I met them five years ago, during the yearly visit south; saw them on several occasions at Bath and Bristol; stayed with them at the Bell in Malmesbury; and for three years spent Christmas at Whitehouse Terrace. With others who knew them, I see in their death an epoch ended.

It was not merely that they had survived from the ‘nineties, not even that they had been at the centre of that society. Each of them in his way had shaped himself to the new age; they read, made friends, and generally lived, with zest, while they kept without display those gifts which they did not see renewed around them—certain courtesies, a certain social sense, certain refinements of understatement. Hence their charm, hence their elusion of many who would have courted them had they taken a conventionally veteran air. When in 1931 Canon Gray published his Poems, the clerical reviews observed that a well-known parish priest had written a book of verse; the secular referred briefly to the modernisms of Mr. Gray. Amateurs of the Yellow Book period were still seeking copies of Silverpoints.

In private they did not discourse on the past, but there were allusions; most often to Beardsley and his sister, sometimes to Pater or Lionel Johnson. If one heard mass at St. Peter’s early in January, one’s prayers were asked for the soul of Paul Verlaine. A chance naming of Dowson permitted me a question on Cynara; it was well received. Yes, she was as Symons had described her; tris gentille; no one saw her much, not Dowson himself. So far one might go; but any plot to elicit a narrative would have been delicately countered.

Twenty-Nine Catholics, most of them lay and many belonging to what is called the modern generation, spent the second week-end of September at a Dance and Phillipson mansion—elegant and comfortable, says De Quincey, who stayed there, but not splendid—square and Ionic, set in a park of rough Northamptonshire turf and beech clumps and encircled by woods of oak. Their purpose, more easily recognized than described, was to form contacts; to discuss the widening of Catholicism in themselves and their society, of Catholicism considered more as a habit of life than a system of revealed principles and organized procedure; and to prepare, if possible, for some form of group action.

The first general meeting started with the statement of two principles: first, the continuity between supernatural religion and the rest of life; secondly, the Catholic significance of every human action. ‘Spirituality’ is not a special occupation, remote from other human interests: the sacred and the profane imply a distinction but not an antithesis: there is such a thing as religious worldliness, which is not a comfortable but a difficult ideal: Catholicism is not a spasmodic treble, or for that matter a treble at all, but covers the whole human movement of living—all these are merely chapter headings, indications of an emphasis, not scientifically stated conclusions.

But while Catholicism is as wide as life, organized Catholicism denotes a special kind of life. From this life springs a special kind of activity called Catholic Action, in which all who attended the Laxton week-end take part in varying degrees.

One of the greatest obstacles that confronts the Fascist Movement in Britain to-day is the opposition of the British public to its arch-enemy. Because Communism is a ‘totalitarian’ doctrine and it is also the very essence of Fascism that ‘a Kingdom divided against itself cannot stand’ the two are lumped together as both standing for a tyrannous ‘dictatorship’ over the citizen by an all-powerful State, extraneous to himself and assumed to be coercive of his will. Nothing could be more unjust to Fascism.

The Fascist conception of the State is not of a thing extraneous to the citizen. To the Fascist the State is himself ‘ with a plus.’ As a man—if he is fit to have one—regards his family, or a soldier—if he be worthy of the name—his regiment, or a footballer—if he is fit to be in it—his team, so, in the Fascist conception, must the citizen—if he is worthy to be accounted as such—regard his country. Thus a man works for his family, which includes himself, a footballer plays for his team, which includes himself, a soldier fights for his regiment, which includes himself, and a citizen must work, play or fight for his country, which includes his family, his team, his regiment and himself. This is the corporate spirit which is Fascism, in contradistinction to the individualistic spirit of ‘liberalism,’ which regards the association as to be valued and worked for by the individual only in so far as it serves his individual ends—the doctrine of ‘enlightened self-interest'—and its natural outcome in the ‘class war ‘of Communism.

ENGLISH Catholics are sometimes charged with indifference to the English saints, with looking to Lisieux instead of Rochester or London or Canterbury. It is not my purpose to argue the truth of this complaint; indeed I propose to take it for granted. Certainly there are C.T.S. tract cases where Ste. Therèse sells much better than Blessed Thomas More. And there is a sense in which no one has any right to grumble. A saint is a saint; the better Englishman for being so, but not the better saint for being English. The terms of reference, so to say, are not national, and there are considerable disadvantages about nationalism in hagiology. The elements of sanctity are the same everywhere. Still, it is also true that these elements are expressed differently, take on a different colouring, according to the natural circumstances of the person who manifests them. Grace builds upon nature, and though the saint is no more a saint for being English, yet he need be no less English for being a saint. Hence it is that we rightly find something congenial in saints of our own nation; hence, too, that our own saints are not ignored without loss. The essentials of sanctity are the same in all the saints, but in so stupendous a success everything is of interest. This man, this woman, succeeded in the only success that is really worth having. We watch their actions and ways in the hope of surprising their secret, and inevitably we want to imitate, so far as we can; to emulate, not only in the very heart of the thing, but in methods, habits, practices, whereby that heart was expressed and confirmed.

‘IN perpetual quiet, Oxford, I believe, is the only city that resembles Rome,’ wrote Aubrey de Vere in the Spring of 1839, words that sound strangely in 1933. Even the Rome of Leo XIII was strangely noisy to those who remembered the dignified peaceful Rome of Pius IX before 20th September, 1870. All artists, many of them foreigners and Protestants, deplored and denounced the change that followed the invasion, among them Augustus Hare, Ruskin, and countless others, including Gregorovius, who hated the Temporal Power and yet thus scathed, in a letter of 1885, its destroyers.

‘The violent transformation which Rome has undergone affords me no pleasure; the city appears to me like a carpet of ancient date, which during the process of beating goes to pieces amid clouds of dust. All the traces of my past life have been obliterated, destroyed, and built over; and the majestic city of former days has been superseded by the tumult of modern life, which is still seeking definite shape, but will hardly succeed in attaining it for a generation to come.’