It goes without saying that, before the Reformation, all actors or mummers or players—or whatever else those vagabonds performing in theatres or on platforms or on inn balconies or just in front of a circle of chairs on a bare floor were called—who happened, irrespective of race, colour or shape to be believing or practising Christians (in so far as this was allowed), were necessarily Catholics and members of the Church.

The fine flowering of the English Theatre occurred during the later years of Elizabeth, far into the reign of James I, and was functioning throughout the most enthusiastic and novel period of Protestantism. There is no reason to suppose that any of the acknowledged great players illumined by the comet-brilliance of Marlowe or enveloped in the solar warmth of Shakespeare’s genius were Catholics—unless secretly; and even this last possibility is pure theory or wishful thinking. A great deal of delving into old archives might prove whether or no men like Alleyn, Burbage, Hemyngc and Condell had yearnings towards the Faith, and I daresay that with more time for a little research it would be easy to ascertain the final spiritual convictions of such writers for the theatre as Chapman, Webster, Tourneur, Marston, Beaumont and Fletcher and a host of others; but within the limits of this space it is hardly desirable to offer a directory or Who’s Who of all the eminent players or writers who have been, or who are, Catholics.

Having rashly consented to the Editor’s request for an article on my brother I find myself doubly embarrassed; by having to write about my brother and about art. But die latter embarrassment is the worse. Being assured of his entire unconcern, I do not really mind discussing my brother in public. Indeed the situation has its advantages; it compels one, at least, to try to be objective. But to play at art-criticism is a game I do not relish.

Let me begin with the fact, plain to me, that my brother’s is a quiet talent. Decidedly not precocious as a boy, he had turned twenty before a bent for carving showed strongly in him. It came then with remarkable spontaneity; not chosen to suit a theory, still less a pose; hardly encouraged by others; not even, it seemed, the result of any specially urgent desire for self-expression. He never appeared tormented or oppressed by any abundance of feeling and imagery striving for an outlet. He was recollected rather than expansive. And so, though its range has widened, his art essentially remains; content with relatively few images. Yet he is drawing attention now, not only because (and this is his own chief conscious concern) his figures evince good craftsmanship, but also because of a quality in them, let me risk calling it a certain sober sweetness, which I shall try, I will not say to define, but to suggest, summarily, in these few remarks.

My brother learned his craft from Eric Gill, during seven years in the workshops at Pigotts or on tour with that master.

The word ‘Psychology’ has become a capacious umbrella which covers a baffling variety of literature. ‘Contributions to Psychology’ covers, a still wider, indeed an almost limitless, range. Nihil humanum a me alienum: there can be no pre-established boundaries to a study or practice, which is concerned with the sources, motives and patterns of the totality of human experience and behaviour. A biography, a novel, a drama, even a painting or a quartet, often reveals depths of the human psyche unattained by works on medical or academic psychology. But these also have immeasurably widened their scope in recent decades. The hypothesis of primitive unconscious layers (whether or not accounted for in terms of a ‘collective unconscious’), which find expression in myths, ritual, and social patterns, has made ethnology, mythology, folk-lore, comparative religion, history, pre-history and countless other fields of research, all tributary in various ways to psychology, while psychology in its turn has given to them a new stimulus and orientation. The breakdown of the post-Cartesian dichotomy of mind and matter, with its restriction of psychology to the former, has also added increasingly to the psychologists’ concern with the biological and physical sciences, while the treatment of psychological phenomena in dynamic rather than purely mechanistic terms has opened new horizons to the theoretical psychologist which are as yet too indistinct to be accurately defined.

The foreign visitor is commonly warned that New York is not America, and the meaning of the statement is clear. But it is not very helpful. A more relevant observation surely is that New York is very American. To go from New York to Fort Wayne, Indiana, is not to go to another country, or even to meet something different: the difference is only in size and degree. Neither in New York nor Pittsburgh, Boston or San Francisco, Cincinnati or Seattle is the foreigner moved to make comparisons of americanism; in the ‘old’ South and New Mexico ‘regionalism’ is still very marked; but in only a few, a very few, places—Sante Fé, for example, or, I suppose, old New Orleans— does he ask rhetorically, ‘Am I really in the United States?’ It is one of the most astounding things about this astounding country —its unity and uniformity.

The area of the United States is three million square miles. New York is as far from the Californian Redwoods as London is from the Urals, the distance from Galveston to the Canadian border is about the distance from Athens to the North Cape. Some 140 million souls live in this area, originating in every nation of Europe (there were still thirteen million foreign-born American citizens in 1930), and with of course a big African clement. And yet they are ‘We, the people of the United States’ as much as the homogeneous two-and-a-half million of 1776. Neither differences of national origin nor geographical and climatic differences—and they are very great—have produced the deep diversities one would expect: the ‘melting-pot’ melted—and then remade.

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.

Michail MacLiammoir has recently referred to the lack of visual sensitivity in the Irish people ‘whose ears had always been its strongest point of aesthetic perception’. Naturally, the storyteller’s art had been the only one to survive the long enslavement. Only the ‘Ascendancy’ had time or money to dabble in the fine arts, and the very nature of the ‘Ascendancy’ clan (those who collaborated with the ruling civil service appointed by England) led them to seek the most superficial portraits or stereotyped landscapes. Nevertheless, way back in our past we had a flourishing school of illuminators and sculptors, and it could not be held with much confidence that we are inherently colour-blind or immune to the suggestivity of lines or forms.

It is a fact worthy of reflection that Catholic clergy and people instinctively reacted against the lovely Georgian styles of architecture in which many of the towns and cities of Ireland were built during the past two centuries. For instance, the Hiberno- Romanesque style owes its popularity in no small degree to the fact that it resembles so little the Georgian manner and, of course, also because it revives the ancient pattern of Cormac’s chapel and other remains of the early Celtic era. It is also felt that the Royal Hibernian Academy carried with it into the 1920’s not only the taint of its origin as a facet of the life which revolved around the society of the Ascendancy, but possessed too, the air of decadence natural to an Irish society which by every artistic standard could only be judged as if it was situated in a suburb of London.

In the nineteenth century there lived in Norway a theologian whose religious development shows a striking resemblance to that of Cardinal Newman. Although the Norwegian theologian could not well stand an exact comparison with John Henry Newman, for he lacked the Cardinal’s unique genius, there is, however, a psychological likeness between the two men. They belong to the same kind of religious type. Both went through a very slow process of conversion. Both began as clergymen in their national churches, and both ended after much study and mental toil in the Catholic Church.

The name of this Norwegian was Knud Karl Krogh-Tonning. Unlike Newman, he did not have much influence on his contemporaries or on later generations. Until the present day he has been of no importance to the history of the Norwegian Church. In a way this situation is strange, for he made some remarkable contributions to theological literature.

Krogh-Tonning (born in 1842) was brought up in a very happy and cultivated home. His parents belonged to the Evangelical- Lutheran Church, which is the State Church of Norway. His mother differed from the ordinary Protestants by attributing great importance to the sacraments, and by stressing the ethical aspect of Christianity. Krogh-Tonning has said that his mother was the first to turn his thoughts towards Catholicism.

When Krogh-Tonning had entered the University of Oslo to study theology, he soon came under the influence of two most powerful professors, Gisle Johnson and Carl Paul Caspari. The theological faculty was under the direction of these two professors. However, their influence was not limited to the university.

Had Fr John Gerard been a highwayman instead of a Jesuit his name would doubtless be familiar to every schoolboy, for his exploits are far more exciting than those of Dick Turpin or Robin Hood, and have the additional recommendation of being authentic. It is strange that such a thrilling autobiography should have been allowed to remain out of print for half a century, and Fr Caraman is to be congratulated not only on making good this deficiency, but on producing an edition that may be read as easily as a novel. The former editions edited by Fr John Morris, s.j., had obvious shortcomings. The homely Latin had been turned into solemn, Victorian prose with a mock-Elizabethan tang about it quite unsuited to the original. The text was so interlarded with notes that one could never be sure whether one was reading Gerard, or his editor, or some spy’s report. Fr Caraman has extricated the text from these encumbrances, and put the notes at the end of the book. He has translated Gerard’s brisk and unstudied Latin into exactly the sort of colloquial English that it demands. He has brought Gerard to life in a remarkable way: at last we can fully appreciate his simple piety, his sense of humour, his love of field sports, and his amazing courage. Those who do not know Fr Gerard should read his narrative straight through as they would a novel, and then turn to the notes, and see how almost every incident may be checked and amplified by reference to State Papers and other sources.