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opposite view, attacked what she perceived as Baring’s “superficiality”. Largely neglected and misunderstood in England, Baring gained solace once again from the empathy exhibited by a more discerning readership across the Channel. In particular, he was “too moved to speak” when, six months before his death in 1945, he learned of the deep admiration that François Mauriac had for his novels. Mauriac had told the Catholic actor Robert Speaight: “What I admire most about Baring’s work is the sense he gives you of the penetration of grace.”
    Perhaps the profundity at the heart of Baring’s fiction was encapsulated in the words of one of the characters from Darby and Joan , his last novel:
“One has to accept sorrow for it to be of any healing power, and that is the most difficult thing in the world. . . . A Priest once said to me, ‘When you understand what accepted sorrow means, you will understand everything. It is the secret of life’.”
    These words, which for Virginia Woolf and others represented Baring’s “superficiality”, were at once both mystical and practical, so practical that Baring put them into practice, accepting his own debilitating illness with a contrite and heroic heart. In 1941, the year in which Virginia Woolf took her own life in an act of despair, Baring answered his earlier complaint that his body was “a broken toy which nobody can mend” with the reply that his soul was “an immortal toy which nobody can mar”.
    Baring’s obituary in the Times on 17 December 1945 regretted that “many English readers” saw his novels as “a form of Roman Catholic propaganda” but maintained that he was “above all concerned to express a passionate conviction that belief in God can alone bring storm-tossed humanity into harbour”. After referring to Baring’s “friendship with the late G. K. Chesterton, and with Mr. Hilaire Belloc”, the obituary concluded with an assessment of Baring’s literary legacy: “Concerning his final position in literature, time may perhaps confirm the judgment of those who see in him one of the subtlest, profoundest, and most original of recent English writers.”
    The emergence of G. K. Chesterton, who entered the literary fray at the dawning of the new century, heralded the second dynamic phase of the Catholic literary revival. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that Chesterton’s role in popularizing Catholicism in the twentieth century was as crucial as Newman’s had been in the previous century. It would also be fair to say that Chesterton’s mind was akin to Newman’s in its ability to communicate timeless truth with seemingly effortless clarity. He hammered the “heretics” in his book of that title and pitted their heresies against infallible “orthodoxy”. Then, in 1909, he became embroiled in the controversy raging in the Church between the traditionalists and the modernists. In prose as profound as Newman’s he argued the case for tradition, labeling it the philosophy of the tree.
I mean that a tree goes on growing, and therefore goes on changing; but always in the fringes surrounding something unchangeable. The innermost rings of the tree are still the same as when it was a sapling; they have ceased to be seen, but they have not ceased to be central. When the tree grows a branch at the top, it does not break away from the roots at the bottom; on the contrary, it needs to hold more strongly to its roots the higher it rises with its branches. That is the true image of the vigorous and healthy progress of a man, a city, or a whole species.
    The modernists, by contrast, did not subscribe to such a concept of tradition, believing instead in “something that changes completely and entirely in every part, at every minute, like a cloud. . . . Now, if this merely cloudy and boneless development be adopted as a philosophy, then there can be no place for the past and no possibility of a complete culture. Anything may be here