PARTISAN REVIEW
and Manzoni though he lived till 1873, had reached the peak of
his
achievement in the century's first quarter.
The restoration of Catholic belief produced quite different effects
in England and in France. In England, where there had been no
vast inert mass of
bien-pensants,
Catholicism very quickly became
smart. The main pleasure of English Catholic publicists like Monsignor
Ronald Knox, Arnold Lunn, and their younger colleagues lies in
demonstrating how muddle-headed other people's thinking is, how
im–
precise their terms and their intentions. This movement is partly
counterbalanced by the sentimental medievalism of Chesterton and
Gill, but even Chesterton was a great one for proving that nothing
is new under the sun. In France, where imprecision of thought had
never been the most obvious sign of the secular or indeed the anti–
clerical mind, similar antics and grimaces were scarcely possible. In
France, the renewal of belief involved in the first place a denunciation
of the nominally Catholic bourgeoisie for its tepidity and for its
material acquisitiveness. Thus the
renouveau spirituel
was by no
means a movement of political reaction. Peguy never quite knew
whether he was primarily a Catholic or primarily a socialist. Uon
Bloy delivered the whole weight of his massive eloquence against
les bien-pensants,
against what he calls
la bondieuserie sulpicienne,
against the rich and against bourgeois mediocrity.
As
a great many
of us remember with gratitude, Jacques Maritain and Georges Ber–
nanos stuck out for the simple facts of the matter during the Spanish
insurrection of General Franco, when the English Catholics were
almost unanimously crying crusade.
The forms in which Catholic intellectuals have chosen to express
themselves have similarly varied between the two countries. England
produced a major Catholic poet, and since then Catholic intellectuals
in this country have contented themselves with general pronounce–
ments and wireless talks. In Graham Greene, we have a novelist of
distinction who
also
happens to be a Catholic, but that he can be
regarded as a Catholic novelist in the same sense as Franc;ois Mauriac
and Georges Bernanos is very much open to question, though in
The Power and the Glory
he for once attempted the Bernanos manner
and though in a recent issue of
La France Libre
he pays respectful
homage to Mauriac. On the other hand, in France, Mauriac and
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