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Neville Hunter Watts
I DON'T KNOW WHAT INTEREST
MY LIFE SHOULD HAVE FOR anyone else, sufficient to make it worth
while to describe it or anyone else's to read. But, after all,
every individual life has something unique in it, something which,
could it be communicated, would contribute to the sum of man's
knowledge of his race. I'm just one of the human crowd, most
human in my failings and my self-importance; but in the sight
of my Maker I have a peculiar value and a special import. There's
a pigeon-hole in heaven where my papers are docketed. And it
isn't everyone who has been undeservedly lucky enough to find
a Way of Life-a way that makes life add up and come close to
a reasonable result, as I have. Everyone's life is different,
but some lives are more different than others. -
I was one of the large family
of an Anglican clergyman, and I was brought up to be "good,
like father," who, in my eyes, could do no wrong. To be
good meant to be like Jesus Christ, to be obedient and gentle
and honest, not to pull my sisters' hair, and not to play with
my toys (except Noah's Ark) on Sundays. On my walks with my mother
or nurse, I would occasionally meet a Catholic priest (generally
fat, and rather shabby) or a pair of nuns, and, on enquiry about
them, I would be told that they bowed down to images, worshipped
the Virgin Mary, and devoted their efforts to "getting hold"
of simple Protestants, especially rich ones.
Throughout my boyhood and adolescence
I was, by my mother's influence and prayers (for which I have
never ceased gratefully to bless her memory) preserved from the
grosser sins. Twice I was swept emotionally off my feet by religious
spasms: once after Confirmation, when in the presence of my embarrassed
family I went to my knees and burst into tears in the dining-room;
once, at the age of seventeen, when a celebrated revivalist preacher
conducted a week's mission in my father's church. But these were
both transient and, in my second year at Cambridge, I avowed
myself as an agnostic, and for the next seven years I never,
except to comply with college rules or to conform to my family
when I was at home, entered any place of worship.
After graduating I applied
for and obtained the post of Classical master at Downside, a
celebrated English Catholic school. My parents, who had expected
that my lapse into irreligion would prove as transient as my
earlier phases of religiosity, had not resigned the hope that
I would enter the Anglican ministry, and were strongly opposed
to my connecting myself with a Papist institution; crucifixes
in all the class-rooms, my father urged, would surely be most
distasteful to me. But I pointed out that, having refused to
swallow anything, I was secure from the fate of being tempted
to swallow everything, and that my choice of the post was due
merely to its being situated in a part of England which I had
known and loved in walking-tours.
The school was run by Benedictine
monks, and among them, and among my pupils, I soon found friends.
I taught Latin and Greek, I played cricket, I walked in the beautiful
countryside, and I was supremely happy. But, though I soon outgrew
my prejudices against the Catholic Church, I drew no nearer to
her. I invented a nature-religion of my own, whose high priests
were Wordsworth and Shelley. One evening, in converse with a
Catholic lay colleague, I threw out some ill-considered and probably
ill-mannered jibe at the Church. My friend, with perfect firmness
and perfect good humour, proceeded to dress me down until I was
no more than a limp rag. I was humiliated, but my humiliation
germinated within me and slowly, in the year that followed, grew
into a realization of the meaning of the Church. I fought against
this, even to the extent of breaking off my engagement to a Catholic
girl on the ground that our religious differences amounted to
an incompatibility which would make married happiness impossible.
She became a nun, and I have no doubt that it was her prayers
that broke down my resistance to the light and brought the truth
into clear focus. I put myself under instruction, and after six
months was received into the Church.
My Protestant relatives, deeply
resentful at my defection, were at pains to represent my 'lapse'
into 'Romanism' as the reaction of a weak and malleable nature
to its environment; it was just a case of protective assimilation
to background. The first World War wrenched me away from this
background and probably gave my family to hope that my delusions
would succumb to an alien and possibly hostile milieu. And it
might well have proved so, but for the grace of God. Sunday Mass
was intermittent, chaplains were rare birds, and the only other
Catholic officer in my battalion had given up the practice of
his religion and was a man of low, indeed of no, morals.
On my return from the war,
I resumed my teaching routine, trying to infect my pupils with
my own passion for the literature, and above all for the poetry,
of the two languages commonly known as 'dead'-the two most alive
languages in humanity-Greek and Latin. Out of these has grown
the literature of the English-speaking races, and my love for
this grew with and out of my love for the former. I spent a summer
holiday in making a selection of English medieval religious poetry,
which Burns and Oates published in 1924, under the title Love
Songs of Sion. I worked at two volumes of translations of Cicero's
speeches for the Loeb Library. In 1937 Burns and Oates brought
out a small collection of my verses, Pedant Poems, as to the
value of which I am under no illusion. More important and more
formative than these was my taking up lecturing in 1926 for the
Workers' Educational Association. This organization, non-political
and non-sectarian, provides for adults in scores of towns and
villages all over England evening courses in a wide variety of
subjects, the only limitation being that the instruction shall
be nonvocational,-education for life, not for livelihood. I threw
myself into this work with avidity, travelling distances up to
thirty miles or more after my day's work in school, often three
evenings in the week. My audience would number sometimes sixty,
sometimes six. I would talk as a low-brow to low-brows. By this
I mean that I was not interested, and made it no part of my business
to interest my class, in the snob-values of literature,-its use
as a means of social or vocational advancement. I tried to present
literature, and above all poetry, to them as a means to fuller
and deeper life for themselves because it would help them, paradoxically,
to live not in and for themselves but in and for others, to care
more about more things. "Christianity taught us to care.
Caring is the great thing, caring matters most," wrote von
Huegel on his death-bed. Great literature, too, teaches us to
care, and so can be a handmaid to religion.
During more than twenty years
of this work, members of my classes had from time to time told
me that they would like to have some record of my talks. So in
1946, I sent a selection of them to a publisher-a Catholic publisher,
as I was confident that my angle on literature had been a Catholic
angle. The book was accepted by Sheed and Ward, published under
the title The Vision Splendid, and has found a fair number of
readers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Such has been my brief and
spasmodic literary output. If it has any import at all, it may
be summed up in lines which perhaps contain more truth and value
than all else that I have written put together:
To set thy heart a harp to every breeze;
To greet life's grandeur on adoring knees;
To see the world as pitying Godhead sees,
One-souled, one-hearted with "the least of these"-
This is the end of all philosophies.
Originally published by
Walter Romig in The Book of Catholic Authors
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