THE

SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE

HE world has seen the rise of many a good movement in the right direction; it may be doubted if it ever beheld one such sign of progress that was not accompanied by its caricature. Just as no man can walk in the sunshine without the companionship of his own shadow-elongated and deformed, made fantastical and grotesque-so no effort after right-thinking and rational living can progress without being associated with some monstrous imitation.

Without dwelling upon the abundant historical examples of these dual movements-the Christian and pagan revival of arts and letters in the fifteenth century, the Catholic and Protestant Reformations of the sixteenth, the Catholic and Jansenist movements of the seventeenth, the double character of the French Revolution in the eighteenth-let us come down to times that are not very remote from our own.

The nineteenth century was crowded with renascences and revivals of various sorts. Prophet after prophet arose with his special message; leader after leader attempted to start a movement which he had the temerity to regard as new. To him, perhaps, and to the Protestant public he addressed, the idea may indeed have seemed original; but it may safely be asserted that wherever the purport of the message was worthy and good, it was always as old as Christianity. In other words, its age was that of the Catholic Church.

Catholics smiled and rubbed their eyes when the prophet of Chelsea began to deliver his message. To them the Gospel of Work taught no new creed. With a Divine Founder who spent nearly the whole of his earthly life in a carpenter's shop; with apostles who were fishermen, tax-collectors, tent-makers, and what not; with hermits and monks and priests who by the labour of head and hand brought about the civilization of the world; with nearly every beautiful building in Christendom as an evidence not merely of labour, but of art and skill that will never be exceeded, perhaps not even approached, as long as the world shall last; with the teeming treasures of its libraries and the priceless triumphs of its preservation of Greek and Latin literature; with all these and more than we could recount through the long hours of a June day, what message had Thomas Carlyle for us?

Not that we carp at, or despise, his efforts for good. To individuals, even among ourselves, his preaching may have been

helpful. But he taught us nothing new. He only emphasized the Master's words-Work while it is called day: the night cometh when no man can work. In so far as Carlyle enunciated the nobility of work, the dignity of labour, the merit of strenuous endeavour, he was preaching Catholic doctrine. A hide-bound Protestant country may have had need of him ; it is certain that it wanted some of his contemporaries.

England's need of John Ruskin was a crying one. His gospel was a complex, sometimes a contradictory one; but he, too, had picked up some fragments of Catholic teaching, and determined that his countrymen should have the benefit of them. He rightly declared that the Puritan dread of beauty in form and colour was a condemnable heresy. He said truly enough that to his countrymen ugliness had become a religion, whitewash a fetish, gloom a superstition. In so many words he roundly asserted that "the Bible superstitiously read became the authority for every error and heresy and cruelty." He agreed with Coleridge who did not scruple to accuse the Bible Society of propagating, instead of the old idolatry, a new bibliolatry.

Ruskin vowed that the "not enjoying the beauty of things' went much deeper than mere blindness. It is a form of antagonism, and is esentially Satanic. A most strange form of demonology in otherwise good people." He forgot-he often did forget-with whom he was dealing. He forgot that he was speaking to a nation of buyers and sellers-to men who were badly educated and cultured scarcely at all—to men who read newspapers and dealt out sugar or cotton or gold; to men who, according to Thackeray, had less knowledge of art than has a French shoe-black. He forgot that, while all men may be taught to read and figure, only a certain number can ever be cultivated. To such men his gospel was new and strange, and he had not the prudence to be patient with these good but wooden people, whose paradise was made up of an easy chair, a bottle of port, and a daily paper.

Yet in spite of his eccentricities and exaggerations and explosions, Ruskin left an enduring mark upon his country and upon his age. And he did this because he had firmly gripped one or two big principles of Catholic ethics. His own heresies were manifold and manifest; but he contrived to strike a deadly blow at the lingering Manicheism of the Puritan. He made stupid people ashamed of their stupidity; he made the lovers of ugliness ashamed of their grossness; he forced men to admit that life contained grander possibilities than the piggish ease of a retired banker or shopkeeper.

Unhappily, the caricature of a movement is sometimes so grotesque as to bring the praiseworthy movement itself into contempt. Already there are signs that a few silly people are mistaking the shadow of the simple life movement for its substance.

The fashionable gospel of the day is certainly not that of Simplicity. Whatever caricature of the simple life is taken up by the frivolous and the smart will always remain a caricature. That wise and witty American poet, Oliver Wendell Holmes, anticipated the travesty long years before the modern movement in favour of plain living and high thinking had made itself a name.

Little I ask; my wants are few;

I only wish a hut of stone,
(A very plain brown stone will do),
That I may call my own:

And close at hand is such a one,
In yonder street that fronts the sun.

Plain food is quite enough for me;

Three courses are as good as ten :

If Nature can subsist on three,

Thank Heaven for three. Amen!
I always thought cold victual nice :
My choice would be vanilla ice.

And so on, for many exquisitely ironical stanzas.

So crying is the need for something less artificial in dress, in furniture, and in food, that the caricature of simplicity, with which we are threatened, is quite as much to be feared as was the loathsome worship of blue china and peacock's feathers that, not so many years ago, filled us all with disgust. Happily such a mockery of an actual art movement, and one that is growing stronger every year, did not deserve to be taken seriously, and was scarcely worth the elaborate satire so freely and fittingly bestowed upon it. So, too, this mere aping of simplicity needs only to be looked upon as the grotesque shadow of a very real movement in order to be despised as it deserves.

The longer we live in this world, the more we realize how few people comparatively ever learn to distinguish between shadow and substance; how very few see the difference between a movement that makes entirely for the well-being of mankind, and one that is merely a passing fancy or the silly fad of a coterie. We laugh at the pseudo-shepherds and shepherdesses of Watteau; they are not so ridiculous as the fashionable folk who for a few nights in the summer elect to play bridge in an expensively

furnished cottage in the country, and then persuade themselves that they are leading the Simple Life.

"But," you ask me, is it a fact that any people who are not really poor are at the present time proving themselves disciples of simplicity?" To this I should like to answer, "Yes, many hundreds "; and certainly, if I included monks and nuns and religious men and women, I might say thousands. But very plausibly you I will answer that of course men and women who are bound to poverty are leading the simple life; it is a necessary part of their profession. Doubtless it is; yet I want you to realize the fact that the lives of those who give themselves to Religion are severely and consistently simple.

Yet putting entirely aside those who are living under vow, there is evidence enough abroad that among many who were gently born and bred, and brought up in a certain measure of luxury, there is a decided tendency towards a course of action that cuts off superfluities, and that is more concerned for the things of the mind than for those of the body. That really great men should be haters of luxury is what we look for. We expect the peer to be simpler than the multi-millionaire. We are never surprised when we find that numbers of the aristocracy, whether that of birth or (a much greater matter) that of intellect, often show a fine disregard for what they eat and drink and for what they put on. We even look for it, I say, and in a sense Idemand it of them. Yet it never seems to enter the heads of the multitude that really great men are simple in their habitsjust because they realize, more than little men can do, the folly and the hurtfulness of extravagance.

David Bearne, S.J.

FROM ST. FRANCIS

E tanto il ben che aspetto
Che ogni pena mi par diletto.

I hope to gain
So great a treasure
That every pain
Seems now a pleasure.