1991: “Mallard’s Comfortable Heresy: A Re‑reading of Felix Montfort’s 1900 Review”
From The Southern Review of Letters and Religion By Professor Dr. Fenella Vorpel, University of Sydney
It is always instructive to meet a critic at the threshold of his century and witness what he thinks the future will thank him for. Felix Ambrose Montfort’s review of Bishop Mallard’s Late Blooming: or, The Theology of Loitering (first published 1821, republished London 1900, reviewed for The Morning Trumpet that same year) is a period artefact of comfortable wit. His manner is one of Edwardian composure—urbane, sensible, a little perfumed with superiority. He approaches Mallard as one would a slightly scandalous uncle who, despite theological indiscretions, still sends excellent port at Christmas. Reading Montfort now, one detects both admiration and containment; the good critic has translated blasphemy into anecdote, and converted sensuality into charm.
The difficulty lies in this domestication. Mallard’s book is not, by any responsible measure, a decorative artefact of Regency leisure. It was a dangerous text even in its later publication; it remains disturbing for precisely the reasons Montfort found it delightful. When he praised Mallard’s “theology of dawdling,” he mistook irony for indolence, and reform for eccentricity. The Bishop did not write about loitering because he was idle but because he wished to question the brutality of progress itself. He lived at the turning of two ages—eighteenth‑century rationality giving way to early‑industrial faith in improvement—and his metaphors of lingering were moral diagnostics, not excuses for spiritual laziness.
Historically, Late Blooming entered English thought during a reactionary decade. By 1821, George IV had settled upon decadence as a political strategy, and religion busied itself with restoring a national sense of guilt. Mallard’s refusal to join that programme—his insistence that holiness might reside in tarrying, curiosity, even delight—was radical theology disguised as conversation. Reasonable defiance could only survive as wit. To write explicitly of godless pleasure was fatal; to write of “divine dawdling” was forgivable. Montfort in 1900, standing at the glittering brink of a century of engines and conquests, read this irony as slogan: he mistook resistance for refuge, the leisure of revolt for the leisure of empire.
Montfort’s review is typical of its moment. Around 1900, after Darwin and before Freud, the British mind converted doubt into culture. Belief became an aesthetic property—a matter of tone rather than conviction. Mallard therefore suited them perfectly: a blasphemer whose language was polite enough to sit beside the sherry. Montfort elevates him as a prophet of “holy elegance,” a Victorian virtue if ever there were one. But what strikes me reading the Bishop—and Montfort almost never does read him directly—is the suppressed violence beneath that elegance. Mallard’s theology was erotically charged not because he sought titillation but because he understood the body as a site of rebellion against abstraction. His insistence on pleasure is not naïve: it is strategic. In The Moral Symmetry of the Androgynous Soul (1793) and again in Late Blooming, he constructs sexuality as spiritual equilibrium, a theology of composition rather than conquest.
Montfort, true to his time, translates these gestures into harmless dandyism, erasing the queer politics of the text. When he calls Mallard “the most charming indictment of piety,” he both flatters him and neutralises him. Charm, as ever, is the adjective by which male critics remove the sting of transgression from spiritual or erotic dissent. To Mallard’s imagery of shared divinity, Montfort applies an Edwardian varnish: the bishop is reduced to a “lazy heretic,” the divine to “fellowship,” the sensual to “conversation.” What began as disruption is restored as wit.
It is important to realise how this softening mirrors historical anxiety. The year 1900 was not an age of serenity but a precipice of exhaustion: industrial modernity had made leisure both fetish and fraud. Montfort’s enthusiasm for Mallard’s “slow spirituality” reflects not liberation but fatigue, an attempt to rehabilitate aristocratic indolence as philosophy. His “comfortable heresy” reassures him that faith may still recline on a chaise longue while the factories run themselves.
Reading Montfort’s article from 1991—from here, the end of a century that has witnessed both liberation and apocalypse—I am struck by how precisely his tone anticipates the postmodern reflex: the transformation of every radical text into self‑referential ornament. We too have learned the art of aestheticising doubt until it becomes a pose. Perhaps the true warning of Mallard is not against rushing toward eternity but against mistaking irony for safety.
Still, one must acknowledge Montfort’s charm, however glib. It is through such genteel critics that heresy survives; ridicule, properly rendered, keeps memory alive. Were he alive today, I suspect he would find religion repackaged as meditation, and Mallard on a T‑shirt quoting memento vivere. He would sip his sherry and call it progress. Yet in our classrooms, as I tell my students in “The Literature of Heresy,” progress is simply heresy institutionalised.
Mallard remains difficult because he was never lazy. Behind his aphorisms lies a theology of resistance: not to God, but to obedience. Montfort saw this and blinked, afraid of the light. We can no longer afford to blink. The late twentieth century has revisited precisely his question: must we hurry through time in pursuit of perfection, or linger in its imperfection long enough to inhabit it? The Bishop’s answer, sharper than Montfort imagined, is that to loiter consciously is to dissent politically.
To republish Montfort’s review now is to read between his compliments and hear the suppressed tremor of history. He wished to tame the revolutionary into a raconteur, because wit seemed safer than vision. His century rewarded him with reputation; ours rewards him with analysis. My own diagnosis is simple: Montfort’s brilliance was critical but not diagnostic, descriptive but not self-aware. Mallard’s was prophetic, perhaps because he was, in every forbidden sense of the word, alive.
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