"To Crie Alarme"

EDMUND CAMPION (239 pp.)--Evelyn Waugh--Little, Brown ($2.75).

Evelyn Waugh's feats in prose include one whole book without a line of comedy. This is it. Waugh finished writing it in 1935, some years after his conversion to Roman Catholicism, as a tribute to his faith and to the Jesuits. It is a biographical study, done skillfully and with full respect, of a fabulous Jesuit priest executed by order of Queen Elizabeth.

About a thousand copies of Waugh's book, printed in England, were sold in the U.S. a decade ago. Now that Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is a best-seller (558,000 copies), Little, Brown has published Campion for the first time in the U.S. Lending-library ladies will find little in it of the Waugh they recently took to their breasts.

A Marriage of Inconvenience. Campion, as a young Oxford scholar, pleased the great Queen Elizabeth by his Latin and his charm. He might have enjoyed a rich career in the newly established Church of England. Campion chose Rome and danger. He found it improbable, his biographer says with an English convert's zeal, "that the truth, hidden from the world for fifteen centuries, had suddenly been revealed in the last few years to a group of important Englishmen."

Taking refuge in Dublin in 1571, Campion wrote a distinguished little history of Ireland. Waugh the stylist quotes with delight several sweet and thrifty Elizabethan sentences about the country which "lieth aloof in the West Ocean, in proportion like an egg. . . ." As a seminarist at Douai in Flanders, Campion decided to accept the military discipline of the new and militant Society of Jesus. In 1580, he received what amounted to a martyr's orders: to return to England as a missionary. After Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth, her government had made it high treason, punishable with death by butchery, to act as a Roman Catholic priest in England.

The 16th Century Jesuit crossed the Channel in high spirits and in the gallant disguise--according to later charges--of "a velvet hat and a feather, a buff leather jerkin and velvet Venetians." For a full year Campion rode up & down the English counties, eluding the Queen's men, saying Mass in secret in Catholic houses. The Jesuits, Waugh says, "came with gaiety among a people where hope was dead."

To the Gallows in the Rain. Gayest feather in any Jesuit hat was "Campion's Brag." This document, written for use after his almost certain arrest, circulated beforehand and made him famous. In it he asked for three audiences: with the Privy Council, the Masters of the Universities, and the lawyers of the realm, to prove the truth of his faith.

The Queen and her ministers could not ignore a challenge so dashing and so well known. After they caught Campion they imprisoned and racked him, then sat him on a stool at four "conferences." Campion held his own, in distress chiefly because his replies were not being taken down in full. "I wish to God I had a notary," he said. On Dec.1,1581, he was dragged through the rain to Tyburn gallows and faced death gently with a,prayer for the Queen.

Says Waugh: "It was an age replete with examples of astounding physical courage. Judged by the exploits of the great adventurers of his time, the sea dogs and explorers, Campion's brief achievement may appear modest enough; but these were tough men, ruthlessly hardened by upbringing, gross in their recreations. Campion stands out from even his most gallant and chivalrous contemporaries . ._. by the supernatural grace that was in him. . . ."

In the mind of Campion's biographer, supernatural grace clearly bears a relation to a certain kind of gaiety. It would be interesting to know how Catholic critics might relate it to the gaiety and polish, unique in modern English writing, of A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited. To judge by Brideshead, at any rate, Evelyn Waugh may sense a similarity between his mission as a writer of comedy and Campion's as a priest: "to crie alarme spiritual against foul vice and proud ignorance, wherewith many my dear Countrymen are abused."

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