Mr Aldous Huxley once wrote an essay on vulgarity in literature. But literature reflects human life; and implicitly he has written many books on vulgarity in human life, on the squalor of humanity. The figures of the fifth Earl of Gonister and his companions at the end of After Many a Summer, undying and unliving, intolerable in their sordid brutishness, represent something that recurs again and again in different forms in his works. ‘Vivre?’ he quoted in Vulgarity in Literature, ‘nos valets le feront pour nous’. That disgust with life, and in particular with the corporeal, still seems to lie at the root of his view of reality; and to colour his approach to Reality.

Some critics of The Perennial Philosophy have waxed indignant at the idea of describing as philosophy a book in which Plato and Aristotle are barely mentioned; others have taken the opposite line, and vindicated the author by viewing western philosophy as pseudophilosophy because of its exclusive reliance on discursive reasoning: if the way to knowledge of Reality is humility, poverty of spirit, purity of heart, how can we describe as philosophers, as ‘lovers of wisdom’, any but those who take this way? The truth surely lies midway between these two extremes. As some of the great Christian mystics have shown in their own lives, there are three wisdoms: the natural investigations of reason, the study of theology, the direct mystical awareness of God; and they can each be valid and valuable in their own spheres, and each help and fortify the others.

Nothing that an art-critic can say about the relationship between art and the Church can have very much value. By his very nature, the art-critic is bound to tackle the problem from the wrong end. The proper person to speak with authority would be the church-critic, but since church-criticism is not a recognized occupation, and since, even if it were, I would not be competent to undertake it, I can only envisage the problem from the end nearest to me—the wrong end, I admit, but at least an end.

The problem, as I see it, is this. The Church is certainly one among the various employers who recognise that the artist can be of service to them—the manufacturers who use his posters, the writers who use him as an illustrator, the personages who want him to paint their portraits and thereby preserve their memory for posterity. But, oddly enough, the Church is the most timid of them all. Poster designers and illustrators, though not usually in the front-rank of illustrative artists, at least tend to use the current idiom: they are ‘modem’ in the sense that they have learned their language from men of their own generation. But the artists employed by churchmen use, on the whole, an idiom that was developed in Italy in the 15th century, was superseded by the Baroque 17th century, forgotten by the frivolous 18th, revived, diluted and sweetened by the piously sentimental 19th and which survives into the 20th because it has been commercialised and further devitalised by firms of Church decorators.

In England it all started in the respectable years of the early industrial development, when common sense was valued above sensibility and far above spirituality, and when church-going was done more for the sake of propriety than to worship God. In that time the pious vaguely felt that art was wrong and the artists were sure that religion was silly. The Church glared at the artist and the artist at the Church, both mutually suspicious. And there was no growing school of religious art—none in the Protestant Church for the state of affairs indicated above, and none in the Catholic Church because Catholics at that time had neither status nor money.

At the eleventh hour who should turn up but the Pre-Raphaelites. They swept Puritan prejudice before them and proceeded to paint religious subjects and even to make a lot of money out of their productions. But the Pre-Raphaelites did us no good. By their superior pastiche they put the clocks of appreciation right back and the sentimental ‘Light of the World’ is still influencing public taste.

But in spite even of the Pre-Raphaelites the average middle-class educated man still refused to take art seriously. He considered it as a furbelow in his house and far less important than comfort. He gave no thought to art in the church whatsoever. The churches were as bad. Even they had the idea that art was something that had been taken up by the Church as an extra glory in the Middle Ages, but as soon as art showed up in the Renaissance as a truly pagan business, then it had to be rejected as dangerous.

Criticism begins in an act of reason. Beason separates individual qualities from a previously undifferentiated whole. Judgment then steps in to appraise the result. Criticism in art results from the detachment of the spectator from the artist and from his work. It works in two ways. It gives awareness of the qualities in the object surveyed. It also reveals to the critic his own attitude towards it. Criticism is, therefore, an advance from the unquestioning acceptance or rejection of an undeveloped mind.

The ancient Greeks lived in an age of great sculpture. We do not find in their writings praise or blame of such works. Criticism originally arose with them in connection with the decline of Hellenic drama, in the Middle Ages books of aesthetics, pointing out the aims, the failures or successes of the architectural magnificence springing up in town and country, were unthinkable. When man has lost the power to create things of beauty he becomes aware of the nature of these. He becomes a critic.

To become aware of the nature of any idea or state of being is to have passed, for better or for worse, beyond it. With the loss of innocence came knowledge of both man’s physical nakedness and his need for a covering. Constant preoccupation with an idea is usually symptomatic of immediate unattainability.

Paul Harris presents a new and very vivid approach to religious painting. He does not see the life of our Lord in the conventional way and his pictures are powerful in their originality. He has the gift of catching real light in paint and does not merely paint in lighter or darker shades. His style was greatly influenced by several years spent with the army in Iraq—many of his figures are brown ar.d move with Eastern grace.

In his picture entitled Adam and Eve there is no angel with a flaming sword : Adam and Eve are driving themselves out of the paradise which their false choice has destroyed. Helplessly they stumble out of their realm, but behind them in the landscape there is no vagueness. It is clear that chaos lias broken out. Xo longer is there an underhung principle of inviolable order, and the hills and trees are frightened. A horse rears and neighs in terror. Yet Adam and Eve still hope they are only dreaming.

The Holy Family is shown to us in a most delightful and unorthodox family group. Our Lady, wearing a brilliantly green frock, is hanging up washing in the garden. The child Jesus, playing at her feet, holds out a flower to her. Saint Joseph, in labourer’s clothes, just stands and watches, resting on a spade and looking very solid and protective