A FAIR PICTURE
By G. M. YOUNG
WHENEVER I take up a book which purports to give " an account of our ideas and ideals " or to " make plain the spirit in which we stand," the question I always put to myself is this: " Could I honestly, and confidently, recommend it to a man of my own sort in Coimbra or Eerne?" Cr would he hand it back to me with a smile, and say: " Of course, in war- time one has to say things like that. We all do. And it is a sad waste of intelligence."
Now here are ten pamphlets, excellently produced and illus- trated by Messrs. Longmans at a shilling each, which seem to me to satisfy my test. People of my sort, in Stockholm of Athens, have a pretty good idea of the difference between knowledge and opinion, and of the nature of evidence: and the writers in this series know their subjects well. Mr. Dudley Stamp leads off with the story of what is really one of the most remarkable achievements in the world—the joint achievement of man and Nature is creating the Face of Britain. Perhaps in deriving Icknield from the Iceni the shoemaker has gone beyond his last, and I wish it were true that only the poorer soil of Salisbury Plain had been taken by the War Office for its mechanised gambollings. But I could hardly imagine a better handbook for the intelligent traveller, and there is one lesson written all over it which cannot be too often reiterated—the immense variety of soil and habitation which Nature has here provided within tiny compass. It is a consideration I particularly commend to those who desire to re-map rural England in nineteen Collective Farms.
Mr. Shanks has indeed somewhere suggested that it was this variety—the fact that every bit of England is the borderland of some other bit—that compelled us to develop the habit of getting on with people of a different kind, at least to the extent of admitting that they are entitled to their own point of view. Hence the value we attach to the virtue of Considerateness, a word which, as Lord Baldwin in The Englishman says, is pecu- liarly untranslatable. But on a closer examination I think it will appear that this, like many other of our most cherished moral notions, is really of more recent growth. There was a great readjustment of English ethical standards in the Nineteenth Century, and part at least of the process was a diffusion down- ward of what were believed to be the aristocratic virtues. Believed to be ; for, as Mr. Bernard Darwin frankly avows in British Sports and Games, the noble sportsman of a hundred years ago could be a very dirty fighter, and fairplay for the accused was not exactly the outstanding virtue of our criminal law, which is the subject of Sir Maurice Amos' contribution. Considerateness was, at first, the attitude of a kindly superior to his tenantry or his subjects, including his wife; and it was gener- alised into the sense it now bears, very much as chivalry became humanitarianism, by cancelling its limitations and accepting obli- gations outside its original circle.
I am inclined to emphasise this modernity of the modern Englishman, because it is a thing which those who undertake " to account for our ideas and ideals " are apt to overlook. There is a time lag in international communications ; we are all in danger of taking our notions of a foreign country from the standard works of the last age: and if ever I write on the origins of the war I shall certainly give a paragraph to I he Forsyte Saga, and its picture of decadence inviting the Enal push. Even in our own country it is easy to fall out of date ; and I do not find it easy to reconcile Mr. Robson's statement, in The Government of Britain, that " the administrative class of the Civil Service . . . is drawn from the privileged class to which the mass of the population has little possibility of access," with Mr. Hales', in British Education, that 30 per cent. of the se.olar- ships at Oxford and Cambridge are held by former pupils of elementary schools. Some editing was here required to make the position clearer to the man from Salamanca, who probably still derives his ideas of English education from Torn Brown.
But suppose I smuggled these pamphlets into Greifswald. How would they strike that Professor who invited me not long ago as an L.B.I. (Leading British Intellectual, local rank) to come and talk things over with the L.G.I.s? I assume him to he an intelligent man, old enough not to have had his reasoning facul- ties sterilised and perverted by a Nazi education, and still capable of forming and exchanging ideas. " Now," I should say, " what is wrong with all that? Why do your rulers and their associates hate it so ferociously? Quare frernuerunt genies, et populi meditati sunt mania?" I have a real Greifswev der in my mind, a supporter, I understand, of the regime, but, from his writings, as well-informed and reasonable as one can hope for a German to be in these days. I shall expect him to answer somehow thus: " What is wrong with this picture drawn by your learned friends is its deadly attractivcness. We should, really, rather like to be something of that sort, but we simply have not the historic material out of which it was made. Take your democracy, about which Mr. Robson writes so lucidly and eloquently. In sentiment, it is monarchical. Its political methods are still the easy give-and-take of a ruling aristocracy. And it rests today on the preposterous fallacy that the opinion of the crowd, who know nothing, should prevail against the opinion of the Government who ought to know everything. We have never had a king, or a political nobility. But we have Science, and on that we must build, with a new principle of unity, and a new hierarchy.
" What has prevented us so far? England—the England por- trayed in your little books, so proud, so unselfconscious, so much at ease with itself. For generations now, we have always been looking over our shoulders to see how you did things, when we ought to have been making something of our own. We must end that historic enchantment which has paralysed us so long: we must throw off die politische Vormundschaft of England. And there is only one way to do it. Therefore, as your illustrious professor and Parliament member Hill has said, ' this is not a tribal war, it is a religious war ' So, you under- stand me?"
I think I do.
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