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Catholics and the Novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 October 2024
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Like a well-used hackney-coach, the stricture that in all spheres critical standards are declining is beginning to creak: it is a commonplace in everyday criticism whose place is so common that like other similar phrases—‘learning for its own sake’ and ‘the cultures of freedom loving peoples’—it is a statement which now employed seems all but empty of content. Narrowing the stricture here to the treatment meted out to the novel, one is forced to the conclusion by the standard of current criticism exhibited in fiction-reviewing that the decline is one caused principally by ignorance: ignorance about the purpose of a novel and the history of the novel. This charge which is general must regrettably include much of the Catholic press, where the confusion only becomes greater by the haphazard use of the term ‘Catholic novel’. For this reason therefore in the present essay an attempt will be made first to trace the emergence of the novel in English fiction and, secondly, to see how in this larger context what is termed the ‘Catholic novel’ came into being. Finally the actual term ‘Catholic novel’ will be examined.
A novel is a large diffused picture comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purpose of a uniform plan. . . . This plan cannot be executed with propriety, probability or success without a principal personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene, by virtue of his own importance.—Smollett.
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- Copyright © 1950 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Reprinted in 1948 and originally published in 1942.
2 This comment is further developed in T. S. Eliot’s book Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) where it is pointed out that if one accepts culture as being dependent upon religion and vice versa, then English bishops are a part of culture and dogs and horses a part of English religion. Smollett, doubtless, would have applauded this sentiment, as indeed would many of his lesser contemporaries.
3 The present writer does not agree with this grouping: it is merely given as a fairly general opinon which is current.
4 It may be remembered in Mansfield Park that when the company at Sotherton were weary of exploring the gardens, ‘they all returned to the house together, there to lounge away the time as they could with sofas, and chit-chat and Quarterly Reviews, till the return of the others, and the arrival of dinner’. One has only in one’s mind’s eye to imagine the same scene today, to see what papers and magazines are chosen for lounging away the time, to have but a good case in point of the way in which general reading standards have deteriorated.
5 For a good ‘fashionable’, Left and Marxist prejudiced survey of these writers, see New Writing in Europe by John Lehmann (1940). The criticism in this volume is poor, but its index and selected bibliography make it a useful handbook.
6 Certain omissions in this article should be mentioned here: some writers have described Newman’s Callista and Loss and Gain as ‘Catholic novels’. Callista, a tale of the third century, is little more than a historical sketch written in fiction form and, it seems, Loss and Gain would be better described as an attempt to present his conversion in terms of fiction—a feat which he accomplished far more successfully, with the veil of fiction off, when he wrote his Apologia. The omission of Benson is more serious; but perhaps he is better described as a historical novelist writing about Catholic history. Even more serious, probably, is the omission of Belloc, Chesterton and Baring, save that their fiction is better served by the term ‘entertainment’ rather than ‘novel’. It should be added too that in this article no attempt has been made to cover in any exhaustive way all the other contemporary authors who have been acclaimed as writers of ‘Catholic novels’.
7 However, his story, ‘A Hint at the Truth‘, published in The Month (February, 1949) raises this issue again.
8 In Colosseum (June, 1935). asked how a writer should live, Erik von Kuhnelt-Leddihn replied: ‘He should go frequently to the sacraments and pray to God not to become a megalomaniac but to attain nearer and nearer to the only thing which really matters—sanctity.
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