and its honorary secretary, Patricia Hall, with the attached Barbara Ward memorandum, see AAW, Hinsley Papers, 2/219. Though undated, the letter discussed the PDC’s meeting in early July, which must have been the 8 July meeting. 92. Ward, Diary, 10 July and 12 July 1940, Box 11, Folder 26.

436

Notes to Pages 344–346

3. For Mathew’s comment regarding Dawson, see Ward, Diaries, 9 29 April 1940. 94. For Hinsley’s employment of Woodruff, Dawson, and others to help him with his BBC addresses during the war, to act as his “inspirer and censor,” see, e.g., Hinsley to Woodruff, 27 October 1939 regarding BBC broadcasts to German Catholics; and the correspondence between Tom Burns (representing the Ministry of Information) and Hinsley, 12–15 December 1939, regarding Hinsley’s famous “Sword of the Spirit” BBC address, which Burns suggested, and Hinsley agreed, ought to be a pamphlet, edited by Woodruff and published by the Tablet. Both in AAW, Hinsley Papers, 2/13. For Hinsley’s effectiveness, see Heenan, Cardinal Hinsley, 212. 95. For the “Sword of the Spirit,” see Heenan, Cardinal Hinsley, 87–92. For the subsequent broadcast to America, see 106–7. 96. See Heenan, Cardinal Hinsley, 108, for the text of Hinsley’s letter to the Times, published 22 May 1940. As forthright as the language in the published letter was, in Hinsley’s original draft he was even more severe, referring to the “savage lust” of these “blood-stained ogres”: see letter to the Times, 21 May 1940, in AAW, Hinsley Papers, 2/173. For Hinsley’s statement on Italy of 10 June 1940, see Heenan, Cardinal Hinsley, 104–5. 97. For Hinsley’s Golders Green sermon, see Heenan, Cardinal Hinsley, 55–62. Hinsley’s less than robust defense in this sermon of Pope Pius XI, who had been widely criticized for not condemning the Italian aggression against Abyssinia, provoked a controversy. He had described the pontiff as a “helpless old man” and was obliged to explain himself in a letter to the Times. He maintained that he had only meant that the pope was in a “materially weak and defenceless position,” and he emphasized that Pius XI had already declared his moral opposition to Italy’s actions in Abyssinia when he had stated that “a war of aggression is always wrong.” For Hinsley’s subsequent opposition to Fascism, see Hinsley to Harold Brinjes, 16 March 1938, in AAW, Hinsley Papers, 2/76. Hinsley in this letter did not dismiss entirely the possibility of an English Catholic belonging to the British Union of Fascists but maintained that it was his or her duty to make sure that the BUF was not totalitarian, that is, that it was not Fascist as commonly understood and as practiced by the Italian regime. Hinsley also particularly condemned Fascist anti-Semitism, observing that “mere Jew-baiting is not law and order, nor is it justice and much less so is it ­charity.”

Notes to Pages 347–351

437

98. For the Birmingham speech, see Heenan, Cardinal Hinsley, 100–102. The encyclical Non abbiamo Bisogno (On Catholic Action in Italy), was dated 29 June 1931. A number of Catholics, many of them women, sent Hinsley letters critical of his condemnation of Fascism—which must only have confirmed to him the necessity of his condemnation. See AAW, Hinsley Papers, 2/76. 99. For Hinsley on Spain, see his “Letter to the Editor,” Times, 7 August 1936, in which he argued that the Church’s opponents in Spain intended the “wreck of Christianity and the ruin of civilisation” and affirmed the dominant Bellocian position that the war was ultimately between Christianity and Communism. For his clashes with the English Catholic left regarding Spain, see the Petition to Hinsley and the other English bishops, dated February 1938 and signed by Eric Gill, among others. The petitioners attacked the Francoists for their aerial bombardment of “unfortified places” and criticized the Catholic Church in England for making the “cause of the insurgents its own.” And see Hinsley’s reply to the petitioners, addressed to Mr. Hanlon, 23 February 1938. Hinsley informed Hanlon that he was obligated to circulate this reply among the signatories of the petition so that some of them might “then begin to use the right eye as well as the left,” and he warned that if Hanlon allowed the petition to “become a specimen of the current propaganda for this side you favour,” then he would in turn publish his response. Both in AAW, Hinsley Papers, 2/217. 100. For Ward’s meeting with Dawson, see her diary entry of 23 June 1940. 101. Dawson to Hinsley, 17 July 1940, in AAW, Hinsley Papers, 2/219. 102. Ibid. For the cardinal’s response to Dawson’s ideas, see Hinsley to Dawson, 20 July 1940, Dawson Papers, Box 8. Hinsley agreed with Dawson’s analysis entirely and concluded, “I rely on your help in the crusade of the ‘Sword of the Spirit.’” 103. See Hinsley to the Bishops of England and Wales, 7 August 1940, in AAW, Hinsley Papers, 2/219, folder 3. 104. Ibid. The following year Woodruff, Hollis, and Speaight would also become involved with the management of the Sword. 105. Heenan, Cardinal Hinsley, 187. 106. For Dawson on the Sword, see his article in the first Bulletin of the movement, 9 August 1940, which Heenan reproduces in his biography of Hinsley, 183–85. Dawson also contributed a longer piece on the Sword to the Dublin Review 208, no. 416 (January 1941): 1–11. For Ward’s article,

438

Notes to Pages 352–353

see Clergy Review 19, no. 5 (November 1940): 377–88. The other secretary for the new movement, A. C. F. Beales, contributed a piece on the Sword to the Jesuits’ journal Month (October 1940). 107. W. Horsfall Carter, “The Catholic-Latin Myth,” New Statesman and Nation, 5 October 1940, 326–27. 108. A. C. F. Beales, “Letter to the News Statesman and Nation,” Sword of the Spirit Bulletin, no. 6, 19 October 1940, 5–6. Beales’s letter was published in the New Statesman of 12 October, launching a debate in the letters section that lasted more than a month. In the 26 October number Barbara Ward maintained that the Latin Catholic bloc idea was being exploited by politicians and had nothing to do with the Church or Catholicism. Indeed, she concluded that the idea of the Latin Catholic bloc was no more than Nazi propaganda and ought to be treated as such rather than taken seriously. 109. Christopher Dawson, “Latin Catholic Bloc,” Sword of the Spirit Bulletin, no. 7, 2 November 1940, 1–2. Dawson also published an article by one J. J. Saunders on the controversy, “A Latin Catholic Bloc,” Dublin Review 209, no. 418 (July 1941): 23–41. Saunders too dismissed the Latin Catholic bloc, arguing that it tended to “identify the Church with one particular group or set of interests and even to pen her into one corner of Europe.” In the United States, Commonweal published an article by Donald Attwater, one of Eric Gill’s associates from his Ditchling days, that also addressed the Latin Catholic bloc idea: “English Catholic ‘Fascists’?” Commonweal, 10 January 1941, 299–302. Attwater concluded that those on the Catholic right in England who had been accused of “Fascism” (he did not name any names) were not in fact Fascists but Latinophiles whose “admiration of Latin culture goes beyond all reason.” Given the Ministry of Information’s involvement in getting the work of English Catholic writers favorable to the war effort published in American journals, it is not inconceivable that Attwater’s article was the result of ministry influence. For an example of how this was done, see Barbara Ward to Dawson, undated, Dawson Papers, Box 9, in which she noted that an article of Dawson’s would be published, via ministry influence, in Harper’s and that “it would be sent through the private intermediary of Brogan and so the Ministry will not be implicated.” Brogan presumably refers to Sir Denis Brogan, the historian, who worked for a time during the war at the U.S. division of the Ministry of Information: H. G. Nicholas, “Brogan, Sir Denis William (1900–1974),” rev., in DNB.

Notes to Pages 354–356

439

110. “A French Dilemma,” Tablet, 14 December 1940. The Pétain government’s cry of travail, famille, patrie appealed to English Catholic intellectuals, as did the invocation of the peasant way of life (retournez à la terre). The repeal of republican laws mandating secular education, and the reestablishment of Catholic schools subsidized by the state, with clerical teachers, also pleased them. That abortion was made illegal, divorce laws made more stringent, and large families given privileges and allowances they also applauded. For the early legislation of the Pétain government, see Michael Curtis, Verdict on Vichy: Power and Prejudice in the Vichy France Regime (London, 2002), 92–97. 111. Letitia Fairfield, “The Vichy Government,” in “Letters to the Editor,” Tablet, 28 December 1940, 512. 112. “Catholics and the Future of Europe,” Tablet, 28 December 1940. 113. For Hinsley’s criticism of the Catholic Worker and Pax, see Keating, “Discrediting the ‘Catholic State,’” nn. 6, 7. The Hinsley letter to O’Hea that she cites was dated 10 April 1940. In it Hinsley informed O’Hea that the pacifists were “more responsible for the war than the war­mongers,” because it had been the former who had convinced the Germans and Italians that they could arm themselves “to the teeth and to conclude that Britain would not resist.” For Ward’s apology to Hinsley for Fairfield’s actions, see her letter of 7 January 1941, in AAW, Hinsley Papers, 2/219. And for Hinsley and Woodruff, see the cardinal’s letters of 2 January and 9 January 1941 in Box 3, Folder 26, Woodruff Papers. 114. For Hollis’s criticism of Woodruff, see his letter of March 1940, Woodruff Papers, Box 4, Folder 1. For Ward on Woodruff, see her diary entry of 6 May 1940, Ward Papers, Box 11, Folder 26. Churchill became prime minister on 10 May 1940, four days after Woodruff and Ward had agreed on the need for a new government. As for Fairfield, she also apologized to Hinsley. She maintained in her defense that she was not arguing that democracy was the only authentic Catholic political system but rather objecting to those who believed that the authoritarian model was the most authentically Catholic: Fairfield to Hinsley, 12 January 1941, in AAW, Hins­ ley Papers, 2/219. It was clear that Hinsley did not share Fairfield’s hostility to the Vichy government. Thus in a letter to Dawson of 16 January 1941 praising Dawson’s article on the Sword in the new number of the Dublin Review, the cardinal noted of Vichy, “I do not defend that Government. But

440

Notes to Pages 356–359

we must give Pétain credit for trying to do good to his country. Some of his strictures of his fellow citizens were just” (here Hinsley mentioned secular education and the lack of children). “As for his policy and intentions, we have too little information to pass a sweeping condemnation. . . . I think we should be cautious in our verdict.” AAW, Hinsley Papers, 2/219, 3. 115. Christopher Dawson, “A Universal Wolf,” Sword of the Spirit Bulletin, no. 23, 26 June 1941, 1. 116. Barbara Ward, “And Now Russia,” Sword of the Spirit Bulletin, no. 23, 26 June 1941, 1–2. Hinsley for his part was more reticent regarding Britain’s new ally. He did not continue to denounce the Soviets, but neither did he embrace the alliance, much to the dismay of the Foreign Office and of Richard Hope, whom Hinsley himself had appointed to head the Catholic section in the Religious Division at the Ministry of Information: see Heenan, Cardinal Hinsley, 92–93; and Moloney, Westminster, Whitehall, and the Vatican, chap. 12. Moloney emphasizes the pressure that the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Information, and even Douglas Woodruff put on the cardinal to be more outspoken in support of the Soviet alliance. 117. “Germany’s Attack on Russia Will Not Divide Christians from Each Other but We Remain 100% anti-Bolshevik,” unsigned editorial, Catholic Herald, 27 June 1941, 1. 118. For the meeting, see Bulletin 19 (24 April 1941) and 20 (15 May 1941). Beales informed Val Elwes, Hinsley’s private secretary, that the crowds numbered over 2,000 for each meeting: Beales to Elwes, 16 May 1941, in AAW, Bourne Papers, 1/174. (Some of the Hinsley Papers are filed under Bourne Papers in the Archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster.) For Beales’s concerns about the movement, see Beales to Elwes, 16 May 1941, in AAW, Bourne Papers, 1/174. For the failed attempt at ecumenism, see Michael Walsh, “Ecumenism in War-Time Britain: The ‘Sword of the Spirit’ and ‘Religion and Life,’ 1940–1945,” Heythrop Journal (1982): 243–58, and 377–94. Hinsley had asked Canon George Smith (who was also editor of the Clergy Review) and Canon E. J. Mahoney, two professors of theology at the Westminster diocesan seminary of St. Edmund’s College, Ware, to consider whether under canon law the Sword of the Spirit could include Protestants as well as Catholics. For their conclusions, see the memorandum in AAW, Bourne Papers, 1/174, as well Canon Smith to Hinsley, 29 September 1941, also in AAW, Bourne Papers, 1/174. 119. Archbishop Williams to Hinsley, 11 August 1940, in AAW, Hins­ ley Papers, 2/219. The emphasis is the archbishop’s.

Notes to Pages 360–367

441

120. For English Catholic work aimed at the United States, see n. 59, above, as well as the discussion of Hinsley’s BBC addresses above. 121. See Heenan, Cardinal Hinsley, 240, for Val Elwes on Hinsley’s illness and death. For the battle concerning the Dublin Review, see Dawson to Hinsley, 7 April 1942, in AAW, Griffin Papers, 2/130 (some of the Dublin Review correspondence from the Hinsley era is filed in the papers of his successor, Bernard Cardinal Griffin), informing the cardinal of Jerrold’s plans. This letter has the notation that Hinsley had then written to Jerrold, 10 April 1942, “to urge continuance of publication.” Jerrold replied 20 April 1942, also in Griffin Papers, 2/130. 122. Woodruff to Elwes, 22 April 1942. For Walter Starkie, who before the war had been a professor at Trinity College, Dublin, see Burns, Memory, 102–3. 123. Woodruff, Draft of Letter to Jerrold from the cardinal. A handwritten notation on the typed document reads, “Sent as draft 24/4/42,” so presumably Woodruff’s letter was sent to Jerrold with Hinsley’s signature. 124. Dawson to Hinsley, 22 May 1942, in AAW, Griffin Papers, 2/130; Hinsley to Dawson, 29 May 1942, Dawson Papers, Box 8. 125. Ward to Dawson, 1 July 1942, Dawson Papers, Box 9. 126. For Ward’s parting instructions, see Ward to Dawson, 24 July 1942, Dawson Papers, Box 9. 127. Dawson to Speaight, 27 August 1942, and Dawson to Jerrold, 27 August 1942, Dawson Papers, Box 9. The letter to Jerrold is written on the back of the one to Speaight, suggesting, particularly as both were handwritten rather than typed, that these were drafts. 128. Speaight to Dawson, 30 August 1942, Dawson Papers, Box 9. 129. Dawson to Speaight, 5 September 1942, Dawson Papers, Box 9. 130. Ward to Dawson, 11 March 1943, Dawson Papers, Box 9; for Ward on the Dublin Review sapping her energy, see Ward, Diary, 7 May 1940, Ward Papers, Box 11, Folder 26; for Hinsley’s final weeks, see Heenan, Cardinal Hinsley, 239–40. 131. Sheed, Church and I, 250, related the Churchill story. See also Shane Leslie, Long Shadows: Memoirs of Shane Leslie (London, 1966), 271. 132. For the negotiations and agreement between the archdiocese and Burns & Oates, see AAW, Griffin Papers, 2/130. For Wall’s role in keeping Dawson informed, see Wall to Dawson, 24 February 1944, Box 9, Dawson Papers.

442

Notes to Pages 368–376

133. See Speaight, Property Basket, 220–21. The Gill piece was Walter Shewring, “Considerations on Eric Gill,” Dublin Review 213, no. 431 (October 1944): 118–34. For Dawson’s objections to it, see his letter to Speaight of 19 June 1943, Dawson Papers, Box 9. 134. Lunn in letters to Bedoyère of 1 August 1941 and 29 August 1941 called the Catholic Herald editor a defeatist and castigated him for furthering the notion that Catholics were crypto-Fascists. See Thomas Greene, “Vichy France and the Catholic Press in England: Contrasting Attitudes to a Moral Problem,” Recusant History 21, no. 1 (May 1992): n. 25.

Epilogue 1. For Orwell’s comments, see the prologue above. 2. For the provisions of the postwar welfare acts, see Chris Cook and John Stevenson, The Longman Handbook of British History, 1714–1995, 3d ed. (London and New York, 1996), 169–70; for the Beveridge Report and its popularity, see Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain, 1900–1990 (London, 1997; originally 1996), 213–14; and see Clarke, Hope and Glory, 221, for Churchill on the postwar welfare state, and 191, for the wartime buildup. 3. For Wall’s experience in Italy during the war, see his Headlong into Change, 130–43; and for his work after the war on behalf of AngloItalian rapprochement, see 144–47. After he returned to England Wall contributed talks on English and American literature to the La Voce di Londra (Voice of London) radio program that was broadcast to Italy to inform Italians about Anglo-American culture. For his contributions the Italian government made him a cavaliere of the Republic. For Wall on the necessity of supporting moderate democratic socialism, see his letters to Dawson of 7 April 1946 and 2 September 1946, Dawson Papers, Box 9. And for a reply of Dawson’s to Wall’s musings, in which Dawson did not disagree with Wall’s views on social democracy, see Dawson to Wall, 26 August 1946. Likewise, reading between the lines of Wall’s half of the correspondence, it is clear that in other, nonextant replies of Dawson to Wall, Dawson also did not take exception to Wall’s political analysis. 4. Dru to Woodruff, 15 November 1948 and 25 November 1948, Woodruff Papers, Box 2, Folder 16. The emphasis is Dru’s.

Notes to Pages 376–380

443

5. Dru to Woodruff, 14 December 1948, Woodruff Papers, Box 2, Folder 16. 6. Wall to Dawson, 7 April 1946 and 2 September 1946, Dawson Papers, Box 9. For another example of how Bellocianism proved divisive after the war, see Joan Keating, “Faith and Community Threatened? Roman Catholic Responses to the Welfare State, Materialism, and Social Mo­bility, 1945–62,” Twentieth Century British History 9 (1998): 86–108. Keating describes how continued fealty to Distributism among some influential contributors provoked divisions even in the Catholic Social Guild, hardly a bastion of Bellocianism. 7. Taylor, in the “Revised Bibliography,” dated June 1973, of his English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1992; originally 1965), 647, wrote of Waugh’s war trilogy: “Some novels are set in the war. With one exception none illuminates it. If future generations want to know what the second world war was like for English people, they can safely turn to Sword of Honour by Evelyn Waugh, the greatest work of a great English novelist.” The first volume of the trilogy was published in 1952 and the last in 1961. As for Buckley, unlike Lunn, Waugh turned down his overtures to contribute to the National Review. See Waugh to Buckley, 3 June 1960, in Letters of Evelyn Waugh, 542. 8. Woodruff to Lunn, 22 August 1946, Woodruff Papers, Box 5, Folder 10. For Ward on the Worker-Priest movement, see Unfinished Business, 270–97. 9. For Dawson, see his letter to Wall of 26 August 1946; and for Wall’s comments, see his letters to Dawson of 21 November 1945, 6 February 1946, and 8 May 1946, Dawson Papers, Box 9. And see also Wall, Headlong into Change, 145. Wall eventually established with Manya Harari a new journal, Changing World, which lasted all of seven numbers from summer 1947 through 1949. Harari herself was more successful with her publishing venture, Harvill Press, which introduced to English speakers the work of Boris Pasternak—Harari herself, with Max Hayward, translated Dr. Zhivago (1958)—and later Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. See P. J. V. Rolo, “Harari, Manya (1905–1969),” rev., in DNB. 10. For the effect of the modernist crisis on English intellectual efforts, see William Schoen, The Intellectual Crisis in English Catholicism: Liberal Catholics, Modernists, and the Vatican in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York, 1982), 228–30—and this despite the fact

444

Notes to Pages 381–383

that, as Sheridan Gilley has waggishly put it, modernism in England “was not so much a ‘movement’ as Friedrich von Hügel’s postbag,” that is, his correspondence with theologians, philosophers, and biblical scholars. For this comment, see Gilley, “The Years of Equipoise, 1892–1943,” in From without the Flaminian Gate: 150 Years of Roman Catholicism in England and Wales 1850–2000, ed. Vincent Alan McClelland and Michael Hodgetts (London, 1999). For Maisie Ward’s reflections on Newman, modernism, and English Catholic intellectual life, see the discussion of her Insurrection versus Resurrection (1938) in chap. 4 above. 11. Dawson to Maisie Ward, 3 December [1937], as discussed in chap. 4. 12. Wall to Dawson, 21 June 1946, Dawson Papers, Box 9. 13. For Manning and Ultramontanism, see the prologue. For a recent exposition of the English hierarchy and “fortress” Catholicism in the twentieth century, see Kester Aspden, Fortress Church: The English Roman Catholic Bishops and Politics, 1903–1963 (Leominster, 2002). For a broader, pan-European examination of Catholic efforts to segregate themselves, see Hugh McLeod, “Building the ‘Catholic Ghetto’: Catholic Organisations 1870–1914,” in Studies in Church History 23 (1986): 411–44. 14. For the dissolution of this distinctive subculture, see Michael Hornsby­-Smith, Roman Catholics in England: Studies in Social Structure since the Second World War (Cambridge, 1987), as well as the same author’s “A Transformed Church,” in Catholics in England, 1950–2000: Historical and Sociological Perspectives ed. Michael Hornsby-Smith (London and New York, 1999), 3–28. For a profound reflection on what was lost when this subculture collapsed, see Sheridan Gilley, “A Tradition and Culture Lost, to Be Regained?” also in the latter volume, 29–45. 15. For a discussion of this broader European Catholic context, both during the interwar period and after, see Martin Conway, Introduction to Political Catholicism in Europe, 1918–1965, ed. Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway (Oxford, 1996), 1–33. 16. For a similar point, see Jeffrey von Arx, “Catholic and Politics,” in From without the Flaminian Gate, 267. Von Arx argues that Gaudium et Spes and Dignitatis Humanae, the council’s “Declaration on Religious Liberty” (1965), “simply could not have been written apart from the experience of Catholics living in countries characterised by religious pluralism and liberal democratic politics.”

SE L E C T ED B I B L IOG R A P H Y

Primary So u rc e s Newspapers and Other Periodicals Blackfriars Catholic Herald Catholic Times Chesterton Review Clergy Review Colosseum Dublin Review English Review Eye-Witness G.K.’s Weekly Month New Witness Order: An Occasional Catholic Review Sword of the Spirit Bulletin Tablet Universe Weekly Review Archives Archives, Archdiocese of Westminster (AAW) Francis Cardinal Bourne Papers Bernard Cardinal Griffin Papers Arthur Cardinal Hinsley Papers Boston College, Burns Library Hilaire Belloc Papers 445

446

Selected Bibliography

British Library G. K. Chesterton Papers (consulted at the old British Museum Manuscript Reading Room before the opening of the new British Library) Georgetown University, Lauinger Library, Special Collections Michael de la Bedoyère Papers Harmon Grisewood Papers Shane Leslie Papers Arnold Lunn Papers Bernard Wall Papers Barbara Ward Papers Douglas Woodruff Papers University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota, Special Collections, O’Shaughnessy‑Frey Library Christopher Dawson Papers University of Notre Dame Archives Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward Papers Books Adam, Karl. Spirit of Catholicism. Steubenville, OH: Franciscan University Press, 1996. First published as Das Wesen des Katholizismus. Augsburg: Haas & Grabherr, 1924. First English translation Spirit of Ca­ tholi­cism. London: Sheed & Ward, 1929. Alcalá-Zamora, Niceto, Alejandro Lerroux, Gregorio Marañón, Miguel de Unamuno, and Pío Baroja y Nessi. Spanish Liberals Speak on the Counter‑Revolution in Spain. Translated, edited, and published by the Spanish Relief Committee. San Francisco, CA: Spanish Relief Committee, 1937. Baring, Maurice. The Puppet Show of Memory. Boston: Little, Brown, 1923. Beales, A. C. F. Catholic Church and International Order. New York: A. Lane, 1941. Bedoyère, Michael de la. Christian Crisis. New York: Macmillan, 1942. ———. Christianity in the Market‑place. London: A. Dakers, 1944. ———. Drift of Democracy. London: Sheed & Ward, 1931.

Selected Bibliography

447

Belloc, Bessie. In a Walled Garden. London: Sands, 1896. Belloc, Hilaire. A Change in the Cabinet. London: Methuen, 1909. ———. The Contrast. London: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1923. ———. The Cruise of the Nona: The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with reflections and judgments on life and letters, men and manners. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1925. ———. Danton: A Study. London: J. Nisbet, 1899. ———. Emmanuel Burden, Merchant, of Thames St., in the City of London, Exporter of Hardware: A Record of His Lineage, Speculations, Last Days and Death. London: Methuen, 1904. ———. Europe and the Faith. New York: Paulist Press, 1920. ———. Four Men. London: Thomas Nelson, 1912; London: Thomas Nelson (Argosy Books series), 1948. ———. French Revolution. 2d ed. London: Oxford University Press, Home University Library, 1911; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, Oxford Paperbacks University Series, 1970. ———. The Hills and the Sea. London: Methuen, 1927. ———. History of England. 4 vols. London: Methuen, 1925–31. ———. House of Commons and Monarchy. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922. ———. How the Reformation Happened. London: J. Cape, 1928. ———. The Jews. London: Constable, 1922; Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1923. ———. Lambkin’s Remains. New York: Dutton, 1920. ———. Letters. Selected and edited by Robert Speaight. London: Hollis & Carter, 1958. ———. Mr. Clutterbuck’s Election. London: E. Nash, 1906. ———. Path to Rome. London and New York: Thomas Nelson, 1936. ———. Introduction to Perils of the Peace, by Cecil Chesterton. London: T. W. Laurie, 1916. ———. Pongo and the Bull. London: Constable and Co., 1910. ———. The Restoration of Property. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1936. ———. Robespierre, a Study. London: J. Nisbet, 1901. ———. The Servile State. London: T. N. Foulis, 1912; reprinted with an introduction by Robert Nisbet. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1977. ———. A Shorter History of England. New York: Macmillan, 1934. ———. Stories, Essays, and Poems. London: J. M. Dent, 1938.

448

Selected Bibliography

Belloc, Hilaire, and Cecil Chesterton. The Party System. London: S. Swift, 1911. Belloc, Hilaire, F. W. Hirst, J. A. Simon, J. S. Phillimore, J. L. Hammond, and P. J. Macdonell. Essays in Liberalism by Six Oxford Men. London and Paris: Cassell, 1897. Belloc Lowndes, Marie. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911–1947. Edited by Susan Lowndes, with a foreword by Elizabeth Iddesleigh and Susan Lowndes Marques. London: Chatto & Windus, 1971. ———. “I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia”: A Record of Love and of Childhood. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1942. ———. Where Love and Friendship Dwelt. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1943. ———. The Young Hilaire Belloc. New York: P. J. Kennedy, 1956. Bentley, E. C. Those Days. London: Constable, 1940. Blair, Peter Hunter. Anglo-Saxon England. London: Folio Society, 1997. Originally published as An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956; 2d ed. 1977. The Folio Society volume is a reissue of the 2d ed. Burns, Tom. Use of Memory: Publishing and Further Pursuits. London: Sheed & Ward, 1993. Campbell, Roy. Collected Works. Vol. 1. Edited and with an introduction by Peter F. Alexander, Michael Chapman, and Marcia Leveson. Craighall, South Africa: A. D. Donker, 1985. ———. Light on a Dark Horse: An Autobiography (1901–1935). London: Hollis & Carter, 1951. Chesterton, Cecil. Perils of the Peace. London: T. W. Laurie, 1916. Chesterton, G. K. Autobiography. London: Sheed & Ward, 1936; London: Hutchinson, 1969. ———. Ball and the Cross. New York: John Lane, 1909. ———. Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1906. ———. Eugenics and Other Evils. London and New York: Cassell, 1922. ———. Everlasting Man. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1925. ———. Heretics. 12th ed. New York: John Lane, 1914. ———. Irish Impressions. New York: John Lane, 1920. ———. Man Who Was Thursday and Related Pieces. Edited and with an introduction by Stephen Medcalf. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Selected Bibliography

449

———. Napoleon of Notting Hill. New York and London: John Lane, 1904. ———. New Jerusalem. New York: George H. Doran Co., 1921. ———. Orthodoxy. London: John Lane, 1908; New York: Dodd, Mead, 1943. ———. Outline of Sanity. London: Dodd, Mead, 1926; New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927. ———. Resurrection of Rome. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1930. ———. St Thomas Aquinas. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1933. ———. Short History of England. London: Chatto & Windus, 1917; London: Chatto & Windus, 1924. ———. Stories, Essays, and Poems. London: J. M. Dent, 1935. ———. Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays. New York: Boni and Live­ right, 1917. ———. Victorian Age in Literature. New York: H. Holt, 1913. ———. What I Saw in America. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1922. ———. What’s Wrong with the World? New York: Dodd, Mead, 1910. ———. William Cobbett. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1926. Cooper, Duff (Viscount Norwich). Old Men Forget: The Autobiography of Duff Cooper (Viscount Norwich). London: Hart‑Davis, 1953. D’Arcy, Martin, S.J. Laughter and the Love of Friends: Reminiscences of the Distinguished English Priest and Philosopher. Collated and edited by William S. Abell. Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1991. Dawson, Christopher. Age of the Gods: A Study in the Origins of Culture in Pre-historic Europe and the Ancient East. London: J. Murray, 1928. ———. Beyond Politics. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1939. ———. Christianity and the New Age. Essays in Order 3. London: Sheed & Ward, 1931. ———. Crisis of Western Education. With specific programs for the study of Christian culture by John J. Mulloy. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1961. ———. Dynamics of World History. Edited by John J. Mulloy. London: Sheed & Ward, 1957. ———. Enquiries into Religion and Culture. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1933. ———. General Introduction to the series Essays in Order. London: Sheed & Ward, 1931. ———. The Gods of Revolution. Introduction by Arnold Toynbee, with an appreciation by James Oliver. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1972.

450

Selected Bibliography

———. Judgement of the Nations. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1942. ———. Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity. London: Sheed & Ward, 1932. ———. Mediaeval Religion and Other Essays. The Forwood Lectures, 1934. London: Sheed & Ward, 1934. ———. Modern Dilemma: The Problem of European Unity. Essays in Order 5. London: Sheed & Ward, 1932. ———. Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry into the Causes and Developments of the Idea of Progress and Its Relationship to Religion. London: Sheed & Ward, 1929. ———. Religion and Culture. London: Sheed & Ward, 1948. ———. Religion and the Modern State. London: Sheed & Ward, 1935. ———. Religion and the Rise of Western Culture. London: Sheed & Ward, 1950. ———. Spirit of the Oxford Movement. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1934. ———. “Tradition and Inheritance: Memories of a Victorian Childhood.” Pts. 1 and 2. Wind and the Rain 5, no. 4; 6, no. 1 (1949). ———. Understanding Europe. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1952. Gill, Eric. Art-Nonsense and Other Essays. London: Cassell, 1929. ———. Autobiography. New York: Devin‑Adair, 1941. ———. Beauty Looks after Herself. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1934. ———. In a Strange Land. London: J. Cape, 1934. ———. It All Goes Together. New York: Devin‑Adair, 1944. ———. Letters of Eric Gill. Edited by Walter Shewring. London: J. Cape, 1947. Green, John Richard. A Short History of the English People. London, Macmillan, 1874; new ed., thoroughly revised. London: Macmillan, 1888. Greene, Graham. A Sort of Life. London: Bodley Head, 1971. Grisewood, Harman. One Thing at a Time: An Autobiography. London: Hutchinson, 1968. Harari, Manya. Memoirs, 1906–1969. London: Harvill Press, 1972. Hollis, Christopher. Along the Road to Frome. London: Harrap, 1958. ———. American Heresy. New York: Minton, Balch, 1930. ———. Breakdown of Money. London: Sheed & Ward, 1934. ———. Dr. Johnson. London: Golancz, 1928. ———. Foreigners Aren’t Fools. London: Longmans, 1936. ———. Italy in Africa. London: H. Hamilton, 1941.

Selected Bibliography

451

———. Lenin: Portrait of a Professional Revolutionary. London: Longmans, 1938. ———. Monstrous Regiment. London: Sheed & Ward, 1929. ———. Oxford in the Twenties: Recollections of Five Friends. London: Heinemann, 1976. ———. The Seven Ages: Their Exits and Their Entrances. London: Heinemann, 1974. ———. Sir Thomas More. London: Sheed & Ward, 1934. ———. The Two Nations: A Financial Study of English History. London: G. Routledge, 1935. ———. We Aren’t So Dumb. London: Longmans, 1937. Huxley, Aldous. Hidden Huxley: Contempt and Compassion for the Masses, 1920–1936. Edited by David Bradshaw. London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1994. Jarrett, Bede. Letters of Bede Jarrett: Letters and Other Papers from the English Dominican Archives. Selected by Bede Bailey; edited by Simon Tugwell and Aidan Bellenger. Dominican Sources in English, 5. Bath: Downside Abbey; Oxford: Blackfriars, 1989. Jerrold, Douglas. Britain and Europe. London: Collins, 1941. ———. England. Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1935. ———. England, Past, Present, and Future. London: Dent, 1950. ———. Georgian Adventure: The Autobiography of Douglas Jerrold. Special edition, reprinted for the Right Book Club. London: Collins, 1938. ———. “Hilaire Belloc and the Counter-Revolution.” In For Hilaire Belloc: Essays in Honor of His 71st Birthday, edited by Douglas Woodruff. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1942; New York: Greenwood Press, 1969. ———. Necessity of Freedom: Notes on Christianity and Politics. London: Sheed & Ward, 1938. ———. Spain: Impressions and Reflections. London: n.p. [1937?]. Reprinted from The Nineteenth Century and After, no. 772 (April 1937): 470–92. ———. Storm over Europe, a Novel. London: E. Benn, 1930. ———. They That Take the Sword: The Future of the League of Nations. London: John Lane, 1936. Jones, David. Dai Greatcoat: A Self-Portrait of David Jones in His Letters. Edited by René Hague. London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1980. ———. Dying Gaul, and Other Writings. London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1978.

452

Selected Bibliography

———. Epoch and Artist: Selected Writings. London: Faber & Faber, 1959. ———. Inner Necessities: The Letters of David Jones to Desmond Chute. Edited and with an introduction by Thomas Dilworth. Toronto: Anson­ Cartwright, 1984. ———. In Parenthesis. London: Faber & Faber, 1937. ———. Letters to Vernon Watkins. Edited and with notes by Ruth Pryor. Foreword by Gwen Watkins. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1976. Knox, Ronald. Caliban in Grub Street. London: Sheed & Ward, 1930. ———. Essays in Satire. London: Sheed & Ward, 1928. ———. Let Dons Delight: Being Variations on a Theme in an Oxford Common‑room. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1939. ———. Occasional Sermons. Edited and with an introduction by Philip Caraman. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1960. ———. Spiritual Aeneid. London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1918. Leslie, Shane. End of a Chapter. 3d ed. London: Constable, 1916. ———. Long Shadows: Memoirs of Shane Leslie. London: John Murray, 1966. ———. Passing Chapter. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934. Lunn, Arnold. Come What May: An Autobiography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1941. ———. A Critic and a Convert: or, A Challenge and Its Sequel: Letters Exchanged between Dr. G. G. Coulton and Mr. Arnold Lunn, and Printed by the Former with the Latter’s Permission. Taunton: Barnicott & Pearce, 1935. ———. Flight From Reason: A Study of the Victorian Heresy. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1931. ———. Is Christianity True? A Correspondence between Arnold Lunn and C. E. M. Joad. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1933. ———. Now I See. London: Sheed & Ward, 1933, 1938. ———. Public School Religion. London: Faber & Faber, 1933. ———. Roman Converts. London: Chapman & Hall, 1924; New York: Scribner’s, 1925. ———. Science and the Supernatural: A Correspondence between Arnold Lunn and J. B. S. Haldane. London: Eyre, 1935. ———. Science of World Revolution. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1938. ———. Spanish Rehearsal. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1937. ———. Whither Europe? New York: Sheed & Ward, 1940.

Selected Bibliography

453

———. Within That City. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1936; Fort Collins, CO: Roman Catholic Books, 1999. Lunn, Arnold, and Ronald Knox. Difficulties: Being a Correspondence about the Catholic Religion. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1932. Maritain, Jacques. Three Reformers: Luther—Descartes—Rousseau. London: Sheed & Ward, 1928. Originally published as Trois réformateurs: Luther—Descartes—Rousseau. Paris: Plon‑Nourrit et cie, 1925. McNabb, Fr. Vincent, O.P. Catholic Church and Philosophy. New York: Macmillan, 1927. ———. The Church and the Land. London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1926. ———. Old Principles and the New Order. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1942. Newman, John Henry. “Sermon preached 13 July 1852, in St. Mary’s College, Oscott, in the First Provincial Synod of Westminster, before Cardinal Wiseman and the Bishops of England.” In Newman, Sermons Preached on Various Occasions. 6th ed. London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1891. Noyes, Alfred. Two Worlds for Memory. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953. Orwell, George. Funny, but Not Vulgar and Other Selected Essays and Journalism. London: Folio Society, 1998. ———. My Country Right or Left and Other Selected Essays and Journalism. London: Folio Society, 1998. Sheed, Frank. The Church and I. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974. ———. Communism and Man. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1946. Speaight, Robert. Property Basket: Recollections of a Divided Life. London: Collins, 1970. Wall, Bernard. European Note‑book. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1939. ———. Headlong into Change: An Autobiography and a Memoir of Ideas since the Thirties. London: Harvill, 1969. ———. Spain of the Spaniards. London: Sheed & Ward, 1938. ———. These Changing Years: Notes on Civilization and Revolution. London: Harvill, 1947. Ward, Barbara. Hitler’s Route to Bagdad. Fabian Society International Research Section. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1939. ———. Italian Foreign Policy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941. ———. Russian Foreign Policy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940. ———. Turkey. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1942.

454

Selected Bibliography

———. West at Bay. New York: Norton, 1948. Ward, Maisie. To and Fro on the Earth: The Sequel to an Autobiography. London and New York: Sheed & Ward, 1973. ———. Unfinished Business. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1964. ———. The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition. Vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century. Vol. 2, Insurrection versus Resurrection. London: Sheed & Ward, 1934, 1937. Watkin, E. I. The Catholic Centre. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1939. ———. Men and Tendencies. London: Sheed & Ward, 1937. Waugh, Evelyn. Black Mischief. London: Chapman and Hall, 1932; Boston: Little, Brown, 1977. ———. Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. Boston: Little, Brown, 1945. ———. Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999. ———. A Little Learning: The First Volume of an Autobiography. London: Chapman & Hall, 1964; London: Penguin, 1983. ———. Decline and Fall. London: Chapman & Hall, 1928; Boston: Little, Brown, 1977. ———. Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Edited by Michael Davie. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. ———. Edmund Campion: Jesuit and Martyr. London: Longmans, 1935; Boston: Little, Brown, 1946. ———. Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh. Edited by Donat Gallagher. London: Methuen, 1983. ———. Letters of Evelyn Waugh. Edited by Mark Amory. New Haven, CT: Ticknor & Fields, 1980. ———. Robbery under Law. London: Chapman & Hall, 1939. ———. Scoop. Boston: Little, Brown, 1938 ———. Sword of Honour Trilogy: Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, Unconditional Surrender. London: Penguin Books, 1984. The three novels were originally published in London by Chapman & Hall, 1952–61, and first published in one volume by Chapman & Hall, 1962. ———. Vile Bodies. London: Chapman & Hall, 1930; Boston: Little, Brown, 1977. ———. Waugh in Abyssinia. London: Longmans, 1936; London: Methuen, 1984. Woodruff, Douglas. Charlemagne. London and New York: D. Appleton­ Century, 1935.

Selected Bibliography

455

———. Plato’s American Republic. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1926. ———. Plato’s Britannia. London: Sheed & Ward, 1930.

Secondary S o u rc e s Alldritt, Keith. David Jones: Writer and Artist. London: Constable, 2003. Allitt, Patrick. Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Altholz, Josef. Liberal Catholic Movement in England: The “Rambler” and Its Contributors, 1848–1864. London: Burns & Oates, 1962. Aspden, Kester. Fortress Church: The English Roman Catholic Bishops and Politics, 1903–1963. Leominster: Gracewing, 2002. Attwater, Donald. A Cell of Good Living: The Life, Works and Opinions of Eric Gill. London: Chapman, 1969. ———. Eric Gill: Workman. London: Clarke, 1941. Auld, John W. “Liberal Pro‑Boers.” Journal of British Studies 14 (May 1975): 78–101. Bailey, Bede. “Father Vincent McNabb, Dominican.” Chesterton Review 22 (February–May 1996): 45–55. Barker, Ernest. Age and Youth: Memories of Three Universities and Father of the Man. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953. Barmann, Lawrence F. Baron Friedrich von Hügel and the Modernist Crisis in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Beck, G. A. English Catholics, 1850–1950; Essays to Commemorate the Centenary of the Restoration of the Hierarchy of England and Wales. With a foreword by Cardinal Griffin. London: Burns & Oates, 1950. Bence‑Jones, Mark. The Catholic Families. London: Constable, 1992. Blissett, William. “David Jones and the Chesterbelloc.” Chesterton Review 23 (February–May 1997): 27–55. ———. The Long Conversation: A Memoir of David Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Bossy, John. English Catholic Community, 1570–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. ———. “English Catholics after 1688.” In From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, edited by Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

456

Selected Bibliography

Boyd, Ian. The Novels of G. K. Chesterton: A Study in Art and Propaganda. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975. Brown, Callum G. Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain. Harlow, U.K.: Pearson, 2006. Browne, Harry. Spain’s Civil War. 2d ed. New York: Longmans, 1996. Buchanan, Tom. Britain and the Spanish Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. “Great Britain.” In Political Catholicism in Europe, 1918–1965, edited by Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Campbell, Debra. “The Catholic Evidence Guild: Towards a History of the Laity.” Heythrop Journal 30 (July 1987): 306–24. Canovan, Margaret. G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977 Caraman, Philip. C. C. Martindale: A Biography. London: Longmans, 1967. Carpenter, Humphrey. Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and His Friends. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Chadwick, Owen. Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Clark, Elaine. “Catholics and the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage in England.” Church History 73 (2004): 635–65. Cleary, J. M. Catholic Social Action in Britain, 1909–1959: A History of the Catholic Social Guild. Oxford: Catholic Social Guild, 1961. Coates, John D. Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis. Hull: Hull University Press, 1984. Coman, Peter. Catholics and the Welfare State. New York: Longmans, 1977. Conway, Martin. Catholic Politics in Europe, 1918–1945. London: Routledge, 1997. Corrin, Jay. Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. ———. G. K. Chesterton & Hilaire Belloc: The Battle against Modernity. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981. Cowling, Maurice. Religion and Public Doctrine in England. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980–2001. Currie, Robert, Alan Gilbert, and Lee Horsley. Churches and Church­goers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.

Selected Bibliography

457

Curtis, Michael. Verdict on Vichy: Power and Prejudice in the Vichy France Regime. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002. Dale, Alzina Stone. The Outline of Sanity: A Biography of G. K. Chesterton. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982. Davey, Arthur. British Pro‑Boers, 1877–1902. Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1978. Dilworth, Thomas. “The Letters of John O’Connor to David Jones.” Chesterton Review 23 (February–May 1997): 57–63. Doyle, Patrick J. “Frank Sheed on the Stump.” Commonweal 126 (23 April 1999): 16–18. Doyle, Peter. “The Catholic Federation: 1906–1929.” Studies in Church History 23 (1986): 461–76. ———. “Charles Plater, S.J., and the Origins of the Catholic Social Guild.” Recusant History 21 (May 1993): 401–17. Drumm, Walter. The Old Palace: A History of the Oxford University Catholic Chaplaincy. Foreword by Basil Cardinal Hume; epilogue by A. O. J. Cockshut. Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1991. Edwards, Francis. The Jesuits in England: From 1580 to the Present Day. Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1985. Eliot, T. S. “A Note of Introduction.” In In Parenthesis, by David Jones. New York: New York Review of Books, 2003. Elliot, Kit. “‘A very pushy kind of folk’: Educational Reform, 1944, and the Catholic Laity of England and Wales.” History of Education 35 (2006): 91–119. Farr, Barbara Storm. Development and Impact of Right-Wing Politics in Britain, 1903–1932. New York: Garland, 1987. Farrell-Vinay, Giovanna. “London Exile of Don Luigi Sturzo (1924–1940).” Heythrop Journal 45 (2004): 158–77. Fecher, Charles A. Philosophy of Jacques Maritain. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1953. Ferguson, Robert. The Short Sharp Life of T. E. Hulme. London: Allen Lane, 2002. Feske, Victor. From Belloc to Churchill: Private Scholars, Public Culture, and the Crisis of British Liberalism, 1900–1939. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Ffinch, Michael. G. K. Chesterton. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986. Fielding, Stephen. Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England, 1880–1939. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1993.

458

Selected Bibliography

Fitzgerald, Penelope. Knox Brothers. London: Macmillan, 1977; London: Harvill, 1991. Flint, James. “‘Must God Go Fascist?’: English Catholic Opinion and the Spanish Civil War.” Church History 56 (September 1987): 364–74. Fogarty, Michael Patrick. Christian Democracy in Western Europe, 1820– 1953. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957. Fothergill, John. An Innkeeper’s Diary. With an introduction by Craig Brown and illustrations by Peter Bailey. London: Chatto & Windus, 1931; London: Folio Society, 2000. George, Margaret. Hollow Men: An Examination of British Foreign Policy between the Years 1933 and 1939. London: Frewin, 1967. Gilley, Sheridan. Newman and His Age. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1990. ———. “Roman Catholicism.” In Nineteenth‑Century English Religious Traditions: Retrospect and Prospect, edited by D. G. Paz. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. ———. “The Years of Equipoise, 1892–1943.” In From without the Flaminian Gate: 150 Years of Roman Catholicism in England and Wales, 1850–2000, edited by Vincent Alan McClelland and Michael Hodgetts. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1999. Gray, Robert. Cardinal Manning: A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Greeley, Andrew. Catholic Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Green, Martin. Children of the Sun: A Narrative of “Decadence” in England after 1918. New York: Basic Books, 1976; New York: Wideview, 1980. Greene, Dana. The Living of Maisie Ward. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. Greene, Thomas. “English Catholic Press and the 2nd Spanish Republic.” Church History 45 (1976): 70–84. ———. “Vichy France and the Catholic Press in England: Contrasting Attitudes to a Moral Problem.” Recusant History 21, no. 1 (May 1992): 111–32. Griffiths, Richard M. Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933–9. London: Constable, 1980. Hale, Frederick. “Fighting over the Fight in Spain: The Pro-Franco Campaign of Bishop Peter Amigo of Southwark.” Catholic Historical Review 91 (2005): 462–83.

Selected Bibliography

459

———. “From Pacifism to Neutrality to Advocacy of Francisco Franco: The Case of Michael de la Bedoyère.” Chesterton Review 29 (Winter 2003): 529–43. Hastings, Adrian. History of English Christianity, 1920–1990. 3d ed. London: SCM Press, 1991. ———. “Some Reflexions on the English Catholicism of the 1930s.” In Bishops and Writers: Aspects of the Evolution of Modern English Ca­tholi­ cism, edited by Adrian Hastings. Wheathampstead: A. Clarke, 1977. Hebblethwaite, Peter. “Into the Mainstream with Cardinal Hinsley.” New Blackfriars 68 (1987): 346–55. Heenan, John. Cardinal Hinsley. London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1944. Heimann, Mary. Catholic Devotion in Victorian England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Hills, Paul, and Nicolete Gray. David Jones. London: Tate Gallery, 1981. Hitchcock, James. Catholicism and Modernity: Confrontation or Capitulation? New York: Seabury Press, 1979. ———. “Post-Mortem on a Rebirth: The Catholic Intellectual Renaissance.” American Scholar 49 (Spring 1980): 211–25. Holmes, J. Derek. More Roman than Rome: English Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century. London: Burns & Oates, 1978. ———. Papacy in the Modern World, 1914–1978. London: Burns & Oates, 1981. Hornsby-Smith, Michael P., ed. Catholics in England, 1950–2000: Historical and Sociological Perspectives. London: Cassell, 1999. ———. Roman Catholics in England: Studies in Social Structure since the Second World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Hulmes, Edward. “Faith in Crisis: From Holocaust to Hope, 1943–2000.” In From without the Flaminian Gate: 150 Years of Roman Catholicism in England and Wales, 1850–2000, edited by Vincent Alan McClelland and Michael Hodgetts. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1999. Kaiser, Wolfram, and Helmut Wohnout, eds. Political Catholicism in Europe, 1918–1945. Vol. 1. New York: Routledge, 2004. Kalyvas, Stathis N. Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Keating, Joan. “The British Experience: Christian Democracy without a Party, 1910–1960.” In Christian Democracy in Europe: A Comparative Perspective, edited by David Hanley. London: Pinter Publishers, 1994.

460

Selected Bibliography

———. “Discrediting the ‘Catholic State’: British Catholics and the Fall of France.” In Catholicism in Britain and France since 1789, edited by Frank Tallett and Nicholas Atkin. London: Hambledon Press, 1996. ———. “Faith and Community Threatened? Roman Catholic Responses to the Welfare State, Materialism, and Social Mobility, 1945–62.” Twentieth Century British History 9 (1998): 86–108. ———. “Looking to Europe: Roman Catholics and Christian Democracy in 1930s Britain.” European History Quarterly 26 (1996): 57–79. ———. “Making of a Catholic Labour Activist: The Catholic Social Guild and the Catholic Workers’ College, 1909–1939.” Labour History Review 59 (Winter 1994): 44–56. Ker, Ian. Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. ———. John Henry Newman: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Kernan, Julie. Our Friend, Jacques Maritain: A Personal Memoir. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975. Knowles, M. D. “Christopher Dawson (1889–1970).” Proceedings of the British Academy 57 (1970): 430–52. Krieg, Robert, Karl Adam: Catholicism in German Culture. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992. Larkin, Emmet. “Socialism and Catholicism in Ireland.” Church History 33 (December 1964): 462–83. Leonard, Ellen. “English Catholicism and Modernism.” In Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and AntiModernism in Historical Context, edited by Darrell Jodock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Lunn, Kenneth, and Richard Thurlow, eds. British Fascism: Essays on the Radical Right in Inter-War Britain. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980. Lynch, John. “England.” In The Church and the Nations: A Study of Minority Catholicism in England, India, Norway, America, Lebanon, Australia, Wales, Japan, the Netherlands, Vietnam, Brazil, Egypt, southern Africa and among the Lele of the Congo, edited by Adrian Hastings. London and New York: Sheed & Ward, 1959. MacCarthy, Fiona. “Baptism by Fire.” In Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales, edited by Mark Bostridge. London: Continuum, 2004.

Selected Bibliography

461

———. Eric Gill: A Lover’s Quest for Art and God. New York: Dutton, 1989. McCarthy, John. Hilaire Belloc: Edwardian Radical. Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1978. McClelland, Vincent Alan. “Bourne, Norfolk and the Irish Parliamentarians: Roman Catholics and the Education Bill of 1906.” Recusant History 23 (October 1996): 228–80. ———. Cardinal Manning: His Public Life and Influence, 1865–1892. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962. ———. “The Formative Years, 1850–92.” In From without the Flaminian Gate: 150 Years of Roman Catholicism in England and Wales, 1850–2000, edited by Vincent Alan McClelland and Michael Hodgetts. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1999. McCool, Gerald. The Neo‑Thomists. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994. McLeod, Hugh. “Building the ‘Catholic Ghetto’: Catholic Organisations, 1870–1914.” In Studies in Church History 23 (1986): 411–44. ———. Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996. McMahon, Malcolm. “The Relevance of Father Vincent McNabb, O.P.” Chesterton Review 22 (February–May 1996): 34–36. McNeill, William H. Arnold Toynbee: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Machin, G. I. T. Churches and Social Issues in Twentieth‑Century Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Mason, Francis. “The Newer Eve: The Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society in England, 1916–1923.” Catholic Historical Review 72 (1986): 620–38. Mathew, David. Catholicism in England: The Portrait of a Minority: Its Culture and Tradition. 2d ed. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948. Mendilow, Jonathan. The Romantic Tradition in British Political Thought. London: Croom Helm, 1986. Merwin, W. S. Foreword to In Parenthesis, by David Jones. New York: New York Review of Books, 2003. Mews, Stuart. “Religious Life between the Wars.” In History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre‑Roman Times to the Present, edited by Sheridan Gilley and W. J. Sheils. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.

462

Selected Bibliography

———. “The Sword of the Spirit: A Catholic Cultural Crusade of 1940.” Studies in Church History 20 (1983): 409–30. Misner, Paul. Social Catholicism in Europe from the Onset of Industrialization to the First World War. New York: Crossroad, 1991. Moloney, Thomas. Westminster, Whitehall, and the Vatican: The Role of Cardinal Hinsley, 1935–1943. Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1985. Muggeridge, Malcolm. Chronicles of Wasted Time. Vol. 2, The Infernal Grove. New York: Morrow, 1973. Nichols, Aidan, O.P. “Chesterton and Modernism.” Chesterton Review 15 (February–May 1989): 157–73. ———. “Christopher Dawson’s Catholic Setting.” In Eternity in Time: Christopher Dawson and the Catholic Idea of History, edited by Stratford Caldecott and John Morrill. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997. ———. Dominican Gallery: Portrait of a Culture. Leominister: Gracewing, 1997. Norman, E. R. The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. ———. Roman Catholicism in England from the Elizabethan Settlement to the Second Vatican Council. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Oldmeadow, Ernest. Francis Cardinal Bourne. London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1940. Patey, Douglas Lane. The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Paz, D. G. Popular Anti‑Catholicism in Mid‑Victorian England. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Payne, Stanley G. History of Fascism, 1914–1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. ———. Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Pearce, Joseph. “The Catholic Literary Revival.” In From without the Flaminian Gate: 150 Years of Roman Catholicism in England and Wales, 1850–2000, edited by Vincent Alan McClelland and Michael Hodgetts. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1999. ———. Literary Giants, Literary Catholics. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005. ———. “Tradition and Conversion in English Literature.” In Victorian Churches and Churchmen: Essays Presented to Vincent Alan Mc­

Selected Bibliography

463

Clelland, edited by Sheridan Gilley. Woodbridge, UK, and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press [for] the Catholic Record Society, 2005 ———. Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997. Pepler, Conrad. “In Diebus Illis: Some Memories of Ditchling.” Chesterton Review 8 (November 1982): 333–52. Preston, Paul. The Coming of the Spanish Civil War: Reform, Reaction and Revolution in the Second Republic. 2d ed. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Pryce-Jones, David, ed. Evelyn Waugh and His World. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973. Quinn, Dermot. Patronage and Piety: The Politics of English Roman Catholicism, 1850–1900. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Radosh, Ronald, Mary R. Habeck, and Grigory Sevostianov, eds. Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Robbins, Keith. “Britain, 1940, and Christian Civilization.” In History, Society, and the Churches: Essays in Honour of Owen Chadwick, edited by Derek Beales and Geoffrey Best. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Robichaud, Paul. Making the Past Present: David Jones, the Middle Ages, and Modernism. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007. Rutkoff, Peter. Revanche and Revision: The Ligue des Patriotes and the Origins of the Radical Right in France, 1882–1900. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981. Salwen, Michael B. Evelyn Waugh in Ethiopia: The Story behind “Scoop.” Lewiston, NY, and Queenston, Ont.: E. Mellen Press, 2001. Sarjeant, William A. S. “G. K. Chesterton at St. Paul’s School.” Chesterton Review 21 (August 1995): 315–41. Schoen, William. The Intellectual Crisis in English Catholicism: Liberal Catholics, Modernists, and the Vatican in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. New York: Garland, 1982. Schreck, Alan. Afterword to Spirit of Catholicism, by Karl Adam. Steubenville, OH: Franciscan University Press, 1996. Schwartz, Adam. “Confronting the ‘Totalitarian Antichrist’: Christopher Dawson and Totalitarianism.” Catholic Historical Review 89 (2003): 464–88.

464

Selected Bibliography

———. The Third Spring: G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005. Scott, Christina. A Historian and His World: A Life of Christopher Dawson, 1889–1970. London: Sheed & Ward, 1984. ———. “Vision and Legacy of Christopher Dawson.” In Eternity in Time: Christopher Dawson and the Catholic Idea of History, edited by Stratford Caldecott and John Morrill. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997. Scotti, Paschal. Out of Due Time: Wilfrid Ward and the “Dublin Review.” Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006. Sewell, Brocard. “Father Vincent McNabb: A Great Distributist.” Chesterton Review 4 (Fall–Winter 1977–78): 75–88. Shagan, Ethan. “Introduction: English Catholic History in Context.” In Catholics and the “Protestant Nation”: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England, edited by Ethan Shagan. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Sheed, Wilfrid. Frank and Maisie: A Memoir with Parents. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. Siderman, Edward. A Saint in Hyde Park: Memories of Vincent McNabb, O.P. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1950. Speaight, Robert. Georges Bernanos; A Study of the Man and the Writer. New York: Liveright, 1974. ———. The Life of Eric Gill. New York: P. J. Kenedy, 1966. ———. The Life of Hilaire Belloc. London: Hollis & Carter, 1957. Stannard, Martin. Evelyn Waugh. 2 vols. London: J. M. Dent, 1986, 1992. Swift, Roger, and Sheridan Gilley, eds. The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939. Savage, MD: Barnes and Noble Books, 1989. Sykes, Christopher. Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975. Taouk, Youssef. “‘We Are Alienating the Splendid Irish Race’: British Catholic Response to the Irish Conscription Controversy of 1918.” Journal of Church and State 48 (2006): 601–22. Taylor, Gary. Orage and “The New Age.” Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University Press, 2000. Tenbus, Eric G. “‘We Fight for the Cause of God’: English Catholics, the Edu­ cation of the Poor, and the Transformation of Catholic Identity in Victorian England.” Journal of British Studies 46 (October 2007): 861–83.

Selected Bibliography

465

Thomas, Hugh. Spanish Civil War. 3d ed., rev. and enl. London: H. Hamilton, 1977; reprinted, with a 1986 preface, London: Penguin, in association with Hamish Hamilton, 1990. Thomas, R. T. Britain and Vichy: The Dilemma of Anglo‑French Relations, 1940–42. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979. Valentine, Ferdinand, O.P. Father Vincent McNabb, O.P.: The Portrait of a Great Dominican. London: Burns & Oates, 1955. Vincent, Mary. Catholicism in the Second Spanish Republic: Religion and Politics in Salamanca, 1930–1936. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Von Arx, Jeffrey. “Catholics and Politics.” In From without the Flaminian Gate: 150 Years of Roman Catholicism in England and Wales 1850–2000, edited by Vincent Alan McClelland and Michael Hodgetts. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1999. ———, ed. Varieties of Ultramontanism. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998. Wall, Barbara. “Bernard Wall and the Colosseum, 1934–1939.” Chesterton Review 7 (August 1981): 198–224. ———. “Eric Gill, Hilary Pepler, and the Ditchling Movement.” Chesterton Review 5 (Spring–Summer 1979): 165–87. ———. René Hague: A Personal Memoir. Wirral, UK: Aylesford, 1989. Waller, Philip. “Roman Candles: Catholic Converts among Authors in Late-Victorian and Edwardian England.” In Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain: Essays in Memory of Colin Matthew, edited by Peter Ghosh and Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Walsh, Michael. “Catholics, Society and Popular Culture.” In From without the Flaminian Gate: 150 Years of Roman Catholicism in England and Wales, 1850–2000, edited by Vincent Alan McClelland and ­ Michael Hodgetts. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1999. ———. “Ecumenism in War-Time Britain: The ‘Sword of the Spirit’ and ‘Religion and Life,’ 1940–1945.” Heythrop Journal 23 (1982): 243–58, 377–94. ———. From Sword to Ploughshare: Sword of the Spirit to Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1940–1980. London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1980. ———. The Tablet, 1840–1990: A Commemorative History. London: Tablet Publishing, 1990.

466

Selected Bibliography

Ward, Elizabeth. David Jones, Mythmaker. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983. Ward, Maisie. Gilbert Keith Chesterton. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1943. Watkin, E. I. Roman Catholicism in England, from the Reformation to 1950. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1957. Waugh, Evelyn. The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox: Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and Pronotary Apostolic to His Holiness Pope Pius XII. London: Chapman & Hall, 1959. Weaver, Stewart A. The Hammonds: A Marriage in History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Webber, G. C. Ideology of the British Right, 1918–1939. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Wiener, Martin J. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. White, Gavin. “Fall of France.” Studies in Church History 20 (1983): 431–44. Whyte, John. Catholics in Western Democracies: A Study in Political Behaviour. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. Wilkinson, Alan. Dissent or Conform? War, Peace, and the English Churches, 1900–1945. London: SCM Press, 1986. Williams, Michael E. Venerable English College, Rome: A History, 1579–1979. London: Associated Catholic Publications, 1979. Wilson, A. N. Hilaire Belloc. New York: Atheneum, 1984. Wolfe, Kenneth M. Churches and the British Broadcasting Corporation, 1922–1956: The Politics of Broadcast Religion. London: SCM Press, 1984. Wolffe, John. God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843–1945. London: Routledge, 1994. Woodruff, Douglas. “Judge and Jury Must Decide.” In Evelyn Waugh and His World, edited by David Pryce-Jones. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973. Wykeham‑George, Kenneth, and Gervase Mathew. Bede Jarrett of the Order of Preachers. London: Blackfriars, 1952.

Index

Abyssinia, Italian invasion of Hinsley’s indictment of, 346 Hollis on, 198, 413n99 Waugh’s support of, 193–96 Acción Nacional, 301 Acton, Harold, 163 Adam, Karl, 232–34 criticism of neo-Thomism, 234–35, 239 influence on Order, 262 aesthetics of Gill, 104 shared by Burns, 246 Aeterni Patris (Leo XIII), 75 Age of the Gods, The: A Study in the Origins of Culture in ­Prehistoric Europe and the Ancient East (Dawson), 221, 273–74 agnosticism Catholic Evidence Guild and, 229 Chesterton and, 109, 113 of Dawson, 271 of Hollis, 167 of Lunn, 205 of Siderman, 401n30 Agnostic’s Apology (Stephen), 205 alcohol consumption. See also Hypocrite (drinking club) Catholic Church and, 168 Alfonso XIII (Spain), 301 alpine skiing, Lunn and, 204

American Heresy (Hollis), 173–75 Anathemata (Jones), 284 anti-Communism, 323 Bellocians and, 220, 377 divisiveness of, 360, 378 of Jerrold, 160 of Lunn, 220, 307, 377 anti-Semitism of Belloc, 64–69, 141 of Chesterton, 134–39, 141 of the Ligue des Patriotes, 6, 65 of New Witness, 64–65, 134 of Prothero, 65 anti-totalitarianism of Dawson, 322 apologetics, Christian Chesterton and, 139 eschewed by Sheed & Ward, 231 Lunn and, 204, 205, 219 McNabb and, 77–87 Waugh and, 191 “Art and Sacrament” (Jones), 252 Art and Scholasticism (Maritain), 105, 235 influence on Burns, 246 Arts and Crafts movement, Gill and, 93, 94–95 Asquith, Herbert, 23, 28 Attwater, Donald, 438n109 Augustine, Saint, 280–83 “Augustine and His Age” (­Dawson), 283 467

468

Index

authoritarian governments. See also Fascism; Nazism Belloc and, 42 Bellocians and, 141, 220 Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (Cunard), 310 Autobiography (Chesterton), 108 Autobiography (Gill), 106 Azaña, Manuel, 301, 302 Bad Child’s Book of Beasts, The (Belloc), 17 Balfour, Arthur, 22 Balfour, Patrick, 181 Balfour Education Act (1902), 23, 24 Ballad of Lepanto (Chesterton), 139 Ballad of the White Horse, The (Chesterton), 139 Balliol College. See Oxford University Ballot, Lily, 4 Baring, Maurice, 41, 62, 109, 118, 168 Barker, Ernest, 269 Barnes, “Mugger,” 168, 169 Beales, A. C. F., 353, 358 Bedoyère, Michael de la, 311 in Latin Catholic bloc ­controversy, 373 Nazism and, 340–41 supporter of Franco, 317 Bell, George, 358 Belloc, Bessie, 2–3 Manning and, 9 Belloc, Hilaire, 1–70, 370–71 advisor to Sheed & Ward, 230–31 condemnation of modernism, 76 condemnation of Nazis, 325 Dawson and, 289–90 on Déroulède, 7

education, 8 Gill and, 105 as historian, 43–50 —Hollis critical of, 175–76 Hollis’s friendship with, 175 influenced by Déroulède, 7 influence on —Burns, 245 —Chesterton, 113, 119, 120 —Gill, 98 —Hollis, 166, 174–75, 176 —Jerrold, 150–51, 152 —Sheed, 221, 224–25 —Ward, 221, 226 —Waugh, 187–88 —Woodruff, 173 on majority rule, 397n94 on Manning, 10 marriage to Elodie Hogan, 17 McNabb’s relationship with, 77–78, 79 military service in French army, 11–12 opposition to the Balfour ­Education Act (1902), 24 at Oxford University, 13–16, 41 in Parliament, 22–29 on Spanish Civil War, 309 stroke during World War II, 326 on the Tablet, 294 on the United States, 410n56 Waugh on, 192 Bellocianism. See also Distributism central tenets of, 70 culmination of antimodernism of Pius IX, 381 culmination of intellectual revival within English Catholicism, 380 Dawson and, 286

Index

end of, 368–69 Lunn’s conversion to, 216 results of failure of, 381–82 Spirit of Catholicism compared to, 233 Bellocians. See also ­Chesterton, G. K.; Gill, Eric; Hollis, ­Christopher; Jerrold, ­Douglas; Lunn, Arnold; McNabb, ­Vincent; Waugh, Evelyn; Woodruff, Douglas anti-Communism, 220, 377 and authoritarian governments, 141, 220 English Review forum for, 160 and Fascism, 372 influence on Sheed & Ward, 221 and Spanish Civil War, 372 support of Franco’s Nationalists, 300, 323–24 Benedict, Saint, as model for McNabb, 84–85 Benn, Ernest, 148 Benn Brothers, 148 Bentley, E. C., 13, 19, 110 Berdyaev, Nicholas, 241, 316 Bernanos, George, 336 Berry, Sidney, 358 Beveridge, William, 374 Beyond Politics (Dawson), 337–38 Blackfriars (periodical), 264 Black Mischief (Waugh), 294–95, 422n5 Blogg, Frances, 113 Bloomsbury group, Gill and, 95 Boer War anti-Semitism and, 65 opposition of Belloc to, 19 opposition of Chesterton to, 119

469

Bolin, Luis, 303 Borkenau, Franz, 335 Bossy, John, 388n10 Breakdown of Money (Hollis), 200 Britannia (periodical), 153 Brogan, Denis, 262–63, 360 Buckley, William F., Jr., 377 Buddhism, progress and, 277 Burns & Oates, 148, 230, 331, 332 Dublin Review and, 361, 362, 364, 366–67 Burns, Thomas, 81 Burns, Tom, 221, 243–49. See also Order: An Occasional Catholic Review and Bellocianism, 372, 380 on Dawson, 285 Dawson and, 284 departure from Sheed & Ward, 423n8 director of the Tablet Publishing Company, 297, 300 Ditchling visitor, 103 family and early life, 243–44 McNabb and, 87 and sale of the Tablet, 297 salon in Chelsea (see Chelsea group) at Sheed & Ward, 242 during Spanish Civil War, 313 supporter of Franco, 312 on the Tablet, 294, 422n5 Wall and, 315 Butler, Cuthbert, 209 Caballero, Largo, 302, 307 “Call to Contemplatives, A” (McNabb), 84, 102 Campbell, Roy, 312–13

470

Index

Campbell-Bannerman, Henry, 22–23 Campion, Edmund, 180 biography by Waugh, 186–91 Capel-y-ffin (Wales) Gill’s move to, 103 Jones at, 254 capitalism Belloc on, 35, 36 Chesterton on, 123 instability of, 36 people’s, 126 Reformation and, 40 Caröe, W. D., 91 Carter, Horsfall, 352 Catholic bloc controversy. See Latin Catholic bloc controversy Catholic Church. See also Ca­tholi­ cism; conversions to Catholicism Dawson’s interest in, 270 Lunn and Church militant, 217–18 Ward on conflict with modern world, 239–40 Waugh on, 186 Catholic Evidence Guild (CEG) McNabb and, 85–88 meeting of Sheed and Maisie Ward through, 222 purpose, 85–86 training of speakers, 227–29 Ward, Maisie, and, 227–28 Catholic Herald influence of Sword of the Spirit on, 357 on Latin Catholic bloc, 341–42, 373 Nazism and, 340–41 peace plan of, 434n86 on Spanish Civil War, 311–12

Sturzo on Franco in, 313 on World War II, 325 Catholic intellectual revival ­manifesto by Ward, 239 Catholic Intellectuals and the ­Challenge of Democracy (­Corrin), 387n6 Catholicism. See also ­Catholic Church; conversions to Catholicism Lunn’s patronizing attitude ­toward, 208 medieval society and, 40 political, of Belloc, 33 Catholic Popular Party (Italy), 131 Catholic press criticism by Carter, 352 defense by Sword of the Spirit, 352–53 “Catholic Press and Non-Catholic England” (Order), 261 Catholic Social Guild, 330, 359 Catholic Times, 353 Catholic Truth Society, 244 Catholic Worker, 355 Catholic Worker’s College at ­Oxford, 330, 343, 359 Cecil, Robert, 47 CEDA. See Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA) CEG. See Catholic Evidence Guild (CEG) Chambers, F. W., 297, 423n8 Changing World ( journal), 443n9 Chants du Soldat (Déroulède), 5–6 Chelsea group, 221, 243 D’Arcy and, 246–47 Grisewood and, 246, 247, 248–49

Index

Thomas Aquinas as starting point of, 247 Wall and, 315 Chesterton, Cecil. See also Party System, The (Belloc and Chesterton) New Witness and, 51 Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 71, 107–40 on Belloc leaving Parliament, 29 books published by Sheed & Ward, 231 charisma, 371 condemnation of German Nazis, 325 conversion, 118, 202 —Lunn on, 207 editor of the New Witness, 65 education, 110–11 family, 108–9 Gill and, 105 influence on —Burns, 245 —Sheed, 224–25 as journalist, 112–13 Lunn on, in Roman Converts, 206, 207 Orthodoxy, 113–18 in publishing, 111–12 and the Speaker, 19 on the United States, 410n56 Chinese labor in South Africa, ­Belloc on, 22–23 “Christian Equality” (Maritain), 335 “Christian Individualism and ­Scientific Individualism” (­Lindsay), 335–36 Christianity democracy as outgrowth of, 338

471

need of Western society to return to, 280 as progress, 315 as spiritual dynamic of European culture, 276–78 “Christianity and Humanism” (Watkin), 335 “Christianity and War” (­Colosseum), 316–17 “Christopher Dawson’s Catholic Setting” (Nichols), 387n6 Church of England Gill and, 91 Waugh on, 186 Chute, Desmond, 100, 102 City of God (Augustine), 280–83 civilization, Catholic Church as for Hollis, 168 for Waugh, 220 civilization, European, Dawson on, 288 Clergy Review, 351, 360 Clonmore, Billy, 422n5 Colosseum beginning of, 315 decline of, 429n48 defense of Franco by, 316 as forum of political debate, 316–17 representative of Dawsonites, 314 on Spanish Civil War, 372 Communist threat. See anti-Communism Companion to Wells’ Outline of History, A (Belloc), 231 Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), 301–2 conservatism of Dawson, 287–88 of Jerrold, 154–55

472

Index

Contrast, The (Belloc), 410n56 conversions to Catholicism Belloc’s influence and, 371 Chesterton, G. K., 118, 202, 207 Dawson, 272–73 Gill, 96–97 Hollis, 166–69 Jones, 251–53 Knox, 202 Lunn, 203, 209–10, 216 Waugh, 184–86 corporate state of Jerrold, 155 Corrin, Jay, 387n6 Coulton, G. G. criticism by Lunn, 218–19 influence on Lunn, 207 Cowling, Maurice, 387n6 Crisis of Western Education (­Dawson), 379 Critic and a Convert (Lunn), 218–19 Cruise of the Nona, The (Belloc), 61–62 Cunard, Nancy, 310 Daily Mail (newspaper), 194 Daily News (newspaper), 112 Danton, Georges biography by Belloc, 17, 20, 224 political role model for Belloc, 21 D’Arcy, Martin Burns and, 244 at Burns’s salon, 246–47 Dublin Review and, 363 Lunn and, 216 on Tablet’s attack of Black ­Mischief, 295, 422n5 Waugh and, 184–85 Dawson, Christopher, 221, 266–91 after World War II, 379

on Bellocianism, 380 break with Maritain, 319 contributor to English Review, 290, 372 conversion, 272–73 director of the Tablet Publishing Company, 297 editor of —Dublin Review, 330–31, 332–33 —Essays in Order, 265 education, 268 erudition, 285 family and early life, 266–68 on German invasion of the Soviet Union, 356–57 Hinsley and, 378 influence on —Burns, 284 —Sheed and Ward, 283 —Wall, 315 on intellectual community after World War II, 379 at Oxford, 268–70 personal dislike of Belloc, 372 Religion and the Modern State, 320–23, 337 supporter of Franco, 313–14, 317 Sword of the Spirit and, 348–50, 351 Wall and, 319 Ward, Barbara, and, 378 wartime writings, 374 Decline and Fall (Waugh), 181 Decline of the West (Spengler), 276 “Dedicatory Ode to the Republican Club” (Belloc), 162 Déroulède, Paul, 5–7 Diary of My Times (Bernanos), 336 Difficulties (Knox and Lunn), 203

Index

Dimitrov, Georgi, 307 Distributism, 57–58, 70, 371 Belloc on, 38–39 Brogan on, 263 Chesterton on, 127, 135–36, 140 Ditchling as showpiece for, 89, 102, 104 failure of, 373–74 Gill’s radical interpretation of, 107 Jerrold and, 143, 154–55 Lunn’s promotion of, 217 strategy for creation of distributist state, 54–55 usage of term, 403n64 Waugh and, 192 Distributist League, 122 Ditchling advertising of, 102–3 Burns’s visit to, 245 Catholicism at, 101 Gill’s move from, 103 Gill’s move to, 95, 99–100 Jones at, 103, 253–54 McNabb and, 88 self-sufficiency and, 103 as showpiece for Distributism, 89, 102, 104 simplicity of, 100–101 divinity of Jesus, Lunn on, 213 Drapeau, Le (newspaper), 6 Dreyfus Affair, 6, 65–66 Driberg, Tom, 181 Dru, Alick, 246, 375–76 Dublin Review, 381 Dawson’s writings for, 338–39 first issue of the new, 333–36 Griffin’s agreement with Burns & Oates about, 366–67

473

Jerrold and, 331, 361–63 —conflict with Dawson, 368, 373 on Latin Catholic bloc controversy, 438n109 transformation of, 330–32, 335 Ward, Barbara, and, 330–31, 364, 365 Eccles, F. Y. on Belloc, Hilaire, 13–14 and the Speaker, 19 “Ecclesiastical Materialism” (Order), 262 economic philosophy. See also Distributism Bellocian —Ditchling as embodiment of, 89, 102, 104 —failure of, 373 —influence on McNabb, 78 of Chesterton, 126 of Gill, 94, 97, 98–99 interpretation by followers, 71 of Jerrold, 156 Economist, 327 education Belloc on, 23–24 McNabb on, 77 Education Bill (1906), 24 elections Belloc in 1906, 21 Belloc in 1910, 26–27 Eliot, George (Marian Evans), 3 Elwes, Val, 358, 361 Emmanuel Burden (Belloc), 19–20 English Review Dawson contributor to, 290, 372 forum for Bellocians, 160 Jerrold editor of, 154

474

Index

English Review (cont.) Mosley invited to luncheon club, 159 Epstein, Jacob, 95 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Newman), 289 Essays in Liberalism by Six Oxford Men (Belloc, et al.), 15 Essays in Order (pamphlets), 265, 420n74 Estin Thalassa (Gill), 95 Ethiopia. See Abyssinia Europe and the Faith (Belloc), 45, 48, 167 Evening Standard (newspaper), 193 Everlasting Man (Chesterton), 139 Everyman (periodical), 153 Eye-Witness, 29, 34. See also New Witness Belloc’s resignation from, 51 McNabb’s contributions to, 78 Eyre, Oliver, 331 Eyre and Spottiswoode, 148 Dublin Review and, 331 Fabian Arts and Philosophy Group, 93 Fabian Society, 93 factory system, Gill’s rejection of, 94, 97 Fairfield, Letitia, 343, 435n90 in Catholic bloc controversy, 354, 439n114 on Tablet’s criticism of Black Mischief, 422n5 Fascism Belloc and, 42, 61–64 Bellocians and, 372

Chesterton and, 128–31, 131–34 condemnation by Hinsley, 346, 347 condemnation by McNabb, 78–79 Dawson on, 321 Gill and, 107 Hollis on, 199, 201–2 Jerrold and, 156–58 and papal authority, 64 Waugh and, 192–97 Fawkes, Guy, 47 Ferry, Jules, 6 financiers Belloc on, 20, 42, 52, 65, 68 Boer War and, 19, 119 Chesterton on, 108 corrosive influence of, 42, 70 Hollis on, 200–201 Jewish —Belloc on, 65, 68 —Chesterton on, 136 —New Witness on, 53 press and, 173 Fisher, H. A. L., 49 Flowering Rifle (Campbell), 312–13 Foreigners Aren’t Fools (Hollis), 175, 198–99 foreign policy, Jerrold on, 156 Foreign Research and Press Service (FRPS), 327, 330 France. See also French Revolution; Vichy regime Belloc, Hilaire, on army, 12 Burns and Catholic revival in, 244–45 as example of Distributist society, 121 Franco, Francisco, 303, 309 Bedoyère and, 317

Index

Bellocians and, 300, 323–24, 372 Burns and, 312 Colosseum support, 316 Dawson and, 313–14, 317 Jerrold and, 303–6, 317 Lunn and, 306–9, 317 Frankau, Gilbert, 153 freedom, Catholic Church as, 168 freedom of the press, 133 “French Catholic to Herr Hitler, A” (Bernanos), 336 “French Dilemma, A” (Tablet), 353–54 French Revolution Belloc on, 17, 20–21, 287 Dawson on, 287 Froude, J. A., 176–77 FRPS. See Foreign Research and Press Service (FRPS) Fry, Roger, 95 Fumet, Stanislas, 335 Game (journal), 105 Gardner, Evelyn, 181 Gaudium et Spes (Paul VI), 383 “Germany’s Attack on Russia Will Not Divide Christians” (Catholic Herald), 357–58 Ghéon, Henri, 231 Gill, Eric, 71, 89–107 charisma, 371 Chesterton compared with, 125 conversion, 96–97 death, 326 early life, 89–90 education, 90–93 influence on Burns, 245 Jones and, 253–54 on McNabb, 101

475

McNabb and, 88 philosophy of art, 104–5 as sculptor, 95 sexuality, 106, 403n70 on Spanish Civil War, 309, 317 on Tablet’s attack of Black Mischief, 295, 422n5 Gilson, Étienne, 139–40 G.K.’s Weekly, 104, 122 on Order, 264 Goodwin, Charles, 25 Gospels, Lunn on, 212 government. See also authoritarian governments; parliamentarism Chesterton on role of, 124 Grands cimetières sous la lune, Les (Bernanos), 336 Green, John Richard, 44 Greene, Grahame, 143, 388nn8, 9 Griffin, Bernard Cardinal, 366–67 Grisewood, Harman Burns’s salon and, 246, 247, 248–49 influenced by Dawson, 284 on Jones, 250 on Order, 265 Guardini, Romano, 248 Guérin, Jules, 6 Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic, 102, 253 guilds Belloc on, 39–40, 59, 371 Chesterton on, 124, 125, 126 Gill on, 100 Lunn on Chesterton’s view of, 206–7 Gunpowder Plot, Belloc on, 47, 49–50 Gurian, Waldemar, 199–200 contributor to Colosseum, 318 on Franco, 309

476

Index

Gurian, Waldemar (cont.) on Hollis, 201 neutral position in Spanish Civil War, 301 Haecker, Theodore, 248 Hagreen, Philip, 253–54 Hague, René, 246, 247, 250 Hall, Patricia, 435n91 Hammond, J. L., 19 Harari, Manya, 330, 344, 370, 432n67, 443n9 Harnack, Adolf, 272 Harvill Press, 443n9 Heenan, John, 298, 345 Herbert, Gabriel, 313 Herbert, Laura, 180 Heretics (Chesterton), 216, 224 Hinduism, progress and, 277 Hinsley, Arthur Cardinal, 293 and American Catholic opinion, 360 apostolic visitor to Africa, 299 death of, 366, 373 Dublin Review and, 331, 361, 363, 368 at English College, 298–99 patronage of Knox, 299, 424n12 recognition of talented individuals, 297–98, 344 sale of the Tablet, 296–97 on Soviet Union, 440n116 Sword of the Spirit and, 343–44, 351 on Vichy government, 439n114 as young priest, 298 Hirst, F. W., 19 history. See also history of England, Bellocian

as apologetics, 50, 175, 176, 286 Dawson’s interpretation of European, 287 Wells’s vision of, 231 History of Dogma (Harnack), 272 History of England (Belloc), 43, 69 history of England, Bellocian, 43–50, 371. See also Middle Ages; Reformation Catholic Church and Catholicism in, 45–46, 48 Catholic intellectual community and, 50 Dawson and, 286–87 influence of, 70 interpretation by Jerrold, 152–53 on Normans, 45 rejection of, 375–76 Roman foundation, 44 Hogan, Elodie, 11, 17 Hollis, Christopher, 198–202, 372 Catholic Church as freedom, 168 contributor to the Tablet, 300 conversion, 166–69 debating tour in the United States, 169–70 education, 164 friendship with Belloc, 175 influenced by Europe and the Faith (Belloc), 167 influence on Wall, 314 Jerrold and, 160–61 at Oxford, 164–65 Sheed & Ward and, 231 support of Franco, 309 on Tablet’s attack of Black Mischief, 295, 422n5 as teacher, 170 Ward, Barbara, and, 364–65

Index

Ward, Barbara, on, 342 Waugh on, 192 during World War II, 326 Home Rule, Belloc and, 27 Hope, James (Lord Rankeillour), 8 Hope, Richard, 361 Hopkins, Gerald Manley, 244 House of Commons and Monarchy (Belloc), 58, 69 House of Lords, reform of, 27–28 Howard, Brian, 163 Howard, Edmund, 246 Howard, Francis, 246 Howell, Arthur, 255 How the Reformation Happened (Belloc), 187–88 Hughes, Daniel, 251 Hulme, T. E., 145–46 human nature, Waugh’s pessimism regarding, 185–86 Hypocrite (drinking club), 162–63, 165, 409n37 Industrial Revolution, Belloc on, 36 infallibility, Lunn and, 208, 213–16 In Parenthesis (Jones), 249, 251, 255–60 Insurrection versus Resurrection (Ward), 239–41 Ireland Belloc and, 11 Chesterton and, 132 as example of Distributist society, 121 Hollis and, 165 Isaacs, Godfrey, 51 Isaacs, Rufus, 51 Isis, 15, 16, 204 Italian Foreign Policy (B. Ward), 327

477

Italy. See Abyssinia, Italian invasion of; Fascism; Mussolini, Benito Jackson, Holbrook, 93 Jarrett, Bede, 295, 422n5 Jerrold, Douglas, 143–61, 372. See English Review anticommunism, 220 as civil servant, 147–50 on Dawson, 290–91, 333 Dublin Review and, 331, 361–63, 373 education, 144–45 family and early life, 144 and Latin Catholic bloc controversy, 373 at Oxford, 145 in publishing, 148 supporter of Franco, 303–6, 317 Ward, Barbara, and, 364–65 Ward, Barbara, on, 342–43 during World War I, 146–47 as writer, 153–54 Jews. See also anti-Semitism Chesterton on, 134–35 as constituting a distinct nationality, 66, 68–69 financiers and businessmen —Belloc on, 65, 68 —Chesterton on, 136 —New Witness on, 53 McNabb and, 79 violence against —Catholic defense of, 68 —Chesterton’s opposition to, 139 Jews, The (Belloc), 64, 66–67 John, Augustus, 95 John, Henry, 103, 244 Johnston, Edward, 92–93

478

Index

John XXIII (pope), 383 Jones, David, 249–60 Chelsea group and, 246 conversion, 251–53 cover of Order, 260 covers of Essays in Order, 265 at Ditchling, 103, 253–54 early life and family, 250 education, 251 influenced by Dawson, 284 during World War I, 250–51 journalism Catholic, criticism by Order, 261 Chesterton and, 112–13 Waugh and, 194 Woodruff and, 170 Jowett, Benjamin, 13 Judaism, progress and, 277 Judgment of the Nations (Dawson), 338–39 Keating, Joseph, 297 Kessler, Count, 95 Knox, Ronald adviser to the Tablet, 297 conversion, 202 Lunn and, 203, 216 Lunn on, in Roman Converts, 206 on Order, 264 at Oxford Union, 165 patronage by Hinsley, 299, 424n12 Koestler, Arthur, 308 labor, Belloc on, 10–11 land redistribution, Chesterton on, 124 Lateran Treaty (1929), 64, 129 “Latin Catholic Bloc, A” (Catholic Herald), 341–42

“Latin Catholic Bloc, A” (Saunders), 438n109 Latin Catholic bloc controversy, 373, 438nn108, 109 Bulletin on, 353 Catholic Herald on, 341–42 Fairfield, Letitia, in, 354, 439n114 Tablet and, 354–55 League of Nations, 339 Leo XIII (pope), 57, 75 Lerroux Garcia, Alejandro, 301, 308 libel laws, Chesterton on, 123, 133 liberalism criticism of, 324 Dawson on, 323, 337–39, 374 of Jerrold, 148–49 Ward, Barbara, and, 327 Liberal Party Belloc and, 22 Hollis and, 165–66 Jerrold and, 148–50 “Liberal Tradition, The” (B. Ward), 329–30 “Liberty—True and False” (address, Hinsley), 347 Licensing Bill (1908), 25 Ligue antisémitique de France, 6 Ligue des Patriotes, 5–6, 65 Lindsay, A. D., 335 Lloyd George, David, 22, 51, 371 London Dock Strike (1889), 10 Longmans Green, 297 Louvain, University of, 75 Lunn, Arnold, 202–19, 372 anti-Communism of, 220, 307, 377 Burns and, 245 conversion, 203, 209–10, 216 early life, 203

Index

education, 203–4 faith, 204–5 influenced by Chesterton, 216 Roman Converts, 206–9 supporter of Franco, 306–9 Lyon, Hugh, 358 MacCarthy, Fiona, 106 MacDonald, Malcolm, 166 machinery, Chesterton on, 125–26 Maine, Henry, 151 Manchester Guardian (newspaper) Belloc’s 1906 letter to, 26 on Sheed & Ward, 242, 284 Manchester Sunday Chronicle (newspaper), 112 Manning, Henry Edward Cardinal, 380, 381 Belloc, Hilaire, and, 9 Belloc, Hilaire, on, 10 and London Dock Strike (1889), 10 published in the Paternoster, 9 Von Arx on, 390n17 Man Who Was Thursday, The (Chesterton), 139 Marañón, Gregorio, 308 Marconi scandal Belloc and, 51 New Witness on, 51, 64 Maritain, Jacques, 105, 235–36 contributor —to the Colosseum, 316, 318 —to Dawson’s Dublin Review, 335 early life, 235 education, 236 neutral position in Spanish Civil War, 301

479

Martindale, C. C. Hollis on, 168 Sheed & Ward and, 231 on Tablet’s attack of Black Mischief, 295–96, 422n5 Mathew, David, 297, 331, 344 Mathew, Gervase, 344 Matthews, Basil, 15 Maura, Miguel, 301 Mayer, J. P., 335 Maynard, Theodore, 102–3 McCann, Justin, 232 McCarthy, John, 56 McCuskern, Wulstan, 82 McNabb, Vincent, 71, 72–89 Catholic Evidence Guild and, 85–88 charisma, 371 on Chesterton, 119 Chesterton compared to, 125 death, 326 Ditchling and, 101 in the Dominican order —Dominicans and, 399n2, 400n25 —joining, 73–74 —as prior, 77, 78, 81 —as public preacher, 82–83 —at St. Dominic’s Priory, London, 82 —as teacher, 77, 81 early life, 73 education, 73, 75–76 Gill and, 99 influence on Maisie Ward, 87 modern world rejection, 72, 74, 83 on Order, 264 Sheed & Ward and, 231 as writer, 77

480

Index

Men at Arms (Waugh), 325 Middle Ages. See also guilds Belloc on, 38–40, 45–46 Gill on medieval system of production, 97 Lunn on Chesterton’s view of, 206–7, 216 need for a new, 241 religious unity of the Church and, 278 Sheed’s interest in, 225 Mills, Valery, 272, 273 Missing Masterpiece, The (Belloc), 65 modernism Catholic Church and, 76, 381 Maritain and, 246 modern world, Bellocian rejection of the, 72, 74, 83. See also return to the land monarchy, Belloc and, 50–51, 59–61, 70 Monstrous Regiment (Hollis), 176–78 Mont César abbey (Belgium), 96 Month (periodical), 264 Moore, Ethel, 93 Morning Leader (newspaper), 77 Mosley, Oswald, 158–60 Mr. Belloc Still Objects (Belloc), 231 Mussolini, Benito Belloc and, 61–62 Chesterton and, 129, 130 Waugh and, 195, 197, 413n90 Napoleon of Notting Hill (Chesterton), 139 National Insurance Act (1911), 151

Belloc’s Servile State written in response to, 34 National Insurance Act (1946), 374 National Liberal Association, 21 National Review, 377 Nazism Bedoyère and, 340–41 denunciation by —Belloc, 325 —Hinsley, 346 —Woodruff, 355–56 neo-Thomism, 75–77 criticism by Adam, 234–35, 239 Gill and, 402n60 Maritain and, 236, 239, 246 Sheed on, 235 Wall and, 315 New Age (weekly), 35 New Jerusalem (Chesterton), 134, 139 Newman, John Henry Cardinal influence on Dawson, 288–89 Oxford Movement and, 380 New Oxford Review (magazine), 145 New Statesman and Nation ( journal), 352 New Witness, 51. See also Eye-Witness anti-Semitism, 64–65, 68–69, 134 Chesterton editor of, 121 on corruption in Parliament, 122 on Ditchling, 102 on Fascism, 128 on Italian Catholic Popular Party, 131 Nichols, Aidan, 387n6 Nineteenth Century and After (review), 303

Index

Nonconformists, 24, 25 Now I See (Lunn), 216 Nuptials of God (Gill), 105–6 O’Callaghan, Stephen, 293 O’Connor, John, 105, 118, 251, 252 O’Hea, Leo, 330, 355, 359 Oldershaw, Lawrence, 109, 110 Oldershaw, Lucian, 19 Oldmeadow, Ernest, 293–94 “On the Teaching of Mr. Belloc” (Brogan), 262–63 “Open Letter” (Chesterton), 121 Orage, A. R., 35, 93 Order: An Occasional Catholic Review, 260–65 Burns publisher of, 221, 243 criticism of Bellocianism, 372 end of publication, 264–65 success, 263–64 Orthodoxy (Chesterton), 113–15, 116, 139, 216 Orwell, George, 370 Osservatore Romano, L’, 312 “Our Contemporaries” (Order), 261 Outline of Sanity (Chesterton), 122–23, 127 Outlook (journal), 112 Oxford Conferences on Faith (McNabb), 78 Oxford Fortnightly (magazine), 145 Oxford Movement, 380 Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs (FRPS), 327 Oxford Union Belloc at, 14–15 Hollis at, 165 Jerrold at, 145

481

Lunn and, 203–4 Woodruff president of, 164 Oxford University. See also Hypocrite (drinking club) after World War I, 161–62 Belloc at, 13–16, 41 Catholic Worker’s College, 330, 343, 359 Dawson at, 268–70 Lunn at, 203–4 Wall at, 315 Ward, Barbara, at, 326–27 Waugh at, 162–63, 165 Woodruff at, 164 pacifism Gill and, 107, 355 Hinsley on, 355 neutralization by Sword of the Spirit, 356 Spanish Civil War and, 317 Pall Mall Gazette (newspaper), 9 Paris, Burns in, 244–45 Parkes, Elizabeth (Bessie). See Belloc, Bessie parliamentarism criticism of, 324 defense by Dawson, 337–38 disillusion of Bellocians with —Belloc, 30, 41, 50–51, 58–59, 70 —Chesterton, 121–22 —Gill, 94 viability demonstrated by World War II, 382 Party System, The (Belloc and Chesterton), 22, 29, 30–33 influence on Jerrold, 151–52 Pascal, Dawson on, 288

482

Index

Pascendi (Pius X), 76 Paternoster (monthly review), 9 Path to Rome, The (Belloc), 17, 18, 216 patriotism, Chesterton and, 136 Pax (journal), 355 people’s capitalism, 126 Pepler, Douglas (Hilary), 93, 100, 102 Perils of Peace (C. Chesterton), 52–53 Pétain government. See Vichy regime Phillimore, J. S., 19 philosophy of art of Gill, 104–5 Pius IX (pope), 381 Pius X (pope), 76 Pius XI (pope), 293, 436n97 Pius XII (pope), 319 place, in Chesterton’s thought, 135 Plater Society, 343 Plato’s American Republic (Woodruff), 170–73 political freedom in England, Chesterton on, 133 political philosophy Belloc, 370–71 —rejection of, 373 Chesterton, 127–34 Dawson, 287 Hollis, 165–65 Jerrold, 155–56 second generation of Bellocians and, 372 politics Belloc and, 21, 26–27 Chesterton, 119, 120–21, 123 Pollard, Hugh, 303 Pollen, Arthur Hungerford friendship with Belloc, 8

Paternoster and, 9 Tablet and, 297, 423n8 Priestley, Eliza, 2 Prior, Edward, 93 progress Christianity as, 315 as modern religion, 275–76 religion and, 277 Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry, 274–80, 283 property Belloc’s definition of, 55 redistribution of, 42, 54, 55–57 Protestantism, Dawson on, 270–71 Protestantization of England, 46, 179 Prothero, J. K., 65 public-house licensing reform, Belloc on, 24–25 Raffalovich, André, 99 Rauschning, Hermann, 335 Reckitt, Maurice, 317 Redwood, Vernon, 85 Reformation Belloc on, 36, 40, 46, 176, 187–88, 189 Hollis on, 176–80 Waugh on, 186–91 Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (Cowling), 387n6 Religion and the Modern State (Dawson), 320–23, 337 Renaissance and roots of the modern world, 278–79 republicanism, Belloc and, 2, 12, 20 Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII) Belloc and, 57 influence of, 80–81

Index

“Restoration of Property” (Belloc), 54–55 Restoration of Property, The (Belloc), 55–56 Resurrection, Lunn on, 213 Resurrection of Rome (Chesterton), 129–30, 132, 139 Retchford, Dorothy, 435n91 return to the land, 140 Chesterton on, 124 Ditchling and, 88 McNabb on, 84 Revue Néo-Scholastique, La, 75 Rivera, Primo de, 301 Robespierre, Maximilien de, 17, 20 Robles, Gil, 301–3 Roman Converts (Lunn), 206–9 Rome, Dawson’s visit to, 271–72 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 30 Rubinstein, H. F., 69 Rubinstein, William, 68 Russian Foreign Policy (B. Ward), 327 sacralization of everyday life, 248 Saint in Hyde Park, A (Siderman), 86 salon of Burns. See Chelsea group Samuel, Herbert, 51 Saunders, J. J., 438n109 Sayers, Dorothy, 358 Schwartz, Adam, 111 science and spiritual needs of humanity, 279 Science and the Modern World (Whitehead), 210–11 Scoop (Waugh), 194, 197 secularization, Dawson on, 329 self-sufficiency Ditchling and, 103 Jerrold and, 156

483

“Servile State” (Belloc), 35 Servile State, The (Belloc), 22, 29, 33–42, 69 influence of, 41 —on Gill, 98 —on Jerrold, 150–51 —on McNabb, 78 on property, 55 success of, 41–42 servile state in England, 37–38 Seton-Watson, R. W., 327 Sheed, Frank, 87. See also Sheed & Ward and American Catholic opinion, 360 on Bellocianism, 380 on Dawson, 285, 289 as Dawsonite, 372 education, 225, 229 family and early life, 223–24 influenced by —Belloc’s biography of Danton, 224 —Dawson, 283 —Heretics (Chesterton), 224 influence on Burns, 244 intelligence work, 431n59 on Spanish Civil War, 312 Wall and, 319 Sheed & Ward. See also Sheed, Frank; Ward, Maisie Burns at, 243 choice of books published, 231–32 colophon, 419n53 creation, 87, 221, 230 English intellectual life and, 242 Essays in Order pamphlets, 265 publisher of Progress and Religion, 283

484

Index

Shorter History of England, A (Belloc), 43 Short History of England (Chesterton), 128 Short History of the English People (Green), 44–45 Shrove, Herbert, 102 Siderman, Edward, 86, 401n30 Simon, John, 15 Smith, F. E., 15, 165 socialism Bellocians and, 140 Belloc on, 36–37, 79 Chesterton on, 116, 120, 127 Gill and, 91–92, 93–94 Jerrold and, 159, 160 McNabb on, 79–80 social justice, Belloc and, 70 society, contemporary, Waugh on, 182, 185–86 Sociological Review, 273 Spain. See also Franco, Francisco; Spanish Civil War coalition of anticlerical parties, 301 Spanish Republic, 301 “Spain: Impressions and Reflections” (Jerrold), 303–4 Spain of the Spaniards (Wall), 317–18 Spanish Civil War, 300–324 Bellocians and, 372 as conflict between Communism and Catholicism for Dawson, 313–14 as cultural battle, 317–18 Dawsonites’ support of Nationalists, 312, 323–24, 372 Hinsley’s opposition to Republicans, 347–48

source of friction among Catholics, 360 Spanish Cockpit (Borkenau), 335 Spanish Rehearsal (Lunn), 306–9 Speaight, Robert, 247, 379 Dublin Review and, 363–64, 367 Speaker (journal), 19, 112, 119 Spirit of Catholicism (Adam), 232–34 Spirit of the Oxford Movement (Dawson), 288–89 Starkie, Walter, 361 St. Dominic’s Press, 100 Stead, W. T., 9 Stephen, Leslie, 205 Steuart, R. H. J., 423n5 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 112 Stroud Journal (newspaper), 77 St. Thomas Aquinas (Chesterton), 139–40 Sturzo, Luigi, 131, 301, 313 Swanton, Louise, 2 Switzerland as model of Distributism, 217 Sword of Honour (Waugh), 377 Sword of the Spirit, 342–45, 381 Bulletin, 352–53 Dawson and, 348–50 launching of, 350 manifesto, 350–51 success of, 356 “Sword of the Spirit” (address, Hinsley), 345, 436n94 symbolism compared to sacramental theology, 252 Tablet after World War II, 376 anti-Communism of, 377 anti-Vichy, 353

Index

in Catholic bloc controversy, 354–55 Catholic intellectuals on, 294 condemnation of Black Mischief, 294–95 —remonstrance of, 422n5 criticism by Order, 261 on Franco, 311 McNabb contributor to, 79 sale of —Burns and, 243 —Hinsley and, 293, 296 Spanish Civil War and, 310–11 Woodruff editor of, 202 Tablet Publishing Company community of Bellocians and their critics in, 300 Dawson in, 291 establishment of, 297 Tate Gallery exhibit of Jones’s, 255 Taylor, A. J. P., 377 Temps Présent ( journal), 335 Third Order of St. Dominic, Ditchling members and, 102, 253 Thomas Aquinas, Saint Maritain and, 236 need for a new, 240–41 as starting point of Chelsea group, 247 study of, at University of Louvain, 75 Thorold, Algar, 311, 320 on Tablet’s criticism of Black Mischief, 423n5 Three Reformers (Maritain), 236–38 Tory Philosophy, A (Hulme), 146 “To the Balliol Men Still in Africa” (Belloc), 19, 162

485

“Towards Social Thinking” (McNabb), 79–81 Trades Unions, 122 Truth about Publishing (Unwin), 231 Turkey (B. Ward), 327 Two Nations: A Financial Study of English History (Hollis), 200 Ulysses (Joyce), 244 Unamuno, Miguel de, 308 United States Belloc on, 410n56 Chesterton on, 410n56 Hollis and Woodruff visit to, 169–70 Hollis on anti-Hitlerism of American press, 201 Woodruff’s idealization of agrarian South, 173 Universe, 264 Unwin, Stanley, 231 Vann, Gerald, 317 Vichy regime, 373, 439n110 Victorian Age in Literature (Chesterton), 139 Vignaux, Paul, 335 Vile Bodies (Waugh), 181–84 violence, revolutionary, Chesterton and, 132 voluntary association, concept of, Dawson and, 337 Von Arx, Jeffrey, 389n10 on Manning, 390n17 Wall, Bernard, 314–19. See also Colosseum break with Maritain, 318–19

486

Index

Wall, Bernard (cont.) Chelsea group and, 246 Dawson —correspondence with, 374, 381 —influenced by, 284 education, 314 evolution, 374–75 on intellectual community after World War II, 379 at Oxford, 315 on Tablet after World War II, 376–77 Wall, Frank, 252 Ward, Barbara, 326–30, 368, 370 and American Catholic opinion, 360 conception of the Sword of the Spirit, 342–43 education, 326 end of work on Dublin Review, 365 on German invasion of the Soviet Union, 356–57 on Jerrold, 332 on Latin Catholic bloc controversy, 438n108 meeting with Hinsley, 344 and new Dublin Review, 330–31 at Oxford, 326–27 secretary of the Sword of the Spirit, 351 work for Ministry of Information, 438 Ward, Josephine, 229 Ward, Leo, 229 Ward, Maisie, 87, 226–29. See also Sheed & Ward on Bellocianism, 380 biography of her parents, 380

on Dawson, 284–85 as Dawsonite, 372 education, 226–27 family and early life, 226 influenced by Dawson, 283 on Progress and Religion, 283 on Spanish Civil War, 312 and Worker-Priest movement in France, 377 Ward, Wilfrid, 240 War of 1870–1871, Belloc family and, 3–4 Watkin, E. I., 271–72, 313 contribution to Dawson’s Dublin Review, 335 pacifist position in Spanish war, 317 Waugh, Evelyn, 180–97 anti-Communism, 377 as Bellocian, 161, 372 on Campion, 180 Catholic Church and civilization, 220 contributor to the Tablet, 300 conversion, 184–86 on Hinsley, 299 interview with Mussolini, 413n90 at Oxford, 162–63, 165 and questionnaire on Spanish Civil War, 309–10 support of Franco, 309 support of Italian invasion of Abyssinia, 193–96 on undergraduate Woodruff, 164 Vile Bodies, 181–84 during World War II, 326 Waugh in Abyssinia (Waugh), 194–95 Hollis on, 198

Index

Weizmann, Chaim, 138 Weld, Joseph, 293, 296 What I Saw in America (Chesterton), 410n56 “What Is France?” (Fumet), 335 White, Victor, 330, 432n67 Whitehead, Alfred North, 210–11 Whitman, Walt, 112 Williams, Thomas, 359–60 Wilson, McNair, 200 Wiseman, Nicholas Patrick Cardinal, 380 Woodruff, Douglas, 375–76 Bellocianism and, 372 and conversion of Lunn, 216 debating tour in the United States, 169–70 director of the Tablet Publishing Company, 297, 300 education, 164 family, 163 Hinsley and, 296–97 Jerrold and, 160–61 and Jerrold’s campaign to take over Dublin Review, 361–62 as journalist, 170 opposition to Latin Catholic bloc accommodationism, 373 at Oxford, 164 Spanish Civil War and, 310 support of Franco, 309 on Tablet’s attack of Black Mischief, 295, 423n5 Waugh on, 192

487

“World Crisis and the English Tradition” (Dawson), 288 World War I. See also In Parenthesis (Jones) Belloc and, 52–53 Jerrold during, 146 Jones during, 250–51 Ward during, 227 World War II Burns during, 313 German invasion of the Soviet Union —Dawson on, 356–57 —Sword of the Spirit and, 356 Hinsley as promoter of the war effort, 345–46 Jerrold’s influence during, 148 Nazi-Soviet pact (1939), 325 as spiritual conflict for Dawson, 333 support for Britain’s declaration of war against Germany, 324–25 U.S. entry into, 360 Wust, Peter, 248, 316 Wyndham, George, 29, 55 Wyndham Act (1903), 55 Wyndham Lewis, D. B., 145 on Tablet’s criticism of Black Mischief, 422n5 Yeats-Brown, Francis, 153 Zamora, Alcalá, 301 Zionism, Chesterton and, 136–38

J A M ES R . L O T HIAN is visiting assistant professor of history at Binghamton University.