Life of Robert Southwell

The Life of Robert Southwell, Poet and Martyr by Christopher Devlin, 324 pages

Born into a well-connected family in England in the middle of the sixteenth century, as a teenager Robert Southwell, possibly under the influence of recusant relations, converted to Catholicism and departed to the Continent where he could practice his faith freely, beyond the reach of Protestant persecution.  Attracted, like many devout young men of the time, to the Society of Jesus, he entered the Jesuits after an initial rejection and became first a student and later a professor at the English College in Rome.  He left behind this position to become a missionary in his homeland, where he managed to minister to the Catholic community for several years before finally being cornered, captured, tortured, and executed.  Southwell's poetry, much of it written while in hiding, would serve as an inspiration to Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, and Hopkins, among others, while his holy life and martyrdom led to his canonization in 1970, 14 years after this biography was published.

In the author's note that begins this biography, Christopher Devlin connects Southwell with St Edmund Campion, the illustrious Jesuit scholar and martyr of the preceding generation, and refers readers to the "brilliant study" of Campion by Evelyn Waugh.  Just as Southwell lived happily in the shadow of Campion, so Devlin writes in the shadow of Waugh.  While Devlin cannot match Waugh's literary genius, he compensates with thorough scholarship, something sorely needed when the historical record is so fragmentary.  

Boyne Water

The Boyne Water: The Battle of the Boyne, 1690 by Peter Berresford Ellis, 152 pages

In 1690, the deposed Catholic King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, James II, backed by France's Louis XIV, seized control of Ireland and attempted to use it as a stepping stone to reclaim his throne from his Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange.  William landed his primarily English and Dutch troops in northern Ireland, and James resolved to use his largely Irish and French army to block William's advance on Dublin at the river Boyne.  The battle was brief, James' forces were routed, and James himself made the defeat seem decisive by returning to France rather than attempting to carry on the fight in Ireland, where his supporters would continue to resist until the Battle of Aughrim the following year.  By the 19th century, the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne became the occasion for annual celebrations by Irish Protestants, and the Battle itself became understood as one of the turning points of Irish history.

According to Peter Berresford Ellis, this is all very exaggerated.  In the context of the Williamite Wars, he argues, it is Aughrim which was the final, decisive defeat, but even more importantly he sees the Jacobite cause as alien to Ireland itself.  Ellis contends that while James was able to rouse the Irish Catholics to his side, his restoration would have had little effect on the course of Irish history.  Indeed, insofar as the struggle was a personal one between rival claimants to the throne, Ellis' sympathy is entirely with William, who conducted his campaign in Ireland with dash and daring, in stark contrast to James, who proved timid and uncertain.

It is precisely in his portrayal of the individuals involved in the battle that Ellis is at his best, presenting an array of memorable characters, from William's grizzled, grumpy general the Duke of Schomberg to the bold cavalier, James' bastard son the Duke of Berwick.  As a result, the narrative of the battle proves highly interesting despite the author's claims that it was not tremendously historically significant.

Mornings in Florence

Mornings in Florence, Being Simple Studies of Christian Art for English Travellers by John Ruskin, 115 pages

Mornings in Florence takes the form of a guidebook, wherein the reader is instructed how to profitably spend six successive mornings in Florence examining the art and architecture of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance.  It is a book written in open contempt for the guidebooks of Ruskin's day, and it is undoubted that he would have been no more impressed by Mr Steves in our day than he was by Mr Murray in his own.  Moving back and forth between Santa Maria Novella, Santa Croce, and the Duomo, the purpose here is less to tell the reader what he should see as how he should see.  And this is a gift that extends to much more than the appreciation of Cimabue and Giotto and Botticelli, great as they are: "Easy or not, it is all the sight required of you in this world - to see things, and men, and yourself - as they are."

Ruskin is able to see things as they are, not because of his excellent education or refined sensibility or even because he was an incredible snob, but because he was not a materialist, not even unconsciously.  Whatever the truths or errors of his personal metaphysics, Ruskin was able to hear that "higher wisdom, governing by her presence, all earthly conduct, and by her teaching, all earthly art, Florence tells you, she obtained only by prayer."

Stoner

Stoner by John Williams, 278 pages

When William Stoner left his parents' small farm to attend the University of Missouri, he never expected that he would be spending the rest of his life there.  By chance he discovers in Archer Sloane's English course a love of literature and poetry he had never known he possessed.  It is a love that remains with him all his life, through disappointments in his career, his romances, his marriage, and his fatherhood.  It is, in the end, the pattern of all his loves, and the one love to which he remains most true.

John Williams, who taught at the same university for a time, is clearly at ease describing familiar places and personalities.  This gives his writing a powerful realism, so that the novel is genuinely moving without being sentimental.  The flap of the first edition describes Stoner as "a man who is clearly out of keeping with his times," and if the lackluster sales of the book upon its publication bear this out, its subsequent rediscovery suggests that Stoner, like Sloane before him, is of a type that exists in all times.