To ask such a question, when we consider the publicity and importance which is accorded nowadays to psychology, may appear rather startling, if not absurd. Yet, as the late Professor Miinsterberg observes, “to reach a clear understanding as to the true meaning of psychology is a more difficult task than the solution of any special psychological problem.” Of late years there has arisen a great deal of criticism not only concerning the foundations on which this science rests, but also in regard to its very aims and scope. The student of psychology is at the outset confronted by a perplexing variety of “schools,” each claiming right of way to the general exclusion of all others. Quite recently this discordance was voiced in no measured terms by Professor Spearman. “It is generally agreed,” he writes, “that nowadays psychology has arrived at a very undesirable degree of disunitedness. Each school, if not each individual, seeks to establish the science independently both of his predecessors and even of his colleagues. The result is that all alike have come into general discredit. Psychology is a byword of reproach among other sciences.” Even Professor McDougall, whose writings on Psychology are so widely known, seems infected with this feeling of discontent; for in a recent publication he remarks: “Even now after some forty-five years of sustained effort I am not sure that I have made any progress, have learned anything of human nature.” He further adds that he inclines to the view current among the Oxford philosophers of his day that such a knowledge is impossible.

. . . And Mr. Timothy worth a hundred and fifty thousand pound nett if he’s worth a penny. Compound interest at five per cent, doubles you in fourteen years. In fourteen years three hundred thousand—six hundred thousand in twenty-eight—twelve hundred thousand in forty-two—twenty-four hundred thousand in fifty-six—four million eight hundred thousand in seventy—nine million six hundred thousand in eighty-four—why, in a hundred years it’ll be twenty million. And we shan’t live to use it. It is a will. (From John Galsworthy’s To Let.)

The passage above comes from the concluding chapter of one of John Galsworthy’s masterpieces. Those who have read the book will recollect the scene. For those who have not I will explain. The old veteran, Timothy Forsyte, has directed his entire property to be formed into a trust which through the provisions of the will will probably remain intact for the better part of a century. The words quoted are put into the mouth of old Gradman, the solicitor’s clerk, and the glee, utterly free from envy, with which he utters them, is one of the most perfect touches in the book.

Now you can make a very interesting experiment with this passage. Give it to read to the average educated English Catholic of normal artistic sensibility and take note of his comments. He will admire what rightly deserves to be admired, the sensitive delineation of the lovable Gradman, the success with which the author brings home a sort of primitive force in old Timothy, that huge embodiment of the possessive instinct, a force that reaches beyond the grave and still continues to mould and impose itself on succeeding generations.

Let us follow the sun in its perpetual rising, as it passes over the earth's scarred surface, crossing illimitable oceans, continents, deserts, and towering mountain ranges, and the eternal snows—silent, glistening, old.

It lights up, with its dawn, the dawn of the world—the superposed strata of archaic cultures, one upon another in an unfolding phantasy, of prolific confusion, yet a crumbling order, proclaiming an ordered growth in the buried millennia of the world’s childhood. It tells us things we had never grasped as a whole, till we came to this preparatory contemplative vision (preparatory to all real thought), or, perhaps, which we never knew at all. Giant human forms, of enigmatic origin in the abyss of time, emergent, yet now in retreat, from crumbling stone, among the old decay of Easter Island. The stone lamps, the lavers of holy water, and 200,000 shrines, each with its frail conscious beings, who reason and pray within, in the red dawn of Shinto Japan. The convents of Tibet, and Burma, and Siam, where thousands upon thousands of devoted religious pray, and work, and sacrifice—the daily priestly offering of incense, fruit, and flowers, to the lord Buddha’s golden image, and his relics, in their precious shrine. The earth’s-dawn mysteries of Ur, and Agade, and Babylon: crumbled, earth-sprawled temples, where vultures call and jackals prowl, and all is distant, and dim, and past, the crumbling symbols of a mighty religious conception—the ziggurats, or ‘‘step- temples,” of Babylon and Ur, each a consciously planned microcosm, in form and detail, organically symbolizing all creation: the steps or degrees of created being.

Academism in painting has been defined as a sort of formalism imposed on art by philosophers and men of letters through too exclusive an admiration for the works of Classical Antiquity. It might also be described as the expression of that which is officially sanctioned by a governing body of painter-professors, endeavouring to control and instruct public opinion and to regulate painting by a sort of schoolmastering system. The Renaissance gave birth to it, and the pedagogues and flatterers who have beset the person and fame of Raffaello Sanzio, living and dead, have fostered it. It grew up side by side with that dignification and ennoblement of painting that is so striking a feature of the sixteenth century, and to it is due the self-consciousness that has haunted the painter ever since. “To this enthronement of Raphael we owe many mediocre and even hateful works. To it we owe the taste for the simpering in religious art; the taste also for modelling that is at once photographic and blurred,

. . . the taste for lowered eyelids or for eyes raised piously to Heaven (expressions that the Saints in ecstasy never had), the taste for noble old men, theatrical philosophers, apostles in paper togas; and all this at the expense of truth which has since been found ignoble, of fine colour which has since been thought too material, and of genius which we have treated as madness.”

Although the spirit of Academism has persisted for four centuries, during which time it has served as a form of arbitrary criterion whereby the art of an individual or of an epoch may be judged by the layman, there have, nevertheless, always been artists of temperament and of fine sensibility who have ignored the precepts of the Academism of their epoch, and who have sought expression by methods that are less dictatorial and pedantic, and, in fact, more proper to art itself.

There is no more deceptive key to a country than its popular seaside resort. For the pursuit of pleasure is curiously the same, whether it be in Brighton or Boulogne. One has to penetrate beyond the promenades and smart hotels to reach the heart of a nation. Of no country is this so true as of Wales. The English visitor, spending his fortnight at Llandudno or Rhyl, is aware of little that distinguishes these places from their English counterparts. There are probably more chapels, the Sunday restrictions are more puzzling, odd snatches of a barbaric tongue may be heard on country ‘buses. And there are the inevitable comic postcards, depicting tourists battling with unpronounceable names. But these are the most incidental of features. The charabanc tour of the countryside, with its well-worn round of beauty spots, does little to impart the true spirit of the land. The country is but a convenient and picturesque hinterland to the seaside town.

To Catholics, recognition of the individual character of Wales is of special importance. Wales may, in the practice of government, seem little more than an extended England. But it is a fatal mistake to suppose that the accidents of history have wrought a complete and unquestioning submission. This is not to suggest that there is any want of loyalty among the Welsh. Political nationalism is never likely to be a major issue. But there is a loyalty—of culture and of language—that overrides the artificial bonds of a constitution. The survival of this intense regard for national expression is sufficient proof of how deep-rooted are the things of the spirit.

Like everybody else who is inane enough to write letters to the paper and put an address at the bottom I get a certain number of circulars sent to me—sometimes even that most exciting of all things, an anonymous letter.

I have therefore been assured in the past six months that the troubles of the nation in general and my troubles in particular are entirely due to drink: and I have of course been assured that I shall get cancer if I continue to smoke, and, inevitably, that the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.

Three circulars came to me (I wish I could say I found them all together on my breakfast table, it would sound so much more impressive—actually they did come within a week of each other), one telling me that Rome was at the bottom of all our troubles (not the Rome of Mussolini of course, but the Scarlet Woman). I cannot remember all the dark and sinister places in which She was featuring—the Colonial Office was one and the Ministry of Education another (I think), certainly She was responsible for the Soviet —Pope Benedict XV having apparently initiated the Russian Revolution so as to get rid of the Orthodox Church.

The second circular (in order of appearance) told me that Communism was at the bottom of all present evil—not merely the Bolsheviks but everybody everywhere who refuses to believe that every Communist is necessarily an incarnate Devil.

Since novels are often books of science, as scientific anyhow as the whimsical symbolical sketch that journalism has made of modern physics, they fall under two heads according as the tale adorns the moral or the moral adorns the tale; which is roughly what historians of philosophy mean when they class their creatures by the deductive and inductive methods; the latter coming in with Bacon, Francis to some, Roger to others. Great novels, however, like great systems of thought, are not so easily settled, and in Sparkenbroke there is such unity of philosophy and poetry and prose, such fusion of insight and love and everyday sense, that to criticize it as a didactic piece is like the recent attempt to turn Beaudelaire into commercial verse.

Mr. Morgan’s aspiration may be Platonic, yet his art is Aristotelian; ideas are embodied, the universal made concrete, the mind continued into sense. Sparkenbroke may say that Emily Bronte desired more than Marvell could give her: “My outward sense is gone—Gone. Even the green thought in the green shade—gone. No sight in the open eyes; no challenge of the brain; an ‘unutter’d harmony,’ Earth lost, the whole shell of being utterly dissolved’ ‘: he may think his senses a leash withholding him from a higher world of experience, yet often are they charged with spirit without losing their own colouring. Propter melius animae est ut corpori uniatur.