Sparrows and Gunpowder

An Eminent Edwardian and Evelyn Waugh’s Journey to Faith

by Hermione Nettlethwaite

Not a sparrow falls to earth, Scripture assures us, without our Father (Matthew 10:29). God presides, in other words, the smallest detail of His Creation quite as closely as the greatest, for all things are part of His Design and the fall of a sparrow may, in His eyes, have quite as much significance as the death-throes of a dynasty. This faculty of omnipresence is shared, on a infinitely smaller scale, by those of God’s creatures engaged in what has been described as a work of sub-creation.¹ An artist controls every aspect of the world he sub-creates, and the smallest detail of a novel, like the smallest chip of gold or lapis lazuli in a mosaic, may contribute as much to the design as the largest. Of few novelists is this truer than of Evelyn Waugh, who sometimes worked on his literary mosaics with chips of gold or lapis lazuli light enough to be carried away on the breath. Two of these breath-delicate chips can be found among the “meagre and commonplace” books owned by Charles Ryder, the narrator of Brideshead Revisited (1945), in his first term at Oxford: one is the “the Medici press edition of A Shropshire Lad”, by the unnamed A.E. Housman (1859-1936), the other an undifferentiated copy of “Eminent Victorians”, by the similarly unnamed Lytton Strachey (1880-1932).² Like the fall of a sparrow in God’s Creation, these books do not appear by chance in Waugh’s: both are symbolic of Ryder’s state of religious-and-sexual mind, because both represent the agnostic or pessimistic rejection of Christianity by a homosexual. Only one of these books, however, was written by a comic genius, and only one may have contributed materially to Ryder’s, and Waugh’s, conversion to the Catholic Faith.

That book is Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918). Some of the lyrics of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896) may be aere perennius,³ but if one laughs while reading certain others one may be sure that it was not the author’s intention. If one laughs while reading Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, one may be sure that it was:

For some time it had been obvious to every impartial onlooker that Newman was slipping down an inclined plane at the bottom of which lay one thing, and one thing only – the Roman Catholic Church. What was surprising was the length of time which he was taking to reach the inevitable destination. Years passed before he came to realise that his grandiose edifice of a Church Universal would crumble to pieces if one of its foundation stones was to be an amatory intrigue of Henry VIII. But, at last he began to see that terrible monarch glowering at him wherever he turned his eyes. First he tried to exorcise the spectre with the rolling periods of the Caroline divines; but it only strutted the more truculently. Then in despair he plunged into the writings of the early Fathers, and sought to discover some way out of his difficulties in the complicated labyrinth of ecclesiastical history. After months spent in the study of the Monophysite heresy, the alarming conclusion began to force itself upon him that the Church of England was perhaps in schism. Eventually he read an article by a Roman Catholic on St. Augustine and the Donatists, which seemed to put the matter beyond doubt. St. Augustine, in the fifth century, had pointed out that the Donatists were heretics because the Bishop of Rome had said so. The argument was crushing; it rang in Newman’s ears for days and nights; and, though he continued to linger on in agony for six years more, he never could discover any reply to it.⁴

This, from the essay on Cardinal Manning, is a good example of Strachey’s elegant and unsparing demolition of the Church of England: when he has finished not one stone is left upon another (Matthew 24:2). Later, however, when the dust has cleared above the rubble, some agnostic readers may find that the stones of the Church of Rome stand unshaken. Strachey has laid a charge beneath these too, lit the train, and retired to watch the walls tumble from his tour d’ivoire, but it may be that his gunpowder was damp or imperfectly compounded and blew finally with a dust-stirring whimper, not a foundation-wrecking roar. Like a theorem in Euclid, the absurdity of the Church of England is susceptible to proof; like an axiom in the same, the absurdity of the Church of Rome is self-evident or nothing.

In other words, Strachey’s essay demonstrates that overturning Catholicism is practically synonymous with overturning Christianity. If Christianity is true, it is impossible for many to see how Catholicism can be false; if Catholicism is false, it is impossible for many to see how Christianity can be true. These are conclusions Evelyn Waugh reached on his own journey from homosexual agnosticism to heterosexual Catholicism, and it is pleasant to believe that he, like Charles Ryder, took the first steps of that journey in the pages of a book designed by its human author to quite another end.

NOTES

1. The theory of art as sub-creation was (sub-)created by J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973).

2. Op. cit., Book One, “Et in Arcadia Ego”, ch. 1.

3. Exegi monumentum aere perennius, “I have erected a monument more lasting than bronze” – Horace’s description of his own verse (Odes, Book 3, 30, 1).

4. Op. cit., ch. iii.

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