"While Kings of eternal evil
Yet darken the hills about,
Thy part is with broken saber
To rise on the last redoubt."
-- Louise Imogen Guiney.
THIS book has been written -- if it must be weighted down with a purpose -- to make clear that a portion of modern English literature is definitely Catholic in spirit, that it represents the Catholic mind; and a general view of the subject will, therefore, not be out of place here at the end. We have seen, first of all, that it was essential, in a country where the ancient traditions of Christendom had been discarded or discoloured, that the past should be brought to light again as it really was, with no disparagement of the truth and beauty of its culture. While the romantic movement, particularly as represented by Scott, may be said to have become acquainted with the people of the Ages of Faith, it was on the whole too superficial and fanciful to revive the reality of their society. The characters evolved by the romanticist were, so to speak, galvanized into a modern attitude. Kenelm Digby was the first great English writer to see the Middle Ages as they ought to be seen, to group the picturesque qualities of the time round the profound social unity which they coloured, and to understand the soul of Europe as a Catholic would understand it. Even if one cannot say that the author of "Mores Catholici" was a literary genius, surely it is not wrong to call him a genius simply, by reason of his remarkable discernment of a buried world. Others would exploit the discovered country; and John Ruskin preached a comely gospel of beauty from the texts of his master.
But no Catholic who is really alive would spend much time dreaming of the reign of Saint Louis or the heyday of the Schools, solely for their own sakes, or because he believed them models after which society could be refashioned. The point of the medievalist is simply this: the spirit which informed mediaeval life is latent and can be made effective in modern life, a philosophy which really worked out should again become a working philosophy. It was the great service of Newman, the most scientific mind in modern England, to have understood this truth in its myriad ramifications. With a grasp of history that seems amazingly acute and complete, Newman went to work upon the spirit of his age by analyzing its horizons. Moving a full step ahead of the time he guessed its limitations; he went from the equator of English thought to the poles and left no intermediate land unvisited. His work was, of course, mental and aimed at the conversion, the renovation, of the English point of view. The more immediate and concrete matters he was willing to leave to others.
Those others were not wanting. A great body of poets engaged in the very practical business of song with gifts that will in the end be ranked with those of Wordsworth and Browning. The impetus given to the action of the Catholic Spirit upon social problems by Cardinal Manning was accepted with devotion by many other able men. It became also the chief interest of a powerful group of pamphleteers at the head of whom have stood the Chestertons, W.S. Lilly, and Belloc. History has been written from the Catholic point of view by some of the ablest among its masters; fiction has taken on the allurement of faith; eloquence, philosophy, journalism -- the multiform endeavours of the modern literary movement have engaged the powers of notable Catholic writers. There is not a department of English letters that has not profited by the expression of the spirit of Christendom. All this has been accomplished in a country which a hundred years ago scoffed at the name of Rome and which scorned nothing so deeply as the memory of the Faith which had once crowned England with the glory of its handiwork. Add the fruitful appeal of the Catholic voice in Ireland and the growing power of its utterance in America, and you have a magnificent force, creative of truth and beauty for the world.
Seen thus in its entirety, the literature which we have examined is a most impressive spectacle. Let us use the word "spectacle" because it implies that the matter is quite visible, although it has been overlooked often enough. In no weapon has the philosophy which is anti-Catholic seen such power as in silence. And yet we have become too tall to be ignored; we have talked too much to be termed mute; we have stood in the market-place too long to be thought hermits. Clearly the Catholic presence is quantitatively important; and the only thing we still have to do is to consider briefly its inner value, the worth of its principles as standards in art. We recognize very fully that Catholic letters must not be separated from the world at large, or limited to a body of thought which is not directly concerned with the life of the time. The pages of this book have shown, it is hoped, some of the relations which have actually existed between the current we have been following and the surrounding domain of English literary art. The creative power of the Catholic Spirit has worked with the materials of the age and has been subject to its influences, joyfully and in the spirit of service.
Now what have been the conclusions of the modern time concerning the purpose and nature of art? We naturally think broadly of literature as expressing first the individual and then society. We feel that what distinguishes it from mere writing, is creative sincerity. An artist must know and be able to express human nature as it actually is. Unless he has divined correctly the mixture of aspiration and perverse instinct that constitutes an individual; unless he understands concretely the dream, the resolve, the prayer, and the effort that lead to heroism or towards it, as well as the inner egoism so seldom subdued, the reverie of passion, the urge to lust, and the petty misery of unfed mentality that induce ugliness and spiritual subservience, the artist is not in the end accepted by humanity. The false ring of his coinage will betray his counterfeiting, and nothing will save him from the derision of the stocks. In a similar way, literature must be based upon a recognition of elemental social truths. The artist need not be a scientist or even a strict philosopher, but he must comprehend intuitively the realities of collective life. He must see, for instance, that Arcadia is not situated just twenty-four miles outside any large city; that the success of marriage as an institution is not based entirely upon an exchange of kisses by May moonlight; and that all ladies are not immediately susceptible to all traveling men. In short, literature must adopt not merely the common language, but also common sense.
These things are simply the result of intelligence looking sanely upon the world it seeks to express. That expression cannot, however, be purposeless, simply because there is no such thing in human life as intelligence acting utterly apart from an exercise of the will. Experience may force upon us the consciousness of facts, but it cannot create that harmonious grasp and orderly representation of facts which we call artistic truth; and, therefore, diversity of moral outlook introduces, despite the objectiveness of the real world, a kind of relativity into art. It is this which explains the manifold differences between the extremes of what are called realism and romance. With these we are not concerned here; but it is evident that the creator of literature must be guided by principles, and the great conflict of criticism rages round what those principles are in practice and should be in theory. Statements concerning them are varied, but none seem on the whole more ample or more nearly correct than those set down by Matthew Arnold, whom we quote the more readily because he was not a Catholic.
In his essay on "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," Arnold says: ". . . the elements with which the creative power works are ideas: the best ideas on every matter which literature touches, current at the time," and goes on to draw the inference that criticism is "a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that has been known and thought in the world." This statement appears to be substantially correct, although the emphasis is probably too strong on simple intelligence; surely there is some room also for the best that has been felt in the world. To the substantial elements of knowledge and insight the artist must add the less tangible but equally necessary forces of form and feeling, the vitamines of literature. Guided by the light of eternal verities, he will not forget the soil of the land through which he passes. Such a standard Catholic writing is ready to adopt and to practice faithfully, but the question naturally arises: What is the best, and what manner of expression is most befitting it? Arnold insisted upon the separation of the world of ideas from the 'lower' sphere of practical considerations and sectarian opinions. This is probably a Cartesian principle, but without criticizing it here, let us see whether great liberty and tolerant breadth are incompatible with the Catholic point of view.
II
Nothing could be more false than the impression that the Catholic creed acts as a curb upon thought. As a matter of fact, one of the foremost advantages to be gained from an acceptance of that creed is freedom. One can belong to the Church without being required to believe in any of the rigid specialties of the modern mind; one may be an evolutionist or none; a prohibitionist or none; even, it might be added, a sinner or none. The Catholic has not one rule of faith but two; in a more earthly sphere he may be an employer or a laborer, an Englishman or an Irishman, a pacifist or a warrior. The Church has always most firmly opposed encroachments upon the rightful liberty of the individual; she has denounced state monopolies such as Socialism, religious sects which, like the Flagellantes, stake everything upon an eccentric observance, and movements within the fold which tend to sacrifice universality for nationalism. During the nineteenth century she was accused by Napoleon of being un-French; by Bismarck of being un-German; by Gladstone of being un-British: in short, she has been steadfastly arraigned for being too broad.
No other institution has ever made half so detailed a provision for the divergent temperaments of men. Her sacraments and rites reckon with every moment in and every state of human life. She has created establishments for the mystic as well as for the active man, which are so carefully individualized that they adjust themselves spontaneously to every conceivable type of soul. The very Calendar of the Saints is a study in the differentiation of the human species. And Catholic society, which liberated woman from sexual bondage and made of the slave an owner of the land, has also done most for the freedom of art. It made of the artisan an artist; it raised masters of beauty beyond number from the hovels of the poor. The coefficient of its action for social emancipation was its eagerness to expand the reign of intelligence. Historically it has proved the only collective group that could thrive on disputes and to it the distraught have come for settlement. How many modern minds, egoistic in the face of surrounding mediocrity, have turned to Rome for solace! Brunetière went that road with Coppée, Patmore with Beardsley, Stoddard with Brownson. Men whose belligerent individualism was the root of their genius have thus come by scores into the most compact organization in history. They have discovered that a Catholic has a right to do his own thinking as Saint Thomas and Dun Scotus did theirs. They have found in the principles of belief the pathways to new horizons, to new continents of splendour and security. To sum up the matter, it may be said that if experience has proved anything thoroughly it is that the Catholic spirit has never interfered with the fullest liberty demanded by art.
What a different story this is from that of the sectarianism which marred the sacred structures of the older Christian time, or from that of modern industrialism which scorns the very name of beauty or its servitors! It is characteristic of our commercial civilization to be ignorant of the most simple artistic principles and at the same time to regard the whole matter with undisguised contempt. The conflict between art and the service of material results is irremediable. Our cities are huge villages of foreigners, not the victims of immigration, but the creatures of dissociation. The things that keep these people together are ugly, like the places in which they weave and spin. Society has vertigo from incessant turning in a dizzy treadmill, and, having been blinded by a delusion of progress, does not even realize that it is standing still. Art cannot be divorced from serenity of intellect, and we have lost that. From the literature of sentimentalism we have gone to the literature of sentimental cynicism, the ugliest expression of life that has ever been offered for worship.
The Catholic Spirit, however, has continued to insist upon one thing with all the vigour of its being. It has declared that there is a "best" among ideas and sentiments, that the premise of art is truth, and that truth (which is beauty also) lies in and above what the intelligence perceives as existing in the world. The senses have their usefulness and the appearances presented to them have their allurement, but it is often a deceptive allurement. Only a rational treatment of the garment of the universe will reveal the reality and preserve the beauty of the raiment. And here is where the service of religion to art becomes important. By reason of its faith in and communication with a world that is higher than nature, by reason of the revealed truth which it manifests, the religious spirit is successful in keeping the mind on a level higher than matter, in rescuing the hand of the artist from the iridescent pools that form in the mud of life. There is, indeed, a terrible beauty for the depraved soul of man in the ways of evil, a beauty that seduces the spirit so easily cajoled from the beginning by the powers of Darkness.
It need scarcely be added that in practice Christianity is the only force which can save art and life from the decay of the flesh. "Always and everywhere," says Taine the skeptic, "for eighteen hundred years, wherever those wings fail or are broken, public and private morals are degraded. In Italy during the Renaissance, in England under the Restoration, in France under the National Convention, man seemed to become as pagan as in the first century; he became at once as he was in the times of Augustus and Tiberius, voluptuous and hard-hearted; he misused others and himself; brutal or calculating egoism regained ascendancy, cruelty and sensuality were openly paraded, and society became the abode of ruffians and the haunt of evil."{1}
To save art from ruin is one service; to provide it with a new world is another. In the wide rooms of the spirit, as they are unfolded to the Catholic vision, there are far-reaching vistas which have their influence on the reading of life. The symbolism that has distinguished Christian art is simply an attempt to visualize that portion of the unseen world which is manifest to the spirit. Whether we term this effort mystical or not, its sponsors vouch bravely for its reality. Their discovery has been bought too dearly to be termed a delusion, and its results are too worthy to be scorned. Anyone who derides it as untrue, or rejects it without earnest personal investigation, is emphatically not a seeker for the "best that has been known and thought in the world." He is simply a person with prejudices. Practically, then, the Catholic Spirit in art is both a regulative and a widening power: it is conservative in its human aspects and radical in its superhuman aspects. But it never forgets the soul or the body, the reality or the symbol.
III
It is particularly necessary to insist upon the dignity of art at this time when unusual efforts are being made in English-speaking countries to ignore it. The authors who are upheld as masters of contemporary writing are almost generally men with very little appreciation of the soul or of those things in which it is vitally interested. Naturalistic motivation in fiction, the drama of emotional revolt, impressionistic poetry that has been begotten sensuously, are acclaimed with surprising enthusiasm. George Moore, D. H. Lawrence, Gilbert Cannan, with a hundred lesser individuals, are literary gods before whom much incense is uproariously burned. In America the name before which we are bidden to make obeisance is Theodore Dreiser. Every adjective adapted to convey the impression of virility, of rugged honesty, of unique beauty, is made part of the vocabulary of a school of critics that seems to have gathered expressly to advertise naturalism. The coveted goal of expression appears to be visualization, and this is achieved principally in regions where the human race is "at its damndest," as Patmore would have said. New departments of "science" -- psycho-analysis and spiritism -- are invoked to justify the cloudiness of intelligence which seems to have conquered the world. The whole of this business has been admirably organized to drive away the faintest trace of a spiritual idea from the minds of those whose course in modern reading has been sufficiently thorough. We are not attempting here any defense of squeamishness nor do we wish to imply that naturalistic art is without value. It is probable that the romantic and yet fleshly "innocence" in which so many modern fictionists have steeped their plots has been more baneful than plain speaking would have been; certainly it has given a distorted view of life, has occasioned a sentimentalism that wraps the most serious affairs of existence in flimsy pink gauze, and has induced puerile reveries that kill honest thought. Assuredly Saint Francis de Sales was a modest man; and yet his discussion of sex in the "Introduction to a Devout Life" does not shun reality. It was Saint John Chrysostom, the denouncer of kings and profligates, who thundered against prudery as a heresy. And in so far as intense, even squalid, realism is concerned, it may very well be true that modern industrialism has given abundant excuse for the terrible portrait of life which men like Balzac and Gissing have provided.
But it is a different matter to assert that literature is privileged to sponsor any principle so long as the form in which that principle is couched happens to be à la mode. It may be untrue, it may even be the product of a diseased mind. No sepulcher can ever be more than a whitened sepulcher; no literary grace can cloak the thing that is a lie. Dreary volumes of sordid detail will never manage, either, to be art, if the idea which they are written to express is some cheap falsity of pseudo-science, some hectic justification of brutish instinct. Every sane man in this world realizes the perverse fascination of the obscene; and it is the task of art, as it is of thought and religion, to transfix the demon that is without and within us. The great danger for an age which is the prey of advertising lies in the fact that the appeal of books which glorify the animal in man can be artificially stimulated to give them a literary prominence which the common sense of humanity would ordinarily refuse. Subtle philosophers are not average readers; and volumes that are utterly gaudy, useless, and vile can be set before the public as "great art" and "epoch-making," can be grounded on some mad aesthetic system, and can thus be made to aid in the subversion, now so nearly accomplished, of the sense of the true and the beautiful.
The forces which used to oppose paganism have weakened considerably. There can be no doubt that as Protestantism decays in America, other systems of thought based upon some vagrant species of mysticism will take its place. The mind of man is hungry and, it might be added, his nerves are weak. Centuries of individualism have pushed him close to the precipice which is license. What does the multitude know today of the true and the beautiful? What does it know of God? These realities, which formed the pillars of Christendom, are scarcely more than ruins to a large part of our society. But men do cling to the Messianic dream, to the Jewish delusion that the king shall rule on earth. And one after another social Utopias are being made into religions, Utopias which proceed upon the basis of some mechanistic interpretation of the world and in the hope that out of material welfare peace of heart may be born. Demagogue follows fanatic and their number is legion; all sense of the solidarity of human effort, of human destiny, of human dignity, disappears. The poor are either invariably virtuous or the rich are above reproach. Man is no longer measured as man, but by the riches he possesses or by the industrial function which he chances to fulfill. The degradation of art is a necessary consequence; for if the vocation of the artist is to conserve anything like concern with beauty, with aspiration, with ecstasy, it must deal first of all with man.
However much we should like to apply to this or that feverishly acclaimed author the words which Joseph de Maistre threw at Voltaire, "Paris le couronna: Sodome l'eut banni," the ghost will not be downed in that way. The battle must settle into a contest between conceptions of life; it must be won on the ancient alignments of right and wrong. The service of honest criticism is, therefore, of the greatest value, and we shall try to outline briefly the organized opposition in America to the cult of literary sensism. Most important, perhaps, is the humanistic position as defended principally by Irving Babbitt and Paul E. More. Professor Babbitt's principles are strikingly evident from two able books, "The New Laokoon" and "Rousseau and Romanticism"; and these may be permitted to represent the movement to aid which they were written. Babbitt's criticism, ably documented and based upon very wide reading in many literatures, is concerned chiefly with modern romanticism. The substance of his doctrine is apparently to be found in this statement: "The romantic error has been to make of revery the serious substance of life instead of its occasional solace; to set up the things that are below the reason as a substitute for those that are above it; in short, to turn the nature cult into a religion." He teaches that the true humanist is he who mediates between prosaic sensibleness and imaginative illusion, who satisfies "the standards of poetry without offending the standards of prose."
With so much of his doctrine we are in accord. Unfortunately, however, there is not wanting evidence to show that he tends to be what Ruskin would have called "a short-sighted Protestant person." One does not mean to be ungenerous, but it is clear that Babbitt has not taken into account many things which happened between the Aristotle whom he deifies and the Luther whom he admires. He does not realize that to the reasoned naturalism of the Greeks Christianity added the supernaturalism, to proclaim which it had been born into this world; he does not see that in Saint Thomas and other scholars of the mediaeval time a synthesis of the two elements was effected that changed forever the intellectual complexion of Europe. Of course Mr. Babbitt has not stopped with Luther. The innate quietism and the ethical preoccupations of his spirit are interestingly shown by the fact that he has taken refuge in Buddhism. In like manner his aesthetic system is based upon the Greeks and the Renaissance; he cannot understand Christian society because he has skipped fifteen centuries. To this twist can be traced the manifold narrownesses of a critical system to which, in many respects, we may bow with admiration. Its chief concern is the arraignment of Rousseau, who is pilloried as the father of modern ills, but its author does not take into account either the fact that Rousseau may occasionally have been posing or the no less indubitable truth that Luther was guilty of the same superlative individualism, the same repudiation of intellectual "bondage," and the same reliance on states of mind that are divorced from action. In other words, he does not find the source of what he knows is the trouble with modern literature. But taken all in all, his system seems much more solid and helpful than, for instance, the idealistic views of Benedetto Croce, whose modified Hegelianism, fruitful of novelty, is gaining influence among us. That is quite too subtle and simple for life.
Professor Babbitt's humanistic -- or classic -- principles are ably accepted and defended, with modifications, by at least two exceptionally brilliant women, Agnes Repplier and Katherine Fullerton Gerould. Their writing has poise, wit, and acid, and there are few men amongst us who could safely risk a passage with either. But both are frankly aristocratic, disdainful of the vulgarity of the horde, and intent upon conserving the culture of the chosen few: Mrs. Gerould says bluntly, "I am cynical enough to believe that, if a generation feels like stepping down, it will do so."{2} And she seems quite right. How impossible it is either to stem the current of a popular movement or to inaugurate a new one by the simple expedient of creating a doctrine, especially a high-brow doctrine! Babbitt, as a matter of fact, has generally been either derided or ignored. The people who read Gautier will not accept his authority and those who do not are scarcely inclined to attribute to literary criticism the lofty position claimed for it in "Rousseau and Romanticism." The only influence that can elevate the trend of literature is a correct and generally accepted standard of life, a collective grasp of the sources from which art springs. More individualism is not calculated to remedy the excessive concern with the Ego which has unbalanced modern thought. And it is instructive to note in this connection exactly what has happened in France where the conflict has raged fiercest, where, as Arnold has affirmed, "the people are most alive," and where in spite of the tumult, Catholic tradition is still influential.
The nineteenth century opened, indeed, with the romantic revival of Chateaubriand, but its basis was still the intellectual position that had antedated the Revolution. Rousseau who dreamed of a beatific return to nature, and Voltaire who scorned with the full bitterness of an unbeliever the institutions which had upheld society, had disturbed the minds of modern men too violently for the acceptance of a moderate philosophy. The author of "Emile" had professed to believe that thought is criminal; his disciples simply did not think. Delicacy of sense-perception, satiety of sense-experience, were set up as the guiding principles in art. "Whatever is realized is right," said Oscar Wilde, who was an excellent pupil, though the English jailed him for being in earnest. Literature was divorced from intelligence, from morals, from every faculty of man except his animal instincts and his abnormalities. For the first time, it was maintained, the artist was entirely free; he existed for no other purpose than to dream, "beautifully" perhaps, but differently at all costs.
And yet literature had never been so sternly bound by fantastic and impossible theories. With Zola the art of fiction became an experiment in the discovery of laws that (supposedly) govern humanity with scientific rigidity; his books are enormous wastes across which move primitive men, characters formed and driven according to the iron rules of heredity, environment, and the necessities of existence. For all his wealth of detail, he was interested in large, crude theses and not in facts. Whenever the actual world ran counter to his hypothesis, he denied the existence of the world. But Zola was not an anomaly. He had learned his manner in the company of George Sand, whose theories were ample, vague, often viciously sentimental; of Victor Hugo, who preached long but engaging sermons in the interests of humanitarianism; of Gautier, for whom life was a piquant series of adventures -- or experiments -- in sex; and of Flaubert and the Goncourts who sought the word that would conjure up a musty odour for an inordinate sensibility. Not one of all these but was generously gifted, all had talent, and all were lasting and vivid demonstrations of the truth that literature cannot be divorced from reality and a sound philosophy of the world.
This was an era, too, of skeptic speculation, when the already unsettled souls of men were further shaken by the phrases of Saint-Simon, by the subtle irreligion of Renan, and by the dark Positivism of Taine. The old, solid traditions of Christian France were attacked by the intelligence just as they had been undermined by the romantic appeal to the emotions. It seemed true, indeed, that modern life had pitilessly made impossible the dogmas of the past. Well might Augustin Cochin cry out, "Seigneur, il est bien temps de nous voir." French artistic endeavour slowly poisoned itself with sensism. "Present French society," wrote Julien Benda a few years ago, "demands of works of art that they should arouse emotion and stimulate sensation; it does not any longer seek to reach through them any sort of intellectual pleasure."{3} Emile Clermont observed clearly that moderns ask of art the intoxication which the Greeks sought from wine or the celebration of their mysteries.
It cannot be denied that this attitude persists to a considerable extent today. The emotional derangement of the French mind is still great, but common sense and tradition have gained a victory. It began with the conversion of Huysmans, the "eye" of French naturalism; with the return of Baudelaire the nostalgiac and Coppée the humanitarian; with the sudden arousal of interest in Joseph de Maistre and Ernest Hello. The classic literature of France, with its admirable depth and serenity, had after all not lost its influence -- the influence of Pascal, Racine, Bossuet. More and more forcefully criticism insisted upon the norm of reason, and later on the norm of faith. Brunetiere, Lemaître, Bremond, Giraud, Doumic, Wyzewa, Strowski -- in every instance the intellect was rounded out by religion, the scientific man learned credence. The tide of battle that had been desperate, turned.
Gazing upon modern France from across the ruins of four years, one beholds a civilization that has been shaken to the core, but the ancient traditions of which have stood firm. We intend no such thing as a generalization or classification of so mobile and differentiated a world as French letters. Nevertheless, it seems correct to say that two strong forces are now plainly in evidence: a concern with the morals of life and an interest in the ideal. The novels of Paul Bourget, Maurice Barres, Rene Bazin, Henri Bordeaux, and of younger artists like François Mauriac, Alexandra Arnoux, and Edmond Jaloux, are resolute in presenting the spiritual ideas sternly taught by life; strong French women like Colette Yver and Leontine Zanta are stripping feminism of emotional excess; and a gallant host of poets like Paul Claudel, Francis Jammes, Henri Ghéon, and Maurice Brillant carry to dizzy heights the splendour of Christian song. And, lost in the mists of the war, how many goodly names there are! Charles Péguy, Ernest Psichari, Paul Drouot, and Emile Clermont, and older men like Joseph Lotte and the Count de Mun. With these stand a multitude of shining names in every department of literature -- history, philosophy, criticism, journalism. To press the matter would make of this essay a catalogue.
We do not entertain the delusion that paganism has been banished from France. It does not even fear exile. But the disdain with which the generation of Zola looked upon ideas that expressed confidence in the reality of the unseen is no longer in vogue. Instead, the art of Zola himself has been so thoroughly repudiated that the Goncourt prize for realistic literature went in 1920 to Ernest Perochon for "Nene," a story which the master of the naturalists would have considered dubious, to say the least. The same change is noticeable in many other arts. "There has not been," says Maurice Denis, "for a long time an epoch more passionately devoted to sacred art than our own."{4} The very spokesmen of the Church have recovered the majesty and serenity of the style of Bossuet. We are not interested here, however, in setting forth the victories of the Church: we wish merely to point out the success of Christian, of moral and idealistic art. It must be remembered always that, as Mr. Howells once said, Catholicism is the natural form of religion in France. And the success which the expression of the religious spirit has achieved there is also a succession; it has been the reborn voice of a France reborn, with her heroic breast to the enemy and her shield in front of the sanctuary of the world.
IV
Enough has been said to indicate not only that there is a place for standards in art, but that these have been contested with varying success by the leading schools of the past century. No man can write without a philosophy, because no man can exist without a philosophy; the very technique of an artist may be dependent upon his view of miracles. Now the Catholic standard in art is traditional, or rather the Catholic tradition is a standard. We are humanists in the sense that we do not believe that such and such a professor or critic has been born to give the world its first glimpse of truth and beauty. We are sufficiently conservative to agree with Pascal that "all the good rules have been laid down, and it remains necessary only to put them into practice"; the visions which humanity has entertained in its highest moods will probably not, we think, be improved upon by some small-chested dilettante who knows Baudelaire by rote, no matter how "young" he may be. But the Catholic spirit is above all radical: it has roots which it believes are vital, it will not separate art either from life to-day or from life in the past. One need not state here that the artistic era to which the Catholic mind naturally and joyfully reverts is that of the Middle Ages. This implies reverence for classical culture as a matter of course, for whatever elements of pagan grandeur were known to the mediaeval artist or thinker became vigorous germs, seeds that burst open under the light of a newly risen sun.
The Middle Ages were distinguished from other periods of history by many things, but by nothing more clearly than the universal prevalence of the artistic mood. "That the end of life is not action," says Walter Pater, "but contemplation -- being as distinct from doing -- a certain disposition of the mind: is in some shape or other, the principle of all the higher morality. In poetry, in art, if you enter into their true spirit at all, you touch this Principle, in a measure; these, by their very sterility, are a type of beholding for the mere joy of beholding. To treat life in the spirit of art is to make of life a thing in which means and end are identified; to encourage such treatment, the true moral significance of art and poetry." The identification of means and end, as suggested by Pater, was achieved with happy results for art in the mediaeval synthesis. Then, if ever, nature and human life were viewed as inseparable from the Source of truth and beauty; the smallest creature that hid from the scrutiny of man reflected the splendour of the Creator. Action became contemplation, and the slightest utensil as well as the most ordinary service were endowed with a grace, a comeliness, which our modern world cannot quite understand. Art was indeed inspired utility, uniting in its manifold forms a rigid reasonableness with exuberant fancy.{5}
For the only time in the history of mankind the collective soul, which is just as real and energetic as the individual spirit, functioned harmoniously. It moved staunchly forward along a path of reason that seldom wandered astray from the actual into regions of subjective idealism, or sank to the marshlands of sense. With an admirable persistence the mediaeval mind, though in the end it did expend itself in useless subtlety, continued for a long period of time on the broad level where harmonious cooperation of minds is possible. There Saint Thomas developed the doctrine of Aristotle, while others expounded with supreme originality and concreteness the teachings of Plato. There the science of building, the science of poetry, and the science of music were envested with a perfect vitality that is still the wonder of the world. Never did the din of argument rise higher, and never either was the voice of reason more equitable and discerning. The collective mind was guided in its aspirations by the light of Christ, by a firm and intuitive faith which cast its radiance over the pathway of reason and made the footing easy. No doubt mediaeval men were proud, irascible, lustful even, with violence, but they were always men who knew that the robes of their destiny were about them.
More interesting even than this activity of the intellect among the chosen few, was that great popular experiment of the Middle Ages, the spiritualization of Democracy. The common man really and truly became a man, free in the disposition of his lot, the undisputed possessor of rights which society might violate but which it must recognize as inalienable. It was this man who set into movement the cooperative economic bodies known as the guilds; who undertook the expeditions of mystic conquest called the Crusades; whose menial tasks were so illumined by the glory of his spiritual inheritance that they became beautiful almost of necessity; who made of his handiwork a human firmament in which there are set a countless multitude of stars. The popular voice was not, as a rule, literary -- that would have demanded writing -- but it was more. It was artistic. A wealth of saints' legends and of fairy tales; the universal prevalence of a somewhat uncouth but vigorous and thoughtful drama; the kindly satire which we moderns can only repeat and sharpen; the breath of poetry which was shaken like spikenard over the passing throng: all this was alive with the voice of the people, who were creative because they were free and blessed with unity, because the earth upon which they walked was good.
Necessarily the cooperative effort of the Middle Ages was based on discipline, but it was as far as possible removed from coercion. Europe, which often seems to have been a riot of individual notions, was cast into a mould that was nothing less than a state of mind. The great motive power of Christendom was a full recognition of the freedom of the will and of individual responsibility, based upon belief in personal immortality. The sanctions of society were less than nothing on paper, but written upon the human heart they were immutable, irrefragable. Here was a law which none could escape, but which, properly understood, would become a burden of delight.
We are fully conscious of having said very little about the infirmities of the time. It was not paradise, and it did hear the voice of woe. Nobody need overlook the fact that there were no bathtubs and no automobiles, no newspapers or congressmen. But the men of the Middle Ages proved the human success of their social life by creating one mighty and unforgettable monument to happiness -- laughter. The hale mirth of Christian Europe broke from the lips of the multitude. It looked serenely from the lofty pinnacles of the cathedral, it was discernible on every gate in Christendom. It was lusty in the throats of singers and actors, it was sharp in the derision of the street-seer. It was the blissful virtue that Brother Juniper caught from his superior, and it was the legacy of Sir Thomas More. Nothing ever appeared so spontaneously or unexpectedly. In comparison with the laughter of Christendom, Aristophanes and Mark Twain alike are savage. Here was no deadly acid, but instead salt, which saved the popular spirit from excess of fervour and kept it wholesome even while it itself was the product of wholesomeness. The civilization of the Middle Ages needs no further defense.
Thus a healthy communal philosophy that could not conceive of existence as anything but a noble and consequently beautiful enterprise constructed a society that expressed itself fully, consciously, artistically. Now literature is of necessity more individual than the rest of the arts; it is, in fact, always a blend of the subjective and the objective, of the mind and the world. Nobody ever proved this better than Flaubert, who denied it. Nevertheless, to revert once more to the keen statement of Matthew Arnold, the gift of literary genius "lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere." Art is always, secondarily at least, the product of an artistic society. The masters of mediaeval beauty are often nameless because they were absorbed in the mob -- the mob that rose from the soil of France to build the miracle shrines of Chartres and Amiens; the mob that made every city from Bruges to Saragossa an image of the New Jerusalem; the mob out of which came living, immortal poems like Saint Jeanne d'Arc and Godfrey de Bouillon.
It is characteristic of the leaders of "those incomparable times, when an unsophisticated people had been formed in Beauty without themselves being aware of it," as Jacques Maritain says,{6} that they should have summed up the best energy of the world around them. We shall name as typical of the literary standards of the time three men, one of whom was, indeed, not very literary, but whose influence on literature, particularly in our own time, has been very great. Saint Francis of Assisi won over life because he loved it. There was in his thought no worship of the light within, but instead a wholehearted surrender to the Light Who is above, Whose reflection is upon all things. Francis smiled at learning, but sought truth and found that it was beautiful. His teaching was done by means of symbols, the common alphabet of all poets, and his religion got expression through them also. It was the secret of his success that he should have come close to simple things by renouncing them, that the Wolf of Gubbio walked by his side, tamed by an instinctive perception of unselfish brotherhood. The multitude that followed him lovingly did so because he had been called to represent, like some radiant metaphor, the things which they saw were good. He was the incarnation of the common spiritual quest of the time. Art could seek no better master, for art is not concerned with atoms or microbes, but with the soul that inspires the least of things with a memorable power. No spiritual interest of our own time is more hopeful than the growing love for the Franciscan mood.
Francis was a saint, but the greatest mediaeval writer, the keystone of literature, is Dante Alighieri. One may read the "Divina Commedia" for its revelation of the poet's mind and heart, for its religious fervour and theological science, or for its allegorical wealth. All three views have their value, as one may learn from respectively Ozanam, Moore, and Croce. The poem is the perfect poetic wedding of matter and form, of truth and beauty, of mankind and its aspirations to the knowledge of God. And yet Dante is not a solitary figure looming in solitary stateliness from the wastes of a lowly age. How much he owed to the poets who went before him, to the philosophers like Saint Thomas at whose feet he sat, and to the saints of the Church is not easy to determine, but assuredly he owed much. He was not afraid either to make his poem a realistic picture of society, or to incorporate into it the best that had been known and thought by that society. Dante wished also to do things; he did not seek to divorce the practical from the speculative, the will from the intelligence. Feeling that the life of man is a serious business, he took it sternly; and there is no realism that is darker than the terrible fires of the Inferno. But the nature of his genius made him also a contemplative and his convictions were Catholic, so that the Purgatorio, rich with brooding over the Ideal, with consciousness of man's painful advance to happiness, is a better poem than, as well as a complement to, the philosophy of the Inferno. Dante the mystic is at home also in the inaccessible regions of heaven, and like all true mystics he does not disdain the minute details of the finite world. The Ptolemaic astronomy in the Paradiso is not a blemish but a demonstration of the poet's constant concern with the real world. He knew that heaven would stand when the last star had fallen; but he realized as well that the only highway thither for the mortal poet leads athwart the stars. Nor was he guilty of the modern romantic confusion of revery with contemplation; he knew that the watches of the spirit are kindled by desire. And that impulse, that longing, for the goal of God was the profound motive of mediaeval society, which viewed the Saviour not only with Saint Francis as a child in the manger, but also with Dante as the King whose brow is a throne of thorns.
What the art of the Middle Ages gained and lost by the infusion of humanism may be learned from a study of Shakespeare, who marks the passing of that art and also represents most successfully the nature of the English genius. He was the descendant of Chaucer as well as of the Renaissance, and Chaucer had none of the Latin élan or ecstasy, but instead the fresh kindliness of another race. His world was more earthly because his people were less abstract, more dramatic; and the spiritual concern of his poems lay with the forces that modify character in ordinary life. He gave body to the spirit and put its principles into action. That is the genius of the English race. That is what Shakespeare, too, has done, in a series of moral discourses which are almost as rigorous as the sermons of Saint Jerome. His drama is great, solid, marvel-ously beautiful, but it is also composite. The materials came from other artists, the philosophy is that which the time accepted. Shakespeare may have known comparatively little of the classics, but he stood at the center of life -- a vigorous, all-seeing artist, whose manliness conquered both pit and gallery. This masculine character of his thought and diction ought never to be lost sight of; men are needed to speak his lines, no matter whether they storm or are tender. On the other hand, all that is needed for the male roles in decadent drama is a "perfect thirty-six."
The standards which underlay, and to some extent were responsible for, the creative power of mediaeval art were vitality, a recognition of social solidarity, and a firm grasp of the things of the spirit. The masters of that time were not egoists; they worked for, were members of, a free society which would not have understood a pose of effeminate disdain. But neither were they formalists, restrained from spontaneity by gratuitous conventions. The character of Shakespeare is merged in the general creative exuberance of the time, as the character of the sculptor who wrought the miracle transept of Reims is merged. Nothing that the Christian past has to tell us is more important than that art at its best is a collective endeavour; that sense, that understanding, is still strong at the end of the Middle Ages with Rabelais in France and Cervantes in Spain. These men would have scorned anything but fellowship with their neighbours, and a tower of ivory would have seemed to them suitable only for a lady's boudoir. Let us be firmly assured that we shall have no great art until that spirit of collective endeavour is restored, until beauty is made to rise spontaneously from a free society in which the fundamental principles of life are agreed upon. For beauty cannot be distilled in secret or spun from the sensibilities of the shirker; it is the common delight of men that springs into being in the common light of day.
How, then, modern life being what it is, can the Catholic Spirit in art become effective? It is quite true that it cannot exercise its power to the fullest extent. The connection between us and the mediaeval tradition has been broken, and we could not go back if we would. The reasonable man everywhere is a lover of his time. He may see its many-sided error, its engulfing materialism, the weakness and the sin of its institutional life; he may even believe that the whole structure of modern civilization is built upon injustice, that it cannot create beauty because it was conceived in ugliness. But he will not, unless he is blind, overlook the patient striving for light and loveliness of which our world is full. Living in an age that has been shaped ruthlessly by war, all of us have witnessed the surging idealism, the courage, of the multitude, and have seen, too, their bitter disillusionment in the outcome of the struggle. It is not so far from earth to Sirius as it is from Péguy and even Brooke to cynical books on the Peace Conference. For better or for worse, our world has dreamed of a crusade; you cannot satisfy it with a protective tariff.
Now the great value of the Catholic Spirit under present circumstances lies in its exact balancing of conservative and radical tendencies. It has saved the best that was known and thought in the past and it has refused to accept the results of a break with that past. Nowhere else is there a power which so bridges the difference between us and our forefathers. Unfortunately, the Catholic Spirit is not always alive and active. Unfortunately it, too, has been isolated in practice from the large hopes that once caused the dawn to stand over the Western world. Here in America we have as yet failed to understand fully the bonds which link us to the tradition of Christendom: the memories which Columbus strove to carry to the ends of the earth, memories of the beauty of a society that still rested secure under the dominion of the Fisherman's ring when men first began to wonder whether there might be a continent to the westward sea. For this we are not quite to blame. During several centuries the Church has been living in a state of siege, has heard the din of a tumultuous attack upon her ancient walls. Only today when the opposing forces have been weakened by the disintegration of their morale, when the giant dream of modern society has been shattered, has she, too, been liberated.
But the freedom of the Catholic Spirit has been restored in the midst of darkness. Shall we venture to dream of beauty and peace, of holiness and ecstasy, while the cauldron seethes? Often enough, indeed, one is inclined to accept the opinion that the disintegration of intelligence must proceed further; that only the ignominy of having been driven to its knees will arouse the multitude to fury with the base ideals that it has adored. Be that as it may, the truths and the energy of Christendom are eternal, as is its mastery of the heart. And nothing has been more perennially characteristic of the missionary work of the Catholic Spirit than the recognition of the sacred appeal of art. The beauty inspired by Greece was national, even local, but the creative power of Christendom denied the existence of frontiers. Wherever the Church set her foot, whether upon the coast of England or in the magnificent city of Constantine, the spirit sought expression in matter. Whatever the people into whose midst she came might have been, they grew into artists. To use a homely metaphor, she was the great gong that stirred the rhythm of the music of the world.
If, then, the Catholic Spirit in America can comprehend the cohesiveness of its traditions, can rise to the appreciation of its inheritance, artistic expression is almost certain to follow. Surely it is time for us to understand that life is not all utility or even all morality; that in the ordered union of matter and form is written the very alphabet of God. Our final task here, therefore, shall be to enumerate a few things which the circumstances of our environment would seem to suggest earnestly. The Catholic literature which we have surveyed has been written with full consciousness of the miracle of Christendom, but it has been the work of a comparative handful of men who have felt the constant pressure of isolation and have been forced to overlook the general indifference of their public. The attitude of that public has even in some measure been responsible for the limitations which our letters show.
In the first place, have we been interested in reality, which means life taken as life and not under the form of a palliative, highly edifying in some ways, but on the whole viciously untrue? It is indisputable that the fundamental quality of art must be sincerity, which does not mean realistic banality but does most emphatically mean reality. The dilettantism, the anaemia, so evident in our letters, will make no headway against the spirit of our time, which is based on business. The commercial mind may be dubious in its ethics, but it is sound in its estimate of the actual state of affairs. It examines conditions to find out what they really are, it knows the field and bases none of its calculations upon sugary illusion. Moreover, it prosecutes its purpose with overwhelming energy, with the full verve of the intellect. We know that it is shortsighted and materialistic, that it does not deal with or understand the whole man. But that is not its affair. That is the raison d'etre of literature. And until the art of writing becomes once more a masculine art, strong, courageous, thoroughly alive, it will not learn to speak the words for which this generation is waiting.
Just as soon as literature becomes more than a venal proffering of mental stick-candy, it will regain its position among the forces that mould men. This elevation will not be accomplished by the school of ultra-realism, of pessimistic individualism, now gaining vogue. That is no more honest than the hyper-sentimentalism against which we have protested. The great books that reveal truth believe in facts, but they are essentially not catalogs bound in gloom. "Color," "said Ingres, "is the animal part of art." It is the stroke that reveals the master, and not the paintpots of verbal imagery or "statistics" with which he may cover his work. For interpretation, which is the goal of the creative spirit, is the product of the artist's intelligence and will, not merely of his eyes. It will be coloured, indeed, by his temperament and his state of mind; it may legitimately be as pessimistic as Pascal, as optimistic as Dickens. But it cannot honestly be as pink as "Pollyana" or as dirty as "Esther Waters." After all, Meredith has made the point here: "Philosophy bids us to see that we are not so pretty as rose-pink, not so repulsive as dirty drab; and that, instead of everlastingly shifting those barren aspects, the sight of ourselves is wholesome, bearable, fructifying, finally a delight. Do but perceive that we are coming to philosophy and the stride towards it will be a giant's -- a century a day. And imagine the celestial refreshment of having a pure decency in the place of sham; real flesh; a soul born active, wind-beaten, but ascending."{7}
And that philosophy cannot any longer be effective if marred by an excessive individualism. "Never," says Palacio Valdes, "have men of letters been so much preoccupied with originality as at present and never have they been less original than at present."{8} We simply cannot afford to ignore the lessons that have been taught by the civilizations of the past, or to believe that the imagination of a single man can overshadow the collective experience of the race. Again, if our art is not to be a vain and fruitless endeavour, it must take into account the ordinary lives of men, it must deal with the problems, the joys, and the sorrows of the universal mood. Its dealing must be sober, honest, beautiful.
The literature of the Catholic Spirit can safely trust the wings of its tradition. Let there be a deepening concern with the things of the spirit in the light of reason; convince men once more of the truth of the kingdom of God, teach them the beauty and responsibility of their human inheritance, make them feel the magnificence of the divine adventure into which they are born. The renewal of the face of the earth must begin with the soul of man. When the point of view of the multitude has been weaned from the glitter that distracts it, when the hale solidity of its spiritual heritage has been understood again, our task shall have been done. Until then we shall labour in the light of the past, strong with the strength of our fathers, in the gilded harness of undying kings.
BOOK NOTE
The literature on the subject considered in this chapter is, of course, very extensive. For the mediaeval background see especially: "L'Art religieux en France au XIIIme siècle," by Emile Male; "The Mediaeval Mind," by H.O. Taylor; "Chartres and Saint Michel," by Henry Adams; "The Substance of Gothic Art," by Ralph A. Cram; "Mores Catholici," by Kenelm Digby; and the standard works on mediaeval literature, such as those by P. de Julleville, Gaston Paris, Karl Kantzius, L. Clédat, etc. In addition, consult "Dante" and "The Franciscan Poets," by Frederick Ozanam, and "Thomas v. Aquin," by M. Grabman. The controversy on literary standards may be studied in: "L'Art et Scholastique," by J. Maritain; "Theories," by Maurice Denis; "Le Romantisme Frangais," by P. Lasserre, and the same author's later "Chapelles Litteraires"; "The New Laokoon" and "Rousseau and Romanticism," by Irving Babbitt; "The Drift of Romanticism," by P.E. More; "On Contemporary Literature," by S.P. Sherman; "The AEsthetic as Science of Expression," by Benedetto Croce; "Belphegor," by Julien Benda; "Standards," by Professor Brownell; "Beyond Life," by J.B. Cabell; "Prejudices," by H.L. Mencken; "Essays," by Alice Meynell; "Les Maitres de l'Heure," by Victor Giraud. Among older books see: "Lectures on Art," by John Ruskin; "Principle in Art," by C. Patmore; "Essays," by Matthew Arnold; "Heretics" and "Orthodoxy," by G.K. Chesterton; "Le Roman Naturaliste," by F. Brunetiere; "Le Disciple," by Paul Bourget, and the same author's introduction to "Le Demon de Midi"; "L'Homme," by E. Hello; and, of course, Sainte-Beuve. Among a host of German books on the subject, it may be interesting to see in this connection, "Die Romantik," by Ricarda Huch; "Die Wiedergeburt der Dichtung," by Karl Muth; and a criticism, by Dr. Max Ettlinger, of Deutinger's teaching.
{1} Quoted by A. Baudrillart, "The Church, the Renaissance, and Protestantism."
{2} "The Movies," Atlantic Monthly, July, 1921.
{3} "Belphegor," by Julien Benda.
{4} "Theories," by Maurice Denis, Paris.
{5} Cf. Chap. VIII on Francis Thompson.
{6} "Art et Scholastique," Paris, Librarie de l'art Catholique.
{7} Preface to "Diana of the Crossways."
{8} "Address to the Spanish Academy, 1921.