25. Selected sermons: A Selection from the Occasional Sermons of Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, ed. Evelyn Waugh
Monsignor Knox's literary career has been one that we can contemplate with unusual satisfaction. So often the wit of his year, the delight of the common rooms, fades out in middle life or (worse still) continues in his grey hairs to let off the same sort of squibs that made his reputation as a freshman. Monsignor Knox's work, on the other hand, has shown continual enrichment; from topical lampooner to translator of the Bible, the ascent has been marked at every step by increasingly valuable productions. He would have some right, if he were that sort of man to complain of insufficient recognition. The important introduction to Essays in Satire (without reading which no man should presume to write on Falstaff) has been strangely neglected by literary specialists, and his New Testament received rather less attention than a mere curiosity like the ‘Basic’ version. Yet its handling of the Pauline epistles could hardly be bettered. If it is complained that Monsignor Knox lacks the colour and melody of the Authorised Version, he can reply ‘Salva reverentia, so did St Paul’.
The present volume shows its author in a less familiar light, in his pastoral capacity. By Mr Waugh's calculation Monsignor Knox must in his time have preached about fifteen hundred sermons: we are offered eleven, and cannot help feeling that a larger selection in a humbler and cheaper form would have been more welcome. Monsignor Knox is not an author who requires the fine printing and wide margins.
Yet he can bear them. He is not indeed, and no one expected him to be, one of the floral preachers, like Fisher or Taylor, but neither is he (in his own words) ‘a conscientious Philistine’ like Faber or Latimer. These little homilies are works of art. He has not ventured to recall the medieval liberty of joking in the pulpit, though no man could more happily have made the venture, and his wit, ever present as a controlling force, comes to the surface only at rare moments. Sometimes it does so in an epigram that might be by Chesterton: ‘a hundred years ago our enemies blamed us for thinking wrong, to-day they blame us for thinking’. More often it finds a disguised outlet in oxymoron, or what the Elizabethans would call conceits. (‘In a Jesuit school martyrdom is on the syllabus’ – ‘That creative afterthought, It is not good for man to be alone’.)
But we must not number among the conceits what will appear to some the audacity of the prayer: ‘May the face of Jesus Christ show gay and gentle to him’. That is only the great tradition of Lady Julian's ‘homely and courteous’ revived; a welcome revival. But all such passages are the plums, not the cake. The texture of the work is very plain, the masculine style of one who can use language at his ease because he has long been a scholar and who can be grave without being portentous because he has often been merry. Only once does it suffer by the transition from the spoken to the printed word; the fourth sentence from the end of the last sermon does not run easily.
Monsignor Knox's matter cannot, in the nature of the case, demand the same universal response as his style. He is addressing his co-religionists and there are (naturally) no concessions to nous autres. He is indeed adroit in the art of implying unmeasured condemnation without exactly saying anything uncharitable or uncivil; thus the parallel and contrast between Lord Northcliffe and Edward the Confessor in the first sermon becomes a thing to make the blood run cold. But in almost every piece there is much that will find a welcome outside the author's Church as well as within.
A Coronation sermon is in our days an unpromising thing: we yawn (loyally, but still we yawn) at the thought. Monsignor Knox starts with the naked fact that we ‘are putting a gold crown on the head of a man like ourselves and telling him that he is a more important person than we are’, and from this goes on to develop a profound defence of monarchy. Marriage sermons often warn the young couple of the ‘sacrifices’ necessary in married life, but the word ‘sacrifice’, as it has now been degraded, may mean anything or nothing. Monsignor Knox warns them of ‘a curtailment, a diminishing, of the individual life’; after that we listen.
Elsewhere the interest is more personal and historical. The preacher's own experience has given him a peculiar and poignant insight into the spiritual history of Newman. There is an unforgettable sentence here about the ‘grace of conversion’ as it ‘first comes to a man, still very far off like the sound of a gnat singing in his ears’. But the best of all is ‘Individuality’. Our Lord did not speak only of lilies, but of this lily, held in His hand. The occasion of that sermon was a meeting of the British Association.