Story of International Relations

2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 119

Giuliano was a participant in that conversation and Murray, he accord-
ing to made the following contribution to it:

I remember after our French and and Spanish members had their say, and

eloquently expounded how the one prime necessity for good literature was

freedom, the Italian member, Marchese Balbino Giuliano, a Fascist but

a very cultivated man, ventured to differ. The real issue he thought, was

whether a writer had something important and interesting to say; if he had

not, he might be as free as air, but nothing of much value would come out

of him; after all, the greatest European writer of this century was Tolstoy.

Being in the Chair I had to admit he had the best of the argument.^119

Several of the papers submitted to the event expressed alarm about
the savage assaults on freedom of expression then being undertaken in
totalitarian states. Yet, as stated by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga
in the course of the conversation, there seemed to be a ‘tacit accord’
among those present not to tackle this issue. He observed that if there
were such an accord it had been reached partly for ‘reasons of courtesy’
and partly because discussion of the issue in the context of a previous
conversation had proved uncomfortable. Yet, Huizinga continued, one
could not avoid discussing the great division that had appeared in the
western world concerning freedom of expression when addressing the
problems of civilisation.^120
A reason why discussion of this division could not be avoided at least
as far as the Paris conversation was concerned, was that the event had
been organised with a view to the adoption of a set of resolutions con-
cerning the material and moral condition of writers. This set of resolu-
tions concluded as follows: the Committee of Letters and Arts ‘notes
that the future destiny of letters is linked to freedom of expression
and the moral and economic independence of creative minds.’^121 One
can reasonably surmise that the reasons of courtesy to which Huizinga

(^119) Murray to Jan Christian Smuts, 8 December 1938, reproduced in Jean Smith,
‘The Committee for Intellectual Co-operation in Gilbert Murray’s Papers,’ in Smith and
Toynbee, eds., Gilbert Murray: An Unfinished Autobiography, 203.
(^120) Société des Nations, Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, Entretiens:
Le destin prochain des lettres, 145.
(^121) Ibid., 199.