A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
ALETTER from a young German to an English friend, which has just come into my hands, raises a not unimportant question that deserves some consider- ation. After referring with enthusiam to a lecture in his native town on Malaya by Col. F. S. Chapman (who not long ago wrote a striking article on the same subject in the Spectator) he speaks of various English novels he has been reading, and asks "Why is it that English novelists, or a large number of them, always depict Englishmen as perpetual drunks or more or less degenerates ? I have read a novel just published in a German translation by the re-established firm of Ullstein describing the married life of an English officer during the war.... If you believe the book English officers were drunk every day at about midday and went into a brothel every day after supper. The wives, of course, amused themselves in the same way at home. Why must a host of these books be trans- lated into German ? They, of course, cannot fail to give a totally false impression of England." The question why such works are translated into German only a German can answer. As On why they are written at all the answer is plain. All is done in the sacred name of realism. It is axiomatic that only the repulsive can be real, the beautiful or attractive never. And if the name of England is dragged in the mud, why, who cares ?
* * * *
Previous page
