English Character and the English Literary Tradition 9781487584245

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ENGLISH CHARACTER AND THE ENGLISH

LITERARY

TRADITION

THE ALEXANDER LECTURES THE Alexander Lectureship was founded in honour of Professor W. J. Alexander, who held the Chair of English at University College from 1889 to 1926. Each year the Lectureship brings to the University a distinguished scholar or critic to give a course of lectures on a subject related to English Literature.

English Character and the English Literary Tradition BY MALCOLM W. WALLACE

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto, 1952

Copyright, Canadtt, 1952 by University of Toronto Press

Reprinted in 2018 Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-1-4875-7347-8 (paper) London: Geoffrey Cumberlege Oxford University Press

THE ALEXANDER LECTURES otherwise indicated, the lectures have been published by the University of Toronto Press.

UNLESS

1929-30 L. F. CAzAMIAN Parallelism in the recent development of English and French literature These lectures were included in the author's Criticism in the Making (Macmillan, 1929) 1930-31 H. W. GARROD The Study of Poetry (Clarendon, 1936) 1931-32

IRVING BABBIIT

Wordsworth and modern poetry Included as "The Primitivism of Wordsworth" in the author's On Being Creative (Houghton, 1932) 1932-33

w. A.

CRAIGIE

The Northern Element in English Literature ( 1933)

1933-34 H. J. C. GRIERSON Sir Walter Scott Included in Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (Constable, 1938) 1934-35 G. G. SEDGEWICK Of Irony, Especially in Drama ( 1934, 1948) 1935-36 E. E. STOLL Shakespeare's Young Lovers (Oxford, 1937) 1936-37 F. B. SNYDER Robert Burns, His Personality, His Reputation, and His Art ( 1936) 1937-38 D. NICOL SMITH Some Observations on Eighteenth-Century Poetry (1937) V

1938-39 1939-40

CARLETON

w. STANLEY

Matthew Arnold (1938)

J. DOUGLAS N. BUSH

The Rena.issance and English Humanism (1939)

1940-41 No lectures given. 1941-42

H.J. DAVIS

Stella, a Gentlewoman of the Eighteenth Century (Macmillan, 1942)

1942-43 H. GRANVILLE-BARKER Coriolanus Included in the author's Prefaces to Shakespeare: Vol. II ( Princeton, 1947) 1943-44 F. P. WILSON Elizabethan and Jacobean (Clarendon, 1945) 1944--45 F. 0. MATTHIESSEN Henry James, the Major Phase (Oxford, 1944) 1945-46

1946-47 1947-48

s. C. CHEW

The Virtues Reconciled, an lconographical Study (1947) MARJORIE HOPE NICOLSON

Voyages to the Moon (Macmillan, 1948) G. B. HARRISON

Shakespearean Tragedy 1948-49 E. M. w. TILLYARD Shakespeare's Problem Plays ( 1949) 1949-50 E. K. BROWN Rhythm in the Novel ( 1950) 1950-51

MALCOLMW. WALLACE

English Character and the English Literary Tradition ( 1952)

VI

I

T IS now more than twenty years since the first Alexander Lecture was delivered from this platform, and, except on one occasion when I was absent from the country, I have heard them all. The lecturers have been English, Scotch, French, American, and Canadian, and they were representative of the best scholarship in English letters of their day. I listened to them with a great sense of pride, for I felt that their contribution to the intellectual atmosphere of this university was worthy of the man in whose honour their lectures were given. Today I have no sense of pleasure in the immediate prospect that lies before me. It is almost a quarter of a century since I entered on administrative work which practically forbade serious research of a scholarly kind, and, although the lectureship permits great latitude in the choice of a subject, its founders unquestionably had productive scholarship primarily in mind. You will not then be surprised if I confess that I had great difficulty in persuading myself to accept the invitation of the Committee on Appointments. Why have I done so? For a variety of reasons none of which may seem to you adequate. My relationship to Professor Alexander was of longer duration and more intimate than that of any other lecturer on the Foundation. As a student in his classes during the four years of my undergraduate course I owe to him the establishment of the intellectual and literary interests to which my mature years have been devoted. As his colleague for many years, I shared with him the same office, discussed with him the ideals of the Department of English, and en joyed the unique pleasure of his friendship. I owe more to him than to any other man I have ever known. I have accepted this appointment, then, partly because of the opportunity it gives me to bear testimony to his great qualities, partly vu

because I would record my overwhelming sense of gratitude for all that I owe to him. Professor Alexander seems to me the greatest teacher with whom I have ever come in contact. His long preparation for his life work could hardly have been more thorough -at the University of London, in Germany, and for four years as Fellow in Greek at Johns Hopkins University where he took his Doctor's degree under Profeswr Gildersleeve. All his studies were undertaken for the conscious purpose of fitting himself to be a teacher of English literature. Outstanding as was his record in scholarship, the fundamental honesty of his character and his impeccable literary taste were of even greater significance in his work as a university teacher. He was always more interested in life than in literature, and his old students cannot dissociate his masterly exposition of English authors from his own vivid personality which was an eloquent portion of all his comments. He made a knowledge and love of literature appear as the best of guides in the business of living a satisfying life. It is not too much to say that to many a young student his lectures were a revelation of a new world of infinite interest and richness. They were permeated with his wide acquaintance with ancient and modern philosophy, and his conviction that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." This capacity to reveal to his students a new world, hitherto undreamt of, gave to his hearers an experience similar to that of some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific-and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmiseSilent, upon a peak in Darien. viii

LECTURE

I

The Foundation, of the Tradition PAGE ONE

LECTURE

II

Ethics and Politics PAGE TWENTY-SEVEN

LECTURE III

The Twentieth Century PAGE FIFTY-ONE

P

ERMISSION has graciously been granted to reprint short extracts from the following: R. H. Tawney, Social History and Literature (Cambridge University Pres.s for the National Book League, 1950); Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics by Anton Chekhov, selected and edited by Louis S. Friedland (New York [G. P. Putnam's Sons], 1924); A. V. Dicey, The Statesmanship of Wordsworth (Oxford, at the Clarendon Pres.s, 1917); A. C. Bradley, A Miscellany (London, Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1929); Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper: A Study and a Confession (New York, Harcourt Brace and Company, 1929) ; A Little Book of Modern Verse, chosen by Anne Ridler, with a preface by T. S. Eliot (London, Faber and Faber, 1941).

Lecture I · The Foundation of the Tradition

D

URING the past half-century men have made pro-

gress in their study of natural science far beyond that made in any other similar period. One striking result of this progress is to be seen in the revolutionary change that has been wrought in the field of human communications. Today we set out for the uttermost parts of the earth with no more ceremony or agitation of spirit than that which formerly was bestowed on a visit to a neighbouring village. We breakfast in Canada and dine in Europe. During the journey we listen to a conversation being carried on in the Antipodes. We have supped so full of marvels that new discoveries have lost their power to excite us. Speed, for instance, the god of our idolatry, achieves new records almost monthly-in the air or the stratosphere, on the solid earth, on the water or in the submarine depths. Even yet, like Sir John Falstaff, we have not reached the expedition of thought, though we can outrace sound, and have coined a new word to mark our triumph, "supersonic." We have learned to take these experiences in our stride, but our minds have been modified by them almost unconsciously. For example, the sense of isolation, desired or deprecated, is difficult to maintain. In our familiar conversation we discuss the problems or the characters of people who live thousands of miles away, for on our understanding them may depend our own well-being. Orators 3

proclaim the fact that the human race is becoming one family, and that nothing significant can happen in one part of the earth without its reverberations being felt in many parts. Disease in one land may compass the deaths of many who dwell in far-off countries. Peace, we are beginning to say sagely, is indivisible. We make these wise speeches about our world and about foreigners in a vain attempt to persuade ourselves that we are at home and at ease. But the truth is that we are not at home, and that we know foreigners only superficially. Most of the political and economic problems of the world hinge on our ignorance of other peoples. Try, for instance, to answer the following questions arising out of contemporary world problems: Are Russians merely perverse, acquisitive, and unreliable? Are Germans fundamentally aggressive and capable of hideous cruelty beyond the people of any other nation? Is the United States fitted by experience, temperament, education, and resources to fill the role of world leader of democracy? Does economic strength determine the role of nations today? Is the native ability of the black, brown, and yellow races definitely less marked than that of white men? The truth of course is that it is very difficult for men of different nations to know one another, especially across barriers of language, national temperament, and differing economic and cultural standards. In the past they have been content not to know one another, except casually and superficially, and this mattered very little since it was a programme almost dictated by the isolation of those days. But in these respects the world has changed amazingly. In Mr. Churchill's words we are now all "mixed up together" willy-nilly, and the chief barrier to hearty cooperation is the fact that we have been content hitherto to 4

let our prejudices play the role which should have been reserved for understanding. Now, if you wish to know another people well, there is no better approach to your task than by familiarizing yourself with their history and their literature (if they have any). On these are stamped their national character, their responses to joy and sorrow, to good fortune and bad, what things they admired and what they detested. They are graven here not intentionally, nor for a purpose, but unconsciously and inevitably. And since it is a necessary preliminary to such a study that we make an honest attempt to know ourselves, I propose in these lectures to make a brief study of the characteristics of the English as revealed in their literature throughout the centuries. I shall try to show that there is a living continuing tradition, and by "English" I shall mean all those inhabitants of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales who have written books in the English language. For our purpose we shall think of Shakespeare, Burns, Burke and Yeats, Herbert and Crashaw, Hardy and Conrad as contributors to the English tradition. To confine the subject to practicable proportions I have excluded the Americans. The foundations of this tradition were well and truly laid in the Elizabethan period, and were essentially practical. Sidney, the first of our literary critics, declares that it is the function of the poet to give delight and to exalt the character of his readers. A poet's preparation for his great calling is to know the work of his predecessors both at home and abroad, to know the best that has been thought and said in all ages and in all countries. Besides long and intense study, long and intense meditation is essential to equip him with the wisdom which he seeks to transmit. He communicates delight by his close observation of the world 5

of nature, by the music of words, and by meditating on the human lot, on the characters of men and women, and the conditions amid which their lives are lived. The Elizabethans were all more interested in life than in literature, a characteristic in which they have been followed by their succes.sors. Accordingly, it is in drama and the novel that the practical English writers have most successfully communicated delight. Another aspect of the English interest in men and women is the widespread participation in public affairs, in politics. Very often the man of letters or the director of a business is also a statesman. Indeed, English hunger for a wide experience of life has always worked against complete absorption in a specialized aspect of life. And it is almost always as.mmed that the widest possible measure of individual liberty is antecedent to all other human "goods," but that this liberty must extend to all other members of the community. Again, the Englishman generally takes it for granted that to love one's native land, and to covet for all its children the same kind of well-being as one seeks for one's self is, to a decent human being, little more than an extension of self-love. In his patriotism, indeed, he finds the means of self-development. It serves as a corrective to the self-reliance and love of an independent command which is illustrated in the great English explorers and administrators. Perhaps the English absorption in the ethical aspect of life is the quality of our literature of which foreigners are most conscious, and which differentiates it most strikingly from the literatures of France and Germany. What should I pursue? How should I live if I am to find the experience finally satisfying? These are the questions of dominant importance. This is not a religious attitude, much less an orthodox one. By unsympathetic foreigners it is often called 6

hypocrisy or sentimentalism, or ascribed to low spirits or a bad climate. But there is no more constantly recurring quality in our literature. I have already said that the foundation of the English literary tradition was laid in the Elizabethan period, the most brilliant from many points of view in our whole story. Nothing comparable to it has happened again, and previous to the sixteenth century England had cut a very inconsiderable figure in world history. The Wars of the Roses had almost exterminated the aristocracy, the natural leaders of the people. In the eyes of contemporary Continentals England was a negligible area of darkness. Her inhabitants were boorish, her climate abominable. Leaming and the arts were almost unknown. The promise of a national literature, which Chaucer's great works had seemed for a moment to give, remained unfulfilled. His countrymen had been prevented from continuing to drink at the fountains of Italy and France in which he had found his inspiration. Under the first Tudors, however, peace returned to the weary land, and the beginnings of material prosperity. Moreover, the all-pervading influence of the Renaissance at length reached England. Young English students of the classics and of medicine visited Italy, Continental scholars like Erasmus visited England, and English noblemen, after travelling in Italy and France, introduced the sonnet and other literary forms to their own land. But once more the promise of a new literary revival died away, largely because the Reformation had concentrated English interest on religious questions. Internal strife between Catholics and Protestants raged so fiercely that literary interests could not compete with matters of life and death. The intensely individualistic Englishmen became aware of their growing significance as a nation, and

7

looked to the Queen as the symbol of their independence. To be a good Catholic and a good Englishman at the same time had become almost impossible. In an atmosphere of fierce antagonism and persecution it was even a blot on one's record to show great interest in painting or sculpture, in which arts Romish peoples had excelled beyond others; moreover, pictures and statues were "images," and hence deeply suspect. Music, on the other hand, entered on the period of its highest achievement in England, and learning in schools and colleges was firmly established. The Reformation broke the most effective cords which had bound England to the Continent. It became popular to ridicule French speech and Italian morals ( those of a diavolo incarnato). Aggressive Protestantism nourished this spirit of isolationism which often developed into blatant self-approval and a contempt of foreigners which amused or antagonized the people of the Continent. But if English self-approval was often crude it represented also self-reliance and independence. Had Englishmen not decided that no Italian priest should tithe or toll in their dominions? Had they not matched their strength successfully with the great power of Spain time after time? Of these exploits the defeat of the Armada was only the culmination. Their ships were penetrating into the remotest corners of the known world; the wealth of the Indies and of the Americas was finding its way into English ports. Treason had threatened the stability of their government, but that danger, too, had been effectively dealt with. Before the sixteenth century closed, the character and outlook of Englishmen had taken on a permanent form. Henceforth, it might be taken for granted that English literature would reflect their fierce love of liberty, their tendency to a self-sufficient isolationism, an intense and aggressive patriotism, a love of adventure and exploration, 8

a refusal to regard any abiding human interest as alien to the purposes of literature. Their seriousness, ascribed by the volatile French and Italians to bad climate and bad cooking, was actually an outgrowth of a widespread ethical conviction, and did not preclude the taking of delight in worldly affairs. No modern people has ever made music and sports a more integral part of its daily life. Great numbers of the cultivated Elizabethans could produce competent verses and sing acceptably. They were a complex people, extroverts and introverts at the same time. Perhaps national character is never really simple, is compounded rather of incompatibles. For instance, in the practical British people there is assuredly a genuine vein of mysticism, as illustrated in the characters of such men as Sir Philip Sidney, Burke, Keats, and Thomas Hardy. Many of them are obsessed by the burden of the mystery of life, and, although to their fellows they appear absorbed in their daily tasks, they are all the time convinced that the things which are not seen are eternal. They suspect that they have allowed themselves to become so preoccupied with the tactics of daily busyness that they are in danger of neglecting an adequate strategy for living. Primarily practical, the English produce a minority of dreamers including many men distinguished for intellectual ability and character. The majority are inclined to regard this otherworldliness as a quaint foreign trait, more normally appearing in the Far East or among the Hebrew people. The devotion of Englishmen to the Bible has made it natural for them to assume that they, too, are a chosen people, and that righteousness exalteth a nation. A certain arrogance and ruthlessness may be ascribed to the same sources. At any rate no one will maintain that English character is a simple phenomenon. Moreover, this complexity of character is no recent 9

development. Even before the Elizabethan age Sir Thomas More, for example, had furnished to the English an example of being a dweller in two worlds. The busy Lord Chancellor could carefully husband his material resources in this world, and yet in the midst of all his splendour confess that, had it not been for wife and children, he would long since have retired to a monastery. He performed his duties as Chancellor with scrupulous devotion, but at the same time he seems to stand apart, and to regard his own devotion to worldly duties with a detached, tolerant amusement. A similar spirit is illustrated in Sir Philip Sidney's choice of a motto as his device, Vix ea nostra voco. Perhaps it was also the spirit of Shakespeare, the highly respectable, successful man of business of Stratford, and also the author of Anthony and Cleopatra and The Tempest. In general, we are far too much inclined to assume that human character is a simple thing, that men are good or bad, lively or dull, practical or imaginative. But in sixteenth-century England one finds little to confirm this opinion. There, men were worldly and religious, practical and romantic. They loved beauty and delighted in cruelty. Like children they loved to pretend, to dress up, to organize pageants and theatrical performances. There was also intense nationalism, and no ambition was held in higher esteem than that of doing the Queen service. They were intense partisans in politics and religion. They loved to hear of wonders in far-off lands or in the heavens. They lived their lives intensely, and they might be called Godintoxicated and earth-intoxicated men at the same time. In the words of Mr. Ivor Brown, author of an excellent recent study of Shakespeare, they were "lit up," and the colloquialism adequately describes their life. Energy and enthusiasm accompanied their every action. 10

Mr. R. H. Tawney in an analysis of the Elizabethan temperament speaks of "the enthusiastic, high-spirited zest, enchanted with the world and not at odds with itself, which meets one, not only in the high places of poetry, but on the level plain of intimate letters and casual conversations, and which finds its way into literature because it is already in life." He mentions Harrison's Description of Britain "where not only are 'the artificers and husbandmen . . . so merry without malice and plain without inward Italian and French craft and subtlety that it would do a man good to be in company with them,' but the cattle are larger and juicier than in less favoured lands; the mastiffs so humane that, when a parent is about to chastise his child, the generous creature snatches the rod from his hand; and the very mongrels . . . seem to wag their tails twice as fast as ordinary dogs." "If, as has been said," concludes Mr. Tawney, "the best sign of spiritual health is happiness, then I am unable to resist the conclusion that our benighted ancestors were not far from grace. Perhaps, in view of their crimes, they should have been; but, in these matters, the ways of Providence are notoriously past finding out." Now it was in this overflowing interest in living that our greatest literature took its origin. Matthew Arnold says that this great creative achievement depended on the fact that "in the England of Shakespeare the poet lived in a current of ideas in the highest degree animating and nourishing to the creative power; society was, in the fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent and alive." In this state of things, he says, the creative power "finds its data, its materials, truly ready for its hand." A great poem can only issue from the brain of a genius who is fortunate enough to be born at a time when there is a "national glow of life and thought." The conjunction of 11

the man and the moment is essential, for the poet can give voice only to the ideas and life of his generation. This seems a satisfactory theory; it is at least an assured fact that Elizabethan literature was such a vivid phenomenon that it established an English tradition which has persisted to our own times. Not that English society of today bears any striking general resemblance to that of the Elizabethans. But in certain significant attitudes and tastes we are their obvious descendants. Like them we are inclined to believe that conduct is three-fourths of life, and that God made the country, man the town. Drake and Frobisher would recognize their own breed in Scott of the Antarctic, Cecil Rhodes, and many of our modem proconsuls, who have shown the same capacity for exploration and administration. The same fierce love of personal liberty has not prevented them from still holding that the great occupation is to do the Queen service. We have not produced a second Shakespeare, but the succession of minor lyric poets has not failed, nor the men who have combined interest in the humanities with a practical interest in government and politics. Today we still find it natural to appoint the head of an Oxford college, trained almost exclusively in Greek and philosophy, to represent his country as British Ambassador at Washington, and that at a time when the highest diplomatic skill and a capacity to deal with supreme national interests were never more urgently required in the British representative. We are, of course, much less versatile than our forbears. To us the Elizabethans seem like children, as we have noted, and mature adults at the same time. As children, they loved to sing and dance, and hear stories of long ago and far away. They were wilful and craved excitement. In 12

the theatre they could easily forgive improbability ( as in Shakespeare's Othello and Prospero) but never tediousness. They produced great poets, scholars, and thinkers. Everyone seems to have craved the widest possible experience of living, and to have rejected the ideal of confining himself to a mere specialty; this trait has persisted to some extent even in our highly specialized age. Bacon was Lord Chancellor, a great philosopher, a lover of literature and masques, a writer of essays. Young noblemen, like Southampton, Oxford, and Pembroke, patronized men of letters, wrote verses themselves, and have even had the writing of Shakespeare's plays ascribed to them. They seem to have been strangely indifferent to luxury and comfort. In spite of their love of beauty and intellectualism they were tolerant of disgusting cruelty in their executions and public whippings and the sports of Paris Gardens, and also of filthy streets, slums, and vile smells. In these respects we have made progress, but in versatility we cannot compare with the Elizabethans. The significant thing about them was that an unparalleled spirit of creativeness and love of adventure was abroad in their midst, which found expression in poetry and plays, in musical compositions, in discovering new lands, and in adventures beyond the seas. Such a phenomenon can never be adequately explained, and perhaps Arnold's theory that it depends on a current of fresh ideas permeating a whole people is as near an approach as we can make to an explanation. Criticism, Arnold says, is a feebler kind of creativeness, and all that is open to a generation to which the full creative life is denied. The business of criticism, he says, is the disinterested search for clear thinking, and is the necessary preliminary to the greater business of creative writing. It 13

must provide the living, tested ideas which are the raw materials of which the creative power can make use. The critical power tends to establish an order of true ideas which causes a "stir and growth" out of which may come the creative period. But criticism, says Arnold, ·must avoid all traffic with practical politics or it will lose its own soul. It shows its very disinterestednes.5 "by steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas . . . which criticism has really nothing to do with. Its business is, as I have said, simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its tum making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas." The "bane of criticism in this country," he declares, "is that practical considerations cling to it and stifle it." That was the trouble with the French Revolution. There you had a whole nation "penetrated with an enthusiasm for pure reason," but it fell a victim to "the mania for giving an immediate political and practical application to all these fine ideas of the reason." Now I am by no means sure that I understand the point that Arnold is trying to make. He would preserve the disinterestedness of genuine criticism from being made use of by unworthy practical causes, and that is well. But why should such criticism not be given political expression of a worthy kind? In his essay on Heine, Arnold condemns Germany for her failure to apply ideas practically, and praises France for this very virtue. Moreover, in condemning the Philistinism of his own countrymen, he says that, though they have secured a great measure of freedom for themselves, they have done it by merely suppressing whatever they found to be intolerably inconvenient; in suppres.sing grievances they have seldom appealed to reason as the 14

French do. "The enthusiast for the idea, for reason, values reason, the idea, in and for themselves. He values them irrespectively of the practical conveniences which their triumph may obtain for him." As I have said, I am not sure that I understand Arnold; indeed, he seems to me to uphold contradictory views at different times. But he obviously prefers the logic-loving procedure of the French to the muddling through of his own Philistine compatriots. How, if ever, ideas are to be applied to politics, he himself seems uncertain. One sometimes gets the impression that, for Arnold, the poet and the politician are forever poles apart. Whether the contention is sound or not, that practical political life tends to corrupt the virtue of critical ideas, we must observe that men of letters and men of affairs in England have always worked hand in hand. Indeed, the same man has often been man of letters and man of affairs; Arnold, himself, might serve to illustrate the point. Another of his contentions is that an interest in religion or social reform is also the enemy of the pure rational self. After its magnificent devotion to the ideas of the Renaissance and of the Reformation, he says, the great English middle class "entered the prison of Puritanism and had the key turned on its spirit for two hundred years." . Arnold hated the spirit of Philistinism so deeply, its satisfaction with self, its aversion from pure, disinterested thinking, its instinctively partisan attitude in seeking the truth, that he could play the role of wise physician ministering to the deep-rooted moral disease of his countrymen as perhaps no other English critic has been able to do. After the sifting process of nearly a hundred years has done its work, we are still inclined to rate his services ever more 15

highly. But where he denounces Puritanism, or praises the French love of reason, or deplores the practical tendency of the English, is it not possible that he is looking at only one side of the shield? Few men can rise so successfully as Arnold above their native prejudices, but he, too, carries them with him. For instance, he says that "Milton, of all our English race, is by his diction and rhythm the one artist of the highest rank in the great style whom we have." Moreover, he says, "the mighty power of poetry and art ... resides chiefly in the refining and elevation wrought in us by the high and rare excellence of the great style." But in order to give Milton this high praise Arnold finds it necessary to distinguish the Milton of poetry from the Milton of religious and political controversy. Would it not be more reasonable to seek for some of the greatness of the poet in the writer on political and domestic themes? The pure love of liberty in its noblest sense that shines forth from the Areopagitica and The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce must have appealed to Arnold. He detested the contemporary divorce laws of England as a peculiarly disgusting achievement of the English Philistines. Was Milton's high conception of the married state-spiritual commerce-not worthy of recognition? And are Milton and Bunyan not products of the prison of Puritanism? Assuredly, Milton would have had little patience with Arnold's fears lest the impulse to practical action should corrupt the purity of disinterested thinking. He would have retorted that poetry is good, and that disinterested thinking is good, but that when the time arrives both must be postponed to the greater immediate good of civil liberty. Milton, himself, had been faced with that choice, and he had not hesitated to make his decision. Is it true that in a sense an interest in ethical questions 16

and practical politics is antagonistic to the spirit of rational understanding? May it not be that both the French and the English attitudes to these questions proceed from deeprooted national characteristics which condition all their thinking? At any rate there is no doubt that the English literary tradition has always given a place of primacy to right conduct and to political services, a fact which is illustrated in the works of a great multitude of our men of letters. Men should certainly engage in a disinterested search for truth, but are men of practical temperament to be excluded from the enterprise? It is certainly not the function of literature to draw morals, but are men forbidden to be interested in conduct which makes up so much of the interest of life? We are never on more slippery ground than when we attempt to define national characteristics. Our wisest generalizations about the characters of Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Italians can usually be shown to be contradicted by actual examples. The faith of the German Nazis in their capacity to rate one breed highly and another low has resulted in widespread scepticism as to the value of the exercise, and, indeed, as to the existence of distinctively pure breeds. And yet no one really doubts that an Englishman, a German, and a Frenchman differ from each other in fundamental ways, and illustrate in their thinking the results of their respective cultures and traditions. It is not a question of the purity of the breed, but rather of the influence exercised over long years by their environment, physical and intellectual. In all nations contemporary thought is the product of past generations, and although in discussing national characteristics we may be tempted to generalize too sweepingly, the residuum of genuine truth cannot be ignored. English literature is per17

meated, for example, by the love of the country, though it is true that Dr. Johnson preferred the beauty of Fleet Street to that of the Scotch Highlands ( or of anything else in Scotland for that matter) . But the strong national tradition held sway in spite of exceptions. Let us now consider the relation between English literature and English politics. To any intelligent student of the English story it is a commonplace to say that literature has rarely absorbed all the energy and interest of our men of letters. Indeed they have consciously resented the theory that they should exchange an interest in life for an interest in writing about life. Their taste is shared by a great multitude of our general population, and it is illustrated in contemporary life as clearly as at any time in the past. Throughout our Western world there is a strong tendency today to intense specialization in all the occupations of men. In university education, for instance, the vast increase in knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, has made it more and more difficult to give an all-round training to our students. We feel that if they are to escape amateurishness they must concentrate their energies rigidly within a narrow sphere. We prefer that they be ignorant of a multitude of things and exhaustively familiar with a few, rather than be superficially familiar with many. This devotion to specialism is a comparatively recent development in our history, and nowhere has it made progress with more difficulty than in England. There the specialist has always been regarded as a valuable asset for the man of affairs who may need his assistance. He has been regarded as essentially an instrument, but not as an educated man. In government, for instance, the civil service makes ~ of a great number of highly trained specialists, but they do not ordinarily become cabinet ministers. The cabinet minister 18

has an all-round education, derived from Eton or Balliol, or from the London Docks or coal mining. His most important qualifications are character, native ability, and a capacity to take wide views, to sift the small amount of relevant information from the mountain of the less relevant. He must have a capacity for acquiring this information quickly-by his own efforts, and with the assistance of his specialists. When he has developed a competent acquaintance with the problems of one portfolio, he must be prepared to become responsible for administering another, which deals with very different and perhaps largely unrelated problems. He should be familiar with the history and literature of his own country, and of as many others, ancient and modem, as possible, for in becoming so he will have meditated on human character, and have a wide general acquaintance with problems of government. But his intellectual calibre and his personal character will far outweigh any acquired fund of knowledge he may have, if he is to operate successfully at the Exchequer, the Navy, and the Colonial Office. No English characteristic has been more striking through the centuries than the genius for government, one aspect of the English absorption in practical life. Our story has been a long battle for liberty, for the gradual transfer of power from the king to the aristocracy, to the common people; Britain has become the Mother of Parliaments, throughout the Commonwealth and the United States and in South-East Asia. This is her great contribution to the modem world, an achievement to which all her peoplestatesmen, men of letters, ordinary citizens--have contributed, and in which they have found their essential national unity. Her poets have been statesmen, and her statesmen have nourished their political capacity on litera19

ture. To think of them as living independently of each other is to make hash of English history. Examples crowd upon the mind. Milton and Wordsworth are as truly landmarks in the political history of England as are Burke and Gladstone. A striking illustration of this fact may be drawn from the record of a single English family, the Churchills. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, "Marlborough," says Professor Trevelyan, "as a military strategist and a tactician, as a war statesman and war diplomatist, stands second to no Englishman in history. His powers resemble those of Chatham and Clive rolled into one." It is an astonishing tribute. Marlborough's dominant ambition was for his country, in defence of which he did not hesitate to break the ties that bound him to a political party. In these respects his even greater descendant of our own day resembles him. Perhaps in the long course of English history no one has placed his countrymen so deeply in his debt by magnificent services as has Mr. Churchill, if only because the danger from which he delivered us was a supreme danger. Like Marlborough, he too has been a Liberal and a Tory, and has directed many different departments of government. He was virtually self-educated, like Lincoln and Burns; if one's native genius is sufficiently genuine he has little need of assistance from the schools. Mr. Churchill, as a young cavalry officer in India, became convinced that he needed a knowledge of history if he was to play an intelligent and satisfying role in life. He began with Gibbon and Macaulay, and went on to Plato and Aristotle, Malthus and Darwin. In the process he became widely and profoundly acquainted with the story of men's speculations and actions, and incidentally taught himself to write his native language with clarity, persuasiveness, and wisdom 20

not surpassed by any of his contemporaries. He has been soldier and sailor, prime minister and cabinet minister in many departments, a voluminous author, and for the sake of variety he has also explored the arts of painting and brick-laying. But his greatest achievement has been as a supreme national leader, who in the blackest hours of danger inspired the English people with confidence, courage, and endurance commensurate with their grim task, and taught them to envisage any fate except failure. The nation is indeed fortunate which in her hour of need finds at her service able leaders, and perhaps England's good fortune in this respect is largely a result of the practical bent of her people. We must recognize, however, that the English have the defects of their qualities, a certain self-sufficiency, not unaccompanied by arrogance, a tendency to isolationism and provinciality--qualities which have not endeared them to neighbouring peoples. In their literature their emphasis on ideas has often meant indifference to form and beauty. Their dose observation of nature and life, their energy and emotional drive, have sometimes seemed to leave too little place for those formal beauties which are inherent in the very nature of all great art. Fortunately for herself, England has not neglected to seek the best correctives of these national limitations in the literatures of the countries which had developed the virtues complementary to her needs. The literatures of Greece, Italy, and France have at various times been peculiarly stimulating and fertilizing in their effect on the works of English men of letters. No greater or more beneficent influence can ever be exercised on a national literature than that which flows from a familiar acquaintance with the best that has been written by other peoples. No poet ever

21

wrote well who was not a close student of his predecessors, and if he knew the works of foreign poets as well as those of his own country his equipment for his task was correspondingly more adequate. It is an egregious vulgar error to think that Bums, for instance, was an exception to this rule, that he was an unlettered ploughman of genius. The truth is that few of his contemporaries were so widely educated, even though he was not indebted to a university for his education. In translations he knew most of the great classics of Greece and of Rome; he read French and Italian, and knew well the greatest authors in these tongues. No Englishman or Scot of his time had a more intimate acquaintance with the works of British poets, from Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton to his own contem• poraries. From literature, from history and philosophy he had accumulated a great stock of ideas, in addition to those derived from his unrivalled capacity to assimilate a knowledge of the scenery, the inhabitants, and the wild life of his native land. He had meditated deeply on the significance of what he had seen and read-the sine qua non of every poet. He was a member of a family of great intellectual and administrative ability, various members of which attained distinction as Orientalists and servants of government in difficult administrative posts. No poet can begin to write de novo; he must have some real acquaint• ance with the world of thought and expres.sion, and he must consciously build upon the foundations laid by his predeces.sors. English poets have heeded these injunctions, and it would be difficult to exaggerate the total debt of our literature to the Greeks and the Hebrews, the Italians and the French. In our English poets, as in Burns, we shall generally find a deep interest in the work-a-day world, in the beauties

22

of nature, and love of their native land. They are interested in life and its practical concerns before poetry, in men and women and human relations and experiences. It is a poetry which in spite of its defects has served to nourish in the English people a deep love of their home land, a zest for life and ideas, a conviction of the supreme importance of right conduct, and a delight in meditating on the human lot. Naturally it bears the mark of their practical temperament, but this fact does not obscure their essentially complex character. No theme recurs more frequently in our literature than love of home and native land. Patriotism is certainly not an exclusively English virtue, but it is a virtue which runs like a bright thread through the whole fabric of English history and literature. It may at times degenerate into the last refuge of a scoundrel, who thus unconsciously pays the tribute of vice to virtue, but it has shone most brightly at all the great crises of our history. The Armada, the Puritan Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the wars of the present century, are simply landmarks that give coherence to the story. Nothing has bound the English people together more effectively than their conviction that no sacrifice is too great to preserve their national liberty. Why did Britain successfully resist the terrible onslaught of the Germans in the First World War, and escape the horrors of an actual invasion in the last? Perhaps the simplest and truest answer is that it was because a great majority of her people preferred death to the slavery which she saw her neighbours enduring across the North Sea and the Channel. And the intense love of individual liberty in her people has never prevented their combining in the common cause. For instance, no blacker prospect has ever faced Britain than when in 1806 both Fox and Pitt died while the might of embattled Europe prepared to attack. Wordsworth, in

23

one of his noblest sonnets, has described her plight, but he has no fear for the quality of the English population: his only doubt is regarding the quality of their leadership. We shall exult, if they who rule the land Be men who hold its many blessings dear,

Wise, upright, valiant. . . . It is true that patriotism is a heady cordial which may make men forget that valiant dust may be building on dust. Tennyson's toast To this great name of England drink, my friends, And all her glorious empire, round and round, sounds less convincing in a day when her empire ( and all empires) seem to be in a process of disintegration. No doubt patriotism has always been subject to the temptations of arrogance and blatant self-sufficiency, and it is always well to remind ourselves that The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things. At its best, however, patriotism has played a high role in its enthusiastic recognition that the individual can find his full development only in his membership in the state, and that liberty is a possession that must constantly be reconquered. It may well be that nationalism today is a less potent force in the world than it has been, that we are groping blindly toward larger loyalties. But this does not mean that we shall ever repudiate utterly the minor loyalties that have served us well. No matter what may be the future political organization of men, loyalty will remain the cement or binding force of any successful world state, and the habits which men have learned in a less highly organ24

ized world will serve them in whatever future they are tc experience. And a world state which is not dominated by a love of liberty can be only one more form of totalitarian slavery. Better a world divided between the adherents of democracy and communism, in which an honest attempt is made to live and let live, than a spurious unity which seeks to ignore the fundamental convictions of men regarding their own government, and the influence which government is to exercise over the lives of individuals. Perhaps it would be better still to envisage a continuation of our world of many nations, reorganized for common effort in many fields, but retaining the loyalties, the diversity, the sense of local responsibilities, which in spite of their limitations have done so much educational service in directing at least many peoples along the path that leads to wisdom in the art of living together. In a day of revolutionary change we must indeed preserve our access to new ideas. We must none the less cherish our soundest traditions lest the fate of the rootless overtake us, and we have few sounder traditions than love of native land. Most of our poets have sung its praises as have the poets of other lands. No instinct is more normal; none bears surer witness to a sound framework of character. Tennyson has given the idea adequate phrasing: No sound is breathed so potent to coerce, And to conciliate, as their names who dare For that sweet mother land which gave them birth Nobly to do, nobly to die. Their names Graven on memorial columns are a song, Heard in the future; few, but more than wall And rampart, their examples reach a hand Far thro' all years, and everywhere they meet And kindle generous purpose, and the strength To mould it into action, pure as theirs.

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It would seem, then, to be premature, to say the least, to assume that nationalism is completely outmoded, that the love of our own land and of those whom we know best is incompatible with loyalty to a new world in which we recognize that all good things-peace, well-being, and liberty-must be shared in order to be possessed. We must not forget that it was only yesterday that intense national patriotism preserved England from the nameless horrors of subjection to barbarism. Dunkirk was a symbol of her finest hour, and while she treads the difficult road which leads to something approaching the security and prosperity of her past, she is not likely to forget the glorious achievements of her darkest days. Her economic decline forbids extravagant dreams of her immediate future. At the same time she has learned that the wealth of a nation does not consist least in the character and ability of its citizens. Britain is finding it difficult at the present moment to ad just her sense of duty to her own people, at home and overseas, to her duty to the European continent. We may hope, however, that her great political experience will once more discover a solution, that she will take a significant part in bringing to the birth the world of tomorrow, and that her great experience of world affairs and her love of liberty as antecedent to all other good things will help to guarantee the sanity and stability of pending political decisions. As heirs of their own past, all nations can contribute to the general welfare only what they have learned is permanent, is so intimately related to human needs that it can adjust itself to strange new worlds. We may hope that in these circumstances the British contribution will be great, partly because of the practical and political bent of the national temper as it has been hammered out through the centuries.

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Lecture II · Ethics and Politics

W

E SHALL now tum our attention to the important place occupied by right conduct in the works both of English poets and of English prose-writers. In recent times, and especially during the vogue of the art for art's sake doctrine, there has been a strong tendency to decry the introduction of moral values into poetry. Throughout the ages, however, there has been something approaching unanimity among great poets and critics alike of all nations in favour of giving a prominent place to ethical values. Mr. I. A. Richards thinks we should speak of the "ordinary values" rather than the moral theory of art, and he quotes approvingly the opinion of Walter Pater: "'Given the conditions I have tried to explain as constituting good art, then if it be devoted further to the increase of men's happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or to the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of new and old truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may fortify us in our sojourn here ... it will also be great art; if, over and above those qualities which I have summed up . . . it has something of the soul of humanity in it, and finds its logical, its architectural place in the great structure of human life.' " It would be strange indeed if it were otherwise, especially if we think with Arnold that literature is a criticism of life, and that conduct is threefourths of life. 29

This is very far from saying that the purpose of art is to draw a moral, or that the poets of all nations are equally obsessed by the ethical values of life. French critics, for instance, regard the English preoccupation with conduct as something abnormal; they would insist that the English pay very inadequate attention to that one-fourth of life which deals with very different ideals and experiences. For example, our unwillingness to assign a very high place to Byron is regarded by many French and German critics as preposterous, and as an indication of the provincial quality of English taste. "The two greatest poets of the Romantic period," says M. Faguet, "were Lord Byron and Shelley; the former the admirable poet of disenchantment and despair, gifted with a noble epic genius creating and vitalizing characters, which, it must be confessed, differed very little from one another, but an exalted figure with a grand manner, and, except Shakespeare, the only English poet who exercised genuine influence over French literature." The English are not inclined to use extravagant language in praising a poet of disenchantment and despair, however much they may recognize his satirical power. Moreover, they are inclined to be sceptical of a poet's creative and vitalizing genius if it must be confessed that his characters differ very little from one another. But most French critics have no such scruples. M. Taine, for instance, notes caustically that Carlyle "set the democrat Burns above Byron"; and that "he has exalted Dr. Johnson, that honest pedant, the most grotesque of literary behemoths." "Carlyle would reduce the heart of man to the English sentiment of duty, and his imagination to the English sentiment of respect. The half of human poetry escapes his grasp. For if a part of ourselves raises us to abnegation and virtue, another part leads us to enjoyment 30

and pleasure. Man is pagan as well as Christian . . . ." Carlyle "has no taste for French literature," M. Taine continues. "The exact order, the fine proportions, the perpetual regard for the agreeable and proper, the harmonious structure of clear and consecutive ideas, the delicate pie• ture of society, the perfection of style,-nothing which moves us, has attraction for him. His mode of comprehending Ii£e is too far removed from ours. In vain he tries to understand Voltaire, all he can do is to slander him." This is indeed a fair and adequate description of one of the fundamental differences between the two literatures. Even M. Sainte-Beuve, who had an English mother and an English education, can only declare: "England is still a foreign country to us." To be sure, he cannot endure his countrymen's exaltation of Byron. "In France," he says, "we have not yet got beyond Byronism. For us, modern poetry is still embodied in the works-brilliant enough and easily understood--of a man whooe disorderly life, whooe ootentation of misanthropy, whose pretentious dandyismin a word, whose littleness and affectation have never succeeded in diminishing his ancient vogue with our countrymen. But the English are long past Byronism." Somewhat surprisingly M. Sainte-Beuve is a great enthusiast for George Eliot and her works, "the most perfect novels as yet known." He is willing to compare her as a creator of characters to Shakespeare, and he quotes approvingly Lord Acton's judgment that "George Eliot is the most considerable literary personality since the death of Goethe." But her overwhelming interest in morals must have been difficult for him to accept. "With her serious and moral nature," he says, "she ran the risk of becoming a moralizer; with her sympathy for the faults and foibles of her kind, inclination must have carried her towards the 31

didactic. But she knows the danger, and remains en her guard against it." "George Eliot will not yield to the ideas of social progress which have seized so tyrannously on the modern spirit; she is too thoroughly persuaded that happiness is above all a moral state to expect much of institutions." These quotations from French critics illustrate the tremendous influence exercised on taste and judgment by national traditions, and it is well that we reflect honestly on opinions which we may not share. We must remember that even Goethe said that Byron "must unquestionably be regarded as the greatest talent of the century." "The English may think of Byron what they please, but it is certain that they can point to no poet who is his like. He is different from all the rest, and in the main greater." That Goethe was aware of Byron's weaknesses and defects is obvious when he adds: "The moment he reflects, he is a child." It is tempting to draw the moral from these contradictory opinions-doubtless an English weakness. But the only safe generalization is that we should remember what oddly different estimates have been expressed by men of ability on a capacity for moralizing and an incapacity for reflection. The differences stir up many questions in our minds. Is there any organic connection between a poet's personal character and the literary value of his poems? Can a brilliant personality and fiery energy atone for the lack of other qualities both of substance and of technique? But we are discussing the English literary tradition, and these questions, interesting and even fundamental as they may be, are not immediately related to our theme. Let me give one more example of the consistently opposed English and French traditions by comparing two

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speeches delivered under similar circumstances by two great literary critics of the last century, the one French, the other English, Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold. Sainte-Beuve was addressing the st4dents of the Ecole Normale, Arnold the boys of Eton College. Both were extolling the virtues of classical literature, and both were pointing out the immense debt of modern literature especially to that of Greece. The classical tradition, says M. Sainte-Beuve, "consists in a certain principle of good sense and culture which, in the course of ages, has penetrated so as to modify it into the very character of our Gaulish nation, and which entered long ago into the very composition of our wits." He goes on to say that the French "are glad to recognize that delicate sentiment of love and courtesy which belongs to chivalry, to see in it yet another ornament added to mankind's crown, side by side with atticism and urbanity." "But," he adds, "let us never separate ourselves from atticism, from urbanity, from the principle of good sense and good reason, which in it is combined with grace. What we must never lose sight of is the feeling of a certain standard of beauty suited to our race, to our education, to our civilization." Matthew Arnold, who was in some sense a disciple of Sainte-Beuve, commends to the boys of Eton much the same qualities in Greek literature, in Hellenism: suppleness and flexibility of nature, lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners. Not even Sainte-Beuve admires these qualities of the Greek mind more than Arnold, but Arnold does not find them allsuffi.cient. "And still," he says, "joined to all the gifts and graces which that admirable genius brought with it, there went, as a kind of fatal accompaniment, moral in-

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adequacy." And again: "The Attic nation gave its heart to those powers which we have designated, for the sake of brevity and convenience, as those of expansion, intellect, beauty, social life and manners. Athens and Greece allowed themselves to be diverted and distracted from attention to conduct, and to the ideas which inspire conduct." Here you have it in a nutshell-French insistence on atticism, urbanity, beauty, grace, and the English insistence that unto these things shall be added morality. The whole course of English literary criticism is marked by this insistence that literature shall in some sense exalt as well as please, that it shall not confine itself to exhibiting grace and beauty, but that it shall likewise interpret life, make men wiser, better. The doctrine crops up in the most unexpected places. Who, for instance, would ever guess that the following sentence was written by Lord Byron? "The highest of all poetry is the ethical, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth." And if the words had been written by someone else, and if they had been called to Byron's attention, we may be sure that his comment would have been, "Of course." One may be a libertine, a revolutionist, a denouncer of cant and of Puritanism, but that does not mean that he can free himself from the fundamental traditions of his race. Professor Gilbert Murray tells the story of a young nonconformist student who in an essay on Keats gave it as his opinion that, after all, the important question to ask was whether Keats had ever saved a soul. And Professor Murray's comment is, "I suspect that the young nonconformist was perfectly correct in the test he applied; that a really great poet ought to save souls and does save souls." We need not here enter into the question whether Professor Murray and his non-conformist protege meant 34

quite the same thing by saving souls. What is important to notice is that in some sense they did mean the same thing, and that Professor's Murray's comment on the story could hardly have been made by anyone who was not in the English literary tradition. Of course the English have no monopoly of enthusiasm for ethical truth as a fundamental quality of great literature and of life itself. Indeed, Count Tolstoy's conversion at the age of nearly sixty to the religion of Jesus brought about his divorce from all worldly interests in art, literature, and nationalism, in order that he might devote himself to loving the humblest of his fellows, and sharing their lives of poverty and manual labour. Tchekhov has described the emptiness of life and of literature which do not rest on the basis of a philosophy of belief and right conduct. Writing to Souvorin in 1892, he says: We [Russian writers] lack "something," that is true, and it means that, lift the robe of our muse, and you will find within an empty void. Let me remind you that the writers who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic; they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it, too, and you feel not with your mind, but with your whole being, that they have some object. . . . Some have more immediate objects-the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka ... ; others have remote objects--God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The best of them are realists and paint life as it is, but through every line's being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that captivates you. And we? We! We paint life as it is, but beyond that-nothing at all .... Flog us and we can do no more! We have neither immediate nor remote aims, and in 35

our soul there is a great empty space. We have no politics, we do not believe in revolution, we have no God, we are not afraid of ghosts, and I personally am not afraid even of death and blindness. One who wants nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears nothing, cannot be an artist. Tchekhov here seems to declare that great literature which captivates men must have an aim to interpret life for them, by organizing their desires, their hopes, their fears, by presenting a picture of life as it ought to be lived. In the long history of English literature only a very few of the outstanding men of letters would incur Tchekhov's criticism; they have regarded it as their function to exalt the characters of men as well as to give pleasure and delight. The general principle is laid down unequivocally by Sir Philip Sidney, the first of our literary critics, when he declares that the end of poetry is to teach and delight, as the ending end of all earthly learning is virtuous action. The poet can qualify himself for his high calling only by assiduous study and long meditation until he has attained unto wisdom. This ethical preoccupation is generally recognized by the English themselves as well as by Continental writers. As we have seen, however, no English characteri&tic has been assailed more vigorously by French and German writers, many of whom do not call it ethical preoccupation but plain hypocrisy or sentimentalism. In our own day a very competent analysis of English character and of English literature has been made by Professor Wilhelm Dibelius, late Professor of English in the University of Berlin. His volume entitled England appeared in 1923; it was addressed primarily to the German people, and was written in German. Now a book written at the conclusion of the First World War could hardly fail to embody national 36

prejudices, even though it was the work of a very competent scholar who honestly admired many English characteristics. Naturally, his final verdict is not likely to appeal strongly to Englishmen, to whom it sounds strange to hear themselves accused of vices which they have ordinarily attributed to their enemies---for example, a lust for power so inordinate that all the outside world regards it as a threat and general danger. Professor Dibelius recognizes our common sense; indeed we are one of the sanest of nations. Throughout the British Isles there prevails a robust, masculine, and sound sexual morality, which amounts to more than the pious phrases of most Continental nations. Self-control is the instinct of the whole British race. The English state is characterized by freedom, a freedom made possible by the fact that most Englishmen prefer to be just like their neighbours and obediently fol!ow the lead given by the upper classes, whether in religion or the cut of a tie. Such freedom would be intolerable to nations more sensitive to liberty in the personal sphere. It is a state which has made the State wellnigh super• fluous. This free state is England's great contribution to civilization; Shakespearean drama is the only other contribution which can compare to it in importance. Over against these virtues Professor Dibelius sets the typical national vices: the lust for power, and hypocrisy. Wherever the Englishman appears as a conqueror he will bring with him not only material benefits in abundance, but also his religious and high ethical sense in dealing with all questions that do not touch his sense of supremacy. The Englishman is apt to point to this pleasant accompaniment; he is generally deaf to the tune, but it is the tune that grates upon the ears of others. "It would be a loss to the world if there were no powerful England, but it would be 37

a lasting detriment to the world, inclusive of England, if ever England were to become all-powerful." Englishmen assume that they only have brought liberty to other nations, and that if there is to be world progress, the Angl~Saxon idea must continue its missionary work in the future until the entire earth is filled with it-in a league of free nations whose defence will be undertaken by Britain. The Englishman's interest in psychology and ethics, politics and political economy is his recognition of their practical importance in managing men and securing power. The English ideal of the gentleman, derived from chivalry, is based on the individual gentleman's sentimentality and his subservience to the upper classes, and does not interfere in any serious way with his principal business in life, the pursuit of power and material goods. This is modified chiefly by his love of comfort. Cant, based on Puritanism, has always been noted by the foreigner as the Englishman's chief trait. Wherever he uses force he will do so with an ethical tinge; when he studies aesthetics and economics the ethical tinge will reappear. Ruskin, for instance, is characteristically English. The Englishman's common sense makes him prefer evolution to revolution, and explains further his love of compromise. The Puritanism which helped to inculcate hypocrisy as an element in the national character is today in its death throes. It is only in the region of foreign policy that the Englishman is still the pure Puritan seeking to set up the Kingdom of God-of the Anglo-Saxons. It will be obvious that Herr Dibelius deals faithfully with us. Many essential traits of the Englishman's character, Dibelius says, are derived from his ancestors, the peasants of Lower Saxony, for example, his materialism, his indi'.idualism, his fondness for eating and drinking, his 38

penchant for the practical, his mistrust of theory, his conservatism. From medieval chivalry is derived his ideal of the gentleman, later modified by Puritanism. From humanism he learned to regard knowledge as the supreme grace of life; accordingly English statesmen are often philosophers or scientists, or men of letters. "Nowhere in the world are there so many agreeable gentlemen with charming manners who have tasted all branches of knowledge." But this eclecticism does not interfere with the English fundamental materialism, the pursuit of power. It would be absurd in a lecture to attempt an objective evaluation of Herr Dibelius's portrait of the Englishman. He has written a most stimulating book, and we cannot ignore the fact that he repeats the old charges of hypocrisy and lust for power. Our self-respect would prevent our giving the opinion unqualified approval, however much we may recognize it as our duty not to ignore the charge. Herr Dibelius was writing at a time when Great Britain's pre-eminence in world affairs had lasted for more than a century, and when there was no definite evidence of its having come to an end. One of the penalties of greatness is that it engenders suspicion especially among the great nation's competitors. Moreover, it is a national characteristic of the British that they talk about right conduct more freely and more insistently than do the people of other nations, a practice which exposes them to unfriendly interpretation. Perhaps no nation can claim for its own programme perfect sincerity or indifference to increasing its own power. But Britain's record as a supreme world power is now open to all who can read, and we may leave the verdict to the historian, with confidence that he will recognize great and enduring virtues however definite may be the accompanying qualifications. A tendency to self39

approval, and a belief that his acts have been inspired by high motives--of these flattering convictions Englishmen assuredly have no monopoly. And now that two world wars and a world depression have reduced the power and prestige of their country to very moderate proportions, it should be easier for both Englishmen and their critics to achieve an objective judgment. But it will be hard for us to believe that our lust for dominion is regarded by the rest of the world as a threat to civilization, and that the English ideal of the gentleman rests only on the twin foundations of hypocrisy and subservience to the upper classes. Hitherto we have assumed, without giving many actual proofs, that throughout the whole course of English literature we find certain definite qualities such as a love of nature, intense patriotism, and a preoccupation in politics and in the ethical values of life. The thesis is abundantly illustrated, however, and by the supreme names in our story. Obviously we can only give examples. There will be general agreement that since Shakespeare the greatest English poets have been Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats, and to them we may confine ourselves for verification of our thesis. I propose, then, to look briefly into the works of each of them. I shall have little difficulty in persuading you of Milton's interest in practical politics and ethics, of his intense patriotism, and of his delicate observation of the details of the countryside, especially in early poems such as L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. His conviction that the poet's great task entailed adequate preparation is seen in his spending eight years at Cambridge followed by six years of intense study in his father's home. He then spent a year in foreign travel, in Italy. The last stage in his work of preparation was to be a visit to Greece, the land in which 4-0

had centred all his fairest imaginings of the human race, where men had lived and speculated on human problems more satisfyingly than anywhere else on earth. But the cup was dashed from his lips, and the ten best years of his life were perforce devoted to political controversy. But even in later years when the shadow of the Restoration was approaching or had actually cast its darkness over the land, when Milton felt that he had indeed fallen on evil days, neither he nor his friends felt any inclination to underestimate the value of his prose writings, the sole remaining product of the years which he would have chosen to devote to poetry. Of all our poets none was more self-consciously a lover of his native land, none gave to right conduct a more exalted place in the business of living, none combined more intimately the roles of statesman and poet, none was more familiar with the best that had been thought and said throughout the world and throughout the ages. Wordsworth has so long been regarded as the poet of nature that it is difficult for any but close students of his works to realize that he was in truth a great statesman as well as a great poet. A general enlargement of the popular estimate of his character began with the publication in 1917 of The Statesmanship of Wordsworth by Professor A. V. Dicey of the University of Oxford. He quotes Wordsworth's own statement in 1833 "that although he was known to the world only as poet, he had given twelve hours thought to the condition and prospects of society, for one to poetry," and he emphasizes the passionate interest which Wordsworth took in the public life of England. "My object," continues Professor Dicey, "is to show that at the very crisis of the Great War between England and Napoleon (that is to say from 1802 to 1815) Wordsworth 41

tendered to English politicians and the people of England the wisest counsel expressed in the noblest language; that he by many years anticipated, thought out and announced the doctrine of Nationalism, which during at least fifty years of the nineteenth century ( 1820-70) governed or told upon the foreign policy of every European country; and that the policy of Wordsworth, as set forth during the war with Napoleon, suggests questions and contains lessons which vitally concern England when engaged, as at present, in a world-wide war to save the independence of the British Empire and of every other free state." Wordsworth was "neither a Whig nor a Tory." "His ideas as to politics, and especially as to foreign affairs, have the closest affinity with his poetry." "He early in life had obtained an intimate and first-hand knowledge of the French people which was certainly not possessed even by the few English statesmen who had lived much on the continent of Europe." " ... he had in 1802, and probably earlier, adopted a great part, and one may fairly say in every sense the best part, of the teaching of Burke." These sentences from Professor Dicey's volume make a definite claim for Wordsworth in the world of political thought. It was John Stuart Mill's opinion that Wordsworth talked on no subject more instructively than on states of society and forms of government. The opinion is not surprising to anyone who is acquainted with Wordsworth's political sonnets and his prose work, The Convention of Cintra, both of which voice the author's passionate interest and competence in the defence of political liberty in his own country and throughout Europe. Few Englishmen have lived their lives less withdrawn from the turmoil of contemporary politics than Wordsworth. His enthusiasm for Milton as a poet hardly exceeded his admiration for Milton, the political thinker. 42

It is unneces.sary to labour Wordsworth's preoccupation with right conduct, for he declared that he wished to be regarded as a teacher or as nothing. Indeed, he not infrequently falls into uninspired moralizing. But we are not now concerned with the poetic quality of his work. Like the great majority of our English poets he recognized that poetry was only one aspect of life, and he was interested in life and its overflowing richness of content rather than in any single aspect of it. Keats illustrates our thesis much less clearly than does either Milton or Wordsworth, chiefly, I think, because of his early death and the long sickness which preceded it. His absorption in poetry, and in learning to think out its nature and the conditions that must be fulfilled before any greatness in its practice can be achieved, was so engrossing that it excluded the possibility of any profound interest in politics. The great spirits whom he recognized as now sojourning on earth were poets, not statesmen. Of course in his letters we have frequent incidental references to the contemporary political situation. For instance in 1818 he tells his brother George that "we have no Milton, no Algernon Sidney. . . . All the departments of Government have strayed far from Simplicity which is the greatest of strength .... Notwithstanding the part which the Liberals take in the Cause of Napoleon I cannot but think he has done more harm to the life of Liberty than any one else could have done .... The worst thing he has done is, that he has taught them [divine right Gentlemen] how to organize their monstrous armies." Then follows some interesting speculation on Russian expansionist ambitions: "The Emperor Alexander it is said intends to divide his Empire as did Diocletian-creating two Czars besides himself, and continuing the supreme Monarch of the wholeShould he do this, and they for a series of Years keep 43

peaceable among themselves Russia may spread her conquest even to China-I think [it] a very likely thing that China itself may fall. Turkey certainly will. Meanwhile European North Russia will hold its horns against the rest of Europe, intriguing constantly with France." He shows no enthusiasm for the democratic experiment being worked out in America. A country like the United States whose greatest men are Franklins and Washingtons will never "take up the human intellect where England leaves off." He can only hope that one of his brother's children may be the first American poet. A year later he again sends to George an analysis of contemporary English politics. Referring to the long struggle of kings through the ages to destroy all popular privilege he says: The English were the only people in Europe who made a grand kick at this. They were slaves to Henry VIII., but were freemen under William III. at the time the French were abject slaves under Louis XIV. The example of England, and the liberal writers of France and England, sowed the seed of opposition to this tyranny, and it was swelling in the ground till it burst out in the French Revolution. That has had an unlucky termination. It put a stop to the rapid progress of free sentiments in England; and gave our Court hopes of turning back t.o the despotism of the eighteenth century. They have made a handle of this event in every way to undermine our freedom. They spread a horrid superstition against all innovation and improvement. . . . Carlile the bookseller . . . has been selling deistical pamphlets, republished Tom Paine and many other works held in superstitious horror. He even has been selling for some time immense numbers of a work called "The Deist," which comes out in weekly numbers. For this conduct he, I think, has had above a dozen indictments issued against 44

him, for which he has found bail to the amount of many thousand pounds. After all, they are afraid to prosecute. They are afraid of his defence; it would be published in all the papers all over the empire. . .. the trials would light a flame they could not extinguish .... You will hear by the papers of the proceedings at Manchester and Hunt's triumphal entry into London. . . . it is calculated that 30,000 people were in the streets waiting for him.

Now it is obvious that Keats took an intelligent interest in politics, but it was not a very practical or absorbing interest. His friend Dilke, he says, "thinks of nothing but political justice and his boy. Now, the first political duty a man ought to have a mind to is the happiness of his friends." Dilke is a man "who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made up his mind about everything. The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing-to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party. . . . all the stubborn arguers you meet with are of the same brood. They never begin upon a subject they have not preresolved on." In a word Keats is conscious of his own immaturity and is absorbed in completing his education; until he has accomplished this task he will preserve an open mind-the negative capability of which he speaks elsewhere. He shrank from identifying himself with a political party until he knew more, as he realized that he must read widely and long before he was equipped for genuine political thought or for writing real poetry. At this programme he was working hard. He tells his brother: "In the course of a few months I shall be as good an Italian scholar as I am a French one. I am reading Ariosto at present, not managing 45

more than six or eight stanzas at a time. When I have done this language so as to be able to read it tolerably well-I shall set myself to get complete in Latin, and there my learning must stop.... The fact is I like to be acquainted with foreign languages. . .. the reading of Dante [is] well worth the while; and in Latin there is a fund of curious literature of the Middle Ages, the works of many great menAretino and Sannazaro and Machiavelli." We know that about this time he was also reading much history. Like Milton and Wordsworth, Keats knew that preparation for his task entailed unremitting work before he could sort out "the dark mysteries of human souls To clear conceiving." "How much toil! How many days! what desperate turmoil! Ere I can have explored its widenesses." "O for ten years, that I may overwhelm myself in poesy!" All his early work belongs to the realm of Flora and Old Pan, from which he must pass on to "a nobler life"-"the agonies, the strife of human hearts." He once told Shelley that he would never have committed to print anything he had yet written had it not been to earn some money. Great poetry must explore the profundities of life, and has no relation to merely pretty charming verses. And of his own capacity to make the transition, he had no doubts. "I am more at home," he declares, "amongst men and women. I would rather read Chaucer than Ariosto. The little dramatic skill I may as yet have however badly it might show in a Drama would I think be sufficient for a Poem." A critic like Professor Garrod will have none of this doctrine, which he regards as mere wrong-headedness in Keats. He refers sceptically to Keats's "old hunger and thirst for 'reality.' " "Philosophy, politics, action, character -all these are for ever calling him." They are indeed, and they are the clue to understanding him. We might refer 46

Mr. Garrod to a sentence of his own regarding Wordsworth. "In general," he says, "I am inclined to the belief that not only are poets commonly a more truthful race than other men, but that they frequently understand themselves better than other people understand them." In one of his earliest poems Keats had defined the great end of poesy: it should be a friend To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man. This is almost a translation of Sidney's "to teach and delight." It is the creed of the great majority of English poets, and it is far removed from drawing morals and preaching orthodoxy. Keats had gradually lost most of his dogmatic belief in Christianity, including the hope of immortality, but his whole interest in life was to discover and experience the meaning of right action and right belief as far as it was possible to do so by strenuous study and profound meditation. When he could penetrate no farther he rested in his negative capability, when circumstance made that the only right action and belief. But aways he was conscious that life was "a vale of Soul-making." It is perhaps unnecessary to multiply examples of the absorption of English men of letters either in ethical conduct or in the business of government. In doing so we are in danger of labouring to establish the commonplace. For instance, British cabinets and the British diplomatic service have ordinarily been composed of men many of whom are equally well known as men of letters. Examples crowd upon one's notice: Gladstone, Disraeli and Churchill, Morley, Balfour and Sir Herbert Fisher, John Buchan, Lord Bryce, Sir Oliver Franks, and Harold Nicolson. Even the seemingly non-literary occupation of Banking has contributed 47

recruits to the ranks of the historians, Greek scholars, and economists, in men like Grote, Walter Leaf, and Walter Bagehot. Had we chosen our examples from the eighteenth century their number would not have been less. I have no intention of making an exhaustive catalogue of the elements which combine to form English character; otherwise I should have called attention to the widespread sense of humour which contributes so much to the readableness of English novels and essays. This is a trait closely related to the broad interest in life, to good judgment in practical affairs, to a love of comparing ideas, their similarities and dissimilarities even in the most unexpected quarters. It would be interesting too to explore the significance of the English love of understatement. We must conclude our analysis of the practical English temperament by recognizing once more that it is a compound made up of many simples. There is, for instance, a widespread cosmopolitanism among the whole people. Their century-old love of the sea, and their hunger for fresh adventures have resulted in their establishing colonies in the four corners of the earth, and this fact has necessitated their study of peoples and of forms of government far removed from their home land. Their experiences in foreign lands have forced them to be interested in questions of administration, have developed their self-reliance, and have permanently impressed on them the belief that one of the first objects of a national education system is to produce leaders. They may have neglected somewhat the educational development of the great mass of their people, but they have always sought both by theory and by practical training to produce a constant stream of young men fitted to serve God and their country in directing the affairs of church and state. Their practical bent has led 48

them to underestimate the importance of abstract theory. Like Mr. Tulliver in George Eliot's Mill on the Floss they have been inclined to believe that "Thinkin's puzzlin' work." They have been too much accustomed, perhaps, to solve their problems from day to day in the light of common sense. But they have not shrunk from accepting the responsibilities that presented themselves, nor have they been inclined to faint-heartedness when problems proved complex and difficult. Indeed they have rather rejoiced in wrestling with difficult problems, and they have recognized in this kind of work the highest of human occupations. Of course their successes have been qualified by their temperamental limitations. Courage and self-reliance and a genius for administration may pass over in the case of men of limited ability into harshness and arbitrariness. Many Englishmen of today recognize in the work of some of their predecessors the lack of vision which often led to failure, the lack of understanding which produced unnecessary failure. But we must not fall into the common error of judging men of one age by the moral and intellectual standards of another. The history of British colonization, and, indeed, the whole story of Britain's relations with less highly developed peoples, will stand comparison with that of any other nation, however much we may wish that her more conspicuous failures could be eliminated from the record. In conclusion we might note that the dominantly practical temper of the English has not resulted in their subjecting the whole of life to an interest in practical things. No people is more devoted to music and poetry and the theatre. The humblest cottages are set in gardens of flowers such as one could hardly find in any other country. The English are indefatigable walkers, and jealously preserve

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much of the most beautiful parts of their country in order that all who care to do so may have access to them. Travel they account one of the greatest pleasures open to men. Probably in no other country does such a large proportion of the population take part in athletic sports, both as spectators and participants. They delight in hunting and fishing. Indeed it has been said that they find a certain cure for boredom in the proposal "Let us go out and kill something." Service in the army and navy is popular, among other reasons because it affords an opportunity to visit far-off countries. In a word zest for living inclines the typical Englishman to familiarize himself with a multitude of good things both at home and abroad.

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Lecture III · The Twentieth Century

I

T IS an astonishing fact that at any given time men arc almost incapable of making an intelligent guess at the course of future events. At the close of the nineteenth century, for example, optimism was the prevailing attitude in England. Faith in the gospel of progress, guaranteed by science and commerce, had hardly begun to weaken. Men looked forward to a warless world in which justice, intelligence, and economic well-being would continue their triumphal march. Had any man described even vaguely what was to be the actual history of the new century-there was none such-he would have been regarded as a madman. Of course there were not lacking critics of the contemporary world. It is absurd to think of the Victorian age as made up exclusively of myopic, Pollyannish people, engaged in a universal chorus of praise for the existing. We need only recall the names of Arnold, Carlyle, Ruskin, Hardy, and Housman to be reminded that there were adequate critics of England's imperialism, economics, social life, and religion. But the established, when it has been long continued, exercises a soporific influence over the thinking of ordinary men, and a century of growth, peace, power, and substantial well-being had persuaded the great majority of Englishmen that this happy world could never pass away, that it was merely the culmination of fundamental forces at work in the universe. In the eighties and nineties many of the outstanding poets and prose-writers had died, and this fact, together 53

with the death of the Queen in 1901, suggested the conclusion of a great age. The Boer War was perhaps the first event to cause general heart-searching: had it indeed been waged for the purpose of making justice prevail? These doubts were somewhat quieted by a magnanimous peace, but it soon became evident that Germany proposed to challenge Britain's long supremacy in military matters. In that event modem science would cease to be a friend to man, and would rather enable him to destroy on an unparalleled scale. That was what actually happened, and once more the English learned to pay the costs of war-the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of their sons in a war that seemed to have no satisfactory result even for the victors, and the necessity of facing a future in which glad confidence had given place to widespread pessimism. A revolutionary reversal of fortunes and of outlook had come about, but no one seemed to understand its causes or to be confident of the future. In the midst of this confusion of thought and foreboding there was an intense desire to arrive at the truth, if this might be achieved by studying the recent past and by an analysis of present-day motives and ideals. The first result of this heart-searching was a conviction that their fathers had eaten sour grapes and that the childrens' teeth had been set on edge. Recent pride in the achievements of the nineteenth century gave place to condemnation and contempt. "Victorian" began to connote all that was sentimental, stupidly conventional and selfish. At the time of Tennyson's death in 1892 his was one of the greatest names in the history of English literature; within a quarter-century there was none so poor to do him reverence. Assuredly his performance had been overestimated by his contemporaries; in the reaction it was denied all virtue. Now, his lyric gift was facile and sacchar54

ine, he lacked intellectual capacity, his solemn morality could no longer cover up fundamental defects, he was not in the main march of mind. He had no appreciation of the scientific achievement of the century. If it was rejoined that as early as 1842 he had guessed at the development of the aeroplane both in commerce and in war, and that in 1886 he had anticipated the physics of a much later age when he defined the universe as Boundless inward in the atom, boundless outward in the whole, his critics remained unimpressed. His vision of aerial warfare had concluded with the lines Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer and the battle flags were furl' d In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the Worldclear proof of his easy, superficial optimism, and a pessimistic age knew at least that the prospects for a League of Nations were doubtful. Today the reaction in favour of Tennyson has set in strongly, and it is once more perfectly respectable to be enthusiastic about his best work. The change of sentiment was marked by the publication in 1929 of A. C. Bradley's essay "The Reaction against Tennyson," in which he declares: ... I believe he is unsurpassed, and I suspect he is unequalled, among English poets in two things--one, the accuracy and delicacy of his perceptions; and the other, the felicity of his translation into language of that which he perceives. The first of these things is not specially distinctive of a poet; the second, though not by itself enough to make a poet great, is the distinction of a poet from other artists .... Well, just now we are concerned with sense-experiences, and especially those 55

that come from Nature; and I repeat that here Tennyson seems to me unsurpassed and perhaps unequalled among our poets in the accuracy and delicacy of his perceptions, and in the felicity of his translation into language of that which he perceives. . .. with the partial exception of Shelley, Tennyson is the only one of our great poets whose attitude towards the sciences of Nature was what a modern poet's attitude ought to be; the only one whose words constantly come to your mind as you read, if you can get no farther, your manual of astronomy or geology; the only one to whose habitual way of seeing, imagining, or thinking, it makes any real difference that Laplace, or for that matter Copernicus, ever lived. He gazed too, without flinching, on aspects of Nature which Wordsworth did not face; and in this also the poetry of the future must surely follow him. The majority of critics of the twenties, however, preferred to Tennyson the two or three late Victorians who shared their own scepticism-Hardy, for example, who pictured the President of the Immortals as taking his sport in the sorrows and agonies of his creatures, or Housman who cursed whatever brute or blackguard made the world. The new critics considered themselves sincere as none had been sincere before them; they scorned to seek solace in mythical creeds. The new world was preparing to show that men could be honest in themselves, that they could live without God and religion, indeed could cut themselves off from most of the traditions of their race which had doubtless been responsible for their present discontents. The spirit reminds us of the heyday of the French Revolution when men found it necessary to draw up a new world calendar beginning with the year 1. In most matters, and especially in matters of belief and artistic practice, traditional creeds were suspect; the new spirit was experi56

mental. Poetry did not need rhyme, nor regularity of metre, nor a logical framework to hold together the images and other raw materials derived from psycho-analysis and the unconscious. These could register their impact on the reader in all their immediacy without the intervention and contaminating influences of logical intermediaries. The rebellion against the past was strengthened by the death of many young poets, some of them in battle. Those who survived were grim, unhappy men, who sought for a scapegoat upon whom to direct their anger and moral indignation as they looked at the sufferings and hatreds of men. The "Lost Generation" of the slain soldiers introduced discontinuity into many fields of the national life, and weakened the force of national traditions. The inevitable demoralization of the war relaxed social restraints, and self-expression was exalted rather than self-repression. Not often had discontinuity stamped itself so obviously on manners, morals, literature, and the practices of social life, for sincerity seemed to point to licence, to the giving-up of religious creeds and practices, and to distrust of most traditional procedures. But in spite of their new-found liberties this was an unhappy generation. Of course these changes did not come about in a day. In the first decade of the new century most writers continued to follow the established literary practices. There was much writing of charming verse in which delicate nature observation was conveyed in conventional forms. Mr. Housman describes the loveliness of the cherry tree in blossom as effectively as he arraigns the scheme of the universe. There was much patriotic verse, and ethics remained the most important part of one's equipment for the voyage of life. It was the war that marked the beginning of a new epoch. An unhappy generation in trying to understand the

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source of their wretchedness will first seek for a scapegoat, but if their unhappiness is long continued they will of necessity explore the problem further. Nothing confirmed the pessimism of the nineteen-twenties more than their own confusion and impotence of thought. Their Victorian forbears had at least known what they believed and wanted, and how to secure it. The Oxford Companion to English Literature, first published in 1932, defines Victorian characteristics as an "improved standard of decency and morality; a self-satisfaction engendered by the great increase of wealth, the prosperity of the nation as a whole, and the immense industrial and scientific development; conscious rectitude, and deficient sense of humour; an unquestioning acceptance of authority and orthodoxy." The nineteen-twenties had been delivered from the more unlovely aspects of such a life, and would have thanked God for it-had they not also abolished God. It was exasperating to realize that these detestable Victorians, in spite of their conscious rectitude and hypocritical orthodoxy, seemed to have been a moderately happy people who found the business of living very tolerable. Might it be that definite creeds and ideals gave men certain advantages in adjusting themselves to life's conditions? Since the twenties we have endured the greatest of economic depressions and the greatest of world wars, but we have gained no access of wisdom. Impotently we dread the approach of a third and more terrible atomic war. We understand this strange world-sickness hardly more than we understood it a quarter-century ago. Its increasing virulence has driven men into a panic of fear and foreboding. We have begun to suspect that our disease is spiritual and deep-seated. Why in recent decades have we thrown up no great leaders of thought, no philosophers

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or poets who might have brought new interpretations of living to the people, who might have delivered them from the bondage of mental confusion? Why has all the wealth of human ability been devoted to scientific research, the waging of war, or the organizing of big business? It used to be believed that the great man appeared in response to the needs of his time. Surely our needs are great enough to summon a deliverer. How fundamental and widespread the revolution of thought has been, and how unhappy in undergoing it thinking men have become is illustrated in a volume entitled The Modern Temper which was published in 1929. The author is Professor Joseph W. Krutch of Columbia University, a well-known and competent dramatic critic, and author of several creditable volumes on aspects of English literature. Professor Krutch believes that modem scientific thought has destroyed the world of yesterdaythe world of poetry, mythology, and religion which represents life as a man would like to have it, while science represents the world as he has gradually come to discover it in its reality. Nature, in other words, has no sympathy with man's wishful thinking. Her desire merely to live and propagate in innumerable forms, her ruthless indifference to human values, and the blindness of her irresistible will, strike terror to man's soul. Gradually he has come to suspect that rationality is an attribute of himself alone, and that there is no reason to suppose that his own life has any more meaning than the life of the humblest insect that crawls from one annihilation to another. It is not likely that if man had been aware from the very beginning that his world was a mere detail in the universe, and himself merely one of the innumerable species of living things, he would ever have come to think of himself, as he even now 59

tends to do, as a being whose desires must be somehow satisfiable, and whose reason must be matched by some similar reason in nature. But the myth having been once established, persists long after the assumptions upon which it was made have been destroyed, because, being born of desire, it is far more satisfactory than any fact. This revolutionary change was an achievement of the nineteenth century which elaborated and applied universally "the great principle of continuity." This means that there is only one kind of knowledge open to man-that established in the natural sciences. "The nineteenth century," says Professor Krutch, "saw the methods of scientific investigation carried into every department of human activity and the data of physical science used as the basis on which every effort to understand either the natural or the human worlds was founded, while the beginning of the twentieth saw the last vestige of a distinction between the various kinds of knowledge wiped away. . . ." Aesthetics has become a branch of psychology, thought "an unimportant physiological phenomenon." "Since thought has never been observed except in connection with certain physiological processes, Science concludes that thought is a physiological phenomenon and since, to take another example, morality can be shown to have arisen when a certain sacrosanct authority was attributed to tribal customs, scientific history concludes that Morality is only another name for Mores." It is a sweeping victory that science has achieved. It has abolished as mere figments of fancy religion, love, heroism, duty, hope, justice. Tragedy has ceased to be possible with its exaltation of the pigmy man, and its assumption that his greatness and nobleness can triumph over his non-moral world. Henceforth it is mere sickly

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sentimentalism to assume that the primary virtues are in harmony with the real nature of the universe, that morality is the nature of things. Professor Krutch is nostalgic as he witnesses the destruction of this old world. He cannot but remember that such things were, and that the ages of Pericles and of Shakespeare were the great ages of human accomplishment, and perhaps also the happiest and most optimistic periods of human history. They sincerely believed in their myths, but we know that they were mere illusions. A marvellous superstructure for such a shadowy base ! Our emotionally enfeebled age, as Professor Krutch calls it, cannot really appreciate the greatness of tragedy, which gives a rationality, a meaning, and a justification to the universe, in which we do not believe. We believe neither in God nor in man; we believe only in natural science, and we are shocked when we have to recognize the bleak and arid despair which has settled over modern spirits. Of course Professor Krutch's whole argument depends on "the great principle of continuity," and perhaps it is less finally established than he assumes. I have no way of knowing how generally his views have been accepted: the revised edition of This Generation published in 1949 assures us that "in any event his point of view is thoroughly representative of the years which produced it." An author who seeks to assess the character of the temper of his own day should be equipped with some real philosophic grasp, and of this there is no evidence in Professor Krutch's case. For instance he seems to be quite unaware of the fact that both science and metaphysics are imaginative reconstructions of the underlying reality, and that both find it necessary to make large assumptions before proceeding with their quest. There is something naive about his belief that science is free from "myths," and that men can 61

know only the truths that issue from the laboratory. There is something more than naive about his sorrowful dismissal of the thought of the ages before modem science arrived on the scene, and this at a time when the greatest scientists are less and less inclined to be dogmatic. If men can believe that morals and mores are the same thing, and that thought is an unimportant physiological phenomenon, we may well despair of their ever finding a way out of the world of confusion in which they are wandering. Intoxicated as we are with the material triumphs of science we are prepared to minimize the value of tradition, and to ignore the more important truths that have no relation to laboratory experiments. And yet it may well be that these are the things which alone can cure our sickness. Perhaps human efforts to know can rarely be crowned with certitude; perhaps we shall have to be satisfied with dusty answers to our questions. Why should we seek for truth or justice? Certainly not for any reason that natural science can furnish. Certainly we shall not be persuaded by bombastic phrases about the continuum of knowledge in the human and natural worlds. Human values do not lend themselves to justification by purely logical processes which apply to laboratory experiments. Emerson's dictum still holds: There are two laws discrete, Not reconciled, Law for man, and law for thing. The last builds town and fleet, But it runs wild, And doth the man unking.

The law for thing has accomplished much in the way of measuring and weighing, although relativity insists that 62

its inches and pounds are valid only in specially defined circumstances. Even its solid material world threatens to disintegrate into aggregations of dancing atoms each of which appears to have a structure of unlimited complexity. May we hope that such a universe will yield up the secret of its nature to our weighing and measuring? And surely it is preposterous to assume that our present-day successes in one kind of world invalidate the successes of all preceding ages in others. We shall hesitate long before discarding the values that have served us so well, which have given us a real measure of coherence and meaning in our thinking, and some real guide to action, even though science call them illusions. We shall rather assume that any guesses at the nature of men and the universe if based only on the passing moment of time will be futile, that knowledge for men is essentially cumulative, and cannot ignore the traditions of the race, or dispense with a resulting framework of thought to which current thinking may be related. A sounder point of view is phrased in a recent lecture by R. H. Tawney, than whom we have no more profound thinker today. Whatever else the world may contain, man's relations with nature, his commerce with his fellows, and the convictions, aspirations and emotions composing his inner life, are for us, as for the poet, its capital constituents. No one can be fully at home either with it or with himself until, through the vicarious experience of which the vehicle is books, he has learned enough of the triumphs and tragedies of mankind to catch a glimpse of the heights to which human nature can rise and depths to which it can sink. To such comprehension, which less enlightened ages called wisdom, there is more than one road; but an acquaintance which, for most of us, only reading can convey with the methods by which men of like passions

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with ourselves have wrestled, in circumstances different from our own, with problems of individual and collective existence -religion, law and government, the conquest of the material environment and the ordering of social life-that are also ours, can make a modest contribution to it. It is part of the process by which we surmount the limitations of our isolated personalities and become partners in a universe of interests which we share with humanity. Not the least potent of the magicians who fling wide the windows opening on these vistas are the Muses who preside over History and Literature. There is indeed no reason to suppose that The Modern Temper in its triumphant rejection of the English tradition is more fundamentally significant than is Miss Margaret Sherwood's Pilgrim Feet which was published in 1948. This is a novel which recites the story of the early life of a young woman who rebels against her New England Presbyterian inheritance with its emphasis on duties and the sinfulness of all human beings, and who eventually works out a religious creed which makes more room for love and beauty and the creative instincts. The spirit is as deeply religious as if it had been written fifty years ago. Our scientific age has inevitably influenced contemporary thinking in many fields and much of contemporary literature. In spite of his scientific achievements, and perhaps because of them, the status of man himself has declined sadly. Pride of place has been transferred from human character to natural processes. Distrust of the thinking of the poet, and a determination to base all future thinking on the fundamental facts of the laboratory, are illustrated, for instance, in many modern novels. There the subject-matter is the stream of consciousness popularized by Miss Richardson and Mrs. Woolf, the raw materials of which are sought for in the unconscious or the latest

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psychology. For a time, novels concentrated on the primary instincts of sex, fighting, and crime, until gradually it was realized that sex, divorced from idealism, and fighting divorced from a purpose r:onceived of as desirable, became uninteresting. Still it was assumed that honesty demanded a severe restriction of interest to sensations and processes, out of which might come a new apocalypse for men. Intellectual activity was suspect as a constant threat to our legitimate study of processes and sensations, which is merely confused by thoughts and emotions. The intellect, said the new critics, has contributed little to human well-being in the past. One must strive to live by facts and sensations cleared of the cobwebs of logical sequences. In history, religion, philosophy etc. thought has become so conventional as to be sterile. Man and his petty struggles have little significance in the great cosmic development of the umverse. It is not possible to imagine a greater change than that involved in exchanging a religion of progress and joyous faith in man for a religion of fatalism and complete distrust of man and his power to take thought. The laboratory has discovered that his thought is an unimportant physiological phenomenon, as are also his morals and aesthetics. Formerly, man's conflict with circumstance or evil was supremely interesting; today he is a pigmy, an unimportant detail in the natural process. His presumption in supposing that in some way the universe must share his hopes and fears and scale of values can only amuse a generation which rejects as fictitious his interest in right and wrong, his ludicrous pretence to a status only a little lower than the angels. This dethronement of man from the place of supreme interest in the universe to a passive role in the midst of 65

great determining forces might well be regarded as a catastrophic event-if it were not merely a theory. Fortunately for those who cling to the idea of some kind of continuity in human history and even in human thought, there are still many thinkers in the world who would scorn to subscribe to the theory that man has ceased to be the centre of interest in the universe for his fellows. Modem poetry would seem to have broken with tradition even more than the novel. It, too, eschews logical coherence, and seeks rather a coherence of sensibility. It is allusive rather than specific. For the logic of ideas it substitutes a music of ideas, and the reader must find its unity in sensibility rather than in logical succession of ideas. How difficult it is to define its quality will appear from this statement by Mr. T. S. Eliot. "Modem poets," he says, "do not all write in what is called vers Libre; they do not unanimously, or even predominantly, adopt the words and images of an urban, industrialised and mechanised civilisation; they do not all share the same political or religious views, and in much of their work there is no evidence of any political bias or religious conviction at all. Yet they have something in common, though every definition of what it is will be mostly wrong or inadequate: what they have in common can be perceived by the sensibility but not defined in words." "To say that this or that writer is a fraud," continues Mr. Eliot, "may be legitimate literary criticism : to arraign a generation of writers is merely bad sociology. The answer is not to insist on the merits of that whole generation-bad sociology is not confuted by bad criticism. The answer is in a more thorough and scientific examination of the state of society." For good criticism, then, Mr. Eliot looks to more thorough analysis by scientific methods. Much modern poetry 66

is intensely individual and esoteric: it would seem to be addressed to a coterie. Only superficiality will question the profound sincerity and ability of many of today's poets in their search for an adequate idiom of expression. They are deeply conscious of being dwellers in a new world, the new wine of which cannot be contained in old bottles. A new generation revolts against its immediate predecessor more violently than against those of an earlier day, and most modem poets are more conscious of kinship with the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century than with those nearer their own time. In the metaphysicals they admire especially two qualities-their acute sensibility, and the intense concentration of their language. These are certainly characteristics of good poetry in all ages. The memory of early sense impressions also serves modem poets as a kind of recurring inspiration. They distrust all mechanical imitation of their immediate predecessors both in substance and in form. In spite of their break with tradition many of our most successful contemporary poets recognize their disadvantage in attempting to achieve an originality independent of the past. Mr. Eliot, for instance, insists that the poet of today must strive throughout his life to acquire a knowledge of the past, and familiarity with its literature. From it he must build a framework to which his own creative work can be related, because in this way only can he hope to reduce the incoherence of today to a new spiritual order. The poet's own personality is an inadequate source of coherence unless he has learned to relate himself sympathetically to the past. Moreover, he is essentially and inevitably the mouthpiece of the organized beliefs of his own age; otherwise his work falls into a personal didacticism of meagre substance.

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This consciousness of a need for relating the present to the past is seen in Eliot's insistence on the fundamental place of tradition and religion, and in the absorption of many young poets in political questions. Only so, they feel, can the disintegration of thought and belief in the world of today be reduced, and society once more made a partner in the work of the creative artist. But tradition and religion are not external goods to be accepted or purchased: the society of today must work out its own scale of values and systems of belief. Contemporary confusion in the writing of novels and poetry extends to almost every field of human interest. In the social relations of men, for example, fundamental change is proceeding, and the common man who has hitherto received scant justice at the hands of his masters is aspiring to be a master himself. Organized labour has grown incredibly both in numbers and in power. The change of an agricultural to an urban and industrial population has simplified the process. The employee is demanding a new definition of his status which will give him a voice in determining the character of future industrial relations. For five years a Labour Government has held power in Great Britain, and has made significant steps toward the socialized state. Workers are achieving security in employment and pensions for their future. Taxation has brought about a radical readjustment of the national wealth. And all of this has been achieved in our Western democracies without armed conflict or revolution. We have come to take Labour peers for granted, and the limitation of the power of the House of Lords. "Masters and men" has become to some extent an antiquated phrase. In wider political relations change has been no less striking and has been accomplished in Britain with no more 68

resort to violence. World-shaking wars and trade and social upheavals have changed the geography of modem Europe out of all recognition. Age-old empires and kingdoms have followed each other on the path leading to disintegration. Germany and Japan, Austria and Italy have practically ceased to exist as political powers, and the Russian czars and Chinese emperors of former days would have difficulty in recognizing their successors in the vast lands where they held sway for centuries. No government in our contemporary world shows such a long-persisting connection with its past as that of Great Britain. Its monarchy still stands firm, not by accident or peculiar good fortune, but on the foundation of popular affection and instinctive dislike of fundamental change. The tempest has forced the British ship of state to take in sail, and to jettison part of her cargo. Of her far-flung dominions she has in recent years enabled Hindustan, Pakistan, and Ceylon to set up as independent states. She had long taught them her own belief in the blessings of liberty and democracy, and she gave them her good wishes in their new venture. All three, on their own initiative, have chosen to remain within the Commonwealth. Only in Ireland and Burma has the British genius for compromise been lacking, and they have chosen to go on their own independent way. The loss of material wealth has modified the role which Britain has played in world politics, but the conditions under which she has suffered the loss are a source of pride rather than of repining. She is still a potent force, rejoicing in old traditions and conscious of internal unity. Here her genius for compromise has served her well. Her party politics have always been intense, but they have never prevented many of her greatest statesmen from "crossing the floor" especially when the national well-being was at

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stake. The present Labour Government is often upbraided for its foreign policy which, say its enemies, cannot be distinguished from that of the preceding Coalition Government nor from that of a possible Conservative successor. Puzzled onlookers renew the old charge of hypocrisy. As a matter of fact recent changes in the political and social life of Britain have been numerous, but they have been long in process of development, and have carried with them a large preponderance of opinion in all classes. They have been brought about by men who regretted change, constantly sought to perpetuate old customs, and who have always estimated their traditions as amongst their most valuable possessions. The greatest change of all is the most difficult to discuss -the change in men's desires and their sense of values. Only once before in our history, at the time of the Renaissance, has such a radical transfer in interests and values taken place as that which has occurred in our own day. The Renaissance has been defined as a period in which men turned their dominant interest from the unseen world to the seen, and became intoxicated with beauty and knowledge and the pride of life. The temporal things which were seen eclipsed for the time being the glory of the unseen and eternal. The delight in life here and now supplanted the conception of a heaven where the miseries of this world would be compensated. This did not mean, of course, that there was no continuing interest in religion, but that it became a secondary interest. Catholicism thrived under persecution, and Puritanism did much to direct the course of Protestantism. In the twentieth century, likewise, religion became a secondary interest as men harkened to the siren voice of science. It is difficult to estimate just how far the interest in religion has declined in our day. A familiar

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acquaintance with the Bible, for instance, was almost universal in the Victorian age: today there are few young people who have any detailed knowledge of it. University students of first-rate ability now rarely enter the Christian ministry, and only rarely are there crowded congregations in churches. The influence of the church, it is generally agreed, has declined sadly. Nevertheless, there are still a certain number, especially among intellectuals, who re-enter the church which they had abandoned, and there is a widespread recognition of the loss to society and the national life of the integrating force which religion formerly exercised. Of course there are still great numbers of devout people to whom their religion furnishes a guiding light amid the confusions of a materialistic world. The really operative religion of today, however, is that of "getting on," as vast multitudes expend their energies in the quest for wealth, power, and position. Education has become largely subservient to the same end. It is predominantly vocational in character, and is prized chiefly as an instrument which fits the young to take their place in the industrial world-as leaders or as clerks. This is the real explanation of the unparalleled increase in the number of schools and students. In a word our contemporary civilization has not yet found the new vessels which will contain the new wine. In Professor Whitehead's words, humanity is in one of its rare moods of changing the direction of its march. Intoxicated by its new-found powers, and by no means inclined to tum its back upon them, it is intensely in earnest in its search for the fundamental truth which will include the new and as much of the old as is consonant with it. Our religious and political creeds have always been much nobler than our practice. We have long professed Christianity and

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democracy, but there is widespread recognition today that much of our practice is, as it has always been, antiChristian and anti-democratic. We are making a desperate search for a religious and political creed which we can honestly practise. We are beginning to recognize that we are our brothers' keepers, and we are making fumbling attempts to modify our practice-in our colonies, in the vast areas of hunger and ignorance, in our own slums-and we are greatly surprised that our benevolent intentions are looked at askance by those who are to be the recipients of our bounty. They seem to be more impressed by the white man's record as a colonial and imperialistic force than by his present benevolent intentions. The democratic powers are honestly perplexed and disappointed that Asiatic and African peoples cannot forget the record of the past. Our serious goodwill and our awareness of our past sins are illustrated in such a novel as Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, with its rigorously honest pictures of the race problem in South Africa. But indeed, we have accomplished little as yet. Our capacity to produce wealth has not been matched by a capacity to distribute it. Race prejudice and intense selfishness have thwarted all our efforts to substitute co-operation for enmity. Our greatest industry is still the making of war to which we devote one half of all our wealth. Man's failure to organize his life satisfactorily is a pathetic spectacle in which good and evil seem to be almost balanced forces. He desires peace, but never has he engaged in warfare so continuously as during the present century. Science has greatly increased wealth, but primarily it has enabled him to wage war more destructively. It is not strange that many men have grown sceptical about the adequacy of human reason to serve

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man's deepest needs. But these are a minority. As in all past ages wise men today know that their only hope is in their own courage, and their faith in their capacity to deal with human problems. And never did they recognize more humbly their failure to think clearly. We may believe that they are making some progress. We know now that war is the first enemy to be overcome, and that only by seeking for the well-being of all men can the individual achieve his own well-being. Perhaps it is still true that we believe these things theoretically rather than in practice. There is no reason to suppose that men will ever solve all their problems, nor that they would be happier if they could do so. Life means change, and the real interest of life consists in the struggle of men to adjust themselves to the ever changing conditions. Indeed, man is primarily a problem-solving animal. To perform this function intelligently he must know what he wants and what is possible, and to know these things is the chief of human problems. They can be solved only gradually, for each new generation must solve them anew, and ready-made solutions are of no avail. The wisdom attained by the fathers cannot be transmitted to their children. Nature may seem indifferent to moral issues, but man is one of her products, and in him the struggle between good and evil is incessant. To think clearly and to act rightly are his most important occupations. He learns wisdom slowly. It was about eight hundred years before the beginning of our present era that a wise man declared that wisdom for living consisted in doing justice, in loving mercy, and in walking in humility, and perhaps we have never progressed far beyond that ideal. But wise men have never doubted its essential truth, nor questioned the deep intuitions which assured him of it. Ignorance of ultimate truth shrouds all human striving,

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but we may at least believe that we are living in a period of great decisions for men, and hope that our own efforts may contribute to right conclusions. Wisdom is cumulative, and therefore men's traditions are their richest possession. Inevitably, in a time of fundamental change it appears that we have abandoned traditions, but this is only seeming. We shall find them emerge in new ideals where they take on a new Ii£e. We are the heirs of all the ages, and it would become us neither to be faint-hearted, nor to be unworthy of the best we have inherited. During days of confusion and readjustment it may seem that we are prepared to deny all that the past has achieved, but we know that such hesitation is the necessary accompaniment of the experience of change which is life. Nature has endowed us with hope, an intense interest in the future though we may never share it, and an unshakable belief that the whole drama is not without meaning. Accordingly, we shall continue to believe that the traditions of our race, like those of other races, in as far as they are sound, will persist, and will give us comfort and guidance in the future as they have done in the past. When we compare the achievements of our past history with the confusion of today it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that men need a dominant philosophy of life more than any other good. Such a philosophy is essential if we are ever to achieve an integrated society, which is a condition of satisfying individual lives and of the production of a significant literature. Today we are obsessed by our fears -fear of communism, fear of our industrial relations, fear of unemployment and of an economic slump. We deal with most of our problems in a negative, makeshift fashion. Beyond everything we must seek for a programme for 74

living, a programme in which men of goodwill can believe whole-heartedly. In the absence of such a programme our best efforts lack coherent direction. Men cannot live satisfactorily without beliefs, without standards of value; in other words human effort must be organized toward a definite end if it is to escape futility. Fortunately man's constructive instinct is sufficiently strong to make us feel sure that he will work out such a programme. It is a stupendous task of reconstruction that he is grappling with, and success depends on his understanding the forces which have brought him to his present impasse. He must learn to use the tremendous increase of power and wealth which science has given him, for true human betterment. He must strive to get rid of the monstrous evil of war which largely cancels out the increase of wealth, and which will destroy him in these days of terrible weapons if he does not destroy it. His imagination must be captured by the ideal of making wealth and knowledge available for the countless millions who dwell in ignorance, hunger, and disease. He must believe that cooperation only can give him permanent satisfaction-not strife and mastery. In a word he must learn wisdom for living. What are the prospects for his immediate future? It becomes us not to be dogmatic on such a subject, as it also becomes us to be hopeful, for pessimism is always threequarters dishonesty and self-deception. In a world of enmity and selfishness there is much goodwill and unselfishness. Of late we have tended to despise the wisdom of our forbears, but we are learning to be more humble. The large contemporary output of the best books of the past in popular editions such as the Penguin and Pelican series is a very significant and heartening fact. The area of selfish

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domination in the undeveloped parts of the world is steadily growing less. The white man's burden is ceasing to be a phrase for cynicism. Never has there been such a determined effort on the part of the more advanced nations to reduce the area of conflict, and to substitute co-operation for warfare. If present-day results are disappointing the effort is sincere. The faith in a purely materialistic philosophy is under serious attack, and science has taught men that unflinching honesty is essential even in our search for the truths of natural science if we are to achieve results. In this great programme of reconstruction what may we hope will be the contribution of English character? It is highly improbable that Britain will ever again regain her pre-eminence as a military power. Her limited natural resources and population would seem to be a final argument here. We may rejoice, however, that her mantle has fallen on the shoulders of a daughter nation which in great measure shares her ideals and traditions. But if men's prime need is for wisdom rather than power, Britain may yet play a great role in the new world of tomorrow. Her unequivocal faith in the supreme value of human liberty, her past achievements in fostering self-government, the vast improvement in the industrial condition of her colonies and dependencies, and her unique experience in administration in many parts of the earth-all of these justify us in cherishing great hopes regarding the contribution which she may yet make to the task of human reconstruction. She can furnish leadership in many fields, for her civil service is unparalleled today in experience and in devotion to teaching undeveloped peoples to assume responsibility for governing themselves. On the solid rocks of character and past achievement, then, we may build reasonable hopes that she will go on to even greater things in the future. 76

Pessimism and cynicism can contribute nothing to the solution of human problems. We must indeed be realistic and face the future with eyes undimmed by sentimentalism, but our world has no more immediate need than the substitution of hopeful, constructive programmes for our prevailing negativism. Above all we must recover something of Milton's proud assurance that man's primary business is to wrestle with problems, and that he is endowed with adequate capacity for his task. The amazing increase in easy communications between the peoples of the earth which we have seen in recent years is probably one of the most determining conditions of our present world, and this will mean, among other things, that many peoples will have their own contributions to make to the satisfying philosophy of the future. Our busines.s is to see that our own people discharge their responsibility worthily. We shall have to preserve an open mind when other peoples present their ideas, and we shall certainly find it necessary to modify our own in this increasingly unified world. But that does not mean that we shall underestimate our own best qualities in the past or today. We have seen that throughout recent centuries nothing has been more characteristic of British thought than its jealous concern for the liberty of the individual, its absorption in ethical and political questions, and its genius for compromise. We may believe that these qualities have much to contribute to the well-being of the world, even though our enemie.5 call them by such unlovely names as hypocrisy and imperialism. Our practical capacity, our belief in fair play, our wearing the badges of Conservative and Liberal light-heartedly, our fundamental belief that sport and music and literature must find a place in the good life, even though m~t men devote their chief energies to getting-on

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-these things will not soon become antiquated. Briefly, if some of our national traditions are at present under a cloud they will emerge again in the full sunlight, modified, no doubt, in response to changing conditions, but constituting the best offerings which we can bring to a reconstituted world.

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