Catholic Church Interiors in Fin-de-Siècle Literature (2023)

2Church interiors in fin-de-siècle literary texts are usually constructed aesthetically in opposition to an exterior—a polarised vision of space which mirrors the Decadent view of the Catholic Church as a kind of shelter, a space radically antagonistic to the industrialised, utilitarian urban world outside (the theme of the refuge is central to fin-de-siècle literature, as illustrated in K.-J.Huysmans’s À rebours, published in1884, a novel entirely devoted to the evocation of Des Esseintes’s retreat to an isolated house in Fontenay-aux-Roses, far from the hustle and bustle of the city). The incompatibility between an ideal of beauty, embodied in the aesthetic experience of entering a Catholic church, and the coarseness of the modern world, is reflected in a letter by the poet Ernest Dowson to his friend Arthur Moore, written in1891, a few months before the former’s conversion to Roman Catholicism.

You ought to have come to N.D. de France tonight. There was a procession after Vespers of the Children of Mary.... It was a wonderful & beautiful situation: the church—rather dark the smell of incense—the long line of graceful little girls all with their white veils over their heads—banners—: a few sad faced nuns—and last of all the priest carrying the Host, vested in white—censed by an acolyte who walked backwards—tossing his censer up ‘like a great gilt flower’: and to come outside afterwards—London again—the sullen streets and the sordid people & Leicester Square. (Dowson1967, 172‒73)

3All the clichés of fin-de-siècle Catholicism can be found here: incense, Latin, the acolyte, disincarnate nuns, Marian devotion, and, most strikingly, the opposition between this picturesque and symbolically rich Catholic microcosm and the dull world outside it. Asimilar opposition emerges in Lionel Johnson’s sonnet ‘Our Lady of France’, written in the same year as Dowson’s poem(1891), which also refers to the French Catholic parish in London, and which begins with those lines:

Leave we awhile the turmoil of the town;
Leave we the sullen gloom, the faces full of care:
Stay we awhile and dream, within this place of prayer,
Stay we, and pray, and dream: till our hearts die down
Thoughts of the world, unkind and weary: till Christ crown
Laborious day with love. Hark! On the fragrant air,
Music of France, voices of France, fall piercing fair
(Johnson 1982, 13‒14)

4The poem begins with a deliberate displacement (‘Leave we’), then unfolds around an invocation of the foreignness of the place, which is the source of its beauty (‘Music of France, voices of France’). The church becomes a space of spiritual expatriation in the heart of London, an exterior interior. The opposition in Dowson’s letter and Johnson’s poem between ‘the turmoil of the town’, ‘the sullen gloom’, ‘the sullen streets and the sordid people’ on the one hand (notably, both writers use the adjective ‘sullen’ to describe the exterior world), and the peaceful, dark interior of the church with its incense-laden air on the other hand, is a recurrent theme in Decadent poetry. The interior of the church is represented as a distinct, radically separate sacred space.

5There is theological ground for such a view. Whereas in most Protestant denominations a church is essentially a functional building used for Sunday worship, churches in Catholicism are holy, consecrated spaces. The Protestant theologian Henry Mottu comments on this distinction in the following terms:

pour les protestants, le sacré n’est pas un ordre ou un lieu à part, hors de la réalité quotidienne, mais il est une exigence, un principe moral: «le sacré de ce qui doit être» (holiness of what ought to be). Le protestantisme, en première analyse, est donc la dissolution de l’opposition entre sacré et profane, car la grâce ne saurait s’identifier à aucune réalité visible, humaine, fût-elle l’Église et ses sacrements. Dieu seul est sacré. (Mottu1338)

6Dowson and Johnson distance themselves from this Protestant dissolution of the distinction between the secular and the sacred: for them, to enter a Catholic church is to tear themselves away from the profane world of the English city, and to enter a holy space. Many fin-de-siècle texts illustrate this interior-exterior dialectic. Ernest Dowson’s poem ‘Benedictio Domini’, for instance, like Johnson’s ‘Our Lady of France’, contrasts the silent, contemplative darkness of a Catholic church with the noise of the city around it:

Without, the sullen noises of the street!
The voice of London, inarticulate,
Hoarse and blaspheming, surges in to meet
The silent blessing of the Immaculate.

Dark is the church, and dim the worshippers,
Hushed with bowed heads as though by some old spell,
While through the incense-laden air there stirs
The admonition of a silver bell.

Dark is the church, save where the altar stands,
Dressed like a bride, illustrious with light,
Where one old priest exalts with tremulous hands
The one true solace of man’s fallen plight.

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Strange silence here: without, the sounding street
Heralds the world’s swift passage to the fire:
O benediction, perfect and complete!
When shall men cease to suffer and desire?
(Dowson1934, 18)

7The semantic series on noise that emerges in the first stanza (‘noises’, ‘voice’, ‘inarticulate’, ‘hoarse’), taken up by the adjective ‘sounding’ in the last stanza, is contrasted with the lexical field of silence in the description of the church (‘silent’, ‘hushed’, ‘silence’). The emphasis on the adverb ‘without’, which is the first word of the poem, and the chiasmus in the last stanza constructed around the adverbs of place ‘here’ and ‘without’ (‘Strange silence here: without, the sounding street’) underline the radical incompatibility of the exterior world and the interior space of the church.

8The opposition between the secular and the sacred takes on a different meaning in Theodore Wratislaw’s 1893 poem ‘Palm Sunday’, which also describes the celebration of mass in a Catholic church in London, but follows the opposite movement. Whereas Johnson’s ‘Our Lady of France’ and Dowson’s ‘Benedictio Domini’ begin with the hustle and bustle of the city outside, before taking the reader into the quiet space of the church, ‘Palm Sunday’ opens inside the church, and ends outside, in Hyde Park:

The clouds of incense mounting in the air,
The heavy fervent smell,
Palm branches waving by the altar-stair,
While we redeemed from hell,

We knelt together humbly, she and I,
Before the red-stained East,
To seek for mercy for our sin, as high
The purple-vestured priest

Held up the chalice to the face of God,
And a long silence fell,
Three times and as the wine became God’s blood
Thrice rang the smitten bell.

Then like two slaves regaining liberty,
When the long mass was done,
With prayer and sadness left behind us, we
Emerged into the sun,

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Forgot what hearts had felt or eyes had seen
And gave ourselves to mark
Friends’ faces as we talked and strolled between
The toilettes of Hyde Park.
(Wratislaw16‒17)

9The sacred awe induced by the celebration of mass in the church is followed by a sense of frivolity and also of a kind of relief when the two protagonists leave the church. The sensorily overloaded space of the church is succeeded by the sunny space of the park, a place for carefree walks and sociability. The poem presents a purely aesthetic vision of the interior of the church: it is above all the stage for intense and ephemeral sensations, which the two characters forget as soon as they leave the church—just as they would leave the theatre after a performance. This symbolic opposition between a space saturated with sacred elements and a profane space is also found in the third sonnet of Wratislaw’s1896 series of love poems entitled ‘Songs to Elizabeth’. The quatrains describe the end of mass and the passage from the church to the outside world. The atmosphere inside the church suggests an opium den rather than a place of worship: as in ‘Palm Sunday’, the church serves as a sensory stimulant, eliciting rich and intense impressions and visual and olfactory pleasure, in contrast to the blandness of the outside world:

As when the prayers and chants have passed away,
At mass, when nave and chancel are dense
With purple fumes of cloud-like curled incense,
One bows before the altar’s sovereign sway

And wanders forth into the garish day,
Waking as after slumber from the tense
And strange delight of the exalted sense
Unto the dull world’s hurry and delay:

So you being gone out of my life and soul,
Gold censer on whose breath my life was fed!
Monstrance that held of old love’s sacred bread!

I am as one that runs without a goal....
(Wratislaw34)

10In the tercets, we understand that the scene presented in the quatrains has a metaphorical function, expressing in an analogical mode the poet’s distress after the departure of his beloved. Here the contrast between interior and exterior only serves as a metaphoric expression of unrequited love.

11From these poets’ perspective, as in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s two sonnets entitled ‘The Church Porch’, the threshold of the church is truly a passage between two worlds, between two incommensurable realities. This is emphasised by John Oliver Hobbes (pseudonym of the writer Pearl Craigie, another fin-de-siècle convert to Roman Catholicism), in her1897 novel The School for Saints, as she describes the moment when her characters Robert Orange and Lord Reckage enter a Jesuit church:

As the two young men crossed the threshold of the Church, the sight which opened before them was like a dream imprisoned in a rock. The dark stone cavernous building, where shadowy forms were kneeling in prayer and praise, seemed a hollow not made with hands, and the light on the high altar shone through the mist of incense as something wholly supernatural yet living and sacred. (Hobbes217‒18)

12In addition to the elements identified in the poets quoted above (the darkness, the incense, the kneeling figures), this passage is also imbued with a supernatural, almost fantastic atmosphere. The church is no longer a monument built by man but a kind of ghostly cave, filled with disembodied shadows, transfigured by the light of the candles whose glow emerges from a darkness clouded by incense. We are no longer in the tangible universe of the city, but in ‘a dream imprisoned in rock’.

13This construct of the church interior as radically opposed to the exterior world is reflective of what William Whyte calls the ‘notion that the church building should inspire a particular economy of emotion—should be set apart from the emotional landscape of the outside world’ (Whyte80). For him, this is a typically Victorian notion. He argues that ‘the belief that the church was a distinctively different sort of building—and one that evoked emotions differently’ gained universal acceptance in the Victorian era, when the dominant understanding of church buildings became what he calls the ‘architecture of affect’ (Whyte92). He argues that ‘the first few decades of Victoria’s reign... saw the evolution of a new idea of affective architecture: architecture that shaped the emotions by touching the senses’, and he explains that ‘the notion that churches should move worshippers, that buildings should themselves shape spiritual experience, marked a radical departure from the Protestant architecture of the recent past’. (Whyte69)

14To illustrate this point, he quotes John Harvey’s study of 18th–century Welsh chapels. According to Harvey, the architecture of Protestant worship before the Victorian era was based on two principles: first, it drew attention to the congregation, to the community of the faithful rather than to the celebrant or to the furnishings and decoration; secondly, the spare interior, creating a visually neutral context of worship, was an attempt at conveying the idea that God was invisible. This is what anthropologist David Morgan calls ‘sublation’(168‒70), which Whyte defines as ‘the deliberate downplaying of one sense (in this case, sight) in order to emphasise another (in this case, hearing)’(72).

15Obviously, the way church interiors are represented in fin-de-siècle literature is completely at odds with this aniconic tendency of Protestant architecture. To begin with, the community of worshippers is strikingly absent from these texts: the focus is not on the congregation, but on the altar, and on what is going on around the altar (the celebration of the sacrifice of mass, the incense, the altar lights, the priest and his acolytes, etc). Moreover, the context of worship in fin-de-siècle representations of church interiors is anything but auditory and transparent; on the contrary, it is extremely visual (with an emphasis on incense, stained glass, colours) and material, with the central presence of objects such as the censer, the bells, the monstrance, the chalice, and the vestments—all elements which were extremely polemical in the religious context of Victorian Britain, because they were associated both with ‘Popishness’ or ‘Romishness’ (in reference to Roman Catholicism), and with ritualism, (which was perceived as the infiltration of Roman Catholic practices within the Anglican Church).

16Indeed, church decoration and liturgical practices took on a charged political dimension in the second half of the 19thcentury. In1872 the Privy Council made liturgical vestments, the use of wafer bread for communion, the eastward position of the altar, and the mixing of water and wine in the chalice illegal. The Public Worship Regulation Act was passed in August1874 to limit the growing ritualism within the Church of England, perceived as dangerously ‘Romish’. This act concerned ‘any alteration in or addition to the fabric, ornaments, or furniture... made without lawful authority’ and ‘any decoration forbidden by law’ in churches. The intense religious but also political debates about church interiors show how sensitive these issues were in the late 19thcentury. Many anti-ritualist pamphlets were published, denouncing the idolatrous practice of re-organising and adorning church interiors.

17For example, Colonel S.Dewé White denounced in1881 the fact that ‘the Ritualists have introduced into the Church Romish decorations, gorgeous processions, the lighting of candles, the use of crosses, incense, and birettas, and other objectionable innovations’ (White11). In a similar vein, in ‘Ritualism Traced to its Pagan Origins’, an1878 pamphlet, the Reverend H.C.Leonard argued that Roman Catholicism and ritualism were idolatrous because they were directly derived from the ancient Roman religion, and explained that Catholic and ritualist churches were just modern transpositions of pagan temples: ‘The worship of the Pagan temples was highly ritualistic and imposing to the senses. Music charmed the ear, and the sweet perfume of incense filled the atmosphere. In worship they turned to the East.... Candles lighted were placed on the altar.... After the sacrifice the image of the god was locked up’ like communion wafers in the tabernacle in Catholicism (Leonard7‒8). Leonard then makes parallels with the early history of the Christian Church: ‘Incense was retained in the churches, once temples. Candles were placed on altars as before the re-dedication, gorgeous vestments clothed the Christian ministers now called priests. Thus came in Ritualism’ (Leonard7‒8).

18One can see how these controversies around ritualism concerned, among other things, the organisation and decoration of church interiors, two aspects of which appear in the fin-de-siècle depictions of church interiors quoted above, i.e. the eastward position, and altar lights. The eastward position (one of the ritualist practices condemned by the Privy Council in1872) designates a liturgical usage which consists in the priest celebrating the Eucharist with his back to the congregation, facing the altar from the same side as the people—as was the practice before the Reformation, and in the Roman Catholic Church prior to the VaticanII Council—instead of ‘at the north side of the Table’, as required by the 1662 Book of Common Prayer(246). In terms of church architecture, this meant that the Eucharist was celebrated on a stone altar fixed to the back of the chancel rather than on a wooden communion table. Words themselves were fraught: the use of the word altar suggested Romish or ritualist sympathies, and was associated with ancient pagan practices. Stone altars in churches had been replaced by wooden tables in1550, and mainstream Evangelical Anglicans in the Victorian period used the phrase ‘communion table’ instead of ‘altar’, thus emphasising the utilitarian and communal character of the object rather than its intrinsic sacredness.

22Most of the texts quoted in this article represent the church as a dark space: Dowson’s letter evokes ‘the church—rather dark’, Johnson in ‘Our Lady of France’ repeats anaphorically ‘Dark is the church’, and Hobbes’s Jesuit church is described as a ‘dark stone cavernous building’. This enclosing darkness can be understood in various ways, as standing for the archetypal maternal womb, as the materialisation of Mircea Eliade’s regressus at uterum(123), or as a space of initiation or regeneration. It also draws on anti-Catholic clichés that associate Catholicism with darkness, both literally (Catholic churches were often dark) and figuratively, and Protestantism with light—the white-washed walls and clear glass windows of Protestant churches, but also metaphorically the light of acuity of perception, intelligibility and reason. But the effect of this dark setting is also theatrical: the dim atmosphere of the church draws the attention of the characters—and of the reader—to the taper-lit altar, which becomes the focal point of the description. Indeed, fin-de-siècle depictions of church interiors often play dramatically with the chiaroscuro effect produced by the presence of altar lights—a typically Catholic (and ritualist) practice, which was denounced by Evangelical Anglicans. In his pamphlet on the supposedly pagan origins of ritualism, for instance, Leonard explains that in ancient Roman paganism ‘Candles lighted were placed on the altar’(7‒8), and then makes a parallel with the Catholic and ritualist usage of lighting the altar with tapers (his thesis being that Catholic and ritualist churches are just modern transpositions of pagan temples, reflecting the worshippers’ idolatrous religion).

23Several examples of the fin-de-siècle fondness for altar lights can be found in the texts of the period. Ernest Dowson, in the aforementioned poem ‘Benedictio Domini’, describes the altar as ‘Dressed like a bride, illustrious with light’, an image echoed in his story ‘The Diary of a Successful Man’, in which the narrator attends a religious service in a Catholic church in Bruges, hoping to see the countess whom he once loved and who has become a nun. While the service begins with the altar server, ‘taper in hand, ...gradually transforming the gloom of the high altar in a blaze of light’ (Dowson1947, 46), it ends on a return to the initial darkness:

• 6 Note the reference to the perpetual light of the tabernacle.

When the service was over and the people had streamed out and dispersed, I went back for the last time into the quiet church. A white robed server was extinguishing the last candle on the altar; only the one red light perpetually vigilant before the sanctuary made more visible the shadows everywhere.(48)⁶

24Similarly, John Oliver Hobbes in The School for Saints focuses on ‘the light on the high altar [that] shone through the mist of incense as something wholly supernatural yet living and sacred’ (Hobbes218), and while the Young King, in Wilde’s story, ‘[kneels] before the image of Christ’, ‘the great candles [burn] brightly by the jewelled shrine’ (Wilde221). One could add to those examples Wilde’s negative dream of ‘an altar, on which no taper burned’ in De Profundis (Wilde1019).

25Such aesthetic tastes in church decoration and liturgical practices were frequently lampooned in the late Victorian period. In his satirical essay ‘The Cultured Faun’, Johnson himself gently mocked the Decadent taste for altar lights: ‘Here comes in a tender patronage of Catholicism: white tapers upon a high altar, an ascetic and beautiful young priest, the great gilt monstrance, the subtle-scented and mystical incenses’ (Johnson1966, 111). In The New Republic, W.H.Mallock’s 1877 satiric novel about Oxford aestheticism, MrRose (a thinly veiled caricature of Walter Pater) is fascinated by the chiaroscuro of ritualist churches, with their darkness and tapers: ‘“I every now and then,” said MrRose, “when I am in the weary mood for it, attend the services of our English Ritualists, and I admire their churches very much indeed. In some places the whole thing is really managed with surprising skill”’ (Mallock273). This declaration is followed by a description of the church: ‘The dim religious twilight, fragrant with the smoke of incense; the tangled roofs that the music seems to cling to; the tapers, the high altar, and the strange intonation of the priests’(273). The tapers, standing out in the dark atmosphere of the church, are here ironically described as props in the elaborate stagecraft of Anglo-Catholic church interiors.

26The light produced by tapers on church altars contributes to creating a highly visual setting, made of dramatic contrasts and light effects. It reflects the taste for sensory—and more specifically visual—intensity which characterises late-Victorian attitudes to the layout and decoration of churches. This emphasis on sight is central to understanding the aesthetic and religious significance of fin-de-siècle church interiors. In the first chapter of Unlocking the Church, aptly entitled ‘Seeing’, William Whyte describes 18th–century churches as ‘machines for listening in’(43) or ‘preaching boxes’(48), spaces where ‘Function even dictated the furnishings, with acoustic effect uppermost’(42). The interior architecture of these pre-Victorian churches drew on a Protestant spirituality based on hearing, which meant that the focus of the church was the pulpit rather than the communion table or altar. But in the first half of the 19thcentury, ‘the old auditory church [was] replaced by a visual church’ (Whyte63). Hence a change in the design and decoration of churches, encouraged by proponents of the Gothic revival, such as the architect A.W.N.Pugin, and by the Cambridge ecclesiologists, who advocated a return to a medieval style of church architecture and furnishings. Hence also the growing popularity in High Church circles of candles, vestments, religious images, embroidery and flowers. Fin-de-siècle literary representations of church interiors reflect this shift from the ‘auditory church’ of the 18thcentury, where function (essentially focused on the proclamation of the word of God) dictated the organisation of space and even the furnishings, to the ‘visual church’, saturated with symbolism, where the eye, rather than the ear, becomes the central organ of religious experience. For Wilde, Johnson, Dowson, Wratislaw or Hobbes, entering a church involves a departure from the sensory landscape of the outside world in order to enter a sacred space designed to address the eye.

27It is worth noting that their visual approach to church interiors turns on its head the conventional Protestant condemnation of the Catholic emphasis on sight, perceived as a sign of the Roman and ritualist obsession with exterior surfaces—a view which is found in much of the anti-Catholic literature of the Victorian period. In an1885 anti-Ritualist pamphlet, a certain J.Spencer Palmer praised a book entitled The Priest in Absolution for revealing the perverse nature of the Catholic sacrament of confession, and denounced what he saw as the obsession of Catholics and Ritualists with the exterior, by which he meant appearances, surfaces, and more generally the visible elements of worship—i.e. the elements of church interiors that most fascinated fin-de-siècle writers:

We can never be too thankful for the unearthing and exposure of this book [The Priest in Absolution], for it has proved what a sink of iniquity lies under the plausible exterior of many fine services, grand music, gorgeous vestments, &c., in which Ritualism abounds. It is, in fact, the miserable, sickly aestheticism... carried into religion, in its exterior; but the interior... is a seething mass of corruption. (Palmer22, my italics)