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All except Belloc of these six writers were converts and, in the case of Hopkins, Ker argues that conversion dictated the way he wrote. He wanted to wrench the language away from the sonorities of the Anglican services into the cadences and monosyllables of ordinary speech. So we arrive at the idea of a man who is credited with being ‘the first modern 20th-century poet affected by the demotic devotions of English Catholicism’.
Belloc, the cradle Catholic, saw things historically and regarded the Reform- ation as an unmitigated disaster, creator of the nation states bound always to be at war with each other. According to him, Prussian militarism was ‘essentially the reaction of the barbarous, the ill-tutored and the isolated places external to the old deep-rooted Roman civilisation’. Here one is tempted wearily to say that even God can’t put back the clock, or perhaps has a different one to Belloc’s.
The Chesterton chapter is largely devoted to his brilliant Charles Dickens in which Chesterton cheerfully elects Dickens — a conventional English Catholic mistruster — an honorary Catholic by placing his temperament in the Middle Ages, alongside Chaucer, where, it has to be said, he seems comfortably to fit.
To my way of thinking, after The Power and the Glory Greene’s Catholic novels, if that is what they are, seem too joyless to be Catholic at all, with God used as a card up the sleeve. Ker tells a glorious story of Greene remarking to Waugh that he was going to write a political novel as a change from writing about God. ‘Oh, I shouldn’t do that,’ said Waugh, ‘it would be like P. G. Wodehouse dropping Jeeves in the middle of the Bertie Wooster series.’
The whole Waugh chapter is a delight. Waugh, like Newman, like Hopkins, delighted in the idea of the Catholic priest as a craftsman, one who does things — administer the Sacraments, say Mass — quotidian things of this world penetrated with the numinous. Shocked at first by the matter-of-factness of Catholicism, it is what they came to respect and love.
Not everyone will agree with a book that discusses and clarifies matters seldom mentioned, never mind examined. What more can I say than that this is a book I would like as many people as possible to read, and not to be put off by the title?
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