Hinsley dies, and almost hope for art

By IRIS CON LAY
SIR JOHN ROTHEN
STEIN, who continues his autobiography in Brave Day, Hideous Night (Hamish Hamilton, 42s.), had a great concern for the employment of the hest talent in the remaking of churches destroyed by enemy action.
In 1941 he outlined, at Campion Hall, a practical proposal for the creation of an advisory body by the Church—like the Fine Art Commission—consisting entirely of laymen who would be authorities on architecture, painting, sculpture, stained glass and the various crafts to tender advice to administrators of cathedrals and parish priests.
Cardinal Hinsley gave his enthusiastic encouragement and after Sir John's visit to him about the plan he wrote:
I was so delighted to hear your ideas and plans concerning church art. There are difficulties involved — taste, devotion, business. But I agree with you that we must stop cheap commercial stuff which is so lowering to the dignity of some of our churches.
I am not a puritan but 1 do love simplicity. For instance I cannot hear the multitude of figures and complexity of ornament in the Lady Chapel of Westminster Cathedral. I am not an artist and know
very little about art but I do think our cathedral would be more impressive without its costly marbles and mosaics.
I have suffered and had to pay for these convictions. 1 do not suppose I shall live to support action along the lines you have suggested to the Archbishop of Birmingham. But I shall let him and others know my convictions: we must reform our artistic work in our churches.
A month later Cardinal Hinssley died. The project almost died with him. Cardinal Griffin, his successor, who ordered St. Thomas More's pet monkey to be hacked off Eric Gill's altar carving in More Fisher chapel in Westminster, also dismayed many of us in the 1940s by ruling that this advisory body should not be recommended to the hierarchy. There was a storm of protest and the committee was revived.
The story of the "Tate Affair" which occupies the first half of the book is one of the most extraordinary of modern times. If it had happened in the Middle Ages it would have been said that Sir John had been the victim of evil spirits, and in the way the saints (for wholly different reasons) were haunted by horrid apparitions and attacked by ghostly buffetings, so he appears to have been set on by diabolically inspired people whose intention was to hound him from from his directorship of the Tate Gallery.
The unravelling of the puzzle as it is here presented is sometimes difficult to follow, but no doubt Sir John's nightmare experience, prolonged at least two years, must have been full of confusion and the memory of it now is even more cloudy. It is doubtful, though, if a clearer picture will ever emerge — the chief protagonist, Le Roux Smith Le Roux being dead, but the best summing up was made by Lionel Robbins who described it all as "a case of collective madness".
The greatest mystery of all to my mind is how the work ever got done while this madness seized up the Director, his staff and the Trustees. Yet it did and out of it emerged the present highly successful Tate of today
quite one of the leading and most progressive galleries in the world. Sir John, whatever his experiences, can at least now look back on that splendid achievement and know that he could not have a better or more public vindication of his life's work.
So much for Hideous Night. Brave Day is full of happiness and full of hazards. Fire-watching in the gallery and its destruction were heartrending enough, but through these experiences Sir John sailed serenely. Nothing was so unkind as main's ingratitude.