in out of the way corners, but merely to seal a verdict already given by success and notoriety. Mr. Shaw has further justified the honour by refusing the money which accompanies the Prize, so that he is entitled both to congratulation and applause.

AND THE

CITY CHURCHES

ANCIENT BUILDINGS: The Report of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings is interesting reading, and may be obtained for two shillings from the Secretary (20, Buckingham Street, Adelphi, W.C. 2). It also contains information for any who are sufficiently interested to wish to join this useful society. It is difficult to formulate the reasons for which an old building may be worth preserving: Lord Burnham, in his address, gives the adjectives artistic, picturesque, historical, antique or substantial'. Artistic and historical, certainly; picturesque, doubtful: Shadwell and Stepney are picturesque, so is Bayswater; antique, meaningless; substantial, some of the concrete work at Wembley is substantial. But this is no time to cavil over definitions; there are only too many buildings in need of attention, concerning which there is no doubt. And, everyone who cares for the beauty of England should read the report, if only to understand how many good reasons and justifications there are, in addition to those which immediately propose themselves, for preserving many condemned structures. One of the reasons is simply that many old buildings (even old cottages, though here we have the special difficulty of low ceilings) are better built, and are still capable of longer usefulness, than the modern structures which would supersede them. And the report makes clear that only an architect of specialised experience is competent to deal with such buildings.

The Report makes no special mention of the City Churches: perhaps there is nothing more to say about them

until they are destroyed. But we would reiterate our argument of last October: that besides the powerful and concurrent reasons for preserving them as ancient buildings, there are other powerful reasons for preserving them as churches. And the shame and error of destroying them would be far greater in a National Church, which represents the body of citizens, than in a sectarian church which is directly responsible only to its own communicants.

NEW THEATRE New movements in the theatre are by no PROJECTS means at an end. During the last year or two the activity took the form of Sunday Societies, which multiplied until they seemed seriously to impede each other, and for the modification of which we made some suggestions several months ago. Then came the Sadlers' Wells movement, and since then other attempts to found repertory theatres of a permanent kind. We have recently been notified of two new ventures: the Forum Theatre Guild, and the Festival Theatre at Cambridge. There is also of course in existence the Gate' Theatre. In this type of theatre, too, we fear that too many people may try to do the same thing. All these ventures are eclectic and international, and there is danger of their all wanting to perform the same plays, and too many of them foreign plays. The New Criterion should be the last voice to complain of intelligent patronage of foreign playwrights, but it must be avowed that the majority of foreign plays at the present time-with the exception of French which are seldom performed-are too alien to be successfully transplanted: England can never take really kindly to the Teutonic, the Scandinavian, or even the Russian conceptions of drama.

All this, however, is merely a word of warning. Meanwhile the Maddermarket Theatre in Norwich pursues its sure and modest way, perhaps the most hopeful sign in the British dramatic world. Of new and recent ventures,

the Festival Theatre in Cambridge seems to us the most interesting; though we are somewhat terrified by its advertised efficiency, its 'triple stage', its cylindrical cyclorama lit with prismatic lighting' which makes it possible to practise a type of stagecraft never before seen in England'. Stagecraft' is ominous; and we need plays and players rather than cylindrical cycloramas' and steeply rising banks of armchair seating ... set at an obtuse angle to the floor'. Nor do we wish to be encouraged' to smoke; it is enough if smoking is tolerated. And a gourmet would prefer his special delicacies and wines obtained direct from Bordeaux' in a restaurant where he could give them his whole attention. But the seats are cheap; and somehow we feel that a theatre in an university town has a better chance of intelligent guidance and intelligent criticism than a theatre in London. We welcome the idea of collaboration between the Festival Theatre and the kindred institution in Oxford. Certainly the Festival Theatre is worth watching. Between the writing of these lines and their publication four plays will have been performed; we hope to discuss these performances in a later number. The programme is an interesting one, and raises our hopes of the Theatre.

NOTE: An INDEX to Vol. IV (THE NEW CRITERION, 1926), MAY BE OBTAINED POST FREE ON APPLICATION TO THE PUBLISHERS (Messrs. Faber & Gwyer, Ltd., 24, Russell Square, London, W.C.1.) This Index was omitted in error from the October number.

T

I

Plotinus, Enneads, I, 8

HE ideas of God are not, like our concepts, representative signs drawn from things, made to present to a created mind the immensity of what has been made and what is, and to bring this mind into conformity with things existing1 independent of itself. Ideas precede things, they create them. That is why theologians, trying to find here below some analogy for them, compare them to the ideas of the artist.

On this point, Thomist theology considers the idea of the artist in its proper nature, and investigates the notion of it. A factive or operative idea, a spiritual and immanent object contemplated in the mind, born of and nourished by it, living its life, which is the immaterial matrix by which the work is produced in the being, this idea is formative of things and not formed by them. Far from being measured by things like the speculative concept, the better it realises its proper essence, the more is it independent of things; subjecting them to its creative fecundation, it holds them under its dominance to such an extent that, in order to give, with a Jean de SaintThomas, full force to the word idea', it becomes necessary to say that no one really has the idea of a thing unless he is capable of making it.2 It does not bring the mind into 1 Actual or possible.

2 Jean de Saint-Thomas, Curs. theol. (Vives, t. III), 9, XV, § 13: Multi perfecte vident et cognoscunt aliquod artefactum,

conformity with the real, it brings the real into conformity with the mind; for there is always a resemblance, but in this case the resemblance of a little matter to the abyss of the generating invisible. With us, the creative idea is not a pure intellectual form, because we are on the lowest level of mind; on the contrary, operating as it does through the organs of the senses, and entangled in matter, the spiritual germ which makes our art fruitful is for us only a little of the divine which we barely glimpse, which is obscure to our own eyes, and raises and irradiates the stuff of sense and the elementary impulses. And, in especial, this independence with regard to things, which is essential to art as such and to the operative idea, is thwarted in us by our condition as minds created in a body, placed in the world after things were made, and forced at first to draw from these the forms which they use. This independence of things appears in perfection in God alone, who sees in His Ideas all the ways in which His essence can be manifested, and who produces creatures on the model of His Ideas, thus putting the seal of His likeness on the whole of what is made, and detaching things from the life they had in Him, and in which they were Himself, only in order to rediscover in them a trace of Himself. Here only, on the peaks of divinity, the idea as a working form obtains the entire plenitude required of it by its notion.

That is to say that art, like the intelligence (and indeed it is nothing but the working intelligence), considered apart and in its pure essence, realises the full perfection postulated by its nature only by passing to the pure Act. It is ridiculous, remarked Aristotle, to attribute to God the civic or political virtues. But in the same sense as v.g. domum vel statuam, imo res naturales perfecte a multis cognoscuntur: et tamen non habent ideam istorum, quia non sunt artifices, et multo minus factores rerum naturalium. Idea autem est forma factiva ideati exemplariter.'