Pages From an Oxford Diary
by
[Princeton University Press, $1.50]
A DOZEN years ago while playing the recluse if not the hermit during a sojourn at Oxford, the late Paul Elmer More set down his meditations on religion. His intention had been to let these appear as the diary of an actual Oxford don. There are brief but happy glimpses of the town, the meadows, the study, and the common room. They are now acknowledged as a transcript of his own experience. A man who has read so much and thought so much is entitled, when he makes public his self-communings, to a respectful hearing — whether a reverent one must depend upon the reader’s sympathies and no doubt, too, on his powers of comprehension. Many of the permanent puzzles of man’s relationship to the unseen world are here worded in lucid language and confronted with candor, and it is possible that like-minded persons can d raw solace or even sustainment from these pages, pages so few that the publishers have not seen fit to number them except in XXXIV sections.
Unless a religious thinker, in wrestling for his own soul, is also wrestling for the souls of all mankind, unless he is such an athlete of the spirit as a Saint Augustine, a Pascal, or a John Bunyan, his meditations run the risk of falling into the category of the reviewer of music who offers us his explicit visualization of the landscapes, faces, or experience conjured up by its sound. To the uninitiate such discourse is misleading; to a compeer it is, to say the least, superfluous. Once arrived at such a level of understanding, each listener, to music or to the inner voice, prefers his own hearing. There remains, of course, the profit of comparing experience. Such profit is not denied Mr. More’s pages.
In a world so torn as ours has been for the past quarter of a century, a world where every ablebrained thinker is wanted in the front-line trenches, the meditations of an army chaplain may conceivably be of more avail than the efforts of the workers and soldiers, but one reads these pages with a singular sense of their remoteness from any world save the personal one of the man who wrote them.
LUCIEN PRICE