A good deal of fuss has been made one way and another about the Catholic Association’s Christmas pilgrimage to Rome; vivid pictures were drawn of the horrors of third-class continental trains, especially at night: the idea of staying in Rome at anything but an hotel was supposed to be particularly revolting : while even the Association itself thought it necessary to print in heavy type a warning extract from the Bull Indictio Universalis fubilaei urging pilgrims to accept discomforts in a spirit of penitence.

Quite apart from the fact that, once a man has made up his mind to visit St. Peter, nothing will stop him, these vaticinators might have kept their breath for their prayers. There were no hardships; and of discomforts, no more than any healthy man or woman, to say nothing of a pilgrim, would regard as an amusing novelty. A pilgrimage is not necessarily and in se a penitential undertaking; contemporary English custom makes of it rather a comfortable conducted tour; the Catholic Association at Christmas hit the mean, so that their 380 representatives of Great Britain and Ireland, having the right spirit, found the right conditions and could call themselves pilgrims without an incredulous grin.

There were no hardships—but there was heroism, for not all the travellers were young and strong. There were many old folk and some in bad health, to whom hard seats and full carriages and sleepless nights were far more than a mere passing irksomeness. Their patience and devotion are to be remembered with humility, rather than to be written about with fulsomeness.

Time was when English judges could say, without apparent insincerity, that the Christian religion was part of the Law of the Land. That was how the judges put it; what they meant was that at least theoretical acquiescence in Christian principles was assumed in those for whom the Law was framed and administered. In fact, that England was ‘a Christian country.’

The beatitudes were always, and perhaps necessarily, outside the Law’s purview. But there used to be some attempt to enforce the Ten Commandments. To-day, the blasphemy laws, though never repealed, have long been a dead letter. And the London traffic may, it seems, be held up for a triumphal procession of any idol—whether it be the symbolical figure of ‘Big Business’ or the living person of Rudolph Valentino. But not, of course, for one of the True Incarnate God in His own Corporeal Presence. The offer of such a spectacle being, one must suppose, too blatantly like wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve to accord with the ‘grand old English Public School tradition’ of ‘what’s done.’

A father used to be held responsible for his child’s welfare. And a child was presumed to be under parental control. Now-a-days the Law looks daily with greater favour on the interference of the ‘health visitor’ and the school teacher (non-sectarian). And magistrates listen gravely to stories of how Tommy, aged ten, is ‘beyond control’ and unbirched youngsters file off in the full tide of impudence to the industrial school.

Ten or half-past get off from Innerleithen Station, southwards, in early days of January. Before you might know it you are over the Tweed, a Scotch river which has already acquired an ‘English accent.’ There is plenty of water in its tributaries, and their little daughters; the whole country is abustle with them. You catch no sight of the beautiful old house as you pass through Traquair Village and cross Quair Water.

The scene soon gets to business. Before you are beyond the last fir plantation and straggling, bad-tempered-looking birches, it is evident that the country is of a high quality; and if you turn to verify the steepness of the ascent, the view of Moorfoot, seldom disappointing, is fine. It is Newhall Burn against which you are walking; the road in time leaves it deep on the right in the valley, the far side of which has become a vast wall of pasture. Only get the sun upon it and any sort of blue sky, and the effect is admirable : the grass tends to be quite pale; the bracken, squirrel-colour of course, provides the striking accent; the heather is sepia, and a scanty element. A few pockets of snow help; as may later the nearly black of a peat cutting; but not the outbreaking stone, blueish. The sheep are blueish too; here is a flock of ewes, watching the departure of a ram, refractory without hope against the tactic of a fine border lad and two young bitches.

II.

In addition to singing and dancing, one other species A of music is introduced in Dante’s Heaven, though less is said of it than might, perhaps, be expected. This is the music of the spheres. The idea that the movement of the planetary spheres caused them to emit sound was first scientifically expounded by Pythagoras, but the myth of sphere-music is of earlier origin, for the seven strings of the lyre and seven pipes of the syrinx are said to have been made to correspond with the seven notes of the spheres. The Pythagorean doctrine, though rejected by Aristotle, was accepted by many philosophers, and becoming widely known through the teaching of the neo-pythagorean Nicomachus of Gerasa (second century A.D.) had a considerable influence on the musical theories of the Middle Ages. The comparatively small use which Dante makes of it may be accounted for by the fact that the ‘master of those who know’ (Inf. iv, 131) declared it to be false. It is natural to think that the idea of sphere-harmony, based as it is on numerical proportion, would have attracted Dante, with his love of the symbolism of numbers, and the mere fact that he introduced it at all, in defiance of the authority both of Aristotle and of St. Thomas, shows that it made indeed a strong appeal to him.

It seems strange that the work of so remarkable a poet as M. André de Lujan, who is, moreover, a great force in the Catholic world, should be comparatively little known in England. Though his last work, Le Miroir Diving has attracted the notice of some of our best reviewers, it has not by any means received the close study it deserves. The Miroir, like the rest of Lujan’s poetry, commends itself to the critic by the fact, only too rare in works of the imagination, that its thoughts and the way in which they are expressed are so harmoniously fused that the reader cannot dissociate the music of the verse from the spiritual life which it reveals. The following short notes, offered by one who has no claim to criticize poetry, are solely meant to draw attention to the philosophical and religious value of the book. The trend of the thought is already familiar from the poetry previously published by M. André de Lujan, a pseudonym borrowed from one of the famous pilgrimage shrines of South America to conceal the real name of a distinguished diplomat. Yet, however great the beauty of his earlier verse, however lofty its intuition, it is now surpassed in the Miroir Divin, where the poetry strikes a note that is quite original in modern literature. Indeed, were we to seek for parallels to André de Lujan among contemporary English or French poets, we should discover them with difficulty. In point of fact, this book of French verse brings to the mind of the English reader the religious poets of the seventeenth century, the mystics Donne and Crashaw, the pious Herbert.

A World without rhythm would be a world without joy and sorrow, toil and rest, life and death; a world without its land and water, hill and valley, light and shade, sunshine and storm, springtime and autumn; a world without alternation, relief, contrasting harmonies, and that ‘variety’ which ‘is the spice of life.’

Whence does the placid lake derive its beauty, or the pathless snow? Surely in very small measure indeed from mere placidity or pathlessness. Given the boundless sea with never a wave, no play of light and shadow; or an Antarctic waste of untrodden snow, and who would say ‘How lovely!’? Not so the gallant Scott, as he gazed on the white wilderness around him.

‘O God ! this is an awful place ! ‘was the poignant cry he recorded—not because of the terrible cold, or even the disappointment that met him at his goal, but because of that feature of the Antarctic solitudes that weighs most heavily on the stoutest heart—dreary, unrelieved Monotony.

We set out in this essay to make two discoveries. In the first place we have to discover what the Catholic Church has done for Art, and in the second place what, according to the Church, is the relation of Art to Life. The discovery of the practical effect of the Church upon the Arts is of much less moment than the discovery of the necessary implications of Catholic doctrine, for observations upon the fruit of the tree are less important than the knowledge of the tree itself. But as a tree is known by its fruit, so we will attempt to get knowledge of the doctrine of the Church, in the matter of Art and Life, by examining first the artistic product for which the Church may have been responsible. It is true that by examining the artistic product we might, if we conducted the examination with sufficient insight, historical sense, and knowledge, arrive at a true view of the implications of Catholic doctrine, and that, therefore, it would be unnecessary to do more than summarise the results of the examination to discover a Catholic doctrine of the relation of Art to Life. But the artistic product of which the Church appears to be the instigator is so manifold and so various, and the period of time with which the examination would have to deal has seen so many changes and revolutions of thought and manners, that it is better to deal with the matter in two distinct parts, in the first to note simply the material facts, and in the second, not drawing conclusions from the first, to set out, with but brief reference to any examples, the fundamental principles of Catholic faith and philosophy and the resulting æsthetic.