I do not know if the conclusion that was reached at Teheran, now after three months still holds good : ‘We come here with hope and determination. We have been friends in fact, in spirit and in purpose.’ Nor do I know whether the British and American columnists who so solemnly proclaimed that the Moscow, Cairo and Teheran Conferences, had laid the foundations for the perpetual and peaceable direction by the Big Three or Four (leaving out of count all the other countries) of a future world order are to-day of the same mind. What has happened in these months is so significant and entails so many hypotheses as to the future of the world, that it challenges all the over-simple formulae which have nourished a superficial press.

Stalin is in the foreground. He has an active, volitive policy which starts from Moscow and arrives at Moscow. Without stressing historical comparisons too much, he can be considered as a Russian Napoleon, who is as much a Muscovite (a Muscovite of Georgia) as the Corsican was a Parisian. Such types bring to capital cities a certain provincial originality, which cuts them off from tradition, thus facilitating the developments of their inventive spirit. Just as Napoleon transformed the semi-anarchic democracy of the French Revolution, (already at its third phase), into a Directory and then into an Empire, while maintaining the symbols of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, so Stalin has transformed the Leninist Soviet regime into a politico-military dictatorship, while preserving the name and certain structures of Communism.

Stalin has dropped the Red International for a more concrete and profitable nationalism ; he has passed from persecution of the Orthodox Church to benevolent toleration ; he has restored a particularist trend to economic life, little by little bringing back private interest.

Provided we do not blind ourselves to its present defects, nor leave its undeveloped potentialities unexplored, our British Commonwealth system of regulating-international affairs can justly be regarded as an object lesson for those who will shape the peace. General Smuts has described it as ‘this greatest experiment in political organisation, this proudest political structure of time, this precedent and anticipation of what one hopes may be in store for human society in the years to come.’ On the other hand, Lionel Curtis, who shared with Smuts and others the task of creating the Union of South Africa, makes the following criticism in ‘Decision and Action ‘(Oxford University Press) :—

If we are wise, we shall study, with equal impartiality, these apparently conflicting but really complementary points of view. Curtis divides political systems into two kinds; organic (states such as Great Britain, federations such as the U.S.A.) and inorganic (confederations, alliances, leagues). The British Commonwealth he regards as a mixture of both, and cites Mr. Menzies of Australia to prove that its effective functioning is primarily due to some degree of hegemony exercised by the Mother country. His book demonstrates that inorganic systems are unstable and that as regards international coalitions for war purposes ‘history, when it comes to be written, always shows how the inorganic bond of alliance hastened defeat or delayed victory.’

Strictly, there is no such body as the Catholic Parents’ Association. The various parochial units may be linked with a central council, and, as in some dioceses, with a diocesan council, but in general each local association is self-contained, and has its parochial or district denomination. There is divergence in constitution and even in title, and that absolute uniformity is undesirable is evidenced by the declaration of the Bishops of England and Wales on 24th August last that ‘The Hierarchy have given full approval to the formation of Parochial and Diocesan Associations of Catholic Parents under the direction of the Bishops of the various dioceses. But they do not approve the formation of the National Federation of Catholic Parents’ Associations, nor of its appeal for funds.’

The Constitution approved for one English Archdiocese details the purpose of the Association thus:

• (a) To learn and teach the duties and rights of parents.

• (b) To promote and safeguard Catholic educational interests and the care of Catholic youth.

• (c) To encourage representation of Catholic parents on public educational bodies.

• (d) To encourage the practice of family prayers in every Catholic household of the parish.

This is a fourfold aim whose effectiveness will be in the efficient carrying out of the primary provision. The average Catholic, even if he or she has remembered the catechism teaching of younger days, is not so deeply versed in Catholic doctrine as to have clear notions on parental duties and rights in education. How many Catholics could answer correctly three elementary questions on them? The fact of State education, moreover, has familiarised nearly everybody with an almost Communistic conception of the State as the universal parent. It is the old story of an antiCatholic idea fraudulently winning assent as a principle through popular acceptance.

To assert that modern verse is needlessly obscure is not to range oneself alongside those who regard Kipling and Mr. Masefield as the standard by which their successors should’ infallibly be judged. Nor is it to be in the (position of the dear old don who, in the early ’thirties, interviewed me for a scholarship, which I did not obtain, at one of the Oxford colleges.

Your answers have so far been fairly satisfactory,’ he said, ‘but have you read any modern poetry?’

The name Eliot’ was trembling on my lips, and would have been uttered had he not bereft me temporarily of speech by adding : Tennyson or Swinburne, for example?’

To come nearer home, I do not share myself the contempt for the poetry pf the ‘Georgians’ that is so fashionable to-day. Gibson, Brooke, Abercrombie, Drinkwater, de la Mare, Blunden, Davies and the rest wrote excellent simple verse on simple subjects. The poets of the ’thirties, and even more, the poets writing since the war, keep to simple subjects, often extremely naive subjects, but wrap them up in a modern, fashionable ‘poetic diction’ which they claim to have been invented by Hopkins, Yeats, Pound, Eliot and Joyce. This claim needs looking into.

The Marxist poets in Britain fell, of course, between two stools. They tried to equate an ingenuous code of politics with the expression in verse of the complexities of the modern world. Their needless obscurity was intended to cover up the confusions they inevitably ran into. They styled themselves the followers of Eliot, until the elder poet (in the comic words of John Strachey) ‘encouraged no doubt by the 1922-9 period of capitalist recovery, left the despair of the Waste Land behind him and took up the position of a highly intellectual reactionary.’ Thenceforward, Mr. Eliot was a ‘pedant,’ to borrow a diatribe from Louis MacNeice.

Mr. Eliot’s criticism of Joyce has been of two kinds; moral and technical. Moral, in such phrases as ‘the most ethically orthodox of the more eminent men of my time ‘and ‘an extremely serious and improving writer,’ technical, as in the introductory note to the present selection, where the reader is told that ‘Stuart Gilbert’s Ulysses is the standard analysis of the structure of that work; and An Exagmination of ‘Work in Progress ... is a useful introduction to Finnegan’s Wake.’ In all cases a moral judgement in literary criticism is more valuable than a technical one because it is more inclusive. In criticism of Joyce a moral judgement is the only judgement because a technical judgement is not only irrelevant, it is misleading. It is misleading because it distracts from an attempt to reply to another, and a very different, moral judgement—D. H. Lawrence’s ‘My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is ! Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness,—what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new! ‘It distracts from a firm realization that Finnegan’s Wake is gibberish.

Finnegan’s Wake fails even in Mr. Eliot’s own minimal requirement of literature—‘to communicate before it is understood.’ The fact is so obvious that it is rarely stated. The function of an ‘introducer ‘of Joyce should not be to refer the reader to An Exagmination of Work in Progress but should be to explain to him how the change from the earlier to the later prose took place’. Such an explanation is contained in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in a passage which Mr. Eliot includes in his selection. Stephen is replying to Cranly, who has been questioning him why he left the Church : ‘Look here, Cranly, he said.