All Sides of a Question

...So like- wise the greatest of Poland's living writers today, Stanislaw Przybyszewski (pronounced Shib-e-shevsky) is of peasant origin...

...And most of us rightly take for granted that the advance of civilization means getting farther away from the cave and its club, nearer to the discrimination, the urbanity, the delicate irony, the charity of great minds...

...for one thing, he manifests a pon-derable slowness in grasping the idea of taxation--and there is danger in that...

...In the first place, the problem is not at all the style of Mencken, but whether or not one is a genuine critic...

...If church mem- bership is made the basis of the definition, one soon finds it quite embarrassing to explain why certain dog- gerel verses or even ribald tales should be labeled with a religious adjective...

...If the writer of a book cannot feel certain that he is going to meet with civilized criticism, why should he try to write for civilized minds ? I remember seeing a review of a very good book by a Catholic on a Catho- lic subject of first-rate importance...

...Now it so happens that in France, where there exists a great spiritual activity in letters, these fundamental dit~culties have stirred up a great deal of talk...

...Finally, you may agree (with the present writer's quondam, hotly contested thesis) that the ultimate test is a cer-tain way of looking at life--a conformity of mind with Christian tradition as opposed to varied modernisms-- manifest in the literary work or its author...

...Przybyszewski did just this...

...Reymont, to whom was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in x925, was also of peasant stock...

...If Jammes and Claudel are Christian artists, it is not because of their evident and often expressed piety...

...He is forever asking and wonder- ing...

...I wager that William Lyon Phelps (who is not a notable critic but who retains the secret of cheerfulness) sells more books annually than any two other critics now living in the United States...

...But the fact that right now every Catholic with literary gifts, whether creative or critical, must orien- tate himself by them, makes the whole problem poig- nantly practical...

...In this case it will be necessary, of course, to concede that many a page of sterling Catholic writing has been signed by persons who, in all likelihood, never dreamed of entering the Church...

...and that his tragedy is in his transplantation from the soil...

...And these things will be so until we face the problem of literature squarely and tell ourselves what it is...

...Even such a poem as Francis Thomp- son's Hound of Heaven contains, in the final analysis, no point of view which a certain variety of dissenter might not easily have grappled to his soul...

...I do not consider the hate of l_~on Bloy, the little sensations of Huysmans, or the precise prettinesses of Verlaine equiva- lent to Christian art...

...The critic was hurt by a phrase on one page of the volume...

...That means knowing how to influence public opinion...

...In a country like the United States, Cath- olics are in a minority...

...Perhaps the masters of an older day were greater...

...We are en-chained in our own formalisms and inveterate habits...

...To the astonishment of most of us we have discovered, while we discussed this son of the soil in his relation to government, that already, and long ago, he has demonstrated his right to a place among the literati...

...The noblest crafts will be the handiwork of the noblest Christians, if they possess that intelligence of the Sacred Spirit which is a calm personality and a great love...

...This is earnestly invited...

...It is always the product of life and poetic vision...

...Indeed, I do not consider it necessary to speak of God and the Holy Mass in order to be a Christian artist...

...And the third error...

...orate testimony from many sources...

...We may suppose that the environ- ment in which he has reached manhood has been defi- nitely shaped by religious influences...

...How shall he corrdinate these personal things--these things which are, fundamentally, himself with the ends of the craft which he hopes to practise and with the conditions prevalent in the world of literary production...

...One could draw an excellent analogy from those novels of Sienkiewicz which set forth the achieve- ments of Pan Michael and Pan Longin...

...The first was a brave little man and a master of fence...

...No, indeed...

...Do these conclusions mean anything to the United States...

...The place where this flows most freely is at the annual "liter- ary week" which draws together scholars and poets, novelists and critics, who hold the Catholic faith in common and who therefore also have common diffi-culties and aspirations...

...How, then, can one dare to re-fuse recognition to the beautiful achievement of a writer whose formal view of life and morals is different from our own...

...You get instead the amorphous automatons which freeze the soul---the lifeless clatter of conventionalized details and unsounded characters, of copied pianissimos and farcical andantes, of books with a moral and of books without anything but a moral...

...Now, anyone who has read Reymont's epic of the soil, The Peasants, and his equally searching Promised Land, which is a study of the peasant transplanted from the soil to the industrial centre, knows this--that the story of the peasant is a tragic one...

...In the final analysis, however, Thomas 5. Kempis and P~re Gratry are not literary figures, but religious teachers to whom writing was a vocation...

...our young men follow other gods...

...And when he lifts himself out of the rut of his narrow little thatched domain, and ventures into the sophisticated world, he goes almost mad with the puzzle of life...

...What invariably happens when criticism clenches its fist against beauty and mystical insight is that these things die and with them literature...

...Pagan influences have prostituted art during the past Ioo years...

...There are wrong notions in Shelley which for the most part are also laughable notions ; but there is a censer that swings with the spon- taneous rhythm of the earth itself, and the face of an acolyte...

...Well, consider what appears to be the fashion- able attitude of certain popular critics...

...The seventeenth century is entirely Christian, even when it is atheistic: strength, renouncement, obedience, order, humility, poverty of the spirit, sobriety, chastity, respect-- these are at once aesthetic virtues and Christian virtues...

...But our vitality finds no artistic outlet...

...A POET OF SOUL AND SEX By CHARLES PHILLIPS N OTHING has been more frequently remarked in recent discussions of Europe and its post-war reconstruction, than the phenomenon of the peasant...

...Whatever "self-determination" may or may not mean, this fact is established: that the peasant, especially the peasant of eastern Europe, has, since the world war, come into a place and a power not dreamed of before...

...No, he simply found that Shakespeare is more con-stantly and with greater intensity the poet of the depths of his own being...

...We know once more that we are made to dominate the world, not to be dominated by it...

...and they proceeded to use their heads...

...It is a serious form of scepticism to deny the luminous in the work of man...

...Now in the United States there is really only one Catholic reading public--a highly cultivated group of men and women interested in spiritual read- ing...

...Verily there is some reason for hearkening to the Abb~ Calvetl But there is a second dire aspect of the error...

...Nothing is more frequently referred to than this literature, and nothing means so many differ- ent things to so many different people...

...Would it not, therefore, be the simplest way out of the difficulty to declare that literature is literature, and that the term "Catholic" ought not to be fastened to it...

...It makes us appear aloof from the life of the nation, as if sectarian, and in this respect alien, with little or no part in public affairs," declares the Reverend John J. Wynne in a recent manifesto...

...These words from a recent book by the Abb6 Henri Bremond have a perfectly obvious implication (which is that religious externals are always externals) and another implica-tion by no means obvious (which is that the tests of art are perennially different from the dassifications of sci- ence or the categories of reason...

...Is it safe to entrust so much to his un- trained hands...

...Our books are dull and asleep...

...Will anybody really pay attention to your unreasoned tirades...

...Perhaps I should add that this paper is necessarily a personal view...

...Listen to these recent re-marks by Paul Claudel: We have been liberated from the slavery of the spirit in the presence of matter, from the fascination of quan- tity...

...Ours is, in all truth, a time when life courses once again in the veins of the spirit...

...This idea is actually being recommended by many critics...

...He votes and holds office and sits in the halls of legislature--in Poland he has even occupied more than once the prime minister's chair...

...But the study of the peasant has brought some sur- prises...

...Take Poland alone: the greatest poet of modern Poland, the recently deceased Jan Kasprowicz, late dean of the College of Letters in the University of Lwow, the man who gave Polish literature her best translations of Shakespeare and Shelley and other English masters-- was a peasant, one who rose directly from the soil...

...The Abb6 Bremond's method is really deadly to facile generalizations l But the point is made so well by Max Jacob, a poet of the first order even though he has not yet been appointed an ambassador, that I cannot refrain from quoting him at some length : European art, our art, is the art of the Christian era...

...What answer shall the young poet or prose-writer give...

...One need not agree with the tirades launched by Huys- roans against art in which the reality of beauty is "sat- anized" to hold, with the scholastics, that every artist is gifted in a singular mystical fashion which may be of divine origin...

...Since this can only be a brief paper, I shall pass on rapidly to the no less engrossing problem of creative writing, abandon the poets to their varied anthologists, and note that the French "literary week" assembled novelists whose names have an international ring--Bourget, Baumann, Bertrand, Bazin...

...but when it came to titanic tasks like striking off the heads of three Tartars at one fell swoop, he promptly turned the mat- ter over to Pan Longin, whom nature had hugely fitted for the job...

...But in many places, especially among women and in schools conducted by religious women, there is now visible a growing eagerness, a clearer discernment, a great tact in the presence of art...

...They saw what prose fiction could do, and what prose fiction could not do...

...On the other hand, the anarchy and anaemia resulting from confused principles deprive us of what everybody is clamoring for--vigorous Catholic life in the arts...

...February 2, I927 THE COMMONWEAL 349 ALL SIDES OF A QUESTION By GEORGE N. SHUSTER T HE question to be asked here is this: What do we have in mind when we talk of a Catholic liter- ature...

...Whatever it may be that his fresh veins draw from the turned furrow or that his soul apprehends in the mys- teries of the fructifying earth and the shadowy hori- zon of forests that forever circles his hard-won fields, the peasant unquestionably develops a nature that is profoundly sensitive, deeply philosophical, and thus essentially tragic...

...Did these come into being by a fortunate accident, quite independently of public circumstance or the conditions of the book- trade...

...The apostolate is only a Christian virtue under the excep- tional conditions of vocation ; it is never an aesthetic virtue...

...The sun has swept into the sky anew, we have thrust the curtains aside, and we have thrown out the window the plush furniture, the bibe- lots of the bazaar, and the "pallid bust of Pallas...

...With a true peasant's soul in him, profound and sensitive, he ventured as it were from the reedy pond of his native Polish prairie out onto the high seas of the world, the world of...

...Neither history, nor ethics, nor arguments can make a great prose story...

...It could have been supported by elab...

...They almost invariably begin by declaring that there is too much timidity, too much concession to current aberrations, on their side of the fence...

...Thus there is manifested a threefold deadly error...

...the Christian virtues of some artists have mean- while defended beauty against the barbarians...

...and his notice consisted entirely of two paragraphs of abuse thrust at the phrase...

...This year the discussion brought to the fore a great many matters so pertinent to the problem under consideration here that I shall try to isolate a few of them...

...Apart from all rea- sons of right and wrong, Catholic opinion should be re- strained by mere prudence from manifestations of tow- ering rage...

...We know that the world is indeed a text and that it tells us, humbly and gayly, of its own nothingness but also of the eternal presence of Another...

...It renders us unable to influence public opinion, to make known the sound principles and traditions we possess, and to im- press these deeply on multitudes who would derive benefit from them even if they should never adopt our religion...

...One mere glance at the history of letters reveals the fact that fiction "with a purpose" is all more permanently deceased than the works of Scaliger...

...In what degree, they have asked, is the peasant fitted for self- government...

...They may profit by adroit mastery of fence and appropriate bravery, but tremen- dous problems must be turned over to general public opinion...

...he has a Catholic mind, and to a greater extent, perhaps, than he could tell you, he is interested in Catholic life...

...They appeared and waxed strong, first because there is a French-Catholic audience which (on the testimony of M. Thibaudet) "reads much," and secondly because they stood firmly for their rights as novelists...

...But if what has been said proves at all interesting, there will be plenty of substantiating material...

...In the art of letters he is no longer a tyro, but a master tried and proven...

...Why is Shakespeare more Christian and more genuinely a poet than Racine?' was a question Man- zoni put to himself...

...Perhaps you suppose he answered by saying that there is a monk in Romeo and Juliet...

...This phenomenon, while pleasing to the lovers of democracy, has nevertheless raised serious questions at times in the minds of the friends of liberty...

...This does not exist, and the reason is neither ignorance nor poverty (as is so often supposed) but the unfortunate identification of Catholic art with apologetics...

...The first is criticism, important both because it requires so exact a statement of principle and because without good criticism great artistic creation is killed by misunderstanding and neglect...

...The modern writer, as an art- ist and a critic, must look for a different public--a pub- lic interested in his product...

...It so hap- pens that criticism means, if anything, the reaction of a civilized mind to what is presented to it for considera- tion...

...Must a novel stress a point or a moral...

...He is a tyro at the arts of economics and government...

...If, on the other hand, you make expression of definite Catholic principle in the work a standard of definition, it soon becomes apparent that the word "literature" must be scaled down to al- most nothing...

...Modern works of literature or painting are barbarous only because they are the product of barbarians: I demand for them the Christian virtues...

...Such an amount of electricity was generated 350 THE COMMONWEAL February2, I927 by this topic at the "literary week" that one is surprised to see how calm and discerning were the conclusions drawn by the Abb~ J. Calvet : that critics, while loyally and frankly adhering to their convictions, ought to guard against soft habits of unctuous flattery and also against the practice of launching broadsides of virulent abuse into the world...

...Isolationwthe ghetto-like retreat from the scene of action into a little nook where there is no danger of being disturbed...

...It seems to me that this problem is at present studded with so many thorns, most of them imposed from the outside by people who know nothing of literature or art, that many a promising youngster gives up the battle altogether or else grows old nursing a grouch...

...Menckenism--that is, the broadax habit--they clamor for, and then proceed to tumble into the perennial abyss of all partisan criticism : the practice of denying every merit to those with whom they disagree, and of oiling with extravagant praise the works of their cronies and confreres...

...If these questions were merely of academic interest, one might be satisfied to arrive at no conclusion about them...

...Life and poetic vision] It seems to me that never before in the history of Christendom could a man or woman dedicate life to these two with so much confi- dence and glorious zeal...

...The answer is very simple: a good February2, x927 THE COMMONWEAL 3St novel cannot demonstrate a thesis...

...A book addressed to them is always pretty sure of success, and that is a commendable fact...

...No dark terrors such as haunted our fathers, of science that would destroy the foundations of belief in a night or of paganism that could engulf all spiritual citadels, oppress our minds...

...Meanwhile it may be well to remember that the past ten years have been remarkable for the development of interest in the culture which is a product of faith...