‘I was there when France fell; and I have written this book to mourn her.’ Many English-speaking people were there when France fell, and many have written books, to mourn the collapse of her army, or the dissolution of her political machine, or the capture of Paris, or the surrender of her navy. But the France mourned here, with this pall of many colours and many patterns, is not the agony of events that announced her painful death, but the reality of France, dying beneath the suffering of the last fatal illness : France as men of the French way of thinking loved and understood her. This reality is not widely, or at any rate not fully, understood in England and America; it is not understood what has died, nor what is the loss caused by that death, nor the true nature of the disease from within and the enemy from without which combined to bring about this disaster. These are the three leading strains of Mr. Bagger’s ‘Impersonal Autobiography,’ which he calls ‘an account of the End of Our Time in terms of one man’s life,’ likening himself to a scribe hurrying away from the sack of Cnossus, that most modern and urban of ancient cultural centres, to tell the Egyptians ‘to look to their fences and defences.’ For Mr. Bagger escaped with difficulty to New York, and there they said to him, what they had aid in France : ‘It cannot happen here.’

This is neither a historical treatise, nor a philosophical essay, nor humorous reminiscence, nor a traveller’s diary, nor an epicure’s observations—it is all of these things, and much more. It is much more, because all these kinds of writing are woven together in a lively and powerful narrative, which gaily carries the reader, now along one strand, now another, though it always winds in greater or lesser circles around the background of France.

Maurice Barrés, that great Frenchman whom the Church buried as a Catholic although he had not officially returned to her fold, had written of ‘The Great Pity of the churches of France.’ It was at the time of Waldeck-Rousseau and Combes’s iniquitous anti-clerical laws for which France is paying with her heart’s blood to-day.

How many Catholic hearts are now again aching for the great pity of the Church of France ! Not that, as yet, the iron heel of anti-Christ is pressed home on that Church. Hitler has had, so far, to restrain the tactics of open persecution so long followed in Catholic Germany and that have reached their unashamedly sadistic peak in Poland. But it seems as if the great Catholic renaissance operative in all ranks, those of the intelligenzia and of Labour alike, had availed nothing for the salvation of Church or country.

In the four centuries preceding the Reformation, the decoration of the walls of churches was an important form of the art of painting. In many English parish churches the whole of the interior may have been covered with pictures. The subject matter generally included scenes from the Gospels and Lives of the Saints, but varied considerably according to the local:ty and period. Although a higher degree of artistic merit was attained in many of the illuminated manuscripts and panel paintings produced by the great monastic centres and by the Court school at Westminster, the wall paintings were often more representative of contemporary ideas.

At the present time, only a comparatively small proportion of mediaeval wall-paintings remain in a good state of preservation. It is recorded that after the Reformation, Puritan iconoclasts destroyed literally thousands. Fortunately, however, some were only covered with whitewash, and others had been obscured by additional stonework, and these have been brought to light again. Many accurate copies of these have been made by Professor Tristram, of which eight hundred are in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Towards the end of the fourteenth century, the social changes following upon the Plague were reflected in the wall-paintings. It would appear that in, this period of social unrest, something very like our present idea of Christ the Worker came into being. Wall paintings began to appear having for their subject Christ as a poor man, displaying his wounds, and surrounded with workmen’s tools. The usual cruciform halo is absent, and in some cases the tools take its place. About fourteen or fifteen examples of these paintings are to be found in various parts of the country, in Buckinghamshire, Suffolk, Berkshire, Sussex, Gloucestershire, Cornwall, and Pembroke. Considering the large number of paintings which were destroyed, the fact that so many survive is a good indication of its popularity at the time.

The illustrious Catholic philosopher has not been idle during his enforced exile in New York. He left France at Christmas, 1939, to undertake his usual lectures in the Universities of Toronto and America, and then came the fall of France. He sojourns in a free country and believes it his duty to aid his own country to rise again, and to help to bring about the triumph of the universal human ideals and values symbolised by Christian Democracy. To this end he is writing books, articles and lectures. His students are the great public of Europe and America; his studies and ideas converge upon the philosophy of modern politics. He is not enclosed within the narrow confines of any party, bur soars to the heights, untrammeled by preoccupations with slogans. In all his social writings his calm judgment, at once profound and deeply human, has always stood out. The philosopher usually follows the paths of mere speculation; Maritain takes pleasure in turning the searchlight of Catholic philosophy upon the living reality offered in the succession of great events through which we are now passing.