I suppose it is foolish to read Assyriology all day, especially when you have a cold. However, I did it, and my brain was a seething mass of Tiglath-Pilesers, Assurbanipals, and Sennacheribs by the time I went to bed. Sleep was impossible, so I took my never-failing recipe. I turned on the light and got down a book descriptive of glorious days on Irish rivers and lakes in pursuit of glorious fish. Fish began to rise, lines to cut through the water and reels to sing, and then drowsiness came. Out went the light and I slept.

‘So that is the Tigris,’ I said, as I peered at the muddy stream flowing between its low banks. ‘Yes, and those, I suppose, are Nebi Yunus, Nimroud and the other mounds I have heard of.’ They looked very uninteresting somehow, and I turned and gazed at the flowing stream.

Why, bless my soul! That was a fish rising ! Look at his broad tail! By jove, it is a salmon !’

How I longed for a rod ! And just then I realised that I had one, a familiar old 16 ft. Castle-Connel. I slapped my pocket, and there was my fly-case, and yes, wonderful to relate, there was my pocket gaff in its place! Was there a cast on? Yes, with a ‘Green Parson’ and a ‘Silver Doctor.’ Deftly I began to get out line, ten yards, fifteen, twenty; that’s all I can safely do, though experts will sneer. The favourite old ‘Green Parson’ was just getting over him when a voice at my elbow said in raucous tones, ‘By Istar of Arbela, what are you doing to my river?’

I turned with a jump, and then my knees gave in and I trembled from head to foot. Not a doubt as to who it was.

It is a depressing thing that there should be so few people who really appreciate fairy stories, and still fewer who allow themselves to believe them. In fact, there is even got to be a certain theory that not to believe them is a sign of intellectual enlightenment and freedom from superstition; than which nothing could be more false. It would be very much nearer the truth to say that it is a sign of intellectual darkness to reject the Daoine Shee, and a notable token of superstition to deny the royalty of Huon, once of Bordeaux and later of Fairyland.

We would not assert, indeed, that it is necessary to have for the world of elves the same certainty of belief that one has for the truths of religion; nor need one be able to dogmatise as positively about the motives of Titania as one is able to about those of Attila the Great, Anthemius, Heraclian, or any other historical characters of whom we know even less than we do of Titania. But there is no valid argument against the existence of fairies and fairyland which would not be equally valid against the existence of Kamschatka, in which, nevertheless, we most firmly believe. In fact, if we return to the days of the innocence of nations, before their characters had been vitiated, and their intellects depraved, by the horrors of education, we should find that, whereas it was exceedingly difficult to convince them of the existence of Kamschatka, it would have been even harder to convince them that there were no fairies.

The theory known as the Materialistic Interpretation of History, which constitutes the philosophical background of Communism, asserts that religious beliefs are the product of social and economic circumstances and vary according to those circumstances. I had never realised the large measure of truth in that theory until quite recently. The need of refreshing my memory concerning the methods of worship among certain sects, for the purposes of a series of articles on the subject in a Catholic newspaper, led to sundry visits to non-Catholic bodies. The formative influence of class traditions on ecclesiastical proceedure and belief was impressed on my mind with considerable force as visit followed visit.

It was impossible, for instance, not to recognise that factor in the case of the Christian Scientists. It was not merely that the roadway outside the Hall was lined with motor-cars for some hundreds of yards or that those who filled the building were most obviously of the leisured class. The whole tone of the Service was that of a drawing-room meeting, well-bred, politely interested, and—if the paradox may be allowed—profoundly superficial.

Christian Science is an American importation. One might speak of it as the Gospel of Optimism or as Christianity without the Cross. It is a cult patronised almost exclusively by those whose external circumstances have placed them beyond the need of that severe struggle which others must make for a livelihood. Happiness for these consists largely in their power to shut out the ugly and sordid aspects of life. Conversation among such people quietly assumes that the whole world, or at least the part of it that matters, is circumstanced as are they themselves. The intrusion of poverty and disease into their comfortable circle is resented as something lacking good taste.

In the popular mind Poetry is synonymous with anything but exact and definite truth. ‘People,’ says Thomas MacDonagh, ‘simply refuse to take words in Poetry at their face value.’ And when we find that Dante, in his great poem the Divina Corn-media, has painted for St. Dominic a character almost mythically splendid, one cannot wonder that the picture is often considered with a little incredulity, until the perfection of the original has been gauged by the standards at one’s disposal—that is, principally, by the Chronicles of St. Dominic’s life. Measured by these standards, however, Dante’s picture of the Saint does not lose any of that brightness with which it has been painted by the Poet; on the contrary, one finds that he has limned it with such exquisite fidelity that one is inclined to postulate for him a connection with the Order even closer than that claimed for him by his Dominican admirers. Dante’s appreciation of Dominic is to be found chiefly in Canto XII of the Paradiso, where he naturally begins by describing the birthplace, the coming and the infancy of the Saint, whose soul was

That the poetic imagination is sometimes a companion of, and sometimes the substitute for, the mystical gift is, perhaps, a truism of literary criticism. But it is a truism of especial interest for students of English because the strength of the English artistic genius has always lain in religious subjects, or, at least, in those related to religion. The truth of this may be proved by a very simple experiment. What are the subjects of the stock passages of English literature? Here are a few in the order of memory:

And, even more familiar :

‘The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things :
There is no armour against Fate;
Death lays his mighty hand on Kings. . . ,’

And Shakespeare :

‘. . . We are such stuff
As dreams are made of; and our little life
Is rounded by a sleep. . . .’

Or the famous close of Astrophel’s passion for Stella :

‘Leave me, O Love, that cleavest but to dust,
And thou, my soul, aspire to higher things. . .

Lastly, for this can be but a brief selection, that most apt putting of the world’s most pertinent question :

Truth, and death, and love: these would seem to be the habitual subjects of the great literary tradition of England; and, as Spenser has it, love turning from earthly to divine pleasure. And this even when the work does not profess to be of a specifically religious character.

The establishment of a Holy Year, or year of Jubilee, is universally attributed to Pope Boniface VIII, who in the fear 1300 published a bull granting a plenary indulgence to all who, having approached the Sacraments, should visit as pilgrims the tombs of the Apostles Peter and Paul in their separate basilicas on the Vatican Hill, and outside the Walls. Amongst the many reasons which led Pope Boniface to publish this jubilee was a strong tradition that exactly a century previous Pope Innocent III the Great had promulgated the same indulgence. Many witnesses came forward to attest that they had heard this stated by those who had actually been present in Rome as pilgrims in 1200. Two men from Beauvais and several Italians were amongst the most aged of the witnesses, in addition to two reputed eye-witnesses. One of these latter was a Spaniard, Fernandez by name, a reputed nephew of St. Dominic, who now in his hundred and fifteenth year told the Pope that he had been present in Rome during the indulgenced year of Innocent III. The other was an Italian, aged one hundred and seven years, who related that his father (prophetic man!) had ordered him many years before to come to Rome if still alive in 1300, in order to gain at the tomb of the Apostle a plenary indulgence such as he himself had gained in 1200.

Boniface VIII published the Jubilee by the bull ‘Antiquorum, February 22nd, 1300, and so great were the crowds of pilgrims that flocked to the Eternal City to gain the indulgence that the Pope directed the Jubilee to be held for the future on the first year of each succeeding century.

It was a cruel fate that drove Lord Balfour from the well-guarded security of the Holy Land, where the public expression of popular opinion has long been smothered by means of armoured cars and effective military supervision, to the freer atmosphere of Syria where he had such a rude awakening from his idealistic dreams. If we know anything of the sentiment of our continental neighbours with regard to the Zionist experiment (as it is euphemistically called) now being carried on in Palestine under the armed protection of the British Government, we can imagine how Europe must have rocked with laughter at the sight of that philosophical statesman flying for dear life from Damascus and the wrath of the Arabs. We cannot resist the temptation to remark that he missed a great opportunity. If only he had had the presence of mind to be let down from the walls of Damascus in a basket! But after all there is something of a parable in the fact that Paul, the friend of the Gentiles, escaped from his Jewish enemies in a basket, while Balfour, the friend of the Jews, escaped in a motor. Saint Paul fled from the Jews and took refuge in Arabia; but Lord Balfour would find the whole country of the Arabs too narrow after his recent experience of Arab opinion in Damascus.

Such a ludicrous ending to his pilgrimage has changed indignation into pity, not unmingled with amusement. For a week we read patiently of his triumphal progress through the Jewish settlements as he was shepherded from one to the other, and listened with resignation to the much-repeated assertion that the supposed antagonism of Jews and Arabs was a myth; then came the anti-climax of his exodus from Damascus, which gave the lie to this assertion once and for all.

Recent affairs have stirred afresh the interest in early British intercourse with Russia which Hakluyt and Early Voyages awakened. To those who love to find history repeating itself it will be especially gratifying to learn that three centuries ago there was a projected Russian treaty which failed. In 1623 the movers were the representatives of the Royal Houses of Stewart and Romanoff; in 1924 they were the Socialist and Soviet Governments of the two countries of Great Britain and Russia.

Casting a glance on previous relations and events it is to be recalled that the Muscovy Trading Company was formed nearly fifty years before the famous East India Company. In 1635 this financial venture (the outcome of the veteran Cabot’s voyages of discovery) was entered into by many persons of high degree as well as by influential merchants, and received a royal charter. Three ships were equipped, and under the leadership of Chancellor made the voyage and returned with many promised trading privileges from the Czar, Ivan the Terrible. So the Muscovy Company was reconstituted into the ‘Company for the Discovery of New Trades,’ and, in its royal charter in 1566, was empowered to secure solely any trade’ established by sailing north, north-east or north-west from England.’ These terms suggest the spacious times to which they belong.

Horace Walpole’s charities were on a much larger scale than a perusal of Lord Macaulay’s bitter and waspish character-sketch of him might lead one to expect. Walpole had an especial fondness for relieving the necessities of those poor souls who lay languishing in the many debtors’ prisons of the age. Again and again we find him writing to his man of business to expend for him in this way two, five, or six guineas, as the case might be, for the prisoners in the Compter, the Clink, the Fleet, or the King’s Bench prisons. He would take pains to raise similar subscriptions for them among his friends, would write to the press on their behalf, and in one instance at least he was at the expense of raising a striking memorial over the grave of a heart-broken bankrupt.

Right in the centre of the metropolis, amid the purlieus of Soho, surrounded by play-houses and taverns, there lies a sad little graveyard. Those who read this may often have passed by it. The gates stand ever open in the day-time, there are seats amid the tombs, the poor and the homeless can rest there awhile, and the children make the place their familiar playground. On a wall opposite the entrance is an old and crumbling monument surmounted by a royal crown. The inscription tells us that near that place is buried Theodore, King of Corsica, ‘who died on Dec. n, 1756, immediately on leaving the King’s Bench Prison’; and it concludes with these lines :

‘The grave—great teacher—to a level brings Heroes and beggars, galley-slaves and kings;
But Theodore this moral learn’d ere dead;
Fate pour’d its lesson on his living head—?
Bestow’d a kingdom, and denied him bread.’

If the Reverend John MacEnery (1796-1841), an obscure Catholic priest of Torquay, had not died prematurely, he might have been honoured at the present day with the title of ‘Father’ of English Prehistory. During the first five years of the reign of George IV he made discoveries which undoubtedly proved the existence in England of a prehistoric race more ancient than that hitherto known to archaeologists—Palaeolithic Man. But the conservatism of the scientific world of his day little encouraged, him to press home his discoveries; while lack of funds and ill-health prevented him from bringing them before the public in book form.

As a foreword to the story of MacEnery’s ‘ Systematic observations of Kent’s Hole and other caverns’ in South Devon, of which his monument in the parish churchyard of Tor proclaims him to have been the pioneer, one must recall the state at that period of this type of scientific investigation.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, geology was but emerging from an elementary stage, and as a separate science and recognised under that name it was barely fifty years old. The work of cave research, however, had been pushed forward in Germany about the end of the eighteenth century; and Cuvier’s marvellous identification of the extinct mammalia from fossil fragments had given it further impetus. In England papers had been read to the Royal Society, in 1817 and 1821, describing fossil bones discovered by workmen while quarrying limestone, at Oreston, for the Plymouth breakwater.

This true story begins in a little English town called Wotton-under-Edge, in the Cotswolds, about half-way between Bristol and Gloucester, and ends in the city of Lille sometime in October in the year 1918.

I am afraid it will be a disconnected, rambling tale, full of digressions and irrelevances. When it all happened, I was one of the many wanderers on the face of France, one in the vast army that was advancing on the heels of the Germans in the last phase of the Great War. Little wonder if in those stirring days the rambling spirit took hold of one’s mind and one’s thoughts. Little wonder if the war of movement, even as a memory, tends to disconnect one’s thoughts. However, the story may recommend itself by its only quality, its truth.

For about six months before becoming a Chaplain to the Forces, I used to say Mass on Sundays at Wotton-under-Edge and at Dursley for the Belgian refugees whom the war had brought into our neighbourhood. We used to call them the ‘Motor Missions,’ because the priest usually travelled to and fro from our monastery at Woodchester on a motor-bicycle.

Among the Belgians at Wotton-under-Edge was one whom I shall call Henri. Henri was a painter. I do not mean that he was a painter in a specialistic sense. He did not produce wild masses of colour on canvas; but he served his fellow-men in a humbler and more effective manner by painting their houses and doors in bold, primary colours. With his colours he could play upon the emotions with all the wizard’s power of a Pied Piper.

In all the welter of film production one can hardly fail to be struck by the paganism of the average film entertainment: that is, if ever one pauses to think about such things. I do not, of course, refer to topical or interest films, but to the average dramatic photoplay. I see pictures six days a week, and I am frequently reminded of the words in the Catechism which tell us that we are prone to evil from our very childhood. I think film producers must have read this too; at any rate, they are sufficiently studious of human nature to realise that this is so—and to realise the commercial possibilities underlying the exploitation of this proneness. Knowing that there is a universal latent curiosity—an inquisitive interest—in the lower manifestations of human nature, the seamy side of life is depicted in such a manner as to pander to this, often in a very emphatic manner. The resultant atmosphere of the picture is called ‘entertainment value.’ Crime as depicted in order to impart ‘punch’ to the production. The film play is supposed to depict life in all its shades; probably it does — particularly the shades. Easy divorce is a commonplace on the screen, and in this respect the average film-maker displays a strange lack of consistency, for while on the one hand divorce is used as an easy and laudable way out of all manner of difficulties, both matrimonial and of the plot, on the other hand marriage is usually presented as the crowning act of a woman’s life, to be treated with greater seriousness, one would think, and given a fairer chance than is usually evidenced by the ease and even flippancy with which film characters are made to break their vows and start afresh—usually with the one who should obviously have been their first choice. Obvious, that is, to the audience; love in the film studio is very blind.

Our modern literature has become so self-conscious, analytic, subjective, conventional, and, invariable concomitant of the last, licentious in the true meaning of that word, that it would be an interesting experiment to see if any of the old accomplishment were still possible to it. Owing to our unfortunate acquisition of ‘temperaments,’ ‘view-points’ (loathsome word) and subjective theories of all sorts we have become singularly skilled in distorting language from its proper use as principally to make it the means of telling various kinds of lies which are no more true because they fall into the artistic heresy of subjective sincerity. (And, O Sincerity, what crimes are committed in thy name.)

From a psychological point of view these things are doubtless very interesting; and we ought to be very grateful to most of our modern authors for showing us so very instructively how many things can be used for purposes which their Maker never intended : how the English language can be tortured into a parody of German or Greek, and the fine gold of our verbal heritage transmuted, by a devil’s alchemy, into the base tokens of our common speech. But, in the intervals of our scientific raptures, some of us would like, occasionally, to read a little poetry, and, even more, a little prose. The air is full of neologisms unbeautiful, and twisted syntax inexpressive of thought, and not less opaque of feeling . . . ‘But that large utterance of the early Gods,’ where is it?