The gulf today between body and spirit, between material things and the praise of God, is widening at a pace and to an extent never known before. It would be very easy to despair. It would be very easy to despair of this civilisation of ours; very easy to despair of the future of our race; very easy to feel that, so far from marching triumphantly forward to a golden age, we are sinking rapidly into an abyss; very easy to feel that man is doomed because all the physical side, the material side of his life and his world must continue to drag him down and degrade him till the heavens are closed to him. But no; it is just at this very moment that the voice of the Church comes to him like a challenge : we are on the contrary to shout aloud our belief in the dignity and holiness of material things; we are to affirm again our faith and our hope in the future of man’s flesh. The woman who stands in the heavens is the mother of men; and her glory is the guarantee of theirs.

That is why the definition of our Lady’s Assumption is far from having a purely domestic interest or importance. The greatest definitions have always been defensive: defensive of some more central truth which would otherwise be in danger. But the Church is not merely concerned with the guarding and defending of her own children; she is concerned with the guarding and defending of the whole world.

‘The medieval divines’, I was reading, ‘strenuously resisted the profane philosophers who seemed to threaten the most cherished traditions of Christianity; however, the revolutionaries of yesterday are the respectabilities of tomorrow, and the aristotelean schoolmen themselves were to be the first to bear the brunt of the attack from the new scientific humanists, who...’—It was not the book, nor yet the chapter on Faith, Philosophy and Science, one would choose for reading on a wet afternoon, still less after the brown Windsor, mock cutlets with vapourish potatoes and khaki cabbage, topped by stewed pears and custard—all the Bishop and Mermaid at Barminster can rise to in these days. But it had to be reviewed. Still, I was not sorry for the distraction when three women were shown into the lounge.

They had that look of perennial middle age, of making for fifty but not a year beyond, presented by women who have never thought of marrying and who have occupied themselves with a routine without anxiety about a wage. Despite their differences, for one was stocky and bustling, the second vaguely rounded and languid, and the third rather angular and restrained, there was a family resemblance between them, elusive yet unmistakeable: the set of eyebrow or cheekbone perhaps, or a similar air of faint and well-bred insolence, the hint that they could never find themselves in circumstances to ask for permission. They might have been in their own drawing-room; they glanced at me with incurious interest as though I were of a piece with the leatherette armchair in which I was sunk.

Writing so soon after Gide’s death, one would like to remember only his charm, the music of his prose and, above all, the prayers addressed to God in Numquid et Tu. Yet the influence of such a writer does not cease with his life; as long as French is read the sinuous harmonies of that prose will ceaselessly convey a definite message.

That ‘message’ renders neutrality impossible. Gide, by subordinating a moral code to aesthetics, of which he declared it ‘a dependency’, raised fundamental questions which it would be inexcusable to evade. While he repudiated any wish to make ‘converts’, books are not published in a vacuum. Moreover the Journal reveals that, at times, Gide was fully conscious of the power of corruption which he wielded. In fact, if his basic postulate be accepted—the necessity of the full development of one’s individuality, unhampered by ethical considerations—a pagan moral code has been adopted. This invalidates the undoubtedly sincere advice which he gave to his readers to cast aside his book —to free themselves from his influence as well as from that of others.

While this fundamental clash between Gide’s ethic and that of the Christian is continually touched on by Mr Thomas in his book published just before the French writer’s death, it might be argued that, because of the chronological presentation and a certain, perhaps inevitable, lack of synthesis, the idea will be insufficiently clear to the ordinary reader, less familiar than Mr Thomas with the texts.

One of the ablest critics of contemporary art has distinguished two groups among the more abstract types of painting today. The one, deriving through cubism from Cézanne and Seurat, is characterised by this critic as intellectual, structural, architectonic, geometric, rectilinear and classical. The other, deriving from Gauguin through fauvisme, and especially Matisse, he defines as instinctive and emotional, organic or biomorphic, curvilinear and romantic.

The opposition of these two groups is the modem equivalent of the old opposition of the classical and the romantic or, to formulate the distinction in still more general terms, it might be said to represent the eternal distinction between the draughtsman painter and the colourist. It is to the former that the art of Mr de Maistre belongs. He is the leading exponent in this country of the later developments of cubism. His conventions are personal to himself, being dictated by his personal experiences, but his point of view is analogous to that shewn in recent work by the continental artists who created cubism.

Like theirs, Mr de Maistre’s pictures retain a relationship to natural appearances absent from the most extreme forms of contemporary abstract art. Mr de Maistre takes for his theme the emotional experience provoked by some event, real or imaginary, which has struck his imagination. The ceremony of the coronation, for example, has inspired a picture which he has named The Procession. Form and colour are his means of expression, so that :he forms and colours of the scene which has inspired him are of necessity intimately associated with the emotions which it has provoked.

Ezra Pound was born in the Middle West in 1885: he came to Europe in 1908: he was at the height of his fame in the ‘thirties with the publication of successive volumes of his title-less epic poem known as The Cantos: in 1945 he disappeared from the public eye. This is what happened. From the late ‘twenties Ezra Pound had been in sympathy with the régime in Italy, seeing in Mussolini a practical philosopher after his own heart, ‘ordering’, ‘building’, ‘draining swamps’, ‘renewing the empire’: a creative ruler comparable to his other heroes, Thomas Jefferson, Pietro-Leopoldo of Tuscany, Sigismondo Malatesta, and the Great Emperors and Divine Sages of ancient China. In 1939, having spent seventeen years in Italy, he returned to the United States to warn the American people against Roosevelt’s policy, unsuccessfully urging them to reject it before it led them into war. Back in Italy in 1940, but before Italy had entered the war, he began a series of broadcasts on Rome Radio against Roosevelt, and American ‘usurocracy’. After the declaration of war, he continued the broadcasts with increasing animus; was indicted as a traitor; in 1945 was taken into detention by the invading United States army, and imprisoned alone in a barbed- wire cage in a military prison at Pisa. In this cage, which according to reports available, offered no protection at all, he spent two months, being then sixty yean old, exposed to the variations of the Italian climate and to the ill-treatment of the negro guards who used to while away their time tormenting him with their bayonets.