THE CHURCH AND LITERATURE

New Zealand Tablet, 3 February 1916, Page 22

THE CHURCH AND LITERATURE

SOME EMINENT WRITERS, SONS OF THE CHURCH. ) (For the N.Z. Tablet by ' Daleth.') i i INTRODUCTION. The Church is the great- mother of the arts and the sciences—the arts, whereby man's nature is rendered more refined; the sciences, whereby his knowledge is increased and his power extended. Imagination fills in the bare outlines supplied by the intellect; imparts beauty and animation; revels in color, in sound, in grace of form, in the metaphor and simile of poetry; makes life less crude, less rigidly exact. But the intellect burns more brightly in proportion as the flights of fancy are restrained ; and invariably we find that the great imaginative geniuses of the world are as children in its practical affairs. La Fontaine and Rousseau, to whom imagination was as the air they breathed, were both utterly incapable of looking after themselves.

Music, painting, and sculpture are the facets of the great aesthetic diamond ; poetry is, as it were, the brilliance that plays over the whole. There is poetry in music as there is in sculpture, . and the very spirit of poesy breathes from the canvases of Titian and Murillo, of Raffaelle and Rembrandt. And poetry can give what music, painting, and sculpture cannot give. The harmonies of sound lack definite ideas; they arouse the emotions of the soul, but diversely in different souls; poetry defines the ideas that music vaguely awakenr Tainting and sculpture represent nature at one definite moment poetry, besides going back to the past, leaps forward into the future. Thus, poetry, manifesting itself as music, painting, or sculpture, is something mors than these three; besides entering into each, it has & sphere of its own; it breaks

forth in the warlike singing of a Homer; in the materialistic philosophy of a Lucretius, in the visions of a Dante; it may be light and unrestrained, or heavy and solemnly mournful; it may move with airy gracefulness, or linger brooding, stern, and sorrowful, clinging to some one idea with unremitting force; it may be epic or prophetic, meditative or full of ecstasy; changeable- as clouds in summer, it is as beautiful and as delicate. Nor is it confined to expression in rhyme and metre. It appears in the rhythmic prose of an Herodotus or a Demothenes, of a Cicero or a Livy; the greatest prose writers of the world are also among the number of its greatest poets. Sir Thomas Mallory's ' Mort d' Arthur,' although a prose epic, is nevertheless a wonderful poem. The prose of Jean Jacques Rousseau is considered by French critics as perfect poetry. Rhythmic and melodious, it has, when read aloud, the effect of music; when read in the study it soothes the mind as only poetry can.

It would take too long to traverse the entire aesthetic world, which stretches before us like a wild and rugged landscape, with here and there a lovely copse through whose recesses tumbles noisily some pebbly-bedded brook. The great musicians tower above us like majestic peaks; the grand medieval painters seem like some far-reaching and magnificent vista, while the sculptors, like the sheer precipices of some North American canyon, terrify us by their gigantic proportions. Leaving the domains of art to enter those of science is like emerging from some old-world cathedral into the glare of the noon-day sun.

But it is not our purpose to discuss the works of science; to pass in review its leaders or examine its import in the life of man. We are to bring before our readers some of the great artists the Church has produced; we are to show that while the Church is ever the guardian of truth, she is none the less warm in. her exposition of it; that she is not. cold, reserved, and formal, but full of beauty and animated with as keen an aesthetic sense as any of the great nature-worshippers who spurn her. Besides her great doctors she places her great poets; beside her consummate statesmen she places her divinely-gifted painters, and she employs the genius of a Michel Angelo in the decoration of her places of worship. Ever since the Church began she has been the patron of all art; it has grown and flourished under her protection, and to her fostering care the world is indebted for its greatest masterpieces.

Many of the poets and painters who have grown outside her influence still go to her for their inspiration; but most of them have simply relapsed into the paganism of Greece and Rome. While Spenser, bitter and virulent as he is, has in many places an aroma of Catholicism about him, and the very atmosphere of Shakespeare is Catholic; the cold splendor of Milton, repelling, if magnificent, is Puritan in tone and sentiment, with none of the warmth and feeling belonging to the work of the sons and daughters of the Church. What are Goethe, Wordsworth, Lamartine, but brilliant pagans occupied only with perishing nature and corrupt mankind ? They are like the man with the muck-rake in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress; they go scouring among the refuse while angels offer them golden crowns which their down-turned eyes refuse to see; or, like the dwellers in Plato's cavern, who, seeing the shadows of images, take the shadows for the reality, and on their fancied knowledge build their lives.