The fact that a Bill proposing divorce after seven years’ separation has passed its second reading in the House of A Commons, and that a Royal Commission is to investigate Divorce Law in general, makes relevant some consideration of the existing German law which provides for divorce after a separation of only three years. As was said during the House of Commons debate, once granted the principle of separation as grounds for divorce, even a shorter time limit might be adopted; and, since the German law provides the evidence of the working of such a law over a period of some thirteen years, it should be possible, from German experience, to consider the similar British proposals and their likely effects.

It is significant that the German law which permitted divorce by the objective fact of separation, in addition to divorce on the grounds of adultery or misconduct, came into force when Hitler had reached the climax of his career in 1938. The Hitler law had for its background theories of race and population: the man who was physically able to produce nordic children must not be hindered by the matrimonial vows which he once gave to a now ageing woman no longer capable of bearing children. One needs just to mention this primitive idea of the sense of matrimony to understand its full bearing. It was very characteristic that the upstarts of the Nazi party—the Kreisleiters and Gauleiters—were the first to make use of this law; their womenfolk who had carried the burden of the past were no longer young and sophisticated enough to fit in with the ‘glory’ of the new class:

According to Edmond Malone, the poet’s most considerable biographer, Dryden’s family after being long established at Staff hill in Cumberland migrated south about the middle of the sixteenth century and settled in Northamp- shire, where the then head of the family, John Driden, married the daughter and heiress of Sir John Cope, through whom he became possessed of the estates and manor of Canons Ashby which had been seized from the Austin Canons by Henry VIII some twenty years before. His eldest son Erasmus, who was created a baronet by James I in 1619, had three sons, of whom Erasmus the youngest became the father of the poet born in 1631. As this Erasmus had thirteen other children to provide for, it is not surprising to read that on his death in 1654 he left John but a small patrimony, although he was the eldest child. This was the inconsiderable property of Blakesley, about three and a half miles from Canons Ashby, reckoned as bringing in an annual sum of -£60, of which a portion had to be paid by John to his widowed mother, so that he had to look elsewhere for a living. Already at Cambridge he had shown ability in literature, and now he embarked seriously upon the career of a poet and dramatist with such success that before he had completed his thirtieth year he was already accepted as a writer of eminence and had even attracted the notice of the newly restored Stuart king, Charles II.

The last thing we are ever told about anything is who made it. Naturally, for what do makers matter in a world of ‘minders’?

The author of The Gothic World advances a half-hearted plea that a like technical indifference may explain medieval anonymity. He persuaded us more when in his former volume Gothic England he set out to deny the allegation altogether and to rid ‘le miracle occidental’ itself of ‘the plague of anonymity’. (Will no one rid us of the plague of notoriety?) In sober fact ‘from the period 1250-1550 a vast number of names survive. It would be no exaggeration to say that the men responsible for all the major developments of art in this period are already known to us by name.’

Mr John Harvey sets himself to answer four questions: ‘What, How, Where and When was Gothic Art?’ He has especially enthralling things to tell us about the ‘How’ and not least about medieval craftsmen, trassours and devysours, their lodges and guilds, their gear and skill. Coming pat at the moment when the swinging pendulum of controversy has come to rest at a point of equilibrium, his researches should greatly help to establish once and for all a true idea of the master-builders and of the vivid world of medieval craftsmen.

For Mr Harvey the master-mason is neither, according to the extreme folk-art view, just one of the lads’, nor, according to the opposite extreme, the irresponsible ‘artist’ he has been since the Renaissance.