Edward Short

(Gracewing, 2023, 508 pp.)

Reviewed by Ellen Wilson Fielding

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The author of this hefty collection of essays and reviews will be well known to readers of the Human Life Review: For a number of years now Edward Short’s finely articulated essays, weaving great literary illuminati and their works together with themes common to Western Civilization’s fast-dissipating deposit of wisdom, have appeared with welcome regularity. What the Bells Sang: Essays and Reviews is a compilation of work originally composed not only for the Human Life Review, but for The Catholic Herald, The Bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society, the Weekly Standard, City Journal, and Catholic World Report; our readers will not only have the benefit of reacquainting themselves with old favorites but of dipping into many pages of fresh material.

Short breaks up What the Bells Sang into genre categories: Poets (including Hardy, Kipling, Eliot, and Auden), Moralists (including Abigail Adams, C.S. Lewis, Samuel Johnson, and Edmund Burke), Historians (with reappearances by Burke and Hardy among others), Novelists (including Trollope, Henry James, Huysmans, and Evelyn Waugh), and Biographers. Near the end there is a special category of seven pieces exploring aspects of Short’s beloved Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman.

In Short’s introduction, which he titles “Confessions of a Catholic Essayist,” he defends himself against the charge of viewing his subjects through a biased religious lens:

. . . my answer to that is that all writing is biased, and certainly a Catholic bias is better than a Marxist or, indeed, a secular bias. . . . Catholic bias, after all, . . . puts one beyond the pale of fashion, which is a good place to be, when so many within that pale spend most of their days following the silliest or, as the case may be, the most sinister hula hoops. The good Catholic essayist is a sign of contradiction; a just, sympathetic, generous guide to the good work of others; but always a defender of the good, the beautiful and the true, even when being so exposes him to opprobrium or marginalization.

And “a just, sympathetic, generous guide to the good work of others” Short repeatedly proves himself to be. For what he shares in these appreciations of literary masters is that the vantage point of each—the soil in which they grew and the spiritual and psychological roots from which they sprang—was the goodness, beauty, and truth of Western Civilization’s Christian heritage.

Most (though not all) of Short’s authors were themselves late-blooming products of that civilization, plying their writing trade from the early 1800s through the mid-twentieth century. That means that secular currents of thought were already running strong, and that scientific and mechanistic challenges to traditional religion and morality (including Darwinism, new geological estimates of the Earth’s age, and the deconstructing of the Bible by German skeptical scholars) were making shipwreck of the faith of many Victorians.

As a “good Catholic essayist,” Short can be trusted to tease out all the layers of religious, non-religious, or antireligious sentiment in a Hardy poem or elucidate the extreme domestic challenges through which and within which Christian moralists like Samuel Johnson and C. S. Lewis astringently defended family life. About the latter topic, Short astutely observes, “Yet it is worth noting that, despite all of their familial woes, neither Johnson nor Lewis ever had anything but good things to say about the primacy of the family” (p. 144). Good things—but not trite or treacly or sentimental things. For example, among Lewis’s principles that need to be followed to convert and redeem family life—for, he notes, “like everything else that is human, it needs redemption” (p. 144)—is his fifth principle on the necessity of proper family rules, because “The alternative to rule is not freedom but the . . . tyranny of the most selfish member” (p. 144).

Short’s trustworthiness as both a moral and literary guide makes What the Bells Sang a perfect “dipping” book—readers can confidently follow their fancy in reading this or that essay or review in any or no order, and they will be sure to find gold, as well as learning more about authors they may have thought they knew very well indeed. I found this to be true with many of my favorites, including Samuel Johnson, Henry James, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and Cardinal Newman. Short serves up “Evelyn Waugh’s Displaced Persons” (devoted to Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy) as the Epilogue of this volume, and surely only a “good Catholic essayist” could do such justice to both its lighthearted farce and its moving profundity. So well does Short convey the effervescent comedy of the characters in Waugh’s trilogy—including the “prodigal, promiscuous, ingenuous” Virginia—that the reader may not initially be aware of the wisdom being absorbed about the ways of God and man and the immeasurable value of the human person that God so unaccountably loves.

The meanings Short apprehends from the works he presents throughout What the Bells Sang are particularly pertinent to those of us dealing with the carnage of the current age. Reeling from the clash between timeless truths and modernity’s destructive iconoclasms, we can fall victim to a kind of moral vertigo. But we are in good company. Most of Short’s authors were also attempting to salvage the good, the true, and the beautiful from the mental and moral compromises by which we human beings convince ourselves to snatch what we want, regardless of the fallout to others.

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Original Bio:

—Ellen Wilson Fielding is a senior editor of the Human Life Review.