The propaganda of intellectual Marxism in England is the chief concern of this article. All Marxism is intellectual in the sense of being strictly doctrinal, not sentimental, though it may exploit sentiment; and not merely ‘practical’ in the sense of valuing immediate ameliorations regardless of their relation to a general scheme and a final goal. The Communist Party of Great Britain, recruited though its membership is mainly from very unintellectual unemployed, is extraordinarily doctrinaire in its attitude to the matters on which it has to frame practical policies. This is as evident from the Daily Worker written for the crowd, as from the Labour Monthly, which aims to be philosophical. These two publications officially represent the C.P.G.B. and the Third International, and their Marxian orthodoxy must be taken to be indisputable. The National Council of Labour Colleges is also professedly Marxist, its educational reach is probably wider than that of the official Communist organizations, and if we consider it, as we justly may, as a continuation of the defunct Central Labour College, founded before the War, it is older than the C.P.G.B. and the Third International. It would be absurd for an outsider to attempt to adjudicate on disputed questions of Marxian orthodoxy, yet it can be said that the National Council of Labour Colleges, related as it is to the Labour Party and the trade unions, is not so exclusively Marxist as those bodies that frankly accept the leadership of Moscow.

Our only English Dictator, Cromwell, has suffered from being sandwiched between a martyred and a merry monarch. And his rule of the Saints was not more acceptable to Cromwell’s contemporaries than his memory has been to us. But to-day, confronted by the prospect of everlasting government, not by Dictators, but Cunctators, we are changing front and on all sides above the click of knitting needles, the clink of port-glass or the clank of trucks, hear the cry: ‘We want a Mussolini.’

Rather more than a century ago, our attitude to the great revolutionary Corsican was to make a bogey of him: ‘Boney will get you.’ Then we opposed foreign political revolutions while inaugurating our own more fundamental Industrial one; to-day we admire the foreigners’ polity and only fight shy of it because it may involve a new economic system also. We cannot help thinking that we might like the Soviets no more than the Saints.

My interest in the Soviet became active when, after a course in the art of pantomime, one of my pupils was asked to demonstrate my technique for the American section of the M.O.R.T.(which I believe to stand for Moscow Olympiad of the Revolutionary Theatre). It is obvious that the Soviet-minded in New York, ‘where one of the strongest dramatic councils exists,’ where also there are so many languages spoken, would like to be acquainted with a wordless drama. We reluctantly decided against the proposal. I say ‘reluctantly’ because I confess to sharing most of the Communist’s views with regard to the existing theatre, and even a few of his ideals for a future stage. I cannot disagree with his condemnation of ‘the revue of the bourgeois theatre distinguished for its extreme banality, absolute absence of political coherence, abundance of triviality, pomposity and out-and-out pornography.’ And not only citizens of U.S.S.R. might endorse the following: ‘The broad masses of workers and peasants, crushed by political and economic oppression, did not know the theatre, and when they did receive some crumbs of scenic art, it was perverted and vulgar . . . Inartistic, in the great majority of cases, and almost always devoid of ideas, offered for sale to the mercantile petty bourgeoisie, under the influence of uncultured impressarios and other business men of ill repute, the ordinary theatre presented a pitiful spectacle.'

Twelve or thirteen years ago, Alice Meynell introduced me to Mr. Frederick Page in her drawing-room at Granville Place, and we talked about Patmore. He sent me Patmore’s Courage in Politics afterwards, as a memento of that talk. In those days one met fewer devout students of this English and Catholic philosopher and poet. I, ever since, have been waiting for the book on Patmore which Mr. Page was already planning.

It has at last been published: Patmore : a Study in Poetry. (Oxford University Press).

The nervous and just prose in which it is written strikes one as being, in itself, homage to Mrs. Meynell, from one who, for more than three dozen years, has known her standards of accuracy and lucidity. But in the Acknowledgments there is a compliment superb, austere and delicate enough to become her. ‘Through Patmore,’ he writes, ‘I became a pupil of Alice Meynell, and our love for him brought me her friendship. That in the following pages I mention her name almost always only to differ from her slightly, is to be ascribed to that vigilance, that care for justice, which, more than from anyone else, and almost more than anything else, I learned from her. If I have said anything to which she would not consent, then I have said what is not true.’

I should like to think, as I handle this lean and well-considered book, that it is only a first slice of the contribution Mr. Page is ready to make to Patmoreana.