A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

ONE of the international visits which had been confidently announced as about to take place, and which has not taken place, is that of Dr. Benes to Moscow. After the Czechoslovak President visited Washington in May; and conferred there not only with President Roosevelt but with Mr. Churchill, it was dearly understood that his visit to Moscow would follow immediately. The advantages of such an arrangement were obvious. It was the intention that Dr. Benes should sign in Moscow a Russo-Czecho- slovak Treaty following closely the lines of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1942, a step which would have begun to lay the foundations of stability and permanence in Eastern and Central Europe. At the same time the value of the assurances which Dr. Benes, from the knowledge he has acquired during his stay in Britain, could and undoubtedly would have given to M. Stalin and other leading Russians of Britain's resolve and unquestioned good faith and good- will towards Russia would by the nature of things have had far greater effect than any such assurances from a British source. But Dr. Benes has not gone to Moscow. There is reason to believe that the dissuasion came from the Whitehall region, and it is very difficult to understand. The people who will find it most difficult of all to understand are the Russians. There is every reason indeed to fear that in proportion as the visit might have been fruitful in allaying suspicions, its cancellation or postponement must inevitably have the opposite effect. If it was right for General Sikorski to go to Moscow and conclude an agreement with M. Stalin in 1941, why is it wrong for Dr. Benes to do the same in 1943? The more sound contacts between London and Moscow the better—obviously.

* * * * It is, I suppose, better that six guilty men should escape punish- ment than that one .innocent man should be unjustly punished (though I realise that this is an arguable proposition), but the pardon extended last week to a clergyman whom two courts have, after full deliberation, found guilty of importuning, seems to call for some little explanation. The cleric in question was in the first instance sentenced at Bow Street to three months' hard labour. On appeal this was quashed, and the defendant was bound over for two years —which means that the evidence given against him was believed, and the conviction stood, but it was apparently thought by the Chairman of London Sessions that the publicity given to the case was sufficient penalty. Now the Home Office, for reasons unex- plained, grants a free pardon, which automatically wipes out die conviction, and the Bishop of Rochester states publicly that the arrest was due to a misapprehension. If so evidence to that effect ought clearly to be given. The evidence that was given publicly led a metropolitan magistrate to pronounce the defendant guilty, and the Court of Appeal to confirm that decision. The reputation of the courts deserves some consideration as well as the reputation of inipugried citizens. * * * *

The disappearance of the Frankfurter Zeitung would at ordinary times be a notable event in the journalistic world. But at ordinary times, no doubt, the Frankfurter would not have disappeared. Corre- sponding roughly to the Manchester Guardian, it naturally found life increasingly difficult after Hitler's advent to power in 1933, and the inevitable process of trimming the paper's sails to the wind was plainly visible. Since 1934 (I think) the paper was edited from Berlin by Rudolf Kircher, who ultimately surrendered com-

pletely to Nazi doctrines (unlike Theodor Wolff, of the Berliner Tageblatt). Kircher's ability, and his former reputation as a Liberal, were of considerable value to the Hitler regime. He was formerly London correspondent of the Frankfurter and lived for several years

in the Hampstead Garden Suburb. His character-studies-of English public men were able pieces of work.

* * * * My expressed preference for one paraphrase of the 23rd Psalm, Addison's " The Lord my pasture shall prepare," over Sir Henry Baker's " The King of love my shepherd is " evokes the comment that while Baker paraphrases the whole Psalni, Addison omits the last two verses, and so does George Herbert's hymn. Actually Herbert only omits half the last verse, but mention of him draws attention to a rather flagrant plagiarism. Herbert early in the seventeenth century wrote: The God of love my shepherd is, And He that doth me feed ; While He is mine and I am His What can I want or need?

and Baker, late in the nineteenth:

The King of love my shepherd is

Whose goodness faileth never ; I nothing lack if I am His And He is mine for ever.

The first lines may pass ; but Herbert's "He is mine and I am His' represents nothing in the original. Yet Baker follows it almost slavishly. Why?

* * * * My appeal for help as to the origin of the term " ivory tower" has been variously rewarded. Many replies quote from the Song

of Solomon " Thy neck is as a tower of ivory," but that, of course, has no relation to the recognised meaning of the term. Then comes

the suggestion that the originator of the term_ was Brunetiere, who applied it to the attitude of romantics like Rousseau and Novalis and other seekers after the unattainable. But it is, in fact, dear, as a number of correspondents show, that the author is Sainte-Beuve, who in a poem published in 1837 in his Pensies d'ai:n2t wrote: " . . . et Vigny, plus secret, Conune en sa tour d'ivoire, avant midi rentrait."

Sainte-Beuve used the term in prose also, in his Portraits LittOraires, thus:

" Longtemps it 's'est donc tenu a part sur'sa colline, et comme je lui disais tut jour, il est rentre avant midi dans son tour d'ivoire."

And over the authoritative initials G. M. Y. comes a reminder of Henry James' unfinished novel, The Ivory Tower.

* * * *

I am flattered at finding a photograph of myself in The Field. It is true that it is not quite myself as I know myself. I have always been content to be 7anus bifrons, looking before and• after, but to be 7anus trifrons, embracing specifically present (which might have been taken for granted) as well as past and future, is perfectly agreeable. It makes, no doubt, almost a superfluity of visage, but that, after all, depends on the visage, a subject on which it would be unbecoming in me to say anything. This portrait is carved on a

pew-end' in Cardinham Church, Cornwall, and The Field publishes

a photograph of the carving. J„ us.