Off-beat swans' way

Like Black Swans: Some People and Themes by Brocard Sewell (Tabb House £11.95).
FATHER Brocard Sewell has a great knowledge of the byways of English literature and is, as Colin Wilson says in the introduction to this book, "fascinated by rather 'off-beat' figures". The "People" that he has written about here are a varied collection, linked by the fact that all except two were at some state members of the Catholic Church.
One of them — Robert Stephen Hawker, Vicar of Morwenstowe in Corn wall was received into the Church on his deathbed after more than forty years as an Anglican cleric. He was the Pastor of Morwenstowe from 1834 until his death in 1875, and these were years that saw a number of upheavals in religious life, chief among them the Oxford Movement, the secession of Newman and Manning to the Catholic Church and the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species which seemed to some people to invalidate all orthodox religious teaching about creation.
The only thing that I thought I knew about Hawker — other than that he was a clergyman in Cornwall — was that he was the originator of the Harvest Festival which is so popular in the Anglican Church and which still brings many people to church who are not seen there at other times. But, although there is an interesting extract from
Hawker's sermon at a Harvest Festival, Father Sewell does not say that he originated it so I was doubtless mistaken.
There is a piece about that strange figure Frederick William Rolfe, known also as Baron Corvo, who wrote Hadrian VII among other things and was expelled from the Scots College in Rome in 1890 after five months' residence as a student for the priesthood.
There is a study of Philip Howard, brother of the Duke of Norfolk, who was a Dominican and was principal chaplain and Grand Almoner to Catherine of Braganza. He played a principal part in negotiating the marriage of the Duke of York (later James II) with Mary of Modena, and in 1675 after, of course, he had left England for Flanders, he was made a Cardinal.
Other studies in this book are of Father Vincent McNabb, H.D.C. Pepler, Montague Summers (whose strange autobiography, The Galanty Show, Father Sewell has edited) and — Henry Williamson. There is also a "contrast" between Thomas Hardy (the one non-Catholic) and G. K. Chesterton, for whom Father Sewell worked on G. K. 's Weekly.
The author is particularly interested in the literary scene of the 1890s, and one of the "offbeat" figures that he writes about here is Olive Custance, the daughter of a Norfolk squire, who wrote not very good verse and married the odious "Bosie", (Lord Alfred Douglas. They seem to have deserved each other.
The "Themes" of the sub-title
are Monastic Life Today and Catholic Spirituality, Anglican and Roman. Both are very interesting. On the subject of the great decline in vocations in our time and the loss of many young men who start on the religious life and leave before making their final vows, Father Sewell suggests that the reason for this is the present emphasis on doing things, such as teaching, nursing, social work, rather than on the contemplative ideal. "In the end" he writes, "the monk will be judged on the extent to which he has become a man of prayer, a man of God; not on his degree of success or otherwise as a preacher, scholar, writer, artist, teacher or administrator".
The discussion of the similarities and differences between the Catholic and Anglican Churches and the spiritual writings that each has produced is illuminating. I had never thought of the dilemma of the Anglican Church in the first century after the Reformation when they had hardly any religious books written by their own members and hesitated to recommend to their flock the works of earlier Catholic writers. The theme of this piece is especially interesting in the light of the recent refusal of the Anglican clergy in Synod to vote for the "covenant" with the Non-Conformists, which seems to have stemmed largely from the fact that they felt it would remove hopes of ultimate union with Rome.
This is an enjoyable, a thoughtful and a thoughtprovoking book.
June Badeni