Of perilous seas, by faery lands forlorn "
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that are the avenues of spiritual revelation
through the mystical agency of art.
On this very matter writes that beautiful
soul, Sir Thomas Browne: "For even that
vulgar and Tavern-Musick, which makes one
man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep
fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of
the First Composer. There is something in it of
Divinity more than the ear discovers: it is an
Hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the
whole World, and creatures of God; such a
melody to the ear, as the whole World, well
understood, would afford the understanding.
In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony
which intellectually sounds in the ears of God."
This by the way, for our inquiry is not
here, and I try to return to the path that may,
in the end, lead at the very last to our subject.
I have said enough to indicate what I mean
when I speak of all art as the natural, and, in-
deed, the only adequate, expression in time and
space of spiritual things. If it is this, then it fol-
lows of necessity that it is the ordained language
of religion, for religion, through theology, is the
divine science which is higher than all natural
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sciences, in that it deals with Absolute Truth
through perfectly adequate agencies, while the
natural sciences deal only with finite phenom-
ena through agencies adequate to this end and
to this alone. It follows, then, that preemi-
nently and in a very special fashion art is, or
should be, a matter of absolutely vital import-
ance to religion, since it is ordered by God Him-
self as its mode of visible manifestation. As a
matter of fact, this always has been so from
the very beginnings of recorded history. "God
has never left Himself without a witness"; and
even in the ethnic religions of antiquity, or the
paganism that preceded the Incarnation, or in
the pseudo-religious philosophies of the East,
the dim witnesses of God have made for them-
selves out of art in all its forms witnesses before
men of whatever shadowy glimmerings of truth
were given to them. Babylon, Assyria, Egypt,
all wrought for themselves great art, but always
the beginnings were at the hands of priests and
prophets, and however great the secular art
that ensued, always its greatest glories were
achieved in religious service. And so through
history, century after century, through the
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fastidious and exquisite temples of Greece and
the half-barbarian "grandeur that was Rome,"
to the solemn basilicas of Constantine, the
golden and glimmering shrines of Justinian, the
grave majesty of the churches of Charlemagne,
the towering abbeys of Frank and Norman
Benedictines, the first fine Gothic of the Cister-
cian monasteries, to the crowning glory of the
mediaeval cathedrals of France and the abbeys
of England. Even when civilization was break-
ing down under the assaults of the new pagan-
ism after the exile at Avignon and the fall of
Constantinople, it was religion, whatever we
may think of its momentary condition, that was
still, through the visible Church, leading the
van in the building-up of a new though fictitious
form of art ; and it was not until the Reforma-
tion that, for the first time in the history of the
world, organized religion turned against art,
and, denying its virtue or its efficacy, devoted
itself to the destruction of what it had created
and what had been, in solemn fact, one of its
most potent agencies of operation. And then
followed, also for the first time in history, that
ominous thing, the extinction of all art, of every
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kind whatever, as an attribute of human life, as
a heritage of civilization. Indeed, what actu-
ally ensued was worse even than extinction : it
was the substitution, first, of something with
little beauty and with no art at all in place of
the perfect beauty man already had perfectly
made manifest; then the wild yet deliberate
beating down and utter destruction of these
dumb memorials of a great material and spirit-
ual past; and finally, the setting-up, for the
worship of degenerate society, of the brazen
images of ugliness. A stranger and more omin-
ous thing than this history has hardly recorded.
We have seen, and many times, the perishing
of great civilizations : the flowering of art during
some epoch of splendid development, and its
slow dissolution after that epoch had yielded
to the law of the world, which is the law of de-
generation, in opposition to the law of the
spirit, which is the law of regeneration and de-
velopment. We have seen the exquisite art of
Greece go down in the wake of Greek civiliza-
tion, while the art of Rome that followed on was
immeasurably less noble and complete. In its
turn we have beheld the fall of Rome and the
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coming of the Dark Ages, with even here, at the
height of such culture as came during a barbar-
ian cycle, art that was art still, though less ad-
mirable even than that which developed under
"the drums and tramplings of three conquests/'
Then at last this also was gone with the dying
of the "false dawn" of Carlovingian civiliza-
tion, and night fell again, deeper than ever
before ; night that was to be dispelled for cen-
turies, a little later, when the mingling of
Northern blood with the great life-current of a
regenerated monasticism was to make possible
the first great triumph of Christian civilization.
Time upon time it has seemed that art has
been lost ; but even in the deepest depths it has
struggled for light, and never once has it been
false to its own nature. There might be little,
and that little poor, but its impulse was always
right, until that great world-drama (the three
acts of which we call the Renaissance, the
Reformation, and the Revolution) took posses-
sion of the stage ; and since then the tale has
been different. The Renaissance, by its false
doctrine of the sufficiency of the intellect, set up
a scholastic and artificial theory of the nature
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of beauty and the function of art ; the Reforma-
tion, by its substitution of a manufactured
religion for that of God's Revelation, dried up
the springs of spiritual energy which are the
source of the art-impulse ; the Revolution shook
the very foundations of religious society and
established economic conditions in which art
could no longer endure; while all these cata-
clysms, as a by-product of their activity, an-
nihilated a good half of the monuments of
past generations, and denied the virtue of the
poor remainder they did not destroy.
It was the greatest break-down on record,
and the results were commensurate with the
cause. Art was gone, for the first time in his-
tory; and with the opening of the nineteenth
century not only was the world more empty
than ever before, but there were false gods in
every shrine, hideous idols of the worship of
ugliness and lies. Here and there was a voice
crying in the wilderness, but when it became
audible over the din of an uncouth saturnalia,
it was the voice of a painter, a poet, or a musi-
cian ; sculptor and architect had "none so mean
as to do them reverence."
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And now the wheel has come full turn, and
everywhere is a feverish effort at artistic res-
toration. We are ashamed, and we seek for
the wherewithal to cover our aesthetic naked-
ness ; more than this, the old virus is working
itself out : the fruits of the Renaissance, Refor-
mation, and Revolution have been eaten, the
good is by way of being assimilated, the evil
rejected, and the gray dawn of a new day light-
ens on the hills. In spite of the curial inepti-
tudes of Rome, the invincible Erastianism of
the East, the uncertainties of our own estate ; in
spite of the momentary triumph of atheism and
anarchy in France, the outbreak of unearthly
heresies and superstitions in Russia and New
England, and the apparent victory of secular-
ism in education ; in spite of the ethical, politi-
cal, industrial, and economic disorder, the doom
of the post-Renaissance era is sealed, and in the
midst of all our uncertainties one thing is glori-
ously certain, and that is that a new epoch is
dawning when religion will once more achieve
its due supremacy over man and nations, the
Catholic Faith regain its beneficent dominion
over the souls that God made in His own image.
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It is this conviction, whether avowed or hid-
den, whether conscious or latent, that lies at
the base of the great turning of religion to art
once more in these latest days. Not the desire
of emulation, not the hunger for refinements of
culture, but the dawning consciousness that
each one of the arts is by right a paladin of the
new crusade, that they are all, by the nature
given them by God, soldiers of the Cross, and
that their hearts and their swords are not
lightly to be despised in the new winning of the
world to Christ.
Michelet has somewhere said that "history is
only a series of resurrections " ; and this is what
the Church is doing to-day returning to the
old and tried methods of the past, when the
builder and painter and carver, the musician
and poet and maker of liturgies, marched side
by side with the prophet and monk and mis-
sionary into the strongholds of barbarism and
infidelity, putting into visible and audible
form the faith they practised.
No other course was possible. Since beauty
is the revelation of all that lies beyond the hori-
zon of our finite vision, art, which is beauty
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organized and made operative, becomes the
great language of the soul, and therefore it is
crushed, mutilated, impotent when it remains
in bondage to material things, while without it
religion is shorn of one of her greatest agencies
of self-expression and of influence. This is the
meaning of the wonderful revival of religious
art of every kind that began simultaneously
with the spiritual upheaval of the Oxford
Movement, and has kept pace, step by step,
with the growing consciousness of her Catholic
heritage which, for now three quarters of a cen-
tury, has penetrated the Church of the English-
speaking race. This is the meaning of the new
life in religious painting and sculpture ; in glass-
making and metal-working and embroidery; in
architecture, music, and ceremonial. We look,
sometimes with amusement, sometimes with
horror, on the ecclesiastical fabrics of the early
nineteenth century, on the barren and hideous
forms, the apologetic music, the thin and enerv-
ated ceremonial. Now we, and not we alone,
but all Protestantism with us, are building
churches as near in spirit and in form to those
of the great Middle Ages as the somewhat lim-
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ited capacities of our architects will permit : we
demand the glass of Chartres and York, the
sculptures of Amiens and Wells, the gold and
silver and brass and iron of Hildesheim and
Venice and Dalmatia, the pictures of Umbria,
the music of Milan, the vestments of the treas-
uries of Spain. Daily our ceremonial grows
richer and more beautiful, and its widening
ring takes in, one after another, men and places
that but a few years ago were staunch defenders,
if not of Calvinistic theology, at least of Calvin-
istic art. Even the old shibboleth of "Roman-
izing, Romanizing," is heard no more, for its
absurdity is recognized, and the basic impulse
of religious art is seen to be other than a pre-
liminary symptom of disaffection. It is not
because we want something that Rome alone
has got, but because at last we know we have it
also, the thing itself, that we return to our sis-
ter, Beauty, and call upon her once again to cry
to all the manifold products of God's hand,
"O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord,
praise Him and magnify Him forever."
The theological peculiarities of Geneva and
Edinburgh can adequately be communicated by
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the spoken and unadorned word: the marvel-
lous mysteries of the Catholic Faith breathe
themselves into the spiritual consciousness
through the mediumship of art.
To every movement, then, toward the
restoration of diplomatic relations between
religion and art, the Church must give her
earnest support. Everywhere the artist and
the craftsman are looking wistfully toward the
old-time mistress of their art. Usually they
have lost their faith, and they are not wholly to
blame for it ; but in their art lies the possibility
of their conversion, or at least the assurance
that, accepted, it will be easier for those that
follow to regain their faith, or hold it whole and
intact. To all the workers in all the arts the
Church must now go, saying, "We made you;
we forsook you ; we are sorry; and now we need
you again : give us of your best that we may
offer it on the altar of God."
"The best." Here, perhaps, lies the kernel of
it all. For centuries we have taken the worst,
and as little of that as possible ; now we take
anything that comes along, not from perver-
sity but from lack of knowledge, and from a
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certain innocent trustfulness that takes a man
and particularly an artist at his own
valuation, or at least at the valuation placed
upon him by some person or thing of which we
stand in awe. Late Italian Mass music and
decadent ceremonial ; plausible and loudly her-
alded stained glass of barbaric splendour ; com-
mercial products in metal and woodwork, sac-
charine statues sometimes of plaster of
the type dear to the heart of the Latin "par-
rocchio"; imitation Gothic architecture also
sometimes of plaster, with a little harmless,
necessary steel or iron encased within. We want
the real thing, the real beauty, the real art, but
the trouble is we sometimes can be induced to
accept a substitute, while sometimes also the
best of us know too well what we like, and this
is always dangerous.
" The first battle has been won the battle
for Beauty; we know now that this we must
have ; now let us establish the victory by win-
ning the battle for Truth.
And this does not mean the easy victory over
plaster and papier-m&che, gold-leaf and lac-
quer, imitation marble, steel covered with con-
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crete, and all the other substitutes that are now
so tempting to the eye hungry for beauty com-
bined with the emaciated purse. It means the
far more arduous battle for the fundamental
truth of aesthetic ideals, for art that shall be
significant, and vital with the breath of the
great art of the past.
It is not the fault of the priest, or the building
committee, or the altar society that here we so
often fail ; it is the fault, in great measure, of the
artist ; but I honestly believe he himself is only
a victim of that most pernicious and devil-
engendered principle of the present age, namely,
"Give the people what they want." Of course,
any society that acts on that basis has its end-
ing in the pit of perdition ; but this we do not
see with perfect clarity, and so the artist pros-
titutes his God-given art to the false ideal of
what is demanded of him. He is wrong; no one
nowadays wants anything but the best in art
which is one of the most encouraging signs in
a dubious day; but this demand is not always
couched in unmistakable terms. Be specific,
make it clear that you look on the artist as
a minister in minor orders, and that on him
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alone rests the obligation to make his work, in
however small a degree, a revelation of spiritual
truth, and I do not think he will fail you.
I do not mean that as yet any artist can
safely be given his head ; least of all, the ar-
chitect. Art is still in bondage to that spirit of
the Renaissance-Reformation-Revolution the
Church has now freed herself from to so sur-
prising a degree; but I do mean that the time
has come when a principle only may safely be
enunciated, the details being left wholly to the
artist. It is not so long ago that priests who had
read Parker's "Glossary," or some handbook
on church-building, or had spent a summer in
England, felt it their duty to instruct an archi-
tect as to the working-out of his plans, even
in some cases demanding that some church or
other in England should be duplicated. Well,
this was bad enough, but I dare say better than
the terrible things that might have happened
and did happen, for that matter when the
architect was permitted to give free rein to his
fervid imagination. In any case, this time has
gone, and in spite of the schools of architecture
there are now many artists of every kind and
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paiticularly architects who may safely be
trusted to do honourable and competent work.
Nevertheless, there is still one function that the
priest, or, better still, the Church, must per-
form, and that is the laying-down of the funda-
mental law of all religious art.
What is this law ? It is a very simple one,
namely, that religious art must express, not the
predilections of one man, or the arbitrary the-
ories of a school, but the Church herself; in
other words, a divine institution unchangeable
in essentials, infinitely adaptable in everything
else. And this means that whatever is done
must be faithful, first of all, to the universal
laws of Christian art ; then, that it must pre-
serve an unbroken continuity with the art of
our own blood and race; and finally, that it
must declare itself of our own time as to the
accidents of its expression.
Several principles develop from this: under
the first heading we are forced back five cen-
turies to the time when Christian art came to
an end ; across the desert wastes of Protestant-
ism and the opulent gardens of neo-paganism,
back to the Middle Ages, when the living
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stream, that had refreshed a thirsty land from
before the days of Hellas and Byzantium, disap-
peared below the surface into some subterra-
nean channel wherefrom comes now only the
murmur of troubled waters impatient for
release. So far as the art expression of religion
is concerned, nothing has happened since the fall
of Constantinople in which we need display any
particular interest. Back to medievalism we
must go, and begin again. And as to continuity,
that indispensable succession that alone insures
the vitality of art while it parallels that apostol-
ical succession which alone insures the divine
vitality of the Catholic Church, it means that
we are not at liberty to pick and choose among
the tentative styles of a crescent Christianity,
but that we must return to the one style our
forefathers at last created for the full expres-
sion of their blood and faith. Lombard we may
like, or Byzantine, or Norman, or Romanesque,
but they are not for us, for they were stepping-
stones only, not accomplished facts. Those that
were of the South or the East are of alien blood.
Our Church and we ourselves are of the North,
northern. We are of them that purged the
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world of a great paganism, dead, and infecting
all Europe with the miasma of its corruption.
Frank and Teuton, Norman and Burgundian,
Celt and Saxon and Dane are in our blood and
bone and our very flesh, and for the major part
of what we are we owe an everlasting debt to
this fierce blood of the Baltic shores, tamed and
turned into righteous courses by the monks of
St. Benedict, St. Robert, St. Bernard, and St.
Norbert.
We forget it all, for a time, but we return at
last, and as now perhaps the most significant
thing in the development of our own moiety of
the Church is the restoration of that monasti-
cism which was the engendering fire of Chris-
tian medievalism, so by inevitable analogy we
return to the art that blossomed in the gardens
the monks made in the wilderness ; to the heri-
tage of our name and race, the Gothic of
France and England and of all our own north
countries, washed by our own north seas. Yet
there is danger in this the danger of archaeo-
logical dry rot. We must begin somewhere ; we
no longer have within ourselves the power of
artistic generation ; and even if we had, if we
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could produce an art like that of Paris or Can-
terbury or York out of our own inner selves, we
should lack the right, for we must above all
things show that our religion stretches, without
a break, through mediaevalism and the Dark
Ages, to Calvary. Gothic architecture and
Gothic art do this, for in them are gathered up
and perfected all the tentative efforts of all
Christendom ; but if we stop there we deny the
Faith, for we know that in accordance with the
promise of Christ He is with His Church even
unto the end of the world, and that through the
abiding presence of the Holy Spirit she is being
led into all truth. The Christian life is a life of
progressive development ; the life of the Church
is no other ; and little by little new aspects of old
wonders are opened before our eyes. Therefore,
our art must content itself with no finalities ; it
must grow ever and onward, from the highest
point thus far it has reached, the mountain
summit of mediaevalism, from whose cloud-
encircled top dim visions already unroll of still
loftier summits, accessible at last, once we for-
sake the mistaken path that long ago opened
out, broad and inviting, only to disappear in the
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morass of artificial paganism. And so our new
art, refounded on the old, must be mobile,
adaptable, sensitive to all righteous influences,
repellent of all that are evil ; not a simulacrum,
but a living thing.
Is this too much to ask? Greater has been
before, and with faith we may move mountains.
The part that art is to play in the rebuilding
of a new civilization is hardly to be estimated in
words, and of all the arts the one that is des-
tined to do the greatest work is architecture.
Why this is so I confess I do not know, but so
it has been in the past. There is some strange
quality in architecture that makes its spiritual
efficiency dominant over the other arts. Music
is more poignant, painting more human in its
appeal, while each art in its turn exerts some
special influence beyond the province of the
others. Architecture binds them in one, har-
monizing, controlling, directing them, and lift-
ing them up in a great structural Te Deum.
A perfect church, within whose walls is pass-
ing the ordered pageantry unnumbered genera-
tions have built up in beauty, and through the
seven arts, to do honour and reverence to the
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Creator and Redeemer of the world, there
present in the Holy Sacrament of the altar, is
the greatest work of man. Into it enters every
art raised now to the highest point of achieve-
ment, and as architecture, painting, and sculp-
ture assemble for the building of the tabernacle
itself, so do music, poetry, the drama, and cere-
monial gather into another great work of art,
that prefigures the infinite wonder of Heaven
itself.
And we threw it all away, once, in our blind-
ness of heart and contempt of God's word
and commandment : blowing up the matchless
fabrics with gunpowder; beating out the
jewelled windows and shattering with hammer
and axe the fretted altars and shrines and tombs
and chiselled images of saints and martyrs, even
the Crucifix itself, the sign of our Redemption ;
filching the jewels from vestments and sacred
vessels, casting consecrated gold and silver into
the melting-pot, turning copes and chasubles
into bed-hangings, and altar-cloths into chair-
cushions, leaving the few churches we did not
destroy barren, empty, desolated.
Now we are doing what we can by way of
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amendment. We are handicapped by the deeds
of our fathers, and by their consequences, but
the restoration must be accomplished, however
arduous the effort.
And the reward is worthy the effort. Create
in imagination the figure of what may be again:
cathedrals like those of Paris and Chartres and
Gloucester and Exeter; sculptures like the
marshalled saints of Amiens and Wells, pic-
tures and altar-pieces like those of Giotto and
Fra Angelico; windows that rival those of
Bourges and York; the beating of sublime
Gregorian chants like the echo of heavenly
harmonies ; and ceremonial that absorbs half of
the regenerated arts, composing them into a
whole that is the perfection of all that man can
do to honour in material and sensible form the
central mystery of the Catholic Faith.
Once more at the hand of man all the works
of the Lord shall praise Him and magnify Him