For Ruskin was not merely everything that is best, both To hear him recite poetry

unless his own mind be diseased, can derive from the Bible any feeling for what is loathsome except loathing. Ruskin's charge against the Grotesque Renaissance is that it delights in the low, the degraded, and the corrupt. The teeth in the head on Santa Maria Formosa are decayed, and I suppose M. Zola would say, 'Why not? teeth do decay.' Ruskin himself was full of admiration for what he called the noble grotesque, as seen in Dante, in Spenser, and in Albert Dürer. But the base grotesque, he maintains, has in it no horror, no nature, and no mercy. It rejoices in iniquity, and exists only to slander. Although this language is characteristically strong, it is not a bit too strong for the occasion and the subject. It was written at the height of Mr. Ruskin's powers, before the commencement of that strange, subtle malady which impaired his reasoning faculty even before it brought about his seclusion from the world. If it concerned only ugly heads on the bridges and church towers of Venice, it would not be of much permanent value. But the base grotesque is not confined to Venice, to sculpture, nor to the eighteenth century. I believe that the influence of Ruskin's best writing, of what he wrote in middle life, of his three great books, in fact, is destined to endure. It is probably as much read now as it ever was, and the circle of its readers is likely to be much increased when the copyright expires. anart-critic.' He was familiar with in ancient and in modern literature. gave one a new idea of what poetry was. There is a base grotesque in literature as well as in architecture, and the French have no monopoly of it. Ruskin could admire the > noble grotesque in Dickens. He was incapable of appreciating George Eliot, whose characters he somewhere likens to the sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus. There was nothing grotesque in her books. Ruskin had many personal prejudices, and they have to be removed out of the way before we can get the full value of his teaching. The grotesque without horror or nature or pity is a very low type indeed. Even in such poems as Barrack Room Ballads there is nature. Even in such plays as Mrs. Warren's Profession there is horror, though of a very squalid kind. Neither Mr. Rudyard Kipling nor Mr. Bernard Shaw is habitually grotesque. Few can be more eloquent than Mr. Kipling, still fewer have more humour than Mr. Shaw. But in both of them there is an apparent delight in depicting ugly things because they are ugly, though in Mr. Shaw it may be mere bravado, and in Mr. Kipling an affectation of manliness. Both perhaps have in them something of Leech's immortal schoolboy, who only wished his mother knew how wicked he was.' So, too, Justice Shallow: 'I may say to you, we knew where the bona-robas were, and had the best of them at commandment.' There is everything in Shakespeare, except the purposelessly

ugly and the needlessly vile. Ruskin, who knew his Shakespeare almost as well as he knew his Turner, points out that the language of Iago, witty and amusing as it is, betrays the baseness of his mind. No doubt Ruskin was something of a prude, though he could heartily admire Aristophanes, and even Byron. But the base grotesque, such as

or

Come where the booze is cheaper,
Come where the pints hold more,

I've a head like a concertina,
I've a tongue like a button-stick,
I've a mouth like a cold potato,
And I'm more than a little sick,

can be condemned on literary grounds without having recourse to morality.

The delectable ditty called 'Cells,' from which I have already quoted a precious couplet, comprises also this eloquent quatrain :

I left my cap in a public-house, my boots in the public road,

And the Lord knows where, and I don't care, my belt and my tunic goed; They'll stop my pay, they'll cut away the stripes I used to wear,

But I left my mark on the Corp'ral's face, and I think he'll keep it there.

The exquisite humour with its delicate play upon words must appeal to every cultivated reader, and nobody can deny that the incidents are 'true to life.' Is the picture true to art? The least fastidious audience would hardly care to see a man sick on the stage, which would be the spectacular counterpart of this 'poem,' even if a real pair of boots appeared upon a road in the background. The base grotesque is a form of eccentricity which one need not be an austere moralist to dislike. A crapulous and impenitent soldier, even if he has a wife and family, does not move either compassion or interest. 'Porphyria's Lover,' when it first appeared in Bells and Pomegranates, was named 'In a Madhouse Cell.' It is a terrible and tragic story, a story of murder. But it is dignified, it is impressive, it purges the passions'; there are no nasty details. Two great men of the last century contributed to the poetry of war. The 'Charge of the Light Brigade' is familiar to every schoolboy. But there are at least two poems by Sir Francis Doyle-the 'Return of the Guards' and the Private of the Buffs'-which I should put above it.

Then from their place of ancient glory,

All sheathed in shining brass,
Three hundred men, of the Grecian glen,
Marched down to see them pass.

And the long-silent flutes of Sparta
Poured haughty welcome forth,
Stern hymns to crown, with just renown,
Her brethren of the North.

Those noble and beautiful stanzas are from the 'Return of the Guards.' The following is from the 'Private of the Buffs,' who was killed because he would not perform the kotow to the Chinese :

Last night, among his fellow roughs,

He jested, quaffed, and swore,
A drunken private of the Buffs,
Who never looked before.

To-day, beneath the foeman's frown,
He stands in Elgin's place,
Ambassador from Britain's crown,
And type of all her race.

One cannot read those lines without feeling first that they are true poetry, and secondly that war has an aspect of heroic dignity and splendour. Now turn to Mr. Kipling and the two types of grotesque :

Then 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an' the missus and the kid.
Our order was to break you, an' of course we went and did.

We sloshed you with Martinis, an' it wasn't hardly fair,

But for all the odds agin you, Fuzzy-Wuz, you broke the square.
'Fuzzy-Wuzzy?'

That is the grotesque with an element of generosity and nobility in it.

In 'Gentlemen-Rankers' we have the grotesque without a redeeming feature:

We're poor little lambs who've lost our way,

Baa! Baa! Baa!

We're little black sheep who've gone astray,

Baa-aa-aa!

Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,

Damned from here to Eternity.

God ha' mercy on such as we,

Baa! Yah! Bah!

Such, with its scarcely human termination, is the unrestrained development of the base grotesque, of eccentricity from which art has disappeared.

HERBERT PAUL.

THE

DEMAND FOR A CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY

THE population of Ireland may be taken to be three-fourths Catholic and one-fourth non-Catholic, using the word 'Catholic' here and elsewhere throughout this article to mean Roman Catholic. As, however, we are dealing with University education, it is necessary to bear in mind that the excess of Catholics consists of agricultural labourers, other labourers, and small farmers, since in the other classes of the community non-Catholics equal or outnumber the Catholics; and it has further to be noted that the higher we rise in the industrial, the professional, or the social scale the greater becomes the preponderance of non-Catholics to Catholics. This state of things has sometimes been epitomised by saying that while the muscle of Ireland is predominantly Catholic, its mind is predominantly Protestant.

It is for this community that we have to consider the best type of University education, an inquiry which is one branch of what has been called the Irish Education question. Now no investigation of a difficult problem, whether in science or in practical life, is a genuine investigation, nor can it be expected to lead to correct results, unless it includes a survey of, and an adequate allowance for, whatever are in reality the actual factors that mainly influence that problem. Accordingly it is not possible for any person to understand what has been called the Irish Education question in any of its branches unless he make himself in some degree acquainted with aims that relate primarily to countries outside Ireland, but which have nevertheless for half a century at every turn largely determined the attitude and aspirations of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in reference to public expenditure for education in Ireland.

Chief among these is the urgent demand of the Roman Catholic Church in many countries for a very large supply of clever Irish lads to recruit their priesthood. This is because Ireland supplies the recruits not only for the priesthood of Ireland, but also most of those

for Great Britain, the United States, Australia, Upper Canada, South Africa, and a multitude of foreign stations-in fact, for every place over the globe where English is either the only or the preponderating European language spoken. There are about 3,000 priests in Ireland, and the aggregate number of Irish priests in those other countries must be several times as many, so that the total number of recruits required annually is great.

Students preparing for the priesthood of the Irish branch of the Church are educated at St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, mainly out of the public funds conveyed to that College at the time of the disendowment of the Irish Protestant Episcopal Church. But the authorities of the Catholic Church have hitherto been unable to draw upon public funds for the great expense of feeding, housing, clothing, and teaching lads, who are mostly peasant lads, in the numberless ecclesiastical seminaries in Ireland which prepare for the foreign missions,' or at the University of Louvain, in Spanish or Portuguese seminaries, in the Irish College at Paris, the Irish College at Rome, or wherever else Irish young men are both preparing for the priesthood and acquiring some European language which will be of use to them in the country to which they are to be sent. The cost of this great ecclesiastical work has to be largely met out of contributions from abroad, and it would be very convenient to transfer the burden to the public purse.

There seems to be no other English-speaking population from which this disproportionately large supply of priests can be obtained, not even from emigrants in America or Australia. Nowhere but in Ireland has the tone of feeling been fostered with sufficient success, which leads an Irish peasant and his acquaintances to think it a high honour to him if his son, his brother, or other near relative is a priest. To keep up this feeling in Ireland in the face of its decadence elsewhere, and to crush any competition, such as that of the Model Schools,' which would tend to divert the cleverer Irish lads towards secular pursuits, are two aims that have been conspicuous in the educational policy of the hierarchy for several decades.

But it was not always so. Formerly the Irish branch of the Catholic Church enjoyed liberties of which it has since been deprived by the 'Congregations' at Rome; and it was then predominantly domestic in its aims. The desire of its prelates was to bring about what, in their opinion, would most benefit their own fellow-countrymen; and they had not yet been brought, in the degree that their successors now are, under foreign influence. It becomes, then, of importance to ascertain what they put forward as the best University system for Ireland at the time when their judgment was not warped from abroad so much as it now is.

Most instructive light upon this point is afforded by the evidence