The Quarterly Review

April 1923.

THE CATHEDRAL IN FICTION.

1. La Cathédrale. Par J. K. Huysmans. Forty-seventh Edition. Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1921.

2. La Catedral. Por Vicente Blasco Ibanez. Twenty-seventh Thousand. Valencia and Madrid: Sempere, n.d.

3. The Cathedral. By Hugh Walpole. London: Macmillan, 1922.

And other works.

THE three novels whose titles are placed at the head of this article have obtained a remarkable popularity in the countries in which they were written. Though it is several years since M. Huysmans continued En Route in La Cathédrale it still appears in new editions, and Senor Blasco Ibanez has made his study of a cathedral as famous as his study of a war; while Mr Hugh Walpole’s book has proved a ’best seller,’ and has enjoyed the compliment of an extremely diverting parody in Punch.

It is no wonder that in an age of restlessness, and treachery, and blood, imaginative writers turn towards survivals of more peaceful days, towards institutions whose aspect is that of calm quiescence. There is no greater contrast to the spirit of our age than the spirit of the Cathedral. We seek to be busy; or the business seeks us. The Cathedral embodies steadfastness, faith, rest in God. No wonder that the contrast appeals to those whose study is human nature and the circumstance which besets it to-day. All over Europe indeed, in the last twenty years or so, the novelists have turned from the turmoil around us to the peacefulness that lies within a Close. The three novels named at the head of this article do not stand alone; but they are especially valuable as showing how eminent writers in France, and Spain, and England find a peculiar interest in one of those ancient institutions which, in spite of local and national differences, are fundamentally the same all over Christendom. A severe Protestantism in Scotland or in Switzerland or in Holland may have severed the links, and the differences between a cathedral in the Catholic countries of the continent of Europe and a cathedral in England may be not a few, but to the ’plain man’ the system, be it good or bad, is the same. The youthful campanéro who in the glorious church of San Isidoro at Leôn begged that he might come with me to England and be my sacristàn was not merely showing a natural friendliness of disposition: he was recognising the identity of an institution. And that fact lies behind the superficial differences between the real Chartres of M. Huysmans, the real Toledo of Senor Ibanez, and the imaginary Polchester of Mr Walpole. The similarity is not merely that belonging to great buildings with organised bodies of men engaged in the performance of a dignified Christian worship: it descends even to minute particulars of character, of temptation, of influence, of failure, or of success. It is indeed, we recognise, in the same atmosphere that these cathedrals stand and that their servants breathe. There is something almost tangible in the ethos of the great institution to which glorious architecture has given its setting, whose ministers, deans and canons, and chaplains, and clerks, and choristers, and vergers and bellringers, are all of the fraternity, with the same traditions and the same aspect to those outside their circle, and the same outlook, themselves, on the world without.

This the novelist sees and seizes on. There are passages of each of the three writers which could be transferred without jar from one book to another. Cathedral character is fundamentally the same. But how do these writers, men obviously so different in their training and their sympathies, regard it? Is it to them bad or good?

It is not possible to answer the question easily or abruptly. M. Huysmans wrote as an ardent Catholic, Senor Ibanez as a Socialist, Mr Walpole perhaps as a somewhat detached Anglican. Yet each most clearly wrote con amore. The severest of them yet flnds that the glory of the cathedral which he begins to criticise eventually dominates his thought. The cathedral which began as his subject becomes his master.

And this is especially true of that one of the three books mentioned which is most conspicuously a work of genius. Senor Blasco Ibanez may not know the inner life of a cathedral very intimately: he may write with a rooted prejudice against Christianity; but he is a stylist, and an analyst, of commanding power. The greatness of the cathedral which he describes is reflected in the penetrating realism of his work. La Catedral is a masterpiece. The novel of Ibanez, like that of Huysmans, is woven round an actual building. It is the meaning of the age-long history of Toledo that he illustrates, the story which goes back even behind the Moorish occupation that leaves its historic record in the statue of Alfaqui, Moorish survivor among Christian Saints, in the ’Capilla Mayor.’ It is a story of ever-increasing richness; of a primitive building, transformed by additions in each age into a museum of ecclesiastical art. Perhaps there is no more glorious church in Spain, the land of gorgeous churches, though the thoughts may turn back more fondly to the beauty of Burgos. Senor Ibanez well knows the history; and he tells it, in fragments, with no very generous interpretation or sympathy. Days that seem to him barbaric make no appeal; and to him all medievalism, one feels, is barbarism. But he sees how the memories of a far past, concentrated in stone and marble and wood and glass, cluster round the hearts of those who serve in a place so ancient and so glorious: how there has arisen, and still survives, a family, a clan, whose entire life is devoted to the building, stamped with its traditions, absorbed in its service. And, in the story he tells, the centre of all this interest is the Tesóro, the richest ecclesiastical treasure-house, it may well be, in the world.

Above the cathedral exists that strange congeries of dwelling-houses, the Claverias, like an eyrie of great birds, where dwell the hereditary servants of the cathedral, the ’semi-ecclesiastical tribe which was born and died in the heart of Toledo, without emigrating to the streets,’ the people who ’lived above the cathedral, on the level with its roofs,’ were ’saturated with the smell of incense’ and breathed the strange musty atmosphere of antiquity, seeing no further than the great bell-tower, with a glimpse into the blue sky beyond. Peculiar to Toledo are these strange habitaciones, which for ages have been transmitted from father to son; yet they represent but the extreme example of a tendency common to Christendom.

Gradually, all over Europe, there has sprung up that distinct class of men whose life is spent in the outward setting of sacred things, whose service is often a passion with them, whose devotion and enthusiasm, are often wonderful to contemplate and understand. A class apart: men most of them whose life work among beautiful things has given them, a feeling and character far above their education, often a beauty of love which has even something in it like the things among which they pass daily, to and fro. There are, of course, the exceptions: not all men can live always at this high elevation of spirit. Mr Walpole has a sardonic, cruel example of the decadence; Senor Ibanez a more gently sympathetic one, in the young Perréro, whose office was to chase dogs away, the patronising critic of the higher clergy, whose knowledge of his ecclesiastical duties is pat enough but whose pleasure is in the bull-fight. Yet there is many a life of elevation to high ideals, and a great tradition of sacrifice even, among the ministri of a great cathedral. And that Senor Blasco Ibanez exemplifies, with the sure strokes of a master in portraiture, in the picture of the humble, generous-souled, Vara de palo, Esteban Luna, the Silenciario, the man with eyes clear as amber, the quiet eyes of a man used to spending long hours in the cathedral. The story of M. Huysmans, such as it is, belongs to the worshippers in the great cathedral which he describes: it is indeed a fragment of a peculiar autobiography. The story of Senor Ibanez, much more realistic if less individual or intimate, is concerned with those whose daily work is linked with the mechanism of the sacred institution, the building consecrated to God. They dwell in the solitude of an airy cloister high above the cathedral in silent loneliness at night: a very wilderness of wood, says Senor Ibanez, inhabited by strange creatures who lived unnoticed and forgotten under the roof tree of the Church — ’the good God made a house for the faithful, and a vast garret for the creatures of the air.’

To it returns, after sad and devastating experiences, Gabriel Luna, once the brightest flower of this garden in the clouds, student, enthusiast, trained for the priesthood, but led away by the Carlist wars, indoctrinated with the Communism of his time and its attendant rejection of the religion in which he had been brought up; still, utterly changed though he is, and though in the fatal disease which dogs him he still retains his ’liberal’ opinions, the cathedral of his childhood exercises upon him its immemorial charm. He realises, when he returns to it, that through all his wanderings along the highways of Europe, hunted by the police, disbelieving wholly in the faith which seems to him to be dying visibly, he has yet clung to the great cathedral, clinging as a shipwrecked man clings to a spar from a sinking vessel. Gradually he falls again into the routine of work in the building where his ancestors have so long laboured , and, unbelieving though he is, he dies in the defence of the treasures of the Virgen del Sagrario which his Socialist disciples have plotted to steal.

The cathedral which he thinks of as a huge derelict survives in its decadence. No one attends the choir services. Long since has the ancient plain-song died, and the music is that of the Italian opera. Nothing is sung in Latin, except the Tantum Ergo. The musicians, priests though they are, are treated as an inferior race: the canons control the music though they know nothing of the art. Complaints like this are common throughout Europe; nor will they be met — as the Bishop of Ripon has recently pointed out in an admirable article in ’Music and Letters’ — till cathedral experts receive the salary, the dignity, and the authority which is their due. Art to be true must be living. It is the same in other branches: there is too much of the aping of the Middle Age which makes some people like the so-called Gothic vestments in preference to the style which convenience and dignity evolved in later times.

Then, too, there is the old archbishop, domineering as those who have risen from very humble life often are; and the canons spread scandal about him among those who have known him from his youth, who could not bear to hear these calumnies — ’The canons had spoken of all the preceding archbishops precisely as they now spoke of Don Sebastián, but this does not in the least prevent their all being called saints after death.’ That is the bitter yet not altogether unkindly comment. Half unconsciously Senor Ibanez admits that religion is still a living power in Spain.

Let us pass frorn Spain to France, whence come so many influences which the Spanish ecclesiastics detest. There is, indeed, in the famous study of M. Huysmans, something of the sentimental exaggeration which the stern Spaniards abhor. And yet, it is impossible to question the entire sincerity of the writer. Durtal, the hero of En Route, comes in La Cathédrale to a life of continued and penitent devotion. There is no story. We are simply shown the man living in the provincial atmosphere of Chartres, and after all his exciting past yet finding it supremely satisfying. Two priests and a priest’s housekeeper are all the other characters. The subject is that most glorious triumph of medieval art as the exponent in stone of the theology of the Middle Age. That theology is strained, it must be admitted, till it is made wholly to revolve round the Blessed Mother of the Lord; and the mystical meaning of sculpture is extended till it includes almost all Christian history and all Christian doctrine. So, said Mr Kegan Paul,

’The book resolves itself into a series of dissertations on the Bestiary of Holy Scripture, on church painting, on early pictures, on the more mystical and suffering saints of the Middle Ages, and on such parts of the flora and fauna as have shown themselves most adapted to church decorations.’

It is more than a glorified guide-book — though there is no better guide to the great church of Chartres: it is almost a summa theologiae. But what is to our present purpose is that it is the presentation, by a writer of singular skill, of the idea of the Cathedral as an essential expression of Christian life. Not only is the great building that, but it is also an inspiration of goodness. It is not without significance that the most impressive description of Toledo by Ibanez is from above, while that of Chartres by Huysmans is from below. Durtal looks up as the fog disperses to a glory of height and ’a gigantic panoply’ of building, the great vault, the groined roof within, and the tower and pinnacles without. So the cathedral keeps watch

’over the unthinking city ... alone beseeching pardon for the unreadiness for suffering, for the listlessness of faults displayed by her sons, lifting up her towers to the sky like two arms, while the spires mimic the shape of joined hands, the ten fingers all meeting and upright one against another in the position which the image makers of old gave to the departed saints and warriors they carved upon the tombs.’

The cathedral, to M. Huysmans, radiates beneficence. A most beautiful description of the act of Communion in the wonderful crypt at dawn represents the summit of devotion, in the old priest and the child who serves him. ’Pour la première fois, Durtal vit servir réellement une messe, comprit l’incroyable beauté que peut dégager l’observance méditée du sacrifice.’ But M. Huysmans was a critic as well as a devotee. He denounced the narrowness of Catholic education, the hothouse atmosphere which while endeavouring to exclude vice encouraged it. The unseemly subjects in which the medievalists often dealt — there is a passage of savage satire about them in Senor Ibanez — were intentional object-lessons of the horrors of sin, which bade the soul examine itself before it should presume to eat of that Bread and drink of that Cup. ’Open the windows: air the rooms.’ The Church of old aimed at moulding manly souls, not the crippled creatures manufactured by spiritual orthopaedists; thus the glory of the ancient cathedral is that it represents all life, as it symbolises all theology; and it dedicates all to God.

But this is certainly not always the French view. Walter Pater once wrote of Ferdinand Fabre in the ’Abbé Tigrane’ as delineating, ’with wonderful power and patience, a strictly ecclesiastical portraiture, shrewd, passionate, somewhat melancholy heads, which, though they are often of peasant origin, are never by any chance undignified,’ and he added that ’the passions he treats of in priests are indeed strictly clerical, most often their ambitions — not the errant humour of the mere man in the priest, but movements of spirit properly incidental to the clerical type itself.’ In its sombre deliberateness resembling Mr Walpole’s study, L’Abbé Tigrane is indeed a deeply impressive book. Though the life it analyses is rather that of the Seminary than the Close, and the types of ecclesiasticism which it portrays are rather French than medieval, there is a general application which the whole clerical class might well take to heart; and it is one from which the members of a cathedral body may not consider themselves to be immune. L’Abbé Tigrane is a study, etched with a biting irony, of clerical ambitions; and ambition, whatever moraliats may say of it in other walks of life, is a deadly foe to the ideal of the Christian priest.

’Cromwell, I charge thee fling away ambition.
By that sin fell the angels. How can man then,
The image of his Maker, hope to win by it?’

And it is as subtle as it is deadly. There are so many veils by which the ecclesiastic may hide it from himself. But let him be quite sure that the ravages which it makes in his character are never hidden from the laity with whom he mingles. The relentless persistency with which the Abbé Capdepont forces his way to the episcopate, and at the end of the book is within sight of the Papacy itself, is told with unflinching realism.

Gradually the heart is hardened, the sympathy is frozen, the aim to exalt God in the Church is merged in the aim. to exalt the man to whom. power bas become an unquenched passion. The saintliness of others first becomes ignored. Then is utterly disbelieved in. The clerical Egoist stands out as the embodiment of personal ambition. He is determined to be Bishop of Lormières, and by a relentless passage through every kind of intrigue, ecclesiastical and political, pursued as cruelly as persistently, he achieves his end. His self-confidence is rarely shaken, his determination never. He ends by thinking the Papacy possible -, Qui sait?’ Jealousy, M. Ferdinand Fabre would suggest, is another clerical vice; but it is certainly not exclusively clerical; and in these studies of ecclesiastical life it is quite subsidiary to ambition and its inevitable companion, arrogance. The Abbé Tigrane is not jealous of his compeers. he despises them. too much. But lie is devoured by the cravings of his ambition, which are fed by the pride with which he contemplates his own capacities and. anticipates his destiny. We turn from. the book almost with nausea. This is not the way in which religion is served, we say, in the sheltered places of the Church.

If L’Abbé Tigrane may be used for a moment’s comparison with La Cathédrale, we may make brief référence to a very amusing book, The Canon in Résidence, by Victor L. Whitechurch, published a few years ago, for it deals with much the same subject as Mr Walpole’s new story. In The Canon in Residence the new-comer in a Chapter flnds himself beset by a cruel rumour, for which there is a certain, but quite innocent, foundation, and it is some time before he can get ’the man in the street’ to see that it is not justified. Quite good people spread quite bad stories: they don’t speak of their own first-hand knowledge but of what they ’are told.’ This is, of course, a common experience in life, and one not at all creditable to human nature. But the special point of the story is that it is the gossip of a cathedral town; and it ends happily; while Mr Walpole’s story ends very sadly. In The Canon in Residence it is the dean, a silly old man much henpecked, who is the, rather unwilling, gossip. He has a nephew who bas become a fishmonger-partly, it seems, to annoy him. He is friends with a vulgar brewer, who grinds the faces of the poor. The general impression left on the reader is that canons are not quite as kind to each other as they might be, and that old women, of both sexes, who might be better employed, spend toomuch of their time in gossiping about them. It is rather an absurd story, but quite a pleasant one, There is not much bias, if any, against a cathedral system: it does not appear, as in Mr Walpole’s book, as a upas tree. There is no sign that the author fancies that there is discord in the capitular nest. We are sorry for the foolish dean, as we are for all who play at scandal and burn their fingers; but we do not feel that they bring discredit on the system, whether they belong to it or attack it from outside.

We are in the region of comedy, and so especially in the references of a much more eminent writer. Mr Compton Mackenzie, too, knows something about deans, perhaps a little about canons also, but does not seem to concern himself with cathedrals and their system. In Rich Relatives there is quite a nice, though mildly malicious, dean. He puts pins on to the chairs of his typists, and when his wife tells him that the archdeacon is coming to dinner, ’in some odd way Jasmine divined that the dean thought "Damn." She felt like somebody in a fairy tale who is granted the gift of understanding tho speech of animals and the tongue of birds. What he actually said was, "Delightful! Don’t open the ’58 port. Foljambe has no palate."’ Then again in The Altar Steps there is an approach to a cathedral. We have a good bishop, and one not so good: we have a rather inferior Theological College in a cathedral city; but not much is said about anything which does not illustrate the view that the Church of England really ’won’t do.’ Among all the beautiful descriptions of spiritual aspiration and emotion perhaps the only one which definitely brings the cathedral into the foreground is that which describes the blessing which ends the service — ’When Mark heard these words from the altar far away in the golden glooms of the cathedral, it seemed to him that the building bowed like a mighty couchant beast and fell asleep in the security of God’s presence.’ Nearer seems this novelist to the truth than Mr Walpole or Senor Ibanez.

So far the English writers seem to stay upon the surface of things. There is the comedy of character. M. Huysmans writes what we might call a comedy-pastoral. Senor Ibanez soars to the highest elevations of melodrama, not merely theatrical but the melodrama of an artist of genius. But the subject can be taken higher still — into tragedy. For, very different from Mr Whitechurch’s or Mr Mackenzie’s comedy, a tragedy is what we find in the work of the latest English novelist, The Cathedral by Mr Hugh Walpole.

In not a few reflexions and descriptions the three studies resemble each other. But the English writer is more explicit than the Spaniard in his animosity:

’It is the cathedral, Ronder, that I fear. Don’t you yourself sometimes feel that it has, by now, a spirit of its own, a life, a force that all the past years and all the worship that it has had have given? Don’t you even feel that? That it has become a god with his own rites and worshippers? That it uses men for its own purposes and not for Christ’s? That it almost hates Christ? It is so beautiful, so lovely, so haughty, so jealous.’

Senor Ibanez and M. Huysmans both wrote, no doubt, with a purpose: with them the story is quite subordinate. It is not so with Mr Hugh Walpole. He writes frankly as the teller of a thrilling tale. To the Spanish novelist the cathedral is the emblem of decay; to the French it is the symbol of Eternity. To the Englishman it is a half-malignant influence which seems to goad men into wrong. The similarities between these three books are obvious; the differences are no less plain. Perhaps the most striking of the latter is the change of tone, which is seen in so many novels of the last three years. Senor Ibanez and M. Huysmans wrote before the Great War: Mr Walpole, though he dates his story earlier, writes most plainly under the influence of the cataclysm. There is a cruelty about recent works which is unmistakable. The Spaniard’s and the Frenchman’s books are critical as well as appreciative, but when they condemn there is no touch of cruelty. In the later novel there is no longer the flinching back from pain which was characteristic of ten years ago. The writer has seen cruelty unmasked and now he sees it in all life. Even the cathedral is cruel. Mr Walpole has explained to an American magazine that he spent all his youth under the shadow of English cathedrals, and seems to have thought of one of them as ’encrusted with a mosaic of small intrigues, plots and meannesses’: he says that ’it had for the most part developed only the worst and most cynical and sordid side of human character, and was glad of it.’ There is no need to believe that he considers this typical of cathedral life, or that he undervalues the influence of sanctity and beauty, or makes light of the glory of human character inspired by a divine ideal. Only now he chooses to write of the dark side of life. That clever writer, Miss Rose Macaulay, has summed up the attitude of the clergy and their families in this book by saying that if you sought for religion among them you would seek in vain. ’They have not, indeed, a chance, since they live in the shadow of a cathedral which exorcises a baleful, sinister, and irreligious influence on all who live within a radius of several miles of it.’ But throughout Mr Walpole quite clearly intends to diverge from fact. Thus he has many anomalies in his account of chapter life and chapter duties, he mixes up his major and minor canons, his residents and non-residents, gives a most unmedieval epitaph to a medieval bishop, speaks of ’the brasses of the groins,’ and makes his unhappy archdeacon not only, as do the canons, dance at a county ball, but sit down upon a wooden coping. So when he begins to belabour the cathedral clergy we need not take him too seriously.

Briefly, Mr Walpole’s story is one of pride and its fall. Polchester is a town of poor folk below the hill and leisured folk upon it, all dominated by the great cathedral, where there still seems to dwell the harsh spirit of the twelfth-century bishop who gave to the place its dignity and power. ’His figure remained to this very day dominating Polchester, vast in stature, blackbearded, rejoicing in his physical strength. He could kill, they used to say, an ox with his fist.’ And he seemed to live again in the archdeacon of the late 19th century, round whom the story of the book revolves. There is a dean, of course, but he does not count. It would seem that deans have had their day. One is reminded of Bob Acres. The novelists now are obsessed with archdeacons. Archdeacon Brandon rules the chapter and the city and his family with a tyrannous hand. His children do not understand him. His colleagues fear him. His wife hates him. Suddenly his power splits to pieces. His son runs away with the daughter of a low publican, his wife with a shy pathetic parish priest. It is an incredible tale. These things, one says, do not happen. Canons are not like Archdeacon Brandon, or like the horrible silky, self-indulgent, ambitious, determined Canon Ronder who pulls all the strings in the secret intrigue which conquers him. Certainly Anthony Trollope gave a more true picture of cathedral life, and Mr Saintsbury has quite recently told us that ’there are few men in fiction’ he likes better or should more like to have known than Archdeacon Grantley.

No one can doubt the ability, or the interest, of Mr Walpole’s book. He has biting analyses of clerical character: notably the arrogant cleric, and the ambitious cleric who becomes unscrupulous because he has a passion for getting power into his own hands. He tells a story, though it is an improbable one, well. He describes the splendour of nature and of architecture with a fine glow of passion. But we cannot take his description of the life in a Close, or the influence of a medieval cathedral, seriously. No doubt he does not intend us to do so. Wicked men will do wicked things, but it is not working in a cathedral or for it which makes them wicked, as Mr Walpole seems sometimes to wish to make us believe. They are not wicked because they live in a Close or Precinct: they have not less of the milk of human kindness because they worship in a Cathedral. No doubt all small societies encourage small vices, tale-bearing, inquisitiveness, jealousy; but they do not create, they do not encourage, great vices. At the present day Closes and Precincts are not enclaves. The healthy breath of public opinion blows through them: their denizens share in a larger citizenship. It is to this that they must look, while retaining their own ideal of worship and service, if they are still to give to the nation the inspiration which through the changes of centuries they have never ceased to afford.

There are lines, which. Dr Liddon many years ago applied to Bishop Hamilton of Salisbury, which seem singularly to fit the present time, when ancient institutions are subject to flerce criticisms, and those who minister in them, anxious to adapt themselves and all that they inherit to the needs of the day, not resenting thorough investigation but striving to profit by it, have no easy task. The cathedrals survived the Reformation and the Great Rebellion, and with constitutions but little altered: will they survive the modern projects of concentration and uniformity? Those who serve in them may well take the lines for motto:

’In quiet confidence hold on — 
Like him who layeth stone on stone,
In the undoubted faith, although
It be not granted him to see,
Yet, that the coming age shall show
He hath not wrought unmweaningly,
When gold and chrysoprase adorn
A city brighter than the morn.’

W. H. HUTTON.