ENGLAND IN THE WORLD'S EYE
By SIR STEPHEN TALLENTS
VISITORS to England in bygone centuries were fond of recording their impressions of her. The English Channel, no doubt, in days when the Manor of Archer's Court near Dover was held upon the condition that its owner or owners " should hold the King's head When he passes to Calais," was a sufficiently formidable barrier to oversea visitors to give to. the travellers' tales of those who crossed it something of the piquancy which books about the Arabian desert secure today. It is curious to note how different a character the English have worn in continental eyes at different times. A Pope of Rome, eight hundred years ago, declared that the English nation was " fit to be set to anything it would handle, and one to be preferred to others, were it not for the impediment of levity." Yet a foreigner visiting us in the eighteenth century declared that he had never seen an Englishman laugh except at a Frenchman ; and it was the general impression of visitors at that time that we were a melancholy race, prone to suicide. Midway in time between those two contrasted verdicts comes the saying, common among foreigners in Elizabethan times, that England was " the hell of horses, the purgatory of servants and the paradise of women." Those were the days when a traveller to Dover saw the wrecks of the Armada lying on our beaches and found the Thames at Gravesend white with swans. At that time, too, it is worth recalling in a year when we are gratefully accepting a ration of silence in our streets, we were reported upon as " vastly fond of great noises that fill the car, such as the firing of cannons, drums and the ringing of bells."
Travellers this past year have turned their eyes again to England. Our tourist visitors, we are told, are increasing, and, whereas a few years ago it was the fashion for our students of social well-being to take their pencils and their note-books to America in search of the secret of perpetual prosperity, now the migration is reversed. But the modern world differs from its pre- decessors in that the repute of a nation no longer depends only upon the impression which it makes upon visitors, or which its citizens make in their journeys abroad. The growth of the Press, the invention of the telegraph and the telephone, the establishment of the air mail, above all the coming of the wireless and the film, have provided wholly new means for making nations known 'to each other. Moreover, it is no longer left for nations, as though they were living in county society, to decide whether they will call and make each others' acquaint- ance. In a world in which, it has been reckoned, 250 million people go to the pictures every week, in 'which more than 40 million homes are equipped with wireless, the nations of the world cannot escape from making impressions on each other. True or false, clear .or blurred, there will be a picture of England in the minds of hundreds of millions of people. How shall we not be concerned to see that, so far as in us lies, the picture be both clear an I true ?
What sort of picture, then, it is interesting to reflect, would we have England throw upon the world's screen? There would be as many opinions probably on this point as there are English men and English women. We have long been apt to rely on our past and to seek to win the hearts of foreigners by showing them the relics of former centuries—a habit encouraged, no doubt, by Americans in search of their history. Let our antiquities, where they arc worthy of it, be carefully preserved and shown. No other European people has enjoyed a like immunity from invasion and rapine. Our cities and our countryside both arc full of treasures.
But do not let us be content to live upon our past. For modern England is making her own contribution to the world. Without revolution, without recourse to dictatorships of the right or the left, she is equipping herself, not less successfully than any other nation, to meet the changed conditions of modern life. She is speeding up and cheapening her communications, reorganizing her old industries, and developing new ones, modernizing her agriculture, fortifying her social services, encouraging scientific research, building houses, con- structing roads and docks, planting forests, reclaiming land, and enlisting the arts of design in her manufactures. Great enterprises, like the building and launching of the ' Queen Mary ' or the triumphant flight from Milden- hall to Melbourne, strike the world's imagination and our own. This year's -migration of the world's sporting championships to • Britain has not passed unobserved. But many of our other activities even we ourselves overlook, becauSe they are not presented to us vividly. Yet it is by the works of our generation that we must judge ourselves and be content for others to judge us.
No decent Englishman wants to see his country behaving like a child with its first trumpet. Tho years ago, at the opening of the new Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon, Mr. Baldwin voiced that disin- clination and quoted Sir Walter Raleigh's words :
"Passions are likened best to floods and streams: • The shallow murmur but the deep are dumb."
We should all agree in deprecating an insistence on England's . material achievements at the expense—to steal from its context a delightful phrase of Mr. Clive Bell's—of her " rare and runaway qualities." But sow of those who most fear a deliberate national self- expression and most study a national reticence are in danger of reducing their country to the state of Mr, ranch's young lady before her mirror—" It took me hours ..to :appear as careless as this." The alternative is no longer between image and no image. Given modern conditions, some picture of England will meet, the world's eve, and every Englishman must desire that it should. he true and not false. England's real problem is to enlist the artists to paint a true portrait of her on. the world's. canvas,. to use their gifts upon. the stuff of which nualern.England is made. . .
Many artists,—and many patrons—shrink from this material Sonic take refuge in their own surroundings and their own feelings, however insignificant. To them we can fairly say with 1)r. Joluison, " Of the exaltations and depressions of your mind you love to speak and I hate to hear. Drive all such fancies from you." Others are for ever escaping into the past. We have already learned to laugh at mock Tudor villas. We are no less entitled to regret it when, in the world of the films, high skill and great resources are devoted to glorify a small bygone German principality and the discarded modes of a remote Irish island. The discoveries of the Eliza- bethan seamen swept through English literature. There is beauty and power enough in modern England to fire her artists of the brush, the pen and the architect's drawing board, of the spoken word and the. moving film. Not till they have opened their eyes and ears and minds to that power, that beauty. And that discipline will England take her proper place in the world's eye,
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