Lions Will Roar

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32352, 18 July 1970, Page 4

Lions Will Roar

The Lion and the Unicorn. By Arthur Bryant. Collins. 351 pp.

A man of many roles, young (almost juvenile) headmaster, university extension lecturer, historian, journalist, farmer, Sir Arthur Bryant still fills one role superbly, that of patriotic spirit rouser. He did this most directly in his weekly page in the “Illustrated London News” (where he succeeded G. K. Chesterton), on which page this book is largely based, and during the last war was, next to Churchill himself, the most energetic fortifier of national morale. Not all Bryant's attitudes wear well, and the cumulative effect of so much of the England-witb-all-thy-faults-I-love-tnee-stil! theme is of a certain narrowness. Perhaps he reaches the crescendo of diehard sentiment when he criticises the “unthinking sentimentalists in sheltered nations like Great Britain and the United States who ... imagine they owe . . . some kind of penitentiary amends” to formerly subject races. But if what Sir Arthur writes of the public thing grates on some of us, what he writes of his private preoccupations or enthusiasms—his cattle, his tree-planting, his dog and cat, or his adventures among old documents —is wholly beguiling. And then on every page he writes the noblest of prose, keeping up a standard over the 40 odd years from which these essays were selected, which can only be enviously admired. Everyone who reads this book will owe him gratitude, though rarely, one imagines, for the same things.