The level of unemployment rose steadily during 1958. I On January 13 th, 1.8 per cent of the insured population X. were out of work, but by December 8th this figure had risen to 2.4 per cent, and there was a further rise to 2.8 per cent by January 12th, 1959. Although these figures may be explained in part by recession abroad and a fall in British exports, the chief explanation is undoubtedly the effect on the economy of the raising of Bank Rate and the associated monetary measures taken to protect the pound in 1957. Important fundamental questions are raised by this rise in unemployment. It is clear that unless a government is determined to maintain the very low unemployment figures that we have become accustomed to in the post-war period, the level of unemployment is likely to rise as a result of changes in external circumstances or of measures intended to promote price stability at home.

Most people would agree that full employment and price stability are both desirable objectives. On the other hand, opinions differ as to whether or not the two objectives are compatible. Some Catholics may be inclined to believe that there is really no problem: if price stability can only be achieved at the expense of full employment, then the human waste and suffering caused by unemployment is too great to be contemplated with equanimity. They may feel that they have the authority of the Church behind them in taking this view.

It is now little over five years since the worker priest crisis in France provided the world press with a first-class story. For the vast majority in England (whatever may have been the case in France) the disciplinary action of the Holy See and the storm it aroused were, indeed, the first intimation that for several years a number of priests had abandoned the security of presbytery and religious house to work at the dock or in factories and share in every respect the living conditions of the working class. But even for those Catholics in England who were already aware of the movement and sympathetic with its aims, the Roman condemnation came as a bolt from the blue. They found themselves, in fact, singularly ill-equipped to find any answer to the inevitable accusation that the Church had shown itself to be incurably distrustful of any new methods of evangelization and indissolubly wedded to a ‘bourgeois’ outlook and way of life. Their embarrassment was only sharpened by the outcry which broke out in Catholic circles in France. Was there, in fact, danger of a split in the French Church or of the rise of a new and more bitter Gallicanism? Here at any rate was M. Mauriac talking darkly of a new concordat (not that many of us in England at least made much of what that might mean).

Looking back at all the furore from these five years’ distance, what perhaps is most surprising is the silence that has succeeded the storm.

For a number of years, cosmology has been a favourite science with the British public, and, with the development of radio astronomy and the recent launching of earth- satellites, the choice of a cosmologist to give the recent Reith Lectures was not surprising. Professor A. C. B. Lovell, who is well-known for the part he played in the development of the great Jodrell Bank radio telescope, took as his title ‘The individual and the universe’, and in his lectures he found three points of contact between cosmology and religion, each of which calls for comment.

The first occurred in his introductory lecture, which was devoted to the transition from the medieval geocentric and ordered cosmos to the infinite universe of the late seventeenth century. ‘In the three centuries since Galileo and Newton we have moved far, but the vital break with tradition belongs to their age, not ours.’ Now Professor Lovell shows that he appreciates that the revolution sparked off by the publication in 1543 of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus rapidly involved not only physical science as a whole, but also philosophy, religion, and in fact many of the features of man’s world picture. But it is on the religious aspect that he dwells. ‘The story’, he says, ‘is mainly one of persecution of the astronomers on religious grounds’, and in this way he produces a thoroughly distorted and unsatisfactory picture, for which he was rightly censured by Mr Arthur Koestler in a long letter to The Listener the following week.

The last of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s writing is an unfinished note, made during a retreat in Dublin, on the wedding feast at Cana: ‘There has been no stint, but there has been an unwise order in the serving’. It might stand, Father Devlin suggests, ‘for posterity’s estimate of him as well as the steward’s of the wine’. For that matter it might stand for the two volumes that now complete the gathering together of all the fragments of Hopkins’s writing. Rarely can a poet’s papers have been edited with such care, and at first one wonders at the industry that has been devoted to editing material which is often trivial and even tedious. Simply as an editorial achievement, the work of the late Humphry House (completed by Mr Graham Storey) and of Father Devlin will surely remain of classic importance. Here, exactly ordered and sympathetically annotated, is all the detailed record that remains of Hopkins’s curiosity about words or weather (‘Sept. 17. Dull. Sept. 18. Cold. Sept. 19. Dull, I think.’), of doubts and decisions (usually cryptically indicated), with often penetrating glimpses at the world that was his— Oxford, holiday journeys, Jesuit houses. Unfair, then, to say that much in both these books is unimportant. In themselves the diary entries and the retreat notes, the undergraduate essays and the sermons, are hardly likely to earn for Hopkins a new fame. There is little that distinguishes much of them from the papers of any scholarly priest of his period—and there were many—who had lived in Oxford during the years after Newman’s conversion and who shared the taste of the time for botany, country walks, music and ecclesiology.

The Elder Statesman is a success within special limits. It is an extension of the model of its predecessors, The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk. Anyone familiar with those predecessors could have foretold what was to seen on the boards at Edinburgh last year, could almost have read the text of the play before it was printed. One thinks of another sequence of four closely-related plays concluding with The Tempest.

To make such a comparison, even momentarily, is to pay vast tribute to the later poetic dramatist. But a comparison, momentary or studied, points this capital difference: the poetry of Cymbeline or The Winter’s Tale yields more significance, and therefore more delight, at each re-reading; the verse of The Confidential Clerk or The Elder Statesman says nearly all it has to say, at a single hearing or reading—unlike the poetry of The Waste Land, or even of some of the speeches of the Chorus in Murder in the Cathedral, where the resources or reserves appear limitless. This difference in the quality of language has consequences for the theatre. The plays of Shakespeare are a challenge to the producer. Because of the suggestiveness of the poetry, they ask to be produced in all manner of modes, whereas one production of The Elder Statesman cannot—or should not—differ from another production, except in minor points of emphasis depending on the skill of players. A standard production is ensured less by the stage-directions than by a pallid fixity of language.

The Elder Statesman is depressing in that it follows the conventions— conventions which compel a thin language—of its immediate predecessors.