So much of what was once held to have been ‘re-born’ about the year 1450 has since been shown to have been lustily alive in earlier generations that as a result historians are reluctant to attribute any notable changes at all to the period of the Renaissance. It is useful to be reminded by Professor Mattingly of an institution—permanent diplomatic representation—that began and rose to something like its full height between the years 1450 and 1550.

This book is not only about a formative period in the history of diplomacy, but provides a valuable contribution to one of the most fruitful of recent approaches to the past—the study of international relations. The purpose of this study is threefold; to question the motives which led countries to be concerned with one another, to describe the means they employed to get in touch and to negotiate, and lastly to suggest the background of shared ideas against which negotiations .proceeded: ideas derived from the practice of chivalry, which had provided something like an universal gentleman’s code of what might and what might not be done in time of war, the study of civil law, and the continuing pressure of Christian morality formalized in the canons of the Church—three elements which did much to compensate for the lack of formal International Law.

Catholics have been hearing, during recent months, of the prospect of something like a crisis in the Church of England, and even of the possibility of a schism. The trouble has arisen from the anxiety, mainly of Anglo-Catholics, caused by the growing desire amongst Anglicans in general for the acceptance in full communion, as soon as may be, of the newly constituted Church of South India. Most Anglicans, and even many Anglo-Catholics among them, would be ready to extend to this venture the completest possible recognition compatible with maintaining the unity of Anglicanism as a whole. The anxiety of Anglo-Catholics arises from doubts as to how far this may itself be compatible with the integrity of their own particular principles of Faith and Order, which they hold to be an essential element in the Anglican contribution to work for unity.

Any understanding of what all this means, in the context of ecumenical ideas, and that of course is its main interest for Catholics, depends first of all upon a knowledge of what the so-called South India scheme involves, and secondly, less easily attained, upon the understanding of what Anglo-Catholics mean by the maintenance of Catholic Faith and Order in the Church of England, and of the fears they entertain of its infringement by too hasty a recognition of the Church of South India, as it now is in its formative stage.

Every creative writer worth our consideration, every writer who can be called, in the wide eighteenth-century use of the term, a poet, is a victim: a man given over to an obsession. . . . The obsession is perhaps most easily detected in the symbols a writer uses.’ These words written by Graham Greene in a review of Walter De la Mare’s short stories are illuminating in a study of Mr Greene’s own work, and in this brief paper I want to use them as a central point of reference, in attempting to show what is meant by calling Mr Greene’s work ‘poetic’. In a sense, my purpose is pre-critical since its emphasis falls on description rather than appraisal. Obviously, these are simply terms of convenience, and can never be exclusive of each other, but they serve to indicate an emphasis. Where Mr Greene’s work has been concerned, critical arrows have so easily felt the gravitational pull of moral and theological forces that the intended target has remained strangely untouched. This paper, flighted with a literary observation, tries to maintain direction by continually keeping in sight the idea that Graham Greene is a novelist and therefore the target primarily of the literary critic.