A Long Probation

There are times when you come across a religious novelist trying to do something different, and the Catholic novelist Henry Gibbs' A Long Probation (1897) is a case in point.  It isn't a success at the formal level--as even a sympathetic reviewer observed, "the writer seems to do a great deal of wandering"--although Gibbs is a far better prose stylist than, say, E. H. Dering.  (Then again, few Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish novelists managed to match the lows achieved by Dering.) Gibbs, a Catholic convert on the Board of Education, left behind numerous children (including the war correspondent Sir Philip Gibbs); most of his other publications had to do with educational policy, although he may have written a much earlier novel, My Friend and My Wife (I haven't been able to verify if this is the same person).  The novel itself has a classic foundling plot: Valerie, son of a secret marriage between an aristocratic father (Herluin) and a woman his social inferior (Victorine), is abandoned at birth by his  persecuted mother, who promptly dies; he is raised by acrobats but eventually taken in by a reasonably well-off Englishman, Thomas Harrington, who educates him to be a gentleman.  Eventually, Valerie becomes a successful painter, does a number of magnanimous things, gets the girl (his foster brother Frank, also in love, heroically hands her over), and is reunited with his father.  Valerie is a complete dud as a character, as aside from his habit of spending money a little too freely and his one dark night of the soul (which is very literal--he has a spiritual crisis in a foggy London night), he is perfect and loved by everyone.  "But wait," say my readers, "you said the novelist was doing something interesting."  I was just getting to that.

A Long Probation is an exceptionally bookish novel--in fact, it is nearly as bookish as Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere, and I don't think that's an accident.  Two key characters, Tom Harrington and the Abbe Hauchecorne, are devout book collectors along with being devout Catholics,  "lovers of books, of engravings, of rare copies, of fine bindings" (58); notably, however, they collect not to fetishize the book as object, but to engage with the texts themselves.  (We are told repeatedly that the Abbe writes extensive marginalia in all of his books.)  Their friend Dr. Diamond reads avidly in contemporary literature (the novel stretches from 1845 to 1870) and is a staunch partisan of Thomas Carlyle, who eventually crops up as a character.  Valerie and Frank themselves read extensively in classic and modern poetry, drama, and fiction.    And the final revelation about Valerie's identity is hidden in a book in the Abbe's library.  At one level, Gibbs is making a statement about the possibilities of mid-nineteenth century recusant and French Catholic intellectual and moral culture.  Unlike the ultimately deadening library belonging to Ward's Squire Wendover, which traces all of Western culture towards modern secularism, the libraries belonging to the Abbe and Thomas Harrington are vivifying: the books are treated as "those never-failing friends" (84), a source of pleasure, intellectual exchange, and comfort.  Moreover, as Catholics, these characters are also intellectually catholic and cosmopolitan, so that Thomas a Kempis and Francois de Sales play as significant a role as Thomas Carlyle in terms of shaping their understanding of duty.  The Thomas a Kempis-Carlyle connection, in which Carlyle quotes Goethe on renunciation at Valerie and Valerie quotes Thomas back at him, subverts Squire Wendover's ultimately sterile understanding of Western intellectual history: Carlyle keeps Goethe alive by quoting him in support of his own philosophy; Valerie, inspired by Carlyle, nevertheless suggests that Goethe's views have a deep history, embedded in the Catholic tradition.  

Moreover, while Gibbs returns repeatedly to de Sales and Thomas as his characters' key religious touchstones, he very carefully positions his own novel in the tradition of "Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot" (367), all of whom are referenced repeatedly.  (Among other things, the plot is recognizably indebted at various times to Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Vanity Fair, Pendennis, and The Mill on the Floss, as well as to Les Miserables.)  Eliot, in particular, holds pride of place alongside Carlyle as the novel's exemplar of the modern moral imagination: she is "a man of great genius and extraordinary sympathy [this is before her identity was revealed]" who calls attention to the "noble conduct going on around us" (264); some time afterward, Valerie imagines her as the modern equivalent of Savonarola (266).  Significantly, Dr. Diamond praises Eliot as an alternative to medieval chivalric romance, which is a good thing of its sort, but distant from modernity.  Although the boys play at being medieval knights of the Arthurian or Chanson de Roland variety, this is figured as being an important phase in their development that, while morally beneficial, eventually gives way to realist imaginative forms.  This Catholicism is not medievalist in its social vision or moral orientation; it's telling that Frank's short fiction and Valerie's painting both take on the modern world, not historical subjects.  At the same time, the novel aligns itself with Victor Hugo when it comes to contemporary French fiction, as opposed to Zola (mentioned more than once, but always ambivalently).  Its "realism," then, is not Zola's naturalism.  

Taken together with Valerie's adult devotion to "Carlyle, Ruskin and Tennyson" (465), what is so striking here is Gibbs' refusal to distinguish "Catholic" and "Protestant" intellectual traditions.   This is a novel in which modern Catholic authors are almost totally absent.   In A Long Probation, the Catholic reader's right relation to authors of other faiths is self-reflexive and critical, to be sure, but not dismissive: Valerie may not "subscribe" (466) to everything Carlyle, Ruskin, and Tennyson have to say, but he idolizes their greatness and is ineluctably shaped by their respective worldviews.  More slyly, Gibbs repeatedly calls Valerie and Frank "muscular-christians" (403), a title that Charles Kingsley and probably Thomas Hughes would have indignantly denied to Catholics.  But, as Gibbs notes elsewhere, Protestants themselves are split between the Ruskin aficionados and the free-market capitalists; there is, in other words, no unitary "Protestant" tradition, but rather a heritage of British and European texts, many of them in disagreement with each other, to which Catholics can lay claim as well as Protestants.  Moreover, even when engaging in Catholic utopian experiments--Herluin's orphanage, for example--the characters are not thinking in "medieval" terms, but modern ones: Herluin carefully reads up on contemporary pedagogical theory before he starts his school.  What Gibbs offers the late-Victorian reader, then, is a brief for Catholicism as deeply relevant to and imbricated in modernity--not as an alternative to it, but rather working within it.