We read in the Acts of the Apostles (xv, 23-29) :

As the war now proceeds through stages that can, without undue optimism, be considered decisive, we become conscious of anxieties, tears, and even hopes, which, though always looming in the background of our thoughts, have been obscured by the very uncertainty of the war itself. We are all uneasy about the future of Europe. But we cannot postpone the declaration of our uneasiness until the last shot has been fired. Silence now would be imprudent for many reasons, and especially because it is certain that the end of hostilities will be the signal for an immediate outburst of bitter and passionate discussions between the partisans of the different political and economic systems that stand ready to compete for our support. Therefore, before we come to the parting of the ways, each of us owes it to himself to enter into his own mind and sort out his own ideas. Unless we do this, our ideas are always confused, and con-, fusion is always a sign of latent and unsuspected contradictions; until these are cleared away we are in no position to fight for or against anything.

In our opinion Europe is about to become the theatre of still another war, bloodless we hope, between two parties not yet aligned against one another : the one supporting a new order, and eager to profit by the ravages of the present war to build it; the other zealous to preserve in continuity the spiritual, political, or economic life ol the Old World. This is a general view, and does not ignore the intermediate shades of difference that may help to absorb something of the shock between extremes.

On the last page of their classical history of the English Law, Pollock and Maitland wrote these words : ‘The men who were gathered at Westminster round Patteshull and Raleigh and Bracton (in the thirteenth century) were penning writs that would run in the name of kingless commonwealths on the other shore of the Atlantic Ocean. They were making right and wrong for us and for our children.

The rules of right and wrong that were framed by these prelates and judges of the Middle Age constitute the Common Law of England, a system of law that rules not only England (and Ireland), but also the Dominions of Canada and Australia and New Zealand and (in great measure) India and most of the colonies and possessions of the Crown. The Common Law rules also ‘those kingless commonwealths on the other shore ol the Atlantic Ocean,’ the states of the American Union, with the single exception of Louisiana.

The Common Law is thus one of the two great systems of Law and of legal tradition by which the world was governed before the war. The other system is the system and tradition of the Roman Law, which governed the great continental countries of Europe and their non-European dependencies. The Roman Law has a history of twenty-five centuries.. It was accordingly pagan in origin. It reflected what Lord Acton has called the vice of the classical state : it was Church and State in one. Divine honours were paid to the Emperor. And the law recognised or drew a sharp distinction between free man and slave; and between citizen and stranger.

An age which applauds the specialist and the genius will not acknowledge the master. Applause, we might say, costs nothing whereas the master is there to enforce a responsibility. And if modern man pays with a handclap all the debt he acknowledges to genius, from the master he must submit to learn a truth.

Dr. Coomaraswamy is a master in the philosophy of art, as his great pupil, Eric Gill, was a master in stone carving and letter cutting. As a master he embodies in his work the whole positive weight of traditional truth, and in acknowledging him we affirm the spiritual foundations of our civilization.

If this were a tribute merely to the man, to the person, Ananda Coomaraswamy, it would be no more than flattery; but Dr. Coomaraswamy’s position is clearly indicated in an incisive answer to critics printed among the present collection of essays : ‘If I assert . . ., etc., ... I am not necessarily wrong merely because this position was “earlier” maintained by Plato and in the Bhagavad Gita . . . The sooner mv critics realise .... that I am not out to express any views, opinion or philosophy of my “ own,” the sooner will they find out what I am talking about.’ For if the principles he argues and explains are common to Europe and the East, to Aquinas and (implicitly) to all save the essentially commercial eras of human civilisation : to Maori portraiture and the Neolithic cave drawings no less than to Chartres : it is precisely because Dr. Coomaraswamy has not invented them. Neither is the basis of such agreement sought in any type of common-denominator doctrine, humanist or modernist.

The theory of translation is still so undeveloped that any serious study of it is bound to deserve attention. This would be so if the writer touched no more than a few familiar languages; when his experience ranges from East to West and from ancient to modern centuries, the interest is correspondingly greater. Mr. Bates’s new hook is therefore particularly welcome, though in the matter of principles he is less explicit than one could wish, his method through the greater part of the book being to present different modern versions of the same passage (sometimes two, sometimes as many as five) and to leave the reader to draw conclusions. What follows is partly a commentary on Mr. Bates’s positive statements, partly a record of personal conclusions from the material provided. His own endeavour is ‘to provoke thought without unduly provoking the reader’; mine is the same.

In his opening pages Mr. Bates stresses the value of translation as a means to international understanding; few would dispute this, but few again have ever visualised the matter practically. Hence there is aptness in the detailed account of translation in modern Italy, an account which in its knowledge and sympathy is itself an excellent preamble to the renewal of a broken friendship. It is good to find justice done to the intellectual qualities of the Italians and recognition paid to the high standards of scholarship which distinguish much ‘popularisation ‘of Greek and Latin classics. We are given, moreover, an interesting cross-section of Italian opinion (official and unofficial) on the political and cultural significance of translation—a question of particular importance in Italy since so much is translated into Italian and so little out of it. Political propaganda apart, one would welcome signs of a similar concern in this country.