Catholicism and English Literature
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Abstract
IT is s t i l l not uncommon to meet the opinion that Eng l i sh literature first flourished w i t h the rise of Protestantism so that Mr Hu t ton has performed a useful service both by reminding us that ' a l l the sources of our li terature are Catholic ' and then implementing that reminder w i t h a careful survey of many of the relevant facts. W e th ink that the most valuable part of Mr Hut ton 's book is that which is concerned w i t h Eng l i sh li terature before the explici t break w i t h Catholicism, for here the difficult question of the relation between the beliefs which a wri ter m a y hold as a man and the form in which we find them when they are distilled into art is less open to misunderstanding. I t is important not to over-simplify this question. As Catholics we may be inclined to th ink that if the subject-matter of l i terature is some str iking and profound aspect of Catholic t ruth it w i l l follow that the work of art in which such a t ru th is contained w i l l be pro portionately valuable. B u t this is to forget that Li tera ture , as an art , is a highly complex thing wherein subject and style, content and expression, are inseparably interwoven, so that, as one cr i t ic has put i t , ' in predicating success of a poem we m a y be deceiving ourselves by responding to the subject by itself, and to certain t r icks of style by themselves, rather than to a poem in which both are in alliance and unison'. A wri ter is an artist working in language as his medium : if, therefore, we are to assess his work as art and not as apologetics we must pay careful attention to the qual i ty of his language. There is, in fact, between the experience of a wri ter and the language in which that experi ence is art iculated, so close a relation, that the qual i ty and integ r i t y of what he feels is shown by the w a y in which he expresses i t . I n saying, however, that the qual i ty of the language a wri ter uses is a sure test of the significance and genuineness of his response to experience we do not mean that his language must be necessarily original, or that we must assess the value of his thought from the number of unusual words he uses. W h a t we do mean is that a certain freshness, a certain unmistakable note of having realised experience personally, w i l l characterise the wri ter