Literary Giants Literary Catholics Read Online Free PDF

notion of the intrinsic beauty, through inscape , of all created things. Thompson could not have been aware of Hopkins’ work, of course, but the coincidental depth of affinity is clearly discernible, most notably in Thompson’s “To a Snowflake”.
    One also senses an affinity in such poems with the philosophy of gratitude that characterized so much of the writing of G. K. Chesterton a few years later. It is not too fanciful to imagine that Chesterton had read Thompson’s poetry when it was first published in the 1890s, and if he had done so, he would most certainly have recognized in Thompson a kindred spirit. During the years that Thompson’s verse was gaining widespread recognition, the young Chesterton was passing out of the period of adolescent doubt and despondency that had overshadowed his time as a student at the Slade School of Art. Writing of this period in his Autobiography , Chesterton referred to a time “full of doubts and morbidities and temptations; and which, though in my case mainly subjective, has left in my mind for ever a certitude upon the objective solidity of Sin.” Chesterton conceded that his morbidity “may have been due to the atmosphere of the Decadents, and their perpetual hints of the luxurious horrors of paganism” that prevailed at the Slade School of Art in the “naughty nineties”:
Anyhow, it is true that there was a time when I had reached the condition of moral anarchy within, in which a man says, in the words of Wilde, that “Atys with the blood-stained knife were better than the thing I am.” I have never indeed felt the faintest temptation to the particular madness of Wilde; but I could at this time imagine the worst and wildest disproportions and distortions of more normal passion.
    Regardless of how they may be perceived by posterity, Hopkins and Newman saw themselves, first and foremost, as ordained ministers of the Church. They were priests first, and poets second. As obedient souls who sought to do God’s will in their daily lives, they could be called converts of the light. There was, however, a parallel movement of rebellious souls who were intent on experiencing all aspects of life, both the licit and the illicit, and who, often shunning the light, walked in the shadows or stumbled in the darkness. These were the Decadents, adherents of a movement originating in France but that would spread infectiously across the Channel under the beguiling influence of Oscar Wilde.
    In considering the relationship between the Decadents and the Church, one is confronted with another paradox. At first glance the precociously risqué image of Wilde would appear to sit uncomfortably beside the primness and propriety of Newman. Appearances, however, can be deceiving. At the deepest level, saintly souls like Newman and Hopkins have more in common with “sinners” such as Wilde and Beardsley than with the archetypal, stoically self-righteous and sceptic-souled Victorians. “I have dreams of a visit to Newman,” Wilde confessed to a friend in 1877, “of the holy sacrament in a new Church, and of a quiet and peace afterwards in my soul.” Two years earlier he had scribbled in his Commonplace Book the words of the father of French Decadence, Baudelaire: “O Lord! Give me the strength and the courage to contemplate my heart without disgust!”
    In later years Wilde fell under the influence of Baudelaire’s disciple, J. K. Huysmans, whose luridly licentious novel, A Rebours , had scandalized French society following its publication in 1884. Huysmans, like Baudelaire, had chosen to look sin straight in the eye, probing its allure and its ugliness, whereas respectable, “rational” society preferred to sweep it under the carpet or glance at it furtively or voyeuristically through a keyhole. Sin, for the prudishly prurient Victorians, was to be obscene but not heard. For the Decadents, however, the honesty of a sin confessed, even in the absence of contrition, was preferable to the