Transition and decadence are terms that are often applied to the literature of our time. It all depends on the sense in which we use them. Properly understood both, I think, can fairly be used to describe certain tendencies that belong to modern literature in general and to our own age in particular. There is a widespread feeling that we are in the process of changing from one age to another, that we are in fact on the threshold of a New Age. This may be true, but that the signs of the coming spiritual revival are to be found in the works of contemporary writers is an assumption that we are scarcely justified in making. On the contrary, there is abundant evidence to show that contemporary art belongs not to the beginning of a new age but to the end of an old one. That we seem to be on the verge of spiritual collapse is certainly no guarantee that immediate regeneration will follow.

During the Middle Ages no two works were more popular than the City of God and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. To the former Charlemagne listened at meals : ‘Inter caenandum aut aliquod acroama aut lectorum audiebat .... Delectabatur et libris Sancti Augustini praecipueque his qui De Civitate Dei praetitulati sunt.’ A generation later Alfred in England translated the Consolation, ranking it together with the Regula Pastoralis and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History as a fitting instrument for the education of his people. Already Boethius had coloured the great Anglo-Saxon secular epic Beowulf with the influence of his thought, just as in later years Chaucer interpreted Boccaccio with the insight of the Consolation, tinting the Italian’s realism with the compassion that springs from that bond uniting God and man, alternus amor. To Boethius, introducing Aristotle to Western Europe, scholasticism is as much indebted as to the Arab commentators. For if Averroes and Avicenna led Albert the Great and Aquinas to Aristotelian nietaphysics it was Boethius who had provided the basis of scientific thought in translating into Latin the Organon and annotating in the style of Themistius the Isagoge of Porphyry. Through Cassiodorus again he established the ratio studiorum, the trivium and quadrivium, which remained substantially unchanged until the seventeenth century. To Dante he is the eighth light, of the company of St. Thomas and Richard of St. Victor, ‘si trovan molte gioie care e belle tanto che non si posson trar del regno!’ Boethius has fallen into an obscurity that on all counts is undeserved.

One of the greatest obstacles that confronts the Fascist Movement in Britain to-day is the opposition of the British public to its arch-enemy. Because Communism is a ‘totalitarian’ doctrine and it is also the very essence of Fascism that ‘a Kingdom divided against itself cannot stand’ the two are lumped together as both standing for a tyrannous ‘dictatorship’ over the citizen by an all-powerful State, extraneous to himself and assumed to be coercive of his will. Nothing could be more unjust to Fascism.

The Fascist conception of the State is not of a thing extraneous to the citizen. To the Fascist the State is himself ‘ with a plus.’ As a man—if he is fit to have one—regards his family, or a soldier—if he be worthy of the name—his regiment, or a footballer—if he is fit to be in it—his team, so, in the Fascist conception, must the citizen—if he is worthy to be accounted as such—regard his country. Thus a man works for his family, which includes himself, a footballer plays for his team, which includes himself, a soldier fights for his regiment, which includes himself, and a citizen must work, play or fight for his country, which includes his family, his team, his regiment and himself. This is the corporate spirit which is Fascism, in contradistinction to the individualistic spirit of ‘liberalism,’ which regards the association as to be valued and worked for by the individual only in so far as it serves his individual ends—the doctrine of ‘enlightened self-interest'—and its natural outcome in the ‘class war ‘of Communism.

‘IN perpetual quiet, Oxford, I believe, is the only city that resembles Rome,’ wrote Aubrey de Vere in the Spring of 1839, words that sound strangely in 1933. Even the Rome of Leo XIII was strangely noisy to those who remembered the dignified peaceful Rome of Pius IX before 20th September, 1870. All artists, many of them foreigners and Protestants, deplored and denounced the change that followed the invasion, among them Augustus Hare, Ruskin, and countless others, including Gregorovius, who hated the Temporal Power and yet thus scathed, in a letter of 1885, its destroyers.

‘The violent transformation which Rome has undergone affords me no pleasure; the city appears to me like a carpet of ancient date, which during the process of beating goes to pieces amid clouds of dust. All the traces of my past life have been obliterated, destroyed, and built over; and the majestic city of former days has been superseded by the tumult of modern life, which is still seeking definite shape, but will hardly succeed in attaining it for a generation to come.’