It was a stock taunt at Ruskin twenty years ago, when he began to become unfashionable, that he was ‘a schoolmaster.’ In the sense that he was mainly concerned with the imposition of a divinely-inspired discipline on a perverse and unruly generation, this is undoubtedly true. The same may be said—at least in his later manifestations—of Mr. Shaw; with the devastating difference that his curriculum is avowedly of his own devising, and does not lay claim to any sanction whatever outside the author’s invariably upright but occasionally insensitive conscience. Bearing in mind these points of contact and cleavage, it is extraordinarily interesting to read in the speech delivered by Mr. Shaw at the Ruskin Centenary Exhibition, and now re-published as Ruskin's Politics, the younger teacher’s opinion of the older.

Mr. Shaw starts, as all good pedagogues do, by arguing from the seen to the unseen. He points out the portraits of Ruskin on the walls of the exhibition—the early Mozart-like medallion; the Herkomer, strongly resembling John Stuart Mill; the photographs taken at Coniston, where the head is a naturalist’s (Grant Allen’s, to be precise); and finally, Severn’s studies of the wonderful old man like ‘God as depicted in Blake’s Book of Job.’ Through these he traces the painter, music-lover, poet, rhetorician, economist and sociologist who ended (he says) by ‘developing sociology and economics into a religion, as all economics and sociology that are worth anything do finally develop.’

Now this is very much the same thing as saying that a sufficiently devoted mill-wheel finally develops into the mountain torrent that turns it.

By the time that these lines are in print Mr. Belloc’s latest book will have been reviewed in many papers; and I cannot but fear that, if it is taken as gravely as it deserves, it will provoke impatient comment from both English and Jewish readers. For it has been written deliberately to raise the Jewish question, to make it a conscious issue, and to insist that only by the frank acceptance of this issue on both sides can an impending calamity be forestalled. At the moment, for reasons which Mr. Belloc explains, there is only one section of the community alertly conscious of the Jewish problem, and anxious to raise it, namely the Anti-Semites, who are eager to take the first opportunity of attacking the Jews. The rest of us, including the Jews themselves, do not want the question raised at all, and even deny its existence. They severally declare, or wish it be assumed, that the Jews are not an alien nation, but fellow nationals only differentiated by a religion peculiar to themselves. It would not be surprising therefore if the first effect of the book were to excite an irrational Jewish protest, scepticism and annoyance in the general mass, and among the Anti-Semites embittered disappointment that one as alive to the issue as themselves should yet deliberately dissociate himself from their antagonistic policy. For in matters liable to acute controversy the disinterested seeker after truth and consideration is rarely welcomed.

There is something impertinent and objectionable in the action of one who sits down to write of Ireland on the strength of a week’s visit. The Irish people are becoming used to trippers from England and elsewhere who come in order to collect impressions and hand out ready-made solutions to problems that have baffled the Irish themselves for ages. These impressions of mine then are set down in a mood of diffidence, with full apologies to the hospitable people who treated me with so much patient kindness and with a confident assurance that they will know how to measure the worth of my words and to winnow the grain of wisdom from a mass of folly.

Making my way from the train to the boat in a somewhat dazed condition after an all-night journey, it came as a surprise to see people turning out their portmanteaux under the irreverent gaze of a Customs official. I did not realize the reason for this until a Customs officer asked me if I had any arms and ammunition. ‘Two arms, but no ammunition,’ was a truthful reply; but 5 a.m. is an unseasonable time for feeble jokes, and I was obliged to display the contents of my bag, and enjoyed the mild wonder of the official while he examined my Dominican habit and a conspicuously large pair of rosary beads. These were considered innocuous, and I was allowed to go on my way—not exactly rejoicing, for this little drama had reminded me that I was going to a disturbed area in Ireland.

The dogmatic duel between the two intellectual leaders of Anglo-Catholicism and Modernism within the Church of England is a struggle of giants made homely by irrepressible sallies of the ‘average man.’ Neither the Bishop nor the Dean can lay aside that human nature which feels and even repays a hurt.

We should have no joy in recording one of these sallies if strangely enough it did not bind into a single sheaf of words what it elsewhere scattered over the field of controversy. In the August number of The Modern Churchman Dean Rashdall has an article entitled ‘Bishop Gore and St. Thomas Aquinas,’ in which he writes :

‘You must be a believer,’ said an Irish Protestant, ‘to go to Oberammergau.’ Perhaps this good paterfamilas, revealed what the shock of the actualities of Catholicism awoke in him—the sense that he was a vague Theist, or perhaps, as theologians might say, some sort of Monophysite, but that he was disinherited from the Incarnation, and was but confounded, when taken inside the household of faith. All round him in Ireland the faithful lived, bad and good; and had the Faith. But he never went into the only places that best be called churches, nor divined the instinct for reality, the knowledge of the true proportion of things, the supernatural insight, belonging even to the most untried faith.

It is, indeed, no light mantle of greatness, worn (thought Dr. Martineau), by even the humblest Catholic, belonging to a religion passing times and lands, in which there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither bond or free, of which kings have been the nursing fathers, and queens the nursing mothers, for which princes have laid down their crowns, and where, daily, wealth hides its pomp under the rough robe of the cloister (that place in which the Christians still have all things in common); the religion that cares not for race, nor language, for feudalism nor revolution; in the sense, that, whatever turns up among

‘the rapid, blind,
And fleeting generations of mankind,’

the Church will be always there, at home under Charles the Great, and in English haphazard colonies, that Church of the French Jesuits, at the court of the Sun-King, or going, thence to follow Indian trails, that Church of English minsters and of the harried Irish; that Church growing to-day in an American un-traditional State, and not less under a German Republic than under an Austrian Catholic monarchy; the Church which survived the Reformation plannings and plunderings, and which the French Revolution shook out of its officials’ complacency in princely patronage and corroding un-Roman Erastianism; the Church Catholic, in which the nations tortured by inhuman nationalism may find defence against their devouring madness, if not cure of their chronic disease.

Bossuet, in his sermon on the Unity of the Church, sees her history movingly prefigured by the march of the Israelites through the wilderness: ‘leaving Egypt and the darkness of idolatry she crosses, in search of the Promised Land, a measureless desert where she finds nothing but fearsome rocks and burning sand; no soil, no cultivation, none of earth’s fruits; a terrifying drought; no bread but such as must be sent down from heaven; no refreshing water but such as must be drawn by a miracle from the heart of a rock; all nature sterile in her regard and nothing good but by grace ... In the horror of this vast solitude, she appears surrounded by enemies, marching always in battle array, never resting but in tents, ever ready to move on and to fight; a stranger, whom nothing can fix. nothing satisfy; who casts a passing glance on all things but will neither stop nor stay, and yet is happy in this state, because of the consolations granted her on her journey, and the glorious and immutable rest which will be the end of her course.’

The art of Hawthorne is the most beautiful thing; that has come out of America. Perhaps its fantastic quality of imagination, in which beauty kindles from word to word as colour will in tapestry or in the red glow against the dun background of a Yanina embroidery, picked out here and there with fragmentary touches of gold thread, is due to the fact that his sense of beauty was a changeling and had no father in American soil. His subject is the Puritan conscience, whose fine and rigid quality was reflected in a stern law, the first refuge of frigid men who had entered a strange continent with all the forces of nature arrayed against them. Transplanted into a soil unprepared for them, the pioneers, who had revolted from their original home, identified their foes without with their foes within, so that nature everywhere became the enemy, and life itself sinful. To have been born at all was the first sin to these Puritans,—who suffered from the most dreadful of all human superstitions, expiated by sacrifice. To them repentance meant wearing sackcloth and ashes. But there is an old word not open to this confusion, the word resipiscence. It means, as repentance should be held to mean, change to a better frame of mind. This they neglected. The means were confused with the end; punishment was enjoyed for its own sake, and suffering became a man-eating idol after the manner of Moloch.

Jean Francois Marmontel remotely recalls our Pepys. It is true that his memoirs, from which the following account of his school days are culled, are not a diary, and were written late in life for his children’s benefit. But they give a vivid picture of his times, from his peasant home life (after all, not so wretched as might be expected from Victorian literature), through school, college, a brief and ‘distasteful’ ecclesiastical career as a tonsured abbè, and the intrigues, amorous and otherwise, of Parisian life. He writes charmingly as a man of letters, but his confessions are no less candid than those of our Samuel. The spirit of the times made any watering down for his children’s eyes quite superfluous. He was the friend of Voltaire and Madame de Pompadour, and his office of Perpetual Secretary to the French Academy brought him into contact with all who were worth knowing. He was never in the first rank of literature, but was ‘successful in all styles.’ He attained to European celebrity chiefly through his Belisaire, a work deprecating the use of carnal weapons in spiritual warfare. The book was fortunate enough to incur the wrath of the Doctors of the Sorbonne, who drew up an ‘indiculus’ of twenty-seven condemned propositions. Voltaire christened the list ‘indiculus ridiculus,’ and, in conjunction with others, succeeded in making the learned Doctors appear exceedingly foolish.

Several writers in the recent outburst of Dante literature dwelt on his debt to Ireland, to the legends of St. Fursey and to the literature dealing with the most renowned pilgrimage of the western world, the Purgatory of St. Patrick in Ireland. I call it ‘the most renowned’ because centuries before the birth of the glorious martyr of Canterbury, pilgrims visited the lonely isle in Donegal where tradition says that St. Patrick spent several periods of penance.

Legends grew around the holy spot, and the literature of Europe teems with references to the Purgatory of St. Patrick with its wonderful cave where some penitents saw visions of worlds of sorrow and of joy. From nearly every nation in Europe came pilgrims:

From England came Alfred the Great. From Wales came the Knight Owen about the year 1153. The wonders seen by him in the cave are recorded in the Chronicle of Roger of Wendover. From Italy came Guarino da Durazzo and Godelath (1248). The Royal Library of Turin holds records of the wonders seen and heard by him in the holy spot. From Flanders came Le Sire de Beaujean in 1305. In the weird cave he had a vision of souls in hell, some of whom he recognised. From Hungary in 1353 came George Crissaphan, and his wonderful visions are long to narrate.

There are books which, after all, are but books—as cinematograph films are but films. And who ever yearned to probe the heart of the film producer, though our pockets bulge with photographs of film stars? But there are also books which are almost primarily letters of introduction to their authors. Such, in England, are the slim volumes which immortalize Lionel Johnson : such, in France, are the novels—for so we must call them—of Joris Karl Huysmans.

His is a lonely soul. Perhaps the best summaries of it are the quotations his title-pages almost always bear emblazoned on them : for these are armigerous books, even those which do not flaunt St. Benedict’s Cross for their crest. Of the rest the keynote is perhaps furnished by the sentence of Blessed John Ruysbroeck which introduces A Reborns: Il faut que je me rejouisse au-dessus de mon temps . . . quoique le monde ait horrem de ma foie, et que sa grossièreté ne sache pas ce que je veux dire. Ruysbroeck, writing them, knew the echo : to Huysmans it came later : Sed confidite, ego vici mundum.

Another of these blazonries tells us Catholics the raison d'être of the man. It is the shield of La Cathédrale—perhaps the only epic which has made another epic its hero : Domine, dilexi decorem domus tuae et locum habitationis gloriae tuae . . . Ne perdas cum impiis, Deus, animam meam. And in this book most of all Huysmans shows us the way to live out of an age of which so many of us are weary.