After several years of decline, the British Communist Party is steadily growing in numbers and influence. The numbers involved are not, as yet, very great but the upward trend has been maintained for a sufficient length of time for it to be of some significance. The form it is taking and, more particularly, what app ars to be its underlying causes, should however cause Christians to stop and think.

In common with Communist parties all over the West, the British party lost some twenty-five per cent of its members during the months following the Hungarian People’s Rising. Among them was a high proportion of young intellectuals and some of its most promising younger leaders. The membership graph dropped sharply, then flattened out and more or less remained so until a couple of years ago when the Party began to recruit slightly more members than it was losing. Throughout the past year the graph has risen steadily month by month. Between early September and early November 1960, the Party’s membership increased by one thousand. The tempo of recruitment increased too. Before November was through the figure was up to 1,300. This represents, approximately, a five per cent increase in total membership in three months. The numbers recruited may not be spectacular, but the rate of increase is probably just about as much as the Party can effectively absorb at the moment. One must remember that the aim is to teach and train each member to become not just one more Communist but a well-instructed Marxist who is also fitted to be a leader wherever he goes.

If one did not know their context, it would be easy to mistake many of the mystical poems of St John of the Cross for the most passionate declarations of profane love. Influenced in content and imagery by the Song of Songs, and in form and rhythm both by sixteenth-century Spanish court poetry and by traditional folk verse, the poems assimilate several traditions, several attitudes. In one of St John’s songs between the soul and the Bridegroom, the Bride cries,

If the reader did not know St John’s own commentaries on his Spiritual Canticle, it would not be difficult to assign such verse as this to the plane of physical love. The poem shocks because it is soTHE INNOCENT AUDACITY intimate. This is as true of the original Spanish as of the English translation; the problems involved in conveying, without loss, the extraordinary intensity of the original poems into another quite different language are well stated by the American poet John Frederick Nims, who has himself recently produced a very vivid rendering of St John’s poems: ‘My venture’, he says, ‘the windmill I am tilting at,

A child who passes his eleven-plus examination can learn Latin free of charge till he is eighteen. A child who does not pass this test can still learn Latin till he is eighteen, if his father will pay for him to go to an independent or direct grant school. If a candidate cannot pass a university entrance examination in Latin, not even the offer of a fee of a thousand pounds a year can secure a university place for him.

When parents make great sacrifices in order that their children shall learn a particular subject, be educated in the religious tradition of the family, whether it be Jewish, Catholic or Quaker, or have the opportunity of being taught in small classes, they are often accused of ‘contracting out’ of their social obligations. There are at least two menacing assumptions behind this question-begging stock phrase which need to be brought into the open. Recently a weekly columnist wrote, ‘Influential people buy their children out of the public system.’ Since each university is autonomous, the question of contract is forced into some curious acrobatics where the payment of students’ fees is concerned. The passing of an examination at eleven entitles a child to a free grammar-school education, whether the parents be rich or poor. The passing of a university entrance examination at present entitles a young man or woman to a free university education only if the parents are relatively poor. The family problems involved in this situation have been faced in the report of the committee on grants to students which met under the chairmanship of Sir Colin Anderson.

The Algerian war has left so deep a wound in French life that it is rarely realized in this country that the end of the war would be by no means the end of the story. The problems of conscience created by a revolutionary war are scarcely going to be resolved by a particular armistice, and a recent issue of Informations Catholiques Internationales provided concrete evidence of the effect of the war on many of the young Frenchmen who have served in it. An enquiry conducted by priests of the Mission de France, themselves concerned with the pastoral care of soldiers serving in Algeria, underlined the appeal of the Cardinals and Archbishops of France last October for a recognition of the absolute rights of conscience in refusing to co-operate in positive evil. And the ‘reflections’ of a young Catholic, on his return to France after two years in Algeria, under the title ‘A Clear Teaching to Deaf Ears’, provides impressive evidence of how little effect even official ecclesiastical condemnation of torture and other excesses of repression can have when ‘many no longer reason in terms of “Catholics” but in terms of “Catholics of the Left” or “Catholics of the Right”, as though it were a question of two Churches anathematizing each other, and who only select from the Church’s teaching what happens to coincide with their own principles’. It is significant that a recent number of Jacques Soustelle’s Vhitis sur I’Algerie publishes a letter from an officer serving in Algeria which attributes the Declaration of the French Bishops to the propaganda of ‘progressive’ priests,

The John Hay Whitney Collection of paintings in the possession of the outgoing American ambassador to London has for the last six weeks drawn crowds to the Tate Gallery, attracted perhaps by the legendary worth of a private collection such as could scarcely exist nowadays in England. And it must be admitted that these seventy pictures, mostly acquired in the ten years that followed the end of the war in 1945, have the patina of eminent acceptability. Apart from a stray Blake, two Zoffanys and a group of American paintings, they reflect the definitive arrival of the impressionists and post-impressionists as the artists most appropriate for embassy walls.

But Mr Whitney’s choice is marvellously sound. As Sir John Rothensteiny remarks in his introduction to the catalogue (which is itself worthy of so magnificent an exhibition), the criterion has not been a mere ‘programme’, but rather the inherent quality of the actual painting. Thus Braque is, in the gallery sense, not at all well represented, but the two land- (or rather land-and-sea-) scapes of his fauve period in the collection are wonderful in their own right; one can at once see why they were bought, and how irrelevant it would be to insist that they should be ‘matched’ by his later work. Picasso, indeed, is represented by a splendid cubist Homme Assis as well as by a tender portrait of 1905, but once more it is the autonomous interest of the picture that matters. We feel that the whole collection, however ‘safe’ it may seem, is the vindication of the individual picture’s right to please.

In the latest issue of the Revue Internationale du Cinema, the journal of the international Catholic cinema office, there is an article on the moral assessment of certain recent co-production films, as applied in various national centres. This demonstrates how the same film may get very different ratings from country to country: when we see that La Dolce Vita has been put into the ‘a proscrire’ category in Italy, the point is well taken. For now that it has reached the commercial screen in England it is difficult, from the Anglo-Saxon point of view, to see what all the fuss was about. From this side of the Channel it looks even more like a scathing moral indictment of a way of living that may be over-stated but is, as we all know, true enough in its essentials. Signor Fellini has said in a London interview that the Rome he has portrayed is his idea of Rome, not necessarily the true Rome; but this is no more, after all, than any creator’s way with his material and need not in any way surprise us.

This long film, whose spatial control is so precise and whose temporal control is often so slack, sprawls across nearly three hours in a series of episodes whose visual attack frequently packs a much heavier punch than their intellectual content. From the first moment when the helicopter bears down upon the Roman suburbs, with the statue of Christ the Worker slung beneath it—ruined viaduct and bare tenement wall taking the statue’s shadow like a stigmata—Fellini’s sheer cinematic virtuosity imposes itself without question.