I have never found the pen move with greater difficulty than in trying to record the impression which is left with me of Mrs. Meynell’s life and death. It is as hard as writing of her poetry and her prose —the prose with which she enamelled Life, the poetry which she laid up as Death’s garland. If the supremely important moment of a saint’s life is the last, to which every thought and deed has long paved the way, the extreme ecstacy of the poet no less is death. Then the last rhythm of life is rendered and the last measure of the soul is counted. If poesy is a divine gift, then God will call account for the poetic stewardship, not for the false rhymes and broken feet—for He forgives technicalities—but for fine arts wasted and supreme inspiration thrown to the dogs.

Great poets have deliberately given their powers to evil, and petty rhymesters toss their jingles to perdition. But the great poetry of the world is ever religious. Great prose need not be so. Poetry to be great requires the sublimer touch which only religion can give. Prose can be ironical, fantastical, wise, comic, solemn, almost sublime; but sublimity demands the rushing music, the piercing note, the ordered cadence, the organ’s diapason.

Alice Meynell’s prose, culled into a life’s sheaf of Essays, covered all those moods and forms. Out of them could be composed a little Breviary of country life and common-joy things.

Religion and education have been inseparably involved ever since the Church was founded. Just as the two Cities and the two Citizenships are inextricable : and here their jurisdictions meet. The right to teach is part of the Church’s charter, everywhere claimed. In the last struggle between the Church and Paganism, there was a curious episode connected with education—the Julianic persecution.

Julian had never been a Catholic, and when he ceased to be an Arian he became an enthusiast for Paganism. He exhibits the same sort of anti-quarianism raised to a passion and an enthusiasm, as was often found in the Renaissance. Julian forbade any Christian to teach literature, on the ground that nobody should teach what he does not believe: ancient literature is full of heathen gods and goddesses : therefore Christianity must not teach it. The principle would have interesting modern applications . . .

Paganism became intellectually and morally bankrupt. The philosophy stripped off, nothing but a devil-worship was left, which obscurely lingered on in holes and corners, where doubtless they talked of their ‘grand old independence,’ &c. But the Church discovered a part of her mission hitherto unsuspected. It became evident when the forms of Roman Civilization were flooded with barbaric material; then the only life within those forms and the only civilizing power was the Church. While Pagans were still prating about the disloyalty of Catholics as the cause of the downfall, the Church was setting about a new task.

Though many books and articles are written round every decennial performance of the Passion Play at Oberammergau, and the drama has so many points of deep interest that it requires altogether exceptional control in any writer who sees it not to record his impressions, I think that there is still something to be said. With the conviction that the play could not be performed in any other theatre or by any other actors, abides the assurance that its chief virtues, its atmosphere of uniqueness, can yet be shared by the majority necessarily unable to make the pilgrimage. If I can persuade the reader to this paradoxical conclusion, perhaps I shall have deserved my own good fortune. Let me, then, try to show him the simple means whereby he can make a spectator’s experience his own. It is doubtful if The Ring can be enjoyed adequately anywhere but at Munich or at Bayreuth. It is certain that, in England, Shakespeare is himself only at the Old Vic. Ibsen demands to be played in cycles. But the Passion Play, which could not be transplanted, can be experienced in the study by anyone who studies its traditions, its history, and (above all) its text, with the aid of the magnificent sets of photographs that are available. Of course, some supreme effects will be lost. The music, which has never been published, will be wanting. The peculiar virtue of an open-air theatre, to realise which the Greek model at Bradfield should be visited, remains to seek.

When Cervantes created ‘Don Quixote,’ the greatest and most delightful of satires, the perfect picture of Spanish national life and manners, that exquisite ‘Book of Humanity’ as Sainte Beuve calls it, he had it in mind to laugh away and burlesque out of existence those foolish romances of chivalry so prevalent in his day, which he held to be in deplorable taste and fraught with harm for the morals of his country. How well he succeeded, all the world knows.

Two centuries later, Spain brought forth a second Cervantes, a satirist of hardly less eminence, but scarcely known to Englishmen of the present day. He too produced a ‘Book of Humanity,’ a lively study of national character; he too had it in mind to laugh away and ridicule into nothingness something which he held to be dangerous to Spain and a slur on her good name. And he too, on a more modest stage, achieved his object. His book in its only English translation, that of 1772, lies before us in faded calf volumes, as we write: ‘The History of the famous Preacher, Friar Gerund de Campazas.’

The author, still well remembered in Spain, which held a literary festival in his honour as recently as 1903, on the occasion of the second centenary of his birth, was a Jesuit, one Jose Francesco de Isla, whose life covered the years 1703—1781. He was a professor at Salamanca and a popular preacher and director, with pronounced literary tastes and almost unexampled gifts of satire and humour.

More than any other part of France, Brittany has a distinct existence apart from the rest. Its old Celtic language is still spoken habitually among the working people over a great part of its western departments, while in St. Malo, and further east still to the very borders of Normandy, Breton is still the native language of a considerable proportion of the older people, who as often as not are quite illiterate, although in the best sense of the word they are highly cultivated, with their inheritance of traditions that have their roots centuries behind the present day. Brittany includes only five in all out of the ninety more or less equal departments into which (including Alsace Lorraine) modern France is divided. But this small north-western corner is thickly populated, and while it is barely larger than one-twentieth of the whole of France, it contains all but one-tenth of the population. What is more important, Brittany is one of the very few districts in the country in which the population is actually increasing at a normal rate, thereby helping to reduce the steady shrinkage of the whole French population. It is the most conspicuous example of the obvious fact in modern French economics—so obvious that it is now openly, if reluctantly, admitted by the most anti-clerical newspapers—that it is only where the Catholic tradition has remained vital that large families are still to be found as a general rule.

Ater looking forward, for what seemed a very long time, to Father Martindale’s Life of Father Plater/ we now find ourselves wondering how anything so thoroughly well done can have been prepared so quickly. The book is not the mere history of an eventful life; it is a skilful revelation of a remarkable personality. Many of us who before only knew Father Plater now feel that we understand him; and in human relations an understanding signifies more than it says.

It is not the usual lot of a man to be understood in his life-time by the majority of those who know him. Father Plater was more fortunate than most men in this respect, though even he had his critics. His good nature saved him from serious misunderstandings in the less pleasant sense of that word; but occasionally the differences of opinion between himself and others were serious enough. Most misunderstandings of this sort were solved during his life; but one, and that the most serious, has not only survived him, it still exists with regard to the work with which he was principally identified and which others are still carrying on in his name and spirit.

It is said that Dante took his revenge upon his enemies by putting them in his Inferno and thus pilloried them for all time. According to Alphonse de Lamartine, for example, ‘le poeme exclusivement toscan du Dante était une espèce de satire vengeresse du poète et de l’homme d’Etat contre les hommes et le partis auxquels il avait voue sa haine.’ Lamartine's shallow Voltairian view is still vaguely held, for a modern writer has recently referred to Dante’s ‘vindictiveness which mars and prevaricates the truth.’ Carlyle, on the other hand, exclaimed, ‘What a paltry notion is that of his Divine Comedy’s being a poor, splenetic, impotent, terrestrial libel; putting those into hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth ! ‘But the general impression among casual readers of the Commedia is that this was what he actually did.

The purpose, therefore, of this article is to enquire whether there is any evidence of ‘vindictiveness’ in the Inferno.

Now, apart from the crowd of mythological and scriptural and ancient historical personages, there are about sixty-seven persons, mostly contemporaries, mentioned by name or whose identity is undisputed. The supposed ‘vindictiveness,’ of course, could only be shown towards some of these. There are notorious Florentines, like Ciacco, the glutton, and Filippo Argenti, an arrogant and intolerant bully, of whom Boccaccio also tells us a characteristic Decameron story (ix, 8). There are common highway murderers like Rinier de Corneto and Rinier Pazzo. There are prodigals, like Lano of Siena, who in despair committed suicide, and Jacomo da Sant’ Andrea of Padua, who was executed for arson.

Surely of all the hard sayings in the Gospel, the words at the end of the parable of the Good Samaritan are the hardest: ‘Go, and do thou in like manner’ —Vade, et tu fac similiter.

The story itself is plain and simple; none of the parables of Christ is more familiar. The very phrase,

‘a good Samaritan,’ has passed into the language. And yet, is there anything harder for the average man than the concluding injunction, ‘Go, and do thou in like manner’ ? Its very directness leaves no loophole for misunderstanding or evasion. There is no suggestion here of a counsel of perfection. It is just an instruction in neighbourly conduct, and an instruction exceedingly hard to obey.

The Samaritan adopts a complete stranger, whom he finds in distress, and recognizing the wounded man as a neighbour, promptly provides him with hospitality; thereby inventing a home for the homeless, and for one person at least solving the housing problem. ‘Go, and do thou likewise,’ declares the Saviour of the World!

The clergy had passed the injured man by. Perhaps they blamed ‘the system,’ social and economic, that allows wounded persons to lie homeless and destitute by the roadside. Possibly they blamed the authorities, to whom they paid rates and taxes, for not keeping better order and suppressing highway robbery. In any case, the injured man was quite unknown to them. Certainly he was not a regular attendant at church, or they would have identified him. It is impossible to suppose that a sidesman or a seat-holder found lying in the gutter would not be recognised and assisted.

The experience of the Great War seems so far to have left little mark on French literature, and the reader of current French novels, poetry and drama will often find himself wondering what the cause of this may be. He will discover in French political and social life enough evidence of the fact that France in the last seven years passed through a terrible war and emerged devastated, robbed of hundreds of thousands of her sons, but unbroken and proud. In literature, however, so the observer will often think to himself, all this appears to have changed nothing. On the stage, in fiction and poetry, we might be in 1914, before the shadow of the disaster was to be seen or thought of. England, Italy, Germany even, have, in their imaginative and intellectual life, ‘reacted’ more thoroughly to the war than has France, most terribly stricken of them all.

Without criticising this ‘stationary’ character of contemporary French literature or in any way assuming that it will be permanent, we can readily find a reason for it. More than any other of the belligerents France lost her young intellectuals in the great struggle. The men through whom she speaks to-day, in her art and literature, are very often those who were accepted classics already in 1914, incapable of radical change or departure from the style they have made their own. The young writers who should now be writing alongside of them, and eventually succeed them, are dead.

For the satisfaction of the needs of the body, and the nourishment of the physical life, four things are required : food, clothing, fuel, and shelter. By labour, and by labour alone, can these necessary things be obtained, and that labour must be applied to the earth, created by God and placed in subjection to the dominion of man. While ever the populations of the earth are in need of food, clothing, fuel and shelter, labour engaged on the production and distribution of these primary goods is fulfilling an economic purpose and is not wasteful.

Economic waste is either of a positive character, taking place when labour is organized for the destruction of human life and the necessities of human life; or it is a negative thing, seen when labour is engaged at tasks that do not minister to the health of man or is left totally unemployed.

Of positive waste the most obvious examples are war and the whole business of armaments and the manufacture of chemical agencies for the taking of life in war. (Yet even in the case of war it may be that the very real waste of labour is sometimes the only apparent means of stopping a greater and more disastrous waste. As the advance of a raging fire must be checked, and can only be checked by clearing an area —in itself a wasteful proceeding—to the end that the fire shall die down for lack of further fuel; as the progress of an epidemic may require the pulling down of dwelling-houses lest the ravages of plague and pestilence extend unhindered;

That the ways of God are not men’s ways is very clear all through the life of the Père de Foucauld. It is singularly fortunate that this Saint of modern days should have M. Rene Bazin as his biographer. The skill in portraiture that he wields as a novelist, his sure and sympathetic touch are all needed to make a material world realise the deep and far-reaching import of Charles de Foucauld’s vocation.

Its chief characteristic was patient, faithful, waiting on the will of God. He knew from the first moment of his conversion that he had a destiny to accomplish. His own will was utterly subjected to this destiny, this purpose of God, and his sanctity grew in patient, steady labour in utter loneliness in the wide Sahara for its accomplishment. He has paved the way for a new impulse in the French nation for the conversion of the portion of Islam over which they rule.

The life and martyrdom of the Père de Foucauld is a protest against the attitude almost generally accepted that the Mussulman is unconvertable. This opinion has become a maxim—a stereotyped view. Hilaire Belloc, in his Esto Perpetua, a book of Algerian studies, says, speaking of Islam :

There may be some readers of the Commedia who are not familiar with the Convivio, or ‘Banquet’ ; the unfinished philosophical commentary on certain of his odes, which Villani called ‘a beautiful, subtle and very great work.’ And yet its medieval lore, its depth of feeling and (for those who read Italian) its wonderful word-music render it as fascinating as the love-story of the Vita Nuova which Rossetti popularised. One may therefore perhaps venture to introduce such readers to its Fourth Book, in which Dante discourses of ‘true nobility.’

Its title is Contra gli erranti, ‘Against the erring ones,’ which he takes, he says, ‘from the example of the good brother Thomas of Aquino, who gave to a book which he wrote for the confusion of all who depart from our faith the title Contra Gentili.’ He undertakes a mighty work, grande e alta opera, and one that has rarely been handled by others, viz. to examine what constitutes natural nobility. To understand this potenza di natura is all-important, because our mistakes about it lead to the confusion of moral values in our social estimates.

‘There was a certain emperor ‘—he is referring to that brilliant ‘stupor mundi,’ Frederick the Second, Barbarossa’s grandson, whose authority as arbiter of Sicilian taste was as great as his cunning in deceiving the Holy See—’ who was once asked : What is gen-tilezza?’ We English have no word for gentilezza, because we have not enough regard for the quality it

signifies, the quality which is connoted in ‘gentlefolk/ Elsewhere Dante uses the word nobilta, nobleness, as its synonym.

I was being escorted the other day over the Roman foundations of an ancient British city, by a professor who said something that seems to me a satire on a good many other professors. I think it very probable that this professor saw the joke, though he maintained an iron gravity; but I do not know whether he saw that it was a joke against a great deal of historical science and comparative religion. I drew his attention to a bas-relief or moulding representing the head of the sun with the usual halo of rays, but with the difference that the face in the disc, instead of being boyish like Apollo, was bearded like Neptune or Jupiter. ‘Yes,’ he said, with a certain delicate exactitude, ‘that is supposed to represent the local sun-god Sul. The best authorities identify Sul with Minerva; but this has been held to show that the identification is not complete.’

That is what we call a powerful understatement. And it struck me that it was singularly like a large number of parallels I have come across in what is called comparative religion, on which I would add a postscript to these notes. Many professors identifying things remind me of this identification of Minerva with the Bearded Woman of Mr. Barnum. It is indeed an example of the modern world being madder than any satires on it; for long ago Mr. Belloc invented an imaginary don, who said that a bust of Ariadne had been proved by modern research to represent Silenus.

To speak at all of religious values in literature may be regarded by some as rather questionable, on the ground that religion and the art of letters have little in common and that conscious attempts to make literature serve the cause of religion are generally failures or, at the best, half-successes, serving neither the one nor the other with completeness. But it is not quite from that point of view that the theme for this essay has been stated. Even the ‘art for art’s sake’ critics and artists—an ever-diminishing company, in the usual acceptation of the phrase—would agree that literature was expression, individual and social. Most people would further agree that religion was still a vital, if often unrecognised, element in the life of the human being or of the community. Given literature, then, as ‘expression,’ and religious aspiration as the same thing, it is justifiable to isolate them for a while and discuss, without any question of propaganda or of making ‘literature the handmaid of religion,’ the way in which the first is being linked to the second—the particular instance under notice being that of Germany to-day where, as will be seen shortly, the enquiry promises to be especially fruitful and thought-provoking.

Writers to whom the label ‘Catholic’ may be specifically applied are by no means a negligible quantity in Germany to-day, even regarded from the point of view of general literary criticism.

With the beginning of Lent the bishops of nine of the French dioceses in the devastated districts issued an appeal to the public for a loan of 200 million francs. The experiment is in itself a very considerable contribution to solving the problem of reconstruction in the Regions Libérées.

Of the twelve dioceses which suffered partial or complete devastation in the war only nine are included in the list of co-operative reconstruction societies in whose names this appeal for public subscriptions is issued. The diocese of Nancy, which was the first to originate the idea of applying to the reconstruction of the ruined churches the legal privileges accorded to important syndicates of claimants to reparation money, has already successfully floated a preliminary loan for 15 million francs on its own account. It speaks well for the success of this more ambitious project that the whole amount asked for by the diocese of Nancy was subscribed locally within a few weeks. The present issue is the result of an agreement among the nine dioceses which suffered the most serious devastation, that they would make a joint appeal to the public so that none should be penalised by being behindhand in organising the necessary co-operative societies.

The prospectus of the loan has now been distributed, and the first subscriptions are beginning to come in. There is no doubt, however, that the large amount asked for will take some time to materialise.

Even the 200 million francs is only a fraction of the total amount that will be required to repair all the three thousand ruined churches of the Regions Liberies, and it is as well to state at once that the promoters of the loan are anxious to collect money wherever they can find generous friends.

One hundred years ago this September, the independence of Brazil from the Crown of Portugal, and the formation of the new state into an empire, were declared. In commemoration of that series of events, special celebrations are being held over there during September. The Holy See is being (as, indeed, how should it be otherwise?) represented at those rejoicings, and so also are Great Britain and many other Powers. It may be of interest to glance at the very stirring and extraordinary history of that far-away land.

The first European to land in Brazil was Vicente Yanez Pinzon, who, in the year 1500, coasted as far as the Orinoco River, discovering also the mouth of the Amazon. During the same year, Pedro Alvarez Cabral, a mariner from Portugal, also reached Brazil. He disembarked on Easter Sunday. A solemn Mass was celebrated, and to the newly-discovered regions the voyagers gave the name, ‘True Cross’ (Vera Cruz). A vessel was sent back to Europe to announce to the King of Portugal the discovery which had been made, but Cabral himself had quite another object in view than following up that particular matter. In point of fact, in the voyage which had brought him to Brazil, he had been under the impression that he was on his way to India via the Cape of Good Hope! He contented himself, therefore, with leaving two of his sailors in the newly-found land, and then himself continued his original journey.

Our newspapers, which usually offer such scanty information about China, have lately been giving us intelligence of a civil war which has just broken out to add to the sorrows of that much-tried country. We read that the pro-Japanese, Chang-Tso-Lin, has moved south from Manchuria with his well-equipped troops, while the Nationalist, Wu-Pei-Fu, has gone north from the central provinces of Hupeh and Hunan, and that the rival armies have met and are fighting in the neighbourhood of Peking. Also we are told that the professional agitator and arch-plotter, Sun-Yat-Sen, has thrown in his lot with Chang-Tso-Lin, and is preparing to set his Cantonese army against the forces of Wu-Pei-Fu.

It is all very distressing, and not very intelligible to the uninitiated. A few years ago, Sun-Yat-Sen (then in Japan) issued a public letter advising his countrymen to put themselves under the protection of Japan. More recently he has been with his confederates in the south, professing to head a republic of his own, opposed to the Japanese influences dominant in the north. Yet now he returns to his former friends, and is ready to support Chang-Tso-Lin, supposed to be the tool of Dai Nippon. Why? We are not told, and the man in the street may justly be excused for his lack of interest in a country where the political moves are so confusing and so difficult to understand. For the voice of that great nation hardly reaches the West. The representatives of what is called the Chinese Government, men with semi-European names such as Alfred Sze or Wellington Koo,

The art of sculpture as formerly practised by the peoples of India is, in epitome, an exhibition of all that British rule, there, as in England, must inevitably destroy. This may be for many a matter for considerable rejoicing, for, like the Romans in their decline, and for that matter, as it seems, throughout the whole of their history, the British people, though mitigating its appetite for commercial power by a sense of justice and fair play, is almost totally blind to any absolute value in Beauty.

Admirable as it may appear to be in many of its achievements, a civilisation submitting to the widespread and predominant use of mechanical contrivances whose sole claim to existence lies in the fact that by their means things can be made in greater quantity for the same expenditure of time and money is a civilisation wilfully denying itself the possession of things of Beauty, and destroying in itself both the power to produce such things and the ability to recognise them when they are produced.

Those of us who are concerned for the existence of Beauty in the world are often accused, by so-called practical men of business, of a lack of disinterestedness. It is supposed that we desire Beauty because we are artists, and that -were we not artists we should be as indifferent in the matter as they are. It is supposed that as the cocoa-manufacturer wages war against the drinking of beer, because he may thus hope to increase the sales of his cocoa, and it is not to be supposed that he can have any other motive, So the artist wages his ‘forlorn hope’ against commercialism because thus he may hope to increase the sales of works of art.

It came to pass on Sunday morn When the Parish Mass was done,

The men of Woodstock all went home,

And the women every one,

But Hugh the Glover set out north By the banks of Glyme alone.

The sun shone hot on stem and stone,

The robin sang on the thorn,

The last mist lifted off the grass Was tree-top high that morn,

When he doffed his shoes by Wootton Church. That stands high on a rocky perch,

Where the Glyme runs into the Dome.

And barefoot still, by vale and hill,

He took his pilgrim’s way,

For the King’s Glover of Woodstock Sought a great grace that day—

To learn of the Anker of Dornford Wherein Devotion lay.

Now Hugh the Glover was a rich burgess of Woodstock, high in the favour of King John and his peers. He had a fair, cheerful wife; six sons and two daughters; and a large, two-storied house with an arched door and a gabled roof. But for all this he had been ill at ease for a long time, because he did not know the meaning of the word ‘Devotion.’ I do not say he could not hazard a guess at it—most of us could do as much—but he did not think that was the right way to approach so noble a word. And every time he heard Mass—which was almost every day of his life—and the priest prayed for Hugh the Glover and all the other bystanders ‘quorum libi fides cognita esl, et nota devotio,’

No poet since Francis Thompson has won such immediate acceptance as Rupert Brooke. He came, he sang, he conquered. He was a sudden voice; a voice that died away suddenly far from the land he sang and loved. And his death gave a new life to his song.

In Thompson the critics had found a poet complete, crowned in his own right with his own imperishable bays, a poet’s poet. They were denied the luxury of watching him grow. While they slept he had taken Parnassus at a bound. They woke to find him with nothing to learn and everything to teach. He let loose upon them The Hound of Heaven, and from that moment they were prepared for anything. His vision had no limitations but the horizons of beauty and truth; it was a spiritual unity that had no parts; it was so comprehensive that it could enclose eternity in a poppy's fragile cup. His moods were all one mood : a mood towards God by which he interpreted everything aright.

Brooke was saluted in his own day as a poet who would become great. Certain undoubted successes convinced men that he would undoubtedly be a success. Until then he was the most interesting of the younger poets. He conducted his emotional and poetical education in public; that, was the abiding interest. He faltered and swerved and failed many times. But always the conviction prevailed that he would one day find his feet and run in the straight and find with certain eye the goal.