‘It was the pattern of Michelangelo’s life’, writes Mr Michael Ayrton, introducing a translation of the great artist’s sonnets, ‘that in painting, an activity of which he thought little, his greatest designs were completed . . . whereas in sculpture, which he considered his proper profession, all his greatest projects failed to materialise or remained in some compromise form to mock him’. A story, then, of disappointment by distraction: an artist of outstanding genius in several media, but profoundly drawn to one in particular, finds himself repeatedly diverted, by circumstances and his patrons, from the work he most wanted to do; the result being the Sistine ceiling and the Last Judgment on the one hand, and on the other the unfinished tombs for Julius II and the Medici. And while those paintings are superb, they are unmistakably, almost pathetically, the work of a man whose deepest impulse was to carve in stone. ‘Say a good word, John’, wrote Michelangelo in the bizarre sonnet-letter to a friend about the discomforts of painting the Sistine vault lying on his back, ‘for these dead paintings of mine... for this place is no good and I’m no painter’. And many years later, in a letter to Benedetto Varchi, he tries to define what he felt about the two arts. It is a hesitant, halting letter because the old man was genuinely puzzled. Varchi, writing ‘philosophically’, had declared painting and sculpture to be really ‘the same thing’, and though Michelangelo knew by experience that they weren’t, he was too humble to contradict. He had always assumed, he replied, that painting was good ‘the closer it approached relief and relief was bad the nearer it got to painting, so that I’ve always thought of sculpture as the guiding-light (la lantema) of painting and that the two differ as the sun and the moon’. Now however he has changed his mind, yielding to Varchi’s metaphysics, agreeing that these arts ‘are one and the same’.

It is difficult to persuade people to reflect seriously about moral questions concerning war. Most people who turn to the subject of war are primarily interested not in the choice between moral and immoral acts but in the search for ‘a practicable defence policy.’ Such people— especially if they are Christians—may occasionally recognise that the possession of nuclear weapons is what moral theologians call a proximate occasion of sin but they often feel that they are faced by a dilemma.

I believe that the extent of the duty to avoid the occasions of unlawful warfare is very commonly underestimated. Nevertheless one is bound to recognise that many Christians consider—in view of the magnitude of the Soviet threat to our natural and Christian liberties— that the case against nuclear deterrents of all types remains non-proven.

This dilemma disappears once it is shewn that, in a position in which we are bound to be tempted, there is a whole family of acts and omissions which are gravely sinful not after the manner of an occasion— namely, on condition that there is an alternative which is not equally an occasion of sin—but in an absolute manner. This has already been substantially demonstrated. In England, the most convenient presentations of the arguments are: E. I. Watkin’s article ‘Unjustifiable War’ in Morals and Missiles, edited by Charles S. Thompson; Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience, edited by Walter Stein, and Father Anthony Kenny’s article ‘Counterforce and Counter-Value’ in the Clergy Review for December 1962.

Perhaps the greatest paradox in modem art, popular or esoteric, is the gap between the sort of music and verse which expresses itself in breathless, banal statements (often, incidentally, employing a diluted version of the poetic diction of the Romantic poets of the last century), and the quiet, withdrawn, secret and mysterious world of Abstract Expressionism and atonal music. It is as if two kinds of art were constantly at cold war with one another, and as if neither knew what war they were fighting in or who were their enemies. There is no communication, either friendly or aggressive, and the reader, the listener, the looker at pictures seems to be in a state of siege which he or she has not chosen and is powerless to explain.

Since communications between these two different kinds of art seem to have broken down so painfully, we are left with the spectacle of a world where man seeks stimulus through art, yet is not prepared to admit that art is, in some sense, amenable to reason, and where most people believe that if you are ‘with it’, as the current phrase goes, you will be happy, accepted and fulfilled. The Beat poets appear to have taken this dubious credo to its logical conclusion when they seek peace in the oblivion provided by drugs and in a kind of pseudo-mysticism which has little to do either with discipline or God.

Are we then to conclude that this is a decadent, a dead age, a century which is suffering from accidie rather than from violence or masochism? I do not myself think so. In Action Painting, Beat Poetry, and so on, I see an attempt to be realistic and honest, and to achieve something which has nothing to do with nihilism or despair.

The peculiar and precarious balance between elegance and brutality which is the hall-mark of the eighteenth century took many forms, varying widely according to country and society; but basically the intelligence, the vitality and the ruthlessness inherent in its self-confidence are instantly recognisable, whether in Versailles or the vernacular. By one of those curious coincidences endemic in the muddle of the film-exhibitor’s world, adaptations of two of the great classics of the period have reached the London screens within a few weeks of each other this summer, one British, the other French.

Fielding’s Tom Jones appears in a full-blooded Woodfall production, directed very much in the mid-century manner by Tony Richardson from a first-class script by John Osborne, in variable but, on the whole, beautiful Eastman Colour adorning the camera work of one of Britain’s best operators, Walter Lassally, and a score byjohn Addinsell. Optimus quisque, as you will note. The coruscating collection of stars studding the cast list means, in the event, that even the smallest parts are so well acted that the whole film has a homogeneity of style that is only too rare in historical pictures. Voltaire’s Candide, on the other hand, retains its eighteenth century style but not its manner in the modern version directed, produced, adapted and scripted by Norbert Carbonnaux. Though to be sure this black and white picture begins neatly enough by getting the best of both worlds (even if neither is demonstrably the best of all possible ones) with its credit titles set wittily against dissolving toile deJouy backgrounds; moreover the film opens with a fancy dress dance for Cunegonde in which everybody (except Candide himself) makes a first appearance in eighteenth century costume.

Peace on earth—the passionate longing of mankind everywhere. Peace is a word which is on everyone’s lips, and the desire for it in everyone’s heart— statesman and layman alike. The achievement of total and universal disarmament, the biggest step on the road to peace, is, as President Kennedy said only last year, no longer a pipe-dream of a few idealists: it is a stark matter of whether mankind is to survive on this earth or not.

Women, by their very nature, have always had the privilege and responsibility of feeding and nurturing the human family—hers the joy of bringing children into the world and hers the main responsibility for them till they are of an age to fend for themselves. She has a unique opportunity of moulding these children into the kind of beings with the kind of outlook she desires. Her power for good or evil is enormous. It is therefore of the utmost importance that women should be fully alive to the problems of the world in which these children have to live. Nowadays in the complicated state in which the human family lives, each nation and indeed each individual so interdependent on other nations and individuals, relying as everyone does on at least some of the produce of other countries for their very existence, women have a very special duty to extend their sphere of influence and their activities from their own immediate family to the family of the whole world. These are at least some of the reasons why women have a special interest in the achievement of a true and lasting peace, more than ever necessary today when the effects of artificially induced radiation, e.g. by the explosion of atomic weapons, are exceedingly grave, not only to the living, but also to the unborn, maybe for generations to come.