Writing so soon after Gide’s death, one would like to remember only his charm, the music of his prose and, above all, the prayers addressed to God in Numquid et Tu. Yet the influence of such a writer does not cease with his life; as long as French is read the sinuous harmonies of that prose will ceaselessly convey a definite message.

That ‘message’ renders neutrality impossible. Gide, by subordinating a moral code to aesthetics, of which he declared it ‘a dependency’, raised fundamental questions which it would be inexcusable to evade. While he repudiated any wish to make ‘converts’, books are not published in a vacuum. Moreover the Journal reveals that, at times, Gide was fully conscious of the power of corruption which he wielded. In fact, if his basic postulate be accepted—the necessity of the full development of one’s individuality, unhampered by ethical considerations—a pagan moral code has been adopted. This invalidates the undoubtedly sincere advice which he gave to his readers to cast aside his book —to free themselves from his influence as well as from that of others.

While this fundamental clash between Gide’s ethic and that of the Christian is continually touched on by Mr Thomas in his book published just before the French writer’s death, it might be argued that, because of the chronological presentation and a certain, perhaps inevitable, lack of synthesis, the idea will be insufficiently clear to the ordinary reader, less familiar than Mr Thomas with the texts.

Harry (Hilary) Douglas Clarke Pepler was born on January 14th, 1878. His father, George Henry Pepler, who came of an old Wiltshire family, was a partner in Messrs Diplocks, Brewers, of Eastbourne. The family were Quakers, and Hilary and his brother (now Sir George Pepler) were educated at Bootham School, York. At the age of fourteen Hilary was apprenticed to Sir Reginald Hanson, Bart., as a Merchant Taylor in London; but after a time he entered the tea trade. Then followed a post with a firm of wholesale grocers in Cannon Street. With £250 inherited from his grandfather, he next bought a pewterer’s business and set up as a maker and caster of pewter, employing eight men. But his machines were out of date and eventually he sold the business to a competitor from the United States. During this time he shared rooms in London with Harry Mennell (one of the Quaker branch), through whom he became very friendly with the children of Wilfrid and Alice Meynell at Palace Court, where he often saw Francis Thompson.

In 1903 Pepler met Clare Whiteman, who was studying art under Herkomer at the Bushey School of Art, and they were married in the following year. For some reason, he then decided that his vocation was land surveying, and after his marriage he spent a year at Tunbridge Wells learning this business. His own comment, in some manuscript reminiscences, is: ‘Good heavens, I was a rolling stone’.

The work of Christopher Dawson and others has made familiar the fact that each of the great religions of the world has become the matrix of a temporal culture. Less familiar is the converse truth that such a culture, richly proliferating, can almost smother with the complexities of habit, custom, usage and respectability the faith from which it originally sprang; so that for many selves religion may become at worst the handmaid of civic solidarity, at all events something accepted and taken for granted, and at best a vital pattern of rites, reactions and relationships inherent in a certain place, time, and mode of living, a pattern which fades out of the individual mind directly its circumstances change. Thus, on the one hand stands the ‘catholique non-pratiquant', who clings to the noun rather than the adjective, insists that his children should receive a Catholic education, and has a high regard for faith as the cement of a stable social structure. (This figure is perhaps commoner abroad than in this country; and was well exemplified in those portions of Latin America which abused Costa Rica as ‘Communist’ for trying to organise economic life in accordance with the social encyclicals.) In the centre sit at ease in Zion, as in an overcrowded drawing-room, ladies of pious leisure embroidering in petit point on linen cushion covers ready stencilled designs of the Sacred Heart, such as may be seen in the drapers’ shops of Bruges.

There was something indefinite about the effect of Avicenna on the West in the thirteenth century. Constant and pervasive as his influence was—from its beginnings in Spain in the twelfth century, through the confusion of its first contacts with the Cathedral Schools and the nascent University of Paris, down to Albert and Aquinas and Scotus—yet it nowhere crystallised into a definite set of doctrines accepted by a clearly marked group or school, as did, later in the century, the influence of Averroes. Some years ago Père De Vaux brought into circulation the term ‘Latin Avicennism’, parallel to the ‘Latin Averroism’ which Mandonnet had disclosed in his great work on Siger of Brabant. But Père De Vaux’s term, unlike Mandonnet’s, has not gained general acceptance; there is too much difference between the confused eclecticism at the turn of the century, studied by De Vaux, and the clear-cut, far more unified position of the Averroists of the 1270’s. More acceptable perhaps as a name for that earlier phase is Gilson’s ‘augustinisme avicennisant’, though this denoted originally only one aspect of it—the attempt to adapt an Avicennian theory of the ‘agent intellect’ to the Augustinian tradition of the human mind’s dependence upon illumination from God. And in any case one must not overstress the Augustinian element in the currents of thought that were running at the end of the twelfth century, and that largely derived from other sources—Boethius, for example, and Erigena.

The last thing we are ever told about anything is who made it. Naturally, for what do makers matter in a world of ‘minders’?

The author of The Gothic World advances a half-hearted plea that a like technical indifference may explain medieval anonymity. He persuaded us more when in his former volume Gothic England he set out to deny the allegation altogether and to rid ‘le miracle occidental’ itself of ‘the plague of anonymity’. (Will no one rid us of the plague of notoriety?) In sober fact ‘from the period 1250-1550 a vast number of names survive. It would be no exaggeration to say that the men responsible for all the major developments of art in this period are already known to us by name.’

Mr John Harvey sets himself to answer four questions: ‘What, How, Where and When was Gothic Art?’ He has especially enthralling things to tell us about the ‘How’ and not least about medieval craftsmen, trassours and devysours, their lodges and guilds, their gear and skill. Coming pat at the moment when the swinging pendulum of controversy has come to rest at a point of equilibrium, his researches should greatly help to establish once and for all a true idea of the master-builders and of the vivid world of medieval craftsmen.

For Mr Harvey the master-mason is neither, according to the extreme folk-art view, just one of the lads’, nor, according to the opposite extreme, the irresponsible ‘artist’ he has been since the Renaissance.

The English, we have always been told, are incurably literary. When they produce painters their work is illustrative; when they produce sculptors their work is linear. However true this may once have been, the attitude is changing now. Perhaps the very fact that such a statement has become stock has influenced the trend; artists are on their guard and the current art school bogey now is ‘being literary’.

Our two acknowledged contemporary masters, Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore, are examples of the break-away from the literary. Illustration had bitten deeply into Sutherland in his early days. His Samuel Palmer-like observations ask to be clapped between the pages of a book; but this was only a stage in this artist’s development which, quite soon, he left behind. Henry Moore never seemed even to need to push off from the literary bank before he was swimming vigorously in mid-stream. From the outset he seems to have grasped the essential quality of sculpture—the necessity to conceive it solid, and he has never been tempted towards the linear.

To understand the position, the accomplishments and the problems of Catholic higher education in the United States, one must first understand the circumstances under which it was set up. The Catholic immigrants coming to the country found there an educational system already established, and established with an atmosphere that was anything but Catholic. American school law was strict in that it required every child to go to school, and American public opinion was becoming constantly more interested in extending the period in which he should remain in school. But along with this legal and social insistence or schooling there went a universal recognition that a parent could choose the school that his child would attend. He was perfectly free, if he so wished and could afford it, to send the child to a private school. There was neither a state monopoly of education as found in France, nor state aid to private schools as has been the case in England.

The American hierarchy had a choice to make. Would they allow Catholic children to be educated in the state schools and run the risk of loss of faith, or would they construct a Catholic school system and raise the money for it themselves? They chose the latter course, and by herculean effort and great sacrifice they built an educational structure whose aim was to duplicate the public-school system, grade for grade, subject for subject, advantage for advantage. This work would have been impossible without the teaching Orders, especially the Orders of teaching sisters.

The title of this essay requires immediate modification. In fact it is concerned with one cultural movement, one historic process, which in spite of constant and recurring crises may be termed continuous. The so-called civilisation of the West,—Mediterranean in origin, and now, at least in a superficial and technological sense, world-wide in extent—provides its historical background. The purpose of the essay is to view the history of this culture in terms of personality.

Two questions at once suggest themselves: What is meant by history? and What is personality? By history is here meant an interpretative inquiry concerned with human activity—a description derived from Collingwood, but not understood in quite the same way. This description has at least the value that it forces the mind to consider the second question. For what is human activity but the exteriorisation of mental and moral processes which have their root in the person? No sooner has this been asserted than a doubt arises: What is meant by saying that human activity is the activity of a person?

The uneasy relationship between Irish writing and Irish myth a half-century ago may be seen in a controversy carried on by some leading Irish writers in 1899. It was concerned with the question of what the subjects of a national drama should be. To get the setting right one should recall that the year of the controversy was the year of the foundation of the Irish Literary Society, that the Abbey Theatre was still unborn and that a discussion about what directions an Irish dramatic movement might take must have seemed to most people outside the literary circle which had conceived it rather like a discussion between a newly-married couple about what profession their son would follow, if they had a child and if it was a boy and if he lived to become a man.

By that time, of course, the stimulating power of Irish myth and legend had been shown in the early work of Yeats and other poets of the Irish Literary Revival. The controversy began when John Eglinton, one of the best critics of the movement, suggested that this might not be the case with dramatists. ‘The ancient legends of Ireland undoubtedly contain situations and characters as well suited for drama as most of those used in the Greek tragedies which have come down to us’, he wrote, ‘but these subjects obstinately refuse to be taken out of their old environment and be transplanted into the world of modem sympathies. The proper mode of treating them is a secret lost with the subjects themselves.’

Among the discontents and grievances, real and imaginary, which help to fill the correspondence columns of newspapers, ‘B.B.C. English’ is a veteran. Those who complain usually make an assumption and a statement. They assume the existence of a type of spoken English with definable characteristics to which the term ‘B.B.C. English’ may be assigned. They state that this is an undesirable type of English and frequently, explicitly or implicitly, compare it unfavourably with their own. Critics range from the highly educated to the lunatic fringe. From whatever section of society they derive, they share strong feelings, often express themselves with vehement indignation, and accuse the B.B.C. of attempting to force millions of listeners into the strait-jacket of an accent which is in some way decadent. The adjectives used to describe it sometimes express a relation between the writer’s education, social position or home county and those of an imaginary person, the audible embodiment of the B.B.C.: ‘superior’, ‘lah-di-dah’, ‘snobbish’, ‘slipshod’, ‘Mayfair’, ‘Cockney’, ‘Oxford’, ‘drawling’, are examples of the words used to relieve real irritation. In an age when the niceties of language, spoken and written, command so little appreciation, so much emotion may seem surprising. I believe it is both natural and, in some degree, desirable. But I should not like to say why without examining the basic assumption that there is an accent called ‘B.B.C. English’.

Mr Evelyn Waugh once wrote, in a letter, I think, to a Catholic newspaper, that it is the business of the novelist to portray man ‘against a background of eternal values’. Few novelists and few critics have been sufficiently clear-headed to attempt such a succint definition. In making his point so neatly, Mr Waugh has disclosed the dilemma in which the modem poet and novelist find themselves, a dilemma which is fairly represented in this passage from Elizabeth Bowen’s own notes on novel-writing:

This article is concerned with gestures in religion not I with religion in gestures, with the action seen rather than with the prayer prayed as when the hand touches the forehead and completes the sign of the Cross upon the breast. It begins with the story of other actions in a large pageant or spectacle in order to give the setting to so small a gesture as the Sign of the Cross, because that contrast follows my own experience; I saw the Miracle many years before the Sign of the Cross ceased, with my conversion, to be merely a sign of superstition!

Reinhardt’s Miracle happened forty years ago in Olympia, London. It was a good ‘period’ piece, modem in production, medieval in inspiration, and may be described as an example of religious mime; although its theology was faulty and its actors hired only to reproduce the shape or picture of a medieval pageant, it was clearly intended to appeal to the religious instinct of the beholder.

Since that time (1910) pictures, pageant and mime have become more popular. Europe has suffered the upheaval of great wars. Most big cities have become cosmopolitan with large numbers of inhabitants ‘illiterate’ save in their own tongue and therefore avid for the common language of picture and spectacle—a fact which propagandists are not slow to appreciate.

Twenty years ago, a branch of the Moscow Olympiad of the Revolutionary Theatre (M.O.R.T.) in New York ‘where one of the strongest dramatic councils’ then existed (according to a Bulletin of the ‘International Workers’ Theatrical Olympiad’)

One of the ablest critics of contemporary art has distinguished two groups among the more abstract types of painting today. The one, deriving through cubism from Cézanne and Seurat, is characterised by this critic as intellectual, structural, architectonic, geometric, rectilinear and classical. The other, deriving from Gauguin through fauvisme, and especially Matisse, he defines as instinctive and emotional, organic or biomorphic, curvilinear and romantic.

The opposition of these two groups is the modem equivalent of the old opposition of the classical and the romantic or, to formulate the distinction in still more general terms, it might be said to represent the eternal distinction between the draughtsman painter and the colourist. It is to the former that the art of Mr de Maistre belongs. He is the leading exponent in this country of the later developments of cubism. His conventions are personal to himself, being dictated by his personal experiences, but his point of view is analogous to that shewn in recent work by the continental artists who created cubism.

Like theirs, Mr de Maistre’s pictures retain a relationship to natural appearances absent from the most extreme forms of contemporary abstract art. Mr de Maistre takes for his theme the emotional experience provoked by some event, real or imaginary, which has struck his imagination. The ceremony of the coronation, for example, has inspired a picture which he has named The Procession. Form and colour are his means of expression, so that :he forms and colours of the scene which has inspired him are of necessity intimately associated with the emotions which it has provoked.

There are people with a bent for sacramental philosophy and theology who are always awestruck by the amount of earth that mixes with heaven in the Church of God. Heaven has truly folded all its gifts in tissues of earth, and we naturally marvel that heaven should have used the earth so much. There are even those who are scandalised into heresy by this, and begin to talk of God and the soul and the great alone. Yet, one could marvel just as much to see how earth has used heaven or how much the children of this generation have learned from the children of light.

The Church of God has been a great organisation since it emerged from the underground of pre-Constantine days. Genius such as that of Gregory the Great, Hildebrand, or the Tridentine popes, has contributed to the perfection of this organisation. Yet, remembering the lesser geniuses, one cannot but see that the hand of God was in it all—that wisdom of the most high that sweetly but strongly orders everything, the same wisdom which came to teach us the way of prudence. The very organisation of the Catholic Church has taught us a certain prudence. I do not speak of ordinary prudence, but of regnative prudence. How much of our international law was formed by a consideration of the prudence of that government which by force of its mission must be international and supernational.

The perfection of the parish-system, as we have it now, is due to the reforms of the Council of Trent.

The artistic record of the Church in England over the last hundred years is indeed a dismal one. Dull, drab and even ugly churches, in what passes for a period style, are furnished with clumsy woodwork, characterless plaster statues and fussy, over-decorated altars, exhibiting so often a general air of tawdriness which can scarcely fail to depress and may actually repel a seeker after peace and beauty in God’s house. There are, of course, exceptions. There are always exceptions; but no more than enough of them to prove the rule and to show the tremendous opportunities which lie within our grasp.

The reasons for this unhappy state of affairs are not difficult to discover or to understand. The restoration of the English Hierarchy, and the emergence of the Church from obscurity, took place at a time when artistic taste in this country had sunk to its lowest ebb. The classical tradition had had its last flourish in the first two decades of the century, in the form which we now call the Regency style. But it flourished then not as the accepted tradition in which all men worked and within which the genius of the time found new expression, but as one of several styles, an alternative to more exotic forms borrowed from the East, or to the revived ‘Gothick’ manner. There was no longer any accepted grammar of architecture, or any universal standard of artistic criticism. The Romantic Movement in literature had been followed in the graphic arts, and the paintings of Claude and Poussin had fired the imagination of patrons of architecture.

The frequency of the name Martha in Provence from the eighth century onwards, as well as its rarity elsewhere in the West, is an indirect but significant indication of the cult of the saint who first bore it in those parts. Moreover, two charters of 964 and 967, now in the archives of the Bouches-du-Rhône, mention a terra of St Martha near Tarascon.

It is also alleged that there exist no other traditions concerning these saintly personages (Lazarus and his sisters, Martha and Mary Magdalen, Mary Salome, and Mary the mother of James), and no other church has ever claimed them. This has been contradicted by the original opponent of the tradition, the seventeenth-century scholar Launoy, and more recently by Mgr Duchesne. The latter brought forward a number of texts to show that Mary Magdalen, regarded as distinct from Mary of Bethany, had her tomb in Ephesus in the sixth century, and that Lazarus, whom certain traditions also connect with Ephesus, had a tomb in Lamaca, then called Citium, in Cyprus, in the ninth century, and that in 899 his body and that of Mary Magdalen were transferred to Constantinople by Leo VI.