THE QUEST OF THE HOLY GRAIL : THROUGH THE PLEASANT FIELDS OF HIGH ROMANCE.

How Malory Would Teach Us To Be "a Very Knight and Servant of Jesus Christ"

(By Francis Paul.)

There is a tale which might well be on every bookshelf; and it is strange indeed that such a book is not edited and issued for the use of our children by some enterprising Catholic publisher. Through the pleasant fields of high romance the old volume leads us in those Books of the "Morte d' Arthur," which tell of the quest of the Holy Grail. Arthurian Legend—for legend it was—has been cherished for many years, and has interested with its antique charm many poets and many men. Milton was attracted by it; also Dryden, Rossetti, Tennyson, and the colourful William Morris.
 But it cannot be retold without destroying its appeal. It is an echo of other times, other men, other ideas. To feel the reality of it, we must avoid Tennyson's "blameless curates clad in tin mail," and go back to Malory himself. Enchantment is a far-off thing. In a wireless station: the loud crash of a local amateur, and the high, clear, bell like tone of the distant expert. An old tale retold is an old tale marred. Reading the original record of the old forgotten, far-off things and battles long ago, like Guenever,

"Ye gaze upon the arras giddily
 Where the wind set the silken kings asway."

 The world depicted allures. Not Chaucer, Maundeville, or Ascham, widely praised in their own time, are so popular in England to-day. Endurance is a good test of worth.
 Sir Thomas Malory was evidently of the retinue of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (1S82-1439), and with him served in France. "No better school for the future author of the 'Morte d' Arthur' can be imagined than a personal acquaintance with that Englishman whom all Europe recognised as embodying the knightly ideal of the age." The Earl of Warwick lies in a splendid tomb in St. Mary's Church in Warwick, clad, as befits his fame, all in armour, surrounded by stone remembrances of a splendid age. He was the man who visited the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, who performed a marvellous feat of arms at Verona, who splendidly represented England at the Council of Constance, who was Captain of Calais and be came the guest of the French King Charles VI., who jousted like Lancelot of old, at the coronation of Joan of Navarre, queen to Henry IV. Of his retinue was Sir Thomas Malory, knight.
 Out of many books, Sir Thomas Malory in 1469 made one book; out of many tales, one tale; out of the heterogeneity of many a high romance, conceived a glorious narrative. It was a romantic age, and this is its record ; it was a time of noble questings, and the great quest was the search for the white purity of the Holy Grail.

 BEFORE THE PROTESTANT REVOLT.

 We must ever remember, nowadays, that non-Catholic authors are often dangerous, if not insidious literature. But these were the years before the Protestant revolt— before the domestic disagreements and covetous compulsions of Henry VIII. drove the Mother Church from England. Every author was then a Catholic author; every fictitious character, a Catholic character; every knight fasted, heard Mass, received Communion, confessed, did penance, and made him clean of his life, that prayer and deed might be acceptable unto God. Sir Perceval "saw his sword lie on the ground naked, in whose pommel was a red cross and the sign of the crucifix therein ; and he bethought him of his knighthood," and resisted temptation. The days of the year are reckoned from Christmas, Candlemas, Easter, Whitsunday, Michaelmas, and the Feast of the Assumption ; the Pope it is who crowns Arthur "emperor" ; to the Pope the wicked knight is sent to receive penance for foul deeds; "those which at Pentecost at the high feast took upon them to go in the quest of the Sangreal without confession : they might not enter into the meadow of humility and patience"; Sir Bora "blessed his body and his visage," and praised God that he has escaped a devil in woman's likeness.
 True, there was wickedness, there was pride, there was magic. Merlin, "a devil's son," is an "enchanter and a multiplier of words," he "knoweth all things by the devil's craft." Vivien uses the black art against Merlin, and Morgan le Fay against Arthur; an invisible knight rides and slays by treachery; as Apollo hid Æneas in a cloud, so Merlin conceals Arthur from sight. Severed heads are healed, men wax strong with the increasing day. Yet "to tempt God is no wisdom," and Merlin himself foretells that God's Will will be done.

 A FINAL UNITY WHICH HOMER NEVER HAD.

 The capricious meddling gods of ancient epic have departed; the incidents which revolve about Arthur are connected with his name by a single circumstantial link. Then reading through the many books of Malory, we come upon a final unity which Homer never had: "And here followeth the noble tale of the Sangreal, that is called the Holy Vessel, and the signification of the blessed blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, blessed mote it be, the which was Drought into this land by Joseph of Aramathie. Therefore on all sinful souls, blessed Lord, have Thou mercy."
 It was an age of unrealities, of improbabilities, of princesses and maidens distressed. It was also the age of the Crusades, when men were sincere Christians, who loved much, hated much; when the mere chivalry of the legends was transfigured by Christianity ; making the tales immortal. What was formerly undertaken for love of a lady was now accomplished for the love of Christ. Men had ideals then, and fought for them ; the unreality and fantasy of it all is the bold dream of idealism. Men were time to their aspirations, and to themselves. "There were none hermits in these days but that they had been men of worship and of prowess ; and those hermits held great household, and refreshed people that were in distress." There were none who followed false creeds and false gods ; there was aid for all— sometimes simple aid of the healing monk, some times miraculous aid from Heaven.
 A sharp distinction was made between "knightly deeds in God's works, and no knightly deeds in worldly works." The good are rewarded, the evil are punished ; the Prodigal Son receives his deserts, but the Prodigal Son's brother also obtains his rewards. "For ever," said Arthur, "it is a worshipful knight's deed to help another worshipful knight when he seeth him in great danger; for ever a worshipful man will be loath to see a worshipful man shamed ; and he that is of no worship, and fareth with cowardice, never shall he show gentleness, nor no manner of goodness where he seeth a man in any danger, for then even will a coward show no mercy ; and always a good man will do ever to another as he would be done to himself."

 AGE OLD, AGE LONG.

  Nor is it fanciful thus to speak of a part of that book which Ascham denounced as immoral. The quest of the Holy Grail was age long, and shall be age long. The old legends tell that Joseph of Arimathea care fully guarded the cup. In some shadowy stronghold, this Grail was kept under stately guard, as befitted a heavenly treasure. The retention of sin disabled a knight from even locating where that castle stood; he must have confessed his sins at the high feast of Pentecost. The slightest evil thought rendered his passage past the lions at the portal gate a dangerous, if not an impossible, achievement. A few chosen ones were found, each in his heart of hearts, of sufficient purity and worth ; and these saw with their own eyes this glorious chalice, heard the song of choirs angelical, and were strengthened with the grace of heavenly food. The legend of the Grail chronicles no more the merely earthly clash of armed knights, no more the gay tournaments, and the adventures undertaken for love of a lady. This is spiritual struggle and spiritual reward, where each man does the will of God.

 AN ALLEGORY OF THE MASS.

 It is an allegory of the Mass, the most solemn act of religion. Contrition, confession, absolution, penance, the divine aid which supports God's children, the ecstatic joy of future rewards — these are the things represented by the acts of those questing knights, first and foremost of whom was Galahad bearing a huge cross on his shield. It is the reflex, this tale, of that great Mediaeval Faith which raised huge cathedrals and transfigured humble hermits, which kindled the imaginations of unimaginative men. "As all romance is ideal, so this romance is most ideal of all; and as the idealism of romance is its most vital quality, so this highest ideal of romance has lived through all the centuries and won all Christian peoples."
 For us to-day, as for the men of five hundred years ago, Malory teaches courage, purity, endurance, true love likened to summer, worship, and fear of God. Could we learn his lesson and emulate his characters, then would each be "a very knight and servant of Jesus Christ," that "no temptation should bring out of God's service, but to endure as his true champion." The story of the Grail, in Malory's virile version, may show us how to confirm ourselves in the army of Christ. Then might each say with Sir Perceval: "I serve the best in the world, and in his service he will not suffer me to die ; for who that knocketh shall enter, and who that asketh shall have, and who that seeketh him he hideth him not."

 Freeman's Journal  30 August 1917,

ROMANTICISM. THE MOVEMENT IN FRANCE.

 AN INSTRUCTIVE LECTURE.

 At the fortnightly meeting of the Alliance Francaise a lecture was delivered on "The Romantic Movement in France," by Monsieur Collot d'Herbois, . . .
 Monsieur Collot said that France had had the glory of giving to the world two great literary centuries, and, as the seventeenth was known as the Century of Louis XIV., so the nineteenth bade fair to be remembered as that of Victor Hugo. Victor Hugo was the chief of the romantic school, and this school and its work formed the subject of the evening's lecture.
 Between the years 1820 and 1848 France produced a great and durable school. All the younger generation of the Revolution, born amid the thunder of battles, and reared in a period of military glory and expansion, had to submit at the Restoration to the disgrace of the clerical reaction. The result was to intensify their aspirations towards freedom, to urge into revolt the poetic and artistic spirits, and to arouse in them a keen contempt for accepted opinion. It was difficult for our generation to realise the intense excitement of those times. Everything was fresh, joyous, new.

 Everything Breathed Forth Poetry

 and challenged all the old beliefs and the old standards. A movement comparable to Renascence was in progress. Out of the grey basis of a feeble and degraded classicism arose a new art and literature filled with splendour and adoration, thrilled with passion, and scintillating with the glowing fire of genius. France at this epoch was in a state of intellectual ferment, imbued with great aspirations, loving the old, but ready to sweep aside the most venerable idols; childlike in its faith and its fickleness. It was an age of dreams and bold experiments. Literature, which at first, in accordance with the political conditions, had assumed in Chateaubriand an enthusiastic zeal for Catholicism and Royalty, became in 1820 revolutionary. A revolt arose against the ancient and the yoke of tradition. Now appeared that legion of Romanticists who proclaimed

 A New Gospel of Nature and Passion.

 It was poetry that first sounded the onslaught. Modern poetry dated from Chaucer. His fine verses exposed the sterility of the conventional descriptive and didactic poetry. Next came the influence of the English and German literatures. The result was a renovation not only of the literature but also of the language itself. The diction of the eighteenth century had grown feeble and unnatural; simple words had given place to stilted paraphrase. The Romantic poets aspired to change all this. Words were sought for the sake of their sound, for their intrinsic qualities. The rigid formalism of the classic constructions was thrown to the winds. The years 1820-22 were rendered memorable by the appearance of the "Meditations" of Lamartine, the "Odes" of Victor Hugo, the "Poems" of Alfred de Vigny, and the "Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie" of de Musset. Then was formed the group of literary celebrities that carried the Romantic movement to its triumphant conclusion, and Victor Hugo assumed its leadership in 1827. The literary pioneer of the movement was Lamartine, who in his verses essayed to interpret all the great lyric themes—God, Nature, Death, Glory, Solitude, Longing, Hope, and Love. His works were grand improvisations, but showed a distinct lack of careful elaboration. His finest work was his first "Meditatons," the best known of which was "Le Lac." "A literary revolution can succeed only through controversy, and there can exist no real controversy save in connection with a work of genius." Lamartine gave but the half of himself to letters; Chateaubriand, the father of Romantic prose, had no poet's pinions. Hugo alone was able to soar into the highest regions of the poetic blue, and give to the world his "Orientales." Glittering with the shimmer of silk and gold, trembling with the soft radiance of the silvery moon, this collection of poems, with their erratic and lawless beauty of metre, casting aside apparently all trammels of the classic bondage of numbered feet and regular pause, could not be exemplified better than by the weird piece entitled the "Djinns."

Hugo Dominated Literary France

for half a century. . .he died in 1885—a meteoric life, followed by a triumphal funeral. He was in all his work a past master of harmony and word-painting, and remained today the greatest lyric poet that France or the world had ever seen.
 Among the greatest of the Romanticists was Alfred de Musset, the poet of youth, the "enfant terrible" of Romanticism. He sang of youth and love and all the glorious burgeoning of the new movement. In Theophile Gautier the tendency to choose words for their picturesqueness attained its height. He wrote like a painter or carver of precious stones, combining his words into a superb harmony of sound. Perhaps his finest work, and one that would survive, was the "Emaux et Camees." The weak spot in the Romantic movement was specially visible in

 Its Dramatic Product.

 The magnificent dramatic programme of the Reformers, as set forth particularly in the preface to "Cromwell" they quite failed to carry out. The drama, said they, should, above all things, aim at truth. It must represent humanity as it was—heroic or mean, fine or revolting, sublime or grotesque. Art was but the picturing of reality. The unities of time and place were trammels to be cast aside, leaving only that of action in force. It was in "Hernani" that Hugo endeavoured first to put these principles into practice. The scene of its first performance was historic. The classic school in severe and respectable garb crowded the stalls and circle to condemn the piece; the Reformers, clad in every extravagant and fantastic costume, filled the other parts of the theatre. For seven hours they waited for the fray. At length the curtain rose, and thence till the end of the play the auditorium was a pandemonium of cheers and yells, hoots and applause. Victory at last crowned the efforts of the Romanticists. and "Hernani" was famous not less by its merit as a drama than by the battle of its production. Hugo was acclaimed by the younger generation as the Messiah of letters, the liberator of dramatic art from the empty phrases and declamatory verbiage of the classic school. . . . Among the Romantic dramatists the thinker was Vigny, who separated himself later from the movement; while the popular hero and prolific producer was Dumas. The Romantic drama, unfortunately, exceeded the limits of true art by mixing together the epic, the lyric, and the tragic, with a result that produced but chaos and extravagance.

 The Father of the Romantic Novel

was Stendhal. The first romance of the new school was "Cinq-Mars" by de Vigny, but the most important and the most marvellous was "Notre Dame de Paris" by Victor Hugo, which was a powerful etching. The popular historical novel became the peculiar appanage of Dumas. His best known work was "The Three Musketeers." Its history might be false, its characters superficial, its action incredible but its charm remained. We rushed along with d'Artagnan in his fantastic adventures, and to young and old the charm of the Gascon never lessened. Georges Sand was another prolific writer, but one whose books were read with pleasure and forgotten at once.
 The lecturer proceeded to trace the influence of the Romantic movement in music, sculpture, and painting, showing that in the first its principles were embodied typically in the work of Berlioz, who, after a long and little appreciated struggle for a newer and broader conception of his art, finally achieved his aim, and triumphed only in time to die. On sculpture the movement produced but little effect. Its most noteworthy exponent was Barye, whose masterpiece, "The Lion and the Serpent" caused a sensation on its appearance. It was in painting that the Romantic movement exercised its greatest and most saving influence.

The Cradle of Romanticism

 was to be found in the studio of Pierre Guerin, himself not a member of the school. There it was that De la Croix, Gericault, and Sheffer pursued their studies. There they began that great struggle, which, after a quarter of a century of privation and rejection, was crowned with triumph. For these painters of the nineteenth century there was no kindly patron to lend his aid and protection. They met only injustice, opposition, and bitter criticism. But the flame of art burned within them, urging them on towards that ideal which they had envisaged for themselves; and they worked on without bread, in their garrets—frozen perhaps, but near the stars, and serenely confident. It was in 1819 that Gericault exhibited in the Salon his "Raft of the Medusa," the first picture that incorporated in its composition the principles of the new movement. The great apostle, however, of romantic art was De la Croix—a genius, whose place in the history of art was on a level with that of Titian and Rubens, and who was to bear aloft the standard of a veritable new Renascence. His was undoubtedly in art the greatest figure of the last century. He dominated his age as Michael Angelo, Rembrandt, and Velasquez dominated theirs. . . .
 It had been blamed against the Romanticists that they were guilty of a pose, an exaggeration, a violence calculated to startle the bourgeoisie. There was a grain of truth in the charge. Among the group of reformers were some who carried the expression of their theories in art and literature beyond the bounds of reason, and into absurdity. But, at the same time, there was in this movement, even in its exaggerated efforts,

 A Sincere Reaction

 against the pseudo-classics in literature and in art; a spontaneous protest of the imagination against the banality of the recipes and precepts of the academic schools. The followers of Boileau and David had come to believe that literature and painting could be learned as the shoemaker learned his trade, and that for this only a good textbook and a good teacher were needed. Reflection, reasoning, calculation, were everything. It was necessary, only to notice what the masters had done, and to copy them. It was against this that the Romantic school raised its protest. It rendered a sensible service to our generation, and, its work finished, it disappeared.

The West Australian 10 October 1913,

DECADENCE IN GERMAN LITERATURE.

The literature of Germany has always been more or less a closed book in England and among English-speaking people. Nor is this surprising, when one takes into consideration the totally inadequate translations—with notable exceptions of the masterpieces of German literature, and the comparatively few text-books which have been written upon the subject of that literature. Among the notable exceptions must, of course, be included some, at least, of the works of Goethe, Lessing, Schiller, and Heine, in poetry, criticism, and the drama; in philosophy, Schopenhauer, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and other of the metaphysicians are fairly well represented; while in later days, the evolutionary theories of Haeckel have been familiarised in England mainly through the medium of the Rationalist Press. Mention should also be made of the interest evoked—largely as a result of the present war—by the gospel according to Nietzsche and various writers of a similar school of perverted thought, these typifying Germany's prevalent malady—a deadening rationalism, the fruits of chronic philosophy, or its German equivalent. Eclipsed as it has invariably been by the greater literatures of France and England, Germany has nevertheless provided in time past much that is imperishable; and only during the last decade or so has the note of decadence—especially in the realms of fiction and drama—sounded the death knell of all that is most worthy in German literature, which has now yielded pride of place to the pornographic and sexual inanities of the extreme realistic school. The literature of the German Middle Ages was inspired to a considerable extent by the English minstrel, the French jougleur, and the sagas of the old Norseman. However, none of these influences is noticeable in the primitively barbaric "Nibelungenlied," which has been described as the great national epic of the German peoples; neither were they an important factor in the lyric improvisations of the Minnesingers of the thirteenth century, or, somewhat later, in the less artificial compositions of the "Volkslied." But this period proved of brief duration; that great spiritual upheaval known as the Reformation came to pass; but, strangely enough, brought with it no masterpiece of literature, with the exception of Luther's Bible. The sturdy Reformer's other contributions to contemporary letters took the form of popular commentaries, which plainly reveal the unending struggle between an immovable faith and passion unsubdued— the old inevitable contest between light and darkness. Following on the Reformation, the Renaissance was just beginning to exercise a beneficent influence on literature, when the Thirty Years' War —which so seriously crippled the intellectual life of Germany in the first half of the seventeenth century—rendered practically null and void all her efforts to emulate the brilliant literary achievements of more favoured nations. In Germany, the eighteenth century was the age of a neo-classic movement, inaugurated, by Winkelmann and Lessing, and consummated in Weimar by Goethe and Schiller.  This was, indeed, the golden age of German literature, a classic calm broken only by the period of "Storm and Stress"—a crisis to which poets of all nationalities have ever been prone. Winkelmann possessed a native affinity, to the Hellenic spirit, just as Hegel, the philosopher of the absolute, or truth for all intellect, was the ripe product of modern Hellenism. Madame de Stael remarked of the author of "The History of Ancient Art": "There had been known before him (Winkelman) learned men who might be consulted like books; but no one had, if I may say so, made himself a pagan for the purpose of penetrating antiquity." Lessing, besides being a "Greek" classicist and a most profound critic, was Germany's first great dramatist—one upon whom the Elizabethan drama exercised a lasting influence. If Lessing and Winkelmann represented the neo-classic school, their complete antithesis may be found in Klopstock, the epic poet of "The Messiah," who stood out pre-eminently as the champion of German individualism. A characteristic creation of the "Storm and Stress" period was Burger, whose ballads, deftly modelled on Scotch and English originals acquired immense favour in the judgment of his contemporaries. He wrote prose, too—"The Adventures of Baron Munchausen," that immortal record of unrivalled mendacity. His disciple, Schlegel, the critical leader of the Romantic school, is perhaps best remembered as the fond Platonic friend of Madame de Stael. But "Storm and Stress" were to give place slowly to that maturer epoch which is directly associated with the climax of German classic achievement and its high priest, Goethe. "Werther" belongs to the earlier period —surely a very notable "first" novel, with its heroine of extraordinary aplomb, who having seen unmoved the body of the doleful hero

Borne before her on a shutter,
Like a well-conducted person,
Went on cutting bread and butter.

Who shall say that Werther's Charlotte is not admirably true to type? Though Goethe's fame outside the limits of his own country rests chiefly on such acclaimed masterpieces as, for instance, "Faust," "Iphigenia," and "Tasso," Carlyle declared that "Wilhelm Meister," the supreme novel of German classicism, comprised the deepest results of the poet's philosophy; though lesser critics have found the book marred for them by its frequent obscurity, and this despite its claims to be considered an "Odyssey of Culture." On the whole, the Weimar period, with Goethe and Schiller enthroned as the joint arbiters of classical idealism, is the pleasantest picture we possess of the intellectual life and development of Germany: one, at least, of the two great poets was successful in deducting a practical philosophy for ordinary, everyday use from the metaphysical system of Kant, so opposed in spirit to the mystical pantheism—the apotheosis of individualism—which distinguished the philosophy of Romanticism, as propounded by Fichte and Schelling.
The last really notable name in German literature is that of Heine—the supreme lyrical poet—whose supremacy, however, is rather in his manner than in his matter. "The magic of Heine's poetical form is incomparable," says Matthew Arnold. He was (we read) Goethe's successor as "a soldier in the war of liberation of humanity." But that humanity, it would appear, did not extend to England. Like a thorough paced German Heine hated England. In the days of his exile, he remarked: "I might settle in England, if it were not that I should find there two things, coal-smoke and Englishmen; I cannot abide either." Here we have a touch of the mocking, satirical spirit which has done much to counterbalance the esteem with which the world regards the poet's beautiful and rhythmic verse. After Heine's death, the Post Romantic School of "Young Germany" began to show itself in its true light, as essentially a surface literature, irretrievably doomed to decay. Ludwig Borne, like Heine a Jew, and like Goethe a native of Frankfort, became absorbed in the backwash of political journalism. Auerbach, the chronicler of Black Forest life, and Hoffmann, the later Romantic, a morbid distraught genius of the Poe order, are still read and appreciated—in Germany. But the Romanticism, so directly inspired by Scott, was dead beyond all hope of resuscitation.
In its place we find a sort of spurious realism, openly filched from the literatures of France and Russia: and the brutal modernity which discovered an outlet in Nietzsche and his disciples anti-traditional theories of the expediency of a criminal disregard of all moral obligations. Books in glorification of the militant spirit of a militantly docile people began to flood the Press. Able historians, like von Ranke and Mommsen were neglected for Treitschke and his school. World dominion was loudly proclaimed as Germany's inalienable heritage in the pulpit, in the lecture-room, and on the stage. Sudermann and Hauptmann infused into the national drama the realistic indiscretions of their own peculiar psychological vagaries. Germany's lyrical genius stooped to Hymns of Hate ! And never in any literature has fiction touched so low an ebb of sexual and erotic indecency as it has in Germany during the past few years of Prussian supremacy; in no other country in the world have the decadents attained to such popularity and power. In brief, the last decade of German literature has revealed most of those symptoms which might have been looked for in a nation brought up by a paternal Government in a soul deadening, consuming hatred of all other nations, and inoculated with the virus of an individual and national egotism as insane as it is unwarrantably arrogant and aggressive.

 The West Australian 21 October 1916, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article26994856

RICHARD WAGNER and HIS OPERAS.

It has been stated that Wagner assumes to have taken up music where Beethoven left off, and in accordance with this assumption Wagner himself conducted a remarkable performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at Baireuth, when the foundation-stone of the theatre was laid on May 22nd, 1872. Since the completion of the structure only Wagner's music has been heard within its walls. The first performance of the Trilogy was in August, 1876, and resulted in a success beyond the most sanguine expectations of its warmest supporters.
. . . . . .
The triumph of Baireuth was followed in the next year by a Wagner festival in London, when six concerts were given in the Albert Hall, in the presence of Wagner, conducted by Herr Hans Richter, the director at Baireuth, with an orchestra led by Herr Wilhelmj. Here the delight of the audience found full vent in the selections from the early works, but although the Wagner school is now strong in England, there was a manifest difference in the reception accorded to the works composed before the opus magnum " The Trilogy," and to the selections from the " Ring of the Nibelung ;" the reaction set in with the second part, and after the prelude to " The Rhinegold " many left the hall. The dulness of the vocal parts, away from the stage, is undeniable to all but a fanatic Wagnerian. Nor can it be said that an English audience would accept the Baireuth plan, and attend four successive performances in the dark, even with the admirable stage appointments. Experience goes to prove that Wagner's later works are unfit for the concert-room ; and a very powerful faction believe that the present Wagner idolatry is to be reckoned among epidemic mental diseases, and that with Wagner himself the fever will end, since no other can wield the sceptre he has swayed.

The production of " Parsifal " has not with the majority improved the position attained by Wagner. In this work, first given at Baireuth July, 1882, Wagner has boldly embodied the Christian mysteries. He names his opera the " Stage-consecrative Festival Play." He brings religion on the stage, and exhibits his knights at prayer ; in the support of the Knights of the Graal he represents the celebration of the Eucharist, using the very words which occur in the service of the Christian Church ; Kundry, the heroine, anoints and washes the feet of Parsifal ; Parsifal baptises Kundy ; there is the observance of Good Friday and other biblical and religious matters introduced. The worshippers of Wagner see no impropriety in this, and many maintain that, so far from there being any indelicacy, the holy awe of religion, with all its heavenly enlightening inspiration overpowered the heart even in the theatre ; and one German clergyman writes that the production of " Parsifal " at Baireuth had nothing offensive, but that in such performances the stage fulfils its proper task. "In God's name, then," he adds, " let religion, with her symbols and ceremonies, speak and preach to the people upon the stage, provided only that the same protection be accorded to her as at Baireuth ; then there would be good hope of their being weaned from a taste for operas a la Offenbach, with their French glorification of broken marriage vows.'' The music is mainly given to the chorus, and there are some beautiful hymns founded upon the accompaniments of the Roman liturgy: but as a whole the interest is far below that of Tristan or Die Meistersinger, and the Wagnerian peculiarities are stretched until it is hard to decide between style and mannerism. There was much in the dresses and in the enchanted gardens which outraged the refined taste which ruled in the Nibelung Festival; a tawdry exaggeration and glare that was offensive. By an English audience it is scarcely possible that Parsifal would be tolerated it would be as much out of place in London as the passion play of Oberammergau , and the extravagance with which it has been discussed by the violent Wagnerians has already brought it and the composer to ridicule in many places. Common sense is outraged when a would be critic fills 62 pages on an essay on " The Significance of the Morning Summons to awake in R. Wagner's Parsifal," and then apologises for the " scant form of his work, as the result of a superabundant intellectual purport."

One writes that the effect of Parsifal was like that of the Passion Play plus music by Wagner; that only twice had even similar emotions been excited —viz at the funeral of the Duke of Wellington, when the military bands placed the " Dead March in Saul," and, secondly, during the rendering of Croft's musical service at Sterndale Bennett's burial.

Against this the famous critic, E. Hauslick, of Vienna, writes : —" The Wagner Cultus has reached if it has not passed its culminating point. Reason and experience teach us that after such unparalleled inebriation people generally sober down extremely. Many with us in Baireuth thought they had already perceived and remarked signs of this, and even warm adherents of Wagner became impatient over the trying game of catching the guiding motives. " At present the romantic school on which Wagner mainly depends are devoted to him but the most pernicious and, at the same time, the most humiliating feature of Wagner worship is the absolute surrender of all beyond the Wagnerian school, and the endowment of " the master " with little short of omnipotence.

"Die Bayreuther Blaetter," a monthly periodical, in which for the last five years Wagner has personally co-operated with the editor, is the most authoritative public document, and the best proof of this assertion. In its pages Wagner, " the master, " is made a teacher and redeemer of mankind. His opinions on politics, philosophy, morals or religion are recorded and accepted as infallible. The principal utterances relate, firstly to Schopenhauer's philosophy and its connection with Wagner's operas, secondly, to the religious, social, and political regeneration of the human race thirdly, to the agitation against vivisection of animals and, fourthly, to the propaganda of vegetarian views and bills of fare. The true Wagnerite must be, in addition to a worshipper of every bar of music, a pessimist, an opponent of vivisection, an enemy of the Jews, and a vegetarian. Wagner is said to have transferred Schopenhauer into art when transferring Christianity into Parsifal. And among the public announcements of Parsifal appears a request from the editor that those who agree with him will attend the " vegetarian dinner." Yet Wagner in practice was no vegetarian. " No one could compose ' Tannhauser ' or depict Lohengrin on sour milk and beans. " How much the beauty of the language and the clearness of the text suffers by Wagner's peculiar alliterative style has been allowed by his warmest friends, and when such a jargon as " Weia, Waga ! Woge du Welle, Walle zur Weige, Wagalaweia! " is accepted as verse, we cannot wonder that many try in vain to understand Wagner's poetry. One courageous critic declares that Wagnerian worship has become " a sad trade; this incredible false coinage of philosophic thoughts in the heat of enthusiastic æstheticising excitement, lamentable, ridiculous, and odious when we reflect that a school able to produce such apostles dares to strive after intellectual sway, and actually exerts a sway over many weak minds and empty heads." Now that the indomitable spirit of Wagner is at rest we may safely affirm that posterity alone will estimate Richard Wagner rightly. Unlike Mozart and Beethoven, he has been made too much of in life. By his early works he exercised a vivifying, exciting, and purifying influence on opera but his later works have caused a cessation of operatic composition. As the most brilliant and original genius which has arisen for German opera in the last 10 years, he has imposed his system with coercive might upon the world, but it is a system only adapted to his own endowments. It is false and onesided, and we believe it will die with its originator. Wagner is undoubtedly great, but his greatness will not, we think, descend to any of his disciples. " Aida " is on the Wagnerian model ; Gounod, Thomas and Bizet have felt the Wagnerian spoil, but the magician is far above his imitators, and will, we think, stand alone. Of Wagner a theoretical and literary works it may be truly said they are valuable but the latter are smudged by his arrogance and pitiless invective, and his virulent hatred of the Jews is only matched by his perpetual ingratitude. . . . . . .

In 1835 Wagner was appointed conductor of the London Philharmonic Society, and came to England accordingly. Some of his most violent attacks on contemporary musicians had been read with indignation, he had singled out Mendelssohn, so beloved by English musicians and people as an object for special aversion, his revolutionary tendencies were suspected, the public did not care for him, and the press, headed by Chorley, the fearless, independent, and also the most able critic of the Athenæum then musically more powerful than now, is violently opposed to him. Some numbers of "Tannhauser " and "The flying Dutchman" were performed and received with derision and Wagner at the end of the season left in disgust. No one now justifies or sympathises with the treatment he then received, on the other hand, Wagner did nothing to conciliate the English, while his personal vanity, his arrogance, and his inordinate self- worship made him very objectionable.

 The Sydney Morning Herald 21 February 1883, 

English Thought in the Nineteenth Century

LITERATURE

THE 19TH CENTURY

"English Thought in the Nineteenth Century:" By D. C. Somervell. London: Methuen & Co.

The farther we recede from a great historic period the better are we able to Judge of its character and achievements, and the thirty years which have elapsed since the close of the 19th century is a long enough stretch of time to admit of an estimate of the value of its contribution to the story of civilisation. As the title states, it is with English thought alone that the author is concerned, but who would minimise the debt which human development owes, to English thought? The philosophers, scientists, publicists, and litterateurs, certainly fill no small space in the intellectual life of the period, and as Mr. Somervell's pages show, he is not gravelled for lack of matter. His difficulty, indeed, has been to compress into less than 250 pages the mass of thought accumulated in a century. As the 19th century was closely connected in respect of opinions with the 18th, he was forced to disregard what he calls the accidents of our decimal system of numeration," and, as 1800 marks no distinct stage in the progress of thought, and as the death of Queen Victoria really does mark such a stage, to treat the century as beginning with the French Revolution in 1789 and ending in 1901. In English literature the Revolution gave a stimulus to the Romantic movement, which came to its full growth and splendor in the writings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Lamb, and De Quincey in England:—

The fundamental impulse of the Romantic movement can be found in a simple phrase—the "call of the wild." Rousseau was the first great prophet of the Romantic movement, and his books (which were written in the middle of the 18th century) are continually contrasting civilisation with Nature, to the great disadvantage of the former. Rousseau was, incidentally, keenly alive to the beauty of wild scenery, but the nature of his political treatise is a kind of garden of Eden, out of which man has mistakenly strayed, and to which he must find his way back. The Revolution was an exposition in political terms of the Romantic movement, a quest after some mysterious rights of the natural man. Since the Romantic movement missed its ideal in politics, it passed into poetry, art, and music, and inspired the wild dreams of Shelley, the sunsets of Turner, and the solemn splendors of the later works of Beethoven. Wordsworth was intoxicated by the Revolution, and only financial pressure exerted from home prevented him from throwing in his lot with the Girondin party. The later course of the Revolution, culminating in the military tyranny of Napoleon disillusioned him. He ended in mere negation, deploring the Reform Bill as heartily as Scott, and doubting like a Tory extremist, whether popular education will not do more harm than good. As Hazlitt said, he missed the road to Utopia, and lighted in Old Sarum. Coleridge's early manhood, like Wordsworth's, was tarred with the revolutionary brush, for he planned with his brother-in-law, Southey, to find an ideal Pantisocratic (all-equal) community in the United States. His best poems belong to the realm of the unfettered imagination; though it would be possible, on the strength of its final stanzas, to connect "The Ancient Mariner" with the humanitarian movement. Coleridge's brother-in-law, Southey, started life, like himself, full of revolutionary ardor, and in later years, when he entered the opposite camp, his enemies unkindly published a play "Wat Tyler." written by him in his undergraduate days, glorifying rebellion. His sycophantic ode on the death of George III. was savagely attacked by Byron, who composed an alternative "Vision of Judgment," probably the most blasphemous poem of any merit in our language. Byron and Shelley, who came later, classed the revolution as among accidental events, leaving unaffected the essential gospel of the revolutionists. They both died young, revolutionists of a sort to the last. Byron holds that man is naturally good, and is only made bad by civilisation. Among his heroes are Cain, who first broke the sixth Commandment, and Don Juan, who held the the record as a breaker of the seventh. Byron's first speech in the House of Lords was a defiant defence of the Luddite rioters. Byron was a great satirist, but not a great poet. Shelley was a great poet, who has inspired enthusiasm even more possibly than greater poets, and it is certain his philosophy has colored the outlook of life for many people. He fashioned a figure of Man triumphant over God and civilisation.

Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower,
Even in its tender bud.

As Mr. Brailsford says, the history of the French Revolution so far as concerns Britain, begins with a sermon and ends with a poem, the sermon being Dr. Richard Price's discourse on the fall of the Bastille and the poem Shelley's "Hellas."

The Second Period

So much for the first of the three parts into which Mr. Somervell divides his work. The middle period saw the Realist School exerting itself with powerful effect, especially in the domain of fiction. Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant in France, Turgeniev, Tolstoi, and Dostoieffsky in Russia, Sudermann in Germany, Bjornson and Ibsen in Norway, D'Annunzio in Italy, and many others created a body of literature strikingly unlike that of the romantic school. In Britain the new movement showed itself partially in Thackeray, and more fully later on in Hardy, Gissing, and Kipling. Another conspicuous feature of this middle term was the extraordinary ascendency gained by the novel over all other forms of imaginative literature. In the early years of the century the greatest writers were the poets. Later they were the novelists, who, disdaining dreams, painted life as they found it:—

There is hardly a single writer of fiction who could not be proved to be at least a reflector, if not a direct exponent, of some phase of the thought of his generation. It is not fanciful to connect the political activities which in the later forties centred in the problem of controlling hours and conditions of work in factories with the contemporaneous publication of four notable novels dealing with industrial life:—Disraeli's "Sybil" (1845), Mrs. Gaskell's "Mary Barton" (1848), Charlotte Bronte's "Shirley" 1849), and Kingsley's "Alton Locke" (1851). Of all Victorian novelists, Anthony Trollope has come to be recognised as the most faithful recorder of ordinary life and manners. "The Chronicles of Barsetshire" are tales of the imaginary provincial diocese. Trollope's sympathies are with the old high-and-dry school. In the first novel we see the amiable "warden" of the ancient alms houses ejected from his comfortable sinecure owing to the misguided agitation of a young Benthamite reformer of abuses, and the results are unfortunate for all concerned. In the second novel, "Barchester Towers," the comfortable old bishop has died, and is succeeded not, as he should have been, by his son, the Archdeacon, but by the evangelical Dr. Groudie, who is ruled by his wife and his chaplain, Mr. Slope, a Uriah Heep in holy orders. As for Trollope's political novels, they suggest that for him Parliament was little more than the best of clubs and debating societies. His political novels are very pleasant, but their politics are purely formal. If Trollope has a lesson for Victorian thought it is that, judging by moral standards, the period was a fairly placid one. But the greatest popular writer of the middle decades was, of course, Charles Dickens. Though be amassed wealth, he never abandoned his belief that a curse rests on riches, and a blessing on poverty. Dickens was a man of great public spirit, wide interests, and close observation, but he had no theories as to how the abuses he exposed could best be rectified. That he belonged neither to the orthodox school of thought, the utilitarian, nor to the opposition, is shown by his being claimed by both. Chesterton calls him the prince of anti-Benthamites; Sir Henry Maine, a great lawyer and political philosopher, in his day. wrote in his "Popular Government" —"It does not seem to me a fantastic assertion that the ideas of one of the great novelists of the last generation may be traced to Bentham," the novelist being Dickens.

The Third Period

With the death of Dickens we are brought to the third period of the century, which in fiction may be called the psycho-analytical. Never before in fiction were the sexes more assiduous in analysing each other's souls. The century was heralded by a crusade of expurgation in respect of fiction. The careful avoidance of all direct allusion to the physical side of sexual relations is described as a product of evangelicism. which took a strong hold of the early Victorian public. Thackeray, in the preface, to "Pendennis," warned his readers that, the spirit of the age being what it was, they must not expect to find in his pages the whole truth about the life of a young man as they would find it, for example, in Fielding's "Tom Jones." All that, we are told, was changed towards the end of the 19th century. Just as restraints on the use of "swear words" were discarded, so in sexual matters there was a general kicking over of the traces all round. A generation brought up on evangelical principles were invited to solace their declining years with "The Yellow Aster," "The Sunless Heart," and other stories by women, to say nothing of "The Woman Who Did," "Tess of the D'Urbervilles." and similar examples of what male writers could do in the same class of literature. Apart from sex matters, liberties were taken with religious orthodoxy by distinguished novelists like Meredith and Hardy, whom Mr. Somervell brackets as typical ''pagans." Meredith is described as in one respect the first of English moderns, having been the forerunner of the psychoanalytical school of novelists:—

Meredith is pagan, but his paganism has the serenity of one who, having never had faith, has never lost it, and bears no grudge against it. As the previous generation had paired Dickens with Thackeray, so the later Victorians paired Thomas Hardy, the "Wessex" novelist, with Meredith. All Hardy's novels were written before the end of the 19th century. There is a difference in outlook between the novelists. Meredith is an optimist, Hardy a pessimist. Meredith held, like Wordsworth, that it is possible for man to be in tune with Nature. To Hardy, man is in Huxley's phrase, "Nature's rebellious son." Man has risen above Nature's plan without disentangling himself from her claims. Nature holds man by the chain of sex. All Hardy's novels are love tragedies. For Hardy, as for Meredith, Nature is Providence, but for Hardy it is a malign Providence, and the Christian religion, with its pretence that Providence is not malign, is supremely irritating to him. "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," probably the greatest, and certainly the most popular of the Hardy novels is full of anti-Christian innuendo. Its author is the only great Victorian for whom Chesterton has no toleration: for him, Hardy is "a sort of village atheist, brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot." Hardy and Meredith were representatives of their period, and ours, too, in that they were concerned with the fundamental problems of existence. The present age has been abused as one of mere pleasure seeking. But never was there an age when more persons were actively concerned in promoting, in one way or another, the general welfare of society. Such immersion in the practical may make us, by comparison with our fathers, somewhat uninteresting, both to ourselves and posterity, but it should, protect us from a too sweeping accusation of frivolity.

The Advertiser 21 June 1930,