‘The only artist retaining the image and its allusions today is David Jones, and his paintings exhibit very clearly the enormous difficulty of finding pictorially the relation between it and the coherent whole—for unlike Rosetti and like Dante he is not content to see his image in the unknown.’

These words are found in the concluding passage of Nicolette Gray’s study of the Romantic Image and of the dilemma to which it gives rise in the art of today. Her thesis is that Dante was not content to see the vision of Beatrice as prefiguring a reality beyond herself, but in addition he needed to know what is the nature of the relation. To Dante there was available the idea of a world order as really existing. But by the end of the eighteenth century this knowledge of the whole was reduced to an abstract idea of order so attenuated ‘that it had no place for the particular’. Thus the idea of the image became divorced from order, romantic from classical art. Henceforth the artist can with certainty use no valid terms in which the mind can rest.

No one is more fully aware of the difficulty this thesis presents to the artist than Mr David Jones. He has met the difficulty frontally not only as painter but intellectually as a scholar, as shewn in his hitherto un-collected critical writing, and as a poet in In Parenthesis. He comprehends our cultural predicament and has allowed himself in his work no evasion of the formidable difficulties that arise for one who adds to an artist’s response to the material world a need to endow the result with a validity that stands the tests of the intellect.

Fifty years have passed since Elgar’s setting of Cardinal Newman’s poem ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ was first performed at the Birmingham Festival. This great music now holds an established place in the general repertoire of choral societies: indeed, so secure is its present position that it is easy to forget how chequered has been its career in the half century, to what accidents it has been a prey, under what misunderstandings it has suffered—and does still suffer.

When ‘Gerontius’ first appeared, Elgar was just beginning to attract attention as a national rather than as a provincial composer, very largely because of the enthusiasm Hans Richter had shown in conducting the ‘Enigma Variations’. Though the forty-three year old composer at this time, therefore, commanded a certain amount of respect among musicians, his new work must have seemed a strange affront to the old, but extremely vigorous, oratorio tradition of choral singing, well nurtured on a staple diet of Handel and Mendelssohn. Even Parry and other composers of the English musical renascence of the last two decades of the nineteenth century had made no really significant advance in this genre, and while Elgar refrained from describing ‘Gerontius’ as an oratorio (although the proportions of the work make this seem a more suitable description than Jaeger’s ‘cantata’) the new durchkomponiert setting of Newman’s poem must have appeared as a determined tilt at the venerable oratorio tradition, to which indeed it virtually gave the death blow.

It goes without saying that, before the Reformation, all actors or mummers or players—or whatever else those vagabonds performing in theatres or on platforms or on inn balconies or just in front of a circle of chairs on a bare floor were called—who happened, irrespective of race, colour or shape to be believing or practising Christians (in so far as this was allowed), were necessarily Catholics and members of the Church.

The fine flowering of the English Theatre occurred during the later years of Elizabeth, far into the reign of James I, and was functioning throughout the most enthusiastic and novel period of Protestantism. There is no reason to suppose that any of the acknowledged great players illumined by the comet-brilliance of Marlowe or enveloped in the solar warmth of Shakespeare’s genius were Catholics—unless secretly; and even this last possibility is pure theory or wishful thinking. A great deal of delving into old archives might prove whether or no men like Alleyn, Burbage, Hemyngc and Condell had yearnings towards the Faith, and I daresay that with more time for a little research it would be easy to ascertain the final spiritual convictions of such writers for the theatre as Chapman, Webster, Tourneur, Marston, Beaumont and Fletcher and a host of others; but within the limits of this space it is hardly desirable to offer a directory or Who’s Who of all the eminent players or writers who have been, or who are, Catholics.

In the nineteenth century there lived in Norway a theologian whose religious development shows a striking resemblance to that of Cardinal Newman. Although the Norwegian theologian could not well stand an exact comparison with John Henry Newman, for he lacked the Cardinal’s unique genius, there is, however, a psychological likeness between the two men. They belong to the same kind of religious type. Both went through a very slow process of conversion. Both began as clergymen in their national churches, and both ended after much study and mental toil in the Catholic Church.

The name of this Norwegian was Knud Karl Krogh-Tonning. Unlike Newman, he did not have much influence on his contemporaries or on later generations. Until the present day he has been of no importance to the history of the Norwegian Church. In a way this situation is strange, for he made some remarkable contributions to theological literature.

Krogh-Tonning (born in 1842) was brought up in a very happy and cultivated home. His parents belonged to the Evangelical- Lutheran Church, which is the State Church of Norway. His mother differed from the ordinary Protestants by attributing great importance to the sacraments, and by stressing the ethical aspect of Christianity. Krogh-Tonning has said that his mother was the first to turn his thoughts towards Catholicism.

When Krogh-Tonning had entered the University of Oslo to study theology, he soon came under the influence of two most powerful professors, Gisle Johnson and Carl Paul Caspari. The theological faculty was under the direction of these two professors. However, their influence was not limited to the university.