Immortal Garland

"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister'd Vertue, unexercis'd and unbreath'd, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary; but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat."

This 300-year-old sentence from Areo-pagitica--"A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England," was very much alive last fortnight in London. In London's Institut Franc,ais, members of the International P.E.N. Club met to celebrate Areopagitica's tercentenary with a conference on: 'The Place of Spiritual and Economic Values in the Future of Mankind." Outside, glass tinkled as cleaners swept up the Institutes buzz-bombed windows. Within the drafty building P.E.N.'s calm General Secretary Hermon Quid remarked: "A klaxon will sound for imminent danger. That will not allow time to leave the hall, so you must just duck. We are all used to behaving oddly, and we might as well do it in good company."

The good company of men of literature and science spoke their minds frankly in ten sessions of vigorous debate. Keynoted Chairman E. M. Forster (A Passage to India): "[After the war we should] insist on less secrecy in public affairs. . . . The world today has become a darkened room with more & more proceedings in camera, secret committees . . . banned books and withheld lists of banned books, censorships, prohibited areas and private understandings so esoteric that they could scarcely be mentioned even in cipher."

The sessions' most colorful, provocative speaker was side-whiskered, bushy-browed, radical Scientist J. B. S. Haldane, who boomed: "The British people find it difficult to understand the American people and the results may be disastrous for the peace of the world. One reason for this is that their ideas of the American people are largely derived from films filtered through the Hays film censorship. This remarkable organization never allows wrong to triumph or ministers of religion to appear as villains. . . . No wonder we are apt to think of Americans as alternating between violence and smugness."

U.S. Historian-Journalist Herbert Agar (former president of New York's Freedom House) got the loudest applause. Said he: "When we have beaten back the tyrannies . . . there will be many temptations to suspend our allegiance to Areopagitica at least so far as the enemy is concerned.... Let us forbid them the use of arms. Let us make such disposal of their persons and property as we and our Allies think appropriate. But let us not try to tell them what they may read or even what they may print. ... It will be irksome if the Germans rush into print at the end of this war with a nauseous literature of self-pity and self-aggrandizement. . . . [But] the redemption of the German spirit must come from the German mind."

Wittiest, most serious paradox came from iron-grey, satirical New Statesman Editor Kingsley Martin: "We are now in a period of profound peace, which is the last we are likely to have for some time to come. . . . When the war is over, the period which we shall enter will be one of the greatest difficulty and danger."

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