MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
ALWAYS whenI get the chance I listen on Friday even- ings to Mr. Alistair Cooke's " Letter from America." I still find it impressive to hear a man talking to me in my own room from New York or Chicago, with rare atmos- pherics to recall to me the long wash of Atlantic waves. It is stimulating to be told by this alert and amusing man of the curious thoughts and habits that govern the lives of the one hundred and fifty seven million citizens of the great republic. And it is satisfactory to know that he is able in his detached and humorous way to convince British listeners how unlike the Americans are to ourselves and yet how like. I have never met Mr. Cooke and I do not feel that I know him. I am an admirer of his articles in the Manchester Guardian and I regard him as the most competent broadcaster of three conti- nents. But his personality remains an enigma to me, being . strangely compounded of salt and sugar, of acerbity and senti- ment. He seems to combine the acumen of a bright Manchester boy with the vigorous fantasies that preserve the club-car commuter from being dull. I picture him as a youngish man, lean and handsome, derisive of fraudulence, yet capable of soft affection for outworn conventions and lost causes. I see him standing there by the refrigerator, thinking out his next broadcast, with a cocktail-shaker in one hand and in the other a child's milk-bottle; a smile of loving irony moulds his virile lips. Last Friday he told us about the church-going habits of the Americans; he explained to us that, whereas they have but few sauces, they possess as many as two hundred and fifty two religions; eighty eight and a half per cent. of the total population are, he assured us, registered members of some church. He did not contend that every single registered member regularly attends his own church service ; but he did make it perfectly Clear that Sunday absenteeism is not, for American clergymen, a cause of anxiety and distress. On Sundays, he informed us, the pavements outside the different places of worship are blocked by worshippers going either in or out. * * * * It is true, as he remarked, that the Americans are more sensitive than we are to conforming to the traditions and con- ventions of their own immediate community. I have been told (although I do not believe it) that to this day all Americans discard or resume their winter hats and clothing on exactly the same date; and that the man who wears a panama or a boater on Wednesday, April 30th, instead of on Thursday, May 1, is exposed to ridicule in the streets. I have myself observed that, in some of the smaller American towns, people do not have hedges round their lawns, or draw their curtains in the evening, for fear lest the neighbours may suspect them of living private lives. I have noticed also that Americans are more apt to become " lonesome " than we are and that, when detached from their group, they become restless and inclined to nervous display. It is not that they possess no eccentrics: it is rather that their eccentrics tend to become discontented and sour, whereas ours remain self-satisfied and warm. To them it may appear self-evident that a person who does not conform to the group convention is lacking in a sense of equality and is therefore asocial, conceited or uncouth. It may be, therefore, that their habits of church-going derive, not so much from deep religious convictions, as from a wish to mingle with the herd. Yet the statistics provided by Mr. Cooke are im- pressive; the fact remains that in the United States some 1'20,000,000 people go to church on Sundays. These astro- nomical figures cannot be ascribed solely to group sense. * * * * I do not know why, in this country, the figures of church attendance have during the present century so markedly declined. When as a boy I spent a holiday with my grand- mother or aunt we had family prayers, attended by all the servants, every morning before breakfast. On Sundays we would go to church as a matter of course. At school there were both morning and evening chapels, and I would derive much solace and encouragement from the beautiful words of the services, from the lights and the music, and above all from the refreshing interlude of quiet in a turbulent and combative life. To this day, when I visit a college chapel, I can recapture something of the solemn beatitude inspired by these retreats. It is not sufficient to explain present delinquency by saying that one godless generation was succeeded by another. We were not a godless generation ; we admired and often practised virtue ; the austerity of my contemporaries at Oxford would have aroused in Lycurgus feelings of envy and respect ; we really did believe that abstinence, industry, truth, beauty and love were means to the good life. Nor do I agree with those who contend that the decline in attendance is to be attributed to the fact that Anglican services bear little relation to the social and economic problems of today; it was to escape from these problems that we kneeled upon hard hassocks and sang psalms; it was not the modern, but the old-fashioned that we welcomed; we did not expect the rational or the logical, we were comforted by the irrational. What happened, I think, was that we reacted against the theological disputes of the nineteenth century; that we felt it wasteful that great poets, such as Tennyson, Matthew Arnold or Clough, should have been distracted by the dichotomy between faith and science; to us the issue appeared a matter of taste and temperament. the preference as voluntary as that between an appreciation of Milton or Pope.
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Nothing was further from our thoughts than militant atheism or anti-clericalism on the continental model. We did not deride, still less did we wish to disturb, the thoughts and feel- ings of those whose lives were rendered melodious by their early Heaven; we " left our sister when she prayed." But our dislike of theology certainly led us away from the teaching of the Protestant Church and induced us to seek in pagan philosophy the purpose, the discipline, the principia ethica, that ritual could no longer furnish. Some of us found refuge, and often to their great benefit, in the gentle certainties of the Roman Catholic creed; but for most of us the religion of our childhood just faded away in the haze of memory, into a recollection as pleasurable and remote as that of a summer evening beside some ruined abbey, "within the hearing of the wave." We were then told by our elders that we should con- tinue to attend church services, if only "as an example " to others. This injunction appeared to us irritating and hypo- critical. Our doubts became disreputable once they became insincere; our principle of not offending the susceptibilities of the faithful would be violated if we made false genuflexions to their beliefs. Our abstention was not dishonourable. We were told that our paganism was little more than an intellectual pose, and that when age, or illness, or great sorrow assailed us, we should repent of having abandoned the ancient formulas with all their wealth of comfort and protection. These arguments did not produce even a momentary suspension of disbelief.
I am aware that there are men and _women, more gifted and erudite than myself, who are convinced that ethical prin- ciples in themselves are not enough; that, in this mutable and precarious life, some more transcendental precepts are essential to human happiness and virtue. It is not sufficient, they con- tend, to aim at the good life, as if man, created in the Divine image, were no more than some vegetable growth, striving, without conscious aim, to achieve evolutionary perfection. This argument assuredly commands respect and thought. The i day may come when I also acquire this conviction. But it will be reached, not as an escape from personal misfortune, not as a surrender to convention, but only when I also am able to attain a state of grace.
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