Communications
COMMUNICATIONS MR. ATTWATER REPLIES Wales. TO the Editor:-Discussions in periodicals are apt to be tiresome and when conducted at a range of 3,000 nautical miles (or whatever the width of the...
...Copeland and Mr...
...Why...
...The building of Christmas cribs for the home has assumed big proportions abroad and, we hope, will increase among us and help to offset the materialism that nowadays surrounds the birth of the Infant Saviour...
...The success of the young Turks created a serious situation for the statesmen of Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria...
...But I like it precisely because it seems to me that the people responsible for it have produced a building that has far more of that spirit (which, Mr...
...Kilian J. Hennrich, O. M. Cap...
...The letter is certainly of interest to all...
...To revive this spirit, we have published for the members of the Catholic Boys Brigade fine liturgical cards, suitable for use as they are, or for painting with water-colors...
...Is this the authentic voice of progressive American civilization...
...There was none in the eighteenth century, none in the nineteenth, with the exception of the work of Delacroix, Mille, Legros, (occasionally) Ingres and Puvis, and the imitation-ware of the pre-Raphaelites, and one can think of very little in the twentieth, a few canvases by Sargent perhaps (such as his Hermit or his Padre Sebastiano in the Metropolitan Museum) and some by Mancini...
...I find it in Bonnard, Camoins, Matisse, Derain, Marquet and De Segonzac of France, in Steer and Sickert of England, and in Marin, Rockwell Kent, Davies and Demuth of our own country, and in all the older impressionists from Corot to Renoir...
...Donald Attwater...
...This naturally centers the thoughts of the family on Christmas long before the day arrives and keeps them alive long after, since the figures for the Epiphany are included in the outfits...
...In 1908 these provinces had been thirty years under Austrian administration...
...5. I would remind Mr...
...As for vernacular liturgies, the Byzantine Catholics of * But then I am not an architect...
...I do not find it in Rouault, Soutine, Modi-gliani, Vlaminck, and such artists, who seem to me nothing but very brutal cynics...
...Cram will further agree that we must use contemporary godless industrial conditions of building...
...TO the Editor:-I note to my great regret that your paper is anti-prohibition...
...Cram's gloss makes a rather important modification of those premises of mine with which he agrees, when it states that the Church took the best art that was available and kept asking for better...
...Everything went smoothly until 1908...
...This was chosen, as Bulgaria chose the corresponding method...
...But why should she have neglected Cezanne...
...While under the sultan, Turkish suzerainty over Bosnia was only nominal...
...A year ago, the finest and most artistic paper cribs were imported from Europe for the first time, and it seems that the activity is arousing more and more interest among the boys and the members of their families...
...I will take my citation from the Encyclopedia Brittanica, eleventh edition...
...How can concrete be obscene or natural stone chaste ? It's either a practicable building material or it's not, and that's all there is to it...
...History does not support such a view...
...This is nonsense...
...James, L. I. TO the Editor-I cannot too strongly commend Mr...
...The expense of most of this was borne by the taxpayers of Austria-Hungary...
...Rambusch that it would have been as absurd to a thirteenth-century builder to be asked to build in "Norman", with which he was quite familiar, as to build in "Byzantine," which probably he had never seen...
...I do (the difference has no effect on the truth of the matter...
...Otherwise, the government of the country was conducted in the name of the Austrian emperor...
...What evidence have we for thinking that the clergy were any more exigent then than now ? That they were any better at "art-criticism" then than now...
...Now it would be, I think, a pity if the spirituality of those artists, mentioned or not mentioned, who belong to the former group went unharnessed...
...In the intervening centuries the Church per se has been no less strong, but religious art has ceased...
...THE BALKAN PIVOT Baltimore, Md...
...Gerrity's Reflections Upon Art, a communication to The Commonweal of October 23, to every person interested in the relation between art and religion...
...What had been accomplished...
...3. That, I believe, is the real difference between us...
...But he concedes that "an outburst of religious fervor" would do the trick...
...The reason why this demand is decreasing seems to me to be not only the fact that thousands of these cards are sent out by religious agencies but principally the fact that the real Christmas spirit has vanished from many a modern home or has been confined to the services of the day itself...
...Besides, the very necessary task of reforesting the depleted soil and starting industrial developments had just been begun...
...Then, since we must accept the conditions, why not accept the materials, and the forms and technique...
...But we agree that they are all good buildings and meet for their purpose...
...For-as Father Ryan explains just before the quoted remark-as soon as the request of workers from non-public industries could not be easily met by the labor available at the time, then the public work would be slackened, thus increasing the labor supply for the industry...
...Cram's similarly named article, so that I do not know whether, like Mr...
...TO the Editor:-Discussions in periodicals are apt to be tiresome and when conducted at a range of 3,000 nautical miles (or whatever the width of the Atlantic is) may easily become futile...
...Cram is too much the specialist of a particular period in art to be entirely catholic in his tastes...
...Allow me to thank you for your earnest and indefatigable labors in the present movement...
...That would help in directing the situation toward equilibrium...
...Cram will agree, does not depend on materials or "style") than have, e.g., the Catholic churches at Norwich and Arundel (Mr...
...Yours very truly, (Signed) "Theobald Mathew...
...Have new technical devices which have been the discoveries and the apanages of modern painters discouraged the Church from employing them, on conventional grounds...
...Two railways were also built in connection with the Hungarian state system...
...and although the administration has been reproached alike for undue harshness and undue leniency, neither accusation can be sustained...
...On July 22, 1908, there occurred in Constantinople, the Young-Turkish Revolution which resulted in the promise of a Parliament...
...Austria settled with Turkey amicably by paying a certain sum of money...
...Perhaps the problem is really the same as that of the dearth of religious greeting cards, which another of your correspondents discussed below Mr...
...Please permit me to give a short sketch of the historical development involved...
...If we will buy only what is set before us, then we will most certainly not demand religious art done in a modern or innovating spirit, but will seek out merely the tried and true-Siennese and Florentine Gothic, Raphaelesque, renaissance, and baroque-and that only in churches...
...What such critics, who have an undoubtedly well-founded nostalgia for the art of the past, do not understand is the trend which modern painting, modern architecture and modern sculpture at their best have toward the spiritual goal of the present...
...Gerrity, I, too, would have aspersed it...
...ATTWATER REPLIES Wales...
...I did not read Mr...
...The principle of prohibition seems to be the only safe and certain remedy for the evils of intemperance...
...This opinion has been strengthened by the hard labor of more than twenty years in the temperance cause...
...Ford's factory to "build" 1915 models...
...And are we to picture the classical revivalists offering their wares and the Church accepting them under protest as a not-better article...
...and it is as absurd to build "Early English" in 1929 as to order Mr...
...1. Mr...
...Rambusch think that "a radical new style of architecture will not be developed until there are radical changes in our services" (does he mean the substitution of vespers for the congregational rosary...
...My dear young friend:-The question of prohibition of the sale of ardent spirits and many other intoxicating drinks which are to be found in our country is not new to me...
...I, for one, should be sorry at such an innovation- but there is much that can be said for it...
...In speaking about the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary he says, "Few persons in Europe believe other than that this Austrian seizure was part and parcel of the German policy of Drang nach Osten...
...That would contribute in keeping conditions normal and not in exaggerating business...
...I rejoice in the welcome intelligence of the formation of a Maine law alliance which I trust will be the means, under God, of destroying the fruitful source of so much crime...
...Gerrity's thesis that good modern art has spiritual, if not specifically Catholic, ends must be realized...
...For in all good modern painting, for instance, there is definite spirituality...
...Cram probably knows both these buildings, even if many of your readers do not...
...Boyd-Carpenter's remark that Germany soon afterward threatened Russia with war, must be corrected by the statement that Germany threatened that, if Russia made war on Austria, it would find Germany on Austria's side...
...TO the Editor:-Relating to Father Ryan's article, The Senate Looks at Unemployment, in The Commonweal of October 2, 1929, I fail to understand the remark that the possible good effect of the proposed "prosperity reserve" plan (the increasing public works in a time of industrial depression and the slackening them in very busy times) "would be offset to some extent by its evil influence in exaggerating business activity during a prosperous period, thereby causing excessive expansion and inevitably increasing the depth of the succeeding depression...
...In 1878 the Congress of Berlin commissioned Austria-Hungary with the administration of these provinces...
...Karl Herzfeld...
...Not necessarily as bad building materials (though we agree there are better, but not always easily available) but in some esoteric way as bad ethically...
...By the other way, when a business depression would come, then the slackened public works would be ready to be speeded up, thus giving employment to a number of workers left unemployed by the industry...
...What blinds Mr...
...Three hundred years ago at the time of call-it-what-you-will-Inquisition, Reformation, Jesuit and baroque art, the decadence or the French Academy-many of the best artists subserved her and they were no less than Rubens (e.g., his Antwerp Crucifixion) Van Dyck (e.g., his Kiss of Judas at the Prado) and Teniers in Flanders, Rembrandt in Holland, Le Brun in France, and almost any artist you please to mention from Spain and Italy...
...He calls concrete "obscene" (and Bessemer steel, an excellent article, is "absurdly named...
...Cram and other unsympathetic appraisers of the art of today is the quantity of hocus-pocus in a great deal of it...
...That the western Church and the eastern Church were not quite on "all fours" in this matter of "mothering the arts" I concede...
...indeed his judgment is apt to become musty when he turns it to other periods, such as the Romanesque and our own...
...we deplore them but, if we don't use them, we shall have no churches at all or else must worship in plain rectangular halls built by our own hands of stock brick or concrete blocks (and a jolly good thing too, say I...
...Therefore how could the plan exaggerate business when conditions are good and make the depression worse when conditions are bad, if it would function as a safety valve in both cases...
...Moreover we have introduced as a home activity the building of Christmas cribs...
...Education for boys and girls between the ages of seven and fifteen was free, but not compulsory...
...Bosnia and Herzegovina had been under Turkish rule, and as in other Turkish provinces with a Christian population, there had occurred a number of outbreaks...
...But, speaking in general, Mr...
...The four Bosnian regiments made an excellent showing in the world war...
...The Roman rite in a spoken language is not an impossibility...
...Boyd-Carpenter's remark is evident...
...COMMUNICATIONS MR...
...REFLECTIONS UPON ART St...
...They, at least, have not committed treason...
...2. Now as for my non sequitur...
...First of all, I did not write, and certainly never meant to imply, that we were "under no circumstances to try to recover some of the . . . spirit of the art of Catholic society...
...Possibly he finds in Gothic the religious and Catholic dignity of which he may deem ideal art to be compact, but surely Mr...
...At the time of the Austrian annexation in 1908 the only remaining token of Ottoman suzerainty was that the foreign consuls received their exequator from Turkey instead of Austria...
...A regenerated Ottoman empire might in time be strong enough to demand the evacuation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and to maintain, or extend, the nominal suzerainty over Bulgaria which the sultan exercised since 1878...
...This review, under the heading, One Hapsburg Heir, is by Mr...
...Clearly there were only two alternatives: First, the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which meant only the abolishment of a, legal fiction without changing anything in the actual status...
...The Church definitely legislates for the material and shape of vestments and for the sort of music to be used in church...
...Alexis B. Bertusi...
...4. There is no parallel between vestments or plain-chant and church buildings...
...Roumania, Syria and Hungary have them and the use of the vernacular is spreading among oriental Catholics in the near East...
...The only other alternative would have been to give back the provinces to Turkey, and I do not know of any great power in the world who would have done so...
...Cram regards concrete, steel and so forth, as bad...
...Rambusch, and to do so would, moreover, lay me open to the charge of indulging in that infantile proceeding of chucking a brick and then running away...
...James W. Lane...
...It did not discourage her from employing Titian, or Tintoretto, or El Greco...
...so far as they are possible under existing circumstances, the spirit and the principles-which do not involve the same materials or forms- are exactly what we want...
...or in our religious needs" (does he mean more reason and less emotion...
...I thought you might be interested in a letter written by the great temperance leader Father Mathew to the Reverend George W. Pepper as follows: Cork, January 14, 1854...
...Cram, Mr...
...Director General, Catholic Boys Brigade U. S. FATHER MATHEW ON PROHIBITION New York, N.Y...
...I think Mr...
...On the contrary...
...Copeland makes no bones about it...
...TO the Editor:-Returning from my vacation, I read in The Commonweal for August 21a review of The Balkan Pivot, by Charles R. Beard and George Radin...
...Why then does Mr...
...Moreover, the religion of the Hagia Sophia, of old Saint Peter's and of York Minster was the same and their services essentially the same-yet as buildings they are radically different...
...The independence of Bulgaria was proclaimed on the 5th...
...Cram does not like the church at Raincy...
...There was compulsory military service, as in most European countries...
...I have a painful notion that Mr...
...All classes and creeds were treated impartially...
...THE DEARTH OF RELIGIOUS CARDS New York, N. Y. TO the Editor:-In a communication entitled The Dearth of Religious Cards in The Commonweal of October 23, the writer refers to a statement that "there is no demand for religious cards...
...During this period life and property were rendered secure and great progress was achieved on the lines already indicated in creating an efficient civil service, harmonizing Moslem law with new enactments, promoting commerce, carrying out important public works and reorganizing the fiscal and educational systems...
...The construction of carriage roads, wholly neglected by the Turks, was carried out on a large scale by the Austrians...
...Mass was said in Gloucester lady-chapel and Catholics worshiped in Durham nave, but they are different kinds of building...
...It would have been necessary under the new regime to have elected Bosnian representatives to the Turkish Parliament and the Turkish Parliament would have made laws with validity in Bosnia and Herzegovina...
...I should like to add further that Mr...
...Accordingly, at the beginning of October, 1908, the Emperor Francis Joseph informed the powers signatory to the treaty of Berlin that the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the dual monarchy had become necessary, and this decision was formally announced in an imperial rescript dated the 7th of October...
...THE SENATE LOOKS AT UNEMPLOYMENT San Francisco, Cal...
...It seems to me that from this outline the incorrectness of the charge contained in Mr...
...Then, for reasons that no doubt are legion, this condition changed, and only artists of the quality of excellent copyists seem to have been employed...
...But it would be discourteous to neglect the letters of Mr...
...How well, if rightly approached, they could subserve the Church with their painting...
...Gerrity's article...
...Rev...
...Boyd-Car-penter...
...Alice Warren...
...but she lays down neither the shape of church buildings nor the material of which they are to be built...
...Against this sentence, I must strongly protest...
Vol. 11 • November 1929 • No. 2
