A well-known humorist, Mr. Stephen Leacock, has decided that Popes and Ecclesiastical dignitaries are as a class deficient in humour, and he extends his condemnation to crowned heads, captains of industry, great writers, thinkers, philanthropists, martyrs, reformers and patriots. Such a sweeping charge it is difficult to challenge, and all we can do is to indicate here and there certain symptoms of a humorous nature latent in the higher clergy and royalty ; we have neither time nor space for the rest of mankind.

Humour, like a verb, is sometimes active and sometimes passive. If active in a subject it either produces wit or appreciates it in another. If passive, it is generally unconscious and consequently the amusement is gathered by others. To be plain, the one so gifted is himself a joke, and his state of mind prevents him from being a humorist of the active or real type. The heavens prevent that we should consider the Popes and “the more dignified clergy” in this category of unconscious humorists. The title of this paper is not Dignity versus Humour, and it is far from being our intention to hold up position and responsibility as objects of merriment, though misplaced dignity is one of the foundation stones of the world’s laughter. Few writers would be bold enough to regard the Popes as fit subjects for a joke, but bishops and abbots, more especially the mediaeval ones, have long been looked upon as legitimate prey by writers of amusing (?) fiction. Emperors and other crowned heads have oftentimes aroused amusement, usually a discreet amusement, amongst their subjects ; but there is little humour, conscious or unconscious, in a Captain of Industry, whatever that pompous and preposterous title means.

It is generally acknowledged that throughout the history of mediaeval art the Church was not only the most generous protectress of the artist, but also the most fruitful source of his inspiration. This is true in a special sense of the art of music. The Church, of course, has always had her own music, namely, the plainsong, which, as Dom Shebbeare wrote in a recent number of Blackfriars, she evolved in the process of evolving a liturgy. Plainsong had been brought to its highest stage of perfection by the beginning of the seventh century, under Saint Gregory I, the great classifier and arranger of the music of the liturgy, but it remained a living musical language for many centuries after the time of the great Pope. As new Feasts were instituted, new music was composed for them, and fresh melodies for the Ordinary Chants of the Mass were written throughout the Middle Ages. All this new liturgical music was written according to the rules of a long-established tradition, but side by side with the unchanging music of the Church, there has existed in Europe for a thousand years another branch of the art, derived from plainsong, yet differing profoundly from it, chiefly by reason of the fact that it has undergone an unending series of changes and developments.

In Russia the population is always mentioned in numbers by the word “ Souls.” A village counts so many “ Souls.” A man is not described according to his “ heart,” but according to his soul, and the soul with its needs and fluctuations is never overlooked. It is not unusual to hear of somebody who has disappeared from society that he is absent “ saving his soul,” a form of occupation like hunting, trading, or any other accepted as natural and seemly. The man who has suddenly gone “ saving his soul ” may have gone “ into the desert,” i.e. solitude, to bewail his transgressions for a time and return chastened, or he may never return, having made the sacrifice for ever. Anchorites are still found in Russia, happily in districts so remote that they remain undisturbed by the present chaos.

Revolutions, always hazardous, have seldom realized the immediate objective of their promoters. Sudden and violent methods are often deceptive in results.

Among the “metaphysical poets” of the seventeenth century Richard Crashaw, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan form a group apart. They were writers of purely devotional poetry in an age when licentious love-poems and “epithalamiums”— what Dr. Johnson styled “amorous ditties”—were the prevailing fashion. They were united by the . immense spiritual debt which, as they both acknowledge, Crashaw and Vaughan owed to “holy Herbert.” And their chief poems were written within the space of twenty years, for Herbert wrote “The Temple” in 1632 ; Crashaw, “Steps to the Temple” in 1648 ; and Vaughan, “Silex Scintillans” in 1654.

Johnson’s use of the word “metaphysical” in his Essay on Cowley is a curious instance of how a quite inappropriate epithet may fairly describe a certain peculiarity of poetic style. For, although it has no relation whatever to any philosophical matter in the poetry, it is by no means difficult to see what was in the great critic’s mind. An appearance of profundity of thought produced by cryptic language was what he noted, and he used the word “metaphysical” in much the same way as some modern writers use the word “mystical,” without regard to its exact connotation, as a general term for that which is not easily understood because its meaning does not lie upon the surface. Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan were thus, to a certain extent, “metaphysical” poets, like Cowley and Donne. Herbert, indeed, explains, and partly justifies, his use of this form in the poem strangely entitled “Jordan”

We like the method the author of A Catholic History of Great Britain has proposed to herself of emphasizing, that is to say, “leading ideas” rather than “unimportant facts,” it is the only method for treating history on so compressed a scale. But we confess to some disappointment at the result. Perhaps we expected too much. The test of a general survey consists of its presentment of Constitutional and Social development and of Foreign Relations. Here the one strikes us, more particularly in the earlier part, as wanting in clearness of outline—it is crammed with small detail—and the other as lacking the essential elements of connection and continuity.

The Saxon ceorl, for example, described as a farmer, an agriculturist (p. 20), serves as a key to Anglo-Saxon society if his position as occupying the lowest rank of free landowner, midway between the noble class on the one hand and the slave class on the other, is clearly brought out. To trace the effect of growing feudalization on the status of the ceorlish man in the age immediately preceding the Conquest, and his subsequent identification with the unfree villein of Post-Conquest days following the introduction of the fully organized Feudal System into England by the Conqueror, is to grasp the successive stages through which Englishmen passed from an order where the middle-class man, in the person of the ceorl, was free, but had below him a slave class to a society where he himself had become debased and had lost his independence, but the community at large rested no longer on a substructure of slavery. The Saxon theow had gained where the Saxon ceorl had lost, and progress was justified of her children in the dying institution of slavery.

It is a custom with that venerable institution, the Aristotelian Society, to elect each year a new President whose duty it is to open proceedings with a Presidential Address. Dr. F. C. S. Schiller, our President for this year, chose as his subject “Novelty,” and endeavoured to prove first and foremost that novelty exists, “or rather occurs.” One wonders whether this was quite necessary, novelty is so very obvious everywhere. But we suppose that it must have been ; and there are at any rate people, known as Eleatics, who are supposed to have denied its existence, though illustrating it by their own. In any case, Dr. Schiller did prove it; if in no other way, by the very fact that a President of the venerable Aristotelian Society should have talked to us about milliners and tailors and the fashion of dressing one’s hair.

He was not quite so successful, however, it seems to me, in establishing his second point, namely, that hatred of novelty exists and is man’s normal attitude. Our President, at any rate, is an exception here again ; and in his philosophic studies has nobly resisted the “inertia, laziness, custom, timidity, stupidity, the whole brood of Habit and Ignorance” which “combine their forces to repulse the new.” He admits that there are exceptions, however ; and mentions as instances the love of novelty in fashion, and the craving for news. Science also has “looked with favour upon novelty in the last century or two.” But this is not enough. Science has not only favoured novelty in the last century or two : it lives upon novelty and always has done so.

“The Oxford Movement is a spent force.” Several recent writers and speakers, both Catholic and Anglican, on either side of the Atlantic, have given utterance to this phrase, which has been indignantly denied by High Church leaders, and even by Catholics whose interest in non-Catholic affairs has led them to study the present situation of our separated brethren. In view of the recent demonstration of the Anglo-Catholic Congress, and the marked activity of the English Church Union under the able leadership of its new Secretary-General, there would seem, at first blush, to be rather a preponderance of truth in the denial, and all the more so when one remembers that the statement has been made, and denied, again and again, since the secession of Newman from the movement which he led (though he did not start it), and that to the confusion of prophets, Anglican and Roman Catholic alike, the trend towards Catholic doctrine and practice in the Establishment, and in the American Episcopal Church, has been steadily onward and upward. We do not read, nowadays, of High Church Vicars being hooted through the streets of London for daring to preach in a surplice, or imprisoned for donning other “rags of Popery.”

There have been many digressions and regressions, modifications, adaptations, new points of view, new theories on special subjects, in the philosophic world since the days of Berkeley, but, with the exception of Herbert Spencer, no one has attempted to devise a new philosophy outright. Professor Alexander has redeemed our English reputation for originality. Mill is little more than a methodologist, Wm. James and Dr. Schiller have given us a new theory of knowledge, Green adapts Hegel, Bradley introduces further modifications, and criticizes everybody else, Professor Ward has revived Leibnitz, but it has been reserved to Professor Alexander to make a fresh start and to think out a new philosophy ab initio.

The fact that the Aristotelian Society should have allotted four sittings to the discussion of Professor Alexander’s book, testifies to the esteem with which he is regarded in the philosophic world, and also to the importance of the views he sets forth. The reason is apparent. The fundamental reality out of which all evolves is for Professor Alexander space-time. His philosophy, in fact, though not based upon Einstein, nor discussing in detail his theory, may be aptly described as an Einstein-metaphysic.

Two dates in the present year are likely to be of great moment to the historians of this country. On Thursday, March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day) there was opened at 61 Marlborough Road, Holloway, N., the first “Mothers’ Clinic for Birth Control.” Its founders were “Humphrey Verdon Roe and his wife, Marie Carmichael Stopes, D.Sc., Ph.D.”

On Tuesday, May 31, the Queen’s Hall held a large and sympathetic audience at a “Meeting convened by Dr. Marie Stopes, author of Married Love, Wise Parenthood, and Radiant Motherhood, on the theme of Constructive Birth Control: its Ideals and Helpfulness to the Individual and to the Race.”

As an old “hymn-tinker,” sere if not yellow, may I presume to discuss the subject of hymns? I suppose all hymnodists begin with zeal and end with knowledge, as even I, the least, but I hope not the last, since there is still room on top. There is room chiefly for original hymns. We have too many of the wrong sort and not enough of the right sort, and the career of Father Faber is an expensive object-lesson. For every good hymn he gave us we have three bad ones, and I venture to suggest that all his hymns could well be done without except O Purest of Creatures and Faith of Our Fathers. Perhaps I speak without the book, but even on second thoughts I cannot recall any indispensable hymns of his except that on St. Benedict. Would that he had always wrought up to this standard ! But he set bad headlines for worse men and women than himself. Not only this, but he shelved Caswall and obscured Newman. Now Caswall was our best translator, of distinctly higher quality than Neale (who is not “ours”), and some of his original hymns, e.g. Joy, joy, the Mother comes, are models of what is wanted. I do not for a moment admit that he reaches the heights of Newman, but he is better than anyone else I know of, after Matthew Bridges. And only after Matthew Bridges at his best.

Generalization about national or racial characteristics is a dangerous—if, for one’s leisure moments, rather fascinating—game, above all if played with no sense of humour. The Germans and their followers in this and other countries have cultivated the sport to a most tiresome degree. Very systematically and very solemnly they have constructed a marvellously complete index of mental and spiritual characteristics, tabulating opposite each the particular race which, in their opinion, embodies those characteristics. The game then consists in tracing, in the mixture of races inhabiting Europe since history began to be recorded, the proportion of this or that racial element and the precise intellectual, physical, or social characteristic for which it is held to be responsible.

It is, of course, far removed from the intention of this essay to assert that there is nothing in anthropology, even in German anthropologists. The question under discussion, which concerns the growth in Europe of our day, above all in Germany, of what may be called an “end of Europe” literature—the reason why this has been introduced with this apparently irrelevant remark is that, in the first place, the methods of the German race-theorists will form a good object-lesson for use later on in this article ; second, because tht writer wished to be above all suspicion in himself making a generalization concerning national characteristics. It is this—and it will be seen that it differs from German race-theories in being based, not on an entirely questionable assumption of racial elements in this or that nation, but on the proved and generally observed practice of representative German historians, philosophers, and scientists.

Blessed Albertus Magnus was one of those unfortunate saints who get covered up with odd stories like an old castle with ivy. The castle is as solid as the rock on which it is built, but what with the thickness of the ivy and the chattering of the jackdaws that live in it, you hardly get a chance of seeing it or speaking about it sensibly, and it runs the risk of getting forgotten altogether. There was an amazing quantity of such overgrowth and bickering about Blessed Albertus, even in his own lifetime. People even said he was a wizard. As if a Blessed could be a wizard ! They painted a white horse on the side of a tower in the market-place of his native town and said that as a little boy Albert, and Albert alone, could lead that horse about. They made out that he had a magic cup in which he had but to pour wine or water and the sick man who sipped it was cured. They pretended that beside his own cell, in the Convent of Cologne, he had a little room hidden away and full of strange animals and fantastic instruments and uncanny vessels of glass. They said there was a scarlet curtain in one corner of it behind which stood a Talking Figure which could say “Salve ! Salve ! Salve !” and had taken Blessed Albertus thirty years to make. They boasted that the Four Crowned Martyrs, the patron saints of masons, had traced him out the plans of Cologne Cathedral—though all the world knows that it was Gerard of Riel, who travelled in France first and worked in a timber-yard afterwards—to whom the plans of Cologne Cathedral are owing.

Long ago, in the days of St. Louis, there lived in the city of Paris a rich pastrycook. He had not always been rich ; in fact, he began in a very small way indeed as one of those itinerant rissole-sellers who go about at night with a large basket covered with a white napkin, selling rissoles and wafer-cakes to the poor scholars of the University. The scholars used to lead most of the pastrycooks no end of a dance, stealing their baskets and eating the rissoles and hanging the empty baskets up as trophies under their windows. But this pastrycook, whose name was Master Otelinus, did not lose his basket twice, but kept his eyes open and stuck to business and rose very high indeed in what was only too appropriately termed in those days (as, indeed, it should be in our own) the mystery of a pastrycook.

In due time he built a handsome shop in The Great Street not far from the Sorbonne, and here he stood at his open window—whose bottom shutters let down into the street made a fine counter, while the top ones were hooked back for an awning—and sold pies of all sorts and sizes from morning till night. Pies stuffed with pork and eels and wild-fowl and eggs—sometimes good eggs and sometimes bad, sanis et quandoque itn-mundis—and very peppery cheese custard. And his servants paraded the city—for he no longer went out himself—cheating his old enemies, the students, over black and white prunes and cherries and unripe apples and such-like small gear.

On September the 14th, this year, the six hundredth anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, at Ravenna, will be celebrated. It is a significant fact that the revival of the study of the great Italian poet, and of mediæval Italian literature generally, in the nineteenth century was contemporaneous with the “Second Spring” of Catholic life in England. For while it is true that many non-Catholic scholars have contributed to our knowledge of his life and work, it is also true that no one who has not an inner knowledge of the Catholic Church can fully understand the Commedia. To such there must always be, inevitably, something in it that is alien to his mind. For Dante was, first and foremost, a Catholic and regarded everything from a Catholic standpoint.

The argument in his famous political treatise, De Monarchia, and the real purpose of the Guelph and Ghibelline wars in Italy, can be properly understood only from that point of view.

Those protracted wars ended at last, in 1266, after fifty years of swaying fortunes, in the victory of Charles of Anjou over King Manfred at Benevento, and the final supremacy of the Guelphs. Dante was one year old when that decisive battle was fought. The echoes of the long struggle are heard throughout all his writings, for his family were patriotic Guelphs. It must be remembered that the war was not, fundamentally, a strife for mastery between Popes and Emperors.

Seven hundred years ago, in a castle not twenty miles from Canterbury, there lived a very vain and beautiful lady. She was the wife of the lord of the manor and was known from Oxford to Jerusalem— wherever there were knights to joust for her and minstrels to sing of her—as the Fair Châtelaine. And there was also, tucked away in a little cell under the castle leads, a very holy old priest called Dan Bartholomew, who said Mass for the inmates of the castle and did his best to look after their souls.

This was no light task. For though the lord of the castle was a pious enough man when he was at home (which was not often), and the poor peasants round about found time between dawn and dusk to say a few prayers and light a few candles in the forlorn little chapel by the gate-house, the lady kept as far as she could from prayer and altogether from penance. Yet certainly few people needed penance more than that worldly dame. Never a year went by but she spent a knight’s ransom in clothes ; and the older she got and the more her beauty waned, the more new-fangled and costly became her attire.

Of course in her husband’s absence it was Dan Bartholomew’s business to check her ; but she was like the crab which when asked why it walked sideways said, “So I learnt from my parents,” and gave him nothing but saucy answers in return for his serious admonitions. When her husband came back from the Crusade it was even worse.

An “Anglo-Catholic Convention of Priests” has been held this summer at Oxford. Learning and piety, goodwill and good works, enthusiasm not without convenient forgetfulness, together with plenty of dicta, a la Podsnap’s “I don’t admit America,” have there been patent to all respectful observers. Another Anglican Congress of Fellowship was held at the same time in Oxford. Perhaps a third of the Anglicans therein taking part were of the same religion, or religions, as those in the Convention of “Anglo-Catholics.” Those of Fellowship had also their “don’t admit it.” Nor can they be gainsaid, when they declare that “Anglo-Catholicism” is not the Church of England in esse ; nor yet when they maintain that the Reformed Church of England never before Ruled these “Anglo-Catholic Priests,” nor their words, nor their works, nor their ways, until this day and hour.

“Let us give a rest to the religion of sacrifice,” seemed to be the dominant note at this Anglican Congress of Fellowship; “let us trust for religious reunion, to goodwill, charity, and philanthropy. Let us not exclude our brethren of the Free Churches, far nearer our faith than are our separated brethren of Rome. Let us take their Protestant orders ; let us exchange orders as equals.”

The late Rev. John de Soyres wrote to the present writer as follows : “Of course Pope Leo is quite right; we have no orders in the Roman Catholic sense ; but we are content with our orders as all Protestants understand them.”