The apologetic defence of the central Anglican position, if the extremes of Anglo-Catholic papalism and Protestant fundamentalism are excepted, finch its final justification in an appeal to sound learning. The formula is Bishop Creighton’s. It was the application of this principle, he maintained, that brought about the changes made in the English Church in the sixteenth century. Not that the Church of England claims a monopoly of learning, but that it owes its present existence to the fact that the theology and devotional life of Western Christendom, of which up to the Reformation it was an integral part, had become overweighted and distorted in its development, and was maintaining an ecclesiastical system that obscured rather than illustrated the vital principles on which the Christian life is founded.

Efforts at reform from within were defeated because the logical fabric of scholastic theology on which it rested was so strong that it was difficult to deal with it in detail; it was hard to see where reform was to begin or where it was to end. Reforming efforts resulted in a sense of hopeless weariness, and at length it became apparent that reform was only possible by returning to the principles of sound learning. It was these principles that were applied during the formative years of the Reformation, not by any one great leader whose personality impressed itself upon the changes that were made, but by the long process of the aspirations which have sprung from these principles, producing by gradual evolution the formularies, and in particular the Prayer Book, from which the Anglican oudook and ethos derive.

Pope Leo XIII, in his letter Rerum Novarum of 1891, said the condition of the working classes was the pressing question of the hour; that the hiring of labour and the conduct of trade were concentrated in the hands of comparatively few individuals, so that ‘a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than slavery itself.’

In that same year there met in Newcastle-upon-Tyne the twenty-fourth Annual meeting of the Trade Union Congress, over which presided a miner—a Mr T. Burt. That Congress represented a little more than 1,300,000 organized workers. Last year it was my great honour, at the Isle of Man, to preside over the eighty-fifth gathering of the T.U.C. representing over 8,000,000 trade unionists.

The British trade union movement knew only too well the truth of the Pope’s words. Had it not waged for many years before an incessant struggle against the evil social conditions produced by the growth of nineteenth-century industrialism?

When the first T.U.C. met in Manchester in 1868, 34 delegates attended, representing 118,000 members. Barely thirty-four years after George Lovelace, a farm labourer of the village of Tolpuddle in Dorset, and five of his colleagues, had been convicted before the High Court for ‘treason’—i.e. administering ‘an unlawful oath’ and endeavouring to form a branch of the farm workers’ union— and transported to Botany Bay in the infamous convict ships of the day. The beginnings of our trade unions are rooted in struggle, hatreds, victimization and oppression. They were outlawed as conspirators, deprived of the right to hold property, handicapped by Governments, and ruthlessly opposed by employers.

One of the paradoxes of the modern literary situation is that we have more criticism than ever before, while this critical activity has not been accompanied by any corresponding clarification of artistic values or by the emergence of a distinct literary tradition. In poetry, for instance, there is a bewildering variety of individual voices as well as a diversity of what may be called group- or coterie-styles; of course poetry is written by poets and not by traditions, but our present variety does not result merely from the healthy abundance of individual talents; it comprises utterly different solutions to the same fundamental problems, as in the contrast between the deliberately pedantic nicety in the use of words of Mr Empson and his followers, where the single irony or ambiguity is everything, and the blurred use of epithets for their vague suggestiveness in the verse of Miss Edith Sitwell and Mr W. R. Rodgers. In earlier periods, as in our neo-classical age, such intense critical activity was often the prelude to the emergence of a poetic school with a common programme.

To turn to the critics themselves, their numbers, the authority they command, and the extreme sophistication of literary argument to which they have accustomed us, would suggest that we are entering upon an Alexandrian age. To remark this now strikes a respectably commonplace, almost a trite, note; but until comparatively recently it would have been quite impossible to think in this manner. Thirty-four years ago in The Sacred Wood Mr T. S. Eliot deplored the lack of trained second-order minds on the English literary scene (he was at pains to indicate that his use of the term ‘second-order’ was in no sense derogatory).

Elizabeth Simpson was born at Standingfield in 1753. Her parents were Catholic gentry-yeomen of Suffolk, whose simple way of life did not satisfy Elizabeth’s ambitious spirit. Growing up to be intelligent and attractive, she also suffered from an impediment of speech, the desire to conquer which probably inspired her to seek a living in that profession least suited to a stammerer—the stage. Eventually, she ran away from home and arrived in London—‘that perilous town’, as she later described it, ‘which has received for centuries past . . . the bold adventurer of every denomination’. As a distinct adventuress she was attracted by the glamour of the metropolis, but she soon learned that there was a seamier side. It is surprising that so attractive, so innocent and so penniless a girl, always ready for a flirtation, should have survived these perilous weeks unscathed. However, she found security quite soon by marrying a provincial actor called Inchbald, also a Catholic, who died a few years later in 1779. She had already joined a travelling repertory company, and shared its never very prosperous fortunes, but unlike the rest of her female companions, she learned, observed and hoped. She had begun a novel; but in 1784 she had the great joy of seeing her first play accepted and produced with great success before a London audience. The hard years were over and Mrs Inchbald’s career had begun.

For the next two decades, hardly a year passed in which a new play by Mrs Inchbald was not performed.