Cyril Westward
I've been buried under Book Two, but allow me to surface to talk about the hitherto elusive Cyril Westward: A Story of a Grave Decision (1899). This was the sole novelistic effort (which was probably all to the good) of Anglican clergyman Henry Patrick Russell, who converted to Catholicism in 1896 (followed thereafter by his wife).1 The novel received reasonably good reviews, although critics did gently advert to the total lack of anything bearing even the slightest resemblance to a plot. It made enough of a splash that it went through at least a second edition, and probably counts as the most successful late-Victorian Catholic controversial novel--bearing in mind that, by the late 1890s, straightforwardly controversial fiction was losing its mainstream market lustre; certainly, Cyril Westward had far less of an impact than mid-century novels like Geraldine and Loss and Gain, which arguably had said it all before.
Cyril Westward represents what we could call the self-confident mode in Catholic controversial literature. As a genre, the controversial novel (as opposed to controversial fictions more generally) started on the Protestant side of the equation, and Catholic responses from the 1820s to the 1840s were often rather beholden to Protestant strategies, especially Biblical prooftexting. By contrast, like many later Catholic controversial novels, Cyril Westward features almost no quotations from the Bible at all, except for a rerun of St. Augustine's famous Tolle, lege. Instead, it focuses on ecclesiastical history ("'With regard to the Third Canon of the Second General Council at Constantinople...'" [118]), nearly always to demonstrate that the Pope is, indeed, the Supreme Head of the Church. In turning to history, Catholic controversialists insisted that the evidentiary record charted only the decline and fall of Anglicanism from its Catholic original. History reveals Catholicism's sameness and Anglicanism's difference: "Do these champions for the historic continuity of the Church of England, he thought, really imagine that their religion very much resembles the religion that the endowments were given to perpetuate?" (20) Protestants who obsess over the late "definition" of doctrines, as the Catholic priest Father Fairfield remarks, mistake clarification for novelty (85). This question of continuity and papal authority had become newly topical, thanks to Leo XIII's Apostolicae Curae (1896), which concluded that Anglican orders were invalid; much of the novel in fact revolves around clerical angst about this. In other words, Cyril Westward seizes on the papal bull to force Anglicans to face the problem of a united visible church with a single head.
As far as the novel is concerned, disunity is the name of the Protestant game. The "wonderful comprehensiveness of the English Church" (48) turns out to be a sign of its endemic fragmentation; in encouraging, or at least tolerating, widely-varied opinions on matters of grave theological import (baptism, the Eucharist, eternal punishment), the CofE constantly bodies forth the absence that lies at its center. "The only people who seem to know what authority and obedience mean," sighs Cyril's cousin (and would-be love interest) Amy, "seem to be the Roman Catholics" (77). This causes all the more angst for Cyril because he is slated to take orders and succeed his uncle to the family living. The novel consists of Cyril and various other symbolically-named characters (Seking, Broadway, Bubbler, Gaudful...) discoursing at considerable length about theology, hermeneutics, and the like. (Cyril's last name appears to derive from his arguments against the Eastern Church as a viable alternative to Catholicism; when he converts, he heads West, not East.) Notably, although even the Broad Church Mr. Broadway points out that there must be a "present interpreter, teacher, guide" (46) for Biblical interpretation, disallowing both sola scriptura and attempts to harken back to a mythical "Primitve Church" (46), there's little in the way of such interpretation going on. Nor is there very much in the way of Catholic dogma, liturgy, and the like; we hear little about transubstantiation (although respect for the Eucharist crops up repeatedly), the Virgin Mary, or the necessity of confession, although all of these topics wander through. Instead, as the title indicates, the novel is about characters seeking to make a decision. They want to rest, as the novel repeatedly puts it, and they cannot rest anywhere except where there is a power at work that transcends the anarchism of local and individual desires.
By focusing on the quest for reasons to convert, Cyril Westward offers one more hint at its debt to John Henry Newman, whose ghost hovers over the narrative, and whose letters are treated as almost sacred documents. Besides citing Newman's theological work repeatedly, Cyril Westward borrows Loss and Gain's satirical take on what it represents as Anglo-Catholicism's rag-bag nature (Gaudful has "the Latin Missal bound up with part of our Book of Common Prayer" [61]) and religious antiquarianism in general, along with the onslaught of clegy with comical names. (Newman, however, had a rather better sense of humor. Make that a sense of humor. Russell's is...dubious.) Where the novel departs from Loss and Gain is in its more extensive discussion of religious aesthetics, something which Newman effectively brackets (his hero finds peace in a church that looks like a brick warehouse, basically). Anglo-Catholic aesthetics come in for particular critique; studying an Anglican church got up to look like its Catholic counterpart, the characters fault their inability to feel "a sense of awe" (73). Anglicans, in other words, have no sense of the true beauty of holiness; their churches are fundamentally bric-a-brac.
Ultimately, however, reasons matter less than the gift of grace, a point the novel makes with the deathbed conversion of Cyril's scapegrace cousin Robert. (Robert does find ample time to speechify before his death, despite being in agonizing pain.) Robert admits to his sister that "I have taken so much of my time to come to a decision" (226), invoking the novel's main theme, but the narrator reminds us later that this was through the "Divine Compassion" (228). Given that Robert has spent most of the novel snarking, therefore supplying what little entertainment the book deigns to provide, it's exasperating to find him killed off instead of Cyril. But the point is clear: "'Who'd have thought of his outstripping us?'" says Cyril's friend and would-be fellow Catholic Probyn. "'Happy Robert! Verily God's ways are wonderful!'" (231) Even though the novel is loaded with angsty seeking after truth, it is Robert, who has spent the shortest amount of time seeking, who joyously gives up himself to God. By contrast, Cyril and Mr. Seking, who feel weighted with temporal concerns--Seking, in particular, will lose his living and his livelihood, potentially shipwrecking his family--have, in a sense, used their ongoing theological debates as a means of evading grace. After all, it turns out that the grave decision is precisely one that cannot be made by the self alone...
1 See W. Gordon Gorman, Converts to Rome: A Biographical List of the More Notable Converts to the Roman Catholic Church in the United Kingdom during the Last Sixty Years (London: Sands and Co., 1910), 240-41.