Joseph Pearce writes that the gestation period for the
Catholic Literary Revival lasted from 1798 to 1845 and: ‘saw the rise
of neo-medievalism, beginning with Coleridge’s Mariner and Scott’s chivalrous
heroes, and ending with Pugin’s Gothic Revival and Newman’s Oxford Movement.
After its 47 years in the womb of neo-mediaeval culture, the Catholic Literary
Revival could be said to have been born, in 1845, amid the controversial pangs
of Newman’s conversion. This heralded what may be termed the Newman Period in
the Revival, dating from 1845 until the great man’s death in 1890. Apart from
Newman himself, this period was graced with the presence of other eminent
convert literati, including the poets, Coventry Patmore and Gerard Manley
Hopkins, the latter of whom is perhaps the finest and most important poet of
the whole Victorian period.’ (https://www.ncregister.com/blog/whatever-happened-to-the-catholic-literary-revival)
In his writings on the Catholic Literary Revival Pearce
usually claims Anglo-Catholics, such as T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis, for the
movement. Unusually, here he overlooks Christina Rossetti in his list of
eminent literati. As Elizabeth Huddleston notes: ‘Rossetti spent her life in
London, where she attended Christ Church, Albany Street, which was known as the
leading Oxford Movement church in London. Along with her sister, Maria,
Rossetti supported many Anglican sisterhoods, including The Society of All
Saints, of which Maria would become a fully professed sister in 1876.
Rossetti’s regular religious, devotional practices were encouraged by members
of the Oxford Movement (such as confession and receiving Holy Communion) and
would play a major role in her life and writings.’
Huddleston also helpfully summarises the Tractarian influences
on Rossetti’s work: ‘Noted in the introduction to the 1925 edition of
Rossetti’s Verses is that “Her [i.e., Christina Rossetti’s] religious views
were Tractarian, that is to say, Anglo-Catholic without any leaning toward
Roman Catholicism and strongly Puritan.” Seen in her private library is that
she carefully illustrated her own copies of Keble’s Christian Year, as well as
Isaac Williams’s The Altar. According to Diane D’Amico and David A. Kent,
Rossetti held the writings of Isaac Williams in special esteem during the last
years of her life, and in 1892 as she convalesced from cancer surgery, she
enjoyed having her brother read from the Autobiography of Isaac Williams.
Elizabeth Ludlow demonstrates how “Tractarianism informed
the early Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic and how Rossetti took this aesthetic forward
and, in turn, used it to inform and disseminate Anglo-Catholic theology,
contributing to the maturing of the Movement’s theology rather than being
simply an [and I quote from Tennyson] ‘inheritor of the Tractarian devotional
mode in poetry.’” This dissemination is demonstrated when, as Ludlow explains,
“a number of her poems appeared in seminal Anglo-Catholic anthologies,”
particularly, Orby Shipley’s Lyrica Mystica: Hymns and Verses on Sacred
Subjects (published in 1865) and Lyrica Eucharistica: Hymns and Verse on the
Holy Communion (1864). Ludlow argues that “the fact that Rossetti’s first
volume of devotional prose was authorized by Burrows, a key Tractarian figure
in mid-nineteenth-century London, strengthens the association between her
writing and the Movement’s teaching still further.”
Much of Rossetti’s religious poetry can be seen as a
typological depiction of “the church as a space prepared for an experience of
divine revelation.” This is seen prevalently in the final lines of Rossetti’s
unpublished poem “Yet a Little While”:
“We have clear call of daily bells,
A dimness where the anthems are,
A chancel vault of sky and star,
A thunder if the organ swells:
Alas our daily life—what else?—
Is not in tune with daily bells
You have deep pause betwixt the chimes
Of earth and heaven, a patient pause
Yet glad with rest by certain laws:
You look and long: while oftentimes
Precursive flush of morning chimes
And air vibrates with coming chimes.”
According to James Pereiro, much of the ethos of the
Oxford Movement “considered religion and poetry closely related, for God has
used poetical language to communicate himself to man, employing symbolical
associations—whether poetical, moral, or mystical—to reveal a world beyond
sense perception.” This interplay between the earthly and the mystical can be
seen in these lines of Rossetti’s poem.’ (https://www.newmanreview.org/rethinking-newman-s-influence/)
Claire Masurel-Murray has set out how in the works of the
Pre-Raphaelites - of which Christina Rossetti was part - in particular the
early paintings and poems of her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘religious
references convey a desire to escape the fluctuations of Victorian scepticism
and to hark back to the spiritual certainties and unmitigated fervour of
mediaeval times.’
Masurel-Murray explains how: “Rossetti’s Italian origins,
his Tractarian upbringing, his love for Dante, his passion for the poets of the
early Italian Renaissance and his mediaevalism all seem to have contributed to
shaping his interest in Pre-Protestant Christianity. In 1847, he sent to
William Bell Scott a series of poems that he entitled Songs of the Art
Catholic. The title of this first collection is extremely significant. It
does not reveal so much a sense of religious belonging as a form of aesthetic
attraction, a cultivated nostalgia for gone-by days … The phrase “Art Catholic”
refers to an aesthetic discipline, to the study of the religious imagery of the
Middle Ages and of the works of Raphael’s predecessors, and to the
contemplation of religious painting as an artistic model. For Rossetti indeed,
both painting and poetry aspire to the condition of sacred art. He frequently
uses Christian images in his visual and literary works, but ornamentally rather
than functionally, as in the Marian paintings The Girlhood of the Virgin
Mary (1849), which is full of Catholic elements (the stone altar, the
embroidered ecclesiastic ornaments, and other liturgical objects such as the
lamp and the organ to the right of the picture) with its two accompanying poems
entitled “Mary’s Girlhood,” written two decades apart in 1849 and 1870, and Ecce
Ancilla Domini (1850), a representation of the Annunciation. Generally
speaking, Rossetti’s work, particularly his poetry, is permeated with Catholic
motifs—Marian images in particular—inherited from the Italian Primitives, and
filtered through the mythical vision of the Middle Ages, seen as an age of
unanimous fervour and faith. This is apparent in such poems as “The Blessed
Damozel,” in the sonnets he wrote to comment on pictures such as “A Virgin and
Child, by Hans Memmeling,” “Our Lady of the Rocks, by Leonardo da Vinci,” or
“For An Annunciation, Early German,” and in his translations of Italian
religious poems from the Middle Ages such as “To the Blessed Virgin Mary” (from
a poem by Fra Guittone d’Arezzo). The artistic use of Catholicism by
Pre-Raphaelites had a lasting influence on fin de siècle writers, as was noted
by David G. Riede, still writing about Rossetti: “His Art-Catholicism shows the
temptation, which became increasingly powerful toward the end of the century,
to embrace Christianity, particularly Catholicism, for the sake of its
aesthetic tradition.”’ (https://journals.openedition.org/cve/528#:)
It is worth noting at this point that, as Whitney Robert Mundt has explained: ‘At Oxford University [Gerard Manley Hopkins] developed an
interest in the [Pre-Raphaelite] Brotherhood and in Christina Rossetti. He met
her and Holman Hunt and was encouraged to work seriously in both poetry and
painting. His artwork reveals the specific influence of John Ruskin, a close
associate of the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as the influence of John Everett
Millais, a member of the original Brotherhood. Hopkins transcribed a number of
poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a founding member of the Brotherhood, and also
by his sister, Christina Rossetti. Hopkins' letters and diaries reveal
admiration for other Pre-Raphaelite associates, notably William Morris, who
founded the Oxford Brotherhood after the model of the original group.’ (https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3484&context=gradschool_disstheses)
Masurel-Murray also notes that another main source of
inspiration came from across the Channel, the second half of the 19th century being
‘a period of intense exchanges between the French and English literary worlds.’
This included ‘the Catholic works of Verlaine, such as Sagesse (1881), a
collection which has as its central theme the poet’s conversion during his time
in jail in 1873–1874, and Liturgies Intimes (1892), a series of
variations on the different moments of the Mass.’ Also included was ‘Baudelaire,
whose poetic work is haunted by Catholic motifs, liturgical metaphors.’
Additionally, ‘One last name that has to be mentioned is that of J.-K.
Huysmans, whose influence on English writers has been the subject of several
studies.’
Masurel-Murray explains that: ‘His novel À rebours
(1884), which is indirectly referred to in Chapters X and XI of The Picture
of Dorian Gray, was called by Arthur Symons “the breviary of the
Decadence”. The prayer that concludes the book (“Seigneur, prenez pitié du
chrétien qui doute, de l’incrédule qui voudrait croire, du forçat de la vie qui
s’embarque seul, dans la nuit, sous un firmament que n’éclairent plus les
consolants fanaux du vieil espoir!”) was full of foreboding, as the year
following the publication of his satanic novel Là-bas (1891), Huysmans
converted to Catholicism. Là-bas, a novel characterised by its extreme
and disoriented mysticism, focuses on the spiritual quest of Durtal, who is
torn between his carnal obsessions and his search for what lies beyond the
visible world. Huysmans’s next novel En route (1895) was a clearly
Catholic work, chronicling the spiritual progress of a man obsessed with
Christian art, with Romanesque and Gothic architecture, with the great
religious writers of the Middle Ages and with Gregorian plain-chant. Both novels
share a number of characteristics with the works of Huysmans’s English
counterparts, in particular a taste for religious art and for the liturgy, a
ruthless critique of modernity, a regressive and nostalgic movement toward
mediaeval supernaturalism, an inner tension between the weight of the flesh and
the temptation of mysticism.’
Pearce notes that: ‘Following Newman’s death there was
the Decadent interlude of the fin de siècle in which a host of Catholic converts,
such as Wilde, Beardsley, Dowson and Lionel Johnson, came to the Church via the
dark and dangerous path of sin. In doing so, they were following in the
footsteps of a previous generation of French converts, such as Baudelaire,
Verlaine and Huysmans, each of whom had also taken the same dark path to
conversion.’ Masurel-Murray notes that: ‘These writers all inherited from
Walter Pater a taste for the splendours of religious rite. They were also
influenced by their Pre-Raphaelite predecessors’ interest in the Catholic
Middle Ages as well as by their emphasis on the aesthetic dimension of
religious experience, and claimed their kinship with the art for art’s sake
creed of French Parnassians and Symbolists.’
She also helpfully summarises the main members of the
group:
‘In the last decade of the 19th century, a significant
number of English writers chose to become members of the Roman Catholic Church.
What is called the “Decadent” movement probably counts in its ranks more
converts than any other school in the history of British literature. Among them
(in the order of their conversions) Frederick Rolfe (1860–1913), also known as
“Baron Corvo,” who wrote novels, short stories and poems, and converted in
1886; the poets John Gray (1866–1934), who was received into the Church in 1890
and ordained into the priesthood in 1901, Lionel Johnson (1867–1902, converted
in 1891), and Ernest Dowson (1867–1900, converted in 1891); Pearl Mary Teresa
Craigie (1867–1906), who wrote novels under the pseudonym “John Oliver Hobbes”
and converted in 1892; Wilde’s friend Robert Ross (1869–1918), an art critic
and essay writer who converted in 1894; André Raffalovich (1864–1934), a friend
of John Gray and Aubrey Beardsley, a minor poet and theoretician of
homosexuality, who became a Catholic in 1896; the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley
(1872-1898, converted in 1897); Henry Harland (1861–1905), the literary editor
of The Yellow Book, who converted in 1898; Oscar Wilde (1856–1900), who
received the sacraments of the Church on his deathbed in 1900; Katharine
Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), who wrote poetry under the
shared pseudonym “Michael Field” and converted in 1907; and finally Wilde’s
lover Lord Alfred Douglas (1870–1945, converted in 1911).’
Pearce concludes his summary of the main features of the Catholic
Literary Revival as follows: ‘The period from 1900 to 1936 could be called the
Chesterbelloc Period, in which the giant figures of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire
Belloc presided over a golden age of literary converts, including R.H. Benson,
Ronald Knox, Maurice Baring, Christopher Dawson, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene
and T.S. Eliot. (Although Eliot was technically an Anglo-Catholic who never
crossed the Tiber his work is, to all intents and purposes, as Catholic as
anything written by his Roman contemporaries.) From 1936 to 1973 we enter the
Inklings Period, in which the formidable presence of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S.
Lewis dominate. (Lewis, like Eliot, was an Anglican and not a Catholic, but his
work, which is overwhelmingly orthodox, sits very comfortably alongside the
work of his Catholic contemporaries.) Eminent literary converts during this
period include Roy Campbell, Edith Sitwell, Siegfried Sassoon, Muriel Spark,
Dunstan Thompson and George Mackay Brown. In America, this period also saw the
emergence of those two fine writers, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy.’
Summing up developments in France,
Theodore P. Fraser writes, in
The Modern Catholic Novel In Europe, that:
"The Catholic novel in Europe as we know it today originated in French literature of the nineteenth century. Originally part of the neo-romantic reaction against Enlightenment philosophy and the anti-religious doctrines of the Revolution, the Catholic novel attained fruition and became an accomplished literary form spearheading the renouveau catholique, or Catholic literary revival. This literary movement contained in its ranks a number of brilliant writers (
Bloy,
Péguy,
Huysmans,
Bernanos,
Mauriac,
Claudel,
Jacques Maritain, and
Jacques Rivière, to name the most important) who reached maturity at the century's end or during the decade of World War I, and it essentially took the form of a strong, even violent, reaction of these French Catholic writers against the doctrine of positivism that had gained preeminence in French political and cultural circles in the last third at least of the nineteenth century."
For more on the Catholic Literary Revival and the French
Catholic Revival with its influence across the Arts, see https://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2020/04/airbrushed-from-art-history-update.html
and https://joninbetween.blogspot.com/search/label/art%20and%20faith.
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Francis Poulenc - O Magnum Mysterium.
