Contemporary reviews
Novelist and literary critic George Orwell, in the July 17, 1948 The New Yorker wrote:
The central idea of the book is that it is better to be an erring Catholic than a virtuous pagan…it is impossible not to feel a certain snobishness in Mr. Greene’s attitude, both here and in other books written from an explicitly Catholic standpoint. He appears to share the idea, floating around since Baudelaire, that there is something distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class night club, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only, since the others, non-Catholics, are too ignorant to be held guilty, like the beasts that perish.[5][6]
Orwell added: “But all the while—drunken, lecherous, criminal, or damned outright—the Catholics retain their superiority, since alone they know the meaning of good and evil.”[7]
Literary critic William DuBois in the July 11, 1948 issue of The New York Times describes Graham Greene as “a profound moralist with a technique to match his purpose” and his protagonist, the policeman Scobie, as “a textbook case of a judge destroyed by his own sentences.”[8] DuBois offers the following passage to illustrate his characterization of The Heart of the Matter as a “parable” of a man who is “victim of his own acute kindness.”[9] Father Rank, the priest, visits Scobie's widow to offer condolences shortly after her husband's suicide:
[Mrs. Scobie]: "He was a bad Catholic."
"That's the silliest phrase in common use," Father Rank said.
"And in the end, this—horror. He must have known that he was damning himself."
"Yes, he knew that all right. He never had any trust in mercy—except for other people."
"It's no good even praying..."
Father Rank clapped the cover of the diary to and said, furiously, "For goodness' sake, Mrs. Scobie, don't imagine you— or I—know a thing about God's mercy."
"The Church says ..."
"I know what the Church says. The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn't know what goes on in a single human heart."
"You think there's some hope, then?" she wearily asked.
"Are you so bitter against him?"
"I haven't any bitterness left."
"And do you think God's likely to be more bitter than a woman?" he said with harsh insistence, but she winced away from the arguments of hope.
"Oh why, why, did he have to make such a mess of things?"
Father Rank said, "It may seem an odd thing to say—when a man's as wrong as he was—but I think, from what I saw of him, that he really loved God."
She had denied just now that she felt any bitterness, but a little more of it drained out now like tears from exhausted ducts. "He certainly loved no one else," she said.
"And you may be in the right of it there, too," Father Rank replied.[10]
DuBois adds: “Such is Mr. Greene's parable: the reader will search far to find another novel that explores that basic malaise in such clinical depth—and with such compassion.”[11]
Later assessments
Writing in The Guardian, September 17, 2010, literary critic D. J. Taylor places The Heart of the Matter within the legacy of the “Catholic novels” that began to appear in the mid- 19th Century, “born out of the Tractarian movement” and part of the “Catholic tradition in English letters.”[12] Taylor adds that “the real impetus to the Catholic novel's mid-[20th] century rise was provided by converts: Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and, slightly later, Muriel Spark.”[13] Taylor offers this observation on the critical response to these Catholic-inspired works:
Even Catholics found some of the complaints leveled at Waugh and Greene by their contemporary critics difficult to ignore. Even to certain believers, Waugh's Catholicism was a symptom of his pursuit of "smartness", that zealous romanticizing of upper-class English life in which Brideshead Revisited (1945) positively revels. Orwell's quarrel with Greene turned on the idea that the situations in which his characters found themselves were psychologically implausible. Scobie, in The Heart of the Matter, is, according to Orwell, incredible…But what exactly was being fought over here? Both Greene and Waugh believed that their characters' religious sensibilities gave them a dimension that most people in novels no longer possessed.[14]
Taylor reports that “any religious novelist faces…the absolute necessity of opening up the exclusive private club to which you belong to the non-members who don't wear its tail-coats or drink its claret.”[15]
Literary critic Scott Bradfield in the March 10, 2021 The New Republic, considers The Heart of the Matter a “breakthrough” novel.:[16]
Greene achieved international fame by appealing to Catholics who found in it an expression of living in a post–World War II world where God didn’t seem to reward the faith they placed in Him.[17]
Observing that “Greene’s cynicism about the world—and the sufferings of humanity—came close to nihilism,” Bradfield quotes protagonist Scobie from The Heart of the Matter: “Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.” Bradfield adds: “It’s hard to think of any similarly productive, commercial novelist today who speaks so vigorously against religious and political pieties.”[18]
