The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
– The Merchant of Venice, 5.1.81-8

If music be the food of love, play on …
– Twelfth Night, 1.1.1.

I wonder what William Shakespeare would have thought of Ronald Knox. This odd thought was prompted by an anecdote about the two prominent converts Maurice Baring and Ronald Knox that I came across last night when browsing through Frank Sheed’s The Church and I. It concerns their relative response to the beauties of music. Here’s Sheed on Baring and Knox:

I have never found two converts alike …. Consider Maurice Baring – in love with melody, learning the violin almost before he could walk, as a small child leaning out of the window “the better to absorb the whole perfection of a lark’s song”. Now think of Ronald Knox, who could not carry a tune sufficiently to sing High Mass. Once he and I were walking to the railway station in Durham. We passed a brass band. He remarked, “Of course good music is better than bad music. But the best music is inferior to silence.”

What are we to make of Ronald Knox’s singular blindness or deafness to the beauty of music? Is he, as Shakespeare might suggest in his sideswipe against the killjoy Puritans, fit only for treasons, stratagems and spoils? Are his affections as dark as Hell? Can he be trusted?

Well, perhaps only an aesthetic purist would condemn Knox for his deafness to the beauty of music, and perhaps aesthetic purists are not much better than ascetic puritans. It is, however, odd that a man of Knox’s ability should be so out of sympathy with an important part of the beauty of God’s Creation. And is it really licit to believe that silence is better than the most beautiful music? Isn’t a preference for the absence of music an acceptance of a negation that is almost akin to nihilism? Let’s remember in this context that even monks do not seek the absence of music in the absolute sense of preferring silence. Cloisters are not made for silence but for birdsong.

In any event, I have no desire to say anything negative about the great convert, Ronald Knox, whose own singular contribution to the Catholic Revival provided its own linguistic and rational “music” to the convert-inspired symphony of praise which that Revival represented in the twentieth century. I would say, however, that Sheed’s anecdote has made it easier for me to understand why I have always preferred the music of Maurice Baring’s writing to the relative flatness of Knox’s literary style. I would rather re-read the great novels of Baring, such as C, or Cat’s Cradle, or Robert Peckham, than return to the various works of Knox that I have read in the past. If music be the food of love, play on …