Primary Things:

Land^ Work^ and Sign

Adrian Cunningham

ADRIAN CUNNINGHAM is a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Lan-

caster University. An earlier version of this paper was read at the fiftieth
anniversary celebration of Father Vincent McNabb held at St. Dominic's
Priory, London, 1993.

This paper is about connexions and discontinuities; reflexions spurred

by an invitation to speak at St. Dominic's Priory, London, at the fiftieth
anniversary celebration of the life of Vincent McNabb.
Around 1960 I was temporarily employed in my home parish of St.
Dominic's^ with a government population census, guiltily aware of what
Father McNabb would make of such an Herodian exercisehe had once
observed that St. Peter had denied his Lord whilst warming his hands at a
government fire. An elderly lady told me that the taking of a census was
pointless since the area was to be developed and "all these houses are go-
ing to be demoralised [sic]." And walking through it again more than
thirty years later, my feelings were as confused as hers on looking for
Chappell's piano factory where my mother's step-father worked, or Miss
Potter's Catholic repository (where they had once sold Eric Gill's
coloured cast figures), or the tram shed and Mansell's paper factory. Or,
more oddly, not being able to recall what was there in some re-built or
cleared spot.
I could not, as had been advertised, lead a discussion on memories of
Vincent McNabb since I was only a few months old when he died. But he
made a powerful impression on my mother and on my grandmother, who
was bom across the road in Quadrant Grove, near Karl Marx's house in
Grafton Terrace. M y grandmother was baptised in St. Dominic's in the
1880s, in what I inaccurately supposed to be now the parochial room in

The Roman Bridge across the Ucero on the way into Osma.

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 1 ne cnesterron Keview

which we met for McNabb's anniversary. She had walked to work in Tot-
tenham Court Road across the fields before the church was built, was later
married by Father John Leather, and my parents' marriage as well as our
own was celebrated in the same church. So my own connections, i f not
my memory, went back a long way. An early abiding impression was a
puzzle over the fine lettering of the war memorial in the church, lettering
by Eric Gill and Joseph Cribb, and the fact that so many had died. I also
thought of Father Columba Ryan and Father Simon Blake with their large
wooden cross entering the priory at the end of the peace pilgrimage from
Belgium in 1947; of Corpus Christi processions (with, interestingly for
those days, the local Salvation Army band); of the peculiar rolling gait of
the processions of the Guild of the Blessed Sacrament, seeming as i f they
were composed exclusively of former sailors; of the obscure Sunday af-
ternoon "churching of women," a rite whose obscurity was compounded
by my hearing it as "the churning of women."
It is harder to imagine the English Catholic world of that period, of-
ten a right-little, tight-little mission from the mainland of Christendom,
for whom Belloc's mindless slogan: "Europe is the faith, the faith is Eu-
rope" was still in mind. There is an even larger gap in the earlier part of
the century, where, for instance, plain writing and public speaking, and a
Catholic world of syllogisms and slogans, had a role which is hard to re-
capture now. It might then have been said of McNabb, as it was of his ad-
versary Dean W.R. Inge of St. Paul's Cathedral, that he was a pillar of the
church and two columns of the Evening Standard. Though so effective at
the time, these things leave little record now. But it is not just a recalling
that we should be concerned with, but rather a recovery and learning from
that recent but distant past, an inquiry into what bearings our predecessors
may yet offer us in a new context. Father McNabb once said: " I often ad-
mire the efficiency of the modern world. It does not know where it is go-
ing, but it is going there very e f f i c i e n t l y . T h i s remark represents his
characteristically astringent and penetrating humour, or what Philip Ha-
green called "the icy torrent of his jeremiads." ^ McNabb's sentiment was
shared by Gill and Jones but, overall, their emphases were distinct in their
responses to a world which they perceived and felt to be a world gone
mad and in their attempt to return to, and draw from, what they saw as vi-
tal elements of Christian sanity in the right ordering of Hfe. Given the ex-
traordinary range of his activities and interests, which in areas of ecu-
menism and social justice more than once got him into trouble with the
Vatican, McNabb is now thought of as a controversialist with the fugitive

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Primary Things: Land, Work and Sign

record that such activities leave. It seems to me that his lasting influence
is inextricably bound up with the Ditchling "thing"Kipling's line "It is
not given for goods or gear but for the thing" appears in Hilary Pepler's
dedication of The Devil's Devices (1915) to Chesterton, Gill and Edward
Johnstone. There is the wider context of Hilaire Belloc, the Catholic Land
Association, and Distributisman heroically radical critique of moder-
nity from within official Cathohc social (interesting word, not "political")
teaching (another interesting word). I am not sure that McNabb's work
will stand on its own outside that context.
In their responses to the efficiency of the modem world, for the three
figures discussed here, it is the mark of humanity that we are free and ra-
tional beings insofar as we control our work. What I want to clarify is
what Hilary Pepler called McNabb's "magnificent obsession" with Ditch-
ling. I suggest that the extremism of his focus upon "the Land" as the
basis, at times the sole basis, of such freedom tended to undermine the
lasting importance of his teaching. McNabb's condemnation of the cen-
tralising efficiency of the modern world is consistent, and in line with the
views of Belloc and Chesterton. Replying to critics in 1914, he exclaimed,
"It is quite evident that the existing state of things is substantially what
Socialism is condemned for proposing to bring i n ! A n d in May, 1943, a
few weeks before his death. Father McNabb recounted with great glee to
Harold Robbins, the Editor of The Cross and the Plough, a recent conver-
sation with one of Beveridge's senior aides in planning post-war recon-
struction in which he had urged that there were only two kinds of soci-
etythe free and the unfree. The free society was so in virtue of its highly
distributed property. The unfree could be either Capitalist or Commu-
nistall men worked for wages at the dictation of others and were, there-
fore, unfree. Names were irrelevant; the only test was freedom and prop-
erty.^ In this connection, he never deviated from Belloc's The Servile
State.
For McNabb, it was obvious that "The chief function of the philoso-
pher is to justify the intuition or the common sense of the average man," ^
and he had no doubt what this intuition and common sense had to say of
the primary things of life. Above all, "The Family, not the Individual, is
the unit of the Nation."'^ Family and farm are for McNabb indissolubly
hnked, as they were not for Belloc and Chesterton or for Gill and Jones.
Yet there is an important difference of focus for McNabb and the Catholic
Land Association, who believed that the farm is the unit of production;
and the family is the unit of the farm.^ The pursuit of the small-scale was

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not merely beautiful, since "for purposes of social survival the large,
wide-spread, mass-moulded is not as efficient as the smaller organiza-
tion." 9 A stress upon self-subsistence is another distinctive characteristic
of McNabb's position. Farming is for the family hearth, not for the mar-
ket: pro foco non pro foro agri colendi was carved by Laurie Cribb for
McNabb's memorial stone in the chapel at Ditchling. Thus, "Farmers
should farm primarily for self-support. They should sell as little as possi-
ble and buy as little as possible." These general principles of a return to
the land were seen as peculiarly important and urgent for the almost
wholly urban Catholic population. It was only by land settlement in
groups that the faith could be preserved and from such land settlements
the general drift to industrial nemesis could be averted. Father McNabb
writes:
in our town conditions we are beaten; we are beginning to com-
promise on the moral code, because we are beaten by those con-
ditions. The normal family life is now defending heroic virtue
you should never from the average person demand more than
average virtue, and if, in those conditions, your family life, which
should be average and normal, has now become heroic, you must
get out of them.
This stress upon the self-subsistent family unit combines with other
themes to make up McNabbian economics. Among these I wish to high-
light three; his thinking on production, on markets, and on tokens.
Perhaps the most enduringly radical of all his principles was one that
cuts across nearly all the varieties of modem economics and has a bearing
upon current environmental concerns. Something like it may be present in
Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops and other anarchist think-
ing, but McNabb is the only person I can think of who articulated it so
forcefully and so often. The use of the family and of self-subsistence as
the yardsticks of everything else led him to give as much emphasis to con-
sumption as to production. I f these are to be kept together as far as possi-
ble in the family farm, then a more general re-thinking of their global re-
lationship is entailed. The consequence is that
The area of population should be as far as possible coterminous
with the area of consumption. The utilitarians were wrong in say-
ing things should be produced where they can be most economi-
cally produced. The true principle is: things should he produced
where they can he most economically consumed.
This principle is one that was missed by both CapitaUst and Marxist eco-
nomics and one that, along with some other Distributist positions that had

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Primary Things: Land, Work and Sign

little or no prospect in England, has direct relevance to the theory and

practice of development in the Third World towards the end of this cen-
tury.
It is in this perspective that McNabb demotes the role of markets.
Writing about the blasphemy of the destruction of California peaches in
order to stabilise prices, he notes how frequently his contemporaries con-
fuse the mass-production that he detests with the intensive production that
he favours. Mass-production and the dominance of "market forces" are
necessarily and powerfully linked. From the point of view of small-scale
and intensive production, there need be no "fallacy of markets"; for, even
if they are a necessity, markets are never a primary necessity. Father Mc-
Nabb writes:
It cannot be too clearly recognised that the economic primaries
are but two: Production, Consumption. Other activities, such as
Exchange, Distribution, Transport, Market, Price-fixing, Money-
value, are never primary even when practically necessary.
As important as McNabb's fundamental re-casting of the production-
consumption relationship is, in our present situation we might need to
reconsider the stress upon such a primary dyad. We should also need to
consider in what are called, in totally un-McNabbian phrases, "knowl-
edge-based industries," or "service industries," in which so many First-
World people work. The general principles of control over one's work
and, to some extent the ownership of the means of work, can be creatively
applied; but the very local tying together of production and consumption
makes less obvious sense in a world dependent upon instant communica-
tion of information via computers, telephones and fax-machines. One can
feel the simple force of McNabb's point when he writes:
There are only Things and Tokens. The world-wide economic
crisis, i f it exists, is a dearth of things, not of tokens. Now a
dearth of things cannot be met by the creation or redistribution of
tokens. A dearth of things can be met only by the creation or re-
distribution of things. ^4
But there is, odd as it sounds to say this of him, something literalistic,
even fetishistic (in the Marxist sense) in this accent upon things in the
way in which it tends to exclude or at least to marginalise whole areas of
work, of which teaching and medicine can stand as examples. The dis-
tance from "things," for good as well as for ill, as a reality of contempo-
rary work is obviously not something that McNabb or any of his contem-
poraries could have envisaged. But the limitation in his thinking which

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one runs up against when one tries to apply it in a contemporary way in

the First World is not just that the self-sufficient family farm as the only
general solution to impending doom was a fantasy; he could only reluc-
tantly allow anything other than the land to be a basis for right living, and
it is from this that some of his most sympathetic associates did in fact dis-
sent, as we shall see.
My point here can be illustrated by returning to McNabb's magnifi-
cent obsession, the Ditchling to which he says that he gave "something of
the love I never gave a woman." Reflecting, after a quarter of a century,
on his first visits to the "prophetic fugitives from what they looked upon
as doomed and damned Industrialism," who had learned in the machine-
ridden town that "man's head as well as man's heart should beckon totter-
ing civilisation back to man's hand," he recalled an initial misgiving. This
was the handicap that, with the possible exception of Ethel Mairet's
weaving, none of them practised what he thought of as a primary craft.
What he meant by primary is clear:
Has Ditchling worked mainly on Primary things?as the old,
stable, primitive communities worked on primary things: food,
clothing, digging, spinning, weaving. Even community spinning
(such as exists in many primitive communities) would be perhaps
as holy a representation of Nazareth as a Mystery Play. Has
Ditchling thought so?
It was McNabb's influence that led Hilary Pepler into the land purchases
that were part of the upheavel in Eric Gill's departure from Ditchling in
1924, later followed by David Jones. In Philip Mairet's experience of both
groups, although tlie numbers were far smaller, the combination of farm-
ing and craftwork made Ditchling a far deeper and more comprehensive
attempt to revive and to live by pre-industrial values in work than any-
thing the arts-and-crafts guild at Chipping Campden had achieved. It is
true that, with hindsight the mechanisation of farming had barely started
at that time; but Pepler's attitude was basically romantic, "his addiction to
the ancient, picturesque but unprofitable methods of farming was dog-
matic." 1^ Day-to-day farming as a full-time occupation was carried out by
his son David, efforts which were generally considered to have con-
tributed to his early death in 1934. In Hilda Graef's account of her un-
happy six weeks working for Pepler at St. Dominic's Press in the early
years of the War, she noted how the L A N D (in capital letters) recurred in
conversations as i f it were the object of a cult, but a cult that smacked to
her more of Bloomsbury and Chelsea than of Sussex. And the money that

7R
Primary Things: Land, Work and Sign

sustained oil lamps and cows as a horrified protest against industrialism

came from Pepler's editorial work in London. Some of his later income
came from working for the illustrated weekly, Everybody's.
It was also McNabb's influence that led Gill to repeat the efforts at
farming at Capel and at Pigotts. Of the latter, his apprentice David
Kindersley, sharply observed:
It was a brave but unrealistic attempt to unite the workshop and
the farm and a drain on Mr. Gill's income that he could ill afford.
In this care of the farm the craftsman in Mr. Gill seemed blind to
the inefficient, amateur husbandry.
Observations such as these need to be set alongside the atmosphere con-
veyed by other accounts and by David Jones's paintings of "Mr. Gill's
Hay Harvest" or "The Farm Door." In practice, to both Pepler and Gill,
farming was, (in a term that they would have loathed) a hobby.
A reference to G i l l and Pepler would certainly not have been
McNabb's intention when he wrote: "To hve in the country while contin-
uing to live on the town may be serving Mammon rather than God; indeed
may be serving Mammon under the guise of serving God",^! but his com-
ment points up the severity of his stance and the impossibility of its
achievement in the way that he would have desired. The handwork at
Ditchling was only sustainable by its relatively wealthy purchasers. There
is an inevitable irony of the middle ground of life here, which McNabb's
asceticism of analysis missed despite his living in a religious conmiunity
that was itself in part dependent upon income from shares. The penetrat-
ing diagnosis of ills moved to an unhveable prescription for general cure.
McNabb and his Distributist associates were early and astute commenta-
tors on the rise of international conglomerates such as I.C.I.what we
would now call multi-national, or more accurately, trans-national corpora-
tions; but his counter-position had its own unsustainable purity of heroic
virtue. Some Mennonite communities might have fitted his ideal, but they
represented a continuing rather than a broken and a yet-to-be-restored tra-
dition. In 1920 there was an idea to move the Guild from Ditchling to
Crappa Island, off Galway, and Gill briefly wondered about shaking off
the middle-class life and becoming a mere peasant. As a recent biographer
of Eric Gill comments: "Encouraged by Father Vincent McNabb there
was a scheme to affiliate Ditchling with Sinn Fein." 22 Perhaps things
could have taken off in De Valera's peasant wonderland, "but they might
have tried to teach the Irish how to farm."^^ In 1933, when the Domini-
cans, Reginald Ginns and Austin Barker, led twelve representatives of the

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Catholic Land Association on pilgrimage to Rome in the Holy Year, Mus-

solini congratulated them upon the difficult but possible task of securing a
rehabilitation of agriculture, with its arts and crafts. They came home with
what has been described as "the vista of a well-distributed nation, a happy
and contented peasantry." It is instructive to note that in 1933, also,
Dorothy Day had started The Catholic Worker in New York, and it is to
ventures such as this that one looks for some continuing impact of ideas
which McNabb might have shared. In England, it was not to be. Replying
to the question from an anxious Distributist, "But how am I to get out of
London?" McNabb asked whether he had considered walking. Today it is
even clearer that, walk one ever so far, one is never wholly free from the
City of London.
David Jones spent the greater part of his life in or near London, and it
is with his distinctive stance towards primary things that I want to explore
further some of the bearings for the future that we might take forward
from the magnificent obsession. The preoccupation of David Jones and
Eric Gill with the right making of things may offer a perspective upon
fundamental issues in a period when Western culture and personality is,
as it was then, experienced as fragmentation. The stance overlaps with
McNabb's, but the accent is different. David Jones writes:
Man as a moral being hungers and thirsts after justice and man as
artist hungers and thirsts after form, and although these are ulti-
mately one, because of the truth of that best of all sayings, "the
Beauty of God is the cause of the being of all that is," neverthe-
less for us they are not one, not yet, not by any means.

My own introduction to the problem of form was fortuitous, via an exhibi-

tion of Jacob Epstein's personal collection of "primitive" art near my
school in London in the late 1950s. Earlier I had rather dutifully looked at
pictures in the National Gallery, but without much feeling for post-medi-
aeval works and with an uncomfortable sense of not seeing what other
people were seeing in the later work. But here in the exotic setting of Lord
Leighton's (I think) Holland Park house was the real thing! Wanting to
know more of this, I was given, by mistake. Gill's collection Art Non-
sense and Other Essays with its opening two pages "Slavery and Free-
dom" in which he writes:
That state is a state of Slavery in which a man does what he likes
to do in his spare time and in his working time that which is re-
quired of him. This state can only exist when what a man likes to
do is to please himself. . . . That state is a state of Freedom in

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Primary Things: Land, Work and Sign

which a man does what he hkes to do in his working time and in

his spare time that which is required of him. This state can only
exist when what a man hkes to do is to please God. ^6
This complete turning upside down of taken-for-granted common sense,
its inversion of the everyday realities of work and leisure, public and pri-
vate, sacred and profane, made a profound impression. There was an intu-
itive sense that this somehow belonged in the same world as the "primi-
tive" art seen earlier. Gill's essay and a feel for the St. Dominic's Press
books in the London priory led me into the world of Ditchling. There was
a linking of work, of community and of religion as a lived and practised
imaginative critique of the worldintegrating the everyday and the beau-
tiful in things one could see, touch and handle in works of stone, clay,
wood, silver, cloth, paint and print. This tangibility of the things made and
the variety of media in which Gill and Jones themselves worked remains
for me of enormous appeal. Gill, as well as being an engraver and type-
designer, was one of the first sculptors for centuries to work directly on
the stone rather than to have clay models made by others using a pointing
machine. Jones seems the only person since William Blake to be an out-
standing poet, engraver and painter. This tangibility, this tasting and see-
ing that things are good, is also a considerable problem when a majority
of us work in office activities that have no identifiable lasting product. In
preparing this paper, I experienced a strange time reversal. Reading David
Jones concentratedly for days at a time, I was suddenly back there in the
late 1950s when the destructive nature of industrial society and its inher-
ent connection with warfare (epitomised in the Cuba crisis) was illumi-
nated by Gill's writingsnaive, assertive and repetitive as they may be
at a level and with a directness that other more economically and
politically sophisticated critiques did not touch. The vision faded a bit as I
drank a Diet-Coke and put Gill's essay through the photocopier. . . .
Picking up again on the Epstein exhibitionwhilst much of Ditch-
ling could be seen as an English mralist fantasy, from Babylon to Arcady,
or at least marginal to the way of the world, there was an observable con-
nection of the exotic, the "primitive" and work still being produced in
Sussex. The benchmarks for art and work were not all in a distant mediae-
val past. Gill, like Jones, was deeply struck by Post-Impressionism which
he saw as "more a return to primary things than Pre-Raphaelitism ever
was"; and contrasting the godly and the ungodly he linked Cimabue with
MaUsse and Sassoferato with Orpen.^^ Much later, his friend Walter
Shewring was to place side by side a bone harpoon-head from the Mar-

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quesas Islands and Brancusi's "Bird in Space." The connections proved

to be even wider and deeper. Gill's friend, and Ethel Mairet's first hus-
band, Ananda Coomaraswamy was the first to say that the artist was not a
special kind of person, but that every person was a special kind of artist.
He linked traditional Eastern and Western philosophies of artas he did
the writings of Eckliart and Sankarain a conception of tradition that was
both metaphysical and ordinary. He was also instrumental in the founding
of one of the first museums of photographic art. It was a sense of tradition
linking the active and the contemplative with which, for example, both
Bede Griffiths and Dorothy Day could passionately connect. ^9
There are obvious tensions as well as obvious connections between
the works and writings of Gill and Jones. Gill's concentration upon get-
ting work right and letting beauty take care of itself both does and does
not match Jones's concern with art and sacrament. Gill ended as a pacifist
and as a syndicalist; Jones's preoccupation with the First World War
(compeUing and disturbing for peace-makers), his respect for soldiers and
strategy, can feed into rather murky waters in some of his Arthurian and
Celtic writings. But both artists are clear that within the production and
reproduction of everyday life lie the keys to our integrity and sanity.
Much twentieth-century writing concerns justice about work, the condi-
tions under which we work, rather than the nature of work itself. Both Gill
and Jones were concerned with the reciprocity of the finis operis and the
finis operantis\ for, in making our world, we make ourselves. As reflected
images of God, in fashioning a material object, we fashion ourselves spiri-
tually. As Bryan Keeble writes:
In the act of creating, God externalises Himself, whereas the
artist or workman in the act of making intemahses himself^by
making outwardly, in an act of pure worship, man fashions his
own internal essence.
In this tradition, a concern with human subjects is precisely what puts art
beyond subjective expression. Gill's emphasis here seems to me clear,
whether one agrees with it or not. Jones's sense of the human world as one
of sign-making is just as important, but more elusive. He touches on the
question, as to whether in the inundation of flickering heteroclite images
of the media, sacraments can still be "effective signs," and upon whether
or not the iconic can be more than one cultural object amongst others.
For David Jones,
a metamorphosis has occurred affecting the liaisons with our
past. . . our present civilisational pattern in its essential and deter-

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Primary Things: Land, Work and Sign

mining characteristics has occasioned a dichotomy which affects

to some extent the "doing" of man (praxis) and to a much larger
extent all his "making" (poesis).^^
Change was inevitable; but, as Jones discussed what they called "The
Break" (whatever its roots it was clearly evident in the nineteenth century)
with his friends in the late 1920s and early 1930s, "liaison with the whole
past of man the artist was still possible." The search for delight, where it
still appears, resides in the collecting of art-works and of antiques, in gar-
dening and in the creation of a room of one's own. These are the deflec-
tions and subhmations of our hunger for form. David Jones writes:
In our civilisation one stratum after another is reduced to form-
lessness, or the form is so vast and at such a remove, and its
shaping in the hands of so few and the general inhumanisation
so against our natures, that many people consciously or uncon-
sciously tend to cast their eyes to those remaining arts which in
so far as they can be practised are still outside the new
leviathan. ^3
As he put it, in the Preface to The Anathemata in the nineteenth century:
Western man moved across a rubicon which, if as unseen as the
thirty-eighth Parallel, seems to have been as definitive as the
Styx. . . although man has found much to his liking, advantage,
and considerable wonderment, he has still retained ineradicable
longings for, as it were, the farther shore.
The trend of civilisation this side of the break increasingly drives asunder
what is joined together in man-the-artist, the normality of a sacramental
quahty "evidenced in the past works of man over the whole period of his
existence so far known to us."^^ It was only Jones's conviction that man
is, by definition, man-the-artist, which kept him from the latter of the
choices that he foresaw:
Were this alienation to become more complete, then the persons
affected would have to regard the postulate of the Church with
regard to Sacraments as something to be accepted on authority
only, something which the rules happened to say must be done.
Something which, though foreign to all their ways and habits of
thought, was, for mysterious and inexplicable reasons demanded
of them in the name of religion. Or, alternatively, they would
have to reject those postulates as being not only incompatible
with their lives, works and habit of thought but as belonging to
an out-moded conception of man's nature and requirements, and
as no longer even comprehensible except as a survival of by-
gone practices. 36

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It is against this grey background of our increasing alienation from a

world in which work, art and religion went together, or could be seen to
belong to one another, that Jones pursued the question of the effectiveness
of signs. His reflections deliberately weave the language of sacramental
theology into an examination of the right way of making things, whether
they be murals or meals. For him, the efficacious sign is "a re-presenting,
a showing again under other forms, an effective recalling." He took as a
crucial lesson from his early interest in the Post-impressionists that a
painting of a mountain is not a representation of it: "it is mountain under
the form of paint." The artist is "at bottom and always an inveterate be-
liever in 'transubstantiations' of some sort. The sign must be the thing sig-
nified under forms of his particular art." For David Jones, sacrament
presupposes man-as-artist, as maker of signs. This is the essential charac-
teristic of human beings and thus there is no more a Catholic art than
there is a Calvinist method of boxing. And the beauty of signs well made
is distinct from the beauty of nature, for there is a beauty to cancer cells,
but they lack significance. It is sign-making that marks us from the angels
(who neither make nor mate) and from the animals. The world of animals
has skill and beauty, as with the honey-bee or the nuthatch. There is a
meticulous perfection and beauty in the pattern of a leaf-vein or of hoar-
frost on a window, but there is no evidence of gratuitousness or sign:
"Their making is wholly functional, these activities are transitive."

The concerns that I have tried to sketch here need some disentangling
from their context in the 1920s and 1930s, from a too sharp and dismis-
sive contrast between Chartres and "the world of petrol-pumps and the
city of Manchester," 40 or between the ambiguities of fear of "the money
power," and very personal associations. There is such a lapse, it seems to
me, when Jones asserts that "Ruling out all romantic illusions, it is unde-
niable that 'the trenches' are objectively a 'better' life than that to which
vast numbers are condemned by their avocations in the 'peace-time'
world of today." Is there, in a great poem like A,a,a, Domine Deus, a
move from regret to premature resignation as Jones finds the functional
beauty of towers of glass and steel wonderfully impressive but dead, with
no sign of God's presence amongst us, "a confession of failure by one
who tried his hardest?" And now . . . ? The transformation that Gill,
Jones, and McNabb longed for failed. "Of course it has failed," we are al-
most inevitably led to add. But are those central issues illuminated by
them even more marginal than they seemed to the bulk of their contempo-
raries? The Leviathan against which they pitted themselves seems protean

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Primary Things: Land, Work and Sign

and ubiquitous on scales that they perhaps foresaw, but that they did not
experience. To take just two current commonplaces, eighty percent of
food in Britain comes from supermarkets and sixty percent of that from
just six companies. The early form of conglomerate companies which
they detected and detested in L C I . has moved to the world of the trans-
national corporation with budgets and profits dwarfing those of whole
countries and even continents.
Against this state of things, one can set the increased concern of the
churches for justice, a concern expressed in fitful but extraordinary ways,
the communes of the Welsh hills, the greater number of people making
and trading their own products. It is more than saving one's soul with fret-
work; yet there are, at times it would seem, irresistible, forces destructive
of the sense of form in our civilisation. I should like to comment on two
of these, two linked aspects of what David Jones calls the " f i x " that we
are inand not just "in," but which are in us as part of ourselves, our
sense of ourselves. "The Break" that David Jones spoke of was located by
Jacques Maritain (fresh from the monarchism of UAction Frangaise) in
the three "Rs" of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution of
1789. But it is from this last that the sense of individual human rights has
moved inescapably and powerfully to be a central pre-occupation of ours.
The Revolution also issued, for the first time in history, I think, in the
conscription of the nation. With citizens at war, the soldier and the civil-
ian are fused, and total war becomes possible. There seems to be some
fateful linkage between the individual, the modem state, and the all-out
warfare against which the attempt to think of persons rather than individu-
als is a necessary but insufficient effort.
Secondly, to think of our own society over the twenty years since
David Jones's death, and the fifty or so since the deaths of Gill and McNabb,
one can see a superficially contradictory combination of atomisation of
experience and centralisation of power. It was a dictum of Margaret
Thatcher that there is no such thing as society; and, at times, it would
seem that this is so in everyday experience with the glorification of indi-
vidual consumption, the flicking from one television channel to another,
the bizarrely fascinating public spectacle of private sex in the cinema. At
the same time, there have been major shifts of power from local to central
government, of corporations regularly switching factories from country to
country in order to save labour costs. There has been a wholesale loss of
intermediate organisations for which the proliferation of self-help groups
is often only a desperate substitute.

85
 The Chesterton Review

Looking back in 1957 on his own writings in this tradition, Walter

Shewring had it bome in upon him
how much further our world has moved since then from the like-
lihood of accepting or practising the principles defended here.
This may be proof of weakness inherent in the principles; or
merely of our continued progress in the direction of disaster. ^3

As Owen Dudley Edwards pointed out to me, ironically for Shewring, his
splendidly produced book was printed in Massachusetts and shipped to
England. For myself, I cannot be that life that they longed for and par-
tially lived; but, without it as a bench-mark, a point of reference, we seem
in danger of losing our bearings. What new forms the link of, say, medita-
tion and community, or the hunger after justice and the hunger after form,
w i l l take is unclear. As they said, we cannot but seek the Beauty of God.
Nevertheless, for us these things are not one, not yet, not by any means.

^ This paper is based on talks given at the Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of Fr.
Vincent McNabb at St. Dominic's Priory, London, June 1993, and at the Dominican
Peace Activists' Summer School, Keswick, July 1993.
^ "Voluntary v Compulsory Co-operation," The Cross and the Plough 1/3, 1935,
p. 7.
3 Robert Speaight, The Life of Eric Gill, London, 1966, p. 142.
4 The Tablet, 3.1, 1914.
^ The Cross and the Plough, 15/2, 1948, p. 16.
^ Frontiers of Faith and Reason, London, 1937, p. viii.
Francis Thompson and Other Essays, London, 1936, p. 74. I have made the
twelve point thesis here a focus for what follows.
^ Vincent McNabb, "The Family," in Flee to the Fields, The Faith and Works of
the Catholic Land Movement; a Symposium, London, 1934, p. 100.
^ Ihid,^. 104.
Francis Thompson, p. 7.
"Voluntary v Compulsory Co-operation," p. 8.
Francis Thompson, p. 74.
"Mass-production in Agriculture," Nazareth or Social Chaos, London, 1933,
p. 83.
Francis Thompson, p. 74.
Letter to Hilary Pepler, 26.5, 1931, in Pepler's "Handwork or Landwork," the
"Father Vincent McNabb Memorial Number" of Blackfriars, vol. 24, August, 1943,
p. 307.
"A Ditchling Jubilee," ms. Dominican archive; this article, c.1941, was for The
Weekly Review. I have not traced the exact publication details.
^'^ In Pepler, "Handwork or Landwork," p. 307.
Philip Mairet, Autobiographical and Other Papers, Carcanet, Manchester,
1981, p. 125.
Hilda C. Graef, ch. 13 "Back to the Land?" From Fashions to the Fathers, the

86
Primary Things: Land, Work and Sign

Story of my Life, Westminster in Maryland, 1957.

David Kindersley, Mr. Eric Gill, Further Thoughts by an Apprentice, Cam-
bridge, 1990, p. 19.
Francis Thompson, p. 74.
22 Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill, London, 1989, p. 170.
2^ Fr. John-Baptist Reeves, personal communication.
24 Land for the People, 1/19, July 1934, p. 20.
25 "Art in Relation to War" (1942), The Dying Gaul and Other Writings, London,
1978, p. 134.
2^ The first appearance of this polemic in The Game, 1/3, 1917, and as a St.
Dominic's Press Penny Tract, had as heading Aquinas's "The freeman is an end in
himself but the slave is for another" Summa Theologiae I A, Q96, art. 4.
2"^ Sculpture; an Essay on Stone-cutting, Ditchling, 1918, p. 10.
28 Walter Shewring, Making and Thinking, London, 1957, plates 12 & 13.
2^ I am thinking, for example, of Bede Griffiths's contributions to The Catholic
Act Quarterly (latterly Good Work) and the use of many Ditchling blocks in The
Catholic Worker. I am also thinking of a Pax meeting at Spode House both of them at-
tended.
Bryan Keeble, introduction, A Holy Tradition of Working, Passages from the
Writings of Eric Gill, Ipswich, 1983, p. 12.
31 Epoch and Artist, London, 1953, p. 139.
32
"Notes on the 1930s," The Dying Gaul, p. 44.
33
"Art in Relation to War," p. 133.
The Anathemata, Fragments of an Attempted Writing, London, 1952, p. 16.
35 "Art and Sacrament," Epoch and Artist, p. 178.
36
"Art and Sacrament," p. 178.
37
"Art and Sacrament," p. 170.
38 "Art in Relation to War," p. 136.
39 "Art and Sacrament," p. 149.

Walter Shewring, Making and Thinking, p. 17.

41 "Art in Relation to War," p. 133.
42 Philip Pacey, David Jones and Other Wonder Voyagers, Bridgend, 1982, p. 58.
43 Walter Shewring, Making and Thinking, p. xi.

The banks of the Rhone between Saint Gilles and Aries.

87