Dealing as both do so largely with the inner life of English Catholic
society, it is hardly possible to avoid comparing and contrasting _One
Poor Scruple_ [1] with _Helbeck of Bannisdale_,--one the work of a
Catholic who knows the matter she is handling, almost experimentally;
the other the work of a gifted outsider whose singular talent, careful
observation, and studious endeavour to be fair-minded, fail to save her
altogether from that unreality and _à priori_ extravagance which
experience alone can correct. To the non-Catholic, Mrs. Humphrey Ward's
book will appear a marvel of insight and acute analysis; for it will fit
in with, and explain his outside observation of those Catholics with
whom he has actually come in contact, far better than the preposterous
notions that were in vogue fifty years ago. It represents them not as
monstrously wicked and childishly idolatrous; but as narrow,
extravagant, out-of-date, albeit, well-meaning folk--more pitiable than
dangerous.
Formerly when they lived secret and unknown, anything might safely be
asserted about them; nothing was too wild or improbable. In those days
"Father Clement" was the issue of a superhuman effort at charity and
fairness; and the author almost seemed to think an apology was needed
for such temerarious liberalism. But when Catholics began to breathe a
little more freely and to creep out of their burrows somewhat less
nervously; when, in fact, they were seen to be, at least in outward
semblance, much as other men; some regard had to be paid to statements
that could be checked by observation; and the Papist's disappointing
ordinariness had to be attributed to dissimulation or to be otherwise
interpreted into accord with the preposterous principles by which their
lives were thought to be governed.
Mrs. Humphrey Ward represents the furthest advance of this reform. She
at least has spared no pains to acquaint herself with facts, to gather
information, to verify statements. She is never guilty of the grotesque
blunders that other high-class novelists fall into about Catholic
beliefs, practices, and habits, simply because they are dealing with
what is to their readers a _terra incognita,_ and can, therefore, afford
to be loose and inaccurate. An artistic conscientiousness which values
truth and honesty in every detail, saves her from this too common snare.
But it does not and cannot save her in the work of selection, synthesis,
and interpretation of instances, which has to be guided, not by
objective facts, but by subjective opinions and impressions. History
written in a purely positivist spirit, _ad narrandum_, and in no sense
_ad docendum_, is a chimerical notion by which Renan beguiled himself
into thinking that his _Vie de Jesus_ was a bundle of facts and nothing
more. And Mrs. Humphrey Ward is no less beguiled, if she is unaware that
in threading together, classifying and explaining the results of her
conscientious observation and inquiry, she is governed by an _a priori_
conception of Catholicism hardly different from that which inspired the
author of "Father Clement." Hence, to us Catholics, though her evident
desire to be critical and impartial is gratifying, yet her failure is
none the less conspicuous. Dr. Johnson once observed, that what might be
wonderful dancing for a dog would be a very poor performance for a
Christian; and so, to us, "Helbeck" as a presentment of Catholic life is
wonderful as coming from an outsider, and, perhaps, especially from Mrs.
Humphrey Ward, but in itself it is grotesque enough--not through any
culpable infidelity to facts, but through lack of the visual power, the
guiding idea, whereby to read them aright.
In _One Poor Scruple_, Mrs. Wilfrid Ward brings to bear upon a somewhat
similar task, an equal fidelity of observation supplemented by a
first-hand, far wider, and more intimate experience of Catholics and
their ways, and, above all, by that key which a share in their faith and
beliefs alone furnishes to the right understanding of their conduct.
Here too, no doubt, a contrary bias is to be suspected, nor is a purely,
"positive" treatment of the subject conceivable or desirable. The view
of an insider is as partial as the view of an outsider, though less
viciously so; nor can we get at truth by the simple expedient of fitting
the two together. The best witness is the rare individual who to an
inside and experimental knowledge, adds the faculty of going outside and
taking an objective and disinterested view. In truth this needs an
amount of intellectual self-denial seldom realized to any great degree;
but we venture to say that Mrs. Wilfrid Ward proves herself very worthy
of confidence in this respect. There is certainly no artistic idealizing
of Catholics, such as we are accustomed to in books written for the
edification of the faithful. There is the same almost merciless realism
which we find in "Helbeck" in dealing with certain trivialities and
narrownesses of piety--defects common to all whom circumstances confine
to a little world, but more incongruous and conspicuous as contrasted
with the dignity of Catholic ideals. Without conscious departure from
truth, Mrs. Humphrey Ward is evidently influenced in her selection and
manipulation of facts by the impression of Catholicism she already
possesses and wants to illustrate and convey; but Mrs. Wilfrid Ward has,
we think, risen above this weakness very notably, and should accordingly
merit greater attention.
It may well be that this judicial impartiality may meet with its usual
reward of pleasing neither side altogether. Some will complain that she
brings no idealizing love to her subject, and does little to bring out
the greatness and glory of her religion. Yet this would be a hasty and
ill-judging criticism; for our faith is no less to be commended for the
restraint it exercises over the multitude of ordinary men and women,
than for the effect it produces in souls of a naturally heroic type.
That it should bring a certain largeness into the smallest life, that it
should impart a strange stability to a naturally unstable and frivolous
character; that it should check the worldly-minded with a sense of the
superior claims of the other world--all this impresses us, if not with
the sublimity or mystic beauty, at least with the solid reality and
penetrating power of the Catholic faith.
The most loyal and deep-seated love needs not to shut its eyes to all
defects and limitations, but can face them unchilled; and similarly
there is often more faith and reverence and quiet enthusiasm in this
seemingly cold and critical attitude towards the cause or party we love,
than in the extravagant idealism that depends for its maintenance on an
ignoring of things as they are.
Nothing perhaps is more unintelligible to the Protestant critic of
Catholicism, nothing more needs to be brought out prominently, than the
firm hold our religion can exercise over souls that are naturally
irreligious.
This very phrase "naturally irreligious" will fall with a shock on
sensitive Protestant ears; yet we use it advisedly. While all men are
capable of faith and of substantial fidelity to the law of God, it is
undeniable that but few are by natural inclination "religious" in the
common acceptation of the term. As there is a poetic or mystical
temperament, so also there is a religious temperament--not quite so
rare, but still something exceptional.
We find it so in all ages, ancient and modern; in all religions,
Christian and non-Christian--nay, even amid agnostics and unbelievers we
often detect the now aimless, unused faculty. But most men have,
naturally, no ardent spiritual sympathy with holiness, or mysticism, or
heroism; their interests are elsewhere; and even where there are latent
capacities of that kind, they are not usually developed until life's
severest lessons have been learnt. Thus the young, who have just left
the negative faith and innocence of the nursery behind them and stand
inexperienced on the threshold of life, are not normally religious;
whereas we naturally expect those who have passed through the ordeal,
and been disillusioned, to begin to think about their souls, since there
is nothing else left to think about.
Now, the Catholic religion clearly recognizes these facts of human
nature, and accommodates herself to them. However frankly it may be
acknowledged that a religious temperament--a certain complexus of
mental, moral, and even physical dispositions--is a condition favourable
to heroic sanctity, it must be emphatically denied that to be
"religious," in the Protestant sense of the word, is requisite for
salvation. And this denial the Church enforces by her recognition of the
"religious state" [2] as an extraordinary vocation. The purpose of
"orders" and "congregations" is to provide a suitable environment for
people of a religious temperament whose circumstances permit them to
attend to its development in a more exclusive and, as it were,
professional way. Not, indeed, that all religious-minded persons do, or
ought to, enter into that external state of life; nor that all who so
enter are by temperament and sympathy fitted for it, but that the
institution points to the Church's recognition of what is technically
called the "way of perfection" as something exceptional and
super-normal.
But the Church has a wider vocation than to provide hot-houses for the
forcing of these rare exotics, whom the rough climate of a worldly life
would either stunt or kill. Her first thought is for the multitudes of
average humanity, who are not, and cannot be, in intelligent sympathy
with many of the commands she lays upon them. They are but as children
in religious matters--however cultivated they may chance to be in other
concerns. From such souls God requires faith, and obedience to the
commandments--a due, which, in certain rare crises, may mean heroism and
martyrdom; but He does not expect of them that refinement of sanctity,
that sustained attention to divine things, which depends so largely on
one's natural cast of mind and disposition; and may even be found where
the martyr's temper is altogether wanting. We recognize that there is
certain serviceable, fustian, every-day piety, where, together with a
great deal of spiritual coarseness, insensibility to venial sin and
imperfection, there exists a firm faith that would go cheerfully to the
stake rather than deny God, or offend Him in any grave point that might
be considered a _casus belli_. And on the other hand a certain nicety of
ethical discernment and delicacy of devotion, an anxiety about points of
perfection, is a guarantee rather of the quality of one's piety than of
its depth or strength. The saint is usually one whose piety excels both
in quality and strength; the martyr is often enough a man of many
imperfections and sins, veiling an unsuspected, deep-reaching faith. The
day of persecution has ever been a day of revelation in this respect--a
day when the seemingly perfect have been scattered like chaff before the
wind, while the once thoughtless and careless have stood stubborn before
the blast.
Protestantism of the Calvinistic or Puritan type shows little
consciousness of the distinction we are insisting upon. It is disposed
to draw a hard-and-fast line between the "converted" and the reprobate.
Those who are not religious-minded, or who do not take a serious turn,
are scarcely recognized as "saved" although they may not be convicted of
any very flagrant or definite breach of the divine law. Their morality
or their "good works" go for little if they do not experience that sense
of goodness, or of being saved, which is called faith. Much stress is
laid on "feeling good" and little value allowed to what we might call an
unsympathetic and grudging keeping of God's law--however much more it
may cost, from the very fact that it is in some way unsympathetic, and
against the grain. The service of fear and reverence, which Catholicism
regards as the basis and back-bone of love, is held to be abject and
unworthy--almost sinful.
Hence it befalls that no place is found in the Protestant heaven for the
great majority of ordinary people who do not feel a bit good or
religious, who rather dislike going to church and keeping the
commandments, and yet who keep them all the same, because they believe
in God and fear His judgments and honour His law, and even love Him in
the solid, undemonstrative way in which a naughty and troublesome child
loves its parents.
That such a character as Madge Riversdale's should cover a small, firm
core of faith and fear under a cortex of worldliness and frivolity; that
religion should have such a hold on one so entirely irreligious by
nature, is something quite inconceivable to a mind like, let us say,
Mrs. Humphrey Ward's; and yet absolutely intelligible to the ordinary
Catholic.
The Church to us, is not what it is to the Protestant--a sort of pasture
land in which we are at liberty to browse if we are piously disposed. It
is not merely a convenient environment for the development of the
religious faculty. She stands to us in the relation of shepherd, with a
more than parental authority to feed and train our souls through infancy
to maturity; that is, from the time when we do not know or like what is
good for us, to the time when we begin to appreciate and spontaneously
follow her directions. Just then as a child, however naturally
recalcitrant and ill-disposed, retains a certain fundamental goodness
and root of recovery so long as it acknowledges and obeys the authority
of its father and mother; so the ordinary unreligious Catholic, who has
been brought up to believe in the divine authority of the Church, finds
therein all the protection that obedience offers to those who are
incapable of self-government. "In Madge's eyes the woman who married an
innocent divorcee was no more than his mistress." Had Madge been a pious
Protestant she naturally might have examined the question of divorce on
its own merits; she might have weighed the pros and cons of the problem;
she might have consulted God in prayer, and have listened to this
clergyman on one side; and to that, on the other: but eventually she
would have been thrown upon herself; she would have had no one whose
decision she was bound to obey. But wild and lawless as she is, yet
being a Catholic there is one voice on earth which she fears to
disbelieve or disobey. Looked at even from a human standpoint, the
consensus of a world-wide, ancient, organized society like the Roman
Church cannot but exert a powerful pressure on the minds of its
individual members. It would need no ordinary rebellion of the will for
a thoughtless girl to shake her mind so free of that influence as to
live happily in the state of revolt. But where in addition to this the
Church is viewed as speaking in the name of God, and as so representing
Him on earth that her ban or blessing is inseparable from His, it is
obvious that such a belief in her claims will give her a power for good
over the unreligious majority analogous to that possessed by a parent
over an untrained child--a power, that is, of discipline and external
motive which serves to supplement or supply for the present defect of
internal motive.
Thus it is that the Church reckons among her obedient children thousands
of very imperfect and non-religious people for whom Protestantism can
find no place among the elect.
Again, the solid faith of men with so little intellectual or emotional
interest in religion as Squire Riversdale or Marmaduke Lemarchant is
something very puzzling to the Protestant critic who, for the reasons
just insisted on, can have nothing corresponding to it in his own
experience. It is a psychological state of which his own religious
system takes no account. Where there is no intermediating Church, the
soul is either in direct and mystical union with God or else wholly
estranged and indifferent. A man is either serious and religious-minded,
or he is nothing. Like an untutored child, if he is not naturally good,
there is no one to make him so. But when the Church is acknowledged as
our tutor under God, as empowered by Him to lead us to Him; a middle
condition is found of those who are not naturally disposed to religion,
and yet who are submissive to that divine authority whose office it is
to shape their souls to better sympathies. Riversdale is a far truer
type of the Catholic country squire of the old school than the somewhat
morbid and impossible Helbeck of Bannisdale. With her preconceived
notions, Mrs. Humphrey Ward could not imagine any alternative between
'religious' and 'irreligious' in the Puritan sense. If Helbeck was to be
a good Catholic at all he must of necessity be fanatically devoted to
the propagation of the faith and offer his fortune and energies to the
service of an unscrupulous clergy only too ready to play upon his
credulous enthusiasm. His is represented as being naturally a religious
and mystical soul, but blighted and narrowed through the influence of
Catholicism. We are made to feel that the only thing the matter with him
is his creed--"all those stifling notions of sin, penance, absolution,
direction, as they were conventionalized in Catholic practice and
chattered about by stupid and mindless people."
On the other hand, in Squire Riversdale and Marmaduke Lemarchant there
is by nature nothing but healthy humanity, no mystic or religious strain
whatever; they are not semi-ecclesiastics like Helbeck; and yet we feel
that their prosaic lives are governed, restrained, and rectified by a
deep-rooted faith in the authority of the Catholic Church. "The
qualities most obvious are not those of the mystic, but of the manly
out-of-door sportsman who may seem to be nothing more than a bluff
Englishman who rides to the hounds and does his ordinary duties. Yet one
of these red-coated cavaliers would, I have not the least doubt, if
occasion called for it, show himself capable of the very highest
heroism. Men of action, I should say, and not of reflection--a race of
few words but of brave deeds."
It was just men of this unromantic type, men of solid but unostentatious
faith, given wholly to the business of this life save for one sovereign
secret reserve, who in time of persecution stood fast "ready any day to
be martyred for the faith and to regard it as the performance of a
simple duty and nothing to boast of." And if there is in the type a
certain narrowness of sympathy and lack of intelligent interest which
offends us, we may ask whether, with our human limitations, narrowness
is not to some extent the price we pay for strength; whether where
decision of judgment and energy of action is demanded, as in times of
persecution, width of view and multiplicity of sympathies may not be a
source of weakness. Contrast, for example, the character of Mark Fieldes
with that of Marmaduke Lemarchant, and it will be clear that the
strength and straightness of the latter is closely associated with the
absence of that versatility of intellect and affection which make the
former a more interesting but far less lovable and estimable
personality. To see all sides and issues of a question, is a
speculative, but not always a practical advantage; to have many
diversified tastes and affections helps to enlarge our sympathies, but
not to concentrate our energies.
Of course great minds and strong hearts can afford to be comprehensive
without loss of depth and intensity; but our present interest is with
ordinary mortals and average powers. A man who has all his life
unreflectingly adopted the traditional principle that death is
preferable to dishonour, that a lie is essentially dishonourable, will
be far more likely to die for the truth, than one who has philosophized
much about honour and veracity, and whose resolution is enfeebled by the
consciousness of the weak and flimsy support which theory lends to these
healthy and universally received maxims. And similarly those who have
received the faith by tradition, who for years have assumed it in their
daily conduct as a matter of course, in whom therefore it has become an
ingrained psychological habit, who hold it, in what might be condemned
as a narrow, unintellectual fashion, are just the very people who will
fight and die for it, when its more cultivated and reflective professors
waver, temporize, and fall away. Taking human nature as it is, who can
doubt but that this is the way in which the majority are intended to
hold their religious, moral, philosophical, and political convictions;
that reflex thought is, must, and ought to be confined to a small
minority whose function is slowly to shape and correct that great body
of public doctrine by which the beliefs of the multitude are ruled? We
do not mean to say that such prosaic "narrowness" as we speak of, is
essential to strength; but only that a habit of theoretical speculation
and a continual cultivation of delicate sensibility is a source of
enervation which needs some compensating corrective. This corrective is
found in the exalted idealism which characterizes the great saints and
reformers, such as Augustine, or Francis, or Teresa, or Ignatius--souls
at once mystical and energetically practical to the highest degree. It
is something of this temper which is parodied in Alan Helbeck. But the
Church's mission is not merely to those rare souls whose sympathy with
her own mind and will is intelligent and spontaneous; but at least as
much to the multitudes who have to be guided more or less blindly by
obedience to tradition and authority, or else let wander as sheep having
no shepherd. These considerations explain why _One Poor Scruple_ seems
to us so far truer a presentment of Catholic life than _Helbeck of
Bannisdale_--the difference lying in the incommunicable advantage which
an insider possesses over an outsider in understanding the spirit and
principles by which the members of any social body are governed. Of all
religions, Catholicism which represents the accumulated results of two
thousand years' worldwide experience of human nature applied to the
principles of the Gospel, is least likely to be comprehended by an
outsider, however observant and fair-minded.
To those for whom the lawfulness of re-marriage for an innocent divorcee
is, like the rest of their religious beliefs, a matter of opinion, the
scruple of a character like Madge Riversdale is unthinkable and
incredible. Such women do not trouble their heads about theological
points; still less, make heroic sacrifices for their private and
peculiar convictions. But those for whom the Church is a definite
concrete reality--almost a person--governing and teaching with divine
authority, will easily understand the firm grip she can and does exert
on those who have no other internal principle of restraint; who would
shake themselves free if they dared. Let those who despise the results
of such a constraint be consistent and abolish all parental and tutorial
control; all educative government of whatsoever description; nay, the
imperious restraint of conscience itself, which is often obeyed but
grudgingly.
While some features of this portrait of Catholic life are common to all
its phases, others are peculiar to the aspect it presents in England,
where Catholics being a small and weak minority are, so to say,
self-conscious in their faith--continually aware that they are not as
the rest of men; disposed therefore to be apologetic or aggressive or
defensive. Again, the circumstance of their long exclusion from the
social and intellectual life of their country is accountable for other
undesirable peculiarities which Mrs. Wilfrid Ward sees no reason to
spare.
We have not, however, attempted anything like a literary estimate of
this interesting, altogether readable work, but have only endeavoured to
draw attention to an important point, which, whether intentionally or
unintentionally, it illustrates very admirably.
_May_, 1899.
Footnotes:
[Footnote 1: _One Poor Scruple._ By Mrs. Wilfrid Ward. London: Longmans,
1899.]
[Footnote 2: We do not mean to imply that there is any close
etymological relation between these two uses of the term.]