Free Literary Giants Literary Catholics by Joseph Pearce Page B

Christian in its deepest layers of meaning and profusely traditionalist in its inspiration. Eliot’s reaction to Decadence is rooted in the same sense of disgust as that which had animated Chesterton, but his mode of expression is starkly different. Whereas Chesterton alluded to the “diabolism” of Decadence, Eliot exposed its putrid corpse to the cold light of day, dragging it whimpering from its furtively seedy den.
    The Waste Land ’s depiction of modernity as utterly vacuous and sterile is reiterated as the central theme of Eliot’s next major poem, “The Hollow Men”, published in 1925. Following his open profession of Christianity in 1928, Eliot’s poems become more overtly religious, more didactic and “preachy” and perhaps less accomplished as poetry—though it should be stressed that a relatively unaccomplished Eliot poem is considerably more accomplished than the finest efforts of most of his contemporaries.
    Eliot exerted a considerable influence on the writers of his generation. One such writer was the young novelist Evelyn Waugh, who rose to prominence following the publication of his first novel, Decline and Fall , in 1928. Two years later Waugh was received into the Catholic Church, and thereafter, his darkly sardonic and satirical novels could be described as prose reworkings of the fragmented imagery of The Waste Land . Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust even took its title from a line in The Waste Land , and its plot could be seen as a tangential commentary on the disgust at Decadence that Eliot had expressed with such lurid eloquence in his great poem.
    If Chesterton and Belloc could be said to have dominated the first twenty years of the twentieth century, and Eliot and Waugh the next twenty years, the middle years of the century belong to C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. These two giants are perhaps the “dynamic duo” at the very heart of the Christian literary landscape of the twentieth century (though one could certainly argue that Chesterton and Eliot are of equal or perhaps even greater stature—such an argument is, however, beyond the scope of the present essay).
    Lewis’ manifold and multifarious talents covered the spectrum of the peripatetically purgatorial Pilgrim’s Regress and The Great Divorce , space travel and children’s stories, and works of straightforward Christian apologetics. Tolkien, for the most part, channeled his own considerable gifts in one direction only. The subcreation of Middle Earth, through the weaving of The Lord of the Rings within the larger tapestry of The Silmarillion , was, for Tolkien, the labor of a lifetime. In his mythical epic we see the Nietzschean “will to power” countered by the humility of the meek, and we see the poison of Wildean decadence healed by the purity of relationships in which eros is bridled by the charity of chastity.
    Tolkien’s mythical masterpiece is the pinnacle of achievement at the highest and most beautiful point on the Christian literary landscape of the twentieth century. In the same landscape is to be found the most important poem of the century (Eliot’s The Waste Land ) and the century’s finest novel (Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited ). Quite clearly, the twentieth century, like the preceding nineteen centuries, owes a great deal to the munificence and magnificence of its Christian heritage.

PART TWO
    THE CHESTERBELLOC

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THE CHESTERBELLOC
    Examining the Beauty of the Beast
Wells has written . . . about Chesterton and Belloc without stopping to consider what Chesterton and Belloc is. This sounds like bad grammar; but I know what I am about. Chesterton and Belloc is a conspiracy, and a most dangerous one at that. Not a viciously intended one: quite the contrary. It is a game of make-believe of the sort which all imaginative grown-up children love to play. . .
    Now at first sight it would seem that it does not lie with me to rebuke this sort of make-believe. The celebrated G.B.S. [George