Who shall say, then, that to an eye and heart attuned to quick sympathy, any indication is too small to betray the inward spirit and character of the Catholic Church, or to magnetize a soul and render it restless, until it obeys her attraction and rests in union with her?
To a sensitively artistic temperament such as Durtal's, the indications of the Church's "style," revealed in her influence upon art, in her creations, in her selections and refusals, would be eloquent of her whole character and ethos; it would be to him what the very tone of Christ's voice was to the Baptist, or what His glance was to Peter, or what His silence was to Pilate. We have known too many instances of deep-seated and entire conviction, based on seemingly as little or less, to wish for one moment to indulge in any foolish rationalizing or to question the possibility or probability of God's drawing souls to Himself by such methods.
We must, however, remember that it is not merely by the Church's mediæval art that Durtal is attracted, but still more by that mysticism which created it, and by which it was served and fostered in return. Mysticism must necessarily excite the sympathy of one who is in devout pursuit of the highest and most spiritual forms of æsthetic beauty. Whatever be the long-sought and never-to-be-forgotten definition of the Beautiful, of this much at least a mere process of induction will assure us, that men count things beautiful in the measure that they are released from the grossness, formlessness, and heaviness of matter, and by their delicacy, shapeliness, and unearthliness, betray the influence of that principle which is everywhere in conflict with matter and is called spirit. Man at his best is most at home, where at his worst he is least at home, namely, in the world of those super-realities which are touched and felt by the soul, but refuse to be pictured or spoken in the language of the five senses. A hard, "common-sense," labour-and-wages religion, such as is consonant with the utilitarianism of a commercial civilization, could never appeal to a temperament like Durtal's.
Doubtless Catholic Christianity admits of being apprehended under the narrower and grosser aspect, which however inadequate and unworthy, is not absolutely false. The Jews were suffered to believe not merely that God rewards the just and punishes the wicked—which is eternally true—but that He does so in this life, which is true only with qualification; and that He rewards them with temporal prosperity and adversity—which is hardly true at all. Catholic truth, in itself the same, can only be received according to the recipient's capacity and sensitiveness. What one age or country is alive to, another may be dead to; nor can we pretend that here all is progress and no regress, unless we are prepared to say that in no respect have we anything to learn from the past. The Ignatian meditation on the "Kingdom of Christ" evoked heroic response in an age impregnated with the sentiments of chivalry, but to-day it needs to be adapted to a great extent, and some have vainly hoped to gather grapes from a thistle by substituting a parable drawn from some soul-stirring commercial enterprise—a colossal speculation in cheese.
Whatever signs there may be of a reaction, yet the whole temper and spirit of our age is unfavourable to that mysticism which is the very choicest flower of the Catholic religion. The blame is not with the seed, but with the soil. Even where least of all we should look for such indifference, among those who have built up the sepulchres and shrines of the great masters of mysticism, we sometimes observe a profound distrust for what is esteemed an unpractical, unhealthy kind of piety, while every preference is given to what is definite and tangible in the way of little methods and industries, multitudinous practices, lucrative prayers, in a word, to what a critic already quoted describes as les petitesses des cerveaux étroits et les anguleuses routines. [3]
It is one of the narrownesses of Durtal himself to ascribe all this to the wilful perversity of a person or persons unknown, and not to see in it the inevitable result of the vulgarizing tendency of modern life upon the masses. Things being as they are, surely it is better that the Church should do the little she can than do nothing at all. The "meditative mind" is incompatible with the rush and worry of a busy life, especially where educational methods substitute information for reflection, and so kill the habit, and eventually the faculty, of thought in so many cases. But if the higher prayer is impossible, the lower is possible and profitable. Again, if the liturgical sense has in a great measure become extinct among the faithful owing to the unavoidable disuse of the public celebration of the Church's worship, it is well that they should be allowed devotions accommodated to their limited capacity. As the Church would never dream of expecting a keen sympathy with her higher dogmas, her mystical piety, her artistic symbolism, her transcendent liturgy, on the part of a newly-converted tribe of savages, so neither is she impatient with the civilized Philistine, but is willing to speak to him in a language all his own, hoping indeed to tune his tongue one day to something less uncouth. None can sympathize more cordially than the writer does with Durtal in his horror of unauthorized devotions, of insufferable vernacular litanies, of nerveless and sickly hymns, of interminable "acts of consecration" void of a single definite idea, more especially when these things are brought into the very sanctuary itself, with stole and cope and every apparent endeavour to fix the responsibility on the Universal Church. But if the Church is willing to go in rags to save those who are in rags, she is only using her invariable economy. We know well the sort of robe that befits her dignity, and no doubt it is this contrast that makes the trial of her present humiliation more difficult for us to bear.
We do not for a moment allow that the difference between bad taste and good is merely relative, or that a language or art which is externally vulgar can ever be the adequate and appropriate expression of the Catholic religion, whose tendency when unimpeded is ever to refine and purify. But it is perhaps another narrowness to suppose that a reform can only be effected by a return to the past, to mediæval symbolism and music and architecture. No effort of the kind has ever met with more than seeming success. What is consciously imitated from the past is not the same as that natural growth which it imitates, and which was as congenial to those days as it is uncongenial to ours. It is all the difference between the Mass ceremonial in a Ritualist church and in a Catholic church—the historical sense is violated in one case and satisfied in the other.
What is once really dead can never revive in the same form—at best we get a cast from the dead face. No doubt the old music and the old symbolism always will have a beauty of antiquity that can never belong to the new; but it was not this beauty—the beauty of death, of autumn leaves, that made them once popular, but the beauty of fresh green life and flexibility. The effort to make antiquity popular is almost a contradiction in terms. What we may hope for at most is an improvement in the æsthetic tastes of the Catholic public which comes from freer and healthier surroundings, from saner ideas and wider opportunities of education and liberal culture. When they begin to speak a richer language, the Church will take that language and find in it a fuller expression of her mind than she can in the present patois; she will be able again to say to them in other words, as yet unknown, what she said to the middle ages in Gregorian chaunt and Gothic cathedral. She, who in virtue of her Pentecostal gift of tongues, speaks in sundry times and divers manners, may in due season find words as eloquent of her heart and mind as those which she spoke to Durtal in the aisles of Chartres and in the cadences of Solesmes.
July, 1898.
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