Fiction and the Age of Faith

Extract

At Intervals during the past hundred years the historical novel has turned away from the court and the camp to occupy itself with religion, often with enormous popular success. Between Hypatia and II Santo two of the best sellers of their day were Quo Vadis? and John Inglesant. They are still to be found on bookshelves from which those other historical novels, Barabbas and The Sorrows of Satan, have been cast out. Religion in itself; the religious adventure; the problems of conduct and belief; the opposition of the Church—all have long occupied, and continue to occupy modem writers; but it is only in the present decade, with Miss H. F. M. Prescott’s Man on a Donkey, that historical fiction has returned to the Age of Faith.

The immediate gain is immense. We escape from investigations of tortured conscience and the conflicts of post-Reformation theology and practice and are once more involved in the crowded freedom of action based on an accepted creed, an obeyed authority. Haugenier de Linnières, the newly knighted hero of Madame Oldenbourg’s novel, The Corner Stone, goes none too willingly with the pseudo-crusade against the Albigenses. He had heard it said ‘that Raymond of Toulouse had never worshipped the devil; that war against him was not really a holy war. He thought these were quibbling considerations. You go to God’s defence or you do not.’ You also play at I’amour courtois—liberal shepherds give it a grosser name—with another man’s wife who plays at virtue in exquisite raiment and in exquisite vernal settings.