I regard it as a great privilege to be allowed to speak to you about Byzantine music and to introduce a performance of some melodies, chosen from MSS of the flourishing period of Byzantine ecclesiastical music.

Members of the Hellenic Society will be aware how much we owe to the indefatigable work of my friendi and collaborator, Professor H. J. W. Tillyard, whose contributions in the Journal of Hellenic Studies and in the Annual of the British School at Athens during the last twenty-five years have gradually aroused interest in this particular field of studies, not only here, but in'all countries in which scholars are dealing with Byzantine studies. Our mutual interest in Byzantine music and ,our aim to decipher its musical signs have made us collaborators for a long time, and I am glad to say that this co-operation has proved felicitous.

Our method of investigation may be compared with that of an archaeologist, who is obliged first to clear the foundations of a more recent place before he is able to unearth the traces of an old city. We, however—if I may continue the comparison—have had the good luck to discover a whole town, completely intact, in all its splendour. Our rather hard and often discouraging task to find the-clue to the riddle of Byzantine notation was finally rewarded. We discovered that the Byzantine neumes not only helped to read the melodic line, but also contained dynamic and rhythmical signs, providing the most subtle nuances of expression. This discovery enables us to revive Byzantine melodies as they were sung in the time of the Byzantine Empire.

It is, then, by the notion of a vocational making, as distinguished from earning one’s living by working at a job, regardless of what it may be, that the difference between the museum objects and those in the department store can be best explained. Under these conditions, which have been those of all non-industrialised societies, that is to say when each man makes one kind of thing, doing only tnat kind of work for which he is fitted by his own nature and for which he is therefore destined, Plato reminds us that ‘more will be done, and better done than in any other way.’ Under these conditions a man at work is doing what he likes best, and the pleasure that he takes in his work perfects the operation. We see the evidence of this pleasure in the Museum objects, but not in the products of chain-belt operation, which are more like those of the chain-gang than like those of men who enjoy their work. Our hankering for leisure is the proof of the fact that most of us are working at a task to which we could never have been called by anyone but a salesman, certainly not by God or by our own natures. Traditional craftsmen whom I have known in the East cannot be dragged away from their work, and will work overtime to their own pecuniary loss.

We have gone so far as to divorce work from culture, and to think of culture as something to be acquired in hours of leisure; but there can be only a hothouse and unreal culture where work itself is not its means; if culture does not show itself in all we make, we are not cultured.

‘What follows is ho more than some annotations on the very suggestive phrases towards a theory of art, thrown out almost casually by Aristotle in the course of his Poetics. All of these phrases must be taken together, as each may be seen to imply the other at almost every point: and taken together they help to clarify Aristotle’s position with regard to the nature of the aesthetic experience, its nature as an intellectual experience felt as physical or as a physical experience with strong intellectual overtones.

For the Platonic school the artist was a creator of myths, a pseudothinker who merely mirrored the mutable world of sense which in turn merely mirrored the world of Ideas, so that the poet’s creation was distant from life by two removes. ‘Aesthetic distance ‘for Plato meant deliberate withdrawal from the pressing and fundamental issues of life, the moral issues. We shall examine later how to put an Aristotelian complexion on the term. Aristotle, however, makes art an affair of language, and language whose adequacy can be tested by the closeness of its approximation to an experience, by its vividness in reproducing the experience for us. That is what he implies when he says that art imitates not merely the world of sense, but the world of man’s mind, his character, his emotions, his actions : and this world it presents with an almost physical vividness. He calls this artistic reproduction mimesis : ideas are suggested through physical things, just as mime (in the bodies of Greek maskers or Balinese dancers) reproduces emotion in the language of gesture. The master of mime proportions his gestures to the directives of the emotion he wants us to feel: and the lack of this proportion is evidence that the work of art is not under full artistic control.

A number of books dealing with the function of imaginaton in humanu life have recently appeared. Is this because external experience is becoming harsher, as the war proceeds, shattering deli cate sensibility, so that we are forced into the internal world of images? Is it escapism? Or is it not, rather, a dawning realisation that in this interior faculty of sensation lies ‘the key to the great puzzle of our mental decay and to future remedies for civilisation? Excluding, therefore, the complications of psychology and aesthetics, of reflexes and poetic experience, we may profitably return to the simple truths about the human imagination which still throw much light on present problems.

Of the works here under review, the four-page News-Letter Supplement by Philip Mairet stands high above the rest in importance and value. He shows that the imagination, which is the property not merely of men of genius and ‘vision,’ but of all men, is a faculty of ‘etherialised’ sensations. With the memory it forms a kind of treasury of all one’s external experiences, so that a man can see, hear, touch or taste things which he has experienced in the past almost as strongly as if they were physically present and acting on his nervous system. Miss Ellis-Fermor, although she claims that this faculty ‘exists in most men,’ wrongly identifies it with a poetic faculty in the sense of an essentially active and constructive power, creating new reality from the data of experience. This is only one function of the imagination which, as Mr. Mairet seems to suggest, automatically provides a background to life, so that one can interiorly retain contact with the day-to-day physical experiences even when withdrawn from them, as in sleep.

Aladdin’s lamp revealed, to its fortunate possessor, the riches of this world and many would fain have h rub of it; the lamp of Faith which has infinitely greater powers is not so popular. This is odd. The riches of that other world, where one may ‘turn but a stone to start a wing, ‘lie idle; yet we are of that other world in saecula saeculorum.

Speaking under correction (for my similes may be as inaccurate as they are inadequate) I would assert that the rays of our lamp not only pick out abstractions, ideas, reasons, and so forth, the apprehension of which adjusts the soul to the Divine Will, but shines upon material things to be seen; and, having an ‘x’ quality, upon things to be heard, felt, and even tasted. The beams of its light not only dispel the immaterial darkness so that we may see the material way, but enlarge the mind so that we enjoy the journey on it; in short, the light enables us to see God in his creation, especially at its fulness within the narrow borders of his Church.

The Church, irrespective of specifically spiritual truths, is the most amazing storehouse of material truths, the truths also of sound and sense which, as the ray shines upon them, are seen to be of the very texture of Beauty. The adventurous soul under this illumination feels as though she were inspecting the wardrobes of heaven and at last apprehending the music of the spheres.

In the four centuries preceding the Reformation, the decoration of the walls of churches was an important form of the art of painting. In many English parish churches the whole of the interior may have been covered with pictures. The subject matter generally included scenes from the Gospels and Lives of the Saints, but varied considerably according to the local:ty and period. Although a higher degree of artistic merit was attained in many of the illuminated manuscripts and panel paintings produced by the great monastic centres and by the Court school at Westminster, the wall paintings were often more representative of contemporary ideas.

At the present time, only a comparatively small proportion of mediaeval wall-paintings remain in a good state of preservation. It is recorded that after the Reformation, Puritan iconoclasts destroyed literally thousands. Fortunately, however, some were only covered with whitewash, and others had been obscured by additional stonework, and these have been brought to light again. Many accurate copies of these have been made by Professor Tristram, of which eight hundred are in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Towards the end of the fourteenth century, the social changes following upon the Plague were reflected in the wall-paintings. It would appear that in, this period of social unrest, something very like our present idea of Christ the Worker came into being. Wall paintings began to appear having for their subject Christ as a poor man, displaying his wounds, and surrounded with workmen’s tools. The usual cruciform halo is absent, and in some cases the tools take its place. About fourteen or fifteen examples of these paintings are to be found in various parts of the country, in Buckinghamshire, Suffolk, Berkshire, Sussex, Gloucestershire, Cornwall, and Pembroke. Considering the large number of paintings which were destroyed, the fact that so many survive is a good indication of its popularity at the time.