BOOKS OF THE DAY
The European Inheritance (W. T. Wc11s) Modes of Thought (C. E. M. Joad) The Mad Queen of Spain (John Marks) .. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Edward Sackville West) The Arts of Scotland (Janet Adam Smith)... .
• • • • • • • • • • • •
96 97 97 98 99 More of Miss Weeton (C. E. Vulliamy) Britain (Derek Verschoyle) The Finance of British Government (Honor Croome Revue (Celia Johnson) Fiction (Kate O'Brien) , • • 99 ... too
... 102
... 102 ... 504
THE EUROPEAN INHERITANCE
By W. T. WELLS THAT the basic elements of civilised life, as Europeans have grown to understand it, are today in imminent danger of destruction is too obvious to require argument. Both for Europeans and non-Europeans it is a particularly appropriate moment to examine what the characteristic features of our inheritance are : for the former, that they should the better understand the steps by which to preserve, if not the whole, at least some part of it; for the latter, that they should be given the opportunity of deciding, from study of European civilisa- tion while it is still in existence, what part of it they would wish to incorporate in their own systems, and what part they would wish to reject as a damnosa hereditas.
Of the two books here under review, Mr. Mayer's sounds a call to arms, while Mr. Smellie's concludes on a note of detachment and resignation proper to a last will and testament. " This ethos of reason," says Mr. Mayer, " is the common European inheritance. Our task is to hand it down to the generations to come, even if we should have to defend it on the field of battle. . . . Without reason the European would sink into barbarism."
" . . should skill in war and organisation," writes Mr. Smellie, " secure the dominance of Europe by Nazi theories, the owl of Minerva would take its flight to the farthest west or east. It is impossible to foresee by what subtle devices or by what sufferings and sacrifices the life of reason would be preserved. But it will make for courage if we admit that should Europe itself experience another Dark Age, there are worlds elsewhere where the spirit of Greece, of -France, of England, and of pre-Prussian Germany could live." The attitudes of mind underlying these two statements are typical of two points of view of the best means of combating the barbarism that threatens. The man who takes the one view believes that force must ultimately be met by force, and that a war of ideas is, at least for those who fight on the right side, a holy war. The man who adopts the other tends to believe that subtle values must be preserved by more subtle means, and that the higher form of civilisation will tend to absorb the lower. The one will point to the success of the Byzantine Empire in withstanding the onrush of the barbarians. The other will point to that Empire's slow decay and final collapse, contrasting it with that adoption by the Franks of Christian religion and Gallo-Roman culture which was the foundation- stone of the civilisation of the Middle Ages.
" Freedom of thought and doctrine; the dignity of the indi- vidual; a humali responsibility to society and the State." These Mr. Mayer defines as the basic elements of our civili- sation. Whether they are likely to survive another ordeal by battle, whatever its military results, is a question which admits of no easy answer. Mr. Kohn-Boamstedt, who is one of the four collaborators with Mr. Mayer to contribute a .chapter on a special subject to his book, has a sentence in his chapter on Political Thought in France which is sugges- tive in this connexion : —" Only one important institution of the revolutionary period remained, and this was due to the pressure of a foreign foe : the national army—a weapon by which the republic maintained itself externally, but which was ultimately to destroy it internally." Much of the base moral and intellectual currency put into circulation by the last War remains in circulation still; and those who do not believe that a German victory over Britain and France is at all likely may yet fear the deterioration caused by the fearful revenge which will surely be wreaked on Germany after her next defeat.
The immediate task for Englishmen, as both Professor
Political Thought. The European Tradition. By J. P. Mayer. (Dent. 'Ss.) —Reason in Politics. By K. B. Smellie. (Duckworth. 12s. 6d.)
Tawney, in his introduction, and Mr. R. H. S. Grossman, in his brilliant chapter on British Political Thought, emphasise, is to set their own house in order, and by a great effort of self- control to concentrate, in the face of external danger, on in- ternal reform. " Nations reap in storm," as the former puts it, " what they sow in calm. . . . The privileged orders in Western Europe may feel little enthusiasm for the crude barbarities of the Fascist States; but . . . . their collective attitude is that of men who prize property above freedom, and fear the triumph of the dictators less than they fear Socialism. To the mass of the population the ways of Facism are odious; but the conduct of their rulers inspires them with little confidence that the latter shares their horror. . . . The paralysis of British policy from China to Spain, and the loss of moral influence which that paralysis has involved, have more than one cause." To remove the sense of bewilderment on the fundamentals which, according to Mr. Crossman, has since 1931 superseded the traditional English disregard for them, a supreme effort is needed to attain a sense of national unity, founded not on flag-wagging but on social justice.
The central problem of politics, as Mr. Smellie points out, " is the relation in any community between coercion and the possibility of men living together in such a way that each and all would say it was good." The claims which the State makes on the allegiance of men have been based on many various grounds by different thinkers. Aristotle found these grounds in the fact that man was a political animal who could not live apart from society; the Stoics found them in a Law of Nature, on a universal order in accordance with which men should shape their lives; mediaeval thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas, on whose quite logical attempts to reconcile the Law of Nature with the Will of God Mr. Smellie seems un- necessarily severe, found them in God's ordering of the universe. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau postulated different degrees of obedience or different types of Social Contract, the first emphasising man's utter dependence on a strong government for a civilised life, the second arguing that men's interests were easily reconcilable and that governmental oppres- sion was the danger against which to guard, while for Rousseau, somewhere between the two but nearer Hobbes, men can only come to their full development through a freedom in society which transcends their freedom in a state of nature : the State may go against men's wills, but never against their reason. This, not vague mysticism or brute force, is to be the guide. The emphasis on the part of reason in the Euro- pean tradition is the central thread which runs throughout, and connects, Mr. Mayer's book with Mr. Smellie's. Both show how German philosophers of the last century, in em- phasising the importance of development, led the retreat from the conceptions of order and reason.
Apart from this, the two books are somewhat different in character and purpose, though both designed for the same type of reader. Mr. Mayer's first five chapters deal with epochs in political thought down to, and including, the seventeenth century. The remaining six survey the development of political thought in the five leading countries of Europe and in the United States of America. Mr. Smellie's book is more discursive and less historical; it falls into three parts, discussing respectively movements in political thought, the relation between Politics and such subjects as Metaphysics and Ethics, and the nature and future of the State. Both are books for scholars and readers of studious tastes, rather than for the general reader who turns to books mainly to help him under- stand the newspapers. It seems fair to say that Mr. Smellie's book contains much valuabl.e criticism, while Mr. Mayer's should become a classic.
Previous page
