Adramatic Critic, at whose feet the world sits every Sunday has lately announced the imminence of the great War Drama. The Napoleonic Wars waited for Hardy. Does this generation need a great war play to focus its war emotions, or to revive its war experiences? The best in this kind are but shadows : in our memories, in letters, in biographies we have reality. It is true that the unifying force may only be personal or egoistic, and that either of these may lack both greatness and permanence. But where the background is eternity, and the protagonist is man’s spirit, the interest can be neither petty nor ephemeral. There must be drama. The letters of Peter Dominic Dupouey were published last year by the Nouvelle Revue Francaise. The writer was a lapsed Catholic, who left the Church in the search of freedom and returned to it by natural reaction and the influence of a Catholic wife. The letters are addressed to her, and introduced by Andre Gide, a literary friend. In the Introduction, Gide quotes largely from Henri Ghéon, another friend, who is perhaps something over-literary and impressionable for English taste. But between them, they give the necessary background.

Dupouey had the advantage over many of us in that the war did not cut across either his profession or his values. As a naval lieutenant, he could only find it a test and a realisation. In the immediate event, he was dissatisfied with blockade and transport service in the Mediterranean, and, when opportunity offered, he volunteered for the Yser.

A very portly volume on Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition, by Rafael Sabatini, at the cost of twelve shillings and sixpence, has gone into its third edition. The publishers on the jacket of the book tell us that ‘it deals without bias and in a purely historical spirit with this phase of religious persecution.’ Certainly a book without bias dealing with the Inquisition must needs be written ‘in a purely historical spirit,’ and no doubt in time such a book will get written. But it is nonsense to speak of Mr, Rafael Sabatini as having already written it. You feel that he wants to be an historian, and that he is trying desperately hard to be without bias; but the result of his efforts is unhappy.

Of course, no one is biassed nowadays in favour of the Inquisition; so that Mr. Sabatini can be sure that he has it all his own way when he denounces its cruelty, its stupidity, its failure. Persecution has hardly ever been successful except to the persecuted, as we know in England in our own case: and Catholics who have suffered persecution at the hands of their countrymen in the past know enough of its folly to have little sympathy with the efforts of the Inquisition of Spain. Yet we have known also enough in our own time of the panic dread of German spies, of hostility to the Jews in many classes of society, of the American habit of applying torture to certain cases that fall under its police law, to be sure that the spirit that begat the Inquisition is alive, though normally very feebly alive, in all human nature.

Robert Keable is, in a sense, a literary enigma. Prior to the publication of Simon called Peter, which definitely established him as a leading: novelist, his claims to literary achievement amounted only to a small collection of missionary tales, of a combined Anglo-Catholic and spiritualistic flavour, in the more or less obscure pages of The Treasury. The reverential and almost priestly touch which pervades these stories is entirely absent from the novels which have brought him fame. And therein lies the enigma.

In the preface to his latest novel, Recompence, which is a sequel to Simon called Peter, Mr. Keable refers somewhat bitterly to the reception given to his first work by the religious press, although, he says, ‘it was written sincerely and simply as ever pen was set to paper.’ That may be,—but the assumption that he was a Catholic convert, made by his critics in the Anglican press, though untrue, was not unwarranted. Catholic critics, too, felt that his reverence and respect for their dogmas and practices savoured of impertinence, placed side by side with views of immorality all the more interesting in that they were unconventional. The secular press, without probing beneath the surface, welcomed the book as a piece of stark realism, an exposure of the degradation of moral values due to the war.

It seems inevitable that critics should identify authors with their principal characters and regard a novel as a more or less biographical work. Hence it appears that Mr. Keable is Peter Graham in Simon called Peter and Recompence, Chris in The Mother of all Living and Paul Kestern in Peradventure.