It is not easy for someone who is not a professional anthropologist to read a work of social anthropology. The difficulty is of a quite special kind: it is not merely the difficulty someone who is not a botanist may find in reading a study of plant morphology, or someone who is not a theologian in reading a discussion of the instrumental causality of the sacraments. The difficulty is the problem of human relevance. These people about whom the anthropologist is writing are human beings: the detail of their activities should be humanly intelligible; and yet, on the one hand these activities in their detail are often meaningless and sometimes disgusting, and on the other, without a sympathetic grasp of the detail the whole work of interpretation and synthesis offered by the anthropologist would become meaningless in its turn. And the anthropologist has nothing to refer to but the information he himself gives us in his book: he has usually no imaginative literature, for instance, no common body of experience to which to appeal.

If this is a difficulty for the common reader, it is also a difficulty for the anthropologist himself, one which he frequently fails to solve. Sometimes he may seek experiential resemblances in the form of archetypal patterns, and some of these archetypes are undoubtedly genuine; for instance, Professor Evans-Pritchard refers to the social (the human) significance, manifested in Nuer ritual, of the fact of the bilateral symmetry of the human body; and we are all of us familiar enough with the difference between left and right not to be particularly disconcerted by examples of this in societies with which we are not familiar. Or again, we can sympathize readily with the polar opposition in Nuer thought between the above and the below.

The casting out of beams is inevitably a more ponderous process than the discerning of motes. It has about it the heavy-handed inelegance of fly-swatting, in contrast to the darting agile dancing of dragon-flies in the sunlight. God forbid that anyone should wantonly swat a dragon-fly, or that I should attempt to toss a caber at the dexterous mote-discernment of Fr McCabe. I would, in any case, almost certainly miss. But dragon-fly antics, while they delight our gaze, are liable to leave us a trifle dizzy; and the virtuosity of Fri McCabe’s logic, sound and brilliant though it is, may easily reduce the holders of the opinion he attacks to a sad confusion. Now the confusion of the enemy is a legitimate object only of military, not of didactic, attack. Accordingly, in the hope of disentangling some of this possible confusion, I intend to poke about among a few of the fine threads of Fr McCabe’s weaving with my clumsy beam.

He establishes the wholly blameless position that it is possible to judge people’s morals by their actions, that we can say not only ‘That was a wicked thing to do’, but also ‘It was wicked of you to do that’, and even, though less often and with less assurance, ‘You are a wicked person for doing such things’. He does so in terms of two gospel texts, ‘Judge not, etc.’, and the one about discerning the mote in thy brother’s eye. Let us set out in full the passage from the Sermon on the Mount in which these texts occur. I give them in an unauthorized translation in order to avoid the incantation-like quality the well-worn words have acquired, which so insidiously blurs their meaning. ‘Do not judge, in order not to be judged yourselves; for by the judgment you judge by shall you be judged, and the measure you measure out shall be measured out to you. But why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, while you do not notice the pole in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother “Let me get the speck out of your eye”, and just look at the pole in your own eye! Hypocrite, first get the pole out of your own eye, and then you will be able to see clearly to get the speck out of your brother’s eye’ (Matt. 7, i ff.).

Poetry has always a hazardous existence, is rarely held or formed in an adequate organ of words; it is too easily dissipated or clumsily fumbled back beyond the mind’s grasping. To be continually a poet, even under the most favourable conditions, requires great power and self-consecration. Today conditions are nowhere very favourable, and least of all in young countries such as Australia and New Zealand. To be a poet anywhere, but there even more, a man needs genius, or the dedication more usually found in saints.

That these countries have not an excessive share of genius, and that their writers are as mortal and divided as all the world, is the evidence of two recently published anthologies, one of Australian and the other of New Zealand verse. The intention of the editors in each has been to trace from its beginnings the evolution of a distinctly national idiom, to show the growth of a poetic tradition which is characteristically ‘Australian’ or ‘New Zealand’. In each case they have felt that the poetry of their country began to come of age in the 1930s, with the result that the earlier writers are offered mainly as an historical background to the larger number of poems by living authors. That there should be so many living writers of verse (about forty in the Australian book, and twenty-seven in the New Zealand) persistent and skilful enough to have won recognition even in their own country, shows at least the presence of a vital desire for creativity, a vital desire for poetry.

Probably no major Catholic writer has been the subject of more controversy among his co-religionists than Francis Mauriac. The generally acrid atmosphere of the novels, the darkly pessimistic view of human nature (‘Why must he write about such unpleasant people?’), the spiritual perturbation of the so-called ‘pre-conversion’ period—singly and conjointly these have inspired an abundance of searching debate concerning the validity of his Catholic position. Yet, it is almost certainly true that Mauriac is the most widely accepted among that gifted group of Catholic men of letters of this century who have gained for Catholicism in France a hearing and a respect unknown since the century of Bossuet. Consequently, it may be relevant to point out one aspect of Mauriac’s work in which his unquestionable Catholic orientation sets him sharply apart from the leading writers of fiction of his day.

If there is a single theme more than any other which has attracted the major novelists of the past third of a century it is that of man’s relation to time. Proust in France, Joyce in Ireland, Virginia Woolf in England, Thomas Mann in Germany, Faulkner in the United States, to name only the most eminent, have all been centrally concerned with the time problem. A contemporary critic has even suggested that Herman Melville anticipated these writers by half a century in the development of a metaphysic of time. But leaving Melville aside as representing the possible premonitory intuition of genius, the virtual simultaneity of impact of the time thesis in the works of the foremost practitioners of the contemporary novel in the western world is a striking phenomenon.