Several pronouncements by Mgr. Ruch, the Bishop of Strasburg, within the past few weeks, have drawn attention to one of the most intricate and difficult problems of the Church in France since the War. Without attempting to present the whole problem that is involved, it is of considerable interest to note the attitude which has been adopted by the ‘patriot Bishop of Strasburg,’ whose conduct during the trying years since the War has shown him to be one of the most courageous and outspoken and also one of the ablest members of the French hierarchy. He has had to face a situation more embarrassing and more complicated than has any other bishop in France. Nothing proves more strikingly both the simplicity and the courage with which he has faced his duties than his own reluctant disclosure, made at a banquet of the Catholic Young Men’s Association in the spring of last year, that he had been prevented by the Pope himself, year after year since the War, from resigning his bishopric and retiring to a Carthusian monastery.

The circumstances which led to that revelation have already been described in BLACKFRIARS. Mgr. Ruch was speaking in reply to a campaign of persistent misrepresentation of his own conduct by the Action Francaise. It was not that the Action Francaise had attacked him personally. On the contrary, it was they who gave him the title of the ‘patriot Bishop of Strasburg,’ and proclaimed, week after week—until he was forced into making public the most intimate secrets of his spiritual life—that the Vatican had attempted to remove him from his bishopric because of his sturdy patriotism as a citizen of France. The facts were actually the direct opposite.

Those two five-letter names have meant much to thousands, from the time they were children until they were middle-aged, or past middle-age. Macaulay’s nephew and biographer wrote of Kate Terry (the eldest of the Terry sisters) in 1852 : ‘It is almost worth while to be past middle life in order to have seen Miss Kate Terry in Arthur’ : countless others, born in mid or later Victorian times, feel the same, in regard to Ellen Terry, as they recall the beautiful voice and acting which made real and living to us Ophelia, Portia, Juliet, Beatrice, and Desdemona, and it is pleasant to reflect that those of a much younger generation have had the advantage of enjoying the greatness and variety of her gifts in the parts of Lady Macbeth (when she made us understand the relentless conscience and the human element yet alive in Lady Macbeth), of Cordelia, of Imogen, and of Volumnia.

To very many of us, her acting was not only a first revelation of Shakespeare, but, often, a realising of human character one could never have realised or found out for oneself. It is difficult to believe she could ever have had such far-reaching influence as an actress, if she had not been the woman she was; for none other of the Fine Arts so much as the art of acting seems to call for such a keen perception of the tragedy and the humour of life, of the sorrows of the world, its happiness, and its mirth, for all that we mean by the vague terms sensibility, and imagination.

The question, ‘Why did I not become a Catholic before?’ is an idle one enough at best, and to discuss in public one’s own private relations with the Lord is hardly seemly; yet there is one aspect of the matter I would like to draw attention to, if perchance in so doing I may help a few to some understanding of my own state of mind, three and more years ago, and of those whence I sprang. I am referring to that species of Anglicanism which has the greatest appearance of orthodoxy. Those who compose this amorphous group are often very tiresome folk, for in dealing with them you have to surmount, not merely ordinary national pride, but also pride in their own special (Oxford) culture. One must—but I’ll go no further on this point. For as soon as you begin to speak of the Church of England you fall into a slough. Agree with them, and they think you are compromising, and will start to talk about re-union, while, on the other hand, mere negative polemic only drives them away. Nevertheless, there they are! Why are they there? Why do so many English people cling so passionately to ‘their’ Church? I am sure there is some motive force besides mere nationalism and pride. Moreover, I think I can say (with only a beginner’s knowledge of theology) that, mixed up with their apparent orthodoxy, is much that is real. But where does it come from?

Je ne sais pas grand’ chose de plus. Mais que sais-je de mes autres amis? Chercher l’amitié, la donner, c’est d’abord crier ‘Asile! Asile!’ Le reste de nous est sûrement moins bien que ce cri, il est toujours assez tôt pour la montrer.

That Sunday afternoon early in the spring of 1894, when Henry Harland called on Henry James to introduce Aubrey Beardsley and the as yet uncradled Yellow Book, ‘this young man, slender, pale, delicate, unmistakeably intelligent, somehow invested the whole proposition with a detached, a slightly ironic and melancholy grace.’ Henry James ‘had met him before, on a single occasion, and had seen an example or two of his so curious and so disconcerting talent— an appreciation of which’ had, of course, ‘stopped quite short.’ A year later I had not been interested in the Yellow Book, not even in those ‘literary efforts of Beardsley’s own that matched’ his pictures ‘in perversity.’ I had seen him once at the Annan Bryces’. His sister Mabel (met first at the Bruntons and then in Waterloo Place) had persuaded me to hear him lecture. The slender youth did not attract me nor his lecture. The Jacques Blanche portrait accentuates the little I remember: some hardness, much affectation. La voix du sang was quite silent, and yet we were fated to be more brothers than friends. I left without any wish to encounter the Beardsleys again.

Not many weeks later, when I returned to South Audley Street from an early call in Park Lane (it must have been about 10.30 a.m.), I found a strange visitor in the drawing room, near Gustave Moreau’s Sappho.

It is to John Fisher, most illustrious of her Chancellors, that Cambridge owes the introduction of the New Learning which transformed the whole academic system and inspired it with fresh vigour. In his early years at the University Italian scholarship was beginning to arouse the interest of the learned; and the name of his friend Erasmus is forever associated with the Humanist movement and the study of Greek which was then beginning to revolutionise the academic world.

Perhaps few men have ever been more persistently misrepresented, both by contemporaries and by posterity, than the most famous scholar of the Renaissance, Erasmus of Rotterdam. The testimony of his own works was, and is, often either ignored or totally misread; and a number of his later biographers show a distressing lack of any sense of humour—without which he must indeed remain an enigma to the most learned mind—that alone makes them incapable of understanding the witty genius who complained so bitterly when his contemporaries took him too seriously. Some even hail him as one of the leaders of the Reformation, ranging him with Luther and his companions, against whose works the great scholar fought with all the might of his pen. Even the ‘uncoguid’ among those of his own faith have distrusted Erasmus. Surely the best answer to all criticisms— granting all his faults—is the eloquent fact that the two men who knew him best in England, and who stood by him to the end, were Thomas More and John Fisher. If it be true that we may judge a man by his friends, the judgment should stand Erasmus in good stead.