In Memoriam

The dead Cardinal of Malines has stood so publicly and undauntedly for all the principles to which BLACKFRIARS is dedicated that his death should not find us silent. Yet to be silent would be easier than to speak fittingly of so great a mind and soul.

For us, children of the thought of Aquinas, there is a special pride in remembering that our teacher was also the teacher of the great prelate from whose lips not Belgium only, but the civilised world learned lessons in years of intellectual upheaval.

When Leo XIII asked the thinkers of the civilised world to go back to Aquinas there were some, even amongst the children of the Church, who heard the Pope’s invitation with dismay. To them it was as if the Commander-in-Chief of a modern army should ask his soldiers to exchange their service rifles and machine guns for bows and arrows. Incidentally we might remark that a modern war waged with bows and arrows would probably not equal the Great War in loss of men, or in deciding the main issue of truth and justice. But the bow and arrow attitude towards the papal revival of St. Thomas left the Abbé Désiré Mercier unmoved. Already his sound Belgian brain had been abroad in the fields of English and German philosophy. He could appreciate the dogged quest of ultimate truth which lifted the lives of Kant and Spencer to the heroic. There are pages of sympathetic criticism of these fruitless thinkers which accredit this Lion of Flanders, a kinsman of the Dumb Ox of Aquino.

Very few modern biographies cover so wide a range of varied interests and of secret history as these two large volumes in which Mr. Frederic Whyte has collected the intimate papers and the contemporary records of W. T. Stead. The relations between this hopelessly impulsive and quixotic editor and the men and women whom he singled out for special hero-worship give an extraordinary psychological interest to the biography; and none of the great figures who fill its pages stands out more picturesquely than Cardinal Manning in the last years of his life.

The great Cardinal appears inevitably in a somewhat theatrical light in this bewildering book of stunts and moral fervours; but it is clear that he had enough theatrical instinct to respond in some degree at least to the melodramatic instincts of his admirer. And Stead himself, with his complete incapacity for understanding any other point of view than his own journalistic enthusiasms for each new discovery that he made, seems to have been satisfied that the Cardinal shared his own aspirations completely.

How is it that Dr. Coulton, with all his learning and his vast stores of information, his years of historical study and patient accumulation of facts, cannot be accepted as a serious historian? The question crops up with every fresh book that Dr. Coulton issues; and it won’t do to say that the fault lies with Catholics. It is the author who is responsible for the verdict; not his critics. Dr. Coulton is one of the most devoted of investigators. His sincerity cannot be questioned, his earnest desire to establish the truth is as patent as his anxiety to think well of mankind. Not for an instant would we suspect Dr. Coulton of deliberate suppression of fact, of wilful tampering with texts, of carelessness in the verifying of references.

And yet with all that may justly be said in acknowledgement of Dr. Coulton’s industry and in praise of his zeal for truth, the question still remains: How is it that Dr. Coulton, Editor of Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, cannot be accepted as a serious historian, and cannot be trusted as a responsible guide to the history of the Middle Ages?

From the year 1221 to the present year of Grace is a long period, even in the life of a great nation; and yet that is the length of time during which the Dominican Brethren, with long and short intermissions, have exercised their influence in this country. A reminder of this, the great part which the Brethren played in the development of English Character at a period when mediævalism was on the wane and the glimmerings of the New Age were appearing on the horizon, has recently been presented in the form of relics in stone recovered from the church of the Blackfriars in London. For some time the position of the church at Ludgate had been known to a close degree of accuracy, such that when, in September, 1925, the site of the quire was once again in disturbance, the expectation that remains of the Priory would be brought to light was realised. An excavation of the site afforded an opportunity for examination at close quarters of the material cast up during the progress of the work before its consignment, threatened and actual, to the river barges, which within three hundred yards away lay in waiting.

If ever I become a trifle eccentric I shall take it very ill of my friends and relatives if they shut me up with anyone more demented than themselves. It has always seemed to me both extravagant and unkind to put a more or less amateur and occasional lunatic among hard-bitten professionals. Mild madmen are better with their families and their families better with them. As for madmen with no or reluctant families, why not attach them to religious communities as jesters were attached to royal households in the Middle Ages? This would be an excellent plan all round. The community could concentrate on one official imbecile the forbearance they now exercise on each other. And the imbecile, unlike the average religious, could lap himself round with forbearance as with a garment, and hug the warmth. This, at any rate, was how it worked with the only lunatic I ever met in such circumstances—John-Theodore de la Vigne of Cope in the County of Wessex, the Pensioner of the Pied Brothers.

But, it may be argued further, the Church which has the spending of so much money might at least employ the best artists, even if they be few and eccentric. Surely her pictures and statues and extra-liturgical music might be made by artists rather than by commercial firms of Church decorators, even if she be obliged to employ architects and contractors to do her buildings. Why, it is asked, are so many painters competing for customers on the walls of the Royal Academy exhibitions, or why are the younger men so often obliged to sell themselves to advertisement contractors or else to live in penury? Here indeed are faults on all sides! Ecclesiastics certainly seem to show an amazing lack of intelligence in as much as they fail so completely to apply the principles of their own work to the criticism of the works of others, and are often buyers of work which is not only thoroughly unliturgical but also wanting in every quality of intelligence. Upon the other hand, artists to-day are generally both unable and unwilling to do the kind of work which the Church needs. We will examine briefly the history of the matter; then we shall see more clearly the causes underlying the present evil state of affairs.

At the break-up of the medieval system in the 16th Century two great disruptions were acting and interacting—the Reformation and the Renaissance. At the beginning of the century’ the class of persons now called artists did not exist, nor was there such a thing as an architectural profession.