To read modern lion-catholic philosophy at the present day one would really think that the world was presented to us ‘on approval,’ to such an extent does the conception of Value seem to dominate the discussions. Mr. C. E. M. Joad in the Spectator of October 6th last, remarks that four out of the five specifically philosophical books reviewed by him since the beginning of the year were to do with some theory of ‘Value. Dean Inge notices the fact in his God and the Astronomers, and has a whole chapter on the World of Values; while Windleband says frankly that what is expected from philosophy to-day is not so much a ‘theoretical scheme of the world. . (but) . .reflection on those permanent values which have their foundation in a higher spiritual reality, above the changing interests of the times.'

One would like to know by what authority Philosophy abandons its proper function so as to substitute appreciation for apprehension, and turn Metaphysics into a mood —be it optimistic or pessimistic. We will, however, make some attempt to discover why this strange, non-rational, man-centred change has come over non-catholic thinking.

In a letter to Canon Brohée, President of the Centre Catholique d’Action Cinématographique, His Holiness Pope Pius XI wrote, April 25th, 1934:

On reading this letter the loyal Catholic might excusably heave a sigh of relief. Owing to the American Boycott much has been said for and against the Cinema. Some people have deplored its influence and condemned it as a medium; others have accepted it, but entirely misunderstood its power and therefore its danger; some of us have even ventured to make films . . . But amid this mass of conflicting opinion, one thing is now clear, that the Holy Father not only encourages the use of the Cinema, but considers that it is our duty to use it in the Apostolate. This in itself is a great step forward, and will relieve many a dubious conscience.

My interest in the Soviet became active when, after a course in the art of pantomime, one of my pupils was asked to demonstrate my technique for the American section of the M.O.R.T.(which I believe to stand for Moscow Olympiad of the Revolutionary Theatre). It is obvious that the Soviet-minded in New York, ‘where one of the strongest dramatic councils exists,’ where also there are so many languages spoken, would like to be acquainted with a wordless drama. We reluctantly decided against the proposal. I say ‘reluctantly’ because I confess to sharing most of the Communist’s views with regard to the existing theatre, and even a few of his ideals for a future stage. I cannot disagree with his condemnation of ‘the revue of the bourgeois theatre distinguished for its extreme banality, absolute absence of political coherence, abundance of triviality, pomposity and out-and-out pornography.’ And not only citizens of U.S.S.R. might endorse the following: ‘The broad masses of workers and peasants, crushed by political and economic oppression, did not know the theatre, and when they did receive some crumbs of scenic art, it was perverted and vulgar . . . Inartistic, in the great majority of cases, and almost always devoid of ideas, offered for sale to the mercantile petty bourgeoisie, under the influence of uncultured impressarios and other business men of ill repute, the ordinary theatre presented a pitiful spectacle.'

Twelve or thirteen years ago, Alice Meynell introduced me to Mr. Frederick Page in her drawing-room at Granville Place, and we talked about Patmore. He sent me Patmore’s Courage in Politics afterwards, as a memento of that talk. In those days one met fewer devout students of this English and Catholic philosopher and poet. I, ever since, have been waiting for the book on Patmore which Mr. Page was already planning.

It has at last been published: Patmore : a Study in Poetry. (Oxford University Press).

The nervous and just prose in which it is written strikes one as being, in itself, homage to Mrs. Meynell, from one who, for more than three dozen years, has known her standards of accuracy and lucidity. But in the Acknowledgments there is a compliment superb, austere and delicate enough to become her. ‘Through Patmore,’ he writes, ‘I became a pupil of Alice Meynell, and our love for him brought me her friendship. That in the following pages I mention her name almost always only to differ from her slightly, is to be ascribed to that vigilance, that care for justice, which, more than from anyone else, and almost more than anything else, I learned from her. If I have said anything to which she would not consent, then I have said what is not true.’

I should like to think, as I handle this lean and well-considered book, that it is only a first slice of the contribution Mr. Page is ready to make to Patmoreana.

Jose Maria Salaverrίa, the well-known publicist, writing some months back in the monarchist daily A.B.C., bitterly lamented the lack of tolerance and compromise which characterized Spain’s political life. The reason, he stated, was to be sought in the age-old problem .... what must Spain do to keep up with the march of ‘progress’?.... a problem that has perplexed the greatest minds of the Peninsula and yet remains unsolved. Two solutions have been offered, one the europeizaciόn of Joaquin Costa, a renunciation of the past, a purging of all traditional elements, the double lock on the tomb of the Cid; the other the traditionalism of men like Ramiro de Maeztu whose desire was for a regeneration of his country on the old lines. Here in a nutshell is the tragedy of modern Spain, the struggle of opposites. The modernists have wished the complete elimination of traditional elements as incompatible with ‘progress,’ the traditionalists have viewed innovations with mistrust and have desired to maintain the old Spain without any concession. Other nations, confronted with the same problem, reached a solution through a process of transition, but Spain maintains partisan intransigeance to an extent unknown elsewhere, rendering political life a question of all or nothing, a violent oscillation of the pendulum from extreme to extreme. Political fanaticism of the Right or the Left is equally at fault and breeds nothing but continual alarm, violent polemic, and fruitless struggle. That ‘sweet reasonableness’ which is the essence of democracy is completely lacking.

In England, and in most English-speaking countries, we are still bound fast by convention to styles of ecclesiastical art which have long since ceased to live. We are struggling to be free, but we can only think in terms of Classic or Gothic. If we only dared, some of us might build a church in the style of an Egyptian temple; but that also would be a revival. Rather than be deprived of our Gothic arch we prefer to sling it from the ferro-concrete roof. There is nothing new, no development from the past into the terms of the modern. It must all be copied. We can build beautiful factories and cinemas, but we can hardly produce one pleasing statue of a religious character.

In this state of decrepitude it is of great assistance to look to our contemporary ecclesiastical artists abroad. In Italy, Germany and Holland a modern style has developed since the War. It has not broken with the past, but in the true living tradition it is not interested in copying. An English visitor in Holland, for example, will be amazed at the modern architecture which he there finds flourishing. He has become accustomed to entering a new church and finding a Perpendicular, Romanesque or Gothic building in stone or brick covered with plaster. He expects to see lifelike statues in gaudy colours, and windows trying to look as though they were not windows at all, but sentimental pictures in stone frames. In Holland it is different. The material, being the material of the country, is nearly always the same beautiful Dutch brick in its various shades of warm brown.

Gentile attributes to post-Renaissance literary heresy the familiar form of Manicheanism. Body and soul, the Catholic believes, are married indivorcibly in this life: the historical Manichee emphasizes the soul and neglects the reality of the body. Historically the Manichees regarded marriage as sinful, with the consequence that many came to inflict on themselves sterilization, for that was their doctrine in effect. The outcome was soulfulness and Grundyism, which have permeated life and literature ever since. If Gentile errs in applying the emphasis on soul, it is because he neglects the counter-emphasis on the body. The revolt against post-Reformation Puritanism implicit in D. H. Lawrence is a natural though blind realization of the unreality of the spiritual superman exploited in romantic art. It is to a negative religiosity that Lawrence is merciless in his exposure of Miriam who was always begging things to love her. His own romanticist exploitation of sex is mere primitivism, but the Manichean attitude is evident in the fatalistic way logic is dissociated from the world of fact as when the Manichees ignored marriage in spite of its necessity for human preservation. It is useful, therefore, to take the fundamental Manichean spirit as centred obliviously on either body or soul alone, for either way corrupts human integrity and disturbs the unity where body dovetails with soul.

The soul-emphasis in literature is reflected in modem aestheticism. This is partly due to the critical tendency which refines every line of the poem and partly to the abuse of art as religion.

All systems of government are ultimately supported upon three bases: the value of property, the value of life and the value of emotion. Oligarchy rests most strongly upon the first, democracy upon the second and dictatorship on the third. The ideal, of course, is an equal distribution of weight: as should theoretically obtain in England, where the Lords stand for land and money, the Commons for the average man, and the King for the old and moving tradition of a living country. But oligarchy is passing: democracy drags out a mechanized existence: young, ardent and austere minds turn to follow with a dedicated loyalty the leadership of a minority or of a man, the proletariat, the dictator, the monarch. Russia is ruled by the tiny Communist party, Italy by Mussolini, Germany by Hitler; Austria and Hungary meditate the restoration of the Hapsburgs.

The desire for political leadership springs from one of two causes. The first is the possession of a life so busy and emotionally so satisfying as to leave neither time nor energy for political activities: this is usually to be perceived among peasants and housewives, and is the foundation of monarchy. In the King the peasant secs the living embodiment of the loved land: in the Royal Family the woman finds the prototype of her own. The drama of marriage, child-bearing, and death, celebrated in magnificence for them, is charged with meaning for her: their life is symbolic and universal.

The public, like the press, lives from day to day. It is not interested in labour disputes. Labour disputes are not news. It is only when a dispute threatens to end in a strike that headlines are given to it and interest is aroused. But then it is often too late. Tempers have been inflamed; the leaders on both sides have made statements, public statements, upon which, being self-respecting men, they cannot go back. The strike, whose threat made news, occurs, and there is more news; but the dispute which caused the strike has passed unnoticed. The student may find a reference to it tucked away in a corner of last month’s newspaper.

Perhaps that is why the present dispute in the railway industry has caused so little comment. It does not threaten a strike; it is concerned with the question of conciliation machinery, and one can hardly see how that can cause a strike. But the men are restive under wage cuts, the Companies will most certainly resist any claim for a wage advance, and that, in the absence of adequate machinery, might cause a strike.

Up to March 1st last conciliation machinery did exist. It had been set up under the Act of 1921, but the Companies, finding it unsatisfactory, gave notice of withdrawal in 1932, and on March 1st it ceased to function. It must be admitted that the machinery was unsatisfactory; the fiasco of 1932 is enough to prove that. Yet it did serve its purpose sufficiently to show the desirability, and indeed the necessity, of some machinery for settling disputes without an appeal to force.

It must not be thought, because the Christian Church condemns Marxist Communism, that she thereby identifies herself with those who attack it because it seeks to uproot the ‘existing order.’ The Christian's case against Communism is not that it is revolutionary but that it is counter-revolutionary; that it is, in theory and practice, diametrically opposed to the principles of the Christian Revolution, to the Christian conception of Society, to the Christian conception of human personality and destiny. The Christian Church has a long memory, and she cannot fail to recognize in salient features of the Hegelian-Marxist philosophy a resuscitation of the pre-Christian and pagan conceptions from which the Christian Revolution delivered civilization. This reactionary re-paganization of society is by no means a peculiar or distinctive Eeature of Communism, but it is in Communism that it finds at present its most explicit, logical and ruthless expression. A sincere and authentic Christianity will not oppose ‘Marxism by joining forces with liberalism, individualist-capitalism, bourgeoisism and suchlike representatives of the ‘existing order’ (which it finds hardly less abhorrent), but by reasserting the principles of the Christian Revolution and by revitalizing its forces. In these pages we shall attempt, so far as space permits, to sketch the basic conceptions of this Christian Revolution, as a concrete and dynamic historical reality, with a view to suggesting how it may again become a real, positive and dominant factor in social reconstruction.

In comparison with such sciences as Chemistry, Physics or Physiology, which have acquired a certain stability of doctrine and method, Psychology at the present day appears to have little of either of these characters; an excuse is often made to the effect that psychology is still one of the younger sciences, and has not as yet quite found a firm footing. The truth is that there are no clear-cut generally-accepted principles governing either the subject matter or methods of this science, as may be seen by consulting various text-books or that interesting volume of essays, Psychologies of 1930. Psychology may perhaps be considered young as an experimental science, but in regard to a part at least of its subject, it is about as old as any enquiry one can think of, for man has always been interested in man. Speculation on the existence and nature of ‘Soul,’ of mind, of thinking, of appetition, of character and conduct, reaches back to the centuries B.c., when Greek Philosophy was at its highest and best in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. These are subjects with which psychology to-day is still concerned, but having lost contact with the ancient philosohpy it has also lost a great deal of coherence.

It is this perhaps that accounts for the vagueness in the usage of the word ‘psychology’ to-day. But this very vagueness has certain advantages which must not be under-estimated, since it provides an incentive to research, and to scientific, that is to say methodical, investigation of the problems presented by human nature.

In a previous article’ I tried to make clear the distinction between Fascism and ‘Statolatry,’ logically inevitable if we properly understand the twin Fascist principles of the Corporate State and of the priority of civic duties to civic rights. But amongst those calling themselves Fascists there have unquestionably been ‘statolaters,’ avowed or implicit. These may be classed as Demi-Fascists, representing as they do the maximising of one half of the Fascist creed with a corresponding minimising of the other.

From an undue stressing of the corporate idea we may arrive at a worship of the State on a kind of pantheistic basis. If the highest authority is an extension of myself, then both it and myself are participants in the Godhead. But the essential difference between God and a creature is that from the very conception of Divinity it follows that Divine rights have no co-relative duties. Might and right are identified. Thus the true Fascist denial of natural civic rights is neutralized and the result is a mentality extremely dangerous both to the citizen and the world. To the citizen because the condition of his citizenship becomes one of increasing the might, whether it be in wealth or dominion, of the State. To the world because the policy of such a State must be world conquest. It is God's right to exercise universal dominion, and since only your own State is God —or, at any rate, your God, to whom you owe service— it follows that no other State has a right even to exist, save in so far as its existence redounds to your own power.

SINCE the preoccupations of an age are expressed in its current catchwords, it is perhaps not strange that our contemporaries should employ, in every context and without examination, the idiom of pseudo-economics in which is enshrined commercial wisdom. Among the stock phrases which recur in everyday conversations, and which appear to exercise an incantatory power over the minds of those who speak or hear them, ‘the law of supply and demand’ is most frequently evoked; not necessarily because the speaker is intimate with the workings of this mysterious law, but because it is intended to place the discussion, whether moral, political or artistic, upon a wholesome basis of commercial expediency.

Thus it is argued that in the work of the English playwright or novelist there is no scope for Catholic Action, not because of any incompatibility in the activities which it is proposed to combine, but because ‘the public does not want religion; there is no demand for it.’

Before trying the strength of this objection, it will be good to question whether a medium as comparatively frivolous as that in which either the playwright or the novelist works, can be employed in Catholic Action. To do this we must examine the common function of the playwright and novelist, which is to provide the public with a means of living vicariously, projected into an imagined existence, and thus forgetting present circumstances. Where there is great ignorance of the supernatural, such as religious ‘reformation’ has achieved in English-speaking countries, this escape from the apparent harshness of reality must become particularly desirable.

The idea of extending the purview of the League of Nations to ‘international intellectual relations’ was first launched at the Peace Conference, where it found but little favour. The first official recognition of a movement which to some extent originated in the desperate situation of intellectual circles in the early days after the war was obtained in 1921, when the Second Assembly of the League decided to constitute an International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation—a decision which was reinforced in 1924 by the foundation, by the French Government, of an International Institute with headquarters in the Palais Royal. The lists of men and women of international repute which the League succeeded in winning for this cause include some of the greatest names of science and art: Einstein, Bergson, Madame Curie. Paul-Valery, Gilbert Murray, Galsworthy, Felix Weingartner and Bela Bartok. to mention only a few.

The central idea of intellectual co-operation is to promote, in all spheres that come within its range, co-ordination of effort and collaboration capable, not merely of saving time and facilitating information, distribution and progress, but also of encouraging the creation, gradually perhaps—but none the less surely—of an international outlook.

This programme falls naturally into two parts. The first, designed to facilitate study and research, may be described as the perfecting of an international machinery which consists largely in relations between ministries of education, ministries of fine arts, universities, students’ associations, institutes of art and history, museums, libraries and record offices.

A strange anomaly confronts us to-day. We turn from a State inordinately preoccupied with the affairs of the individual to the anarchical interests of Capital hardly conceding to the vast majority of individuals the right to live. Twin Apollyons straddle right across the way with the forces of the world arrayed severally behind them; they have enlisted, between them, every influence, cultural and to a great extent religious; whether or not it be argued that the latter is detached from its true fons et origo. Recurrent contacts between the two, here hostile, there sympathetic, are evidently too many and too involved for anything less than an economic atlas of the world to review. And Catholics in England do not lack their prophets to foretell the destiny of every straw in the wind. At present we must be content with little more than the acknowledgement of certain chilly spasms of apprehension that stir us as the westerly breath that suggests the stormgib. For all we are very much at sea there may be precautions to suit any manner of emergency.

Or, to revert to Bunyan’s metaphor, we will enquire what armament poor Christian can call exclusively his own.

To the muddled vision of this world Catholicism presents a stream of contradictions. The Church, for instance, who is the friend of sinners, is the relentless enemy of Sin. Unmollified by respectability, by the appeal of polygamy to the Law (or of marital onanism to the economy of hygiene) it is She nevertheless who flings wide her doors to the too-unclean for Mammon’s Temples, that prostitute and outcast may enter with the blest. It is a matter of some scandal to our contemporary the progressive protestant.’

Mr. Harold Nicholson has completed his great trilogy, thus concluding his survey of the diplomatic history of Great Britain from approximately the end of ‘Splendid Isolation’ to the death of Lord Curzon. And there has happened to Mr. Nicholson what has happened to other historians; in compiling an account he has unpremeditatedly formulated an indictment. He has focussed his lens delicately upon the clear-cut and aristocratic figure of Diplomacy, but the developed plate has revealed in the background and in the very act of sabotage the hulking and murderous figure of Democracy.

There are many counts upon which to praise Mr. Nicholson. He is an admirer of the modern and obscure method of prose writing, but his own style is limpid and traditional. The Supreme Council overworked him at Paris in 1919 because of his ability in drafting, and we reap the benefit of that ability in his concise précis of situations, protocols, treaties, crises and historic passages, précis which are clear, logical and full, and easier to read than many novels. Most of his historic estimates are not assailable. His narrative of Conferences and correspondences is broken by some of the most brilliant pen-sketches of places and personalities that our generation has produced—the meeting of Edward VII and the Czar at Reval, for instance, the Allied Mission to Bela Kun in 1919, Lord Curzon at Lausanne (a portrait which should be supplemented by his sketch of Arketall in Some People). His epithets and phrases enclose large and precise ideas, his knowledge of Europe and its working make the reading of his volumes almost an education in affairs.