Countryman's Credo
Remembrance. By H. J. Massingham. (Batsford. Jos. 6d.) MR. MASSINGHAM defines his autobiography as " a topographical record of the country of my own mind from early years to the present day." It is, in fact, as remote from the usual run of auto- biographies as twentieth-century England is from the England of Mr. Massingham's vision. A conventional enticement on the dust-jacket speaks of " contacts with a wide range of famous people " ; but the lion-hunting reader will look in vain in this vigorous, far-sighted and yet (to some) exasperating book for even thumb-nail sketches of the great. It is a story of pilgrimage through places and ideas, crusader's book, a tract for- the times.
As the son of a distinguished editor, Mr. Massingham's ear training was strictly urban, and, as he says, " in the long run that i art education in the inessentials." Here, ;hen, is the record of hi exodus from town to country, from Fleet Street to something a proximating to Jesse Collings's ideal of three acres and a cow, of his accompanying conversion from materialism through " a vag individualistic theism " to his present Christian philosophy. Th first real break with his urban training came when, by chance, h found himself exiled in Hampshire. There he discovered the bird world, and so began " to serve my apprenticeship in the worksho of universal nature." But the final and lasting break did not coin until, after a second period in the country, he joined the anthro logical staff at University College. It was here that he acquire that " sense of continuity in the human panorama " which has sine informed all his life and work.
After that there could be no looking back. First the Cotswold claimed him ; and if those favoured but unhappy hills gave tf much, by his books he has given much in return. The Cotswold will always be closely associated with his indefatigable resear It was here that he became convinced of the value of regionalis Next came the Chilterns—and a tragic accident which would has embittered beyond hope any man of less spiritual stature. Fr looking outwards he was now compelled mainly to look inwards Wide reading consolidated all he had discovered upon his physi explorations of England, and compelled him into the belief tha abstraction is the canker at the heart of things today. " As I see the return to realism, the rediscovery—of concrete experience ma be reduced to three primary elements—the Christian faith, individu responsibility, and the land." So the journey " from Hudson toward Cobbett was completed ; henceforward the land, in its wholene was to be his unstinted dbncern. " The vital thing today is t keep the idea and the spirit of the human person, of the small um of the regional nucleus, of individual responsibility and of creath work alive against the high tide of mechanisation, money-values, an that centralised despotism which in Germany has already over whelmed the soul of man."
Some of Mr. Massingham's many readers, preferring his vivi interpretive descriptions of the English countryside and the Englis countryman, may object that Remembrance is itself perhaps t abstract. Clearly, however, a white-hot compulsion was on th author to write this book. In the end it is an attempt to revea under the fierce light of a personal diagnosis, the common malad of us all today—and to suggest a cure. " So I have come to pc ceive that the love and understanding of nature are the only pract means of living at all, and everything I have seen, thought and r confirms me." This book is the vehement credo of that faith.
C. HENRY WARREN.
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