Many years ago I was discussing with Father M. a fairly obscure point of Catholic scholarship, and, rather out of my depth, asked him what Ronald Knox had had to say on the subject. ‘Ah, well’, he replied, ‘Ronnie Knox is of course hors de concours.’

And something slipshod in my mental French translation left me surprised at hearing Monsignor Knox spoken of as hors de combat! Later, amused at my mistake, I passed it on to Monsignor himself, thinking it would amuse him too; and ‘I expect I will be hors de combat next Wednesday’, he remarked; ‘I’m flying for the first time, out to Uganda.’

And I have since wondered what his mind did with that description of himself as hors de concours, for it was certainly by no visible act of diffidence that his comment had left it discarded on the floor. I was still to learn that this great prelate of modem times, this famous wit and scholar, was celled with humility like honey in the comb; an innate humility; he could no more keep it concealed than some people can conceal their innate arrogance. Yet by some spiritual poise he was likewise immune from having to supply those tiresome protestations of inferiority which Freud forgot to remove sharply into a wholly separate classification; true humility exists in its own air of freedom, and when we are in its presence perhaps we remark ‘there must be humility in the room’ as we might say ‘there must be violets in the room’. . .. But an inferiority complex is a miserable sandwich-man with boards front and back; and if their announcements are blatant, the person has an extrovert inferiority-complex: but if the sandwich boards get lugged about with their message turned inwards so that we cannot see what it is, they have an introvert inferiority-complex, just as tiresome.

It will have been noticed that the title of my paper is a timid one; even, it may be thought, excessively so. There are two reasons for this; and the first, which would alone, in my opinion, be a sufficient one, is that the questions raised by the phrase ‘Poetry and Belief’ are difficult ones, intimately involved in all discussion of the nature and function of poetry, and ones which have become especially problematic in our century. It is, I think, true enough to say that in the form in which they particularly concern us as Catholics, these questions begin to emerge fully with Matthew Arnold: they at any rate reach explicitness and are given very serious attention in the work of Dr I. A. Richards and Mr T. S. Eliot; without clear agreement being arrived at by those two critics—the most influential and, by and large, the most arresting and convincing critical theorists of our time.

If further reason for my timidity be thought necessary I shall only add that it is warranted by the way in which this paper has come about—and this I offer too as a declaration that what follows makes claim neither to scholarly exhaustiveness nor to formal completeness. I shall, in fact, be putting before you some questions rather than presenting you with any answers.

I have brought together five poems or passages from poems: and these you now have before you. They certainly raise the question of the place, the effect, of Belief (as we must understand it here), and show a significant variety, possibly a sufficient variety, of ways in which it may be raised.