AN EXCHANGE OF LETTERS
society to recognize. All the more necessary that we who can be dis–
loyal with impunity should keep that ideal alive.
If
I may be personal, I belong to a group, the Catholic Church,
which would present me with grave problems as a writer
if
I were
not saved by my disloyalty.
If
my conscience were as acute as M.
Mauriac's showed itself to be in his essay
God and Mammon,
I could
not write a line. There are leaders of the Church who regard litera–
ture as a means to one end, edification. That end may be of the
highest value, of far higher value than literature, but it belongs to
a different world. Literature has nothing to do with edification. I am
not arguing that literature is amoral, but that it presents a personal
moral, and the personal morality of an individual is seldom identical
with the morality of the group to which he belongs. You remember
the black and white squares of Bishop Blougram's chess board.
As
a
novelist, I must be allowed to write from the point of view of the
black square as well as of the white: doubt and even denial must be
given their chance of self-expression, or how
is
one freer than the
Leningrad group?
Catholic novelists (I would rather say novelists who are Cath–
olics) should take Newman as their patron. No one understood their
problem better or defended them more skilfully from the attacks of
piety (that morbid growth of religion). Let me copy out the passage.
It really has more than one bearing on our discussion. He is defending
the teaching of literature in a Catholic university:
I say, from the nature of the case, if Literature is to be made a
study· of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a
contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of sinful man. You
may gather together something very great and high, something higher
than Literature ever was; and when you have done so, you will find
that it is not Literature at all.
And to those who, accepting that view, argued that we could do
without Literature, Newman went on:
Proscribe (I do not merely say particular authors, particular works,
particular passages) but Secular Literature as such; cut out from your
class books all broad manifestations of the natural man; and those mani–
festations are waiting for your pupil's benefit at the very doors of your
lecture. room in living and breathing substance. . . . Today a pupil,
tomorrow a member of the great world: today confined to the Lives
of the Saints, tomorrow thrown upon Babel. ... You have refused
him
the masters of human thought, who would in some sense have educated
him because of their incidental corruption....
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