Mccabe--3 of 5
FEW POETS AND VAPID HYMNS
Two of the arts, literature and music, deserve special consideration. Both arts had their richest efflorescence after the Reformation; both ought to be of special value in the service of religion; and, while the plastic arts are scarcely suitable for illustrating most of the Catholic doctrines, literature and music are much better suited for the expression of ideas. In regard to literature, moreover, we have a much broader test of the Catholic claim. Even most folk with a fair general culture have to look to the verdict of experts for an appreciation of painting or sculpture. How many ever saw a picture, or a copy of a picture, by one of the Spanish or Italian artists whom Male presses upon us as "great painters" who worthily sustained the tradition of Catholic- inspired art? How many, when they see a collection of reproductions of the religious work of, say, Raphael, Pinturicchio, L. da Vinci, Lippi, Botticelli, Veronese, and Murillo, have the least idea which of these men really had deep religious feeling and which had not? On the other hand, most people have a wider knowledge of books and authors, and every Catholic knows, and ought to have some idea of the artistic value of, the kind of literature which above all ought to show Catholic inspiration, the hymns that are sung in church.
In regard to literature as a whole I have repeatedly pointed out that Christendom did not produce a book that in the general opinion of cultivated men and women could be called "great" between Augustine's City of God (written about 412) and Dante's Trilogy (about 1300). No one, in fact, now reads Augustine's work as literature, and Dante's work, to which Goethe and other critic's of the highest rank denied the title of greatness, has rather an esoteric circle of readers. Let us, however, pass them as great Catholic literature. It is far more notable, when you are discussing the question of religious inspiration, that the Catholic world failed to produce a single work of high rank during the intervening 900 years. Of what other civilization since the Greeks created a great literature can you say that?
We saw the apologist for the Dark Age, Prof. Stenton, admitting that the stretch of seven centuries after the Fall of Rome was "dark" in the sense that it has left us very little literature to throw light upon it. Who ever heard of a civilized period of seven centuries without a literature? It wrote books, of course. The whole output is preserved in the Migne Library, but if you cut out the theological works which not even a priest now reads -- Gregory, Anselm, Bernard, etc. -- you have a thin collection of weird treatises and chronicles, mostly written in a barbaric (often grotesquely ungrammatical) Latin, that makes you smile at the apologists for the Dark Age.
From about 1100 a very different literature began: troubadour songs, ballads, epics, light stories, and so on. Yes, but it was so pervasively licentious and crude in its moral sentiments that the Church, when it began to use its axe and rods, regarded the whole movement as a revolt against Christianity and gradually exterminated it. A religious profession who resents my characterization of the period -- which, by the way, is the same as that of every recognized European authority on it -- told me to read a recent French work, de Rougemont's Passion and Society, for the corrected historical appreciation of the period. The book is one of those freak originalities that the authorities ignore. It takes troubadour literature in its final and feeblest stage, when a few French and Italian poets were trying to save their art from the Church by taking religious themes, and it falsely represents these as typical troubadour literature. It describes as mystic in the religious sense the greater poems of the whole literature, The Romance of the Rose, whereas all experts recognize that "the rose" is sex.
If the apologist wearily grants that Europe in the Dark Age was so low, economically and culturally, that we cannot expect even religion to inspire a literature and insist that no power or agency could have raised Europe afresh more quickly than the Church did, the answer is that just during this period the Arabs and Persians, starting to rebuild civilization long after the Church did, created an amazingly abundant and brilliant literature -- poetic, historical, scientific, and theological -- which Spanish Catholics and Moslem fanatics later destroyed. And if the apologist says that at all events after 1300 Christian Europe produced a great literature he runs into the difficulty I explained in the last chapter: How on earth does the Christian religion inspire a great literature only in the period when, according to all historical authorities, religious feeling and moral idealism were at their lowest ebb?
How many of the most distinguished writers between Dante and Rabelais could even plausibly be claimed to show the inspiration of the Catholic creed! Certainly not Chaucer, the greatest poet of that period. The highest British authority on him, Prof. Lounsbury, shows that he did not believe in immortality and, quoting the poet's words, asks: "Can modern agnosticism point to a denial more emphatic than that made in the 14th Century of the belief that there exists for us any assurance of the life that is lived beyond, the grave?" (Studies in Chaucer, II, 515). Not the two greatest Italian writers, for Petrarch's best work was inspired by illicit love and he scourged Papalism as no modern does, while Boceaccio's great work is as far removed from religion as is that of Zola. Can anyone find the spirit of the Church in Froissart's blood-soaked Chronicle or in the defiant ethic of Villon's poetry'! In the anti- ecclesiastical work of Valla, the purely scientific (a real anti- clerical) work of Bacon, the comedies (often very loose) of Ariosto or Benvenuto Cellini? The Catholic can have Tasso -- who reads him anyway? -- and the Samma of Thomas Aquinas, but he will hardly claim Erasmus or Rabelais as inspired by religion.
It is time the writers who fancy that Gothic cathedrals and religious paintings prove that there is a rich inspiration in the Catholic creed tried to explain to us why it so dismally failed to inspire great or artistic writers, especially poets. They never attempted it. they speak of this period (1100-1500) as the Ages of Faith they are mainly thinking of France and Italy. Isn't it peculiar that of the artistic writers of the two countries, who were numerous enough, three or four were "obscene" for every one who wrote stuff a modern nun would read? Quite a number of them wrote vindications of what the Church called vice, even unnatural vice, and comedies which would make a patrolman blush were written and played in the Papal Court itself, while the great works of religious art were being produced in other parts of the Vatican or the city. Your Catholic friend who says to you, with an air of common-sense; that in spite of all this talk Catholic art, and a very great art, is there for any man to see, is thinking chiefly of Rome, of St. Peters and the Vatican. Well, ask him to reflect on this singular fact: Practically all this Roman art was created under three Popes (Alexander VI, Julius II, and Leo X) of notoriously vicious character and at a time when the Papal Court and the clergy of Rome were steeped in what he calls immorality. And, except for the fact that two out of the three Popes were sodomists, which the Catholic apologist will swear black is white to disprove, he need not read McCabe to learn this but will find it in the most learned and authoritative Catholic history of the period, that of Dr. Ludwig Pastor, which has been translated into English.
It is hardly surprising that the writers of the time did not look for inspiration to the Catholic creed. The best of them, like Picodella Mirandola, looked to a blend of Plantonism and primitive (decidedly not Papal) Christianity. But most of them concentrated on sex or, as they called it, love. They wrote the most brazen erotic literature that had yet appeared, and some of the hottest of them were patronized and rewarded by the Popes. Your professors of European history do not tell you these things. They may mention Macchiavelli, who was really more poisonous than the erotic writers, but they prefer to enlarge on the pretty religious sentimentality of an ignorant friar (the Little Flowers of Francis of Assisi) and the work of Dante. They do not care even to point out that Dante succeeds only when he is illustrating a concrete and repulsive doctrine like hell, and that his poetic inspiration evaporates when he tries to glorify the purely spiritual realm of paradise. The Catholic creed inspires one in the same sense as the Greek mythology did or the bastard Buddhist religion of Asia does. Tell the artist that Buddha, Christ, Moses, or Mary was above the common human level and he will set his imagination to create a superman or a superwoman: Zeus or Jehovah, Athene or Mary.
I said that if these Catholic apologists and artistic folk who blat about medieval art were quite honest they would try to explain why it was most "Inspired" when Italy, or Rome in particular, was most immoral (not merely in respect of sex). They would, have a still more awkward moment if they tried to explain why it shrivelled up as soon as the morals of Rome and the Papal Court had to be comparatively reformed because half of Europe was now Protestant and cynically watching the Popes. It was the same with literature as with the other arts. Italy, Spain, and Portugal became more Catholic than ever. Except that the brazen parade of sexual freedom had to be suppressed in Rome there was little or no change of the moral level but skepticism, which had abounded during the Renaissance, was extinguished and Protestantism truculently excluded. And art above the level of mediocrity died. It is almost a commonplace of the best recent histories of art that a human factor -- a great new wealth with its accompanying sense of freedom, adventure, emancipation, and enjoyment -- had quickened the blood of Europe during the later Middle Ages and evoked its art as the spring-warmth quickens the circulation of the plants and causes the flowers of summer. The soil of strictly Catholic countries froze again, and there was no great literary art until a new human factor, the vision of a better world, fired the blood again in the second half of the 18th Century.
But the absurdity of the Catholic argument, if you can call it an argument, is shown by the record between the Reformation and the Revolution, as it is shown wherever you test it by facts. A new Dark Age settled on Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and Germany was reduced almost to barbarism by the religious wars. In England, on the other hand, art burst into full blossom as soon as the Catholic creed was fully extinguished. No one who knows the history of England would expect it earlier, but the point is that once England got the conditions of an artistic age, which Italy had enjoyed much earlier, it did not make the slightest difference that there was now no Catholic faith to inspire it or Church to employ it. Literary art, in particular, burst into bloom with the robust Protestantism, richly leavened with skepticism, under the skeptical Elizabeth. From Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spencer, and Bacoi, to Swinburne, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Dickens, England -- anti-Papal England -- created a great literature.
France has been a mixed country ever since the rise of Calvin. Until the later years of Louis XIV -- say to 1685 -- it had a very large and influential Protestant element as well as much skepticism, and after the death of Louis and his Jesuits, male and female, skepticism spread very widely. But though the Church controlled the majority it did not inspire the art. Literary historians assign as the greater writers from the Reformation to the Revolution Montaigne, Rabelais, Descartes, Pascal, La Fontaine, Corieille, Racine, Boileau, Moliere, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot. Eight out of the 13 were skeptics: two (Descartes and Pascal) were regarded with more than suspicion by Rome: two only, Racine and Corneille were good Catholics, but they found their inspiration chiefly in Greek tragedy.
Then came the new spring, the stirring of the blood of the race which we broadly call the passion for freedom and democracy, that is still raging. As the Church of Rome was, and is, bitterly opposed to it we do not look for many Catholics amongst the greater writers of the last century and a half. The question is not whether you can name one or two Catholic writers of the first rank -- a Chateau briand, a Newman (though his title is much disputed by critics), a Mistral (a sort of Catholic) -- but why, when the Pope claimed still to rule half the white world, there are only these three amongst a hundred writers as distinguished as they in France, Britain, America, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Scandinavia. And how do even these compare in inspiration with Byron, Shelley, Swinburne, Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Dostoievsky, Pushkin, Hugo, Carlyle, Shaw, D'Annunzio, Galdos, and a score of others? Catholic literature as a whole is the flattest, stalest, feeblest of all literature that takes itself seriously. They have to ask us to accept Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Noyes, and Joyce Kilmer as "great writers." And do not forget that the Church has far more money to pay for art today than it ever had before. It would give a million dollars for a great artist.
Ours will probably be described in historical manuals of the future as an age of mediocrity. Statesmen, artists, and scientific and literary men reach no peaks. Possibly the highest ability enters the business world, where the reward is greatest, but we have to remember that both in art and letters the man of outstanding ability is sure of recognition and will certainly not starve in an attic.
If any reader is still inclined to wonder if I have not yielded in part to prejudice in assigning the relative positions of Catholic and non-Catholic writers let me recall that I have in an earlier booklet followed a high and most impartial authority in estimating the writers of the last forty years: the Nobel Prize Committee. If anything the Committee, though it is supposed to be guided by national committees of great weight and impartiality, is prejudiced in favor of religious writers and, while it has had to award the great prize 27 times out of the 37 to skeptics, it has excluded skeptics whom the critics would put high above some who were selected. Yet in this selection of the world's greatest writers during the last 40 years we have only four who seem to be in some literal way Catholics, though they were certainly not inspired in their work by the Papal creed. The Pope claims the allegiance of half the population of Europe and America but counts -- in some cases dubiously -- only one-ninth of their greater writers; and the award would have been more in accord with the general view of literary critics if these four Catholic writers had been replaced by my four selected from Wells, Conrad, Meredith, Zola, b'Annunzio, Sudermann, Galoz, Ibanez, Santayana, Gorki, and A. Tolstoy: all skeptics and not in favor in pious Sweden.
The most deadly reply to the Catholic argument here, the immediate reply to those who talk about the warmth, colorfulness, and emotional richness of the Catholic atmosphere, is the relative fewness of Catholic poets, especially of poets who show any sort of indebtedness to Catholic belief for their inspiration. In the large volume of distinguished poetical literature of Great Britain they can claim only that of Dryden, who was a skeptic until his later years and would in any case hardly be called inspired. In the German-speaking area of Europe, which has always been one-third Catholic, the record is not better. But it is enough to point out that in what the Church claims as Catholic countries the majority of the more distinguished poets during the last century and a half have been anti-Papal and very few since Dante and Tasso can be claimed to show Catholic inspiration in their work. Yet in literary art we have one of the most effective tests of the Catholic claim. A church may commission a man to paint a picture or carve a statue but you cannot -- except where a Poet Laureate turns out verse to order -- pay a poet to sit down and write a poem. You can neither open the fount of inspiration with a golden key nor, in the case of a true poet, close it by opposition it is arrant nonsense to say that poets have "not yet recovered from the blight which the Reformation brought upon art." A hostile world inflames the true poet. Shelley was greatest in his Prometheus, Swinburn in his Songs before Sunrise, Goethe in the first part of Faust.
Most conspicuously is the failure of the Papal creed to inspire poetic art shown in the cabe of hymns. The great majority of the hymns in a Catholic hymn-book are very poor stuff and many of them are so vapid that one is forced to conclude that even priest-selectors would never have included them if they had plenty of good material to select from. In preparing a small popular work on Rome (The Popes and Their Church) some years ago I looked through an American Catholic hymn-book and selected a few gems. I doubt if even the Salvation Army would (apart from the Mariolatry of it) tolerate such doggerel as:
The earth is but a vale of tears
O Maria!
When this exile is complete
O Maria!
or:
O the blood of Christ!
it Soothes the Father's ire:
Opes the gates of heaven, Quells eternal fire.
Oft as it is sprinkled On our guilty beans,
Satan in confession Terror-struck departs.
It is a conglomeration of rotten sentiments, wooden verse, and even bad grammar. The mechanical grind of the verse-maker runs through the book, and his insincerity is matched by the insincerity of the singers. A very popular hymn for services for young women (children of Mary, etc.) has the refrain:
Holy Mary, let me come: Holy Mary, let me come
Soon to be happy with thee in thy home.
Not a girl of the hundreds of thousands who sing that means what she says, or, in fact, does not feel exactly the opposite sentiment. Grown-up men and women lustily sing:
O Paradise, O Paradise,
'Tis weary waiting here;
I long to be where Jesus is,
To feel, to see him near.
or:
Arm for deadly fight, earth and bell unite,
And swear in lasting bonds to bind me;
Raise the cross on high, Jesus is our cry,
With Jesus still the foe shall find me.
Large numbers of the hymns chant this glorious fight against the world -- most of the men make for the nearest beer-house when the service is over and the girls hurry to keep their dates -- the flesh, and the devil. It helps to keep up the prestige and importance of the clergy. They not only lead the troops but are the only channels of the supernatural force (grace) without which the fight is hopeless for the ordinary man.
This theme runs through the whole collection. Catholics are, you may have found, as cheerful and sinful as other folk, yet you would imagine from merely reading their hymns ("hell is raging for my soul," etc.) that they were a portentously serious and puritanical body of men and women. Next time your Catholic neighbor presses you to read his literature, while refusing to read yours, ask him to lend you his prayer-book and hymn-book. But I wager that he won't. |
