The Third Spring: G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones

by Adam Schwartz

This book is the first detailed examination of these four authors as part of a Roman Catholic, counter-modern community of discourse. It is informed by extensive research in the writers' works, scholarship on them, and their personal papers.

Genres: History

432 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 17, 2005

Reviews

[sch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Schwartz's goal in this long book is to give us "a collective, in-depth, interdisciplinary understanding of the renewal of orthodox Roman Catholicism in early-twentieth-century Britain as a form of rebellion against modern secularism" (p. 13), by way of an analysis of four adult converts. He notes that this book is concerned with his subjects' cultural writings, as opposed to their social-political texts, and promises to write a companion volume concerning the latter.

Chapter 1 is a "spiritual biography" of G.K. Chesterton. The most interesting part is the description of Chesterton's spiritual and moral crisis while a student at Slade in the 1890s. The rest of the chapter wends through the major books, with copious references to minor and unpublished writings. Anyone who has read THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY, ORTHODOXY, THE EVERLASTING MAN, and the two saints' biographies will be familiar with the material. Schwartz has little of interest to add. In fact I think his treatment of THURSDAY is fundamentally flawed.

Chapter 2, on Graham Greene, is markedly better. One's initial incredulity over Schwartz's thesis that GG belongs firmly to the tradition of Chesterton and Newman (cf. the book's title) is gradually diminished (if not extinguished) by the evidence he supplies. Consider these parallels with Chesterton: both came from the "respectable middle class"; each man's (nominal) liberal Christianity was fatally weakened, when still young, by an encounter with evil; for each, the convictions that developed out of this experience were later ratified by Catholic teaching; and finally, erotic attraction brought Christianity back to their attention -- or as Schwartz slyly puts it, "another woman [i.e., other than the Scarlet] helped bring the cross" to both. This is no straitjacket thesis, either, for Schwartz acknowledges that Chesterton's bedrock secular conviction was about goodness, while Greene's was about evil.

Nevertheless one would like to point out to the author that the "legacy of British Catholic protest that [Greene] inherited from the likes of Chesterton and Newman" (112) took a rather different, if not contrary, shape in the younger man's career. I am not convinced by Schwartz's argument that the mature, skeptical Greene was orthodox -- and I can't imagine Greene would be, either. Schwartz claims, citing plausible evidence, that Greene saw faith as distinct from belief, and then blames Greene's friends (e.g. Waugh) and various critics (Fraser, Allitt, Sharrock, Woodman, Updike) for their failure to recognize this distinction ("inattention to nuance"). He's probably right about Greene's thought process. But of course one might reply that the distinction is ultimately specious; while we frequently use "faith" to mean "trust," and "belief" to mean "assent," orthodoxy doesn't permit one to treat either as sufficient by itself. Schwartz either doesn't see this or doesn't think it worth argument; instead he footnotes a few citations to the Catechism that "affirm the general privileging of spiritual experiences over formulas that express them." Privileging is not at issue here. (See p. 185 for several sentences, by both Greene and Schwartz, revealing the ultimate incoherence of the argument.)

On the whole, though, Schwartz provides a good reading of Greene. He is rightly skeptical of the mature Greene's accounts of his own faith and fiction in autobiographies and interviews, and supplements these with Sherry, Shelden, and numerous other critics. There are 348 footnotes in this chapter alone. Likewise his assessment of Greene as perpetually contrarian, as always (though even here critically) defending the underdog, seems sound. His take on A BURNT OUT CASE makes me want to reread it, which is rather impressive, since it's not a good novel. If Schwartz's application to his subjects of various "conversion theorists" such as Wm James, Emilie Griffin, and Walter Conn is sometimes clumsy, it is not thereby invalid. More impressive is the use he makes of archival material, including Greene's personal library. I was always intrigued to learn what Greene underscored, and where he wrote in the margins.

I know much less about Dawson and Jones than the first two subjects. Re: the former, I found the biographical portion more engaging than the survey of Dawson's thought -- perhaps because the survey picks and chooses, seemingly at random, from Dawson's many volumes, essays, and unpublished papers. I had trouble placing each reference (their titles are often similar). Before tackling the Jones chapter, I read IN PARENTHESIS, and am very glad I did. Jones is one of those writers of whom most people nowadays have never heard -- whose name is surprisingly generic, forgettable -- and who turns out to be fascinating. After graduate school I intend to give him serious study. I'm grateful for Schwartz's introduction, which as in the earlier chapters ranges widely across published and unpublished writings, surveys and critiques the scholarship, describes a unique spiritual journey, and aims at interdisciplinarity.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Britain in the early twentieth century witnessed a renewal of the conversion to Catholicism of some of its leading intellectuals. This tells the story of four of those men.