The Creed of the Critics

...If we were not sure of the authorship, how surely the critics would have decreed that at least three individuals wrote the books in question...

...I suppose you think that this artide cuts out all of the marvelous from the realm of the critics...

...It goes without saying that Newman has different styles for different subject-matters...

...But they must exist, for if "Q" did not exist, if the "redactors" did not exist, the critics could not prove that Saint Matthew did not write his Gospel...

...It was entitled, The Life of John William Walshe, and seemed to be sober biography...

...Read that and even more complimentary things 380 THE COM about the Germans in the same book, and then read Europe and the Faith, or The History of England, or The Cruise of the Nona--or other books Hilaire Belloc has written since I914--and you will realize how futile is the principle, "diversity of style and thought is a proof of diversity of authorship...

...I reject Saint Matthew's authorship because I know my Greek so well...

...The Essay on Development is not quite in the same style as The Dream of Gerontius...

...while the rugged, tortuous style of the City of God has repelled many a reader...

...Saint Luke could not have set down the Magnificat, because he wrote the Acts...

...Had anybody seen the 'redactors...

...How many styles has Dante...

...Then we remember Goldsmith, Milton, Dryden, Chaucer, Saint Ambrose, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Cardinal Newman, Dante, Go~the, Schiller, Racine...

...This is the tail that wags the dog...

...The first article of the critic's creed then is: "Miracles are not possible...

...After they had proved conclusively from an examination of the internal evidence that the book is real eighteenthcentury stuff, that it challenges comparison with Pepys, that it gives us a clear insight into the feminine world of those days--then they happen upon disillusionment...

...Now there is no reason for supposing that human nature was very different in the first century from what it is in the twentieth...

...Just as we never met the characters from Alice in Wonderland, so we never met the people, who, as the critic avers, did the Gospel And as it is felt to be impertinent to inquire too anxiously after the reality of white mice whisking along a carriage made of a pumpkin, so too it is bad manners for a Catholic theologian to inquire about the multitudinous populace that stalks through the creative fairydom of the critics, and peeps at us from every page of their books...

...I know that the book was done by a few dozen 'redactors' who worked on a basic document, or 'Grundschrift,' called 'Q' and the 'Logia.' They also used what later on came to be known as the Gospel of Saint Mark, although Saint Mark never had anything to do with that Gospel...

...The girl who wrote the book recently in a castle in western Ireland has now told the critics that they have been fooled again...

...Critics called for the Scotch-Gaelic originals, and Macpherson admitted that he had translated from originals that were not producible...

...Take the Gospel of Saint Matthew...

...Another article in the critic's creed, which greets us at every turn in Old-Testament criticism, is this: "The poetry in a book cannot come from the same hand as the prose...

...Montgomery Carmichael who recently wrote Christopher and Cressida, produced a book some years ago which professed to be a life of his father...

...Let us glance at the principle of "diversity of style proves diversity of authorship," as it works out in modern writings whose authorship is not disputed...

...Yet Saint Augustine wrote both...

...Now the critics are rubbing their heads again...

...He wrote his epic in sonorous Tuscan...

...What two books are so different in ideas and style as the Confessions, and the City of God...

...What saith our "higher" critic...

...Before the critics stabilize their creed, they might heed a phenomenon that occurs rather frequently in history...

...Corkery and Maurice Baring...

...Has not the writer of Orthodoxy written The Ballad of the White Horse ? Did not BeUoc recently bring out~ some of the best modern poetry ? And who will say that he never could write prose ? Masefield and Alice Meynell...

...It is a harder strain on the reason than the Apostles' Creed which has mysteries, but is not contradictory...

...He opines, "I am not prepared to deny that perhaps a legendary person named Saint Matthew might have done a few lines of the document called Saint Matthew's Gospel...

...Francis Thompson and Aubrey De Vere...

...And all the time we keep thinking, "What do the critics of the Bible read...

...Even in his sermons, the earlier Anglican ones differ in style and in ideas from the later Catholic sermons...

...The Confessions have won a place in the hearts of all cultured people on account of their quiet, homely, vulgar Latin...

...It came to me as a pleasant surprise to find out that when the critics cast out mirades in the Catholic sense, they were forced to fill the void by creating a fairyland populous with millions of books and documents they had never seen, and countless authors and "redactors" whose very existence is an imaginary existence...

...Contrary to the critical assertion that a poet cannot write prose, we assert that it is rare to find a poet who cannot come down from Parnassus, or a prose writer who cannot scale at least its lower slopes...

...Tom Kettle, Oscar Wilde, Mangan and Lionel Johnson, Josepl~ Mary Plunkett-these are but a few of the names that throng upon us when we see in cold print the bold declaration: "A poet cannot write prose...

...This book was just as much a piece of fiction as Christopher and Cressida, but it fooled the critics...

...The test of the fairy-tale applies to the critic's vision of who did Saint Matthew's Gospel, or who did Saint Mark's Gospel, for the test of common sense fails completely...

...Then we can show them a few modern instances...

...This sort of stuff is ladled out by modern criticism as "the assured results of modern sdence"--which it surely is not...

...his De Monarchia in one Latin style...

...and his letters to the great in another Latin style...

...In that book, I read these lines about the Germans: "Then on the left you have all the Germanies--a great sea of confused and dreaming people, lost in philosophies and creating music, frozen for the moment under a foreign rigidity, but some day to thaw again and to give a word to us others...

...The solid historical character of the one-time tax-collector is brushed aside with angry impatience, and a whole crowd of fairies, "redactors," unknown sources, "Logia" and what-nots are thrown into the void created by the disappearance of Saint Matthew...

...Newman is another confutation of the critics...

...You see, the critics had it in the back of their heads all the time that the tax-collector never wrote the Gospel, because if he did then the Catholic Church was too solid a fact at too early a date...

...More recently still, the critics swallowed whole--hook, bait, and sinker--a book called The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion...

...Here we are fairly within the gates of this creative fairydom...

...or Saint John being the author of the Gospel that bears his name...

...And this was the thing to be proved...

...Perhaps the so-called "higher" critics feel that the fluidity of their creed forbids any attempt at its fixation...

...Perhaps they may say that the examples of Chatterton and Macpherson do not damage the claims of internal evidence as a sole criterion of authorship...

...Had anybody seen ,Q,?,, No, nobody saw these people or things...

...and the song of Lamech could not have come from the author who wrote the rest of Genesis...

...Scores of names leap into our minds when we hear it stated as a self-evident postulate of criticism that the same man cannot write prose and poetry...

...It was only after people had begun to translate these supposed translations from the Gaelic into other languages besides English, that suspicions were aroused...

...Pearse and MacDonagh...

...Its corollary is a very base of their critical system, and it is this : "Fairy-tales are possible...

...You will not discover in the Anglican sermons the easy style and unhampered fulness of the Catholic sermons...

...People talk about the greatness of the City of God but they read the Confessions...

...Chatterton, too, deceived the critics...

...I do not reject Saint Matthew's authorship of the Gospel, nor do I reject any book of the Bible, because I disbelieve miracles...

...CovenMONWEAL February 9, 1927 try Patmore and Thomas Hardy...

...The Church offers you that, and vouches for it by strong tradition and the tenacious testimony of sound history...

...How often have the critics been fooled by following their principle, "We can tell who wrote a book by looking at the style...

...On that critical principle, Belloc did not write the books which he did write after 1914, because he talks in an entirely different style about the Germans in different books...

...A long time ago, I read a book called The Path to Rome--a book delightful in literary style and in ideas...

...These detached articles do not begin in the honest Catholic fashion of, "I believe in God," but are generally introduced by some literary rubric such as, "No modern man or woman is fool enough to believe the old stuff," about, let us say, Moses being the author of the Pentateuch...

...Not only do the ideas of The Path to Rome differ from those in BeUoc's later books, but the literary style is quite different...

...The idea that different styles mean different authors, is a principle of criticism, but it flies in the face of literary history, ancient and modern...

...But the critic saith serenely: "You Catholic theologians do me a rank injustice...

...Macpherson fooled the critics of his day by giving them Ossian's Poems...

...Do they read at all...

...I am a man of science...

...These few detached articles from the creed of the critics may help some readers to see that, as a creed, it has not mysteries, but contradictions...

...I don't believe in fairy-tales...

...This brings us to the second article of the critic's creed: "Diversity of style proves diversity of authorship...

...No, not at all...

...Yet in the course of the theological reading I have done, I have come across enough detached articles of critical faith to form a creed of critics...

...You might think that the critic would admit that he had been romancing when he was pinned down by this statement about miracles and fairy-tales...

...I can tell from the style of a book alone who wrote it, and how many hands were busy at it...

...It is the cocksure pronouncement of a certain sort of private judgment parading under the name of science...

...The critics believe, not in real miracles based on the testimony of history, but in fake miracles.--in fairies...

...Under diversity of style, the critic indudes turns of thought, ideas, atmosphere--as well as difference in the literary value of the words or phrases used...

...Helen Parry Eden and Enid Dinnis...

...The critics would long ago have resolved the writings of Newman into a constellation--into a whole milky way of writers...

...So the critics backed away from documentary history and told a tall tale of people and of things never seen on land or sea or in the sky...

...No doubt we should remember some more names if we thought of the matter for some short space...

...The critics are willing to admit this...

...The first article, the very corner-stone of criticism, is: "Miracles do not happert...

...In fact, some people would be unkind enough to say that the creed of critics is just pure unreason blowing a loud trumpet...

...February 9, I927 THE COMMONWEAL 379 THE CREED OF THE CRITICS By ALFRED G. BRICKEL UR modern world lacks a catechism of criticism which would fulfil for the unbelieving world the function of the little book which the Catholic Church uses to teach the principal truths of faith...