Literary Giants Literary Catholics by Joseph Pearce Read Free Book Online Page B

across an idealized Merrie England in praise of good ale, good companionship and traditional freedoms. In some respects it bore a remarkable similarity to Belloc’s The Four Men , which appeared two years earlier. The prose in both these works was punctuated with hearty verse, or drinking songs.
    By the time that The Flying Inn and The Four Men were published, Chesterton and Belloc were seen so synonymously that Shaw had dubbed them the “Chesterbelloc”. For all their similarities, however, there remained many significant differences between the two halves of the Chesterbelloc, both in terms of their respective personalities and in terms of their literary achievement. With the notable exception of Belinda , Belloc’s novels were not as accomplished as Chesterton’s, but his verse is more consistent in its quality and more considered in its construction. At its best, Belloc’s poetry is better than anything Chesterton achieved, with the arguable exception of the latter’s “Lepanto”. Belloc’s poems “Tarantella”, “Ha’nacker Mill” and “The End of the Road” place him among the first rank of twentieth-century poets. His “Lines to a Don”, written in defense of Chesterton, is a timeless classic of comic vitriol, while “Twelfth Night”, “Ballade of Illegal Ornaments” and “Rose” are among the century’s finest religious verse.
    Besides Chesterton and Belloc, the writer most responsible for carrying the mantle of the Catholic literary revival in the early years of the twentieth century was Robert Hugh Benson. In some respects, Benson’s life paralleled that of Newman. His conversion to Catholicism in 1903 and his subsequent ordination caused a sensation on a scale similar to that which greeted Newman’s reception into the Church almost sixty years earlier. In Benson’s case the sensation was linked to the fact that he was the son of E. W. Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1882 until 1896. Like Newman, Benson followed a literary as well as a priestly vocation, and before his untimely death in 1914 at the age of forty-three, he had published fifteen highly successful novels. The other obvious parallel with Newman was Benson’s writing of a lucid and candid autobiographical apologia describing the circumstances leading up to his conversion. Benson’s Confessions of a Convert warrants a position alongside Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua as one of the great expositions of the spiritual and psychological background to religious conversion.
    An early admirer of Benson was Hilaire Belloc, who wrote in 1907 that he had met him once or twice “and liked him enormously”. Belloc was particularly impressed with Benson’s historical novels: “It is quite on the cards that he will be the man to write some day a book to give us some sort of idea what happened in England between 1520 and 1560. No book I ever read has given me the slightest conception, and I have never had time to go into the original stuff myself. This is the most interesting of historical problems”.
    Benson’s early death ensured that he was never able to fulfill Belloc’s wish. In consequence, Belloc, increasingly frustrated at the Protestant bias of the Whig historians, would reluctantly take up the cudgels himself. In later life Belloc would publish studies of key sixteenth-and seventeenth-century figures such as Wolsey, Cromwell, James II, Charles I and Cranmer. His How the Reformation Happened , published in 1928, would endeavor to put the whole period into context. Yet to a large extent Benson achieved the same aim in his fiction. Come Rack! Come Rope! remains an outstanding work of literature in its prose, its plot, its characterization and its masterful control of the historical landscape in which it is set.
    Nor did Benson restrict himself to historical fiction. He wrote novels that dealt with the contemporary religious and moral dilemmas of Edwardian society and, as in the case of Lord of the World , novels that