There were giants in those days (1)

It is said that, ‘Of the making of lists there is no end’ and, as it hasn’t done any harm to Nick Hornby’s career, I shall begin with three lists myself. Lists that group together a number of the significant British-based artists in the first half of the twentieth-century.

List one includes C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. Lewis is the link person within this group: he, Tolkien and Williams met weekly in Oxford from 1939 to 1945 through the meetings of The Inklings; Sayers corresponded and met with both Lewis and Williams; Lewis and Sayers both developed a role as ‘popular theologians’; while Lewis, Sayers and Tolkien each contributed essays to what became the posthumous volume, Essays Presented to Charles Williams.

The second list or grouping revolves around T. S. Eliot and includes Christopher Fry, David Jones, Sayers and Williams: Eliot published and wrote introductions to the work of Jones and Williams; Eliot, Sayers and Williams shared a common love of, and wrote on, the work of Dante; Eliot, Fry, Sayers and Williams all wrote drama for the Canterbury Festival; Eliot, Fry and Williams were part of the Verse Drama movement; while, Jones and Williams shared a love of the Arthurian legends – Jones critiquing Williams’ work in The Arthurian Torso.

The final list or group has Eric Gill at its centre and includes, Desmond Chute, Philip Hagreen, Edward Johnston, Jones and Hilary Pepler. Gill, later followed by Johnston and Pepler, moved to Ditchling, Surrey in 1907 and this move led directly to the formation by Chute, Gill and Pepler of the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic in 1920. The Guild was a community of artists and craftspeople living, working and worshipping as Dominican Tertiaries. Jones joined the community in 1921 and then, in 1924, moved with Gill and Hagreen to Caldey in Wales as part of an attempt to establish a similar Guild there.

The links that I have briefly outlined are sufficient to establish that we have here three distinct groups – formed around Eliot, Gill and Lewis – plus a significant amount of overlap and linkage in personnel, ideas and forms between the groups – with Jones, Sayers and Williams emerging as the principal individuals linking the three groups.

Within their own time some of these groupings and links were recognised. Kenneth Pickering has noted that Sayers “was particularly conscious that she was one of a group of Christian writers who were under attack from both radical Christian and agnostic critics”. She wrote of indignation being “reserved for a small group of Anglicans, such as Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis … and, of course, T. S. Eliot …”.

George Bell, as Dean of Canterbury and then as Bishop of Chichester, initiated the Canterbury Festival where, as we have heard, plays by Eliot, Fry, Sayers and Williams, among others, were commissioned and performed. Bell also held several conferences on art and the church and again Eliot, Sayers and Williams were involved.

Accordingly, A. N. Wilson, in his biography of Lewis, suggests that there were giants in the Church of England in those days and cites Eliot, Lewis, and Sayers as examples.

However, it was not only in the Anglican Church that artistic giants existed. The group gathered around Gill, together with Tolkien, were all part of the Roman Catholic Church and there too a similar pattern can be seen. Kathleen Raine, for example, has stated that Gill and Jones were part of “a remarkable flowering of Catholic culture”.

Finally, the links between this group and the Anglican grouping have been noted by Gregory Wolfe who includes Eliot, Gill and Jones in his list of Religious Humanists from this period.

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