Let me begin by setting down a passage from the now well-known One God and Father of All, by Eric Milner-White and Wilfred L. Knox (pp. 46, 47):

With some things in this passage I could not, of course, agree, but with one thing at least I do agree, and that is with the dislike expressed in it for calling Christ’s prayer a ‘creative prayer.’

Mrs. Seemsby-Gore liked, one to have a title, so when she went to the Pyrenees she made up her mind to look up Miss Fairleigh—the Honourable Miss Fairleigh, she would remind you, Lord Fielden’s daughter. If you said ‘Ah!’ vaguely, because you didn’t know Miss Fairleigh and had never set eyes on Fielden, she was tempted to write you down an outsider.

Miss Fairleigh—‘Dubbin’ to her intimates, though Mrs. Seemsby-Gore didn’t know that—was staying in Lourdes while she put in a month of service at the Piscines. Consequently she wasn’t at home when Mrs. Seemsby-Gore called. However, she returned the call the following evening just before dinner, explained the situation and said she would be free to go for an expedition into the mountains two days later. There would be no big pilgrimage in, she said, so she wouldn’t be missed at the Piscines.

Miss Fairleigh’s talk of Piscines and Pilgrimages bewildered the other lady, who wasn’t a Catholic and thought that Catholics, with rare exceptions such as Miss Fairleigh, weren’t good form.

‘Do I “see” Lourdes?’ she asked doubtfully. One saw a Duomo or a Gallery if there was one. She wasn’t sure about Lourdes.

Miss Fairleigh’s eyes twinkled a little.

‘I think one should,’ she said. ‘I’ll lend you a book. I could drop it in as I pass in the morning. You could glance through it while you breakfast and then wander about by yourself. No one’ll say anything to you. Anybody can go anywhere.’

Mrs. Seemsby-Gore faintly liked the idea.

Wales is the lost Brittany of Catholicism in this island. The Reformation was ill-received by the people, and for some considerable time the loyalty of the Welsh to the old religion was a force on which the leaders of Catholicism could rely. For a generation or more after the accession of Elizabeth the religious opinions and prejudices of the greater number of Welshmen are best represented by the forceful lines of the schoolmaster-poet, Richard Gwyn of Llanidloes :

Adam, the first man had
But one Paradise;
And there is but one Church, upon a hill.
Where there is right communion.
She is conspicuous as the sun,
. . . . .
And she is dowered beyond price,
Though smoke mounts from Satan’s pit,
Between the blind man and the sky.

In the end Catholicism in Wales perished, for the most part rather from inanition than from any very positive process of conversion to Protestantism.

Strype, speaking of the middle of the sixteenth century, says:

If there is one thing which, above all others, impresses the mind of the casual traveller through post-war Hungary, it is the amazing resistance to an adverse fate which the people of this Central European country are presenting. Rhapsody—the word most frequently thought of in connection with Hungary—according to my dictionary means : an enthusiastic, high-flown utterance or composition. Well, in so far as its application to post-war Hungary is concerned, this word means something totally different. Hungary’s greatest rhapsody, something infinitely finer than Liszt ever dreamed of, is the slow, firm, unwearying heroism with which she is meeting the trials of Trianon.

Before attempting to show what an amazingly plucky fight Hungary has made since the war, it is necessary that I sketch very briefly the condition of the country before that upheaval.

A thousand years ago the Magyars crossed the Carpathians and settled in the fertile lands to the west; and, from, the time of King and Saint Stephen in the eleventh century, when the nation embraced the Catholic faith, to the commencement of the last war, these people have gone on and on, steadily building up a national culture and a national feeling second to none throughout the world. As early as the fifteenth century, under the rule of Matthyas the Magnificent, Hungary was known as the most brilliant renaissance kingdom in Europe. By the fourteenth year of the present century the country had achieved a civilisation which could not but deeply impress all who came within its influence.

This book may be classed at once as on the sane side in Shakespeare research. It is also on the side of the humaner letters, beautifully written and excellently produced, and striking a golden mean between Textual Criticism and Higher Criticism, begetter of so much futility and freak. Monsignor Kolbe prefaces his analyses of the plays with some simple and profound general remarks on the analogy between great pictures and great dramas. Both alike, he says, display the subconsciousness of the artist, appealing to the subconsciousness of the onlooker. Modern thought is much handicapped by a wilful ignorance of what ancient thought took for granted, and is perpetually bewrayed with startling discoveries of what everyone knew when the world was comparatively young, or at least unstaled. They, the ancients, knew that each man keeps a treasure-house of his experiences organic or mental, and that some have a larger and better store, some a choice and ordered store, and others a parti-coloured rag-bag. And this they called Memoria. Samuel Butler alone and early, rediscovered this mysterious mother of the Muses to be the mother of specific differences in organic matter, and the author of instinct; in one pregnant phrase undoing, or at least gainsaying, the disastrous error of Darwin, who stressed environment as one of the parents of specific differentiation.

Must I submissive bow to earth my head?

Restrain the restless daring of my mind?

Bound by the palimpsests of men long dead,

Live in the daylight as a man made blind?’

‘Yea, lowly bend thy stubborn neck and knees,

And thou shalt win what thy proud ardours seek.

This pathway leads to kindled mysteries

That none have ever seen except the meek.’

‘Never for me such craven sacrifice!

Bravely I go upon a lonely quest.

I will not fold my hands and close my eyes

To gain an easy and ignoble rest.’

‘So thou hast courage? Test it. Thou shalt find

Precipitous the pathway to be trod.

Summon the utmost valiance of thy mind.

Only the audacious ever win to God.’

Theodore Maynard.

Exactly a hundred years ago, in 1831, Thomas Carlyle published his Sartor Resartus which, in his amusing manner of mock bombast, he claimed to be the first contribution of a fundamental character addressed to the British reader on the Philosophy of Clothes. It is probably quite an accident that Mr. Eric Gill’s book, Clothes’ appears in this year of grace 1931 : there is no evidence that he is falling in with the modern craze for celebrating obscure centenaries, or that he has any wish to revive interest in that solemn, sombre man who used to be called (how strange it sounds now !) the Sage of Chelsea. In fact, the two books bear little relation to one another, and they are separated by more important and significant things than by the big gap of a century. They agree in these particulars; each is very much the product of its age, dated 1831 and 1931 respectively; each is written by a man of genius who has an interest in stonecutting, though many will agree that Mr. Gill’s gift is pre-eminently for designing and sculpture and the cutting of letters, and less conspicuously for letters pure and simple; and each is in the nature of a satire which must have given its author great joy to write—Carlyle’s inclining to be sardonic and somewhat turgid, Gill’s more of a brilliant school-boy lark, scurrilous and Rabelaisian.